Eccles had reached for him, it felt like, out of the ground. The minister's voice had sounded tinny and buried. Ruth's bedroom is dim; the streetlamp like a low moon burns shadows into the inner planes of the armchair, the burdened bed, the twisted sheet he tossed back finally when he realized the phone would never stop. The bright rose window of the church opposite is still lit: purple red blue gold like the notes of different bells struck. His body, his whole frame of nerves and bone, tingles, as if with the shaking of small bells hung up and down his silver skin. His spent groin tingles. He wonders if he had been asleep, and how long, ten minutes or five hours. He finds his underclothes and trousers draped on a chair and fumbles with them; his white shirt seems to crawl, like a cluster of glowworms in grass. He hesitates a second before poking his fingers into its illusion, that turns under his touch to safe cloth, dead. He carries it in his hand to the bed with its silent burden.

"Hey. Baby."

The long lump under the covers doesn't answer. Just the top of Ruth's hair peeks out. He doesn't feel she is asleep. When she is asleep her breathing is noisier.

"Hey. I got to go out."

No answer. If she wasn't asleep she heard everything he said on the phone, but what did he say? He remembers nothing except this sense of being reached. Ruth lies heavy and sullen and her body hidden. The night is hot enough for just a sheet but she put a blanket on the bed saying she felt cold. It was just about the only thing she did say. He shouldn't have made her do it. He doesn't know why he did except it felt right at the time. He thought it might be a breakthrough. She had done it for others, what was wrong with ............