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repeating itself without end. This man, this man.
    ‘Turned to stone, have you?’
    Here is her warm breath on my cheek, loving, chiding, relaxed. This is no big deal for her. They are going out. I have to eat the chicken, answer the phone. I have no lines to speak. But I have to walk about the stage.
    Then Roehm speaks, transforming the temperature of the air around him.
    ‘I’m sorry that you aren’t coming with us tonight. I’ll ring you next week.’
    My mother is watching him, smiling. It is as if he is making an improper assignation in public, disregarding her. She doesn’t see it that way. She is nodding, grinning. Her lover is making an effort. He has acknowledged her son. But she is surprised. It’s too soon. She wouldn’t have suggested this. Nevertheless, she is determined to be pleased. Roehm nods, offhand. She bounds out in front of him. The porch door crunches shut and I am left sitting on the bottom step of the stairs in the dingy light from the last bulb left that still works.
    The first meeting was over. I found that I was shaking slightly. I began to finger my own emotions, to turn them over and look at the unpatterned side, as if they had been rare carpets. I was angry, insecure, obscurely humiliated. But why? The scene had passed off in a matter of minutes. I had looked into this man’s face. I now knew who he was and I would know him again. But what was it that I felt? With her, it was simple. A peaceful steady torrent of demand. I love, I need, I want. Give, give, give. This man’s sexual presence, obtrusive, peculiar, still lurked in the empty shadow of the stairs.
    I sat looking at jealousy, naming the emotion for the first time. I had been excluded, given second place. This was the meaning of jealousy. I was being given Iago’s job, ‘and I – his Lordship’s ancient’. What will happen to the three of us? Why are there three? I turned the tarot cards over in my mind, seeing, again and again, not my mother whom I had expected to see, but this man’s face. Then I learned something, sudden and peculiar. I was not jealous of the Minotaur’s grasp upon my mother’s body. I was jealous for myself. Why have you chosen her, and not me? I wanted her place.
    Was this jealousy? I could not decipher the unpatterned side of things.
    I turned back to look at Roehm’s promise: I’ll ring you next week . It was Friday night. A desert plain of homework unfurled before me. Two days of waiting and saying nothing. What if he didn’t ring on Monday? I was at school in the mornings, on Monday I would be home by twelve. Next week suddenly became five, possibly even six days of suspended time. I rushed up the stairs and slammed the door. My Stratford poster of The Taming of the Shrew with Katarina pushing a tiny pink Fiat in her muddy wedding dress shivered slightly in its frame.
    My room now appeared before me like an adolescent pit of discarded identities. There were the old pop posters, plastic Star Wars models, even a one-eyed bear lolling in the corner on the bottom shelf. I sat on the bed, pulling my duvet around me, trying to imagine my mother making love to the man she called Roehm. Everything I knew about sex had been gleaned in the boys’ lavatory at school, both from the walls and from the passing inmates. The underground lavatory was the theatre for assiduous masturbation sessions in which I had never taken part out of fear that my prick would not be sufficiently admired to gain admittance to the inner circle. But what I learned in the lower depths was confirmed by one or two very strange sites on the Internet. If all I had seen was true, then I couldn’t make sense of the difference in size between my mother and her lover. He would cover her like a bull. I felt a gust of nausea sweeping up my gullet.
    I threw the duvet aside and sat down in front of my computer. The screen-save goldfish wobbled past, bubbles rising from their stupid mouths.
     
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