He rolled off her and turned on his side. His whole body felt cold and slack. He concentrated on fantasies of Joyce as his slave, and on the importance of this act which he must perform to make her so. After a while, after the minutes he had asked her to give him, he turned to her once more to look at her face. If he could just look at her face and forget that wonderful terrifying body . . . She was asleep. Her head buried in her arms, she had fallen into a heavy drunken sleep.

Nigel would have liked to kill her then. He held the gun pressed to the back of her neck. Perhaps he would have killed her if the gun had been loaded and the trigger not stiff and immoveable. But the gun, like himself, was just a copy or a replica. It was as useless as he.

He took it with him into the kitchen and closed the door. Suddenly he was visited by a childhood memory, a vision from some fifteen or sixteen years in the past. He was sitting at the table and his father was spoon-feeding him, forcibly feeding him, while his mother crawled about the floor with a cloth in her hand. His mother was mopping up food that he spilt or spat out, reaching up sometimes to wipe his face with the flannel in her other hand, while his father kept telling him he must eat or he would never grow up, never be a man. The adult Nigel bent his head over the table in Marty’s kitchen, as he had bent it over that other one, and began to weep as he had wept then. It was only the thought of Marty coming back and finding him there that stilled his sobs and made him get up again, choking and cursing. Reality was unbearable, he wanted oblivion. He put the mouth of the bottle to his own mouth, closed his lips right round it, and poured a long steady stream of whisky down his throat. There was just time to get back to that mattress and stretch himself out as far as possible from Joyce, before the spirit knocked him out.

Marty looked at the shops in Oxford Street, thinking of the clothes he would buy when he was free to buy them. He had never had the money to be a snappy dresser but he would like to be one, to wear tight trousers and velvet jackets and shirts with girls’ faces and pop stars’ names on them. A couple of passing policemen looked at him, or he fancied they looked at him, so he stopped peering in windows and walked off down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus.

In the neighbourhood of Leicester Square he visited a couple of amusement arcades and played the fruiters, and then he wandered around Soho. He had always meant to go into one of those strip clubs, and now, when he had wads of money in his pocket, was surely the time. But the pain which had troubled him on Monday was returning. Every few minutes he was getting a twinge in the upper part of his stomach, with cramps which made him break wind and taste bile when the squeezing vice released. He couldn’t go into a club and enjoy himself, feeling like that and liable to keep doubling up. It wasn’t his appendix, he thought, he’d had that out when he was twelve. Withdrawal symptoms, that’s what it was. Alcohol was a drug, and everyone knew that when you came off a drug you got pains and sweats and felt rotten. He should have done it gradually, not cut it off all of a sudden.

How long were those two going to take over it? Nigel hadn’t said what time he was to get back, but midnight ought to be OK, for God’s sake. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, no wonder he felt so queasy. He’d best get a good steak and some chips and a couple of rolls inside him. The smell in the steak house made his throat rise, and he stumbled out, wondering what would happen if he collapsed in the street and the police picked him up with all that money in his pockets.

He’d feel safer nearer home, so he got into the tube which took him up to Kilburn. Luckily the 32 bus came along at once. Marty got on it, slumped into a downstairs seat and lit a cigarette. The Indian conductor asked him to put it out, and Marty said to go back to the jungle and told him what he could do to himself when there. So they stopped the bus and the big black driver came round and together, to the huge glee of the other passengers, they put Marty off. He had to walk all the way up Shoot-up Hill and he didn’t know how he made it.

But it was too early to go back yet, only a quarter to eleven. Whether his trouble was withdrawal symptoms or a bug, he had to have a drink, and they did say whisky settled the stomach. His father used to say it, the old git, and if anyone knew about booze he should. A couple of doubles, thought Marty, and he’d sleep like a log and wake up all right tomorrow.

The Rose of Killarney was about half-way along the Broadway. Marty walked in a bit unsteadily, wincing with pain as he passed between the tables. Bridey and the licensee were behind the bar.

‘Double scotch,’ said Marty thickly.

Bridey said to the licensee, ‘This fella lives next to me. Will you listen to his manners?’

‘OK, Bridey, I’ll serve him.’

‘In the same house he lives and can’t say so much as a civil please. If you ask me, he’s had too much already.’

Marty took no notice. He never spoke to her if he could help it, any more than he did to any of these foreigners, immigrants, Jews, spades and whatever. He drank his scotch, belched and asked for another.

‘Sorry, son, you’ve had enough. You heard what the lady said.’

‘Lady,’ said Marty. ‘Bloody Irish slag.’

It was only just eleven, but he was going home anyway. The light in his room was out. He could see that from the street where he had to sit down on a wall, he felt so sick and weak. The stairs were the last phase in his ordeal and they were the worst. Outside his door he thought he’d rather just lie down on the landing floor than go through all the hassle of waking Nigel to let him in. He peered at the keyhole but couldn’t see through because the iron key was blocking it. Maybe Nigel hadn’t bothered to lock it because things had gone right and there was no longer any need to. He tried the key in the Yale and the door opened.

After the darkness of the landing, the yellow light made him blink. From force of habit he locked the door and hung the string the key was on round his neck. The light lay in irregular patches on the two sleeping faces. Great, thought Marty, he’s made it, we’ll be out of here tomorrow. Holding his sore stomach, breathing gingerly, he curled up on the sofa and pulled the blanket over him.

Joyce hadn’t been aware of his arrival. It was three or four hours later that she awoke with a banging head and a dry mouth. But she came to herself quickly and remembered what her original purpose in going to bed with Nigel had been. She looked at him with feelings of amazement and distaste, and with pity too. Joyce thought she knew all about sex, far more than her mother did, but no one had ever told her that what had happened with Nigel is so usual as to be commonplace, an inhibition that affects all men sometimes and some men quite often. She thought of virile confident Stephen, and she decided Nigel must have some awful disease.

Both her captors were deeply asleep, Marty snoring, Nigel with his right hand tucked under the pillow. Joyce put her clothes on. Then she lay down beside Nigel and put her right hand under the pillow too, feeling the hard warm metal of the gun. Immediately her hand was gripped hard, but not, she thought, because he was aware of what she was after. Rather it was as if he needed a woman’s hand to hold in his troubled sleep, as a child may do. With her left hand she slid the gun out and eased her right hand away. Nigel gave a sort of whimper but he didn’t wake up.

Taking a deep breath and wishing the thudding in her head would stop, she raised the gun, pointed it at the kitchen wall and tried to squeeze the trigger. It wouldn’t move. So it was a toy, as she had hoped and lately had often supposed. She was filled with exultation. It was a toy, as you could tell really by the plasticky look of it, that handle part seemed actually made of plastic, and by the way it said Made in W. Germany.