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look. They had been friends since childhood.
    “Guess he got so lubricated he went home to the wrong house,” Pete said, still fixing on Alf. “You know those houses on Gold Street: they all look the same? Guess Timmy pulls in the drive, thinks it’s his place, but he’s actually next door!” Pete grinned around at Joe and Jamie, but his gaze quickly returned to Alf. “Sly Callum’s place — Timmy goes right inside like he’s in his own kitchen …”
    It was a good story — Pete was always up on the latest scandal, which he usually dramatized with a few twists of his own — but Alf was distracted by Margaret’s departure. She and Penny had gone off across the grass, picking their way over the scattered reefs of old shingles to the back steps. A few moments later, Alf glanced around and saw his wife’s dark hair reappear at the window, as she clattered at the dishes in the sink.
    “So he’s in the wrong bedroom,” Pete was saying. “He’s taking off his clothes in the wrong bedroom! So then Sly wakes up and says, ‘Who in hell’s that?’ And Timmy thinks, That don’t sound like Jean! So then Sly jumps on him, starts pounding him out —”
    “Sly’s just a little guy!” Joe said, relishing the story.
    “Yeah,” Pete says, his eyes growing huge. “But don’t cross him, eh? So I guess Mary finally turns on the lights and they get it sorted out.” Pete was focused on Alf again, his eyes wide with amazed disbelief, as if Alf and only Alf might have the answer to the wonder of human behaviour he was expounding. “I guess Jean wasso mad at Timmy when she found out — made him spend the night in the car!”
    Hearing the laughter of his sons, Alf grinned. But he was somewhere else, thinking of the woman moving through the dim house behind him.

4

    SANDY CLIMBED INTO THE BISCAYNE . Her new cat-woman eyes met Joe’s.
    “Wow,” he deadpanned. Eyeliner. Mascara. He wasn’t sure he liked it.
    “If you don’t like it, I can take it off.”
    “Take it off?” His gaze slipped to the tops of her breasts, white as scars above the dipping edge of her halter top. A thin silver chain fell out of sight. At its weighted end, he knew, down there between her breasts, hung Christ in his agony.
    “Dirty mind,” she said, lifting her chin to the windshield.
    West Street lay deserted. They drove off the Island, past small plaster houses, small frame houses, past Bannerman’s old hosiery mill with its decapitated bell tower and up the broken asphalt road wedged into the hillside. At the hump of the level-crossing he glanced left and saw heat shimmering in the distances beyond the town, over the oily bed of the empty tracks: the eternal absences of Sunday.
    She took a small, spade-shaped bottle from her purse, removed the top with its little brush, and with great concentration began to paint her nails. Irritated, he watched the way she curled her tongue over her upper lip and held her hand away to examine her work, an artist enslaved by perfection. It was his notion of her that she was too absorbed in trivial things.
    “Why do you do that?”
    “Do what?”
    “Paint yourself up like that?” He had nearly said, Tart yourself up. Sometimes, and especially now, in the daylight, he was ashamed of their connection.
    She gazed frowning at her hand. The bright-red polish suggested to him a cheap carnival gaiety, a violence.
    “You don’t like it?”
    “It just seems … I don’t know.”
    “I could take it off if you don’t like it.”
    “No, no,” he said, and a moment later: “Anyway, once we get in the water, it’s not likely to last, is it —”
    “The nail polish?”
    “The stuff on your eyes.”
    She adjusted the mirror and studied herself, worriedly. In profile, her face was almost flat. It had been her father who, years ago, had begun to call her Monkey.
    “It’s just for fun ,” she said, pulling down the skin of her cheekbone.
    “Look at me.”
    There was something attractive in her