The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York. Peter Godwin

kind of violence.’ He eyes us steadily as if one of us might be harbouring the suspect.

      ‘You know,’ he says slowly, ‘there are people walking around who have done these things.’ Several of the women nod knowingly, as Paul Benjamin, the playwright whose work is to be performed tonight, emerges from a side door, his chanting now apparently finished.

      It is an adequate drama, notable mostly for the overwhelming earnestness with which it is read. The real drama, however, begins afterwards when the police officers address us.

      Ronald Haas, a huge and rather comforting detective from the Special Crimes Squad, goes first. ‘Obviously a heinous crime has taken place,’ he begins. ‘An individual was raped …’

      ‘A WOMAN was raped!’ shouts a furious girl in dungarees from somewhere on the third row. ‘A WOMAN was raped.’

      ‘A woman was raped,’ the officer corrects himself. ‘Obviously I can’t give you specific details …’

      ‘We don’t want specific details,’ calls another woman. She is gnawing a raw carrot. ‘Just tell us what time it happened.’

      ‘About eight-thirty,’ says Officer Haas.

      ‘Holy shit!’ exclaims someone.

      ‘The only other thing I can tell you’, Haas continues uneasily, ‘is that the assailant was a six-foot tall, two hundred and ten pound, black male with stubble.’

      ‘Why have no police approached me to tell me to take care?’ shouts another girl, this one in a denim smock.

      ‘Because that’s not their job,’ cries a frail man from across the hall.

      ‘Look,’ says Haas, ‘I care deeply about this community and I’m offended by this crime.’

      ‘Well, what can you do about it?’ demands an elderly woman, stroking a dachshund. ‘Every time I walk down the street and see a black guy I’m gonna be scared now.’

      At this point another detective, Merri Pearsall, who says she has coincidentally just rented an apartment in the neighbourhood, takes over. ‘My thought is, I might have prevented this,’ she says wistfully, before running through some tips which might prevent us from being attacked ourselves.

      ‘Get used to noticing details,’ she says. ‘Height, clothing, weight, hair colour.’

      ‘How tall IS six foot anyway,’ shouts the first dungaree’d girl. ‘How can you tell for sure?’

      ‘I have a dog and I always carry a can of Mace,’ interrupts the carrot chewer, brandishing her carrot stick. ‘Which is better? Dog? Or Mace?’

      ‘I’d take a dog over Mace any day,’ says Detective Pear-sail. ‘You can’t use Mace if there’s any wind and I’ve seen a room full of cops overcome by it in seconds. Definitely a dog.’

      Dog over Mace, writes carrot woman on her notepad, firmly underlining each word three times.

      As I gather up my things, preparing to walk home, I try to imagine a fear so intense that you would throw yourself out of a fourth-floor window. ‘Is she OK?’ I ask another woman, who seems involved in the evening.

      She pulls a face. ‘She landed on the second-floor fire escape and lost a kidney,’ she says. ‘But she’s still alive, if that’s what you mean.’

       JUNE

       The baby’s brain, muscles and bones begin to form. The ball of cells growing inside your uterus – the embryo – is now the size of an apple seed.

      BabyCenter.com

      Monday, 1 June Peter

      236 days to go until the baby arrives. We have started calling it B-Day.

      I mooch down Gansevoort Street in the simmering heat, past Judd Grill’s gym, where I can see a trio of burly meat-packers building brawn on the bench presses; past Samba’s Deli and the Maggio Beef Corporation, which is wedged beneath the amputated tracks of the old Manhattan Freight Line. Every lamp-post and street-sign reeks of vaporizing dog’s urine. The very pavements themselves seem to perspire. Through their cracks they ooze beads of greasy sweat from the city’s foul subterranean bowels. I’m on my way to our local twenty-four-hour diner, Florent, for what has become my ritual lunch.

      Outside on the broken sidewalk the restaurant has arranged a hopeful little cluster of fake marble bistro tables and green metal chairs under bright blue sun umbrellas. However, this venue has not proved popular with customers, who have to share it with a clutter of big red metal wheelie bins overflowing with bones, mysteriously dabbed with iridescent green paint, and listen to the insistent whine of band-saws cutting carcasses inside the Shuster Meat Corp – ‘We specialize in boneless beef cuts’.

      Florent looks like a diner. It is long and narrow, and has a mirror and red leatherette bench seats with chrome trimmings along one wall, and a white Formica counter down the other. But Florent is not a real diner at all. It is an ironic diner. A parody of a diner. It has quilted aluminium walls and a pink ceiling, from which hangs a slowly revolving disco mirror ball.

      Above the cash register is an old-fashioned announcement board, the kind you used to see at convention centres, with individual letters pressed into plastic grooves to relay the day’s schedule to delegates. The board has today’s date followed by some helpful information:

      The weather: Hot, hot, HOT!

      Today 96°.

      Tomorrow – Hotter 99°.

      Underneath the heading ‘Flo by Night’ it suggests options for night clubs in the Meat Packing District, helpfully categorized:

      Gay: Hell, Lure, The Anvil, Manhole

      Lesbian: The Clit Club

      Straight: Hoggs and Heifers

      Or: Stay at home and read to each other

      The walls of Florent are decorated with framed maps of various city centres around the world. But between these maps are fictional ones penned by Florent, who is evidently a fantasy cartographer. He draws the imagined layout of cities that might have been, with intricate plans of their docks and parks, bridges and graveyards.

      Florent himself, who is seldom in residence during the day, is a gay Frenchman who arrived in New York about thirty years ago. He organizes the annual Bastille Day event held in Gansevoort Street. The highlight of the Bastille Day festivities is the Marie Antoinette look-alike competition, which a bewigged, powdered and bustled Florent always enters.

      I haul myself up on a stool at the bar and flop the hefty bundle of the New York Times down on the counter. The Mexican busboy immediately slams down a glass of iced water, cutlery, a paper napkin and a paper place mat which is adorned with a map of Caribbean islands: Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. At hand there is also a glass of wax crayons should I feel the need to doodle on the islands.

      ‘Yo,’ says Brigitte, the waitress, a cheerful TV editor from New Zealand working on her first novel, ‘what can I get you?’

      I do not need to see the menu, I know it by heart and have tried almost everything on it. The food at Florent is a peculiarly camp variety of diner food. So today my BLT comes complete with a fussy rocket salad and thin, delicately cut French fries.

      I have with me part of the manuscript of my book and after a cup of stewed coffee I pore over the text.

      ‘Hit a snag?’ asks Brigitte, helpfully.

      ‘Yeah, the voice isn’t quite right. I’m thinking of moving it into the first person.’

      Soon