If symptoms persist.. .

I WAS called out to a local housing estate last week because a lady was reported to be disturbing her neighbours there at night. As I approached her house, I felt the rhythmic vibration of very loud rock music enter my legs through the pavement. Then I heard a deep trump, like a distant barrage of artillery. Finally, my eardrums began to tingle uncomfortably. In the slums, one measures the volume of sound not in decibels, but on the Richter scale.

No wonder the neighbours are com- plaining, I thought. One of the worst things about poverty these days is the sheer ubiquity, the inescapability, of rock music: it's enough to drive one mad. Then I discovered the source of the music: a beaten up old car, painted blue and mauve, inhabited by two young black men, one in a knitted woolly cap in the colours of the Ethiopian flag, and the other in a Che Guevara beret. I was rather surprised to discover that they were not the complained about, but the complainants.

`She's out here all fucking night,' they bellowed above the music, 'banging on our doors.'

Then they drove off in a U-turn, tyres squealing, smoke rising from the road in their tracks. The lady in question came to the door and invited me in. Her home was in some disarray, with old newspapers piled with the washing-up and dirty linen. I could hear next door's radio through the kitchen wall.

`Is there anything wrong?' I asked.

`No,' she said. `I'm just cooking toad- in-the-hole. I like to experiment.' She cackled.

An evil-looking, pale substance lay on the kitchen table in a baking-tray encrusted with the black detritus of past efforts, among copies of some of our less intellectual magazines for women.

`I gather you go out at night banging on people's doors,' I said.

`I'm preaching to them, that's all,' she replied. 'Like the Lord tells me to.'

`Do you hear him direct?' I asked.

`No, he speaks to me in dreams. I'm one of his apostles.'

`One of the twelve apostles?' I asked. `Yes, the twelve.'

I suppose there is no intrinsic reason, if you believe in reincarnation, why one of the 12 apostles should not reappear as a woman in Cherry Park Housing Estate, or why, once there, she should not make toad-in-the-hole. I asked whether I could speak to her son in private. She called him down from his room.

He was an immensely fat young man, so fat that the very effort of breathing made him breathless. When he sat on the kitchen stool, his buttocks over- flowed it. He wore a T-shirt with a pic- ture of some jet aircraft and the legend SADDAM BUSTERS in two lines on the front, the word BUSTERS disappearing in the deep fold between his stomach and his breasts when he sat.

`Have you noticed anything wrong with your mother recently?' I asked. The drivelling facetiousness of a disc-jockey came through the wall from next door.

`No,' he wheezed. 'We don't see much of each other. I have my own room, like.'

The house seemed too tiny for sepa- rate lives. I was suddenly seized by sor- row and pity for the blighted ugliness of so much of our country, for the bleak- ness of so many of our citizens' lives. Better my patient should believe herself elect of God than see things through my eyes!

Theodore Dalrymple