The boy unwound himself like a slow, fat snake, leaned sideways over the far side of the armchair and made some elaborate unseen preparations which clearly involved, as Dirk now realised, an electric kettle. When he resumed his earlier splayed posture it was with the addition of a plastic pot clutched in his right hand, from which he forked rubbery strands of steaming gunk into his mouth.
The rabbit brought his affairs to a conclusion and gave way to a jeering comedian who wished the viewers to buy a certain brand of lager on the basis of nothing better than his own hardly disinterested say-so.
Dirk felt that it was time to make a slightly greater impression on the proceedings than he had so far managed to do. He stepped forward dinectly into the boy's line of sight.
'Kid,' Dirk said in a tone that he hoped would sound firm but gentle and not in any way at all patronising or affected or gauche, 'I need to know who - '
He was distracted at that moment by the sight which met him from the new position in which he was standing. On the other side of the armchair there was a large, half full catering-size box of Pot Noodles, a large, half full catering-size box of Mars Bars, a half demolished pyramid of cans of soft drink, and the end of the hosepipe. The hosepipe ended in a plastic tap nozzle, and was obviously used for refilling the kettle.
Dirk had simply been going to ask the boy who he was, but seen from this angle the family resemblance was unmistakable. He was clearly the son of the lately decapitated Geoffrey Anstey. Perhaps this behaviour was just his way of dealing with shock. Or perhaps he really didn't know what had happened. Or perhaps he...
Dirk hardly liked to think.
In fact he was finding it hard to think clearly while the television beside him was, on behalf of a toothpaste manufacturing company, trying to worry him deeply about some of the things which might be going on in his mouth.
'OK,' he said, 'I don't like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realise that this is a difficult and distressing time for you.'
Nothing.
All right, thought Dirk, time for a little judicious toughness. He leant back against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets in an OK-if-that's-the-way-you-want-to-play-it manner, stared moodily at the floor for a few seconds, then swung his head up and let the boy have a hard look right between the eyes.
'I have to tell you, kid,' he said tersely, 'your father's dead.'
This might have worked if it hadn't been for a very popular and long-running commercial which started at that moment. It seemed to Dirk to be a particularly astounding example of the genre.
The opening sequence showed the angel Lucifer being hurled from heaven into the pit of hell where he then lay on a buming lake until a passing demon amved and gave him a can of a fizzy soft drink called sHades. Lucifer took it and tried it. He greedily guzzled the whole contents of the can and then tumed to camera, slipped on some Porsche design sunglasses, said, 'Now we're really cookin'!' and lay back basking in the glow of the burning coals being heaped around him.
At that point an impossibly deep and growly American voice, which sounded as if it had itself crawled from the pit of hel1, or at least from a Soho basement drinking club to which it was keen to return as soon as possible to marinade itself into shape for the next voice-over, said, 'sHad es. The Drink from Hell... ' and the can revolved a little to obscure the initial 's', and thus spell 'Hades'.
The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging torrent?
Lucifer then mugged at the camera again and said, 'I could really fall for this stuff... ' and just in case the viewer had been rendered completely insensate by all these goings-on, the opening shot of Lucifer being hurled from heaven was briefly replayed in order to emphasise the word 'fall'.
The boy's attention was entirely captivated by this.
Dirk squatted down in between the boy and the screen.
'Listen to me,' he began.
The boy craned his neck round to look past Dirk at the screen. He had to redistribute his limbs in the chair in order to be able to do this and continue to fork Pot Noodle into himself.
'Listen,' insisted Dirk again.
Dirk felt he was beginning to be in serious danger of losing the upper hand in the situation. It wasn't merely that the boy's attention was on the television, it was that nothing else seemed to have any meaning or independent existence for him at all. Dirk was merely a featureless object in the way of the television. The boy seemed to bear him no malice, he merely wished to see past him.
'Look, can we turn this off for a moment?' Dirk said, and he tried not to make it sound testy.
The boy did not respond. Maybe there was a slight stiffening of the shoulders, maybe it was a shrug. Dirk turned around and was at a loss to find which button to push to turn the television off. The whoIe control pane seemed to be dedicated to the single purpose of keeping itself turned on - there was no single button marked 'on' or 'off'. Eventually Dirk simply disconnected the set from the power socket on the wall and turned back to the boy, who broke his nose.
Dirk felt his septum crunching from the terrific impact of the boy's forehead as they both toppled heavily backwards against the set, but the noise of the bone breaking, and the noise of his own cry of pain as it broke was completely obliterated by the howling screams of rage that erupted from the boy's throat. Dirk flailed helplessly to try and protect himself from the fury of the onslaught, but the boy was on top with his elbow in Dirk's eye, his knees pounding first on Dirk's ribcage, then his jaw and then on Dirk's already traumatised nose, as he scrambled over him to reconnect the power to the television. He then settled back comfortably into the armchair and watched with a moody and unsettled eye as the picture reassembled itself.
'You could at least have waited for the news,' he said in a dull voice.
Dirk gaped at him. He sat huddled on the floor, coddling his bleeding nose in his hands, and gaped at the monstrously disinterested creature.
