| s-1
| Yes, look at her, bunioned, bulbous, hair in bulrush rolls, butt-headed, butter-hearted and tenacious as a buckaroo. |
| s-2
| I had seen it happen to others. |
| s-3
| I did not want it to happen to me. |
| s-4
| Fate. A spin on the Wheel of Fortune and out I tumbled at Jove's feet. |
| s-5
| Another dizzy round, and there is Stella waiting to help me off. |
| s-6
| But who is turning the wheel? |
| s-7
| Honest Guv' I had both hands tied behind my back. |
| s-8
| Neither my mother nor my father were able to cope with the 1960s. |
| s-9
| Skirts were too short, hair was too long, and the favoured colour combination of purple and orange made my mother look like a vampire and my father a Matisse. |
| s-10
| They were peculiarly ill-placed for the general assault on the past that the Sixties represented because they lived in Liverpool. |
| s-11
| Liverpool, that should have slumbered its way through the Sixties as it had every other decade, produced the Beatles. |
| s-12
| My parents were victims of the Merseybeat. |
| s-13
| I was born in a tug-boat. |
| s-14
| My mother whelped me in a mess of blankets while my noctivagant father towed in the big ships. |
| s-15
| Perhaps it was the seriousness of our business that pushed us both into laughter, extremes of emotion so easily tumbling into their opposites. |
| s-16
| Yet there was relief for us to find a human face behind the monster mask; the monster wife, the monster mistress, and what about the monster man? |
| s-17
| Tell the story as it happened. |
| s-18
| Why then did I trouble the surface? |
| s-19
| It was not myself I fell in love with it was her. |
| s-20
| 'Are you waiting for someone?' I said. |
| s-21
| 'I was.' |
| s-22
| 'We're going to live in London,' he said. |
| s-23
| 'Why Daddy?' |
| s-24
| 'Because Daddy has a new job.' |
| s-25
| Grandmother was here, wrapped from head to foot in woollens, her face entirely obscured by a seaman's balaclava. |
| s-26
| She made us a cup of cocoa and my mother swept off in a taxi. |
| s-27
| I woke up in the dazed apartment. |
| s-28
| Next to me on the massacred bed, the order and beauty of her body. |
| s-29
| On the table beside, an amputated lamp. |
| s-30
| Across the room was a Snow Queen's mirror, its pieces scatters of despair. |
| s-31
| I crept from beneath the scissored blankets to the bathroom. |
| s-32
| The white and chrome was a shrine to Chanel. |
| s-33
| A place for everything, everything in its place. Peace. |
| s-34
| One day when my mother was taking me to school, the streets seemed very quiet. |
| s-35
| We parked, although we were the only car on the stretch of road, and we got out to walk slowly, hand in hand, through some flimsy barriers of paper and string. |
| s-36
| Far away we saw some policemen waving at us and we waved back. |
| s-37
| We heard a lorry coming up behind and my mother told me it had a television crew on board which excited me who had never seen a television. |
| s-38
| Anything that had been on the market for as little as ten years was unlikely to impress my father. |
| s-39
| 'Are you happy, Alice?' |
| s-40
| 'Yes, Daddy.' |
| s-41
| It should have been fun but neither of them was happy. |
| s-42
| When I was five my father was on pills and my mother was on gin. |
| s-43
| I think I was happy, in the maddening determined way that children have of being happy, and it was that happiness that worked as a magnet on both of my parents. |
| s-44
| They were pulled by it, they wanted it, and instead of taking it for granted, they started to take it to bits. |
| s-45
| At last we arrived at a small diner in a beaten-up part of town. |
| s-46
| She swung inside and we sat at a menacingly nice checked-cloth table with red carnations and a few rods of grissini. |
| s-47
| A boy came out with a carafe of red wine and a bowl of olives. |
| s-48
| He handed us the menus as if this was just an ordinary dinner in an ordinary day. |
| s-49
| I had fallen into the hands of the Borgias and now they wanted me to eat. |
| s-50
| When he stopped holding me up to the light he began to hold me up to the mirror. |
| s-51
| He wanted to compare us, side by side, did I look like him? |
| s-52
| He had enough money. |
| s-53
| It was his wife they were draining away. |
| s-54
| His friends interpreted the resentment as a normal response to a difficult situation. |
| s-55
| My mother took the simple view that a man must have his work. |
| s-56
| My father though, was not simple and he was still aware enough to turn the mask over and over in his hands and ask what it was. |
| s-57
| Uncharacteristically, he went to visit my grandmother. |
| s-58
| Months later, proud complacent Zeus had a headache and yowled his way over the earth, threatening to split the firmament with pain. |
| s-59
| It was Hermes who told him the source of his trouble, and Hephaestus, the lame god of the smithy who took a hammer and wedge and split open Lord Zeus's skull. |
| s-60
| Out came Athene tall strong beautiful and her father's own. |
| s-61
| 'You must be bored there,' said my mother. |
| s-62
| But that was in the future, and in 1959 my father was in the fullness of his present, he could do no wrong. |
| s-63
| As the lorry came close to us, four young men dressed entirely in black ran past. |
| s-64
| Three of them carried guitars, one had a set of drumsticks. |
| s-65
| I had seen people dressed in black before. |
| s-66
| 'Won't hurt,' said Grandmother. |
| s-67
| 'Look at me.' |
| s-68
| Husband and wife. Man and rib. What could be more normal than that? |
| s-69
| And now they were having a baby. |
| s-70
| That is, my mother was bearing my father's child. |
| s-71
| It was different when my sisters were born but I was Athene. |
| s-72
| Athene born fully formed from the head of Zeus. |
| s-73
| My father no longer wanted herring heads. |
| s-74
| He wanted mink and pearls and he got them. |
| s-75
| Like most men he was a transvestite at one remove; if his wife was part of him so were her clothes. |
| s-76
| She was his rib and as such he too wore a silk shift. |
| s-77
| He loved her clothes, loved to see her dressed up, it satisfied a part of him that was deeper than vanity. |
| s-78
| It was a part of himself. |
| s-79
| She completed him. |
| s-80
| She manifested him at another level. |
| s-81
| He absorbed her while she failed to absorb him. |
| s-82
| This was so normal that nobody noticed it. |
| s-83
| At least not until later, much later, when things began to change. |
| s-84
| Page of cups |
| s-85
| Her kitchen had strings of onions and fat hams hanging in glorious torture from twisted hooks in the ceiling. |
| s-86
| She smoked her own kippers up the chimney, skewering them in pairs with discarded knitting needles. |
| s-87
| For this she kept a wood fire. |
| s-88
| The other fireplaces were fed on coal. |
| s-89
| She had a glass-fronted cabinet lined with jars of homemade preserve; pickles, tomatoes, pears, cabbage, and in the middle, a baby rabbit. |
| s-90
| This was not for eating. |
| s-91
| It was an ornament. |
| s-92
| When the wind blew and the cupboard rattled the rabbit bobbed up and down in his transparent prison, his ears buckling slightly as they hit the lid seal. |
| s-93
| Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people keep fish. |
| s-94
| They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. |
| s-95
| Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained. |
| s-96
| 'Tha wife's to give birth.' |
| s-97
| She was not resourceful; her class did not allow it, and I know it worried my grandmother that her son had found a wife who did not know how to make a soup out of herring's heads. |
| s-98
| 'I christen this child ...' |
| s-99
| He didn't come home that night, nor the night after. |
| s-100
| The telephone rang each evening at six o'clock until a week had passed. |