Nicola was right. After he visited her, Keith went to see a ladyfriend. Moreover, Keith visited a ladyfriend before he visited her. Only certain unrepealable physical laws stopped him going to see a ladyfriend while he visited her. Nicola was right again. The girls were all after him, or at least they weren't getting out of his way. And Keith was really putting himself about, with an urgency, a cartwheel­ing canine frenzy he had never known before. Was someone putting something in his lager? It couldn't be healthy (even Keith was sure of this), and he genuinely feared for his darts, not to mention his sanity. Compulsive behaviour innit. But the birds were as bad. Indeed, over the great city, or in those flues and runnels where Keith scampered and paused, his whiskers working, a sewery fever seemed to be abroad, all wastepipes and floodgates and gargoyles, rat-borne. For Keith it was sharp and brackish, like the ever-present smell of urine in the streets. Of course, you had to be persistent, and having nothing to do all day unquestionably helped. After he'd fetched her milk for the ninth morning running, Iqbala consented, once again, to turn the telly up loud. Popping in on Petronella Jones with a series of high-octane gifts to celebrate her recent marriage to the oilrigger, Keith had found that one thing led to another. Since Thelonius's arrest, Keith had been doing the right thing, making regular and glad-handed visits to Lilette and the kids, and he could all too easily see himself developing an obligation there (Lilette okay for a baby-mamma, and not pregnant, or not very pregnant, just now: give the kids a tenner get lost for twenty minutes). It was getting so bad he hardly had time to hang around for hours on end relaxing over a few drinks with his colleagues in the Black Cross. While he performed -in bed, on the couch or the carpet, up against the radiator - while he jerked and stabbed and fought for breath, his thoughts, his desperate presentiments, were all of money, transformation, Nicola and, for the first time in his life, his own death. And here was one final proof that all was not well. He'd stumble in at Christ knows when, after doing Christ knows what to Christ knows who all day, followed by nine hours of darts and rounding it all off at Trish Shirt's - and find himself elbowing Kath awake at four in the morning! Now why would he go and do a thing like that? Kath. Kath, in whose body he had long lost all but a reflexive, Friday-night interest. It was like that time in the middle of the pregnancy, when Keith had been briefly stirred to find himself alongside this cool new fat chick with the big tits and the beer gut. I don't know what's got into me, he now thought, as he pressed her shaking shoulders down the bed. Really and truly I don't.

In imagining the act, she’d forgotten the facts: his rush to get to it—not roughness, really, more like bashfulness; his reluctance to look at her for too long. Back in California, she’d conceded to his haste, hadn’t insisted that he slow down or that he meet her gaze. Now she was more demanding. There was a twinge of antagonism in her touch, her hands directing him, yanking at him to stay still. She hardly knew where it came from—whether she was putting on an act or letting resentment seep through.