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Egan hated nurses. They were working class sociopaths, little barmaid sadists. Nurses had made the last days of people he had loved miserable, full of shame. His father had been afraid to call someone for his bedpan. He thought about it all as he sat looking at the white pantyhose draped over the back of the sofa. Was this one different or were the memories fading enough for him to betray them? With that not answered he got to thinking the next thing: if she left the pantyhose there, he would want to take them up and press them to his face. I am a sick and twisted little man, he thought.

Then she came out the bathroom and sat down on the sofa, across from him. She took the cigarettes from the pocket of her uniform, never once moving her eyes from his face. It was a stare that demanded, albeit very calmly, very logically, he tell her something or take her into the bedroom so that they could have sex on his bed. The eyes, big and green made it clear, that the sex, if they were to have it, would be very good. Egan decided that they should talk instead.

THE BOY Eighteen months before when his father had been in his bed on his back, dying, the boy would come to the window and talk to him. At the time Egan hadn't liked it, the old man wasted his strength trying to hide his fear and swallow groans so he could smile and talk nonsense. Egan wanted, at times desperately wanted, to tell the boy to fuck off and leave his father alone. Of course, then the old man would have cried. He cried at every little disappointment then, after years of it never even entering Egan's mind that his father so much as had tear ducts. He saw his father cry over a spilt cup of yogurt, apologize to tears to Egan for having shat himself. In the night Egan would hear sobbing and lie awake thinking about mentholated tobacco and how as soon as the old man was out of the house he would smoke until his throat closed with phlegm. He would drink every night for the rest of his life.

The boy talked to himself. Seven or eight years old and nobody to talk to over there but his grandmother he would spend his holidays playing by the fence, having loud conversations with himself in the hope that Egan's father would hear and respond. He always did it when he wasn't busy. Always sorry for somebody.

He left in the dark with her in the mornings. She waited with him at the bus-stop, staring back at the people who stared at them while pretending not to. Stared at the ones who did it frankly, mostly women. Sometimes she would kiss him as the bus appeared at the corner and then step back to avoid the crush. After that she would walk back to the house. It worried him that she would get raped one morning.

The boy loved her and she loved him. Those first days in January, he stared over the fence at her as if he had ever seen a white woman before, his jaw slack with simple astonishment, as if he were ready the fling himself over the fence to her.

"They broke into you house looking for him. About two hours after I left to go to work." The television set that they had removed, and brought back for some reason sat on the armchair, the antenna wire hanging down the floor like the arm of a sleeper. "He's dead." She was crying, but her mind was the oiled gun that it always was. "Three hours." They had only one "he" in common. Three hours for what, he wanted to know. He didn't ask, though. He had the idea that it was surgery or resuscitation. He stood looking at his returned TV that he would have to hook up again and let the shock cut into him. "They took him from the yard or off the street. They cut him up. Raped him." "Oh fuck." "Anyway, I'll be home in an hour. They let me off early tonight." Home.

It would almost certainly be a white, early nineties Toyota, a Corolla or an Accord. He would be looking for easy targets, not anything else in particular. You couldn't be choosy here. He would have a place ready to do it, the second part. Candy wouldn't work, it would take too long, he would have to call out. They would fall for it because no one ever told them, it just never happened that way here. Mostly it would be the uncle or the neighbor, and long slow sweaty seductions or threats. Somebody you could see long ahead of time.

Egan had been expelled from St Anthony's when he was nine and caught with one of the big grade six girls in the bathroom. She was a scholarship girl from down at Batten Pen, she said he was paying her in chocolate bars and since it was true he hadn't denied. They expelled them both because in nineteen eighty-eight the thought of a nine and a ten year old having sex in the bathroom of a prep school was still shocking and it got written up in an evening newspaper. If it hadn't been they would only have expelled the girl.

On the night that he told Jane about this, she told him about being raped in Fort Lauderdale.

He told her what he had never told anyone, about the night his uncle had caught him bed with his cousin and beat him with a piece of bamboo until it broke. How his father had, two hours later, thrown his uncle out an upstairs window. He had landed safely and had not come to his brother's funeral. "I know too much." He had said. "I've done everything. Or wanted to do it. It would do you good to stay away from me." "I can't. I won't." She had said.

"This wasn't his first either." He told her when she came in the door. "It seems planned to me. He's not from around here, I don't think, I sure I know everybody who can this kind of thing. Probably from Kingston." "Leave it alone, Egan, you were never that." "I would have been. I was on the road." "If you got then you couldn't have been then, could you? I mean, like that." "I wonder if he took pictures." "Forget it, Eeg." "Tell me how." "Make love to me now." "No." There followed a silence in which she sat beside him and stared but this time he stared back. "He would be pretty intelligent. Probably reads even. Maybe even has a degree or something like that." That sealed the matter.

The place would be good because there weren't a lot of X-boxes here, no Nintendo Gameboys, few televisions and nothing much to watch on them, kids played in the street with cans and string and sticks until they were old enough to have sex.

He would get so greedy for flesh that he couldn't stand himself. No foreigner would have the balls to drive out in the country by himself…two of them? Maybe. In any case something would break, a white man or an accent would always get noticed. Until they did something different, they wouldn't get caught. And if someone came along in three years and did the same thing they too would cut and bludgeon through children till they couldn't bother trying to hide anymore.

In the nights he would sit and they would hold hands on the veranda, trying hard not to think about how it would be to slip his other hand up her dress and listen to her sigh. Know that he would be a different person when that started. He wouldn't ever be able to enjoy just sex, and they wouldn't ever catch him.

THE END