“Shut up,” says Snowman.

“Did you give him a dollar?” Oryx had asked him when he told her about the knife.

“No. Why?”

“You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won’t cut you. I wouldn’t like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, someone,” said Oryx. Someone played a big part in her life.

“Someone who?” Jimmy hated him, this someone—faceless, eyeless, mocking, all hands and dick, now singular, now double, now a multitude—but Oryx had her mouth right next to his ear and was whispering, Oh, oh, some, one, and laughing at the same time, so how could he concentrate on his stupid old hate?

In the short period of the lean-to he’d slept on a fold-up cot he’d dragged from a bungalow half a mile away, a metal frame with a foam mattress on top of a grillwork of springs. The first night he’d been attacked by ants, and so he’d filled four tin cans with water and stuck the cot legs into them. That put a stop to the ants. But the build-up of hot, damp air under the tarp was too uncomfortable: at night, at ground level, with no breeze, the humidity felt like a hundred per cent: his breath fogged the plastic.

Also the rakunks were a nuisance, scuffling through the leaves and sniffing at his toes, nosing around him as if he were already garbage; and one morning he’d woken to find three pigoons gazing in at him through the plastic. One was a male; he thought he could see the gleaming point of a white tusk. Pigoons were supposed to be tusk-free, but maybe they were reverting to type now they’d gone feral, a fast-forward process considering their rapid-maturity genes. He’d shouted at them and waved his arms and they’d run off, but who could tell what they might do the next time they came around? Them, or the wolvogs: it wouldn’t take them forever to figure out that he no longer had a spraygun. He’d thrown it away when he’d run out of virtual bullets for it. Dumb not to have swiped a recharger for it: a mistake, like setting up his sleeping quarters at ground level.