He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with the child throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nursery Guy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him into the potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, again quite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf. As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out to free the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase (the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experi­ments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in other words, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelled Marmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over the collar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobble hat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt, vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game but gagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom, and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelong enthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specialization in hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flying headbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a blunt instrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new pains joined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that were there already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.

In a sinister reversal I am now established as Keith's darts coach. He doesn't coach me any more. I coach him. It's easy.

I can't help him with the technique side of it (there isn't any), and I can't help him with the tactical side of it (there isn't any), but I can help him with the psychological side of it, and there's apparently plenty of that. Everything depends on the savagery of your desire to get that dart to go where you throw it. Afterward, eerily, the money still changes hands in the same direction. Keith looks elsewhere as he receives the notes.

Dink doesn't do it. Dink didn't do it to Lizzyboo and he hasn't done it to Hope either: so Hope's clean, more or less (though I won't use it. I don't need it). Dink'll roll around and everything, and neck and pet. You can see him in the nude if you really insist. But he doesn't do it. He fears for his tennis — his rollover backhands, his whorfing smashes. Dink hasn't come for thirteen years. And the hairy bastard is still only the world ninety-nine.

There's also the fatal-disease consideration. If Dink caught one of them, he'd stop being the world ninety-nine. And start being the world five-and-a-half billion. Dink's smart. Dink's hip. He knows that dead men don't play tennis. That's how come he has this rule.

The car looked funny. Keith scrunched up the parking tickets. Then he froze. The front window on the passenger side had been stove in! Keith's body throbbed from the sudden wound. He went round and unlocked and opened the door - and felt the horrorslide and horrortrickle of the crushed glass. The welded stereo had been scrabbled at, its dials torn off, but. . . Keith's library of darts tapes! It was okay: intact, entire. They hadn't stooped that low. For a while he stared at the faulty burglar alarm he had recently stolen. Without thinking he reached down and with his right hand brushed from the seat the jewelled horrorglass.