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would fail. “Let me,” he begged her, wrestling politely on her white rug that left him, at his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. “Believe me. I’m the one.”

One night, out of the blue , she let him, she said she believed. He married her before she could change her mind, but never learned to read her thoughts. When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until she felt better. “It’s none of your business,” she told him. “I don’t want anybody to see me when I’m like that.” He used to call her a clam. “Open up,” he hammered on all the locked doors of their lives together, basement first, then maisonette, then mansion. “I love you, let me in.” He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn’t manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she tell him that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just begun to menstruate, over their heads in gambling debts, leaving her with the aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman to envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn’t even be bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that’s how much she was loved, so of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.

They never managed to have children; she blamed herself. After ten years Saladin discovered that there was something the matter with some of his own chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn’t remember. His genetic inheritance; apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky not to be some sort of deformed freak. Was it his mother or his father from whom? The doctors couldn’t say; he blamed, it’s easy to guess which one, after all, it wouldn’t do to think badly of the dead.

They hadn’t been getting along lately.

He told himself that afterwards, but not during.

Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the missing babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe that.

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