Angelmaker

III Going postal; amid the frills and bunting; not your average music box.

Edie Banister is feeling like a cow. More, she is conscious of sin. Not in any fleshy way, alas, but in her heart. She has transgressed against Joshua Joseph Spork. She has, in fact, stitched him up like a kipper, albeit for the good of mankind and the betterment of the human race. She persuaded herself that it was not personal. That this was the best way. Now, gazing at the little toy soldier he repaired so deftly, and recalling the stifled disappointment on his face when he saw that that was all she proposed to show him, she feels wicked. She is increasingly certain that some part of her has borne a grudge for longer than J. Joseph Spork has been alive, and has chosen this method to revenge itself. Duty, love, idealism and spite all discharged at once. She contemplates her soul, and finds it wanting.

“Bugger,” she tells Bastion. He looks back at her with rosy-coloured marbles, and snuffles. She believes she detects approbation, even reinforcement in his suffering face, but it could be wind. No doubt she will know shortly if it is.

“Buggery bugger,” she says. She picks up the toy soldier and puts it back in the box without a glance. It’s too late to change horses. The deed is done. The wheels are in motion. Edie Banister, ninety years of age and a stalwart of the established order, has pushed the button on the revolution. She sighs again. It’s so odd to be a supervillain, and at her age, too.

She has to admit privately that she may be mad. Although if so, it is a merciless, clear-sighted sort of madness and not at all what a lady might hope for. She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she has observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal. She tries the expression on for size; it carries a sense of outrage, and fatigue.

Yes. Edie Banister has gone postal. A very British sort of postal which does not involve shouting, but rather a sudden and total reverse of a lifetime’s perceptions. Although in truth, “sudden” is not entirely accurate. It happened by degrees, and actually by choice. She took a correspondence course in postality. She postalled herself up.

“I trusted you all to do the right thing,” she tells fifty years of governments, lined up and sheepish in her mind, “I believed you’d get it right. And you!” she adds, to the electorate, “You lazy, venal, self-deluding… ooh, if you were my children, I’d…” But this brings her up short. None of them is her child. No sons or daughters for Edie Banister. Just Bastion, and the faded love of the one whose trust she has betrayed for half a human life. Betrayed in the name of stability and security. A few decades of calm, she reasoned at the time, and the world would set itself straight.

But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming; even Vaughn bloody Parry, the little suburban nightmare who lived just around the corner, who killed and killed and no one knew because no one bothered to find out. Edie Banister had given her loyalty to an empty throne. There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.

The Parry thing had been the end of her comfortable certainty. It began, according to the broadsheets, in a new allotment patch in some midway town called Redbury. The council had at last untrousered the cash and purchased a stretch of green once part of a railway siding, sold in Thatcher’s time to make apartments and studios for wealthy buyers who never showed up. A vegetable competition was mooted, and organic food for the locality, and a sense of community and all the other things Britain no longer did because finance was cheaper and faster and the housing market made money out of nothing. And then they turned the first spadeful and it was over before it began. A grinning corpse, wrapped in a tartan blanket, and then another and another, and the burg of Redbury had a serial killer to call its own.

Edie could not help but notice that when Vaughn Parry tortured a prisoner and buried the corpse seven inches down in sandy soil, he was a monster, but when the same thing was done at the behest of her own government in a cellar overseas, that was an unfortunate necessity.

Well, perhaps it was. But if so, the world which made it necessary could go hang.

She had taken for a while to going out every night with Bastion, walking the streets and staring up at the houses and offices of a city she wasn’t sure she knew any longer. Mad Old Edie and her eyeless dog, side by side in the London fog. Yes. Mad, in the American sense. And, alone in the vast encyclopedia of “furious of Derbyshire,” Edie Banister had the power to make a difference to everything which was infuriating her. A mysterious difference, whose precise nature she did not understand, but whose originator swore would rock the world and unravel the darkness of a thousand years. A gift of science to a world of horrors.

On a Tuesday evening, with the sound of the BBC World Service (soon to be discontinued) in the background, she got a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down a flow chart of her personal revolution. An item to be acquired, and a man to put it where it must go. These in turn would entail disguises, forgeries… but not so many as that. More a confidence trick, really, than a covert operation. All at arm’s length, of course, because there could be consequences, and because her name might still trigger alarms in places which must remain oblivious just a little longer.

And now, looking at Joe Spork’s business card and stroking her eyeless dog, she thinks about those consequences and feels like a cow. She has webbed the young Spork into a muddle of almighty proportions. It was necessary, if distasteful, and ultimately he will be fine. Once they look at things seriously, they will see he was a patsy.

If they look at things seriously. If they take the time. If they don’t need a scapegoat for the redtops. If they feel generous. And there’s that word again: “necessary.” A magic word to excuse a multitude of sins, and all it really means is “easier this way than the other.”

The only thing she need do now is sit back and watch, and know that she has discharged her debt and made a difference. There’s no danger of anything really bad happening to him. All the old ghosts are surely laid to rest.

So why, having ascertained weeks back that he would do for item two, has she been dragging him here ever since to work on junk? Getting to know him. Discovering that he’s sweet and a bit lost?

No reason at all.

Except that she is feeling, as already noted, like a cow. Cow, cow, cow.

And to be honest… was it necessary? It may have been. It’s quite possible that he’s the only person around with the skills to do the job right. If he learned from his grandfather. If he paid attention. If there are complications any halfway competent clockworker couldn’t deal with. If, if, if. She is conscious that she has heard these arguments before, in the pusillanimous mouths of modern politicians.

She peers at her reflection in the tabletop, wondering. Joshua Joseph Spork, grandson of the great love of her life, but not, obviously, her own. Evidence of her insufficiency.

Is it possible that she has put him in the line of fire out of spite?

Her reflection won’t look at her.

“Mooo,” says Edie Banister.

So now, having been the bad fairy, she will have to be the good one, too, and keep an eye on him.

And with that decision, she finds herself delighted. Hah. Hah! Hold onto your hats, gents, and avert your eyes, you rose-petalled ladies in your mopsy, mumsy woollens. Banister is back! And this time she’s leading the charge!

Bastion looks up at her, and slowly staggers to his feet. A moment later, he turns his back on her and growls ferociously, then cranes his head round for her approval.

“Yes, darling,” she says, “you and me against the world.”

Which is when she hears a hiss of indrawn breath, and moves abruptly from jubilant to very, very serious.

She is not alone in her flat.

Edie Banister opens her bedroom door to find three men, the middle one very large, standing in her living room in attitudes suggesting that her arrival has come at an unexpected time. They wear solid shoes and drab, ho-hum clothes. The large one is carrying a hammer, held loosely in his left hand, and his zip-up tracksuit top is bulgy under the left arm. He has a small, ski-jump nose, the product of reconstructive surgery, fatuous on his slab of a face. His wingers are younger. Trainee bastards. Edie switches over to automatic. Action stations, old cow, she thinks, these lads have your end in view. Too late to stop it all from starting. The deed is done. This last meeting with Joe Spork was for the sake of her conscience, not her devious plan. That was set in motion some days back, oh, yes, and indirectly. This is consequence, not prevention. But in time to take you out of the picture, sure enough. So.

She smiles, a dotty old lady smile.

“Oh, goodness,” she says, “but you made me jump. You must be Mr. Big—”—oh, yes, bloody brilliant, Edie: Mr. Big, because he is big, and so many people have adjectives for family names. Dig yourself out, or fall at the first—“—landry, from the Council. I’m glad Miss Hampton let you in, I’m terribly sorry to be so late!” There. Someone else is due here at any moment, and I think you’re them. Best come back later, eh? Finish me off in the quiet time.

The newly-christened Mr. Biglandry hesitates. Edie steps brightly towards him, hand out, and he moves his body to suggest he may take it. Edie has no intention of touching him, oh, no, not and get a hug from a lad with shoulders so broad. Though in our younger days, we might have enjoyed climbing a mountain like that, mightn’t we? Oh, yes, indeed. “Oh, where are my manners?” She takes her hand away. The junior bastards are spreading out to block her escape. I must just get some milk, darlings, to make you tea, all right? Hah! They’d snap me in two. Softly, softly, old cow. You’ve a long way to go and a short time to get there. Objective: escape. Nothing else. So. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I, and would you mind moving the furniture? I’m too old, I’m afraid, I did try, but the flesh is weak. Not like yours, Mr. Biglandry. And who are these?”

Junior Bastard A sticks out his hand when her gaze falls upon him and mutters “James.” It clearly isn’t his name, but Junior Bastard B and Mr. Biglandry stare at him as if he has taken his trousers off. Hah! I fancy that’s an instant fail on your test, young Jimmy, and quite right too. Mr. Biglandry will want a word later, I imagine, about talking to the mark. “Hello!” Edie waves daftly. “And you must be Biglandry the younger, I can see the family resemblance! Was it George?” You’re both stone killers, there is that, but he’s a red-faced old git and you’ve something pale and Hungarian about you, Georgie-boy, I wouldn’t wonder your Dad was AVH, no, I would not, and likely a goon just like you. She smiles even wider. “Would you mind pushing the bolt across? Sometimes the door rattles in the wind and it gives me a start.” George Biglandry looks at Dad, and Dad nods. Edie slips into the kitchen: knives, rolling pins, the microwave oven (she pictures herself jamming the door open and threatening to cook them, the thing plugged in behind her and beeping, a little picture of a chicken in blue neon on the dash), no, no, and no. Edie Banister knows where she is going. Flick the switch on the kettle. Now they have to separate you from that, indeedy they do. No gentleman wants a lap full of the hot stuff when he’s killing old ladies. Permanent damage can occur. Edie summons her first secret weapon.

“Bastion! Dar-ling? Bast-ion? Mummy’s got a bit of pie, yes, she has, hasn’t she, yessywessy, she has!” And may the good Lord have mercy on your souls.

It is not the hour for pie. Bastion knows it. He knows that Edie knows it, too. They have long ago settled between them that he is to be disturbed between three and nine only in the direst of emergencies or if there is steak. The steak should be meltingly soft and warmed over in the pan. The emergencies are more exigent: fire, earthquake, rains of frogs, the arrival of a cat in the building. Certainly, pie does not figure. Bastion’s afternoon nap is sacrosanct.

“Bastion?” She looks around. He is in her bedroom, of course, at the foot of the bed: does not stir from it except at two-ish to go out onto the balcony and pee on passing truants. Edie smiles at Mr. Biglandry, who is busy preparing to insert himself between her and the kettle. James and George are still in the living room. Edie feints for the kettle, and Biglandry jumps a bit. His eyes narrow. She grins at him, a little wolfish, pro-on-pro. He looks back, hard-faced. Edie rests her hand on the Russell Hobbs. “Would you mind?” You think this is endgame. It is barely begun. You want this? This kettle? Shall I throw it at you? But then there are the boys, no doubt eager to help out in doing me in. You may have this round. Except Edie knows fine well, and Mr. Biglandry almost realises, she never intended to use the kettle for anything other than this. She brushes past as he takes possession of the boiling water. She opens the door to the bedroom, and Bastion barges out, bristling. He sees George first, and immediately charges over, yowling, and starts nipping at his ankles. Who is this man, that comes to disturb my time of slumber? Woe unto you, that are rash enough to let your ankles within my scope. Behold! You shall not leave but that you are shorter by one foot, this much I promise you…

“Oh, Bastion, darling, no!” Edie Banister says with manifest insincerity. She smiles broadly at George, who scowls at her and glances at his boss. But Edie is in motion. Too slow, boys, far and away. Bastion, unwelcome playmate, apparently decides that James has better legs. He lunges for them, and his single solid tooth makes an ugly hole in James’s calf. I should think that’s jolly painful, Edie reflects, as James swears. He lashes out with his foot, but Bastion knows this game well, and has latched onto the other leg. James would have to kick himself, and few people… no. No, James actually is that stupid. There’s a thud, and James goes a bit white. It’s amazing how much you can hurt yourself with your own toecap. Bastion, sensing victory, spins around several times and scents Mr. Biglandry. No, darling. He’s out of your league. But Bastion is game, and more than game. His performance so far has made Biglandry Père nervous enough that he backs up, glancing at Edie with the outrage of non-dog owners: ’Ere, lady, control this dog or I’ll ’ave the law on you!

Like Hell you will.

Edie ducks into the bedroom, and lunges for her knicker drawer and Secret Weapon No. 2, amid the frills and bunting. Yes, knickers! That’s what I shall need. And it bloody would have been, too, in fifty-nine. I could have changed into something more comfortable and they’d have carried me to the nick and handed themselves in… but honesty compels her to admit that even in fifty-nine it might not have been so. Corset. Bloomers. Tights. Popsocks, how I loathe you. Woollen leggings—the shame. Edie Banister, toast of the Fighting 16th, swathed in bloody sheep’s fur and with all the allure of a toast rack. Hard times. Suspender belt, that’s more like it; garters, and stockings, and lace, oh my! And now I’ve thrown my memories on the floor, where the bloody hell is the item we came for? Because if I’ve put it in another drawer then we may assume I am about to die. But the other belt is in her hands, cool and thick, brown leather and a strange, ancient smell. She cleans it once a month, checks it, the way most people do their accounts. And once—Edie Banister grins—once, she did actually wear this outfit as lingerie, to the absolute abandonment and lust of her lover and, she is forced to admit, herself.

Mr. Biglandry shoves the door to Edie’s boudoir open with a very impatient hand. He has his hammer raised to crack her skull into as many pieces as he can. Why a hammer? Edie wonders. Maybe because it’s so unprofessional, so thuggish. Everyone will look for a lunatic—and you can always find one, if you try hard enough. “It’s fucking time, you crazy old bag,” Mr. Biglandry says, angry now at the delay. Perhaps he has somewhere to be. “It is fucking time.”

“Yes,” Edie Banister says. “I believe it is.” And she turns around, holding the gun in the Weaver stance.

Mr. Biglandry says “Fuck” again, but in a more impressed, appalled way. He drops the hammer and goes for his own gun (Edie guesses it will prove to be an automatic, unlike her own, which is a revolver). Edie shoots him in the head. The revolver makes an absolutely huge noise. To her relief, the back of Mr. Biglandry’s head stays on, although it’s clearly a close-run thing. She hears, in the other room, the sound of George saying “Fuck” as well, percussively, and trying to pull something from his waistband. Idiot. If George does not shoot himself in the penis in the next two seconds, he will get the gun out and start firing it, but anyone who sticks a gun in his jeans is probably not someone with surgical weapon skills. He will fire randomly. Edie’s neighbours might get hurt. Or Bastion. She turns, and fires three more times directly through the plasterboard wall, angling so that any misses will hit the bricks of the fireplace in the room beyond. The third shot makes a splunch noise, and George goes down. Edie moves, in case James is about to try the same thing, and sees him exactly where he was, next to the door, a look of absolute confusion on his young, sallow face. She points the gun near him rather than at him. Bastion, emerging from the kitchen in pursuit of Mr. Biglandry, finds his foe already fallen and clambers up on top of him to indicate his conquest. Died of fright. I am mighty. You may now applaud.

Edie looks sharply at James. “Get rid of it.”

James has a gun, but it’s in his pocket and, when it comes to it, not loaded. Sheepish, he puts the ammunition down on the floor next to the weapon. Edie shakes her head. He shrugs at her, surrendered.

“Who sent you?”

“Don’t know. Honestly!”

“Ever see them?”

“No! They had hats on. Or sheets. Like in Iran!”

Like in Iran. Yes, she might know someone matching that description. She sighs.

“Have you got a mum?”

“Yes. In Doncaster.”

“Best piss off back there, ey?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nods, then peers at him.

“This your first?”

“Oh, God, yeah. Christ.”

“Don’t hang about. Don’t go and tell anyone what happened. Best to vanish, all right? Go stay with your mum. No one cares if you didn’t die, so long as you aren’t seen again.”

“Right.”

“Ever. And James? Get a proper job,” Edie says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, I’m going to pick up two bags and I’m going to walk out of here and we won’t see one another ever again. You’re going to sit in that chair, facing the window, and you’re going to ignore me for the five minutes I’ll still be here, and then you’re going to contemplate your soul in silence for another ten minutes in the company of these dead men you once called friends. And then…?”

“Doncaster.”

“Good boy.”

Edie Banister waits until he sits in the chair and turns it round, and then she goes back into her bedroom and collects her flight bag (like the gun, maintained once a month to be sure it’s all ready to go at any time) and Bastion’s travel kit. She collects the dog, steps over Mr. Biglandry and George, and closes the door on James. In the hallway she wrestles briefly with her collapsible umbrella. Edie considers the name to be strictly truthful: the umbrella collapses well, but has issues with opening. Normally she wouldn’t bother, but today it looks like rain, and having sent two men to their graves to preserve her own life, she has no intention of dying of pneumonia before seeing this business through. Death is a reality for Edie Banister, and has been since she was young. All the same, no reason to invite it. Bastion would be devastated.

The umbrella conquered, she glowers up at the grumbling sky, and leaves Rallhurst Court for ever.

The same London sky, grey with a touch of orange from the street lights, unburdens itself of sheets of blinding rain as Joe Spork hurries through the streets of Soho. He has given up on the telephone and decided to make his representations to Billy Friend in person. Since he is here, and since he is very quickly getting soaked through, he is also visiting a stringy, irritating man called Fisher, a former burglar, present fence, and a full-time member of the Mathew Spork nostalgia club. Fisher, not even a member of Mathew’s outer circle, is one of the few people he can turn to on the subject of the unlawful and strange without incurring painful social obligations. Even so, Joe is troubled by a powerful sense of self-inflicted injury, and his grandfather’s voice, now doleful, is telling him I told you so. He hunches his shoulders and buries his chin in the collar of his coat: a big man trying to become a turtle.

A bus—last of the much-despised bendy variety, as doomed as the clockwork business and equally clever and impractical—sprays him with road water and he yells and waves furiously, then catches his reflection in a shop window and wonders, not for the first time of recent days, who this person is who has taken up residence in what ought to be his life.

Fisher’s shop is a merry little place with wind chimes and an aura of shabby hippy mercantilism, squeezed between a tailor and a mysterious bead-curtained place which conducts business entirely in Hungarian. Fisher has a lot of space because his family have lived here since before it was expensive. Customers can sit in an enclosed courtyard for a hookah and a cup of Turkish coffee. Fisher makes it himself, boiling the coffee and the sugar with his secret ingredient, which he allows particularly favoured customers—which is all of them—to learn, and which varies depending on what he’s got in the fridge. Joe has known it to be lemon peel, cocoa powder, pepper, paprika, and on one occasion even a half-spoonful of fish soup. Fisher claims that each of these represents a different member of his Turkish family on his mother’s side, but since his mother was and is from Billingsgate it probably doesn’t matter that this is a lie: no wrathful Stambul cousin is going to show up and demand to know what the Hell crap he is putting in that perfectly good coffee, to the ruination of their shared good name.

“W-hoo is a-that?” Fisher cries out as the chimes go, all Turkic gravitas, but when he pokes his weasel head around the door frame from the back, his face breaks into a wide smile. “It’s Joe! Big Joe! King of the Clockmen! The man in person and himself! ’Ullo, Maestro, what can I do you for?”

“I’m out of the loop, Fisher—” And then, holding up a forestalling finger, because Fisher’s mouth opens to issue an enthusiast’s reproach, “Yes, I know, that’s what I wanted. But now I’ve got a question and there’s only one place I can go, isn’t there? Because you know everything.”

“I do. It’s true,” Fisher preens. And in terms of the life of London’s post-legals, he really does.

“I had a visit,” Joe says, “from two men from a museum which doesn’t exist. One fat, the other thin. Cultured. My heart said police. Titwhistle and Cummerbund.”

Fisher shakes his head. “Nowt.”

“Nothing?”

“Never heard of ’em, never bribed ’em, never even forgotten ’em. Sorry.”

“What about witches?”

“Married one.”

“Monks, then. All in black and—” But Fisher is on his feet and locking the door, closing the shop, and in his eyes is a feverish alarm Joe has never seen before, didn’t think existed in Fisher, who is always chirpy or pompous by turns, and never, ever ruffled.

“Jesus!” Fisher says. “Those fuckers! Brother Sheamus and his bloody ghosts! Christ on a bike, boy! They’re not here, are they?”

“No, of course not.”

“But you’ve seen them? They came to you?”

“Yes, they—”

“Fuck, Joe, but you put a strain on friendship, you do—what do they want?”

“A book.”

“A book? A book? Fucking give it to them, you daft streak of piss! Give it to them and thank them for being so kind as to take it off your hands rather than their preferred option which would be taking your fucking hands off, and then fucking run away and get a proper job in a far-off land. All right? Fuck! And fuck off, as well!”

“Who are they?”

“The sodding Recorded Man, is who they are,” Fisher snarls.

Joe stares. “The what?”

“You don’t remember? I told you when you were a nipper, your mother was so angry she nearly popped.”

Indeed he does remember; it had given him nightmares for weeks. A London ghost story, whispered by the children of the Night Market.

Picture a man, the tale went, in a bed of silk sheets. And picture all around him wires and cameras and men taking notes. Everything about him is written down. They are making a record of him: his breaths, his words, his pulse, his diet, his scent, his chemistry—even the fluctuations of electricity in his skin. As he grows weaker—for he is very old now, and injured, and sick—they press filaments of metal through holes in his skull and into the fabric of the brain itself, and record the chasing flashes of thoughts running from fold to fold of the grey stuff inside his head.

And through all this, he is conscious, and aware. Is he a prisoner? A millionaire? Does he feel pain or horror at his own predicament? Does he have any idea why this is happening? It’s so bizarre. And yet somewhere, somewhere, it is real, and he is lying there. Perhaps, when he is gone, they will need someone else. Perhaps they will need you.

Joe left the lights on for nine days the first time he heard it, and when he finally slept each night, he saw only the eyes of the Recorded Man, glaring at him from his prison of wires. Perhaps they will need you.

Fisher nods jerkily, still angry and afraid. “Right, so Sheamus’s lot are the original. They’re all about machinery and they sit and watch recordings of the bloke who founded their outfit. It’s what they have instead of church. Revered relics of every thought he ever had, or something. I don’t know because I don’t ask because I don’t want to end up in a fucking jar! It’s all a bit Dear Leader, but one way and another it makes them scary as typhus, all right? They’re a power in the world.”

“Since when?”

“Since for ever. Your dad had a run-in with them way back. He got everyone together and showed them the exit. Even then it was touch and go.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you were little. I was a tiddler, too, but, you know…” Fisher contrives to make it sound as if this means that Mathew considered him Joe’s elder brother, the crook he never had.

“And now?”

“Now it’s different, isn’t it? There’s no one like Mathew, but there’s a lot more coppers.”

“So they’re careful.”

Fisher shrugs yes. “But they don’t ask nicely and they don’t ask twice. Cold and surgical, and not like an aspirin and a lie down, like ice in the bathtub and selling your kidneys for cash. They’ve got a hospital somewhere, or a hospice. It’s a bloody pit. People go in, they don’t come out.”

“Who are they? Where do they come from?”

“For all I know they’re God’s own thugs, straight from the Holy City. I met one once, he come in a place I was thinking of renting, told me to piss off. And do you know what else he said? He said: If I have the mind of Napoleon and the body of Wellington, who am I? Mad as a fucking box of frogs.”

“Fisher—”

“All right! All right. Thirty seconds of wisdom. Then you go. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Fine. The way I hear, once upon a time, they were into good works. I mean, they’re monks, yes? Elevate the soul, cherish the meek. Then the world got less amenable to the consolations of the Mother Church and they went a bit funny. Out with the old, in with the new, and the new is some silver-tongued bastard and his own personal heavy mob. Orphans, is the way I hear it, schooled by him for him at some old private house, so that’s all they know and they don’t care to learn more. Now it’s conversion by fire and sword and let God sort it out.”

“What do they want?”

“Whatever they feel like. And antiques. They’ve got a thing for antiques.”

“Why? Fisher, this is important, they—”

Fisher cuts him off, one hand coming down sideways like a blade. “I don’t want to know! All right? You’ve got something they want, give it to them. You’re not Mathew, and that’s your choice, but Honest Joe can’t take them on. It’s that simple. They’re bloody scary. And that’s all I’m saying and, old friend or not, you can piss off!”

Fisher throws open the back door and bundles Joe out into the yard, then slams the door and brings down the shutter.

Outside and now truly unsettled, Joe Spork ducks his head down and shoves his hands into his pockets like a man who has been given the Spanish Archer by his girl. He walks purposefully but not hurriedly, and very shortly slips back down into the Tosher’s Beat.

At lunchtime on the day after the conversation at the greasy spoon, a bored courier rings on Joe Spork’s doorbell and hands over a box containing a familiar piece of kinetic smut and a brown-paper parcel which promises to be Billy Friend’s notorious doodah. The alternative being the quarterly VAT accounts, Joe hastens to open the parcel.

Item: all right, yes, it’s a diary or a journal, no question about that. He sniffs at it; old books have a pleasing smell to them. This one is unusual. There’s a sharp tang of brine and a whiff of chemicals, and beneath it a rich resiny note of old, old leather. Has it been under water? Wrapped in oilcloth? Hm. The cover is flexible, almost rubbery, and the leather is cross-hatched with wandering lines. Stamped into what he takes to be the front—the technical term is “debossed,” like “embossed,” but in reverse—is a curious figure like an inside-out umbrella or a funny sort of key.

Joe opens the book cautiously, and yes, again, it’s an odd duck: along each page at the edge opposite the spine there is a half inch of perforated paper. The whole thing has been bound from individual sheets of stiff paper, and each edge—so far as he can tell—is different. The matrix is a four-by-four square or—if each page is taken as a single block of Information—a four-by-sixteen column separated into groups of letters four holes deep. A hundred or more pages; not an insignificant amount of information, then, but hardly a vast trove, either. A longish piece of music for a pianolo, perhaps.

The spine itself has a dowel—no, it’s metal—a rod running through it, protruding slightly at either end. Not a spine, then: an axle? The endpapers are marbled in rose and turquoise, and sketched over the pattern in pen is a brisk, clear diagram or schematic—electrical, and beyond his ken, but apparently for some sort of brewing or distilling apparatus which is oddly familiar. Where has he seen that?

A certain kind of mind—his grandfather was like this to an extent—is always trying in a spiritual sense to make the perfect mousetrap. Joe has the impression that it is an impromptu sketch, that this volume was not originally intended to have anything written in it at all, but at some point its owner was trapped without an alternative source of paper and defaced it. A long train journey, perhaps—there are periods of comparatively clear text and sudden jolts which could be points. Something which might be a teapot segues into a design for a fishtank sort of item and then dissolves into what he takes to be rather highfalutin mathematics. Quote: “Do something for the elephant.” Quote: “I have written it all in my book.” Quote: “The coffee is ghastly.” Fine. So what’s this then, if not a book? Well, a notepad, obviously; a jotter. A doodah.

Item: or rather, items, plural. A mixed bag of gears and sprockets, ratchets and cogs, bevelled and conventional, large to (very, very) small. The part of Joe which solves puzzles twitches and rolls its shoulders. That piece would go with that one, and that one would…

Jumping the gun, boy. Sure, put it together all higgledy-piggledy, and what will you have? Junk! A pile of nothing. I taught you better.

His grandfather’s voice, husky with time and distance.

“I miss you, you know.”

Don’t be daft, boy. I was old before you were young.

“Still.”

And another thing: don’t talk to the dead. People will get the wrong idea.

“How about if I claim you’re my imaginary friend?”

… You need a girl.

“Probably.”

A helpmeet.

“A what?”

“A help meet for him.” As in a person suitable to share his life.

“I really do.”

He’s lost the thread of the conversation. Daniel Spork never gave him advice about girls. Perhaps his own disastrous love life prevented it. Joe’s imagination baulks at putting words in his mouth on that score.

Move on.

Item: a clamp or fitting, with armature, of a size to embrace the doodah and turn the pages. He touches the end of the armature curiously, and finds it briefly sticky with static. Curious, he taps it lightly against a page from the book. Yes, the page turns, and yes, the static is gone when he goes to lift the armature away again. He taps the next page, and it clings. Moves it, puts it down, and the charge is gone. Clever. He has no idea how it works. Something in the arm, perhaps, rubbing along the metal interior. Smart: clockwork doesn’t take harm from static the way electronics does. A little clean occasionally and it barely notices. It’s almost a credo: the right tool in the right place.

Item: a strange little ovoid box or ball, engraved rather splendidly on the outside, and by hand, no less. A spiral pattern, like a galaxy or a conch shell. The Golden Ratio, but don’t believe all that muck you read about it. Very heavy for its size. Unless the ball is made of gold, there must be a weight or flywheel within. No indication of how it opens, though there is a seam. He turns it in his hand. Something inside goes clish-tink, which his trained ear recognises as a bad noise. Not a disastrous noise, but definitely a broken noise.

He puts the ball in a smooth hollow on the bench. Any number of things in his world are spherical or nearly so, and many of those should not be allowed to roll around. For a while, the company which supplied him with a particularly ferocious acid for cleaning and etching supplied it in round-bottomed containers so that you would have to use their rather expensive clamps and retorts along with the acid. Poison, 1d; cure, a guinea. Well, anyway—the ball settles snugly into the hollow. Joe stretches, hearing things pop in his back and arms, then leans back over the bench. Must get a proper chair. Must get a proper chair. Yes, and half a dozen other things I can’t afford.

Item: the whojimmy, precise function unknown. A tool, for the unscrewing of magic bolts and the opening of locks whose existence we do not presently apprehend. A thing made for a specific purpose. An object of destiny. A funny-looking gadget with a handle at one end and a strange twisting loop which winds around it, almost like the basket hilt on an old duelling sword. Joe waves the whojimmy dramatically, then stops. Like the ball, it’s surprisingly dense.

And finally, a square of white card with words written on it in felt tip: a reminder from Billy that the said object is to be treated with respect and could he please have the bawdy gamekeeper in a hurry because his lady client is getting pressing.

So then: to the Batcave! Or at least, to work. He closes the door and puts the sign in the window saying “please ring.”

The erotomaton (he glances at it guiltily, the fruit and milk he is ignoring in favour of cake) shouldn’t be too hard to fix. It probably won’t be all that interesting, either. It can wait until tomorrow. He ponders the figures slumped in their first positions—the most orderly ménage à trois Joe Spork has ever heard of. He knows a few experimenters in polyamory, has observed from the outside the curious triangular relationships and sexual flat-shares, and come to the conclusion that in most cases there’s rather more poly than amory, for all the protestations to the contrary. It’s not that it can’t be done, just that the odds of finding one person to share your days are bad enough, without looking for two who can also share their lives with each other and remain content with the situation whatever perturbations may arise along life’s curious road.

Hard to find just one person, indeed. The big warehouse is very empty today, and the sloosh of the Thames is sorrowful. He makes tea, temporarily replacing the missing foot of his kettle with a pink reminder notice from the gas company, folded three times. He is reasonably certain he has paid it. Sort that out tomorrow.

At the workbench, tea in hand (the approved commencement of a difficult task, the stricture of patience to be borne strongly in mind, lest one be hasty and make an irretrievable error early in the proceedings) he contemplates the fragments before him. All right, well, simple enough: copy and photograph it all. Easy, in these digital days. Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology—he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.

By contrast, here is his grandfather’s workdesk, with the tools Daniel Spork constructed for himself. It is polished by time, unvarnished but smooth, and on the left is a slight imprint: the pressure of the old man’s elbow. On the right, a vise and a new rubber hose feeding an ancient Bunsen burner. Greying scars from heat, pale ones from tools. The grain of the wood is silvery, and in those lines is the literal DNA of the House of Spork, Daniel’s own co-mingled with his grandson’s—blood drawn by a moment’s inattention, tears choked out in times of sorrow, each drop carrying the blueprint of Daniel’s body, and Joe’s. Even Mathew is represented, probably, because Papa Spork was no stranger to this bench, for all that in his hands it became an armoury, a pouring place of molten lead and sharp-scented powders: a den of alchemy.

For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one who deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own weird little ecosystems. For reference and archive, though, he’s glad to have his baby Canon with its lens by Zeiss.

So. Three pictures from each angle, close and distant. Each fragment documented. He feels Grandpa Spork’s measuring gaze upon his back: Daniel Spork, dead these seven years and some, eyes bright in anticipation of a puzzle—and better, a puzzle shared with his best-beloved student, the son of his wastrel son.

Joe smiles to himself, a little sadly, in acknowledgement of the beloved, irascible dead. He doesn’t look over his shoulder, doesn’t want to see the empty room. Instead, he asks a question of the air, and lets his mind throw back Daniel’s responses.

“What next, old man?”

Use your eyes, boy. What are you looking at?

“It’s a doodah.”

Joseph, no. No, no, and no. In the first place, tell me you have not been dealing with that William Friend?

“Once in a while.”

Pfft.

“What’s the second place?”

Idiot child of my criminal son, you know what I am going to say. You do. Of course you do.

Of course, he does. He knows the speech by heart. Seek the stricture. Find the lesson, the purpose, the essence. The rest is window dressing, and will give itself to you entirely, if you first understand the thing and the nature of the thing.

Joe Spork’s grandfather believed—or sometimes believed, and always maintained—that every object on Earth was created by God with the capacity to impart to the attentive student some virtue or grace.

Consider glass. What is the nature of glass?

It is a curious material used for windows and drinking vessels. It must be created in a crucible, purified and smelted until its nature becomes clear—and during this period it can be ruined by a moment’s inattention, which might also prove lethal to the unwatchful glazier; it is beautiful, friable, explosive and transparent.

Go on. What else?

At every stage in its existence—when it is molten, and must be poured from its cup at the end of a long pole; when it is glowing, and can be blown, but remains so vigorously hot that any organic thing placed in proximity to it will instantly take fire; when it is cooling and clear, and has acquired some definition, but will still shatter if it is not cooled with painful slowness in a series of incubating ovens; and when it is cold, and brittle, and the merest impact from a metal point causes it to become a collection of lethal knives which cut so finely that the nerves are sliced clean and a man may miss the fact that he is injured until he smells the blood or sees it upon his shirt—glass is a lesson.

Yes, Joe. Precisely. And so the lesson, the stricture of glass?

“Caution.” He says it aloud, and jumps a little at the sound of his own voice.

Well and good. A salutary inquisition. Very spiritual.

Joe Spork, with his grandfather’s waspish ghost at his elbow, considers the object before him.

So, question: what do we have here?

Answer: a mess. A book which is also a set of punchcards. A tool which doesn’t fit anything. Fragments. A ball which may be an egg, but which, if so, is locked. There’s something inside, but that need not mean it’s intended to open. Like those Chinese concentric spheres. It’s heavy. Gold, maybe. There’s a design—a clue? Or just an embellishment?

He sets it aside for the moment, and continues his inventory: here’s the whojimmy, right enough. One end carved mahogany wood with a pommel or stud, the other a funny, tangled thing with a circular mouth and a roller-coaster track of polished metal which doubles back on itself. Some ornamentation on one side of the track, the other side very smooth. Some mistake, perhaps, in the connecting of one with the other? This could be a child’s game, a wild, weird variant of ball-and-cup. Cut steel, by the look of it, and quite pretty in a way. The Victorians rather liked steel for ornamentation, though this isn’t that old. Still… hard to see what possible use it could be. Heavy, too. Oh, blast, and how has that happened?

He peers, vexed, at the whojimmy, and scolds himself. The tool is covered in a thin layer of grime and grease. A culpable error, to allow that to happen.

Or, no: not grease. He runs a finger over the strange stuff. Eyes are overrated. Touch. Touch is important. It feels dry and feathery. Cold. Iron filings.

The whojimmy is magnetic.

He sits back again, considering. The tool and the ball must interact, if any of them do. The whojimmy is the key. The ball is the keyhole. The book and the fragments fit together with the ball to make… what?

Question, then: what is the defining characteristic of this thing? He grins. “This thing.” Not “these things.” He has decided they are one object. Good. Follow the instinct. So: it is baroque, even Byzantine. It is complex. And yet, above all, it is elegant. His grandfather’s voice comes back, excited.

I once saw a very elegant design from Shanghai. A sealed box in ivory. Traced on the outside, a pattern. Move a magnet over the pattern outside, and on the inside a metal rod slides through a maze and touches all the pins in the right order to open the box. Voilà! The original magnet was set in a ring, of course, so that the whole thing was like magic. A child’s toy, for a princess. Like casting a spell, yes?

I showed it to your grandmother. She made love to me. Then we opened it together. The magnet was hers.

He remembers the conversation, an evening spent in this very room with a bottle of Ardanza and a plate of Italian sausage. Joe the apprentice, Daniel the mentor, sharing confidences and romances over glass after glass of Spanish red. Tricks of the trade and reminiscences, rolled together, and so convivial that Joe had eventually been so emboldened as to ask the unaskable question.

“Who was she, Grandfather?”

But Grandpa Spork did not answer questions about the woman he loved. It was known that he met her in France in the thirties, and together they had a child. It was all very Bohemian, very modern, and they never married. When the Germans invaded, Daniel and the boy escaped, but his lover was elsewhere and had to be left behind. She found him again after the war, but by then everything was different for reasons which could not be spoken aloud.

Mathew’s mother, Frankie.

Frankie was the almost-glimpsed dream of the House of Spork, invoked with caution lest the use of her name summon her—or rather, fail to do so, to the jagged sorrow of her husband and the startling fury of her son. Swamp gas. An atmospheric phenomenon. A myth.

So, then. A magnet and a box. He waves the magnetic whojimmy in the general direction of the doodah. Something clunks, but beyond that it has no effect. Not surprising: you wouldn’t make something like this and then set it up so that a single movement near a magnet would do the job. He grips the whojimmy. It’s awkward. What’s this wild tangle good for? Except, it can’t be awkward. This thing is elegant. It is the shape it should be. More, the holding of it suggests the employment. With the handle against his palm, he is abruptly certain: it invites you to do the right thing. What I want to do is what I am supposed to want to do.

So… what does he want to do? Flourish it. But not wildly. Slowly. In a measured way. He wants to roll it.

To roll it.

He peers… Roller-coaster track… track. Now that he looks closely, part of the tangle is ratcheted… oh.

He hefts the ball in one hand, weighs the whojimmy in the other. Fiendish yet obvious. Hidden in plain sight. Perfect for preventing casual scrutiny, not hellishly hard to use in real life… very much in keeping with the mind behind this puzzle. A mind, he is increasingly sure, which was as bonkers as it was brilliant.

He slots the ball through the mouth of the whojimmy. It fits. It rolls along the tracks, the spiral engraving on the surface meshing nicely with the ratchet on the whojimmy, turning and turning. A complex pathway created by a simple structure. Very nice. Puh-clink! That’s a new noise. Very good. Clinkclunkscrrrr… glack. The ball emerges from the pattern. Joe tests it gently with his hands.

It opens.

He looks at it for a while.

“… Bloody hell…” says Joshua Joseph Spork.

When he can breathe again, he reaches for the phone.

“Billy, I don’t care. No, I don’t. I don’t care how limber she is or if she has three sisters. No. Billy, shut up. Shut up! I need to meet the client. I need to know where it comes from!”

Resolve is in his voice, and the novelty of this alone is almost enough to exact a moment of obedience from Billy Friend. All the same, Billy dislikes making introductions. It is against his middle-mannish creed. He objects that the client might be unhappy.

“Well, if they needed me for this they’re going to need me again. Whatever it does, it’s not going to do it without me and you can say I said so. It will need maintenance and it may need work doing in situ. It’s a bloody treasure and I want to know—What? Yes. Yes, I am shouting! Because it’s important!”

Joe Spork draws a breath. He is aware that this is not his normal way of interacting with the world. One, two, three. All right. “You have to see it to understand, Billy. Or actually, I’m not sure you would. It’s a clockwork thing. The point is, it’s unique. All right? I mean, absolutely unique. What? No. No. Still no. Well, you could call it priceless. It depends on your perspective.”

Just a little bit unfair, that. It might be more accurate to say that you couldn’t put a value on it. From a scholarly perspective, it’s a diamond unlooked for. In sheer monetary terms, it’s probably not all that exciting, unless the machine of which it is a part does something really interesting or is as ridiculously beautiful as the item in front of him, which would be… well, epic. And not impossible. Billy Friend, however, has senses beyond the merely human, and words like “priceless” are a sort of dog whistle to him.

“Yes, Billy, I did say that. Yes. This is six o’clock news stuff. No, before the swimming bunny. Before the sports. Yes. Exactly. So we’ll deliver it together, won’t we? In person. Very good. Yes. Yes, ‘priceless’. I’ll see you at the station, then.”

Joe puts down the phone.

On the work bench in front of him, the ball lies revealed in all its glory. He has photographed it already, so that he can prove it exists.

Metal like soft cotton, not linked but threaded; warming in his hand: Woven Gold.

The trick is whispered from time to time in kasbahs and jeweller’s shops and at conventions and gatherings and markets, almost revealing itself and then vanishing so thoroughly that many consider it a fiction.

Joshua Joseph’s grandfather came upon it this way:

“Good morning, madame. How may we be of service?”

“My husband’s watch. Or rather, it is my watch, but it was a gift from him. He had it from a man in Cambodia, you see, and now it is broken. I think it may also be wise to see to the strap. It becomes loose. Although that may be because I am shrinking.” And from this you might deduce that the lady client was elderly, and that English was her second language, learned in haste and never entirely polished.

From her bag, she withdrew a small parcel of bunched tissue paper, and this she placed in front of him, with some considerable misgiving.

“It is Asian,” he said, “and I think it is beautiful, but there is no hallmarking, so I do not really know that it is gold.”

Daniel Spork made haste to assure her that the craftsmen of Asia were capable of splendid things, though he worried that he would be forced, when the thing was revealed, to tell her that her husband’s impulsive purchase had been an error. Many travelling gentlemen, lulled perhaps by a sense of north-western superiority, are gently gulled of large sums by enterprising persons in the streets and shops of Asian cities, and deserved in Daniel Spork’s opinion no less for their hubris. He did not extend this judgement to their families, however, and did not relish telling little old ladies with treasured gifts that they were not gold and emeralds but leaf and glass.

He glanced at her, and when she nodded, picked it open with long, unsteady fingers.

The timepiece itself was unexceptional; well made and simple, the face a thin wafer of polished ebony in a gold oval, with a flat glass cover. It was the bracelet which arrested Daniel’s attention, which clenched about his heart and stopped his breath in his throat. He had, until now, never seen its like. Rumours had reached him, and he had dismissed them. Now he held the thing in his hands, and knew it to be almost as far beyond him as it was beyond this nice, unknowing old dame who had brought it in. The difference was that after a lifetime of gears and movements, of gold and lamé and carats and weights, he knew when he was surpassed, when he was in the presence of a master’s work. He passed it back to her, very gently.

“Your husband is—is?”

“Was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was long ago.”

“He was a very wise man, madame. And this thing you have brought me, which he found for you, it is a thing for which a lesser man might search a lifetime. You must treasure it.”

“I do.”

“So, good. And if ever you should meet anyone who can repair such a thing—who understands how this is done—please say to them that you know a man in Quoyle Street in London who dares not ask if they will tell him the secret, but would count it more than a privilege to drink a cup of tea with them and know that someone, somewhere, retains the trick of this, and will make sure it is never lost.” He sniffed.

“I have made you sad.”

“No, madame. You have made me more than happy. I can fix the mechanism for you, but I will not touch the strap. I would not know where to begin. Come back when I am old. Perhaps I will learn.”

Woven Gold. And that is not the most remarkable thing about the doodah. Joe Spork saw what was inside it for the first time twenty minutes ago. He has no idea what it does.

First, there is the matter of the lock. It is, in fact, five locks, each one tiny and rotated by a different section of the whojimmy, each one unlocking the next one, until the last twist releases a clasp and allows the whole to open. These locks are distributed around the interior of the ball in a strange cage-like architecture which reminds Joe distantly of the aviary at London Zoo. Disconnected from one another, they flip back like the wing-cases of a glorious beetle, clasped loosely around the ball’s clockwork heart. That, by itself, is enough to attract his most alert scrutiny. It is good work, and that modest assessment is in the trade tongue, the dour speech of craftsmen looking at their own: Not bad, your Taj Mahal, old son. Bit bald about the edges, mind. And, Oh aye, replies the master builder, it’s all right. You don’t think the water feature’s a bit loud? Wish I’d had time to build t’other one in black, that would have been something… Still, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose. You can’t get everything right.

That kind of good work.

Rare work.

Brilliant work.

White-gloved and with a pair of softwood tweezers (better they should break than this object should be scratched) he examines it again, unfolds the locking mechanism—not without a slightly filthy feeling that he’s undressing a sleeping princess—and examines the mechanism within under his thick, jeweller’s lens.

The largest cog is perhaps two-eighths of an inch across. The smallest is so tiny that Joe has no idea how it could have been made, except that he knows exactly: someone made a special tool, a thing which mimics the gestures of a normal-size tool on a far smaller scale. Write your name normally on the left, and it is scratched into the panel on the right small enough to fit on a grain of rice. Half a grain. And then—this is the part which boggles his mind—each individual piece, each spring and cog and counter, was made by hand and fitted together. It is a rippling, shifting landscape of interlocking gets and pins, tracks and catches.

The envisioning of this apparatus, the planning, without a computer or even a photocopier, must have taken a year in itself. If a normal piece of clockwork is a person, this thing is a great city. It is folded on itself, each section fulfilling several roles, turning in one axis, then another, then another. There is, just here, a yet smaller case which performs some outré function he cannot fathom, but which itself is also the weight driving some manner of self-winding system. The cog which is the output stream, which pokes through the ball at the north pole and meets whatever remarkable thing is driven by this tiny engine (although it’s not an engine, of course, it’s something far more strange and powerful: a storage medium, a computer’s hard disk made of brass), is actually just a dust cover. When the thing is active it slides to one side to reveal a plug of gears so complex that Joe Spork has come to call it in his mind by a modern name. He calls it an interface.

Enigma, he wonders. Colossus? Is this a wartime thing? A code-breaker or a code-maker? He has no idea. He knows only that it is unrecorded, magical, genius. Hence: priceless.

And yes, there is a small flaw, but hardly a surprising one after decades in a sack somewhere. He reaches in—and stops. A tiny sparkle beneath his tweezers.

Impossible.

Joe peers, leaning down, adjusts the lamp. Then he brings two more lights closer, and a hand lens which in combination with the main one gives him a truly ludicrous magnification.

Absolutely impossible.

Beside the smallest cog, driven by a secondary ratchet on the face of the tiny thing, there is a glimmer of metal. Through the double lens he peers, and yes, there it is, appearing to hang in space: another layer of clockwork so small that it’s barely visible even now, a tracery of gossamer meshed and geared and fading away into the interior of the ball.

He stares at it, awestruck and even a little upset. He can do nothing with this. He would need other tools, a cleanroom, practice in micro-gauge engineering… he is utterly outclassed.

Except…

Except.

If there’s damage to the microscopic part, he’s out of his depth. There’s probably no one on Earth who has experience with this. It is unique—and mad, because if you can make this, why wouldn’t you use printed circuitry? Unless, of course, there was no such thing when you made it.

That aside: the macro part is familiar enough. And yes, the central section lifts out as a single piece. This problem was foreseen (of course).

He goes to the kitchen and cleans a glass casserole dish, dries it thoroughly, and lifts the impossible heart of the ball into the dish, then covers it with the lid. Then he turns his attention to the rest of the mechanism.

Yes. This he can fix. A weak pin has sheared away, leaving a small arm flapping. It’s a matter of… well… it might take a little longer, actually…

At some point he finishes, and closes his eyes for a quarter of an hour to rest them. Catnapping is a skill everyone should have.

He checks his work and finds it good. The rest of the mechanism is perfect. There isn’t even any dust.

He cleans and oils it anyway, out of respect.

You, who made this: I wish we could have met.

One thing is plain to a hedgehog, as his unlamented father would have had it: this is not your average music box. He should call a newspaper. He should call Harticle’s. He should call his mother—not because of this but just in general.

He doesn’t.

Slowly, he begins to assemble the other pieces of the doodah. They’re splendidly done, but they look brutish and plain now. The puzzle comes together under his hands without effort. After a second, he realises he’s mimicking the patterns of the ball. As above, so below. More elegance.

He’ll have to give the whojimmy back. It wouldn’t be right to separate it from the machine itself. Although if they were to give him a long-term maintenance contract, he could always…

He looks at his task and his tools, and allows his body to work without interference. Now that the puzzle is solved and the tasks are set, he knows how to do this at such a low level it’s important not to think too much. This is the part he loves, the vanishing of self.

When he finishes, he realises how long he has been working, and has to rush.