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watch a squinting Turk with a grey moustache and a shotgun come up to the bars, asking your name. Only then could you say you were a different person.
Only then would the old man enquire about the passphrase, so you could finally release it to the air, the meaning of the words becoming clearer as you spoke them. Only then would the gate unlock
and slide back for you in the old man’s grip. Only then would you hear him say, ‘
Portmantle’ye ho ş geldiniz.’

When the boy demolished Pettifer in the first game of backgammon we all cried beginner’s luck, but then they played twice more—each bout a little faster than the
one before—and it soon became clear that young Fullerton possessed a startling tactical acuity. He came away with a haul of Pettifer’s belongings: a
çay
glass, a wind-up
turtle made from camphor-wood, and a woven leather belt; and, because I had backed Tif to sweep the best of five, I was forced to surrender my last remaining pack of cinnamon gum. We assumed that
Quickman, a shrewder, more experienced and aggressive player, would prove too wily an opponent for the boy, but it did not transpire that way. Fullerton outmanoeuvred him to the tune of seven
points per game. In truth, it was barely a contest. By the time the boy was done, he had won a fountain pen, a Roman coin, and a silver lighter that once belonged to Quickman’s father,
inscribed with two faded initials. (Tif won back a pair of loafers he had previously lost to Q, and I earned a scoopful of French coffee beans from Mac, though it seemed unfair to claim my winnings
in her absence.)
    ‘We’ve been hustled,’ Quickman said, staring at the chequers that were left on the board. ‘That last bump-and-run was tournament stuff. What are you, regional champ?
National?’
    The boy beamed back at him. ‘I swear, I’ve hardly played before.’
    ‘You don’t fool me.’
    ‘I’m just lucky, that’s all. The dice fell kindly.’
    ‘Rubbish. I’ve never seen so much blockading. That was all strategy.’
    ‘It’s a blocking game all right,’ Pettifer added, ‘but it’s deadly effective.’
    The boy gave nothing away. ‘If you say so.’
    ‘I’d better sharpen up my end-game before we play again,’ Quickman said.
    ‘I’m not sure that’ll help you much.’
    I could not tell if the boy was being earnest or smug. He got up, took his cagoule from the chair-back, and walked across the studio, pausing before my wall of samples. The room was so bright
with the overhead fluorescents that there was nothing but an arrangement of white patches for him to see, a grid of small canvas squares that I had pasted to the wall, in a pattern only I could
interpret. There were at least a hundred of them, each square containing a smear of white paint, hardly discernible from the canvas itself. Fullerton took another forward step, trying to read my
pencilled notes in the margins. ‘What is it you’re working on here, Knell?’ he said quite innocently. ‘I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s something
white.’
    Pettifer tutted. ‘You’re overstepping.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said.
    ‘No, come on—he needs to be told.’
    Quickman called to the boy in a chiding tone: ‘We don’t intrude on other people’s work round here.’
    Fullerton held up his hands in surrender. ‘Jesus. Sorry. I take it back.’
    ‘They’re studies for a mural,’ I told him. ‘That’s as much as I care to explain right now.’
    ‘Anything else would be an imposition,’ Quickman said.
    The boy was still facing the wall. ‘But don’t you ever want to run ideas by each other? Just to see the response?’
    I was getting used to holding conversations with his back. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But then I wouldn’t really be painting for myself. And that’s the only way to
paint.’
    Quickman was now gathering the backgammon chequers into one hand, stamping down at every piece. It was evident that he was still stinging from defeat,