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A male voice answered, and levelly agreed to do my bidding.

'I knew it would be you,' she said, with urgent, husky restraint in her low louche voice.

'Come here. Come home,' I said in the same kind of way. 'I want you. Now.'

'Oh my man. How have I lived?'

'Get a taxi.'

'A taxi!'

'Po it.'

'Yes.'

'Soon, then.'

'Yes.'

I walked round the flat. I picked up the letter. My eyes, how they itched and burned. You know something? This was the first time I had ever seen her handwriting — her floppy, amateurish signature, her scribbled kisses. How was it possible? I mean, I know we're not the most expressive of couples, but all the same. God damn, two years on and off, and not even a note? God damn. I dropped the letter. I looked up. Had I ever shown her my hand? Yes, she'd seen it, on bills, on credit slips, on cheques.

I roved out into the foaming malls. My mission? To buy champagne. Selina, she likes a lot of outlay. You cannot do pornography by halves. Pornography and money enjoy a dose concordat, and you have to pay your union dues... The Cymbeline, eh ? Now I've stayed in that joint myself—with one or other of Selina's forerunners, some model or stylist, some Cindy or Lindy or Judy or Trudy. It's an expense-account, no-account gin palace and gaming den, very expensive, full of yanks and maple-leafers, touts, tarts, hustlers, dirty weekenders. I recommend it. Me, I was up in Stratford making a TV-ad for a new kind of flash-friable pork-and-egg bap or roll or hero called a Hamlette. We used some theatre and shot the whole thing on stage. There was the actor, dressed in black, with his skull and globe, being henpecked by that mad chick he's got in trouble. When suddenly a big bimbo wearing cool pants and bra strolls on, carrying a tray with two steaming Hamlettes on it. She gives him the wink—and Bob's your uncle. All my commercials featured a big bim in cool pants and bra. It was sort of my trademark. No one said my ads were subtle. But boy did they sell fast food fast.

Now I ducked from the wet white light into the prisms of the Liquor Locker. Jesus, have they got a lot of booze in here, and a lot of it is bottom-line — tubs of Nigerian sherry, quarts of Alaskan port. They even stock a product called Alkohol, sold in cauldrons of label-less plastic. The Liquor Locker must have started up in direct response to the many bagladies, bums and limping dipsoes who haunt this part of town. There were certainly some dreadful faces flickering through the racks. As I tarried in the malt-whisky showroom an old head presaged by spores of woodrot breath came rearing up at me like a sudden salamander of fire and blood. Dah! In his idling voice he used distant tones of entreaty and self-exculpation, pointing to the recent scar that split his heat-bubbled cheek. No you don't, pal, I thought—you can't beg in here: it makes all kinds of unwelcome connections. I'd have given him a quid just to keep him at bay but, sure enough, a member of the pimply triumvirate guarding the till came over with a yawn to drop a heavy hand on the poor guy's shoulder, aiming him back to the streets, where he belonged. Out, old son. Why? Because money says so. I scored three bottles of the tissued French usual. At the desk they cleared my Vantage card in the little paperback which lists the numbers of busted frauds and proven losers. .. Then I clanked next door to the place called Chequepoint or Chequeup or Chequeout where a caged chick cashes cheques round the clock but seems to keep half your dough as commission for this fine service. Actually, it's more than half, or feels that way by now. It goes up all the time. One day I'm going to come in here, write a cheque for fifty quid, slide it over, hang about for a while, then ask: 'Come on — what about my money?'

And the caged chick will look up and say, 'Can't you read? We keep all that now.'

I walked home the long way round, to kill time before she came— my shop-soiled Selina, my High-Street