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with whatever is to happen. The gate squeals—is it Gilbert Horsfall, socks around his ankles, the battered case with very little joggling round inside it, returning to dispute your ownership?
    Ready yourself to kick him in the shins when the pins and needles have died like so many insects in what are still your legs.
    *   *   *
    Mrs Bulpit had given up clambering up and down the paths and steps of a garden she would not have wanted to own, if it hadn’t gone with the house Reg bought.
    ‘When you’ve stopped being contrary, young lady,’ she called at her last gasp, ‘you can show yourself and we’ll come to terms.’
    She went inside banging the door with the hole in the mosquito wire.
    Presently the boy came out, chewing on a hunk of bread. He was carrying a second, holding it at a distance from him. Though the evening had started cooling off, the fat from this second slice of bread had begun to melt, he could feel it messing up his fingers as the dripping from the hunk he was tucking into had smeared his mouth, fattening his lips, making them lazy and content.
    If he didn’t find her, he could eat hers as well, so he meandered on, not particularly looking, at moments forgetting the mission Ma Bulpit had sent him on. Then he caught sight of this Irene Sklavos standing below him at the sea wall, which was where he would have least liked to find her. He was looking down on that straight white parting as she scraped the gulls’ white scribble from the wall.
    ‘Hi,’ he mumped, but not loud enough, he really didn’t want to find her.
    She went on scraping, and he went on, his thick-soled school shoes growing heavier as he dragged them along the gritty path to show his indifference, and yet not loud enough for her to hear. If only he would never reach her. What ever would he say to this foreign girl if he did?
    As he made the last elbow in the downward path, brushing up against the guava tree to remain unseen till the moment they must face each other, he turned in the direction of the city, and that evening dazzle of sun and water. There was no postponing it. She jerked round to see who had caught her out—or was she catching him? Her eyes were still screwed up in her face, either dazzled, or disgusted.
    ‘She sent you this,’ he mumbled.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Bread and dripping.’
    She took hold of it at last as though it might have been a dog’s turd you were handing her.
    Squinting at it. ‘I never ate anything like this.’ Smelling, touching the stuff with the tip of her tongue, biting in.
    ‘Aah—po po po!’ Spitting, but not throwing it away.
    ‘… love it…’ Chewing his last rag of crust he made the act look as ugly as he could. ‘If you don’t want it you can give it here.’
    She became more screwed up than ever, and disgusted or something, before glancing back over her shoulder at the fire in the west. ‘My mother’s sailing.’
    ‘Didn’t go to see her off.’
    ‘I wouldn’t be here if I had, would I?’
    He felt himself grow so hot and red she could only notice. He hated her for the weakness she provoked. She must be one of those, not girls, he hadn’t known enough of them, but like grown-up people, fathers, teachers, who go out of their way to make you look stupid—when you weren’t—or were you? He swallowed down the last of the mush his crust had become.
    ‘I wouldn’t go. I didn’t want to.’ She suddenly began biting into the bread and dripping.
    ‘I’d go along any time to watch a ship sail.’
    ‘You wouldn’t understand, even if I told you.’ The bread was making knots in her throat as it went down. She looked to him like that emu in the zoo, a skinny black emu.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re too clever by half. Anybody can see that.’
    She might have been going to cry only the bread and dripping had stopped her mouth up. She was settling down. She was wiping her fingers on the stone wall. A stillness they were sharing made him feel more friendly