Inside a cloud of steam, my imagination adds levels. A husky catch at the end of the phrase.

Oh baaby.

How could I not have noticed this at the time? Connie was sending me a message.

I turn the shower knob way over in the blue.

Sunshine is slanting through my bathroom window, warming the chequered vinyl shower curtain. It’s going to be hot today. Too hot for a woollen hat.

That’s okay. I got lighter hats.

I quite like this time of year in New Jersey. The air on my skin feels like home. The old sod, the emerald isle. Ireland. Sometimes, on a clear day, the sky has the same electric-blue tinge.

Just go home then and stop bitching.

I’m even beginning to irritate my own subconscious. Is there anything more pathetic than a Mick on foreign soil, wailing ‘Danny Boy’? Especially one who never liked the country when he was there.

It wasn’t the country, I remind myself. It was the people in the country and the things that happened there.

My apartment is two floors up, three blocks north of Main Street and ten blocks south of the line of buildings with mildly risqué fronts that pass for a strip in this town. I stroll down the cracked concrete, trying to rein in the menace. I dated a gypsy once who told me I had an aura that looked like shark-infested water. Sometimes I piss people off just by walking by, so I hunch a little and keep my eyes on the ground, trying to radiate friendliness. Think hippies, think hippies.

Dr Kronski’s surgery is in a part of town where there aren’t any trees set into the sidewalk. The trashcans are generally teeming with beer bottles, and if you stand in one place long enough someone’s going to offer you whatever you need.

All of which would suggest that Zeb Kronski isn’t much of a surgeon, which would be totally not true. Zeb Kronski is a hell of a surgeon; he just doesn’t have a licence to practise in the United States. And he can’t apply because he had a boob job die on the table in Tel Aviv; not his fault, he assures me. Implant-related death.