In its wake, also, crept the tublike orange van, with its limp cream curtains, and 13 slumped flaccid at its wheel. "Yes" he managed to say (it was pure sibilant: Sssss) when he saw the three of them standing there. Relief and even rapture were shoving their way through a sepsis of distress. It had hit him as he stared through the gap in the back gate of the dead garage: Them was the same fucking blokes that did Crash. Telling little Marco to run along or piss off. And Adolf saying, What's this then? What's this then, lads? Adolf knew what it was: it was a lesson. Compared to you lot-compared to you, I'm a child. I'm a child … 13 was free. He crept past in the orange van. He didn't want them to see him. He never wanted their fire of eyes.

Marco wasn't crying. But Lizzete was. And so was Richard. In the peripheries of his mind he was already rewriting his Profile (It's not often. Clash the, roll out the, raise high the. Hats off to) and working on a way of forgiving Gina. A form of words. Because if he forgave her, she could never leave him now. Who was he? Who had he been throughout? Who would he always be? He was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia . . .

All the rumors of wind, which had until then been anarchic, like all the backdrafts of London come together, like all the car alarms of London (the Blitz which each of us suffers alone)-all the rumors of wind now gathered themselves, in riptide. More a breath sucked in than a breath expelled, up the street it hastened, shaking the trees until their teeth rattled and their pretty hair fell out. Soon the apple blossoms were everywhere, as an element.

And that was the blossoms gone for another year. But for a little while longer they flew in festive and hysterical profusion, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married.

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows

exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos.

Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.