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Kroplik, failing to hit a single number he was required to hit and having to buy a round of drinks for his team as a consequence.
    ‘Up yerz,’ Kroplik said, raising his glass. Kevern laughed, not finding it funny. He wondered again what possessed him ever to let the barber near his throat with a razor.
    The other men apologised.
    ‘Not necessary,’ Kevern told them.
    Densdell Kroplik didn’t think it was necessary either. ‘Don’t yez go apologising for me,’ he said, spitting on the floor. ‘I do my own, when the time’z right, and thiz izn’t.’
    Kevern walked away. He wanted to leave, but didn’t. His cottage was quiet and he needed noise. A little later, he accepted a challenge to play pool from a handsome, broad-shouldered woman who ran the mug and tea-towel shop in which he sold his lovespoons. Hedra Deitch.
    She scattered the balls with an alarming vehemence, called Kevern ‘my lover’, and made derogatory remarks to him about her husband who was slumped at the bar like a shot animal, coughing out the last of his blood into a pint pot of brown ale.
    ‘That’s how he looks when he finishes himself over me,’ she said, in a voice loud enough for him to hear.
    Kevern wasn’t sure what to say.
    ‘Eat shit!’ her husband called across to her.
    ‘Eat shit yerself !’
    Kevern thought about leaving, but stayed.
    ‘You think he’d be only too glad to give me a divorce,’ Hedra Deitch went on. ‘But oh, no. We must stay together for the children, he says. That’s a laugh. He doesn’t give a flyin’ fuck for the children and suspects they’re not his anyway.’
    ‘And are they?’ Kevern asked.
    ‘What do you think, my lover?’
    ‘I can’t imagine you passing off another man’s children as his,’ Kevern said.
    She choked on her laughter. ‘You can’t imagine that, can’t you? Then you doesn’t have a very vivid imagination.’
    Kevern tried imagining, then thought better of it. He went home alone, after submitting briefly to one of Hedra Deitch’s muscular snogs. Forcing brutish kisses on people you neither knew well nor cared much for wasn’t confined to men. Both sexes broke skin when they could.
    A sharp-edged moon lit his way. Once upon a time he’d have been able to hear the sea on a night such as this, the great roar of the ocean sucking at the rocks, breathing in and then breathing out, but the din of voices raised in brawling throughout the village drowned out all other sounds. A quarter of a mile up the road to his cottage he passed the Deitches kissing passionately in a doorway. To Kevern they resembled a single beast, maddened by the need to bite its own mouth. Great fumes of beer and fish rose from its pelt. If Kevern’s ears didn’t deceive him, Hedra Deitch was alter-natelytelling her weasel husband to eat shit and apologising to him.
    The unseasonably warm wind of earlier in the day – smelling of seals and porpoises, Kevern thought – had turned cold and bitter. Something far out to sea was rotting.
    He could have done with company, but he knew it was his own fault he had none. ‘Company is always trouble,’ his father used to say, laughing his demented solitary laugh. But he didn’t have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn’t it?
    He knelt on one knee and peered in through the letter box of his cottage. Shocked by what he saw, he staggered backwards. The cottage had been ransacked. There was blood on the carpet. In the two or three seconds it took him to recover himself, he wondered why he was surprised.This was no more than he’d been expecting. And now the knife between his shoulder blades . . .
    He looked again, not afraid of what he’d see. Relieved, he thought.
    At last.
    But everything was, after all, exactly as he’d left it – the disrespected rug, the teacup, the slippers. There was a blue glow from the television. All was well. He was in. Alone.
    It was his utility phone that was flashing the colour of blood.

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