"You bloody fool. That is you."

Hogg frowned slightly. "But," he said, "it can't be. It says here that this K had delusions about other people stealing his work and making horror films out of his poetry. That's not quite the same, is it? I mean, this bloody man Rawcliffe did pinch the plot of my Pet Beast and make a bloody awful Italian picture out of it. I even remember the name. L'Animal Binato it was called in Italy-that's from Dante, you see: The Double-Natured Animal or something like it-and in England it was called Son of the Beast from Outer Space." He read more intently, frowning further. "What's all this," he said, "about a sexual fixation on this bloke K's stepmother? That can't be me, this bloke can't. I hated her, you know how much for I told you. And," he said blushing, "about masturbating in the lavatory. And about this woman being very refined and trying to make a real married man out of him." He looked up, his sternness a remote (fourth or fifth or something) carbon copy of Dr Wapenshaw's own. "That woman," he said clearly, "was not refined. She was a bitch. She wanted my bit of money, which she got, and she wanted a bit of my honour and glory. When I was dead, that is," he said, less assertively. "In my biography, if such should come to be written." The great expensive consulting-room tasted that, shrugged, grimaced, swallowed it.

"Can you see it?" said Dr Wapenshaw, his upper lip lifted. "Can you honestly say that you see it, man? The most elegant woman in Europe, controller of the best pop-groups in the business?" Hogg stared at this wink of evidence of knowledge of a very vulgar world (he knew it all; he read the Daily Mirror doggedly every morning before opening his bar) in an eminent consultant. He said: