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By Root 619 0

live to eat. The English, on the other hand, eat to die. I took my pint to the bar, and scored a bag of crisps — shrimp-and-rollmop flavour — and a sachet of Pork Scrunchies. I turned, eating these, and watched the people. No doubt about it, I'm not a badlooking guy when I hang out at the Shakespeare. I may not rate that high among Fielding and the filmstars, but in here I'm a catch. These working-class women, they're like a sheep trial. It obviously takes it out of you, being working class. There's a lot of wear and tear involved. And pubs can't help. I turned again and leaned on the panelled bar, flanked by the heraldic street-signs of the beer-pull logos, the tureen-sized plastic ashtrays, the furry, nippled mats that imitate wetness even when they're dry. Tacked to the square wooden pillar was the hand-written pub-grub bill of fare, with its obsessive permutations of pie-mash and fry-up, the ands and ors underlined, the "coffee" and "tea" in their exotic inverted commas. For a while I stared into the clockface of an antique charity-box. Let the Friends of St Martin's Hospital Tell Your Fortune. You put in a coin, a wand twirls, and a brief selection of perfunctory destinies is on offer. I surveyed the options: Don't get Gout, Stick to Stout. Luck on the Pools. You'll have Joy, Your next a Boy ... Nothing forbidding there. And I fear all portents. If the Friends of St Martin's Hospital had been peddling rug-loss, say, or bonk-famine, then they could fend for themselves. I slipped ten pee into the slot and the coin dropped with a contented click. The wand twirled: Money is On the Way. I slipped in another: Beware of False Advice. All right, it's a deal. I looked up, and the wobbly house-of-horrors mirror slipped its planes: the glass door opened, my father stared out and then gestured encouragingly, as if from a touchline. So I ducked in under the trap.

'Hi, Dad,' I said. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a white silk scarf. He's got a good rug, my dad, silvery and plentiful. I wouldn't mind looking like that when I'm his age. Actually, I wouldn't mind looking like that now. I wouldn't have minded looking like that five years ago, come to think of it, or even ten. It's the clock, the ticker. My heart's not right.

'Don't call me that,' he said with a flinch. 'We're friends. Call me Barry. Now,' he said, placing a creaky arm across my shoulders as he led me through to the parlour, 'I want you to meet Vron.'

'Vron?' He's doing it with robots now, I thought. He halted me with a tug of my hair.

'Yeah. Vron,' he said. 'Now you behave.'

Vron sounded bad enough when I said it. My father has trouble pronouncing his r's, owing to some palate fuck-up or gob-gimmick. Vron sounded a good deal worse when he said it.

The parlour had come on a long way since I was a boy. Now, it was close with money. The ribbed and pimpled gas fire in whose angle-poise heat I used to dress myself for school had been supplanted by a black eggbasket of counterfeit coal. The granny table where I ate my toast was now a cocktail cabinet, with studded plastic, three high stools, a Manhattan skyline of siphons and shakers. Vron reclined on a dramatic sofa of white corduroy. She was a pale brunette of comfortable build, my age. I had seen her before somewhere.

'Pleased to meet you,' I said.

'I've heard so much about you, John,' said Vron.

'Vron's a very happy girl today,' said my father huskily. 'Aren't you, my lovely?'

Vron nodded.

'It's a very special day for my Vron. Show him, Vron.'

Vron sat up, tightening the folds of her kaftan. She reached under the coffee-table and produced a pornographic magazine called Debonair... Now I know my pornographic magazines: Debonair belonged to the cheaper range, targeted at the manual worker's handjob, with many a salacious housewife or spotty-bummed Swede twisting herself in and out of chain-store underwear. 'Sit down, John,' she said, and rubbed the seat beside her with her palm.

Wetting her fingertips, Vron plucked at the pages. With a sigh that was almost a gurgle of gratification, she found the