people, whose pet names were perhaps adopted to ward off the evil eye. The true slaves remain – well, yet more deeply nameless and undistinguished.)
Democratic Kampuchea had not been built by willing patriots, by workers toiling to create a shared vision. It had been built by Dog Doctor, by Cat Teacher, by Rat Banker, by Detestable Clerk. They too had laboured and died, and no revisionist historian has yet rewritten their fate. The evil eye had beamed full upon them. Stephen Cox finds this disappointing. Who now will rebuild? No aid reaches Vietnam, no aid reaches Kampuchea. The Vietnamese cry out for American dollars. They are starving. They will withdraw from Kampuchea if aid is promised. They have had enough of proudly eating stones.
Over Stephen’s head dangles a TV monitor, relaying American newsreel of another explosion in Beirut, an explosion that cameramen have risked their lives to film. It is followed in rapid psychedelic succession by photographs of an adopted child in Denver, bruised and battered by its middle-class parents: by famine in Mozambique: by a report of a new method of making calorie-free cream cakes.
Stephen is depressed. The green hour is very green. He sinks into its subaqueous wash. He is about to go under. Who will save him? And suddenly, there before him, smiling and extending a hand, is Simon Grunewald, ethnologist, homosexual and adventurer, exclaiming with his habitual eagerness, ‘Stephen! I say, Stephen, is that really you? What luck!’ Stephen knows that he is, if not saved, reprieved.
*
Liz Headleand was invited to be one of the witnesses at the marriage of Esther Breuer and Robert Oxenholme. The marriage had followed quickly upon the limousine declaration. Robert, that night, had repeated his offer, and Esther had said, ‘Yes.’ Just the one word, ‘Yes.’ It had hopped out from her mouth, unexpectedly, like a toad or a diamond.
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