Himself and Charmaine: side by side, walking through an art gallery.
Knock knock knock knock.
A sharp banging noise somewhere in the distance, but who cared about that? Finally he was at her side, and her nearness shone on his face like the sun.
“Answer the door!”
They paused before a Brueghel. Fenton remarked that he loved Brueghel and she replied that she loved Brueghel too and perhaps he would like to come back to her house where she possessed a good many books about Brueghel and also a substantial number of original paintings by Brueghel hanging on her bedroom walls. Well, that was a promising development! He assented. She offered him her right hand. He took it in his left.
Knock knock knock knock knock.
Now they were strolling along a sandy country lane holding hands, a long yellow country lane that presumably led to her house, and they were still hand in –
Knock knock knock knock knock knock.
– still hand in hand, and oh fuck it, fuck it, the whole Brueghel thing was a dream, and now he was waking into a world that was hot and dark and smelled of dead cat, a world in which she wasn’t his, a world in which she was Gus’s, a world in which he was pencilled in to commit one of two synchronised ritual murders in one night’s time.
A world, moreover, in which somebody was now pounding on his front door in the dead of night.
“Answer the door!” Trixie or Tara yelled again.
On this night of all nights, he had bargained on getting some quality sleep. He squinted towards his bedside table, seeking the floating red digits of his clock radio. After a bit more of that he recalled that the red digits were no longer there. There was no power any more. The household’s electricity supply had been cut off, on account of his failure to render payments demanded by a second and final notice of termination that was still, even now, magnetted prominently to the door of the fridge. He had failed to render these payments deliberately, to see if that would make Trixie or Tara render them instead.
It hadn’t.
Knock knock knock knock knock knock.
He was out of bed now, padding up the utterly black hall. Entering the reeking hell of the TV room, he flicked the lightswitch out of habit. It clicked impotently in the dark. He skirted the corpse area by feel. Only as he groped for the front door proper did he wake up sufficiently to wonder what manner of person might be standing out there on the other side of it, pummelling on it so urgently in the dead of night. Who was crazy enough to be out there at this hour, with Neville Claude Aggot still at large? Maybe it was Gus, bearing balaclavas and a couple of butcher knives, bringing the operation forward by twenty-four hours. Maybe it was Aggot himself. Hard to say which of these alternatives Fenton cared for least. Maybe it was Charmaine, popping round to inform him that he was, now that she thought about it, the only one.
He opened the door.
Standing on the moonlit porch was an exceedingly short female with a plaster cast on one arm and a hefty suitcase dangling from the other. She wore a cheap nylon tracksuit, a messy blonde wig, a floral neck scarf, a pair of large-format sunglasses hailing from the mid 1970s, a thick crust of facial makeup, and a black bowler hat. The hat and the brevity of stature provided the only clues to her identity. It was Pamela Scratch, and before Fenton could do anything about it she had barged in right past him and been swallowed by the darkness of his home.
“Shut the door!” she whispered urgently from the heart of the room. “And whatever you do, don’t turn on the light.”
He heard her suitcase thump down on the carpet. Her strange silhouette darted from window to window, tugging shut all the curtains. “What the fuck,” she asked him breathlessly, while tussling with a venetian blind, “is that stench?”
Fenton watched her from the open door. “It’s a cat,” he replied shamefully.
“What the hell’s wrong with it? It reeks.”
“It’s dead.”
“Dead? Who killed it?” she asked him sharply. Then: “What the hell are you doing, Fenton? Shut that bloody door!”
He reluctantly complied, ushering the last slice of moonlight from the room. He had been standing by the door and keeping it open in the faint hope that Pamela might very soon be going back out of it. That hope was rapidly expiring. The darkness was absolute now. He couldn’t even see his own hands.
“I don’t think he’s out there, but who knows? He could be anywhere. Your windows are all locked, I take it? Christ, this smell is profane.”
“You get used to it,” Fenton defensively said. He’d never conducted a conversation in complete darkness before. He didn’t know where to look.
A dog started barking outside. Pamela caught her breath.
“Fenton, jam something up against your front door. Quick! Come on. Something heavy: an armchair, a couch. You must have heard what he did to my flat!”
In the dark, Fenton made sounds consistent with the placement of such a piece of furniture against the door. He sighed with simulated effort; he dragged his toenails heavily across the carpet; he gave the door a solid but muted thump with his shoulder, to suggest the arrival there of some large article of cushioned wood. Perhaps because he was only half-awake, he was finding this whole situation obscure, hard to fathom. What precisely was Pamela doing here? Was she just dropping by for a chat? Or did she think she was going to stay? On this question, the suitcase did not bode well. It didn’t bode well at all.
“So where exactly is this ‘dead cat’?” Pamela said, her tone suggesting that she believed this item to be a fiction, concocted by Fenton for his own base gain.
“Actually, it’s just over there near you,” he told her with no little urgency. “Pamela? I wouldn’t go any further that way. Come back towards me.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Fenton.” She paused to negotiate the darkness. She bumped – “Ouch!” – into a small piece of furniture that tumbled to the carpet. “You’re thinking how ‘ironic’ this all is, aren’t you? Aggot smashing down my door and fucking up my flat. After I campaigned so vigorously to get him out. Well don’t. To find amusement in a situation like this … that’s just puerile. It’s the sign of a juvenile mind. It’s beneath even you. Well come on. Say something, for God’s sake. How am I meant to walk towards you if I don’t know where you are?”
“I’m right here,” he said from beside her.
She jumped as if shot. Their bodies came into awkward contact. A sharp knob of flesh filled Fenton’s palm. For an unpleasant moment he feared it might be a breast; but then it flexed in such a way as to identify itself as an elbow. Grasping it, he steered Pamela towards the dining table. He seated her at it, then felt his way round to a chair on the opposite side. Somewhere on the table a candle and a box of matches were stationed, in deference to the electricity crisis. Fenton massaged the wood in widening arcs till he located them. He lit a match and touched it to the candle’s crusty wick. Pamela’s heavily made-up features appeared in a writhing ring of yellow light. She mouthed a cigarette and eased its tip into the flame, puffing till it glowed red. Then she sat back and deeply sighed. As if she was settling in. As if she had come to the end of a long odyssey.
“Honest to God, this smell! But that’s okay. You should have seen the place I stayed at last night …”
An ominous turn of phrase. But if she stayed, where was he going to put her? Out here on the couch, right next to Streetwise? That would be unconscionable. Maybe he should take the couch himself then, and offer her his bed? He thought uneasily about the condition of his sheets. They were pretty unconscionable in their own right, Rorschached as they were with ancient and damning stains, with countless shadowy reproductions of the late Jimi Hendrix’s head. True, he hadn’t come on them in a very long time. But he hadn’t washed them in even longer, and the thought of Pamela Scratch lying on them was too disturbing to contemplate. There was also the question of his own getting back to sleep. Out here on the couch, two feet from Streetwise, he wouldn’t stand a chance. On any other night he might have let this selfish consideration slide, and just hit the couch anyway. But tonight Operation Aggot was less than twenty-four hours away! And he simply had to get in some top-notch sleep before it, some really solid consecutive hours of unconsciousness. Only when fully rested and refreshed would he be able to address the Operation with the required nimbleness of mind, and work out what the right thing to do about it was, and do it. Sleep. Yes! He had to get back into that sweet kingdom without delay, and remain there for as many hours as he could. So no, no, no, Pamela couldn’t possibly be allowed to stay. She simply had to be got rid of.
“The newspapers said you were staying with relatives,” he gambited.
“Yeah, right!” Pamela scoffed, with a vehemence that bent the candleflame horizontal. The disturbed light lapped around her lavishly disguised head. Her grotesque shadow jived on the ceiling. “My relatives read the same papers. And they went to stay with their relatives. Morons! As if I’d have wanted to stay with them anyway. You think Aggot doesn’t know how to look up a phone book?”
Fenton thought this a moot question, but let it pass. “They also said you were under police protection.”
Again Pamela scoffed. “Protection!” She ashed her cigarette into a breakfast bowl. “That’s a laugh. You know what that consists of? Giving me this – ” she rapped on the fake cast “ – and making me put on this.” Here she indicated her wig.
“And those atrocious sunglasses,” Fenton put in sympathetically.
“Hey fuck you, these are mine!”
Yes, she had to go.
“A cheap wig and a fake cast, and apart from that I’m on my own. Can you believe that? I mean, they actually told me that. Right to my face. They came right out and told me they’ve only got enough manpower to protect people who didn’t campaign for his release! Of course they haven’t got the integrity to say that publicly. So instead you get this cock and bull story about how I’m safely in hiding and everything’s – ”
Suddenly she grabbed his wrist.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
Now he heard it too: a whisper of movement in the hallway, consistent with Trixie or Tara – or both – loitering there and listening in, just beyond the reach of the candlelight.
“Is there someone else here?” Pamela asked him urgently.
“No,” he told her. “Just me.” Sometimes you just had to lie on principle, before you really knew why you were lying. And in his defence, he was still not properly awake.
Pamela sat there frozen, her ear cocked towards the darkness. But no further sounds came. By degrees the grip on his wrist loosened. Then she abruptly shook her head, dismissing the thing as a trick of the mind.
“The pigs!” she resumed scornfully. “A couple of them still reckon I aided and abetted the escape. Can you believe that? I’m still under investigation for it. It’s frightening how dumb some of these guys are. I mean, do I look like someone who wanted him out on the streets?” She made a gesture of self-reference that took in the cast, the wig, the tracksuit. She appeared to have a point.
“But you did call his escape ‘a triumph of the human spirit’,” Fenton observed.
“Oh wake up, Fenton. Of course we’ve got to say that now. It’s happened now, hasn’t it? We’ve got to make the best of it. We’re in damage control, aren’t we? But think about it for a minute. Why on earth would we have wanted to bust him out?” Her cigarette glowed a belligerent orange whenever she paused to suck on it. “With him on the outside, we’ve got no bloody reason to exist any more. Why would we want that? It’s not in our interests, is it? Any idiot can see that. Yet these guys are supposed to be detectives, and they can’t even – ”
A distinct creak of floorboard in the hall. Like a starter’s pistol this sonic incident sent Pamela scrambling up off her chair and scampering back into the darker reaches of the room. In the whoosh of her departure the candleflame eerily wobbled, like churned water. Her abandoned cigarette smouldered in the breakfast bowl.
“Neville?” she said quietly, from the other end of the room. “Neville is that you?” Her voice was tremulous. Fenton could just make out her tensed form over near the couch, hovering between the claims of dignity and fear. He thought about saying something to put her at her ease. But he decided he’d be a fool to do so. His basic feeling was this: she was half-way to the door, and anything that kept her moving in that direction was good. If she left right now, it was just conceivable that he might get back to sleep. Just.
Pamela waited out another half-minute or so of silence. Then she strode boldly back to the table. She sat in her chair. She lit a fresh cigarette. She breathed out smoke.
“I’m sorry Fenton,” she said, in a tone of voice not even half-consistent with the strict meaning of that phrase. “I guess I’m a little jumpy.”
“That,” said Fenton, “is perfectly understandable.”
Pamela looked at him sharply, as if that had been an abominably right-wing thing to say. Oh Christ.
“‘Understandable.’ Why, Fenton? Because Aggot’s some kind of subhuman monster? Because I’m this helpless victim and he’s some sort of relentless killing machine? I’ve got a right to think that, Fenton. I’m the one he allegedly tried to slay. I’m the one whose chicken he fucked. So if I want to call him a sick psycho freak, that’s my business. I don’t see what gives you and everyone else the right to label him. To carry on like he’s this massive threat to the community. I mean, how many people’s he actually murdered since he got out, Fenton? Tell me that. Zero. Not one. He hasn’t even tried to murder anybody, except for me. And his wife, obviously. And that guy in the other car. But apart from that, this ‘orgy of violence’ that everyone was so gaily predicting, this so-called ‘reign of terror’ – it’s just sort of conspicuously failed to materialise, hasn’t it?”
Fenton thought uneasily of Operation Aggot.
“I mean, in terms of the actual body count, Fenton – which is zero – in terms of that, SNARBY’s whole stance about his harmlessness has actually been vindicated. Massively vindicated. Not that you’ll hear the media admit that. I’m telling you, the way they’ve seized on this, it makes me sick. Where was all this interest in me a month ago? Back when I was lobbying to get him out? Back then, the newspapers wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole. Me or Neville. But now he’s mutilated a few pairs of my grundies I’m all over the front page. But only as a helpless ‘victim,’ Fenton. A helpless female who needs to be ‘protected’ from the big bad wolf. Well, I don’t need to be protected, Fenton. I can look after myself. I don’t want all these paternalistic expressions of male outrage on my behalf. One of them even referred to me as an ‘honor student.’ Without the ‘u’. Can you believe that? I mean, do they even know what an honor student is? I don’t, and I’m the one that’s supposed to be one. Male logic, Fenton. The male psyche. That’s the thread that runs through all of this. Look at the way he escaped. Look at the macho logic of it. Why did they let him outside the razor wire? Because they thought he was reformed? Because they thought it was time they started treating him with a modicum of humanity and respect? No: so he could play in a bloody football game!” She pronounced the word ‘football’ with contempt, as though it were a form of human rights violation. “That was my mistake in all of this. If I did make a mistake, that was it. I forgot Aggot was first and foremost a male, with all that implies about his attitude to the female subject. His desire to just use her sexually and then snuff her out of existence. And I’m not just talking about me. Look at his wife. Look at the way he treats her. This meek little woman who gets forced to sit there patiently outside the wire, thank you very much, till her ‘man’ is good and ready to escape. To honour and obey, Fenton. It’s right there in the vows. To honour and obey and sit there submissively with the engine running so your old man can get in a full ninety minutes with his mates before he deigns to stroll over and participate in his own escape.”
“Eighty.”
“What?”
“Eighty minutes. It was a game of league.”
Silence. Pamela seemed to consider this comment unworthy of a response.
“Well anyway,” said Fenton, “I’ve still got his letters here.” He tried to cram a vibe of closure into these words, a sense of how nice it had been to talk with her and how they should do it again real soon.
“I imagine you have, Fenton. What of it?”
“Well … I thought you might want them back.”
“Oh, I see. To take with me. When I go. Which you seem to think I might be about to do now. You’re misreading the situation here, Fenton. You look like you’re deciding whether I can stay. This isn’t that sort of situation. This isn’t something you’ve got to think about. I’m the one in a jam here, not you.”
For the first time in his life, Fenton found it necessary to pinch himself, quite hard, in order to establish whether or not he was having an extremely bad dream. It turned out that he wasn’t, but he kept pinching himself anyway. He felt that he somehow deserved it. With each passing minute he felt wider awake. He was trying very hard not to acknowledge it, but it was unquestionably the case. His night’s sleep was slipping from his grasp like youth, like innocence.
“Do you ever pause to consider how abnormal you are, Fenton? I’m being stalked by an alleged killer, for Christ’s sake! A normal person would have been all over me the second I walked in the door. A normal person would have been falling all over me with expressions of concern. Asking me how I am, how I’m holding up, touching my shoulder, insisting that I fucking stay with them, no questions asked. A normal person wouldn’t be making up pathetic lies about a dead cat so I’ll go and stay somewhere else instead. What are you afraid of, Fenton? Afraid he might trace me here? Don’t worry, I’ve been smart. I’m staying on the move. A different place every night. By the time he traces me here, I’ll be long gone. Or are you scared you and I might end up making love? Is that it? I wouldn’t worry about that, Fenton. You’re not my type.”
Down in the hall, Trixie or Tara choked on suppressed laughter. This time Pamela’s departure from the table was swift enough to blow the candle out altogether.
“Neville?” she said from the utter darkness. “I was your voice, Neville. I was always there for you.” Her voice wobbled with fear. “The guy at the table – he laughed at you, Neville. He called you a freak. He laughed at your drawings. He said your wife was a dog.”
Fenton stayed in his chair. It still wasn’t too late to do the decent thing, to call Trixie and Tara out into the open, to offer explanations and effect introductions, to rescind the growing lie. But all that would have been so complicated. It would have taken so long. He felt surprisingly close to tears. Was there really nothing left between him and Operation Aggot now but consciousness, twenty-three raw gaping hours of it? He thought of Gus sound asleep somewhere, out like a light in his comfy bed, snoring the sleep of the shameless. And he thought of her maybe sleeping beside him, a limb or two carelessly intertwined with his. None of this was helping.
With eyes impatiently shut he waited for the moment to resolve itself, one way or another. He could feel Pamela over there in the darkness still, tensed and coiled, awaiting further sound but deeply not wanting to hear it, afraid to move lest the noise of her motion should drown out the telling creak or rustle.
Finally: “Fear does strange things to people, Fenton,” she announced from the darkness. “You’re meant to tell me I’m jumpy. I’m imagining things. That’s what a normal person’d say. Come on. Tell me I’m – ” Her voice felt its way back to the table. “Tell me I’m perfectly safe here, and more than welcome to stay. Offer me a cup of hot chocolate. Try and comfort me.” The chair accepted her slight weight with a tolerant creak. Should he light the candle again? “Put a reassuring hand on top of mine, and tell me everything’s going to be all right. God forbid you should actually come over here and put your arm around me! Or maybe you’re afraid you might ‘accidentally’ touch my tit again.”
No. No candle. Utter darkness had its merits.
“These are just some of the things a normal person might do at this point, Fenton. These are just some of the options. Have you forgotten the extent of your responsibility in all this? I haven’t. If you hadn’t brought along those ocker fool ‘mates’ of yours to stack the leadership ballot, none of this nightmare’d be happening. And don’t think I’ve forgotten who suggested the whole bloody Aggot thing in the first place. Don’t think I’ve forgotten it was you.”
“Jesus. You never mentioned that to Aggot, did you?”
“Would I be here if I had?” Pamela candidly replied. “But I do love that question, Fenton. It’s all got to be about you for you, doesn’t it? It’s all got to be totally centred on you.”
“Well I am me,” he pointed out, emboldened by the absence of light.
“You know what the difference is between you and Aggot, Fenton? He’s at least got the balls, the spunk, to be honest about who he is. You, you just keep all your loathing and petty resentments bottled up inside you in this vile stew of hate. Isn’t that right?”
“Pretty much,” he had to concede. “But I don’t see what that’s got to do with Aggot.”
“Listen to yourself. You sit there like you’re so superior to him.”
“Well who isn’t?”
“You really think you’re better than him, don’t you?”
“Broadly speaking, yes.”
“You think you’ve just got this God-given right to look down on him from this great lofty height.”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you think I’ve forgotten what happened in that sandpit?” she shrilly said.
So here it was. The sandpit, out in the open at last. And Fenton felt … nothing. The moment had no impact, no bite. He experienced no quickening of the breath or heart. Because Pamela had played the card poorly. She had played it out of weakness, not strength. In fact she had botched the moment so badly that he almost felt sorry for her, embarrassed for her, guilty for being present at such a rout. To put the sandpit on a par with the crimes of Aggot … that went beyond mere radicalism. It was just silly. It was laughable. It was one last brick too many on the great superstructure of fear and shame that the incident had been made to bear over all these years. And quite suddenly the whole edifice had become unsustainable, was crumbling in under its own weight. And now all that was left was the incident itself. The incident alone. An incident which suddenly looked like … well, no big deal. A minute or two of harmless fun on the part of two five-year-olds.
Somehow Fenton knew that Pamela, on her side of the table, was thinking similar things. He could feel her perceiving the magnitude of her error over there, realizing too late that she had just blown her ancient moral advantage and was never going to get it back. And at this moment he detected a great vulnerability in Pamela Scratch, and felt a strange and wistful love for her. He suddenly saw that under the bowler hat and the facial jewellery she was still the same harmless and bony and not especially bright little girl he had shared his childhood with, half-naked in various pools and playgrounds. A great calm came over him. He knew exactly what to say.
“Actually, I think you probably have forgotten it, Pamela. Or most of it, anyway. I know I have. But that doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more. Because whatever happened, it was good. Don’t you see? It was natural and fine and good. I don’t regret it. I stand by it. I’d do it again. I only wish I had the guts to do more things like that now. We were five, Pamela. We mustn’t be ashamed of it. We should be ashamed of what we are now. Look at us. We should be ashamed of what we’ve let ourselves become.”
A moist sound, as of swallowing. “Is that it?” Pamela Scratch said finally. Sounding disappointed, even betrayed. “Is that your final word on the matter? Case closed?”
Actually he wanted to say a lot more. He wanted to say that what had done this to them was politics. They had let politics screw them up. Her mainly, but him too. He wanted to tell her that all these theories she believed in, all these strange abstract theories that denied what people really were and wanted, had totally fucked her up. They had ruined her ability to see or think. They made her say far too many things that were simply not true. They had robbed her of the capacity to discriminate between his misdeeds and a multiple murderer’s. They ensured that she would always be disappointed and outraged and bitter and wrong and essentially full of shit. They had rendered her far less wise than she had been at five, when she’d let him fondle her and had maybe fondled him back and had quite rightly seen nothing much wrong with either act. He wanted to tell her that all these taboos and superstitions that were supposed to stop people from getting oppressed had ended up oppressing both of them, mainly him. And he wanted to tell her that it was not too late for her to change this, to unsee the light and dispense with the hat and theories and go back to being normal and nice again. That it wasn’t too late for her to see the sandpit for what it really was: an Eden, a paradigm of innocence, the last occasion on which either of them, mainly him, had acted freely and spontaneously and without political fear. Maybe it was the darkness or the lateness of the hour, but these were the sorts of things he wanted to say. Maybe it was the sense that his life, in its present form, couldn’t possibly go on after tomorrow night. Or maybe it was the knowledge that he was fully and irrefutably awake now, and had no hope at all of getting back to sleep before the Operation, and had therefore better start becoming right away the kind of can-do, no-nonsense, take-no-shit person who might be able to stop such a thing from happening.
In any case, this was the sort of stuff he wanted to say. But instead of saying it he just leant forward, felt around for her hand, placed his own hand reassuringly on top of it, and said: “Pamela, I want you to stay. You look like you could do with a good sleep. You can take my bed if you want. I’ll get you some new sheets. Would you like some hot chocolate?”
But then from the kitchenette there came a colossal smash, as of dropped glassware. And this time there was nothing half-hearted or provisional about Pamela’s departure. She tore her hand out from under Fenton’s and lurched definitively towards the door. Her empty chair fell to the carpet. In the core of the room she tripped hard over her own suitcase and toppled to the floor.
“Pamela, it’s okay,” Fenton said towards her. “It’s not him. It isn’t him.” He tried for a tone of soothing authority, thinking that here was one thing at least he could put right before tomorrow night.
But Pamela wasn’t listening. “Neville don’t,” she pleaded, whinnying backwards across the room, groping back and back for the wall or door, or maybe for the large intervening piece of furniture that Fenton hadn’t really put there.
Fenton stood and moved caringly towards what sounded like her location. In a firm and remorseful voice he began to assure her that Aggot wasn’t here, that this was all a harmless prank that had got slightly out of hand. But just as he began to say that, Trixie or Tara, getting right into the spirit of things, improvised from somewhere quite near him a deep guttural growl, in an attempt – a rather crude one in Fenton’s view – to simulate the inarticulate chestal output of an escaped male psychopath.
With an abject groan Pamela Scratch spewed on the carpet.
At his left shoulder Fenton felt a tickle of leaning female hair. “You’re cleaning that up,” a hot voice whispered in his ear.
Pushing this scurrilous person away, he continued to move calmly towards Pamela’s general position, seeking to approach her without at the same time approaching the vomit, ready to extend an arm towards her and assure her everything was all right, and just beginning to say the word “Pamela” in a very gentle and reassuring voice when the advancing bone of his naked big right toe smashed into something uniquely solid and pyrotechnically painful, causing him to emit a savage animal grunt while crashing heavily to the carpet.
A few feet ahead of him Pamela whimpered with redoubled fear.
“No Pamela it’s me,” Fenton muttered from the floor, clutching at his maimed toe – and sounding, it had to be said, a little like an escaped psychopath himself, but only because he was hyperventilating with pain and speaking through tightly clenched teeth.
Pamela Scratch sobbed and moved. She found, by colliding with it hard, the inside of the front wall. Her hands scrabbled desperately over the fibro, lusting for the doorhandle. They found it and wildly rattled it. Then the door flew open, and a rectangular view of the moonlit front yard was flung into its place. Stranded in blazing toe-pain on the floor, Fenton could only watch with alarm and send out a futile yelp of warning as Pamela’s wigged and sunglassed silhouette streaked out into the night and – using her nippy little quote-making hands for extra spring – vaulted the thigh-high metal fence that ran around the perimeter of the raised front porch. For a moonlit moment she hung there on the other side, in fleeting emulation of the perfect dismount. Then she dropped abruptly from view and landed with a wicked crunch in the large unkempt hedge that Fenton really should have yelped to her about with way more verve. She writhed with what sounded like typical feistiness in its upper brances, until a final crack of hedge matter ejected her to the lawn. She hit the yard running, and reappeared as a relatively distant figure at its far edge, nimble in her tracksuit, departing at a velocity that expelled first her hat to the grass, then her scarf, then her wig, before she merged at last with the night.