Cloud Atlas

One bright dusk, four, five, no, my God, six summers ago, I strolled along a Greenwich avenue of mature chestnuts and mock oranges in a state of grace. Those Regency residences number among London’s costliest properties, but should you ever inherit one, dear Reader, sell it, don’t live in it. Houses like these secrete some dark sorcery that transforms their owners into fruitcakes. One such victim, an ex-chief of Rhodesian police, had, on the evening in question, written me a check as rotund as himself to edit and print his autobiography. My state of grace was thanks in part to this check, and in part to a 1983 Chablis from the Duruzoi vineyard, a magic potion that dissolves our myriad tragedies into mere misunderstandings.

A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement. I stepped into the road to avoid collision. But as we drew level they tore wrappers off their lurid ice lollies and just dropped them. My sense of well-being was utterly V-2’d. I mean, we were level with a bin! Tim Cavendish the Disgusted Citizen exclaimed to the offenders: “You know, you should pick those up.”

A snorted “Whatchyoo gonna do ’bou’ it?” glanced off my back.

Ruddy she-apes. “I have no intention of doing anything about it,” I remarked, over my shoulder, “I merely said that you—”

My knees buckled and the pavement cracked my cheek, shaking loose an early memory of a tricycle accident before pain erased everything but pain. A sharp knee squashed my face into leaf mold. I tasted blood. My sixtysomething wrist was winched back through ninety degrees of agony, and my Ingersoll Solar was unclasped. I recall a pick ’n’ mix of obscenities ancient and modern, but before my muggers could filch my wallet, the chimes of an ice-cream van playing “The Girl from Ipanema” scattered my assailants, like vampiresses the minute before dawn.

“And you didn’t report them? You dolt!” Madame X sprinkled synthetic sugar over her breakfast bran the next morning. “Phone the police for Christ’s sake. What are you waiting for? The trail’ll go cold.” Alas, I had already amplified the truth and told her my muggers were five louts with swastikas shaved onto their skulls. How could I now file a report saying three prepubescent lollipop girls had bested me so effortlessly? The boys in blue would have choked on their Penguin biscuits. No, my assault was not added to our nation’s wishfully fulfilled crime statistics. Had my purloined Ingersoll not been a love present from a sunnier era of our now-Arctic marriage, I would have kept mum about the entire incident.

Where was I?

Odd how the wrong stories pop into one’s head at my age.

It’s not odd, no, it’s ruddy scary. I meant to begin this narrative with Dermot Hoggins. That’s the problem with inking one’s memoirs in longhand. You can’t go changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up even more.

Look, I was Dermot “Duster” Hoggins’s editor, not his shrink or his ruddy astrologer, so how could I have known what lay in store for Sir Felix Finch on that infamous night? Sir Felix Finch, Minister of Culture and El Supremo at the Trafalgar Review of Books, how he blazed across the media sky, how visible he remains to the naked eye even now, twelve months later. Tabloidoids read all about it across the front page; broadsheeters spilt their granola when Radio 4 reported who had fallen and how. That aviary of vultures and tits, “the columnists,” eulogized the Lost King of Arts in tribute after twittering tribute.

I, by contrast, have maintained a dignified counsel until now. I should warn the busy reader, however, that the after-dinner mint of Felix Finch is merely the aperitif of my own peripatetic tribulations. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, if you will. Now that is a snappy title.

’Twas the Night of the Lemon Prize Awards, held in Jake’s Starlight Bar, grandly reopened atop a Bayswater edifice with a rooftop garden thrown in for good measure. The whole ruddy publishing food chain had taken to the air and roosted at Jake’s. The haunted writers, the celebrity chefs, the suits, the goateed buyers, the malnourished booksellers, packs of hacks and photographers who take “Drop dead!” to mean “Why, I’d love to!” Let me scotch that insidious little rumor implying Dermot’s invitation was my doing, that, oh, yes, Timothy Cavendish knew his author was lusting for a high-profile revenge, QED, the entire tragedy was a publicity stunt. Tosh dreamt up by jealous rivals! No one ever owned up to sending Dermot Hoggins’s invitation, and she is hardly likely to step forward now.

Anyway, the winner was announced, and we all know who got the fifty-K prize money. I got sloshed. Guy the Guy introduced me to a cocktail called “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Time’s Arrow became Time’s Boomerang, and I lost count of all my majors. A jazz sextet kicked off a rumba. I went onto the balcony for a breather and surveyed the hubbub from without. Literary London at play put me in mind of Gibbon on the Age of the Antonines. “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

Dermot found me; bad news inexorably does. Let me reiterate, bumping into Pope Pius XIII would have surprised me less. In fact, His Infallibility would have blended in better—my malcontent author wore a banana suit over a chocolate shirt and a Ribena tie. I hardly need remind the curious reader that Knuckle Sandwich was yet to take the book world by storm. It was yet to enter a bookshop, in fact, except the sage John Sandoe’s of Chelsea, and those hapless newsagents, once Jewish, then Sikh, now Eritrean, located in the Hoggins Bros.’ East End parish. Indeed, it was matters of publicity and distribution that Dermot wished to discuss on the roof garden.

I explained to him for the hundredth time how an author-partnership setup like Cavendish Publishing simply cannot fritter away money on fancy catalogs and team-building go-karting weekends for sales forces. I explained, yet again, that my authors derived fulfillment from presenting their handsomely bound volumes to friends, to family, to posterity. I explained, yet again, that the gangster-chic market was saturated; and that even Moby-Dick bombed in Melville’s lifetime, though I did not deploy that particular verb. “It is a truly fabulous memoir,” I assured him. “Give it time.”

Dermot, drunk, doleful, and deaf, looked over the railings. “All them chimneys. Long way down.”

The menace, I trusted, was imaginary. “Quite.”

“Mum took me to Mary Poppins when I was a nipper. Chimney sweeps dancing on rooftops. She watched it on video, too. Over and over. In her nursing home.”

“I remember when it came out. That dates me.”

“Here.” Dermot frowned and pointed into the bar through the French windows. “Who’s that?”

“Who’s who?”

“Him in the bow tie chatting up the tiara in the bin liner.”

“The presenter fellow, Felix . . . oh, Felix whatizzit?”

“Felix f*****g Finch! That c*** who shat on my book in his poncy f*****g mag?”

“It wasn’t your best review, but—”

“It was my only f*****g review!”

“It really didn’t read so badly—”

“Yeah? ‘None-hit wonders like Mr. Hoggins are the roadkills of modern letters.’ Notice how people insert the ‘Mr.’ before sinking the blade in? ‘Mr. Hoggins should apologize to the trees felled for his bloated “autobio-novel.” Four hundred vainglorious pages expire in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief.’ ”

“Steady now, Dermot, nobody actually reads the Trafalgar.”

“’Scuse!” My author collared a waiter. “Heard of the Trafalgar Review of Books?”

“Why, sure,” the East European waiter replied. “My entire faculty swears by the TRB, they’ve got the smartest reviewers.”

Dermot flung his glass over the railing.

“Come now, what’s a reviewer?” I reasoned. “One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely . . .”

The jazz sextet finished their number, and Dermot left my sentence dangling. I was drunk enough to justify a taxi and was about to leave when a Cockney town crier soundalike silenced the entire gathering: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! Your attention, please!”

Saints preserve us, Dermot was clanging a couple of trays together. “We have an additional award tonight, fellow book fairies!” he bellowed. Ignoring arch chuckles and “Oooooo!”s, he produced an envelope from his jacket pocket, slit it open, and pretended to read: “Award for Most Eminent Literary Critic.” His audience looked on, cockatooed, booed, or turned away in embarrassment. “Competition was fierce, but the panel was unanimous in choosing His Imperial Majesty of the Trafalgar Review of Books, Mr.—beg pudding, Sir—Felix Finch O, B, and E, come—on—darn!”

Stirrers crowed. “Bravo, Felix! Bravo!” Finch wouldn’t have been a critic if he didn’t love unearned attention. Doubtless he was already composing copy in his head for his Sunday Times column, “A Finch About Town.” For his part, Dermot was all sincerity and smiles. “What might my prize be, I wonder?” Finch smirked as the applause subsided. “A signed copy of an unpulped Knuckle Sandwich? Can’t be many of those left!” Finch’s coterie chorused hooty laughter, spurring on their commissar. “Or do I win a free flight to a South American country with leaky extradition treaties?”

“Yeah, lovie”—Dermot winked—“a free flight is exactly what you won.”

My author grabbed Finch’s lapels, rolled backwards, sank his feet into Finch’s girth, and judo-propelled the shorter-than-generally-realized media personality high into the night air! High above the pansies lining the balcony railing.

Finch’s shriek—his life—ended in crumpled metal, twelve floors down.

Someone’s drink poured onto the carpet.

Dermot “Duster” Hoggins brushed his lapels, leaned over the balcony, and yelled: “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

The dumbstruck crowd parted as the murderer made his way to the nibblies table. Several witnesses later recalled a dark halo. He selected a Belgian cracker adorned with Biscay anchovies and parsley drizzled with sesame oil.

The crowd’s senses flooded back. Gagging noises, oh-my-Gods, and a stampede for the stairs. The most frightful hullabaloo! My thoughts? Honestly? Horror. Assuredly. Shock? You bet. Disbelief? Naturally. Fear? Not really.

I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.

Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.

A taste of honey!

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory. I make no apology, however, for (re)starting my own narrative with my version of that shocking affair. You see, it paved my first good intention on the road to Hull, or rather Hull’s hinterland, where my ghastly ordeal is fated to unfold. My fortune took the glorious turn I had foreseen after Felix Finch’s Final Fling. On the wings of sweet, free publicity, my Knuckle Sandwich turkey soared up the bestseller charts, where it roosted until poor Dermot was sentenced to fifteen of the best in Wormwood Scrubs. The trial made the Nine O’Clock News at every turn. In death Sir Felix changed from a smug-scented pomposity with a Stalinist grip on Arts Council money into, oh, Britain’s best-loved arts guru since the last one.

On the steps of the Old Bailey, his widow told reporters fifteen years was “disgustingly lenient,” and the very next day a “Duster Hoggins, Rot in Hell!” campaign was launched. Dermot’s family counterattacked on chat shows, Finch’s offending review was pored over, BBC2 commissioned a special documentary in which the lesbian who interviewed me edited my witticisms wholly out of context. Who cared? The money pot bubbled away—no, it boiled over and set the entire ruddy kitchen alight. Cavendish Publishing—Mrs. Latham and I, that is—didn’t know what had hit us. We had to take on two of her nieces (part-time, of course, I wasn’t getting clobbered for National Insurance). The original Knuckle Sandwich shrink-wraps vanished within thirty-six hours, and Frank Sprat was reprinting on a near-monthly basis. Nothing in my four decades in the publishing game had geared us for such success. Running costs had always been recouped from author donations—not from actual ruddy sales! It seemed almost unethical. Yet here I was with a bestseller of one-in-a-decade proportions on my lists. People ask me, “Tim, how do you account for its runaway success?”

Knuckle Sandwich was actually a well-written, gutsy fictional memoir. Culture vultures discussed its sociopolitical subtexts first on late-night shows, then on breakfast TV. Neo-Nazis bought it for its generous lashings of violence. Worcestershire housewives bought it because it was a damn fine read. Homosexuals bought it out of tribal loyalty. It shifted ninety thousand, yes, ninety thousand copies in four months, and yes, I am still talking hardcover. The feature film should be in production as I write. At the Frankfurt Book love-in I was feted by people who until then had never so much as paused to scrape me off their shoes. That odious label “Vanity Publisher” became “Creative Financier.” Translation rights fell like territories in the final round of Risk. The American publishers, glory glory Hallelujah, they loved the Limey-Aristo-Gets-Comeuppance-from-Downtrodden-Gaelic-Son hook, and a transatlantic auction skyrocketed the advance to giddy heights. I, yes, I, had exclusive rights to this platinum goose with a bad case of the trots! Money entered my cavernously empty accounts like the North Sea through a Dutch dike. My “personal banking consultant,” a spiv named Elliot McCluskie, sent me a Christmas card photo of his Midwich Cuckoo offspring. The primates on the Groucho Club door greeted me with a “Pleasant evening, Mr. Cavendish,” instead of an “Oy, you got to be signed in by a member!” When I announced that I would be handling the paperback release myself, the Sundays’ book pages ran pieces depicting Cavendish Publishing as a dynamic, white-hot player in a cloud of decrepit gas giants. I even made the FT.

Was it any wonder Mrs. Latham and I were overstretched—just a smidge—on the bookkeeping front?

Success intoxicates rookies in the blink of an eye. I got business cards printed up: Cavendish-Redux, Publishers of Cutting-Edge Fiction. Well, I thought, why not sell publications instead of publication? Why not become the serious publisher that the world lauded me as?

Alackaday! Those dinky little cards were the red flag waved at the Bull of Fate. At the first rumor that Tim Cavendish was flush, my saber-toothed meerkat creditors bounded into my office. As ever, I left the gnostic algebra of what to pay whom and when to my priceless Mrs. Latham. So it was, I was mentally and financially underprepared when my midnight callers visited, nearly a year after the Felix Finch Night. I confess that since Madame X left me (my cuckold was a dentist, I shall reveal the truth no matter how painful) Housekeeping Anarchy had reigned o’er my Putney domicile (oh, very well, the bastard was a German), so my porcelain throne has long been my de facto office seat. A decent Cognac sits under the ball-gowned lavatory-roll cover, and I leave the door open so I can hear the kitchen radio.

The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o’clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?

Cherry knockers? The wind?

Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Qaeda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though my intruders numbered only three. (You’ll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) “Timothy,” pronounced the gargoyliest, “Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down.”

“My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen,” Bogart would have said, “with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave.” All I could do was blurt, “Oy! My door! My ruddy door!”

Thug Two lit a cigarette. “We visited Dermot today. He’s a bit frustrated. Who wouldn’t be?”

The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces. “Dermot’s brothers!” (I’d read all about them in Dermot’s book. Eddie, Mozza, Jarvis.)

Hot ash burnt my thigh, and I lost track of which face uttered what. It was a Francis Bacon triptych come to life. “Knuckle Sandwich is doing nicely, by the looks of things.”

“Piles of it in the airport bookshops.”

“You must at least of suspected we’d come calling.”

“A man of your business acumen.”

The London Irish unnerve me at the best of times. “Boys, boys. Dermot signed a copyright-transfer contract. Look, look, it’s industry standard, I have a copy in my briefcase here . . .” I did indeed have the document to hand. “Clause eighteen, about copyright . . . means Knuckle Sandwich, legally, is . . . er . . .” It wasn’t easy to tell them this with my briefs around my ankles. “Er, legally the property of Cavendish Publishing.”

Jarvis Hoggins scanned the contract for a moment but tore it up when it proved longer than his concentration span. “Dermot signed this f*****g pants when his book was just a f*****g hobby.”

“A present to our sick old mam, God rest her soul.”

“A souvenir of Dad’s heyday.”

“Dermot never signed no f*****g contract for the event of the f*****g season.”

“We paid your printer, Mr. Sprat, a little visit. He went through the economics for us.”

Contract confetti showered. Mozza was close enough for me to smell his dinner. “Quite a hill of Hoggins Bros.’ cash you’ve raked in, it seems.”

“I’m sure we can agree on a, um, um, funds flowchart, which will—”

Eddie cut in: “Let’s make it three.”

I feigned a wince. “Three thousand pounds? Boys, I don’t think—”

“Don’t be a silly billy.” Mozza pinched my cheek. “Three—o’— clock. Tomorrow afternoon. Your office.”

I had no choice. “Perhaps we might . . . er . . . moot a provisional sum to conclude this meeting, as a basis for . . . ongoing negotiation.”

“Okeydokey. What sum did we moot earlier, Mozza?”

“Fifty K sounded reasonable.”

My cry of pain was unfeigned. “Fifty thousand pounds?”

“For starters.”

My intestines bubbled, toiled and troubled. “Do you really think I keep that kind of money lying around in shoe boxes?” I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.

“I hope you keep it lying around somewhere, Grandpops.”

“Cash.”

“No bollocks. No checks.”

“No promises. No deferments.”

“Old-fashioned money. A shoe box will do fine.”

“Gentlemen, I’m happy to pay a negotiated consideration, but the law—”

Jarvis whistled through his teeth. “Will the law help a man of your years bounce back from multiple spinal fractures, Timothy?”

Eddie: “Men of your age don’t bounce. They splat.”

I fought with all my might, but my sphincter was no longer my own and a cannonade fired off. Amusement or condescension I could have borne, but my tormentors’ pity signified my abject defeat. The toilet chain was pulled.

“Three o’clock.” Cavendish-Redux went down the pan. Out trooped the thugs, over my prostrate door. Eddie turned for a last word. “Dermot did a nice little paragraph in his book. On loan defaulters.”

I refer the curious reader to this page of Knuckle Sandwich, available from your local bookshop. Not on a full stomach.

Outside my Haymarket office suite taxis inched and sprinted. Inside my inner sanctum, Mrs. Latham’s Nefertiti earrings (a gift from me to mark her tenth year with Cavendish Publishing, I found them in a British Museum Gift Shop bargain bin) jingled as she shook her head, no, no, no. “And I am telling you, Mr. Cavendish, that I cannot find you fifty thousand pounds by three o’clock this afternoon. I cannot find you five thousand pounds. Every Knuckle Sandwich penny has already been Hoovered up by long-standing debts.”

“Doesn’t anybody owe us money?”

“I always keep on top of the invoicing, Mr. Cavendish, do I not?”

Desperation makes me wheedle. “This is the age of ready credit!”

“This is the age of credit limits, Mr. Cavendish.”

I retired to my office, poured myself a whiskey, and slooshed down my dicky-ticker pills before tracing Captain Cook’s last voyage on my antique globe. Mrs. Latham brought in the mail and left without a word. Bills, junk, moral muggings from charity fund-raisers, and a package addressed “FAO The Visionary Editor of Knuckle Sandwich,” containing a MS titled Half-Lives—lousy name for a work of fiction—and subtitled The First Luisa Rey Mystery. Lousier and lousier. Its lady author, one dubiously named Hilary V. Hush, began her covering letter with the following: “When I was nine my mom took me to Lourdes to pray for my bed-wetting to be cured. Imagine my surprise when not Saint Bernadette but Alain-Fournier appeared in a vision that night.”

Nutcase ahoy. I threw the letter away into my “Urgent Business” tray and switched on my spanking new fat-gigabyte computer for a game of Minesweeper. After getting blown up twice I telephoned Sotheby’s to offer Charles Dickens’s own, original, authentic writing desk for auction with a reserve price of sixty thousand. A charming evaluator named Kirpal Singh commiserated that the novelist’s desk was already accounted for by the Dickens House museum and hoped I’d not been fleeced too painfully. I confess, I do lose track of my little elaborations. Next I called Elliot McCluskie and asked after his delightful kiddies. “Fine, thank you.” He asked after my delightful business. I asked for a loan of eighty thousand pounds. He began with a thoughtful “Right . . .” I lowered my ceiling to sixty. Elliot pointed out that my performance-linked credit stream still had a twelve-month flow horizon before resizing could be feasibly optioned. Oh, I miss the days when they’d laugh like a hyena, tell you to go to hell, and hang up. I traced Magellan’s voyage across my globe and longed for a century when a fresh beginning was no further than the next clipper out of Dept-ford. My pride already in tatters, I gave Madame X a bell. She was having her A.M. soak. I explained the gravity of my situation. She laughed like a hyena, told me to go to hell, and hung up. I spun my globe. I spun my globe.

Mrs. Latham eyeballed me like a hawk watching a bunny as I stepped outside. “No, not a loan shark, Mr. Cavendish. It just isn’t worth it.”

“Never fear, Mrs. Latham, I’m just going to pay a call on the one man in this world who believes in me, fair weather or foul.” In the lift I reminded my reflection, “Blood is thicker than water,” before spiking my palm on the spoke of my telescopic umbrella.

“Oh, Satan’s gonads, not you. Look, just get lost and leave us in peace.” My brother glared across his swimming pool as I stepped down his patio. Denholme’s never swum in his pool, as far as I know, but he does all the chlorinating and whatnot every week just the same, even in blustery drizzle. He trawled for leaves with a big net on a pole. “I’m not lending you a ruddy farthing until you pay back the last lot. Why must I forever be giving you handouts? No. Don’t answer.” Denholme scooped a fistful of soggy leaves from the net. “Just get back in your taxi and bugger off. I’ll only ask you nicely once.”

“How’s Georgette?” I brushed aphids off his shriveled rose petals.

“Georgette’s going bonkers surely and steadily, not that you ever evince an ounce of genuine interest when you don’t want money.”

I watched a worm return to soil and wished I was it. “Denny, I’ve had a minor run-in with the wrong sort. If I can’t get my hands on sixty thousand pounds, I’m going to take an awful beating.”

“Get them to video it for us.”

“I’m not joking, Denholme.”

“Nor am I! So, you’re shoddy at being duplicitous. What of it? Why is this my problem?”

“We’re brothers! Don’t you have a conscience?”

“I sat on the board of a merchant bank for thirty years.”

An amputated sycamore tree shed once green foliage like desperate men shed once steadfast resolutions. “Help, Denny. Please. Thirty grand would be a start.”

I had pushed too hard. “Damn it to hell, Tim, my bank crashed! We were bled dry by those bloodsuckers at Lloyd’s! The days when I had that kind of spondulics at my beck and call are gone, gone, gone! Our house is mortgaged, twice over! I’m the mighty fallen, you’re the minuscule fallen. Anyway, you’ve got this ruddy book flying out of every bookshop in the known world!”

My face said what I had no words for.

“Oh, Christ, you idiot. What’s the repayment schedule?”

I looked at my watch. “Three o’clock this afternoon.”

“Forget it.” Denholme put down his net. “File for bankruptcy. Reynard’ll do the papers for you, he’s a good man. A hard bullet to bite, I should know, but it’ll get your creditors off your back. The law is clear—”

“Law? The only experience my creditors have of the law is squatting over a can in an overcrowded cell.”

“Then go to ground.”

“These people are very, very well connected with the ground.”

“Not beyond the M25 they aren’t, I bet. Stay with friends.”

Friends? I crossed off those to whom I owed money, the dead, the disappeared-down-time’s-rabbit-hole, and I was left with . . .

Denholme made his final offer. “I can’t lend you money. I don’t have any. But I’m owed a favor or two by a comfortable place where you could possibly lie low for a while.”

Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King’s Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid—any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men’s lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day. I called Mrs. Latham to explain I would be in Prague for a three-week meeting with Václav Havel, a lie whose consequences stuck with me like herpes. Mrs. Latham wished me bon voyage. She could handle the Hogginses. Mrs. Latham could handle the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I don’t deserve her, I know it. I often wonder why she’s stayed at Cavendish Publishing. It isn’t for what I pay her.

I navigated the array of ticket types on the ticket machine: Day Return with Railcard Off Peak, Cheap Day Single Without Railcard on Peak, and on, and on, but which, oh, which do I need? A menacing finger tapped my shoulder and I jumped a mile—it was only a little old lady advising me that returns are cheaper than singles. I assumed she was doolally but, stone the ruddy crows, ’twas so. I slid in a banknote with our monarch’s head up, then down, then front first, then back first, but each time the machine spat it out.

So I joined the queue for a human ticket seller. Thirty-one people were ahead of me, yes, I counted every one. The ticket sellers drifted in and out from their counters much as the fancy took them. A looped advertisement on a screen urged me to invest in a stair-lift. Finally, finally, my turn was up: “Hello, I need a ticket to Hull.”

The ticket woman toyed with her chunky ethnic rings. “Leaving when?”

“As soon as possible.”

“As in ‘today’?”

“ ‘Today’ usually means ‘as soon as possible,’ yes.”

“I ain’t sellin’ you a ticket for today. That’s them winders over there. This winder is advance tickets only.”

“But the red flashing sign told me to come to your counter.”

“Couldn’t have done. Move along, now. You’re holding up the queue.”

“No, that sign ruddy well did send me to this counter! I’ve been queuing for twenty minutes!”

She looked interested for the first time. “You want me to change the rules for your benefit?”

Anger sparked in Timothy Cavendish like forks in microwaves. “I want you to evolve problem-solving intelligence and sell me a ticket to Hull!”

“I ain’t standing for being addressed in that tone.”

“I’m the ruddy customer! I won’t be addressed like that! Get me your ruddy supervisor!”

“I am my supervisor.”

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.

“Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ queue!”

Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. “I know there’s a ‘fackin’ queue’! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue again just because Nina Simone over there won’t sell me a ruddy ticket!”

A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. “Wassa bovver?”

“This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue,” said the skinhead, “and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

“Look, matey”—the yeti addressed me with condescension reserved for the handicapped or elderly—“we got queues in this country to keep things fair, see, and if you don’t like it you should go back to where you come from, getit?”

“Do I look like a ruddy Egyptian? Do I? I know there’s a queue! How? Because I already queued in this queue, so—”

“This gentleman claims you ain’t.”

“Him? Will he still be a ‘gentleman’ when he daubs ‘Asylum Scrounger’ on your housing-association flat?”

His eyeballs swelled, they really did. “The Transport Police can boot you off the premises, or you can join this queue like a member of a civilized society. Whichever is fine by me. Jumping queues is not fine by me.”

“But if I queue all over again I’ll miss my connections!”

“Tough,” he enunciated, “titty!”

I appealed to the people behind that Sid Rotten look-alike. Maybe they had seen me in the queue, maybe they hadn’t, but nobody met my eye. England has gone to the dogs, oh, the dogs, the ruddy dogs.

Over an hour later London shunted itself southward, taking the Curse of the Brothers Hoggins with it. Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain’s decrepit railways, packed the dirty train. Airplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle. Too much matter in this ruddy city.

Still. I felt the exhilaration of a journey begun, and I let my guard drop. A volume I once published, True Recollections of a Northern Territories Magistrate, claims that shark victims experience an anesthetic vision of floating away, all danger gone, into the Pacific blue, at the very moment they are being minced in that funnel of teeth. I, Timothy Cavendish, was that swimmer, watching London roll away, yes, you, you sly, toupeed quizmaster of a city, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blitzed bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen et al.; hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother.

Essex raised its ugly head. When I was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this county was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house, I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes—a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker—varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it along the Say. Sticklebacks in jars. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? Hedgeless, featureless fields. Essex is Winnipeg, now. Stubble was burnt, and the air tasted of crisp bacon sarnies. My thoughts flew off with other fairies, and we were past Saffron Walden when the train juddered to a halt. “Um . . . ,” said the intercom. “John, is this on? John, what button do I press?” Cough. “SouthNet Trains regrets that this service will make an unscheduled stop at the next station due to . . . a missing driver. This unscheduled stop will continue for the duration that it takes to locate an appropriate driver. SouthNet Trains assures you we are striving hard”—I clearly discerned a background snigger!—“to restore our normal excellent standard of service.” Rail rage chain-reactioned down the compartments, though in our age crimes are not committed by criminals conveniently at hand but by executive pens far beyond the mob’s reach, back in London’s postmodern HQs of glass and steel. Half the mob owns shares in what it would pound to atoms, anyway.

So there we sat. I wished I had brought something to read. At least I had a seat, and I wouldn’t have given it up for Helen Keller. The evening was lemon blue. Trackside shadows grew monolithic. Commuters sent calls to families on mobile phones. I wondered how that dodgy Australian magistrate knew what flashed through the minds of the shark-eaten. Lucky express trains with nonmissing drivers shot past. I needed the loo, but it didn’t bear imagining. I opened my briefcase for a bag of Werner’s toffees but came up with Half-Lives—The First Luisa Rey Mystery. I leafed through its first few pages. It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay. Static squealed in the speakers. “This is a passenger announcement. SouthNet Trains regrets that as a suitable driver for this train cannot be located we will proceed to Little Chesterford station, where a complimentary coach will transport passengers on to Cambridge. Those able to are recommended to make alternative travel arrangements, as the coach will not reach Little Chesterford station [how that name chimed in my memory!] for . . . an unknown duration. Further details can be found on our website.” The train crawled a mile of twilight. Bats and wind-borne rubbish overtook us. Who was driving now if there wasn’t a driver?

Stop, shudder, doors open. The abler-bodied streamed off the train, over the footbridge, leaving me and a couple of taxidermist’s castoffs to limp in their wake at quarter speed. I heaved myself up the steps and paused for breath. There I was. Standing on the footbridge of Little Chesterford station. Ye gods, of all the rural stations for a marooning. The bridle path to Ursula’s old house still skirted the cornfield. Not much else did I recognize. The Sacred Barn of the Longest Snog was now Essex’s Premier Fitness Club. Ursula had met me in her froggy Citroën that night during reading week in our first term, right . . . on this triangle of gravel, here. How bohemian, Young Tim had thought, to be met by a woman in a car. I was Tutankhamen in my royal barge, rowed by Nubian slaves to the Temple of Sacrifice. Ursula drove me the few hundred yards to Dockery House, commissioned in Art Nouveau times by a Scandiwegian consul. We had the place to ourselves, while Mater and Pater were in Greece holidaying with Lawrence Durrell, if memory serves. (“Memory Serves.” Duplicitous couplet.)

Four decades later the beams of headlights from executive cars in the station car park lit up a freak plague of daddy longlegs, and one fugitive publishing gentleman in a flapping raincoat striding around a field now lying fallow for EU subsidies. You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap—I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in—but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters. Dockery House was still standing, isolated from its neighbors by a privet fence. How opulent the building had felt after my own parents’ bland box of suburbia—One day, I promised, I’m going to live in a house like this. Another promise I’ve broken; at least that one was only to myself.

I skirted the edge of the property, down an access road to a building site. A sign read: HAZLE CLOSE—HIGHLY PRIZED EXECUTIVE HOMES IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND. Upstairs at Dockery, lights were on. I imagined a childless couple listening to a wireless. The old stained-glass door had been replaced by something more burglarproof. That reading week I’d entered Dockery ready to peel off my shameful virginity, but I’d been so in awe of my Divine Cleopatra, so nervous, so eyeballed up on her father’s whiskey, so floppy with green sap that, well, I’d rather draw a veil over the embarrassment of that night, even at forty years’ remove. Very well, forty-seven years’ remove. That same white-leafed oak had scratted at Ursula’s window as I attempted to perform, long after I could decently pretend I was still warming up. Ursula had a gramophone record of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in her bedroom, that room there, where the electric candle glows in the window.

To this day I cannot hear Rachmaninoff without flinching.

The odds of Ursula still living at Dockery House were zilch, I knew. Last I heard she was running a PR office in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I squeezed myself through the evergreen hedge and pressed my nose up against the unlit, uncurtained dining room window, trying to peer in. That autumn night long ago Ursula had served a blob of grilled cheese on a slice of ham on a breast of chicken. Right there—right here. I could still taste it. I can still taste it as I write these words.

Flash!

The room was lit electric marigold, and in waltzed—backwards, luckily for me—a little witch with red corkscrew curls. “Mummy!” I half-heard, half-lip-read through the glass. “Mummy!” and in came Mummy, with the same corkscrew curls. This being proof enough for me that Ursula’s family had long vacated the house, I backtracked into the shrubbery—but I turned once more and resumed my spying because . . . well, because, ahem, je suis un homme solitaire. Mummy was repairing a broken broomstick while the girl sat on the table swinging her legs. An adult werewolf came in and removed his mask, and oddly, though not so oddly I suppose, I recognized him—that current-affairs TV presenter, one of Felix Finch’s tribe. Jeremy Someone, Heathcliff eyebrows, terrier manners, you know the chap. He took some insulation tape from the Welsh dresser drawer and muscled in on the broomstick repair job. Then Grandma entered this domestic frieze, and damn me once, damn me twice, damn me always make it nice, ’twas Ursula. The Ursula. My Ursula.

Behold that spry, elderly lady! In my memory she hadn’t aged a day—what makeup artist had savaged her dewy youth? (The same one who savaged yours, Timbo.) She spoke, and her daughter and granddaughter giggled, yes, giggled, and I giggled too . . . What? What did she say? Tell me the joke! She stuffed a red stocking with newspaper balls. A devil’s tail. She attached it to her posterior with a safety pin, and a memory from a university Halloween Ball cracked on the hard rim of my heart and the yolk dribbled out—she’d dressed like a devilette then, too, she’d put on red face paint, we’d kissed all night, just kissed, and in the morning we found a builders’ café that sold dirty mugs of strong, milky tea and enough eggs to fill, to kill, the Swiss Army. Toast and hot canned tomatoes. HP Sauce. Be honest, Cavendish, was any other breakfast in your life ever so delectable?

So drunk was I on nostalgia, I ordered myself to leave before I did anything stupid. A nasty voice just a few feet away said this—“Don’t move a muscle or I’ll mackasser you and put you in a stew!”

Shocked? Jet-assisted Vertical Ruddy Takeoff! Luckily my would-be butcherer was not a day older than ten, and his chain saw’s teeth were cardboard, but his bloodied bandages were rather effective. In a low voice, I told him so. He wrinkled his face at me. “Are you Grandma Ursula’s friend?”

“Once upon a time, yes, I was.”

“What have you come to the party as? Where’s your costume?”

Time to leave. I edged back into the evergreen. “This is my costume.”

He picked his nose. “A dead man digged up from the churchyard?”

“Charmed, but no. I’ve come as the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“But it’s Halloween, not Christmas.”

“No!” I slapped my forehead. “Really?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Then I’m ten months late! This is terrible! I’d better get back before my absence is noticed—and remarked upon!”

The boy did a cartoon kung-fu pose and waved his chain saw at me. “Not so fast, Green Goblin! You’re a trespasser! I’m telling the police of you!”

War. “Tell-tale-tit, are you? Two can play at that game. If you tell on me, I’ll tell my friend the Ghost of Christmas Future where your house is, and do you know what he’ll do to you?”

The wide-eyed shitletto shook his head, shaken and stirred.

“When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he’ll slide into your house through the crack under the door and eat—your—puppy!” The venom in my bile duct pumped fast. “He’ll leave its curly tail under your pillow and you’ll get blamed. Your little friends will all scream, ‘Puppy slayer!’ whenever they see you coming. You’ll grow old and friendless and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century from now. So if I were you, I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone about seeing me.”

I pushed myself through the hedge before he could take it all in. As I was heading back to the station along the pavement, the wind carried his sob: “But I don’t even have a puppy . . .”

I hid behind Private Eye in the health center’s Wellness Café, which was doing a fine trade with us maroonees. I half-expected a furious Ursula to turn up with her grandchild and a local bobby. Private lifeboats came to rescue the stockbrokers. Old Father Timothy offers this advice to his younger readers, included for free in the price of this memoir: conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.

A venerable coach arrived three Scotches later. Venerable? Ruddy Edwardian. I had to endure chatty students all the way to Cambridge. Boyfriend worries, sadistic lecturers, demonic housemates, reality TV, strewth, I had no idea children of their age were so hyperactive. When I finally reached Cambridge station, I looked for a telephone box to tell Aurora House not to expect me until the following day, but the first two telephones were vandalized (in Cambridge, I ask you!), and only when I got to the third did I look at the address and see that Denholme had neglected to write the number. I found a hotel for commercial travelers next to a launderette. I forget its name, but I knew from its reception that the place was a crock of cat crap, and as usual my first impression was spot on. I was too ruddy whacked to shop around for something nicer, however, and my wallet was too starved. My room had high windows with blinds I couldn’t lower because I am not twelve feet tall. The khaki pellets in the bathtub were indeed mouse droppings, the shower knob came off in my hand, and the hot water was tepid. I fumigated the room with cigar smoke and lay on my bed trying to recall the bedrooms of all my lovers, in order, looking down the mucky telescope of time. Prince Rupert and the Boys failed to stir. I felt strangely unconcerned with the idea of the Hoggins Bros. plundering my flat back in Putney. Must be lean pickings compared to most of their heists, if Knuckle Sandwich is anything to go by. A few nice first editions, but little else of value. My television died the night George Bush II snatched the throne and I haven’t dared replace it. Madame X took back her antiques and heirlooms. I ordered a triple Scotch from room service—damn me if I’d share a bar with a cabal of salesmen boasting about boobs and bonuses. When my treble whiskey finally came it was actually a stingy double, so I said so. The ferrety adolescent just shrugged. No apology, just a shrug. I asked him to lower my blind, but he took one look and huffed, “Can’t reach that!” I gave him a frosty “That will be all, then,” instead of a tip. He broke wind as he left, poisonously. I read more of Half-Lives but fell asleep just after Rufus Sixsmith was found murdered. In a lucid dream I was looking after a little asylum-seeker boy who begged for a go in one of those rides in the corners of supermarkets you put fifty p into. I said, “Oh, all right,” but when the child climbed out he had turned into Nancy Reagan. How could I explain that to his mother?

I woke up in darkness with a mouth like Super Glue. The Mighty Gibbon’s assessment of history—“little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”—ticker-taped by for no apparent reason. Timothy Cavendish’s time on Earth, in thirteen words. I refought old arguments, then fought arguments that have never even existed. I smoked a cigar until the high windows showed streaks of a watery dawn. I shaved my jowls. A pinched Ulsterwoman downstairs served a choice of burnt or frozen toast with sachets of lipstick-colored jam and unsalted butter. I remembered Jake Balokowsky’s quip about Normandy: Cornwall with something to eat.

Back at the station my woes began afresh when I tried to get a refund on yesterday’s disrupted journey. The ticket-wallah, whose pimples bubbled as I watched, was as intractably dense as his counterpart in King’s Cross. The corporation breeds them from the same stem cell. My blood pressure neared its record. “What do you mean, yesterday’s ticket is now invalid? It’s not my fault my ruddy train broke down!”

“Not our fault neither. SouthNet run the trains. We’re Ticket-Lords, see.”

“Then to whom do I complain?”

“Well, SouthNet Loco are owned by a holding company in Düsseldorf who are owned by that mobile-phone company in Finland, so you’d be best off trying someone in Helsinki. You should thank your lucky stars it wasn’t a derailment. Get a lot of those, these days.”

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage. A feisty stagger was needed to reach the next train before it left—only to find it had been canceled! But, “luckily,” the train before mine was so late that it still hadn’t departed. All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People.

Cambridge outskirts are all science parks now. Ursula and I went punting below that quaint bridge, where those Biotech Space Age cuboids now sit cloning humans for shady Koreans. Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! The I’s we were yearn to breathe the world’s air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell.

Witchy trees bent before the enormous sky. Our train had made an unscheduled and unexplained stop on a blasted heath, for how long, I do not recall. My watch was stuck in the middle of last night. (I miss my Ingersoll, even today.) My fellow passengers’ features melted into forms that were half familiar: an estate agent behind me, yacking on his mobile telephone, I could swear he was my sixth-form hockey captain; the grim woman two seats ahead, reading A Moveable Feast, isn’t she that Inland Revenue gorgon who gave me such a grilling a few years ago?

Finally the couplings whimpered and the train limped off at a slow haul to another country station whose flaky name board read “Adlestrop.” A voice with a bad cold announced: “Centrallo Trains regrets that due to a braking-systems failure this train will make a brief stop at this—sneeze—station. Passengers are directed to alight here . . . and wait for a substitute train.” My fellow travelers gasped, groaned, swore, shook their heads. “Centrallo Trains apologizes for any—sneeze—inconvenience this may cause, and assures you we are working hard to restore our normal excellent standard of—huge sneeze—service. Gi’ us a tissue, John.”

Fact: rolling stock in this country is built in Hamburg or somewhere, and when the German engineers test British-bound trains, they use imported lengths of our buggered, privatized tracks because the decently maintained European rails won’t provide accurate testing conditions. Who really won the ruddy war? I should have fled the Hogginses up the Great North Road on a ruddy pogo stick.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

I groped my way to the ammonia-smelling gents’, where a joker had stolen the bulb. I had just unzipped myself when a voice arose from the shadows. “Hey, mistah, got a light or sumfink?” Steadying my cardiac arrest, I fumbled for my lighter. The flame conjured a Rastafarian in Holbein embers, just a few inches away, a cigar held in his thick lips. “Fanks,” whispered my black Virgil, inclining his head to bring the tip into the flame.

“You’re, erm, most welcome, quite,” I said.

His wide, flat nose twitched. “So, where you heading, man?”

My hand checked my wallet was still there. “Hull . . .” A witless fib ran wild. “To return a novel. To a librarian who works there. A very famous poet. At the university. It’s in my bag. It’s called Half-Lives.” The Rastafarian’s cigar smelt of compost. I can never guess what they’re really thinking. Not that I’ve ever really known any. I’m not a racialist, but I do believe the ingredients in so-called melting pots take generations to melt. “Mistah,” the Rastafarian told me, “you need”—and I flinched—“some o’ this.” I obeyed his offer and sucked on his turd-thick cigar.

Ruddy hell! “What is this stuff?”

He made a noise like a didgeridoo at the root of his throat. “That don’t grow in Marlboro Country.” My head enlarged itself by a magnitude of many hundreds, Alice-style, and became a multistory car park wherein dwelt a thousand and one operatic Citroëns. “My word, you can say that again,” mouthed the Man Formerly Known as Tim Cavendish.

Next thing I remember, I was on the train again, wondering who had walled up my compartment with moss-stained bricks. “We’re ready for you now, Mr. Cavendish,” a bald, spectacled coot told me. Nobody was there, or anywhere. Only a cleaner, making his way down the vacant train, putting litter into a sack. I lowered myself onto the platform. The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches. Back in King’s Cross? No, this was wintriest Gdansk. In a panic I realized I didn’t have my bag and umbrella. I climbed aboard and retrieved them from the luggage rack. My muscles seemed to have atrophied in my sleep. Outside, a baggage cart passed, driven by a Modigliani. Where in hell was this place?

“Yurrin Hulpal,” the Modigliani answered.

Arabic? My brain proposed the following: a Eurostar train had stopped at Adlestrop, I had boarded and slept all the way to Istanbul Central. Addled brain. I needed a clear sign, in English.

WELCOME TO HULL.

Praise be, my journey was nearly over. When had I last been this far north? Never, that’s when. I gulped cold air to stub out a sudden urge to throw up—that’s right, Tim, drink it down. The offended stomach supplies pictures of the cause of its discomfort, and the Rastafarian’s cigar flashed before me. The station was painted in all blacks. I rounded a corner and found two luminous clock faces hung above the exit, but clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all. No watcher at the gates wanted to see my exorbitantly priced ticket, and I felt cheated. Out front a curb crawler prowled here, a window blinked there, music waxed and waned from a pub across the bypass. “Spare change?” asked, no, demanded, no, accused, a miserable dog in a blanket. His master’s nose, eyebrows, and lips were so pierced with ironmongery that a powerful electromagnet would have shredded his face in a single pass. What do these people do at airport metal detectors? “Got any change?” I saw myself as he saw me, a frail old giffer in a friendless late city. The dog rose, scenting vulnerability. An invisible guardian took my elbow and led me to a taxi rank.

The taxi seemed to have been going round the same roundabout for a miniature eternity. A howling singer on the radio strummed a song about how everything that dies someday comes back. (Heaven forfend—remember the Monkey’s Paw!) The driver’s head was far, far too big for his shoulders, he must have had that Elephant Man disease, but when he turned round I made out his turban. He was bemoaning his clientele. “Always they say, ‘Bet it ain’t this cold where you’re from, eh?’ and always I say, ‘Dead wrong, mate. You’ve obviously never visited Manchester in February.’ ”

“You do know the way to Aurora House, don’t you?” I asked, and the Sikh said, “Look, we’ve arrived already.” The narrow driveway ended at an imposing Edwardian residence of indeterminate size. “Sick teen-squid Zachary.”

“I don’t know anyone of that name.”

He looked at me, puzzled, then repeated, “Sixteen—quid—exactly.”

“Oh. Yes.” My wallet was not in my trouser pockets, or my jacket pocket. Or my shirt pocket. Nor did it reappear in my trouser pockets. The awful truth smacked my face. “I’ve been ruddy robbed!”

“I resent the insinuation. My taxi has a municipal meter.”

“No, you don’t understand, my wallet’s been stolen.”

“Oh, then I understand.” Good, he understands. “I understand very well!” The wrath of the subcontinent swarmed in the dark. “You’re thinking, That curry muncher knows whose side the fuzz’ll take.”

“Nonsense!” I protested. “Look, I’ve got coins, change, yes, a pocketful of change . . . here . . . yes, thank God! Yes, I think I’ve got it . . .”

He counted his ducats. “Tip?”

“Take it.” I had emptied all the shrapnel into his other hand and scrambled outside, straight into a ditch. From my accident-victim’s-eye view I saw the taxi speed away, and I suffered a disagreeable flashback to my Greenwich mugging. It wasn’t the watch or even the bruises or the shock that had scarred me so. It was that I was a man who had once faced down and bested a quartet of Arab ragamuffins in Aden, but in the girls’ eyes I was . . . old, merely old. Not behaving the way an old man should—invisible, silent, and scared—was, itself, sufficient provocation.

I scaled the ramp up to the imposing glass doors. The reception area glowed grail gold. I knocked, and a woman who could have been cast for the stage musical of Florence Nightingale smiled at me. I felt like someone had waved a magic wand and said, “Cavendish, all your troubles are over!”

Florence let me in. “Welcome to Aurora House, Mr. Cavendish!”

“Oh, thank you, thank you. Today has been too ruddy awful for words.”

An angel incarnate. “The main thing is you’ve arrived safely now.”

“Look, there is a slight fiscal embarrassment I should mention at this time. You see, on my way here—”

“All you need to worry about now is getting a good night’s sleep. Everything is taken care of. Just sign here and I can show you to your room. It’s a nice quiet one overlooking the garden. You’ll love it.”

Moist-eyed with gratitude, I followed her to my sanctuary. The hotel was modern, spotless, with very soft lighting in the sleepy corridors. I recognized aromas from my childhood but couldn’t quite identify them. Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. My room was simple, its sheets crisp and clean, with towels ready on the heated rail. “Will you be all right from now, Mr. Cavendish?”

“Bliss, my dear.”

“Sweet dreams, then.” I knew they would be. I took a quick shower, slipped into my jimjams, and cleaned my teeth. My bed was firm but comfy as beaches in Tahiti. The Hoggins Horrors were east of the Horn, I was scot-free, and Denny, dearest Denholme, was footing my bill. Brother in need, brother indeed. Sirens sang in my marshmallow pillows. In the morning life would begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This time round I would do everything right.

“In the morning.” Fate is fond of booby-trapping those three little words. I awoke to discover a not-so-young woman with a pageboy haircut rifling through my personal effects like a bargain hunter. “What the ruddy hell are you doing in my room, you pilfering warty sow?” I half-roared, half-wheezed.

The female put down my jacket without guilt. “Because you are new I will not have you eat soap powder. This time. Be warned. I do not stand for offensive language in Aurora House. Not from anyone. And I never make idle threats, Mr. Cavendish. Never.”

A robber reprimanding his victim for bad language! “I’ll ruddy well talk to you how I ruddy well like, you stinking ruddy thief! Make me eat soap powder? I’d like to see you try! Let’s call Hotel Security! Let’s call the police! You ask about offensive language, and I’ll ask about breaking, entry, and theft!”

She came over to my bed and slapped me hard across the chops.

I was so shocked I just fell back onto my pillow.

“A disappointing start. I am Mrs. Noakes. You do not wish to cross me.”

Was this some sort of a kinky S & M hotel? Had a madwoman broken into my room after learning my name from the hotel register?

“Smoking is discouraged here. I will have to confiscate these cigars. The lighter is far too dangerous for you to play with. And what, pray, are these?” She dangled my keys.

“Keys. What do you think they are?”

“Keys go walkies! Let’s give them to Mrs. Judd for safekeeping, shall we?”

“Let’s not give them to anyone, you crazy dragon! You strike me! You rob me! What kind of ruddy hotel hires thieves for chambermaids?”

The creature stuffed her booty into a little burglar’s bag. “No more valuables to be taken care of?”

“Put those items back! Now! Or I’ll have your job, I swear it!”

“I’ll take that as a no. Breakfast is eight sharp. Boiled eggs with toast soldiers today. None for the tardy.”

I got dressed the moment she was gone, and looked for the phone. There wasn’t one. After a very quick wash—my bathroom had been designed for disabled people, it was all rounded edges and fitted with handrails—I hurried to Reception, determined to have due justice. I had acquired a limp but was unsure how. I was lost. Baroque music lilted in identical chair-lined corridors. A leprous gnome gripped my wrist and showed me a jar of hazelnut butter. “If you want to take this home, I’ll jolly well tell you why I don’t.”

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” I scraped the creature’s hand off mine and passed through a dining room area where the guests were seated in rows and waitresses were bringing bowls in from the kitchen.

What was so odd?

The youngest guests were in their seventies. The oldest guests were three hundred plus. Was it the week after the schools went back?

I had it. You probably spotted it pages ago, dear Reader.

Aurora House was a nursing home for the elderly.

That ruddy brother of mine! This was his idea of a joke!

Mrs. Judd and her Oil of Olay smile were manning Reception. “Hello, Mr. Cavendish. Feeling super this morning?”

“Yes. No. An absurd misunderstanding has occurred.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It most certainly is a fact. I checked in last night believing Aurora House was a hotel. My brother made the booking, you see. But . . . oh, it’s his idea of a practical joke. Not in the least bit funny. His contemptible ruse only ‘worked’ because a Rastafarian gave me a puff of a sinister cigar in Adlestrop, and also, the ruddy stem-cell twins who sold me my ticket here, they wore me out so. But listen. You have a bigger problem closer to home—some demented bitch called Noakes is running about the place impersonating a chambermaid. She’s probably riddled with Alzheimer’s, but yowie, she’s got a slap on her. She stole my keys! Now, in a go-go bar in Phuket, that’d be par for the course, but in an old wrecks’ home in Hull? You’d get closed down if I was an inspector, you know.”

Mrs. Judd’s smile was now battery acid.

“I want my keys back,” she made me say. “Right away.”

“Aurora House is your home now, Mr. Cavendish. Your signature authorizes us to apply compliancy. And I’d get out of the habit of referring to my sister in those tones.”

“Compliancy? Signature? Sister?”

“The custody document you signed last night. Your residency papers.”

“No, no, no. That was the hotel registry! Never mind, it’s all academic. I’ll be on my way after breakfast. Make that before breakfast, I smelt the slops! My, this will make a heck of a dinner-party story. Once I’ve strangled my brother. Bill him, by the way. Only I must insist on having my keys returned. And you’d better call me a cab.”

“Most of our guests get cold feet on their first mornings.”

“My feet are quite warm, but I haven’t made myself clear. If you don’t—”

“Mr. Cavendish, why don’t you eat your breakfast first and—”

“Keys!”

“We have your written permission to hold your valuables in the office safe.”

“Then I must speak with the management.”

“That would be my sister, Nurse Noakes.”

“Noakes? Management?”

“Nurse Noakes.”

“Then I must speak with the board of governors, or the owner.”

“They would be me.”

“Look.” Gulliver and Lilliputians. “You’re breaking the ruddy . . . Anti-Incarceration Act, or whatever it is.”

“You’ll find temper tantrums won’t help you at Aurora House.”

“Your telephone, please. I wish to call the police.”

“Residents aren’t permitted to—”

“I am not a ruddy resident! And since you won’t give me back my keys, I’ll be back later this morning with one very pissed-off officer of the law.” I shoved the main door, but it shoved back harder. Some ruddy security lock. I tried the fire door across the porch. Locked. Over Mrs. Judd’s protests I smashed a release catch with a little hammer, the door opened, and I was a free man. Ruddy hell, the cold smacked my face with an iron spade! Now I knew why northerners go in for beards, woad, and body grease. I marched down the curving driveway through worm-blasted rhododendrons, resisting a strong temptation to break into a run. I haven’t run since the mid-seventies. I was level with a lawn mower contraption when a shaggy giant in groundsman’s overalls rose from the earth like Ye Greene Knycht. He was removing the remains of a hedgehog from its blades with his bloody hands. “Off somewhere?”

“You bet I am! To the land of the living.” I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves. I was disorientated to discover how the drive wound back to the dining room annex. I had taken a bad turn. The Undead of Aurora House watched me through the wall of glass. “Soylent Green is people!” I mocked their hollow stares, “Soylent Green is made of people!” They looked puzzled—I am, alas, the Last of my Tribe. One of the wrinklies tapped on the window and pointed behind me. I turned, and the ogre slung me over his shoulder. My breath was squeezed out with his every stride. He stank of fertilizer. “I’ve better things to do than this . . .”

“Then go and do them!” I struggled in vain to get him in a neck-lock, but I don’t think he even noticed. So I used my superior powers of language to chain the villain: “You cruddy ruddy rugger-bugger yob! This is assault! This is illegal confinement!”

He bear-hugged me several degrees tighter to silence me, and I am afraid I bit his ear. A strategic mistake. In one powerful yank my trousers were pulled from my waist—was he going to bugger me? What he did was even less pleasant. He laid me on the body of his mowing machine, pinned me down with one hand, and caned me with a bamboo cane in the other. The pain cracked across my unfleshy shanks, once, twice, again-again, again-again, again-again!

Christ, such pain!

I shouted, then cried, then whimpered for him to stop. Whack! Whack! Whack! Nurse Noakes finally ordered the giant to desist. My buttocks were two giant wasp stings! The woman’s voice hissed in my ear: “The world outside has no place for you. Aurora House is where you live now. Is reality sinking in? Or shall I ask Mr. Withers here to go over things one more time?”

“Tell her to go to hell,” warned my spirit, “or you’ll regret it later.”

“Tell her what she wants to hear,” shrieked my nervous system, “or you’ll regret it now.”

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

I was sent to my room without breakfast. I plotted vengeance, litigation, and torture. I inspected my cell. Door, locked from outside, no keyhole. Window that opened only six inches. Heavy-duty sheets made of egg-carton fibers with plastic undersheet. Armchair, washable seat cover. Moppable carpet. “Easy-wipe” wallpaper. “En suite” bathroom: soap, shampoo, flannel, ratty towel, no window. Picture of cottage captioned: “A House is Made by Hands, but a Home is Made by Hearts.” Prospects for breakout: piss-poor.

Still, I believed my confinement would not last until noon. One of several exits must open up. The management would realize its mistake, apologize profusely, sack the Offending Noakes, and beg me to take compensation in cash. Or, Denholme would learn his gag had backfired and command my release. Or, the accountant would realize nobody was paying my bills and boot me out. Or, Mrs. Latham would report me missing, my disappearance would feature on Crimewatch UK, and the police would trace my whereabouts.

Around eleven the door was unlocked. I readied myself to reject apologies and go for the jugular. A once stately woman sailed in. Seventy years old, eighty, eighty-five, who knows when they’re that old? A rickety greyhound in a blazer followed his mistress. “Good morning,” began the woman. I stood, and did not offer my visitors a seat.

“I beg to differ.”

“My name is Gwendolin Bendincks.”

“Don’t blame me.”

Nonplussed, she took the armchair. “This”—she indicated the greyhound—“is Gordon Warlock-Williams. Why don’t you take a seat? We head the Residents’ Committee.”

“Very nice for you, but since I am not a—”

“I had intended to introduce myself at breakfast, but the morning’s unpleasantness occurred before we could take you under our wing.”

“All water under the bridge, now, Cavendish,” gruffed Gordon Warlock-Williams. “No one’ll mention it again, boyo, rest assured.” Welsh, yes, he would have to be Welsh.

Mrs. Bendincks leant forward. “But understand this, Mr. Cavendish: boat rockers are not welcome here.”

“Then expel me! I beg you!”

“Aurora House does not expel,” said the sanctimonious moo, “but you will be medicated, if your behavior warrants it, for your own protection.”

Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”

“Ah, but we do understand, Mr. Cavendish!” Gwendolin Bendincks nodded.

“No you don’t!”

“Everyone’s visited by the Glum Family at first, but you’ll soon cheer up when you see how your loved ones have acted in your best interests.”

“All my ‘loved ones’ are dead or bonkers or at the BBC, except my prankster brother!” You can see it, can’t you, dear Reader? I was a man in a horror B-movie asylum. The more I ranted and raged, the more I proved that I was exactly where I should be.

“This is the best hotel you’ll ever stay in, boyo!” His teeth were biscuit colored. Were he a horse, you couldn’t have given him away, “A five-star one, look you. Meals get provided, all your laundry is done. Activities laid on, from crochet to croquet. No confusing bills, no youngsters joyriding in your motor. Aurora House is a ball! Just obey the regulations and stop rubbing Nurse Noakes up the wrong way. She’s not a cruel woman.”

“ ‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’ ” Warlock-Williams looked at me as if I had spoken in tongues. “Solzhenitsyn.”

“Betwys y Coed was always good enough for Marjorie and me. But look you here! I felt just the same in my first week. Barely spoke to a soul, eh, Mrs. Bendincks, a major sourpuss, eh?”

“A maximus sourpuss, Mr. Warlock-Williams!”

“But now I’m happy as a pig in clover! Eh?”

Mrs. Bendincks smiled, ’twas a ghastly sight. “We’re here to help you reorientate. Now, I understand you were in publishing. Sadly”—she tapped her head—“Mrs. Birkin is less able to record Residents’ Committee meeting minutes than she once was. A fine opportunity for you to jolly well get involved!”

“I still am in publishing! Do I look like I should be here?” The silence was intolerable. “Oh, get out!”

“Disappointed.” She gazed at the leaf-littered lawn, dotted with worm casts. “Aurora House is your world now, Mr. Cavendish.” My head was cork and the corkscrew was Gwendolin Bendincks. “Yes, you are in a Rest Home. The day has come. Your stay can be miserable or pleasant. But your stay is permanent. Think on, Mr. Cavendish.” She knocked on the door. Unseen forces let my tormentors exit but slammed it shut in my face.

I noticed that for the duration of the interview my flies had been wide open.

Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. On escalators, on trunk roads, in supermarket aisles, the living will overtake you, incessantly. Elegant women will not see you. Store detectives will not see you. Salespeople will not see you, unless they sell stair lifts or fraudulent insurance policies. Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.

A sexless automaton brought lunch on a tray. I’m not being insulting, but I truly couldn’t tell if she or he was a he or a she. It had a slight mustache but tiny breasts too. I thought about knocking it out cold and making a Steve McQueen dash for liberty, but I had no weapon except a bar of soap and nothing to tie it up with except my belt.

Lunch was a tepid lamb chop. The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature. “Look,” I begged the automaton, “at least bring me some Dijon mustard.” It showed no evidence of understanding. “Coarse grain, or medium. I’m not fussy.” She turned to go. “Wait! You—speak-ee—English?” She was gone. My dinner outstared me.

My strategy had been wrong from square one. I had tried to shout my way out of this absurdity, but the institutionalized cannot do this. Slavers welcome the odd rebel to dress down before the others. In all the prison literature I’ve read, from The Gulag Archipelago to An Evil Cradling to Knuckle Sandwich, rights must be horse-traded and accrued with cunning. Prisoner resistance merely justifies an ever-fiercer imprisonment in the minds of the imprisoners.

Now was the season for subterfuge. I should take copious notes for my eventual compensation settlement. I should be courteous to the Black Noakes. But as I pushed cold peas onto my plastic fork, a chain of firecrackers exploded in my skull and the old world came to an abrupt end.