Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.
‘Whew!’ said Hip, awed. ‘You’re so right!’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘What clever ears you have, grandma,’ he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. ‘I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.’
‘Didn’t you?’ she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. And the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. ‘Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.’
She smiled and everything was all right again.
Succulent pizza and cold beer in a booth painted a too-bright, edge-worn green. A happy-weary walk through the darkening booths to the late bus which waited, breathing. A sense of membership because of the fitting of the spine to the calculated average of the bus seats. A shared doze, a shared smile, at sixty miles an hour through the flickering night, and at last the familiar depot on the familiar street, echoing and empty but my street in my town.
They woke a taxi driver and gave him their address. ‘ Can I be more alive than this?’ he murmured from his corner and then realized she had heard him. ‘I mean,’ he amended, ‘it’s as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I couldn’t see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town and tonight as big as… well, a lot bigger,’ he finished weakly.
A lonely passing streetlight passed her answering smile over to him. He said, ‘So I was wondering how much bigger it can get.’
‘Much bigger,’ she said.
He pressed back sleepily into the cushions. ‘I feel fine,’ he murmured. ‘I feel… Janie,’ he said in a strange voice, ‘I feel sick.’
‘You know what that is,’ she said calmly.