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mixture of expectancy and regret.
    Later, in our bed, Jean had said as much to me. What had been strongest in her mind had been the publicness of knowing a lot of the people in there.
    And if the participants had been unknown, and there had been no audience, I’d asked her?
    She hadn’t answered my question with words.

THE SMOKE
    W HEN I GOT TO the Steering Wheel, only Johnny Sheperdson was there. The other four were elsewhere for the moment. Naturally I got the full treatment from the management, just as the Shepherdsons would have got at one of my places. The only thing they didn’t do before I passed through into the main part of the club was to press my trousers for me.
    Johnny was sitting in the deep red leather booth where they always sat, his artificial leg straight and rigid beneath the table. There was no one else in the place. On the table in front of him was a mix of Bucks Fizz. He was pouring some of it into a tall glass as I approached the booth. He was the youngest of the five of them by quite a few years. I made him around twenty-seven or -eight. If he hadn’t been family they’d have concreted him up years ago. In my opinion he drank too much.
    The staff had arrived with the additional glass by the time I got to the booth.
    “George,” Johhny said as I sat down. The staff filled the other tall glass for me and retired.
    I drank some Bucks Fizz.
    “Cheers,” I said.
    I looked round the club. The cleaners had just about finished. Upstairs I could hear the muffled sound of a Hoover.
    The place was very tastefully done out. Knowing the Shepherdsons, I always wondered why.
    “Up and about with the larks,” Johnny said.
    “Yes,” I said. “I’ve done my day’s work.”
    “Neat.”
    I lit a cigarette.
    “Your brothers in?”
    “No,” he said.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Which means they’re out, doesn’t it?” he said.
    I nodded.
    Then with my right hand I took hold of the front of his shirt and pulled very hard so that the side of his head crashed on to the table top. I brought my clenched fist down on the other side of his head like someone rubber-stamping an envelope. In the process of doing this Johnny’s head knocked over the jug of Bucks Fizz. When I’d hit him again, I pushed him upwards and backwards into the red leather. I looked at him a long time, until he was convinced that retaliation would not be a good thing. After that I let him go.
    Two third-division heavies began to steam towards us but Johnny gave them a look that turned them round. They should never have set off in the first place.
    “Now,” I said to him, “as your brothers are out, and not in, I’d like you to tell them this: as even they’ll already have guessed, Arthur Philips and Wally Carpenter and Michael Butcher no longer walk among us. Just tell your brothers that the four of them, and you, are still able to perambulate among those who are more or less alive because just at present I have no intention of starting 1973 all over again. Not that I wouldn’t win, of course. But because if it were to start all over again, Farlow would no doubt be brought into it and eventually brought down and he wouldn’t be selective about what he said, would he? And then nobody’d win, would they? Would they, Johnny? Eh?”
    Johnny didn’t say anything.
    “No,” I said to him.
    I took a drink from my tall glass. Bucks Fizz continued to dribble from the jug and eventually onto the carpet.
    “Do you know what I really hate about you and your big brothers?” I said to him.
    He didn’t ask me.
    “You’re crude,” I told him. “You’re all so fucking crude. That’s what I hate about you most of all.”
    I drank the remains of my drink and stood up.
    Then I took hold of the handle of the draining jug and stood it right way up on the table.
    “For a lad of your age,” I said to him, “you drink far too much of this sort of stuff.”
    Then I walked away from him, across the thick carpeting, and out of the