Then Olivier appeared.

He said, I have brought your suitcase, but it's up to you.

What?

I can't stay here, old mate, he said.

I asked him where was he going.

Off to my club, but you will probably prefer to be with your KISS AND KIN.

Can I come with you? I asked.

He looked me up and down. He did not want me. I could see.

Assuredly, he said at last. He smiled. He put his arm around me, but once we were in the taxi he drew back into his corner and exploded I HATE THE FUCKING BITCH!

Bless me, save us. The misery of Sundays.

I HATE HER.

Hide the knives, lock the doors.

I HOPE SHE DIES.

Then he paid the driver and we were outside a mansion.

This was the Bicker Club whatever that meant. He said would I wait outside a moment as he would HAVE A WORD with Mr.

Heavens. I was causing trouble. What else could I do?

I had AMPLE OPPORTUNITY to read THE BICKER CLUB'S DRESS CODE FOR NON-MEMBERS.

INAPPROPRIATE ATTIRE IS LISTED BELOW: • LEGGINGS, STIRRUP PANTS, CAPRI PANTS • SHORTS OR CUTOFFS • SWEATSHIRTS, SWEATPANTS, OR JOGGING SUITS • HALTER DRESSES OR SUNDRESSES • DENIM OF ANY TYPE OR IN ANY COLOR, INCLUDING DRESSES, SHIRTS, SKIRTS, VESTS AND / OR SLACKS • SPANDEX OR LYCRA GARMENTS • T-SHIRTS, TANK TOPS OR CROP TOPS Did I have CAPRI pants? What was a LYCRA GARMENT?

Olivier returned, not with Heavens but with Jeavons, a strange and ugly thing in a PENGUIN SUIT, as sniffy as the CARDIN JUDGE who gaoled my brother. Jeavons had a bald head and huge ears and when he spoke he raised an eyebrow as if sending me private messages. All Greek to me.

Jeavons provided me with a long fur coat but I was a HOT ENGINE as my mother always said. OUR DEAR V8 she called me. I said I was not cold.

Said Olivier, the bear suit is not exactly voluntary old chum.

Then I understood the rude bugger Jeavons wished me to cover my own clothes. True enough—-once my Marshy body was hidden from the MEMBERS' view I was permitted entrance to the Bicker Club. You never saw such a place, too High Church for Mum, stained-glass ceilings, wood carved like a bloody ROOD SCREEN so it was IN EVERY WAY SUPERIOR to the place where we had left poor old Butcher and Marlene where the only chair had been a case of wine. I kept my coat buttoned tight around me because by now I was certain I must have a LYCRA GARMENT and when Jeavons said, You've had a long journey sir, I answered yes.

Then I added, Mad Max.

He laughed. I was pleased to have made a joke.

On the way to what you would call an ANCIENT LIFT we passed a long gallery with a stained-glass ceiling which was dead as a DODO with no sunlight to drive it. MEDIOCRE CRAP hung on the walls and I was pleased Butcher was not here for he would have got COMPLETELY APE SHIT, taken a whip and driven the so-called artists into the park for manual labour. Of course I did not know anything about Gramercy Park, not the secret tree poisoning, not the locksmith on First Avenue who will cut the illegal key to its gate, not the trouble with the committee either and when Jeavons told me Bowtie Johnson had declared this mansion among the most beautiful in New York, I did not know this name any better than Suspender.

Just the same, on my first night in New York City I understood I was with the CREME DE LA CREME. I slept in a bed two feet wide, as snug as a bug in a rug.

41

My first week in Manhattan was spent jet-lagged, twiddling my thumbs and dozing while Marlene attempted to persuade Olivier Leibovitz that he should exercise his droit moral and sign the certificate of authentication.

Marlene told me everything, blow by blow, and I was so free of jealousy, so bloody adult, you have no idea, and it was only when AT&T asked for my social security number that I really went ballistic. An hour later, at Prince Street Lumber there was a setto when they did not understand that an "outlet" is what is really called a "power point". After that I was nearly run down on Houston Street. I was a lonely, unemployed disaster, a twohundred- pound barra-mundi flapping on the deck.

That Slow Bones had deserted me in favour of the bloody Bicker Club was more upsetting than you might imagine. But what could I do? There is always Hugh, an interference on the screen, a hum in the speakers, a nagging ache when there is nothing wrong. So what was I complaining about? I had more money in my pocket than my father had accumulated in the full total fury of his life. So I could visit the Corots at the Met, or finally admit, if only to myself, that I had never seen a Rothko except in reproduction. I had the time. Indeed, the Mercer Street apartment was full of time, a cold metallic blue colour which soaked into every corner, sucking the life from the greys and browns, and once I had stood naked in front of the dusty falllength mirror, confronting the puckering pectorals, I knew it was better to be outside, away from the Lagavulin and my own decay and guilt.

In an empty lot on Broadway, I bought a severely secondhand London Fog from a hostile Korean in mittens. The coat was adequate, or would be for a week or two. Never mind, I hurried into a shop where they understood my accent and I bought a tourist guide and a five-dollar lottery ticket and then I walked beneath all those blunt sans-serif shop signs advertising quality linen and factory remnants, past the Strand Morgue, all the way along lower Broadway, on up to Union Square where I figured out the subway could get me to the Museum of Modern Art.

Then, on what we might call a faux-impulse, I cut sideways, across the grey and black gum-speckled footpath, down to Gramercy Square. I might just look at this ridiculous Bicker Club. It was in my guidebook after all. Philip Johnson said it was great. Not knowing his work, I went along.

There was also, as there had been on lower Broadway, a certain level of street hollering, so I was not surprised, on entering this lovely garden square, to hear the human voice once more in uproar. Waaaaaa! I shoved my hands into the nasty twenty-dollar coat and peered between the black spiked rails, and there, at the far end of the locked park, I saw a white man running. An ambulance now entered 20th Street and was attempting to push its way across to Madison with the force of nothing but light and sound. In the midst of this confusion it took me a moment to see that the white man was the author of that dreadful Waaaaaaa. He was barrelling around the park with his naked legs exposed by cowboy chaps.

Then I saw that the chaps were split trousers and that the man was none other than my brother Hugh.

The thing about Gramercy Park is you need a key. But if you're a guest at the Bicker Club you are entitled to take a stroll, and Olivier, it seems, had instructed the Little Old Butler Figure whose name I will not say, to let Hugh enter. The Little Old Butler Figure, for whatever cruel reason best known to his own twisted tiny mind, had not only admitted my brother but then closed the gate behind him. And although the idiot savant, on finding himself caged, had attempted to explain his dilemma to the street, first to a dog walker, then to a limo driver and then to what appears to have been a group of English models on their way to a photo shoot, none of them—and this may not be the fault of their characters, but of the Australian accent which in Slow Bones' case was rather broad—not one chose to acknowledge him with the result that he became distressed, and therefore more alarming to those later people to whom he delivered his appeals, including—so I heard—a member of the Gramercy Park Community Board, a "sprightly"—oh save me— eighty-year-old who, having found herself locked inside the park with a "homeless man", fled to the street and slammed the gate.

My brother, it is alleged, then tried to climb the spiked railing and in order to do this he successfully wrenched a park bench from its mooring, managing to shear four quarter-inch bolts, and then dragged it into a flower bed— all quite sensible you would think—until the bench sank from his weight at the most unlucky moment and Hugh got an iron railing shoved up the leg of his brand-new grey flannel trousers which then ripped him from cuff to baggy boxers.