Let it just try anything when I had a pee and Christ would I show it who was boss. I washed, got out, slipped a towel over my shoulder - had a pee. I couldn't tell whether it hurt or not. So I worked it over anyway, and good.

Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing chinese-burn - a last attempt to tempt out a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol?

I experienced thrilling self-pity. 'What will that mind of yours get up to next?' I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.

Steady on. What's so great about going mad?

But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.

I was still soggy with retrospective alarm about the miraculous escape I had had eighty minutes earlier. When I followed Rachel into the room the first thing I saw was a huge notice on the mantelpiece. The notice had this to say:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LET HIM TOUCH YOU HE HAS GOT AN UNUSUALLY REVOLTING DISEASE

The notice was written on a small bottle of pills (pressed into my shaking hand twenty-four hours before). The notice was in code form; it said :

Flagyll. One to be taken four times daily.

There was a warm, musty silence. The diagonal curls of smoke from her cigarette were spangled by a thousand grains of dust highlit by the shaft of autumn sun. The shaft of autumn sun struck through the recently dismembered tree in the front garden, squeezed between the railings, quartered itself against the window-frame, wormed its way into the room.

Her tongue, as yet, was held in abeyance