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“Barney for short,” said John Joe.

“I wouldn’t sully my shop.”

When the steam towel was peeled from his face, John Joe felt dispossessed. He was not a manner of man who trusted much to remembering, especially the past, but under cover of darkness it had seemed no harm. The moment he was stripped and thrown back in the light, though, everything felt wrong. The spinning stripes of the barber’s pole dizzied him, the worn red-leather seat itched his nates, the enamel arms were slimy and cringing under his palms. When he reached up to feel his face, its planes and bones sat strangely to his touch. “One shave, ten bucks, plus tax, plus tip, let’s say twenty and call it quits,” he heard Miss Root muttering, and he tried to get up, but his legs were no use.

Three days with no compass—the long journey from Scath to Manhattan, bus and train and plane, and Juice Shovlin in a tight white collar, no sleep, no food that would stay down, this heat, and his bed swarmed by strangers at the YMCA—the entire parcel rose up at him swirling, hit him one left hook to the solar plexus, and he fell down out of his standing.

Miss Root’s freckles when she bent close were a shifting field of sandflies. A single strand of tobacco had lodged in the gap between her front teeth. She kept trying to suck it free but it wouldn’t budge. “Bed,” she said.

“I have to go.”

“You can have poor Godwin’s room.”

“Juice Shovlin’s expecting me.”

“I hope you don’t mind stained sheets.”

Grains of birdseed stuck to her hair, and the beads of sweat on her upper lip were fat and full as raindrops on a wire. “Mind your step, there’s a loose runner here somewhere,” she said. Her slippers on the stairs flapped at every step, her housecoat hung shapelessly as sacking. From below she looked like an old woman toiling. But when she turned her head, and John
Joe saw the green cat’s eyes, the strand of tobacco still stuck in the gapped front teeth, the face belonged to a schoolgirl. Then he was in a square room with no furnishings, just a mattress on a bedstead by another barred window. Miss Root switched on the light, but the bulb blew out. “Never mind,” she said. “It is an evil generation that asks for a sign.” And she shut him in the dark.

D
rowning not waving
, Stevie Smith wrote that, and wasn’t it the truth? Splash, splash, glug, glug. Only this morning Verse-o-Gram had called her about a gig down in the Washington meat market doing Sylvia Plath and
Lesbos
for a sisterhood bond-in at the Clit Club, and Anna was thrilled, she reverenced that woman, always had done since her days at Shalimar after Chase had had his accident and that nice Dr. Bone, instead of asking about her father, used to read her the Ariel poems. But what to wear? Verse-o-Gram’s wardrobe for London in the Sixties was strictly miniskirts and white Courrège boots
à la
Twiggy, which hardly seemed the thing, but then again, what was? The only snaps she’d ever seen of Sylvia were black-and-whites, bundled up against the English weather in somebody’s back garden, all nerves and wool. So miniskirt and Mod boots it was, and a mousy fringe wig that felt like Fuller brushes, never mind, the sisterhood seemed to lap it up,
Now I am silent, hate up to my neck, thick, thick
and
O vase of acid, it is love you are full of
, nobody said Boo.

Cash on the barrelhead, quick curtsey out the door,
I say I may be back. You know what lies are for
, and afterwards she had gone walking in the meat market. It was just finishing for the day, the trucks rolling out on Little West 12th beneath the disused El, the men in their bloodstained white coats heaving the last sides of beef across the cracked sidewalks, the steel
shutters crashing down like scrims on Green Turtle Products and Royale Veal, Spartan Meats and Adolph Kusy’s Pork Specials that had the best slogan,
We have the Meat and the Motion
, just the best, and the smells of sawdust, pickling brine, frozen slaughter everywhere, it made her feel sort of dreamy, coming so soon after Sylvia and
that night the moon dragged its blood bag
, it made her want her bed.

So she was standing on the corner across from the Liberty Inn where all the transvestite hookers took their Johns, still in her miniskirt and boots trying to flag down a taxi, when up walked this gentleman of colour, two hundred pounds if he was an ounce, in midnight-blue hotpants and a matching wig, a love-charm bracelet dangling from one ankle, who spoke to her in a little-girl lisp. “You got my pitch, bitch,” he said.

Another time and another place she might have laughed it off,
What an amusing misunderstanding! How frightfully delicious!
, but in the mouth of this man on this corner at this certain moment with the Clit Club and all those dead cows on meathooks behind her back it paralysed her almost. “I don’t want to hurt you. I can hurt you,” the man said, and what was the most galling thing, he didn’t even sound hostile, only airing an infomercial, as one impersonator to another.

Praise the Lord, a gypsy cab pulled up in a cloud of dust and whisked her away before she could get herself in deeper, but changing scenes didn’t change the film. Even when she was back home at the Zoo inside her room where she paid to stay safe there was still the mirror like fucking George Washington who could not tell a fucking lie,
a man that don’t lie got nothing to say
, Waycross Martin used to say, but that was not the point, where was she? Oh, where was she?

In front of the mirror, mother-naked except for her Sylvia wig flopping in her eyes like a dead rabbit, Cape Cadaveral with bangs at thirty-three and the fruits of too many fasts, too
many diet pills, too many IVs and stomach pumps, too many dance classes and not enough dance, a plucked chicken saying, “I don’t want to hurt you, I can hurt you,” but it sounded real weak, to be perfectly brutally frank, it sounded like nothing on earth.

Don’t start her to talking, she might tell everything she knew. In bed, chafing and fretting under the off-white sheet, she took a look out the window across the roofs towards the Hudson River and saw a shower of sparks, but she was not in the mood; in fact she wasn’t even there but back at Shalimar where she’d hardly felt a thing, sedated from asshole to eyeball the way she was, in that clean white room and those clean white corridors, and on her balcony at night with the frogs all croaking in chorus, the cicadas likewise, a night-choir, while she memorized the poems that nice Dr. Bone had given her, Henry Vaughan and John Clare, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hopkins of course,
O let them be left, wildness and wet
, and
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
, how did that go,
I am not hungry for berries, I am not hungry for bread
, that’s right,
But hungry hungry for a house Where at night a man in bed
, at Shalimar she had slept so good,
May never hear the plaster Stir as if in pain
, yes,
May never hear the roaches Falling like fat rain
, at Shalimar she had slept.

When she woke it was darkness, she felt like a dead cow herself, and when she glanced through the window her voice of its own accord said
Uh-oh
, just like that,
uh-oh
. Then she was up and out across the landing, blundering in at poor Godwin’s door, forgetting in her hurry that Godwin was long gone, not even startled to find another man’s body in his place, only hoping it was breathing or at least not stiff. “Excuse, please,” Anna said. “I don’t like to intrude, honestly I don’t, but I was sleeping, well, not really sleeping, more drowsing, sort of dreaming, you know the way you do, when I chanced to look up at Kate Root’s
Japanese garden, at least that’s what she calls it, a waste of space if you ask me, she’d be better off quilting or knitting some baby a nice pair of socks, anyway I looked up and of course I might be wrong, I often am, but I think the roof’s on fire.”

The man in the dark said nothing, only wrestled down the front of his white shirt to cover his underpants with one hand while reaching for his jeans with the other. “Of course by rights I should tell Crouch, it’s his responsibility after all, but what would be the use, he wouldn’t lift a finger, couldn’t give a flying fuck, drunk again if not worse, so I took the liberty, though I hate to wake any man, still it’s better than burning alive, the name is Crow, Anna Crow, and who may I ask are you?”

“John Joe Maguire of Scaith-na-Tairbhe.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Three miles and a half from Croaghnaleaba, almost five from Lergynascaragh,” said John Joe. By the hall light his legs looked bony and inadequate, skimbleshanks, as he struggled with his jeans, and midway down his left thigh was a dark raised weal more or less in the shape of a bird with outspread wings and its throat upflung. “Lordamercy, what’s that?” Anna said.

“A birthmark only. I’ve had it my whole life.”

“Looks like a duck, no, a swan.”

“What about the roof’s on fire?”

“A black swan,” Anna said. Squatting by the bedside she scratched at the weal with her black nails, making sure that it didn’t come off, while her bottled red hair in the dimness glinted chestnut and roan, cinnabar, hellebore. “The mark of the beast,” she said. “Just fancy that.”

Outside on the landing there was a ladder to the attic, where a man rolled up in a blanket lay mumbling, a man the colour of baked clay. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, seeing Anna, and put in his teeth.

“God curse you and castrate you, we could all have been pot roast in our beds by now and you still up here pig-happy, dreaming of free lunch.”

“I thank you kindly,” said Crouch.

In one corner was a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe with her dress raised to show her panties, and beyond a window looking onto the roof garden littered with dwarf pines, concrete deer, pots of lobelia and portulaca, a papier-mâché pagoda, and a wrought-iron brazier belching flames.

From inside Crouch’s attic these flames seemed to leap high and wild against the night sky, but when John Joe clambered out for a closer look there was only cardboard, scrap paper, a charred pair of sneakers, one dead sparrow.

“So piss on it, why don’t you?” Anna said.

When the fire had sputtered and turned to smoke, she led him back down the ladder inside her own room, which looked more like a junkshop than any lady’s boudoir, stuffed to overflowing as it was with gewgaws and bibelots, old postcards and stuffed animals, Burmese scarves, Chinese slippers, ivory spice-pots from Nagaland, Claddagh rings,
fin de siècle
shoe-lasts for Parisian courtesans, gilt mirrors, vetivert-scented candles, Venetian fans, and many, many pictures of Anna Crow—as a cheerleader, as a Playboy bunny, in G-string and panties, in cherry-pink voile, in harem pants and veil, and almost lifesize in
Swan Lake
, languidly expiring at Mrs. Sweetwater’s. “Just turned seventeen, a slip of a girl, a Georgia peach, a royal pain,
Vain as the leaf upon the stream and fickle as a changeful dream
, Sir Walter Scott, that stale fart, I never could abide him,” she said. “But still and all, seventeen.”

In this room the light was murky but strong enough for her to see John Joe whole—a sulphurous-looking party somewhere in his thirties, scant and spindling, with his hair cropped
convict-short, dabs of toilet paper stuck all over his chops, he must have butchered himself shaving. And something wrong with his right eye. The lid drooped half-shut, the muscles of the cheek were rigid, and the skin around the eye itself looked raw. “Heavens to Betsy,” Anna said. “What happened to your peeper?”

“It was an accident.”

“Of course it was.” As always in confusion, she assumed the position, her left foot angled out, knees braced, sway-backed. “Besides, you can hardly see it, you’d never hardly notice,” she said. “Almost hardly at all.”

“I had this frog.”

“No need to explain, no need at all, me and my big mouth with the foot in it, but it was the black swan, you see, it threw me for a loop. Not of course that that’s an excuse, only still.”

“I used to jump him for pennies.”

“Good for you,” Anna said. And she meant it, she really did. Though she’d scarcely met this man, he might be an axe murderer or some brain-dead New Ager for all she knew, there was something about him that soothed her. The pink circle around his eye made him look like a panda, well, no, not a panda exactly, more of a mongrel, a mutt. Which she’d always had a weakness for, a soft spot, and why the fuck not? Mutts didn’t snap and bite every time you moved, they had manners, they were grateful for scraps, they knew how to shut up and adore. “You seem a nice boy, harmless,” she said. “Did you ever tend bar?”

“At Pansy Keane’s wedding just.”

“Well, not to worry, we all have to start somewhere. I was thinking they might need a man in the place I dance, a dump but the drinks are free and you’d get to see my bazooms.”

But John Joe, she knew, could see those right now, tax-free, framed by the loose V of her lounging pyjamas where they
dangled tubular, half-ripe. “My boyfriend thinks I’m beautiful, my boyfriend drives a Spyder, my boyfriend has a magic flute,” Anna said, singsong. “I love that boy to death.” Opposite her picture as the dying swan was an Art Nouveau mirror adorned with nymphs and Ganymedes that she used to brush the blue shadows from under her eyes, the feverish patches like TB stigmata from her cheeks. “
Spend all you have on loveliness
, don’t make me laugh,” she said. Her long sprung foot, turned out in reflection, was ropy with sinews, swollen veins. “What age am I?”

“I’d say twenty-nine.”

“Marry me,” Anna said. “You might as well.”

At Sheherazade the smell of incense was strong, the smell of Lysol stronger. Bani Badpa, proprietor of record, sat drinking ouzo and glooming over his losses. “This is John Joe Maguire, he works for you,” Anna said. “You owe him forty dollars.”

“I am a dead man,” said Bani Badpa.

The storage space that Anna called her dressing room was out behind the kitchens, its shelves were full of canned chickpeas and roach motels, soiled tablecloths, sweetmeats, Raid.