He gave her a sideways squint over his frothy mugful, 'Spill it,' he said.

'My little yellow car is booked in today for a service and its road test, and I just wondered…'

'If I'd drive it along to that big garage for you?'

'William will bring you back,' she said persuasively.

'For you, Cassie, anything,' he said. 'Straightaway.'

'Plaster off this afternoon,' she said happily, and I looked at her clear grey eyes and thought that I loved her so much it was ridiculous. Don't ever leave me, I thought. Stay around for ever. It would be lonely now without you… It would be agony.

We all went in my car along to the cottage and I left it out in the road because of Cassie wanting Bananas to back her little yellow peril out of the garage onto the driveway. She and he walked towards the garage doors to open them and I, half watching them, went across to unlock the front door and retrieve the letters which would have fallen on the mat just inside.

The cottage lay so quiet and still that our precautions seemed unnecessary, like crowd barriers on the moon.

Angelo is unpredictable, I told myself. Unstable as Mount St Helens. One might as well expect reasonable behaviour from an earthquake, even if one does ultimately wish him to prosper.

REMEMBER TIGERS.

There was a small banging noise out by the garage. Nothing alarming. I paid little attention.

Six envelopes lay on the mat. I bent down, picked them up, shuffled through them. Three bills for Luke, a rate demand for the cottage, an advertisement for books and a letter to Cassie from her mother in Sydney. Ordinary mundane letters, not worth dying for.

I gave one final glance round the pretty sitting-room, seeing the red check frills on the curtains and the corn dollies moving gently in the breeze through the door. It wouldn't be so long, I thought, before we were back.

The kitchen door stood open, the light from the kitchen window lying in a reflecting gleam on the white paint: and across the gleam a shadow moved.

Bananas and Cassie, I thought automatically, coming in through the kitchen door. But they couldn't. It was locked.

There was hardly time even for alarm, even for primaeval instinct, even for rising hair. The silencer of a pistol came first into the room, a dark silhouette against the white paint, and then Angelo, dressed in black, balloon-high with triumph, towering with malice, looking like the devil.

There was no point in speech. I knew conclusively that he was going to shoot me, that I was looking at my own death. There was about him such an intention of action, such a surrender to recklessness, such an intoxication of destructiveness, that nothing and no one could have talked him out of it.

With a thought so light-fast that it wasn't even conscious, I reached out to the baseball bat which still lay on the window sill. Grasped its handle end with the dexterity of desperation and swung towards Angelo in one continuous movement from twisting foot through legs, trunk, arm and hand to bat, bringing the weight of the wood down towards the hand which held the pistol with the whole force of my body.

Angelo fired straight at my chest from six feet away. I felt a jerking thud and nothing else and wasn't even astonished and it didn't even a fraction deflect my swing. A split second later the bat crunched down onto Angelo's wrist and hand and broke them as thoroughly as he'd broken Cassie's arm.

I reeled from the force of that impact and spun across the room, and Angelo dropped the gun on the carpet and hugged his right arm to his body, yelling one huge shout at the pain of it and doubling over and running akwardly out of the front door and down the path to the road.

I watched him through the window. I stood in a curious sort of inactivity, knowing that there was a future to come that had not yet arrived, a consequence not yet felt but inexorable, the fact of a bullet through my flesh.

I thought: Angelo has finally bagged his Derry. Angelo has taken his promised revenge. Angelo knows his shot hit me straight on target. Angelo will be convinced that he has done right, even if it costs him a lifetime in prison. In Angelo, despite his smashed wrist, despite his prospects, there would be at that moment an overpowering, screaming, unencompassable delirium of joy.

The battle was over, and the war. Angelo would be satisfied that in every physical, visible way, he had won.

Bananas and Cassie came running through the front door and looked enormously relieved to see me standing there, leaning a little against a cupboard but apparently unhurt.

'That was Angelo!' Cassie said.

'Yeah.'

Bananas looked at the baseball bat which lay on the floor and said, 'You bashed him.'

'Yeah.'

'Good,' Cassie said with satisfaction. 'His turn for the dreaded plaster.'

Bananas saw Angelo's gun and leaned to pick it up.

'Don't touch it,' I said.

He looked up enquiringly, still half bent.

'Fingerprints,' I said. 'Jail him for life.'

'But-'

'He shot me,' I said.

I saw the disbelief on their faces begin to turn to anxiety.

'Where?' Cassie said.

I made a fluttery movement with my left hand towards my chest. My right arm felt heavy and without strength, and I thought unemotionally that it was because some of the muscles needed to lift it were torn.

'Shall I get an ambulance?' Bananas said.

'Yes.'

They didn't understand, I thought, how bad it was. They couldn't see any damage, and I was concerned mostly about how to tell them without frightening Cassie to death.

It wasn't that at that point it felt so terrible, but I still knew in a detached fashion that it soon would be. There was an internal disintegration going on like the earth shifting, like foundations slipping away. Accelerating, but still slowly.

I said, 'Ring Cambridge hospital.'

It all sounded so calm.

I slid down, without meaning to, to my knees, and saw the anxiety on their faces turn to horror.

'You're really hurt,' Cassie said with spurting alarm.

'It's… er… er…' I couldn't think what to say.

She was suddenly beside me, kneeling, finding with terrified scarlet fingers that the entry wound that didn't show through the front of my padded husky jacket led to a bigger bleeding exit at the back.

'Oh my God,' she said in stunned absolute shock.

Bananas strode over for a look and I could see from both their faces that they did know now, there was no longer any need to seek the words.

He turned grim-faced away and picked up the telephone, riffling urgently through the directory and dialling the number.

'Yes,' he was saying. 'Yes, it's an emergency. A man's been shot. Yes, I did say shot… through the chest… Yes, he's alive… Yes, he's conscious… No, the bullet can't be in him.' He gave the address of the cottage and brief directions. 'Look, stop asking damn fool questions… tell them to shift their arse… Yes, it does look bloody serious, for God's sake stop wasting time… My name? Christ Almighty, John Frisby.' He crashed the receiver down in anger and said, 'They want to know if we've reported it to the police. What the hell does it matter?'

I couldn't be bothered to tell him that all gunshot wounds had to be reported. Breathing, in fact, was becoming more difficult. Only words that needed to be said were worth the effort.

'That pistol,' I said. 'Don't put it… in a plastic bag. Condensation… destroys… the prints.'

Bananas looked surprised and I thought that he didn't realise I was telling him because quite soon I might not be able to. I was beginning to feel most dreadfully ill, with clamminess creeping over my skin and breaking into a sweat on my forehead. I gave a smallish cough and wiped a red streak from my mouth onto the back of my hand. An enveloping wave of weakness washed through me and I found myself sagging fairly comprehensively against the cupboard and then half lying on the floor.