‘Trish, like,’ said Keith as Trish slowly sat. ‘Pint of vodka, is it? Bucket of mephs?’ And he started to order drinks, at no point and no wise neglecting the flurry of ogreish winks and pouts and thumb-upping and triple-ringing with which he primed the hopes and assuaged the fears of the innumerable followers and disciples and other Keith Talent-addicts who had filled the place as thoroughly, it seemed, as they would have filled his own apartment. A home fixture: Keith was playing at home.

‘Blimey. We’ll have Kath in here in a minute. I’m like You fucky Nefner that’s who I’m like. I have, I have never made no secret of my, my admiration of the, the female charms. Look at this,’ said Keith, turning on Debbee with the hot wind of his stare. ‘Miss Debbee Kensit. Sixteen today. On your feet, girl.’

Debbee rose. The black net T-shirt with its lively catch of breasts; the loose white knickers worn, fashionably, outside the tight black shorts; then the two bands of stark flesh before the thick pink tubing of her legwarmers. Debbee’s round face was pleasant, more than pleasant, until it fully smiled. The smile did a lot for Debbee: it did things like halving her IQ. And it took you, if you would follow, into a world of gum and bone, of dismay, and childish deals to do with love and pain (though only Keith knew the touch of the terrible tenners left trembling on the sideboard and mantlepiece). Guy, who found himself taking comfort from the vivid sprawl of Keith’s commitments, had always believed that you had to be thirty-five or forty before you got the face that you deserved. Debbee showed that you could get the face on your sixteenth birthday. But deserved didn’t come into it; no, not at all.