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The last knife came slowest of all, seemed almost to stop in mid-flight. As if it was caught in two minds, couldn’t quite decide whether to stick her or pass her by.

It was an awkward situation. Spreadeagled, she felt the spinning board pocked and scratchy against her back, the iron bands that strapped down her arms and legs, and saw Charley Root poised to take his bow. Masked but toothless, with his shirt-buttons straining and white coins of corset peeking through, he started to strip off his black gloves. Still
Cherokee
played on, and the knife’s point, dangling, turned hazy-blue like smoke.

The taste in her mouth then was acrid, she felt as if she’d hit an air pocket and was falling weightless. She clamped her teeth against a rush of nausea, shut her eyes, and as she did so she caught a glimpse, somewhere out beyond the knife’s edge, of a city street in daylight.

She saw a line of low wooden buildings in the rain, a bar, a hardware store, and some kind of medical shop, a plate-glass window filled with crutches and neck-braces, surgical trusses, all manner of miracle cures.

It was like looking into a diorama: a girl stood leaning against the glass, eating french fries out of a paper bag in a plastic raincoat with no stockings and no hat against the wet,
just the morning paper on her head, held open at the Classifieds. She kept glancing at her watch, waiting on a bus, but she didn’t seem impatient, merely curious. When the bus arrived, she placed one foot in a white orthopaedic shoe on the bottom step, then she must have sensed she was being watched, somehow spied on, because she looked back across her turned shoulder, the same coy pose that Charley Root had struck when he was scrabbling for his teeth under the vanity, only the girl’s face beneath the evening paper was not rouged or raddled, it was suffused with light.

In that instant, the shock of recognition had whipped at Kate’s eyes like a lash; she’d shouted out. But her cry made no sound. The only noise was the fat thwack of the Susie Q on the board behind her left ear, and a drizzle of applause, as she fell out of consciousness.

How could that be? To be strapped to a board in Tarpon Springs, yet watching a girl in an open street, both at the same moment? Long afterwards, Kate had tried to describe it to Fred Root.
Don’t be so bloody silly
, he’d said, and she had tried not to be, but there were moments like now when she couldn’t help herself. Bloody silliness was her nature, the fashion she had been created.

So she got gas. So sharp and evil, it almost knocked her to her knees. By the time she settled, it was almost time for
Days of Our Lives
.

In yesterday’s episode, Stefano had learned from Celeste that Tony was pretending to be blind in order to trap John and Kristen, and Sami and Lucas joined forces to break up Austin and Carrie. Bo, meanwhile, refused to believe Billie’s claim that Gina was being brainwashed. So Billie, crushed, had returned Bo’s ring.

But Kate could not concentrate. When Bo stole a kiss from Gina, the dirty dog, she felt no sense of betrayal. No sense of
anything, in fact. All she could think of was a small boy on a blue tricycle, velvet drapes and Persian cats, and Tarpon Springs, and the teeth, the pigs, the knives, the girl waiting at the bus stop, and when the girl had turned her head. And Kate couldn’t cope. Too much had come at her too fast, too fierce. Panic swept across her, she felt sickened. Stumbling through the jungle to Pearl’s cage, she opened its gate wide. Opened the door to the Zoo as well, and gestured for her to fly away. But the fool bird refused to oblige. Instead of grabbing its freedom, all it did was flutter feebly in circles, bang its head on the walls and the ceiling, singe its wings on one of the gas heaters, and wind up tangled in a Virginia creeper, head-down and thrashing.

This was no kind of life.

No kind of life at all. Kate couldn’t stay here and watch, not one moment more. So she left the bird to live or die, it could suit itself. She didn’t even stop to lock the door, just walked out on Broadway in her housecoat and fluffy mules, and started swimming upstream. Past the OTB and La Perla
botanica
, past the Nu-U juice bar, Regan’s funeral parlour, and Blanco y Negro, and the Chemical Bank where the clock now read 101°, until she found herself almost at Sweeney’s, where she paused to catch her breath, she took a look around.

A child lay in the street.

A
t lunchtime John Joe Maguire sat in Sweeney’s, drinking a Bud on draught. They had strange beer in this far country, cat’s piss was the fact of the matter, but the bar was cool and dark, and there was a story on the TV about a girl being brainwashed, a man who was pretending to be blind.

It was only his third day in the city, his feet were not under him yet. At Christmas, when Juice Shovlin came home to Scath, red-faced and gleaming in a hired Daimler, buying drinks all around in Tigh Neachtain’s, the man had scattered his business cards like confetti.
The Shovlin Group, Property and Pride
, the cards read. “You must come up and see me sometime,” said Juice.

“I’ll do that,” said John Joe.

“Good man yourself,” said Juice, and handed him a cigar in an aluminium tube, not some squitty little Hamlet or Whiff, but a torpedo thick and long as the dirty drawings in Tigh Neachtain’s outhouse where John Joe was sick later on.

His mother was still living then, propped up in her bed at Uncle Frank’s with her chocolates and Mills St Boon romances. But the morning after her funeral, he came down to breakfast late, with his suitcase already packed.

“If you’re off to America the day, you’ll be wanting a good breakfast,” said Uncle Frank.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Could you not face a rasher?” his Auntie Phyllis asked. “Or a slice of blood sausage even?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you? It’s paid for,” said Uncle Frank, poring over the football pages. It was raining out, Cousin Declan was pulling on his boots by the kitchen door. “I’d say Down would take some beating,” Cousin Declan said.

“I’d say they would,” said Uncle Frank.

The Shovlin Group had offices on Park Avenue, thirty-one floors up. When Juice Shovlin caught sight of John Joe and his suitcase, he burst out laughing. “The Great Maguire,” he said. “What the feck brings you here?”

“You said I must come.”

“Well, feck me rigid,” said Juice.

For the two days and nights since then John Joe had put up at a YMCA. He couldn’t get much rest for the strange men jumping into his bed and out again at every hour, no food would stay on his stomach, and the heat had him sandbagged. But was he downhearted? He was not. Juice Shovlin had promised him a managerial position, he was due to start work this afternoon. Just time to clean his glass, and he walked out in the street.

For a moment the heat and white glare blinded him. When his vision cleared, a child was at his feet.

A young boy, seven or eight years old, lying on his side like a sleeper, with his feet on the sidewalk, his head lolling down off the kerb, and one hand stretched out in the light, its fingers loosely curled, as if soliciting alms.

From Sweeney’s doorway you could only see one eye, and that was shut. John Joe’s first thought was,
This child has gone to meet his maker. He is in a better place
; his second was to pass by. He was a stranger here himself, after all, and the
street was full of other people. Any one among them could stop and mind. Only none of them did.

At least the child had shade. He was lying close by the rear wheel of a parked delivery van, almost under it in fact, a few yards away from the Blanco y Negro bodega. In the heat-haze above him, two men in blue coveralls were handing down crates of Boar’s Head ham and baloney, and sliding them across the sidewalk on a metal conveyor-belt, down into the chill of the cellar. The owner of Blanco y Negro, studying the receipts, massaged a bright red apple on his sleeve and did not stop saying Shit. One of the men in coveralls showed him where to sign. Saying Shit louder, he threw down his apple untouched, and it started to roll down the street, then hit a rut and veered off at an angle until it arrived at the kerb, where it came to rest against the boy’s body, cushioned in the crook behind his bare knees.

John Joe picked it up.

He took one bite, sweet but tasteless, mushy, and put the rest in his back pocket for safekeeping. Then he was squatting on his haunches, fumbling at the child’s throat. It was his duty.

He found no pulse. Then again, he had no notion where to look for one. The flesh beneath his fingers felt cool, not cold, and when he pressed down, testing the collarbone, the breast, no trace of blood came away. Still the child made no stir or sound.

“Give him air. Let him breathe,” some man said. John Joe moved his thumb and forefinger against the child’s lips, tried to prise the teeth open, but they would not part. His fingers felt clammy as slugs, obscene. When he lifted the shut eyelid, the orb was milky white. “Kid can’t breathe,” some other man said. “Why don’t you let the kid fuckin’ breathe?”

All John Joe felt then was guilt. He saw his own crouched shape, the child unmoving beneath his hand.
Not in front of
all these people
, he thought. As if he’d struck down the boy himself. As perhaps he had. He laid his head against the boy’s chest and listened, he strained, but all he could hear was the lurching of his own heart. Then he wanted to shake this boy, to slap him, he wanted to hurt him some way. But that was not feasible.
Not here
, he thought.
Not now
.

Next door to the Blanco y Negro, two men in suits were watching from inside a funeral parlour. The men in coveralls were watching, too, and the man who had thrown down his apple; an old lady in a walking frame, and her black nurse; three teenage girls in hotpants and halter tops; some man, some other man; and one large woman in a floral housecoat.

When this large woman knelt down beside the child’s head, John Joe heard her grunt, could hear her stays creak. “Don’t be so bloody silly,” the woman said.

And the child got up. Rose like a whistled greyhound, in one smooth motion, and turned his face to the light. His opened eyes were hazel with golden flecks, but they didn’t seem to see John Joe, or the large woman either. In the door of Blanco y Negro another woman was standing, shouting. A dark woman who cried out in a tongue that John Joe didn’t understand, and on her fingers were clusters of rings, ruby red and emerald, that clutched the child, and bore him away.

Left alone with the woman whose stays creaked, John Joe fished the red apple from his back pocket and took another chomp, but it was no use, there was still no savour, no tang. “Why waste your money? You might as well chew cotton wool,” the woman said. “Or sugared woodpulp, why not?”

His first impression had been that she was fat, even gross, but now that he looked again, she only seemed hefty, a country woman’s built. Strong, dimpled arms and a broad-boned pink face all freckles, pudding-basin grey hair, beads of sweat on a full upper lip, green eyes, and a gap between her front teeth. In
the street’s white glare, her skin looked rosy and roughened, as though she’d been rudely scrubbed at an outdoor tap on a raw morning.
A butter churner
, John Joe thought.

Those green eyes now looked him up and down, a steady and measuring stare he did not enjoy one bit. “You’d be better off with a carrot. Help you see in the dark,” the woman said. “If you’d care to see in the dark, that it.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Good. That’s good.” But her mind had upped and walked away, he could sense that. Fumbling in the pocket of her housecoat, she found a half-smoked Camel. “My bird got loose. She’s stuck in the Virginia creeper,” the woman said.

An odd voice she had, dead flat, uninfected, that grated like stripped gears from too many smokes, an accent that wasn’t English but put John Joe in mind of that country none the less, the tourists who pass through Kilmullen in season from Birmingham, Coventry and such. “Were you ever in Leamington Spa?” he asked, but she gave no sign that she heard him, just linked his arm, though his apple was only half-eaten, and started to walk him down the block. Her big legs were bare, her blue slippers were out at the toes. “The name is Kate,” she said. “You may call me Miss Root.”

The place they came to shocked him. He’d been expecting a spinster’s tidy room and a budgie, not to tumble into the Amazon, plunged with no word of warning inside a world of serpents and lizards, man-eating plants by the look of them, and fantastical birds straight out of a Tarzan book, parakeets and conures and hawk-headed caiques, all trilling and whooping to beat the band, with their eyes bright, bright, through the dark and dripping leaves.

A pied-pearl bird sat on the counter, staring at the blank screen of a portable TV. When it caught sight of Miss Root, it flew to her shoulder, started pecking at her hair and cheeks.

“Yon bird is trapped in no creeper,” said John Joe.

“But he was,” said Miss Root. “Oh, he was.”

That seemed small excuse. The day was wearing on, time was flushing. “Juice Shovlin’s expecting me,” said John Joe.

“How would you like to earn ten bucks?”

“I am already in work.”

“Ten bucks for nothing. Almost nothing.”

“Night-manager at a warehouse.”

“So make it twenty.”

Fair play to her, it was money for old farts. All he was required to do was make a few passes with a broom, trim a few obstreperous vines, while Miss Root smoked Camels and watched TV with her bird.

The man that was pretending to be blind saw a murder, the woman who was being brainwashed ran screaming off a roof. When John Joe looked up from his chores, Miss Root was studying him again with her flat green eyes, a piercing the like he hadn’t felt since Mrs. Connolly in Chemistry, that style she’d had of pinning you like something on a slide, as if to say:
Your flies may not be undone as we speak, boy, but they will be, oh yes, they will
.

The heat in this room was hellfire. The gas heaters had bars like rows of ginger teeth, and the floorboards squelched like swamp wherever John Joe moved. “I’m finished. All done,” he said.