Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.

Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.

[...] He'd been out until three doing car stereos. Dispiriting work: when you stove in the window bearing the inevitable sticker STEREO ALREADY GONE — on a windy night, with glass everywhere — to find the stereo already gone. [...]

Financially, this was not a good time for Keith. Few times were, financially. Even during his best periods, his purple patches of epiphanic swiping and stiffing, of fiddling and gypping and duping and diddling, when money was coming in hard from all directions, Keith never had a good time, financially. Always, at some point in the day, a bitter destiny lay in wait for him: pennilessness, at Mecca. Always he lost everything, without fail. Well, sometimes he won; but he always persevered until he had lost everything. Kath, who didn't know the tenth of it, used to ask where all the money went: where did they actually go, those tenner-crammed brown envelopes, those toilet-rolls of twenties? For the day usually began and ended with Keith upending her handbag over the kitchen table or banging at the electricity meter with his fists. Where did it all go? Kath had asked this question gently, patiently, and not recently. For it made Keith mad. How could he get anywhere, how could he progress, tied down to a wife with such limited horizons — who thought so small? 'Christ. Investments like,' he told her. 'Currency speculation. Futures.' In fact, Keith did not understand that money could be accumulated, except, perhaps, on an Accumulator, at the betting-shop. On the other hand, to give him credit, Keith didn't like it in the betting-shop. It was not a human option to like it in the betting-shop. Keith didn't mind the banked TV screens, the earache voiceover, the food scraps and dog-ends: it was more the atmosphere of longshot desperation, as guys in dead shoes and fifty-pence suits stood around trying to predict the future, with nothing to help them but the Evening News.

Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, with the spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicola depilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections of simmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (and knowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, in the windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. The thing is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is more or less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); but you start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, had thrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts the beanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play on Keith and Guy were good tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fully clothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons with impeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't going to be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchen floor.

Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.

Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - the shop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.

The other thing the house used up was order. Each day the doublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, the pasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtling towards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older, iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropy elsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, and the desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairs again, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way to exchange a few words with Melba, whose strength for years he had bought and sapped . . .

Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itself significantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in use during the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or the trouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's so totalitarian. In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for the Answer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . . what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door at three a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes -deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass. Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.

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.

[...] There appeared to have been a complementary revision of his status at Lansdowne Crescent. Guy's laundry, once discarded, no longer tangily rematerialized in his walnut chest of drawers. This morning he had wedged his shirt into the laundry basket and then, a minute or so later, tugged it out again.