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some as can do both,’ Frank reminded him.
    â€˜And there’s some as can’t help but do both,’ Harry said, ‘and delight in it’ – turning the rashers over for a final crispness. The hut air was close and heavy with breathsteam, fagsmoke and the top-heavy odour of burning fat, a total blend suggesting warmth and protection from the outside world. It was comfortable, even though Frank’s enduring prostration on the hard boards wore his bones away and ached into his muscles. It was inside, away from the vile attack of problems, and here the only problem Was in talk, and to catch into talk the numerous problematic thoughts that came into his head – before they spun away and lost themselves maybe in the sort of protected atmosphere he’d stumbled into, where no real problem could get at any other problem. His head dizzied at such spinning arrows. He wanted to get up and go outside, lean against the hut, push and strain until the whole ricketty fabric, Harry included, fell into a heap. But he wasn’t even strong enough for that after so much drink. I’m waking up in a way I’ve never wakened up before; or maybe the whisky’s scorched the jungle from my brain and left only a few steel bolts and rods that I can find my way through at last. Unless it’ll only feel like that until the last drop of whisky’s all pissed out and I get into my old leaf-bag skin again.
    He reached for another sandwich, while Harry set the kettle on the primus in a self-indulgent excuse to keep the blue flame comforting the vitals of the hut. ‘Death means nothing to me,’ Frank said to him, ‘because my future has been taken away. Yet I can’t live without a future, Harry. There’s got to be something, but when the whole world can go up in five minutes, what is there? There’s not even a chance of crawling back into the swamps and living off fish and snakes. There’s nothing at all, because the future doesn’t mean anything. But to me it’s got to. I’ve got to rip something out of it. So am I supposed to make a future out of this world that’s already taken it away? People are, better off without a future, tamer, docile. No, I’ve got to figure one out for myself, which means I’m on my own, even when I don’t want to be.’
    He ate, and relaxed. It felt like a truce in life – a white handkerchief slowly ripping in the outside wind. Harry often came here and had this truce with himself, yet he was the one who at work said life was a long continuous battle from cunt to coffin. The wind jumped, caught the hut beam end on, shook but didn’t budge it. I don’t want to go out into that wind. It’s dark outside, and cold. I want to stay where the bacon’s frying and the lamp’s lit. That wind can never bash the hut flat, but it might crash me down if I go out into it. But what’s the use of talking? My mind’s made up to go out into it whether I go out into it or not.
    He shut the back door quietly so as not to wake Pat, felt like an island, drifting away from the continent of his life, almost as if he’d been pushed off by it like some lifeboat no longer needed. The twenty-seven years of it, three times nine, seemed to be receding from the isolated point at which he found himself. He felt more cut-off from life than even when walking the lonely hedgebound roads an hour before dusk. It was a weird feeling, limboed in some Lincolnshire cottage, feet on the table and drinking tea, radio piping softly.
    He had to leave, yet without knowing why, as if there were slow-moving springs in his legs over which he had relinquished control, months ago, before he had even thought about blowing up the bridges of his life. He stood to re-set his pack, wrote on a note-pad: ‘Dear Pat, thanks for everything, Frank.’ She’d had quite a life compared to his: fiancé drowned, married life to an