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self-evident truth, which neither requires nor is capable of proof, but which serves as a foundation for further reasoning. I sat up, awash with a gust of clarity. The language of mathematics is very beautiful. My mother loves another man.
    I hear the door bang behind her. She has seen my bicycle, my new bicycle, the one she bought for my eighteenth birthday, shoved inside the gate. She shouts up the stairs. I do not reply. She goes into the kitchen. She turns on the radio. It is well after six. I hear the news headlines, floating up the landing. She opens the fridge. I hear the plastic rattle of the crisper. Electric with tension, I go down the staircase. All the bronze stair-rods are green with iron oxide, this banister loose, shaking, the carpet worn to brown threads. I see the world too close, as if I had swallowed hallucinogenic drugs. She pauses, smiling in the kitchen doorway, her old, habitual, generous wide smile, full of pleasure to see me. I am well above her height now, next year I will be taller still. Her blonde straight hair, my own is the same, swings as she turns to fling the courgettes into the sink. I cannot take my eyes off the red winking light on the answerphone in the hallway. The number four glints steadily. Four messages. But she is asking about my mathematics homework. She is telling me about another argument with her head of department about the studio budget. She is opening a bottle of mineral water, she is handing me the garlic, the one sharp knife we still possess and the chopping board. She hasn’t even looked at the answerphone. She doesn’t care.
    Like a murderer, convinced that the corpse will be discovered any minute, my gaze is fixed on the glittering, revelatory red light.
    In the midst of a quite different story she suddenly asks if there were any calls. No, I didn’t take any, but there were messages left on the machine. I cut the garlic, which is stinging my bitten cuticles, into tiny unsuitable quadrilaterals. She adds mixed dried herbs from a plastic sachet, gives the courgettes one more stir then bounds off down the hall. Why do you seem so young? You aren’t old enough to be my mother. The radio is still on, so she turns up the sound on the tape. All the voices to which I have listened, again and again, crackle and echo in the steam. I stand there, staring into the filthy sink. The French gutturals, the gallery owner’s twang, Aunt Luce’s breezy chatter, and then the pause, before that last voice begins, firm, unhurried, confident.
    ‘ I’m here till eight. Call me .’
    She is still smiling as she races for the courgettes. It’s OK. Nothing urgent. As she slithers past me, pressed against the table, I catch the unmistakable, incriminating, pungent stench of cigarettes.

2
    LABORATORY
    ‘Toby! Can you come downstairs for a moment? One of my friends is here and I’d like you to meet him.’
    I was practically a recluse. At school I had pitched camp in the library and risked the accusations of ‘teacher’s fucking arse-lick’. I didn’t stop working, but I had started to cut lessons. This enhanced my reputation with the back of the class. My form tutor threatened to write to my mother. I said, go ahead, do it. It was the first time I had been openly rude to one of my teachers. She stopped dead in the corridor and stared at me. I sneered slightly and bolted for home. My moment of rebellion had come at last. But I wasn’t waiting for Iso when she came back from college. I was no longer downstairs, patrolling the corridors and the kitchen, watching out for her. I had retreated to my attic. And she had not noticed. I stood up carefully. Even her voice made me feel resentful, irritated.
    ‘Toby! Did you hear me? Come down.’
    She was coming up the stairs. The figure behind her loomed in the dark at the bottom. His outline suggested the Minotaur, metamorphosed completely into man, irrefutably male, yet unequivocally bestial. She dwindled into pathos beside him. How do you