Cloud Atlas

“Mr. Cavendish? Are we awake?” A licorice snake on a field of cream wriggles into focus. The number five. November 5. Why does my old John Thomas hurt so? A prank? My God, I have a tube stuck up my willy! I fight to free myself, but my muscles ignore me. A bottle up there feeds a tube. The tube feeds a needle in my arm. The needle feeds me. A woman’s stiff face framed with a pageboy haircut. “Tut tut. Lucky you were here when you fell over, Mr. Cavendish. Very lucky indeed. If we had let you go wandering over heaths, you’d be dead in a ditch by now!”

Cavendish, a familiar name, Cavendish, who is this “Cavendish”? Where am I? I try to ask her, but I can only squeal, like Peter Rabbit tossed off Salisbury Cathedral’s spire. Blackness embraces me. Thank God.

A number six. November 6. I’ve woken here before. A picture of a thatched cottage. Text in Cornish or Druidic. The willy tube is gone. Something stinks. Of what? My calves are raised and my arse is wiped with a brisk, cold, wet cloth. Excrement, feces, cloying, clogging, smearing . . . poo. Did I sit on a tube of the stuff? Oh. No. How did I come to this? I try to fight the cloth away, but my body only trembles. A sullen automaton looks into my eyes. A discarded lover? I’m afraid she is going to kiss me. She suffers from vitamin deficiencies. She should eat more fruit and veg, her breath stinks. But at least she controls her motor functions. At least she can use a lavatory. Sleep, sleep, sleep, come free me.

Speak, Memory. No, not a word. My neck moves. Hallelujah. Timothy Langland Cavendish can command his neck and his name has come home. November 7. I recall a yesterday and see a tomorrow. Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina. Bedsores. How many days have I lain here? Pass. How old is Tim Cavendish? Fifty? Seventy? A hundred? How can you forget your age?

“Mr. Cavendish?” A face rises to the muddy surface.

“Ursula?”

The woman peers in. “Was Ursula your lady wife, Mr. Cavendish?” Don’t trust her. “No, I’m Mrs. Judd. You’ve had a stroke, Mr. Cavendish. Do you understand? A teeny-weeny stroke.”

When did it happen? I tried to say. “Airn-dit-hpn” came out.

She crooned. “That’s why everything’s so topsy-turvy. But don’t worry, Dr. Upward says we’re making super progress. No horrid hospital for us!” A stroke? Two-stroker? Stroke me? Margo Roker had a stroke. Margo Roker?

Who are all you people? Memory, you old sod.

I offer that trio of vignettes for the benefit of lucky readers whose psyches have never been razed to rubble by capillaries rupturing in their brains. Putting Timothy Cavendish together again was a Tolstoyan editing job, even for the man who once condensed the nine-volume Story of Oral Hygiene on the Isle of Wight to a mere seven hundred pages. Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?

My stroke was relatively light, true, but the month that followed was the most mortifying of my life. I spoke like a spastic. My arms were dead. I couldn’t wipe my own arse. My mind shambled in fog yet was aware of my witlessness, and ashamed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the doctor or Sister Noakes or Mrs. Judd, “Who are you?” “Have we met before?” “Where do I go when I leave here?” I kept asking for Mrs. Latham.

Basta! A Cavendish is down but never out. When The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is turned into a film, I advise thee, Director dearest, whom I picture as an intense, turtlenecked Swede named Lars, to render that November as a boxer-in-training-for-the-big-fight montage. True Grit Cavendish takes his injections without a quiver. Curious Cavendish rediscovers language. Feral Cavendish redomesticated by Dr. Upward and Nurse Noakes. John Wayne Cavendish on a walker (I graduated to a stick, which I still use. Veronica said it lends me a Lloyd George air). Cavendish à la Carl Sagan, caged in a Dandelion Clock. As long as Cavendish was anesthetized by amnesia, you could say he was content enough.

Then, Lars, strike a chord sinister.

The Six O’Clock News on the first day of December (Advent calendars were on show) had just begun. I had fed myself mashed banana with evaporated milk without tipping it down my bib. Nurse Noakes passed by, and my fellow inmates fell silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.

All at once, my memory’s chastity belt was unlocked and removed.

I rather wished it hadn’t been. My “friends” at Aurora House were senile boors who cheated at Scrabble with stunning ineptitude and who were nice to me solely because in the Kingdom of the Dying the most Enfeebled is the common Maginot Line against the Unconquerable Führer. I had been imprisoned a whole month by my vengeful brother, so plainly no nationwide manhunt was under way. I would have to effect my own escape, but how to outrun that mutant groundsman, Withers, when a fifty-yard dash took a quarter of an hour? How to outwit the Noakes from the Black Lagoon when I couldn’t even remember my post code?

Oh, the horror, the horror. My mashed banana clagged my throat.

My senses rethroned, I observed the Decembral rituals of man, nature, and beast. The pond iced over in the first week of December, and disgusted ducks skated. Aurora House froze in the mornings and boiled in the evenings. The asexual care worker, whose name was Deirdre, unsurprisingly, strung tinsel from the light fittings and failed to electrocute herself. A plastic tree appeared in a bucket wrapped in crepe paper. Gwendolin Bendincks organized paper-chain drives to which the Undead flocked, both parties oblivious to the irony of the image. The Undead clamored to be the Advent calendar’s window opener, a privilege bestowed by Bendincks like the Queen awarding Maundy money: “Mrs. Birkin has found a cheeky snowman, everyone, isn’t that fabulous?” Being Nurse Noakes’s sheepdog was her and Warlock-Williams’s survival niche. I thought of Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved.

Dr. Upward was one of those Academy Award-winning Asses of Arrogance you find in educational administration, law, or medicine. He visited Aurora House twice a week, and if, at age fifty-five or so, his career was not living up to the destiny his name foretold, it was down to us damnable obstacles in the way of all Emissars of Healing, sick people. I dismissed him as a possible ally the moment I clapped eyes on him. Nor were the part-time botty wipers, bath scrubbers, and gunk cookers about to jeopardize their lofty positions in society by springing one of their charges.

No, I was stuck in Aurora House all right. A clock with no hands. “Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

A few days before our Savior’s Birthday, a minibusload of private-school brats came to sing carols. The Undead sang along with wrong verses and death rattles, and the racket drove me out, it wasn’t even funny. I limped around Aurora House in search of my lost vigor, needing the lavvy every thirty minutes. (The Organs of Venus are well known to all but, Brothers, the Organ of Saturn is the Bladder.) Hooded doubts dogged my heels. Why was Denholme paying my captors his last precious kopecks to infantilize me? Had Georgette, incontinent with senility, told my brother about our brief diversion from the highway of fidelity, so many years ago? Was this trap a cuckold’s revenge?

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. God knows, I had bog all else to do at Aurora House except read. The day after my miracle recovery I picked up Half-Lives and, ye gods, began wondering if Hilary V. Hush might not have written a publishable thriller after all. I had a vision of The First Luisa Rey Mystery in stylish black-and-bronze selling at Tesco checkouts; then a Second Mystery, then the Third. Queen Gwen(dolin Bendincks) exchanged a sharp 2B pencil for a blunt blandishment (missionaries are so malleable if you kid them you’re a possible convert), and I set about giving the thing a top-to-bottom edit. One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd.) But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, “But it’s been done a hundred times before!”—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)

My editing work on Half-Lives hit a natural obstacle when Luisa Rey was driven off a bridge and the ruddy manuscript ran out of pages. I tore my hair and beat my breast. Did part two even exist? Was it stuffed in a shoe box in Hilary V.’s Manhattan apartment? Still abed in her creative uterus? For the twentieth time I searched the secret recesses of my briefcase for the covering letter, but I had left it in my Haymarket office suite.

Other literary pickings were lean. Warlock-Williams told me Aurora House had once boasted a little library, now mothballed. (“The Jellyvision’s so much more Real for ordinary people, that’s what it boils down to.”) I needed a miner’s helmet and a ruddy pick to locate this “library.” It was down a dead end blocked off by stacked-up Great War memorial plaques headed “Lest We Forget.” The dust was deep and crisp and even. One shelf of back editions of a magazine called This England, a dozen Zane Grey westerns (in large print), a cookbook entitled No Meat for Me Please! That left All Quiet on the Western Front (in whose page corners a creative schoolboy had long ago drawn frames of a cartoon stick man masturbating with his own nose—where are they now?) and Jaguars of the Skies, a yarn of everyday helicopter pilots by “America’s Foremost Military Suspense Writer” (but, I happen to know, ghostwritten at his “Command Center”—I shall name no names for fear of legal reprisals), and, frankly, bugger all else.

I took the lot. To the starving man, potato peelings are haute cuisine.

Ernie Blacksmith and Veronica Costello, come in, your time is up. Ernie and I had our moments, but were it not for these fellow dissidents, Nurse Noakes would still have me drugged up to my ruddy eyeballs today. One overcast afternoon while the Undead were in rehearsal for the Big Sleep, the staff were in a meeting, and the only sound troubling Aurora House’s slumbers was a WWF contest between Fat One Fauntleroy and the Dispatcher, I noticed, unusually, a careless hand had left the front door ajar. I crept out on a reconnaissance mission, armed with a fib about dizziness and fresh air. Cold singed my lips, and I shivered! My convalescence had stripped me of subcutaneous fat; my frame had shrunk from quasi-Falstaffian to John of Gaunt. It was my first venture outside since the day of my stroke, six or seven weeks before. I circumnavigated the inner grounds and found the ruins of an old building, then fought through unkempt shrubberies to the brick perimeter wall to check for holes or breaches. An SAS sapper could have clambered over with a nylon rope but not a stroke victim with a stick. Drifts of brown-paper leaves were eroded and formed by the wind as I passed. I came to the magnificent iron gates, opened and closed by a flash pneumatic stroke electronic gizmo. Ruddy hell, they even had a surveillance camera and a two-way phone thingy! I imagined Nurse Noakes boasting to the children (I nearly wrote “parents”) of prospective residents that they slept safe and secure thanks to these state-of-the-art surveillance arrangements, meaning, of course, “Pay us on time and you won’t hear a dickey bird.” The view did not bode well. Hull lay to the south, a half-day hike away for a robust stripling down side roads lined with telegraph poles. Only lost holidaymakers would ever stumble across the institute gates. Walking back down the drive, I heard screeching tires and a furious beep from a Jupiter red Range Rover. I stepped aside. The driver was a bullish fellow clad in one of those silvery anoraks beloved of transpolar fund-raisers. The Range Rover screeched to a gravelly stop at the front steps, and the driver swaggered up to Reception like a flying ace from Jaguars of the Skies. Coming back to the main entrance, I passed the boiler room. Ernie Blacksmith poked his head out. “A dram of firewater, Mr. Cavendish?”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. The boiler room smelt of fertilizer but was warmed by the boiler’s coal furnace. Perched on a sack of coal and making contented baby noises was a longtime resident with the status of institution mascot, Mr. Meeks. Ernie Blacksmith was the kind of quiet man you notice at second glance. This observant Scot kept company with a lady named Veronica Costello, who had owned the finest hat shop, legend had it, in Edinburgh’s history. The couple’s demeanor suggested residents at a shabby Chekhovian hotel. Ernie and Veronica respected my wish to be a miserable bugger, and I respected that. He now produced a bottle of Irish malt from a coal scuttle. “You’re half-rocked if you’re thinking of getting out of here without a helicopter.”

No reason to give anything away. “Me?”

My bluff was dashed to pieces on the Rock of Ernie. “Take a pew,” he told me, grim and knowing.

I did so. “Cozy in here.”

“I was a certificated boiler man once upon a time. I service the workings for free, so the management turn a blind eye to one or two little liberties I allow myself.” Ernie poured two generous measures into plastic beakers. “Down the hatch.”

Rain on the Serengeti! Cacti flowered, cheetahs loped! “Where do you get it?”

“The coal merchant is not an unreasonable man. Seriously, you want to be careful. Withers goes out to the gate for the second post at a quarter to four daily. You don’t want him to catch you plotting your getaway.”

“You sound well informed.”

“I was a locksmith too, that was after the army. You come into contact with the semicrim, in the security game. Gamekeepers and poachers and all. Not that I ever did anything illegal myself, mind you, I was straight as an arrow. But I learnt that a good three-quarters of prison bust outs fall flat, because all the gray matter”— he tapped his temple—“gets spent on the escape itself. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. That fancy electric lock on the gate, for example, I could take it apart blindfolded if I had the mind to, but what about a vehicle on the other side? Money? Boltholes? You see, without logistics, where are you? Belly-up is where, and in the back of Withers’s van five minutes later.”

Mr. Meeks screwed up his gnomish features and ground out the only two coherent words he had retained: “I know! I know!”

Before I could discern whether or not Ernie Blacksmith was warning me or sounding me out, Veronica came in through the interior door wearing a hat of ice-melting scarlet. I just stopped myself from bowing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Costello.”

“Mr. Cavendish, how pleasant. Wandering abroad in this biting cold?”

“Scouting,” Ernie answered, “for his one-man escape committee.”

“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

“Veronica’s parents served life sentences in the intelligentsia,” put in Ernie, with a dash of pride.

She smiled fondly. “Just look at the people who come here during visiting hours! They need treatment for shock. Why else do they spout that ‘You’re only as old as you feel!’ claptrap? Really, who are they hoping to fool? Not us—themselves!”

Ernie concluded, “Us elderly are the modern lepers. That’s the truth of it.”

I objected: “I’m no outcast! I have my own publishing house, and I need to get back to work, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but I am being confined here against my will.”

Ernie and Veronica exchanged a glance in their secret language.

“You are a publisher? Or you were, Mr. Cavendish?”

“Am. My office is in Haymarket.”

“Then what,” queried Ernie reasonably, “are you doing here?”

Now, that was the question. I recounted my unlikely yarn to date. Ernie and Veronica listened the way sane, attentive adults do. Mr. Meeks nodded off. I got as far as my stroke, when a yelling outside interrupted me. I assumed one of the Undead was having a fit, but a look through the crack showed the driver of the Jupiter red Range Rover shouting into his mobile phone. “Why bother?” Frustration twisted his face. “She’s in the clouds! She thinks it’s 1966! . . . No, she’s not faking it. Would you wet your knickers for kicks? . . . No, she didn’t. She thought I was her first husband. She said she didn’t have any sons . . . You’re telling me it’s Oedipal. . . . Yes, I described it again. Three times. . . . In detail, yes. Come and have a go yourself if you think you can do better. . . . Well, she never cared for me either. But bring perfume. . . . No, for you. She reeks. . . . What else would she reek of? . . . Of course they do, but it’s hard to keep up, it just . . . trickles out all the time.” He mounted his Range Rover and roared off down the drive. Sprinting after it and nipping through the gates before they swung shut did cross my mind, then I reminded myself of my age. Anyway, the surveillance camera would spot me, and Withers would pick me up before I could flag anyone down.

“Mrs. Hotchkiss’s son,” Veronica said. “She was a sweet soul, but her son, ooh, no. You don’t own half the hamburger franchises in Leeds and Sheffield by being nice. Not a family short of a bob or two.”

A mini-Denholme. “Well, at least he visits her.”

“And here’s why.” An attractive, wicked gleam illuminated the old lady. “When Mrs. Hotchkiss got wind of his plan to pack her off to Aurora House, she crammed every last family gem into a shoe box and buried it. Now she can’t remember where, or she can remember but isn’t saying.”

Ernie divided up the last drops of malt. “What gets my goat about him is how he leaves his keys in the ignition. Every time. He’d never do that out in the real world. But we’re so decrepit, so harmless, that he doesn’t even have to be careful when he visits.”

I judged it poor form to ask Ernie why he had noticed a thing like that. He had never spoken an unnecessary word in his life.

I visited the boiler room on a daily basis. The whiskey supply was erratic, but not so the company. Mr. Meeks’s role was that of a black Labrador in a long-lived marriage, after the kids have left home. Ernie could spin wry observations about his life and times and Aurora House folklore, but his de facto spouse could converse on most topics under the sun. Veronica maintained a vast collection of not-quite-stars’ autographed photographs. She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman. I could say things to her like “The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid” and, safe in her ignorance of J. D. Salinger, I felt witty, charming, and yes, even youthful. I felt Ernie watching me as I showed off, but what the heck? I thought. A man may flirt.

Veronica and Ernie were survivors. They warned me about the dangers of Aurora House: how its pong of urine and disinfectant, the Undead Shuffle, Noakes’s spite, the catering redefine the concept of “ordinary.” Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

Thanks to her, I ruddy well bucked my ideas up. I clipped my nasal hair and borrowed some shoe polish from Ernie. “Shine your shoes every night,” my old man used to say, “and you’re as good as anyone.” Looking back, I see that Ernie tolerated my posturing because he knew Veronica was only humoring me. Ernie had never read a work of fiction in his life—“Always a radio man, me”—but watching him coax the Victorian boiler system into life one more time, I always felt shallow. It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

I cooked up my first escape plan—one so simple it hardly warrants the name—alone. It needed will and a modicum of courage, but not brains. A nocturnal telephone call from the phone in Nurse Noakes’s office to the answering machine of Cavendish Publishing. An SOS for Mrs. Latham, whose rugger-bugger nephew drives a mighty Ford Capri. They arrive at Aurora House; after threats and remonstrances I get in; nevvy drives off. That’s all. On the night of December 15 (I think), I woke myself up in the early hours, put on my dressing gown, and let myself into the dim corridor. (My door had been left unlocked since I began playing possum.) No sound but snores and plumbing. I thought of Hilary V. Hush’s Luisa Rey creeping around Swannekke B. (Behold my bifocals.) Reception looked empty, but I crawled below the level of the desk commando style and hoisted myself back to the vertical—no mean feat. Noakes’s office light was off. I tried the door handle, and yes, it gave. In I slipped. Just enough light came in through the crack to see. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number of Cavendish Publishing. I did not get through to my answering machine.

“You cannot make the call as dialed. Replace the handset, check the number, and try again.”

Desolation. I assumed the worst, that the Hogginses had torched the place so badly that even the telephones had melted. I tried once more, in vain. The only other telephone number I could reconstruct since my stroke was my next, and last, resort. After five or six tense rings Georgette, my sister-in-law, answered in the kittenish pout I knew, Lordy, Lordy, I knew. “It’s gone bedtime, Aston.”

“Georgette, it’s me, Timbo. Put Denny on, will you?”

“Aston? What’s wrong with you?”

“It isn’t Aston, Georgette! It’s Timbo!”

“Put Aston back on, then!”

“I don’t know Aston! Listen, you must get me Denny.”

“Denny can’t come to the phone right now.”

Georgette’s grip on her rocker was never exactly firm, but she sounded buckarooed over the rainbow. “Are you drunk?”

“Only if it’s a nice wine bar with a good cellar. I can’t abide pubs.”

“No, listen, it’s Timbo, your brother-in-law! I’ve got to speak to Denholme.”

“You sound like Timbo. Timbo? Is that you?”

“Yes, Georgette, it’s me, and if this is a—”

“Rather rum of you not to turn up at your own brother’s funeral. That’s what the whole family thought.”

The floor spun. “What?”

“We knew about your various tiffs, but I mean—”

I fell. “Georgette, you just said Denny is dead. Did you mean to say it?”

“Of course I did! D’you think I’m bloody doolally?”

“Tell me once more.” I lost my voice. “Is—Denny—dead?”

“D’you think I’d make something like this up?”

Nurse Noakes’s chair creaked with treachery and torture. “How, Georgette, for Christ’s sake, how?”

“Who are you? It’s the middle of the night! Who is this, anyway? Aston, is this you?”

I had a cramp in my throat. “Timbo.”

“Well, what clammy stone have you been hiding under?”

“Look, Georgette. How did Denny”—saying made it more so—“pass away?”

“Feeding his priceless carp. I was spreading duckling pâté on crackers for supper. When I went to fetch Denny he was floating in the pond, facedown. He may have been there a day or so, I wasn’t his babysitter, you know. Dixie had told him to cut back on the salt, strokes run in his family. Look, stop hogging this line and put Aston on.”

“Listen, who’s there now? With you?”

“Just Denny.”

“But Denny’s dead!”

“I know that! He’s been in the fishpond for absolutely . . . weeks, now. How am I supposed to get him out? Listen, Timbo, be a dear, bring me a hamper or something from Fortnum and Mason’s, will you? I ate all the crackers, and all the thrushes ate the crumbs, so now I’ve got nothing to eat but fish food and Cumberland sauce. Aston hasn’t called back since he borrowed Denny’s art collection to show his evaluator friend, and that was . . . days ago, weeks rather. The gas people have stopped the supply and . . .”

My eyes stung with light.

The doorway filled with Withers. “You again.”

I flipped. “My brother has died! Dead, do you understand? Stone Ruddy Dead! My sister-in-law’s bonkers, and she doesn’t know what to do! This is a family emergency! If you have a Christian bone in your ruddy body you’ll help me sort this out this godawful ruddy mess!”

Dear Reader, Withers saw only a hysterical inmate making nuisance calls after midnight. He shoved a chair from his path with his foot. I cried into the phone: “Georgette, listen to me, I’m trapped in a ruddy madhouse hellhole called Aurora House in Hull, you’ve got that? Aurora House in Hull, and for Christ’s sake, get anybody there to come up and rescue—”

A giant finger cut my line. Its nail was gammy and bruised.

Nurse Noakes walloped the breakfast gong to declare hostilities open. “Friends, we have clasped a thief to our bosom.” A hush fell over the assembled Undead.

A desiccated walnut banged his spoon. “The Ay-rabs know what to do with ’em, Nurse! No light-fingered Freddies in Saudi, eh? Friday afternoons in the mosque car parks, chop! Eh? Eh?”

“A rotten apple is in our barrel.” I swear, it was Gresham Boys’ School again, sixty years on. The same shredded wheat disintegrating in the same bowl of milk. “Cavendish!” Nurse Noakes’s voice vibrated like a pennywhistle. “Stand!” The heads of those semianimate autopsies in mildewed tweeds and colorless blouses swiveled my way. If I responded like a victim, I would seal my own sentence.

It was hard to care. I had not slept a wink all night. Denny was dead. Turned to carps, most likely. “Oh, for God’s sake, woman, get some proportion in your life. The Crown Jewels are still safe in the Tower! All I did was make one crucial telephone call. If Aurora House had a cybercafe I would willingly have sent an e-mail! I didn’t want to wake anyone up, so I used my initiative and borrowed the telephone. My profoundest apologies. I’ll pay for the call.”

“Oh, pay you shall. Residents, what do we do to Rotten Apples?”

Gwendolin Bendincks rose and pointed her finger. “Shame on you!”

Warlock-Williams seconded the motion. “Shame on you!”

One by one those Undead sentient enough to follow the plot joined in. “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” Mr. Meeks conducted the chorus like Herbert von Karajan. I poured my tea, but a wooden ruler knocked the cup from my hands.

Nurse Noakes spat electrical sparks: “Don’t dare look away while you’re being shamed!”

The chorus died the death, except for one or two stragglers.

My knuckles whimpered. Anger and pain focused my wits like a zazen beating stick. “I doubt the kindly Mr. Withers told you, but it transpires my brother Denholme is dead. Yes, stone dead. Call him yourself, if you won’t believe me. Indeed, I beg you to call him. My sister-in-law is not a well woman, and she needs help with funeral arrangements.”

“How could you know your brother had died before you broke into my office?”

A crafty double nelson. Her crucifix toying inspired me. “Saint Peter.”

Big Bad Frown. “What about him?”

“In a dream he told me that Denholme recently passed to the Other Side. ‘Phone your sister-in-law,’ he said. ‘She needs your help.’ I told him using the telephone was against Aurora House rules, but Saint Peter assured me that Nurse Noakes was a God-fearing Catholic who wouldn’t mock such an explanation.”

La Duca was actually halted in her tracks by this balderdash. (“Know thine Enemy” trumps “Know thyself.”) Noakes ran through the alternatives: was I a dangerous deviant; harmless delusional; realpolitikster; Petrine visionary? “Our rules in Aurora House are for everyone’s benefit.”

Time to consolidate my gains. “How true that is.”

“I shall have a chat with the Lord. In the meantime”—she addressed the dining room—“Mr. Cavendish is on probation. This episode is not gone and not forgotten.”

After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X. (The place was a dive. All crumbling council houses and joss-stick shops.) Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?

The point is that it lets your mind go elsewhere. Elsewhere was not rosy. Denholme had died some time ago, but I was still in Aurora House. I dealt myself a new worst-case scenario, one where Denholme sets up a standing order from one of his tricky-dicky accounts to pay for my residency in Aurora House, out of kindness or malice. Denholme dies. My flight from the Hogginses was classified, so nobody knows I’m here. The standing order survives its maker. Mrs. Latham tells the police I was last seen going to a loan shark. Detective Plod conjectures I had been turned down by my lender of the last resort and had Done a Eurostar. So, six weeks later, nobody is looking for me, not even the Hogginses.

Ernie and Veronica came up to my table. “I used that telephone to check the cricket scores.” Ernie was in ill humor. “Now it’ll be locked up at nights.”

“Black ten on red jack,” advised Veronica. “Never mind, Ernie.”

Ernie ignored her. “Noakes’ll be looking to lynch you now.”

“What can she do? Take away my shredded wheat?”

“She’ll Mickey Finn your food! Like the last time.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Remember the last time you crossed her?”

“When?”

“The morning of your conveniently timed stroke was when.”

“Are you saying my stroke was . . . induced?”

Ernie made an extremely irritating “wakey, wakey!” face.

“Oh, pish and tosh! My father died of a stroke, my brother probably died of one. Print your own reality if you must, Ernest, but leave Veronica and me out of it.”

Ernie glowered. (Lars, lower the lighting.) “Aye. You think you’re so damn clever, but you’re nothing but a hoity-toity southern wazzock!”

“Better a wazzock, whatever one of those is, than a quitter.” I knew I was going to regret that.

“A quitter? Me? Call me that just once more. Go on.”

“Quitter.” (Oh, Imp of the Perverse! Why do I let you speak for me?) “What I think is this. You’ve given up on the real world outside this prison because it intimidates you. Seeing someone else escape would make you uncomfortable with your taste in deathbeds. That’s why you’re throwing this tantrum now.”

The Gas Ring of Ernie flared. “Where I stop isn’t for you to pass judgments on, Timothy Cavendish!” (A Scot can turn a perfectly decent name into a head-butt.) “You couldn’t escape from a garden center!”

“If you’ve got a foolproof plan, let’s hear it.”

Veronica attempted to mediate. “Boys!”

Ernie’s blood was up. “Foolproof depends on the size of the fool.”

“Witty homily, that.” My sarcasm disgusted me. “You must be a genius in Scotland.”

“No, in Scotland a genius is an Englishman who gets himself accidentally imprisoned in a retirement home.”

Veronica gathered my scattered cards. “Do either of you know clock patience? You have to add cards up to fifteen?”

“We’re leaving, Veronica,” growled Ernie.

“No,” I snapped and stood up, wanting to avoid Veronica having to choose between us, for my sake. “I’m leaving.”

I vowed not to visit the boiler room until I received an apology. So I didn’t go that afternoon, or the next, or the next.

Ernie refused to meet my eye all Christmas week. Veronica gave me sorry smiles in passing, but her loyalties were clear. In hindsight, I am stupefied. What was I thinking? Jeopardizing my only friendships with sulks! I’ve always been a gifted sulker, which explains a lot. Sulkers binge on lonely fantasies. Fantasies about the Hotel Chelsea on West Twenty-third Street, about knocking on a certain door. It opens, and Miss Hilary V. Hush is very pleased to see me, her nightshirt hangs loose, she is as innocent as Kylie Minogue but as she-wolfish as Mrs. Robinson. “I’ve flown round the world to find you,” I say. She pours a whiskey from the minibar. “Mature. Mellow. Malty.” That naughty she-husky then draws me to her unmade bed, where I search for the fount of eternal youth.

Half-Lives, Part II sits on a shelf above the bed. I read the manuscript, suspended in the postorgasmic Dead Sea, while Hilary takes a shower. The second half is even better than the first, but the Master will teach his Acolyte how to make it superb. Hilary dedicates the novel to me, wins the Pulitzer, and confesses at her acceptance speech that she owes everything to her agent, friend, and in many ways, father.

Sweet fantasy. Cancer for the cure.

Christmas Eve at Aurora House was a lukewarm dish. I strolled out (a privilege bartered through the offices of Gwendolin Bendincks) to the gates for a glimpse of the outside world. I gripped the iron gate and looked through the bars. (Visual irony, Lars. Casablanca.) My vision roamed the moor, rested on a burial mound, an abandoned sheep pen, hovered on a Norman church yielding to Druidic elements at last, skipped to a power station, skimmed the ink-stained Sea of the Danes to the Humber bridge, tracked a warplane over corrugated fields. Poor England. Too much history for its acreage. Years grow inwards here, like my toenails. The surveillance camera watched me. It had all the time in the world. I considered ending my sulk with Ernie Blacksmith, if only to hear a civil Merry Christmas from Veronica.

No. To hell with ’em both.

“Reverend Rooney!” He had a sherry in one hand, and I tied up the other with a mince pie. Behind the Christmas tree, fairy lights pinkened our complexions. “I have a teeny-weeny favor to beg.”

“What might that be, Mr. Cavendish?” No comedy vicar, he. Reverend Rooney was a Career Cleric, the spitting image of a tax-evading Welsh picture framer I once crossed swords with in Hereford, but that is another story.

“I’d like you to pop a Christmas card in the post for me, Reverend.”

“Is that all? Surely if you asked Nurse Noakes she’d see to it for you?”

So the hag had got to him, too.

“Nurse Noakes and I don’t always see eye to eye regarding communications with the outside world.”

“Christmas is a wonderful time for bridging the spaces between us.”

“Christmas is a wonderful time for letting snoozing dogs snooze, Vicar. But I do so want my sister to know I’m thinking of her over our Lord’s Birthday. Nurse Noakes may have mentioned the death of my dear brother?”

“Terribly sad.” He knew about the Saint Peter affair all right. “I’m sorry.”

I produced the card from my jacket pocket. “I’ve addressed it to ‘The Caregiver,’ just to make sure my Yuletide greetings do get through. She’s not all”—I tapped my head—“there, I’m sorry to say. Here, let me slip it into your cassock pouch . . .” He squirmed, but I had him cornered. “I’m so blessed, Vicar, to have friends I can trust. Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

Simple, effective, subtle, you sly old fox TC. By New Year’s Day, Aurora House would wake to find me gone, like Zorro.

Ursula invites me into the wardrobe. “You haven’t aged a day, Timbo, and neither has this snaky fellow!” Her furry fawn rubs up against my Narnian-sized lamppost and mothballs . . . but then, as ever, I awoke, my swollen appendage as welcome as a swollen appendix, and as useful. Six o’clock. The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. Chilblains burned my toe knuckles. I thought about Christmases gone, so many more gone than lay ahead.

How many more mornings did I have to endure?

“Courage, TC. A spanking red post-office train is taking your letter south to Mother London. Its cluster bombs will be released on impact, to the police, to the social welfare people, to Mrs. Latham c/o the old Haymarket address. You’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” My imagination described those belated Christmas presents I would celebrate my freedom with. Cigars, vintage whiskey, a dalliance with Little Miss Muffet on her ninety pence per minute line. Why stop there? A return match to Thailand with Guy the Guy and Captain Viagra?

I noticed a misshapen woolen sock hanging from the mantelpiece. It hadn’t been there when I had turned out the light. Who could have crept in without waking me? Ernie calling a Christmas truce? Who else? Good old Ernie! Shuddering happily in my flannel pajamas, I retrieved the stocking and brought it back to bed. It was very light. I turned it inside out, and a blizzard of torn paper came out. My handwriting, my words, my phrases!

My letter!

My salvation, ripped up. I beat my breast, gnashed my hair, tore my teeth, I injured my wrist by pounding my mattress. Reverend Ruddy Rooney Rot in Hell! Nurse Noakes, that bigoted bitch! She had stood over me like the Angel of Death, as I slept! Merry Ruddy Christmas, Mr. Cavendish!

I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine. I succumbed to the bovine care assistants. I succumbed to the gift tag: “To Mr. Cavendish from your new pals—many more Aurora House Christingles to come!” I succumbed to my gift: the Wonders of Nature two-months-to-a-page calendar. (Date of death not included.) I succumbed to the rubber turkey, the synthetic stuffing, the bitter Brussels sprouts; to the bangless cracker (mustn’t induce heart attacks, bad for business), its midget’s paper crown, its snonky bazoo, its clean joke (Barman: “What’ll it be?” Skeleton: “Pint and a mop, please.”). I succumbed to the soap-opera specials, spiced with extra Christmas violence; to Queenie’s speech from the grave. Coming back from a pee, I met Nurse Noakes, and succumbed to her triumphal “Season’s greetings, Mr. Cavendish!”

A history program on BBC2 that afternoon showed old footage shot in Ypres in 1919. That hellish mockery of a once fair town was my own soul.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides . . . I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself. Lunch was a turkey broth (with crunchy lentils), enlivened only by a search for Deirdre’s (the androgynous automaton) misplaced mobile phone. The zombies enjoyed thinking where it could be (down sides of sofas), places it probably wasn’t (the Christmas tree), and places it couldn’t possibly be (Mrs. Birkin’s bedpan). I found myself tapping at the boiler room door, like a repentant puppy.

Ernie stood over a washing machine in pieces on newspapers. “Look who it isn’t.”

“Merry Boxing Day, Mr. Cavendish”—Veronica beamed, in a Romanov fur hat. She had a fat book of poetry propped on her lap. “Come in, do.”

“Been a day or two,” I understated, awkwardly.

“I know!” exclaimed Mr. Meeks. “I know!”

Ernie still radiated disdain.

“Er . . . can I come in, Ernie?”

He hoisted then dropped his chin a few degrees to show it was all the same to him. He was taking apart the boiler again, tiny silver screws in his chunky, oily digits. He wasn’t making it easy for me. “Ernie,” I finally said, “sorry about the other day.”

“Aye.”

“If you don’t get me out of here . . . I’ll lose my mind.”

He disassembled a component I couldn’t even name. “Aye.”

Mr. Meeks rocked himself to and fro.

“So . . . what do you say?”

He lowered himself onto a bag of fertilizer. “Oh, don’t be soft.”

I don’t believe I had smiled since the Frankfurt Book Fair. My face hurt.

Veronica corrected her flirty-flirty hat. “Tell him about our fee, Ernest.”

“Anything, anything.” I never meant it more. “What’s your price?”

Ernie made me wait until every last screwdriver was back in his tool bag. “Veronica and I have decided to venture forth to pastures new.” He nodded in the direction of the gate. “Up north. I’ve got an old friend who’ll see us right. So, you’ll be taking us with you.”

I hadn’t seen that coming, but who cared? “Fine, fine. Delighted.”

“Settled, then. D-Day is two days from now.”

“So soon? You’ve already got a plan?”

The Scot sniffed, unscrewed his thermos, and poured pungent black tea into its cap. “You could say as much, aye.”

Ernie’s plan was a high-risk sequence of toppling dominoes. “Any escape strategy,” he lectured, “must be more ingenious than your guards.” It was ingenious, not to say audacious, but if any domino failed to trigger the next, instant exposure would bring dire results, especially if Ernie’s macabre theory of enforced medication was in fact true. Looking back, I am amazed at myself for agreeing to go along with it. My gratitude that my friends were talking to me again, and my desperation to get out of Aurora House—alive—muted my natural prudence, I can only suppose.

December 28 was chosen because Ernie had learnt from Deirdre that Mrs. Judd was staying in Hull for nieces and pantomimes. “Intelligence groundwork.” Ernie tapped his nose. I would have preferred Withers or the Noakes harpy to be off the scene, but Withers only left to visit his mother in Robin Hood’s Bay in August, and Ernie considered Mrs. Judd was the most levelheaded of our jailers and thus the most dangerous.

D-Day. I reported to Ernie’s room thirty minutes after the Undead were put to bed at ten o’clock. “Last chance to back out if you don’t think you can hack it,” the artful Scot told me.

“I’ve never backed out of anything in my life,” I replied, lying through my decaying teeth. Ernie unscrewed the ventilation unit and removed Deirdre’s mobile telephone from its hiding place. “You’ve got the poshest voice,” he had informed me, when allocating our various roles, “and bullshitting on telephones is how you make your living.” I entered Johns Hotchkiss’s number, obtained by Ernie from Mrs. Hotchkiss’s phone book months earlier.

It was answered with a sleepy “Whatizzit?”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Hotchkiss?”

“Speaking. You are?”

Reader, you would have been proud of me. “Dr. Conway, Aurora House. I’m covering for Dr. Upward.”

“Jesus, has something happened to Mother?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Hotchkiss. You must steel yourself. I don’t think she’ll make it to the morning.”

“Oh! Oh?”

A woman in the background demanded, “Who is it, Johns?”

“Jesus! Really?”

“Really.”

“But what’s . . . wrong with her?”

“Severe pleurisy.”

“Pleurisy?”

Perhaps my empathy with the role outpaced my expertise, by a whisker. “Healey’s pleurisy is never impossible in women your mother’s age, Mr. Hotchkiss. Look, I’ll go over my diagnosis once you’re here. Your mother is asking for you. I’ve got her on twenty mgs of, uh, morphadin-50, so she isn’t in any pain. Odd thing is, she keeps talking about jewelry. Over and over, she’s saying, ‘I must tell Johns, I must tell Johns . . .’ Does that make any sense to you?”

The moment of truth.

He bit! “My God. Are you positive? Can she remember where she put it?”

The background woman said, “What? What?”

“She seems terribly distressed that these jewels stay in the family.”

“Of course, of course, but where are they, Doctor? Where is she saying she stashed them?”

“Look, I have to get back to her room, Mr. Hotchkiss. I’ll meet you in Reception at Aurora House. . . . When?”

“Ask her where—no, tell her—tell Mummy to—Look, Doctor—er—”

“Er . . . Conway! Conway.”

“Dr. Conway, can you hold your phone against my mother’s mouth?”

“I’m a doctor, not a telephone club. Come yourself. Then she can tell you.”

“Tell her—just hang on till we get there, for God’s sake. Tell her—Pipkins loves her very much. I’ll be over . . . half an hour.”

The end of the beginning. Ernie zipped his bag. “Nice work. Keep the phone, in case he calls back.”

Domino two had me standing sentinel in Mr. Meeks’s room watching through the crack in the door. Due to his advanced state of decay, our loyal boiler room mascot wasn’t in on the great escape, but his room was opposite mine, and he understood “Shush!” At a quarter past ten Ernie went to Reception to announce my death to Nurse Noakes. This domino could fall in unwelcome directions. (Our discussions over whom the corpse and whither the messenger had been lengthy: Veronica’s death would require a drama beyond Ernie’s powers not to arouse our shrew’s suspicion; Ernie’s death, reported by Veronica, was ruled out by her tendency to lapse into melodrama; both Ernie’s and Veronica’s rooms were bordered by sentient Undead who might throw a spanner in our works. My room, however, was in the old school wing, and my only neighbor was Mr. Meeks.) The big unknown lay in Nurse Noakes’s personal loathing for me. Would she rush to see her enemy fallen, to stick a hatpin in my neck to check I was truly dead? Or celebrate in style first?

Footsteps. A knock on my door. Nurse Noakes, sniffing the bait. Domino three was teetering, but already deviations were creeping in. Ernie was supposed to have accompanied her as far as the door of my death chamber. She must have rushed on ahead. From my hiding place I saw the predator peering in. She switched on the lights. The classic plot staple of pillows under the blankets, more realistic than you’d think, lured her in. I dashed across the corridor and yanked the door shut. From this point on, the third domino depended on lock mechanisms—the external latch was a stiff, rotary affair, and before I had it turned Noakes was hauling the door open again—her foot levered against the doorframe—her demonic strength uprooting my biceps and tearing my wrists. Victory, I knew, would not be mine.

So I took a big risk and abruptly released the handle. The door flew open, and the witch soared across the room. Before she could charge at the door again I had it shut and locked. A Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still. Ernie came puffing up with a hammer and some three-inch nails. He nailed the door to its frame and left the huntress snarling in a prison cell of her own invention.

Down in Reception, domino four was bleeping blue murder on the main gate intercom machine. Veronica knew what button to press. “I’ve been bloody bleeping this bloody thing for ten bloody minutes while Mother is bloody fading away!” Johns Hotchkiss was upset. “What the f*** are you people playing at?”

“I had to help Dr. Conway restrain your mother, Mr. Hotchkiss.”

“Restrain her? For pleurisy?”

Veronica pressed the open switch, and across the grounds the gate, we hoped, swung wide. (I preempt the letter-writing reader who may demand to know why we hadn’t used this very switch to make a run for it by explaining that the gate closed automatically after forty seconds; that the reception desk was ordinarily manned; and that wintry miles of moorland lay beyond.) Through the freezing mist, the screech of tires grew louder. Ernie hid in the back office, and I greeted the Range Rover on the outside steps. Johns Hotchkiss’s wife was in the driving seat.

“How is she?” demanded Hotchkiss, striding over.

“Still with us, Mr. Hotchkiss, still asking for you.”

“Thank Christ. You’re this Conway?”

I wanted to head off more medical questions. “No, the doctor’s with your mother, I just work here.”

“I’ve never seen you.”

“My daughter is an assistant nurse here, actually, but because of the staffing shortage and emergency with your mother I’m out of retirement to man the front desk. Hence the delay in getting the main gate open.”

His wife slammed the car door. “Johns! Hello? It’s below freezing out here and your mother is dying. Can we sort out lapses in protocol later?”

Veronica had appeared in a spangly nightcap. “Mr. Hotchkiss? We’ve met on several occasions. Your mother is my dearest friend here. Do hurry to her, please. She’s in her own room. The doctor thought it too dangerous to move her.”

Johns Hotchkiss half-smelt a rat, but how could he accuse this dear old biddy of deceit and conspiracy? His wife harried and hauled him down the corridor.

I was in a driving seat again. Ernie hoisted his arthritic cara and an unreasonable number of hatboxes into the back, then jumped into the passenger seat. I hadn’t replaced the car after Madame X left, and the intervening years did not fall away as I had hoped. Ruddy hell, which pedal was which? Accelerator, brake, clutch, mirror, signal, maneuver. I reached for the key in the ignition. “What are you waiting for?” asked Ernie.

My fingers insisted there was no key.

“Hurry, Tim, hurry!”

“No key. No ruddy key.”

“He always leaves it in the ignition!”

My fingers insisted there was no key. “His wife was driving! She took the keys! The ruddy female took the keys in with her! Sweet Saint Ruddy Jude, what do we do now?”

Ernie looked on the dashboard, in the glove compartment, on the floor.

“Can’t you hot-wire it?” My voice was desperate.

“Don’t be soft!” he shouted back, scrabbling through the ashtray.

Domino five was Super-Glued vertical. “Excuse me,” said Veronica.

“Look under the sun flap!”

“Nothing here but a ruddy ruddy ruddy—”

“Excuse me,” said Veronica. “Is this a car key?”

Ernie and I turned, howled, “No-oooooo,” in stereo at the Yale key. We howled again as we saw Withers running down the nightlit corridor from the dining room annex, with two Hotchkisses close behind.

“Oh,” said Veronica. “This fat one fell out, too . . .”

We watched as Withers reached Reception. He looked through the glass straight at me, transmitting a mental image of a Rottweiler savaging a doll sewn in the shape of Timothy Langland Cavendish, aged sixty-five and three-quarters. Ernie locked all the doors, but what good would that do us?

“How about this one?” Was Veronica dangling a car key in front of my nose? With a Range Rover logo on it.

Ernie and I howled, “Yeeeeee-sss!”

Withers flung open the front door and leapt down the steps.

My fingers fumbled and dropped the key.

Withers flew head-over-arse on a frozen puddle.

I banged my head on the steering wheel and the horn sounded.

Withers was pulling at the locked door. My fingers scrabbled as indoor fireworks of pain flashed in my skull. Johns Hotchkiss was screaming, “Get your bony carcasses out of my car or I’ll sue—Dammit, I’ll sue anyway!” Withers banged my window with a club, no, it was his fist; the wife’s gemstone ring scratched the glass; the key somehow slid home into the ignition; the engine roared into life; the dashboard lit up with fairy lights; Chet Baker was singing “Let’s Get Lost”; Withers was hanging on to the door and banging; the Hotchkisses crouched in my headlamps like El Greco sinners; I put the Range Rover into first, but it shunted rather than moved because the hand brake was on; Aurora House lit up like the Close Encounters UFO; I flung away the sensation of having lived through this very moment many times before; I released the hand brake, bumped Withers; moved up to second; the Hotchkisses were not drowning but waving and there they went and we had lift-off!

I drove round the pond, away from the gates, because Mrs. Hotchkiss had left the Range Rover pointing that way. I checked the mirror—Withers and the Hotchkisses were sprinting after us like ruddy commandos. “I’m going to lure them away from the gates,” I blurted to Ernie, “to give you time to pick the lock. How long will you need? I reckon you’ll have forty-five seconds.”

Ernie hadn’t heard me.

“How long will you need to pick the lock?”

“You’ll have to ram the gates.”

“What?”

“Nice big Range Rover at fifty miles per hour should do the trick.”

“What? You said you could pick the lock in your sleep!”

“A state-of-the-art electric thing? No way!”

“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”

“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”

“Encouragement?” I yelled, scared, desperate, furious in equal thirds. The car tore through a shrubbery and the shrubbery tore back.

“How terribly thrilling!” exclaimed Veronica.

Ernie spoke as if discussing a DIY puzzler. “So long as the center pole isn’t sunk deep, the gates’ll just fly apart on impact.”

“And if it is sunk deep?”

Veronica revealed a manic streak. “Then we’ll fly apart on impact! So, foot to the floor, Mr. Cavendish!”

The gates flew at us, ten, eight, six car lengths away. Dad spoke from my pelvic floor. “Do you have any inkling of the trouble you’re in, boy?” So I obeyed my father, yes, I obeyed him and I slammed on the brakes. Mum hissed in my ear: “Sod it, our Timbo, what have you got to lose?” The thought that I had slammed not the brakes but the accelerator was the last—two car lengths, one, wham!

The vertical bars became diagonal ones.

The gates flew off their hinges.

My heart bungee-jumped from throat to bowel, back again, back again, and the Range Rover skidded all over the road, I gripped my intestines shut with all my might, the brakes screeched but I kept her out of the ditches, engine still running, windscreen still intact.

Dead stop.

Fog thickened and thinned in the headlight beams.

“We’re proud of you,” Veronica said, “aren’t we, Ernest?”

“Aye, pet, that we are!” Ernie slapped my back. I heard Withers barking doom and ire, close behind. Ernie wound down the window and howled back at Aurora House: “Waaaaaaazzzzzzoooooo-cccccckkk!” I touched the accelerator again. The tires scuffed gravel, the engine flowered, and Aurora House disappeared into the night. Ruddy hell, when your parents die they move in with you.

“Road map?” Ernie was ferreting through the glove compartment. His finds so far included sunglasses and Werner’s toffees.

“No need. I memorized our route. I know it like the back of my hand. Any escape is nine-tenths logistics.”

“Better steer clear of the motorways. They have cameras and whatnot nowadays.”

I contemplated my career change from publisher to car rustler. “I know.”

Veronica impersonated Mr. Meeks—brilliantly. “I know! I know!”

I told her it was an uncannily accurate impression.

A pause. “I didn’t say anything.”

Ernie turned round and yelled in surprise. When I looked in the mirror and saw Mr. Meeks twitching in the rearmost compartment of the vehicle, I nearly drove us off the road. “How—” I began. “When—who—”

“Mr. Meeks!” cooed Veronica. “What a nice surprise.”

“A surprise?” I said. “He’s broken the laws of ruddy physics!”

“We can’t very well do a U-ie back to Hull,” Ernie stated, “and it’s too cold to drop him off. He’d be an ice block by morning.”

“We’ve run away from Aurora House, Mr. Meeks,” Veronica explained.

“I know,” the sozzled old duffer bleated, “I know.”

“All for one and one for all, is it?”

Mr. Meeks leaked a giggle, sucked toffees, and hummed “The British Grenadiers” as the Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.

A sign—PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY IN SCOTCH CROSS—shone in the headlights. Ernie had ended our route plan here with a big red X, and now I saw why. An all-night petrol station servicing an A-road—next door to a pub called the Hanged Edward. Midnight was long gone, but the lights were still on. “Park in the pub. I’ll go and get us a can of petrol so nobody’ll spot us. Then my vote’s for a swift pint to celebrate a job well done. Silly Johns left his jacket in the car, and in the jacket—tra-la.” Ernie flashed a wallet the size of my briefcase. “I’m sure he can stand us a round.”

“I know!” enthused Mr. Meeks. “I know!”

“A Drambuie and soda,” Veronica decided, “would hit the spot.”

Ernie was back in five minutes carrying the can. “No bother.” He siphoned the petrol into the tank, then the four of us walked across the car park to the Hanged Edward. “A crisp night,” remarked Ernie, offering his arm to Veronica. It was ruddy freezing, and I couldn’t stop shivering. “A beautiful moon, Ernest,” added Veronica, looping hers through his. “What a splendid night for an elopement!” She giggled like a sixteen-year-old. I screwed the lid down on my old demon, Jealousy. Mr. Meeks was wobbly, so I supported him as far as the door, where a blackboard advertised “The Massive Match!” In the warm cave inside, a crowd watched TV soccer in a distant fluorescent time zone. In the eighty-first minute England was a goal down to Scotland. Nobody even noticed us. England playing Scotland, abroad, in the deep midwinter—is it World Cup qualifier time again already? Talk about Rip van Ruddy Winkle.

I’m no fan of television pubs, but at least there was no thumpy-thumpy-thump acidic music, and that evening freedom was the sweetest commodity. A sheepdog made room for us on a fireside pew. Ernie ordered the drinks because he said my accent was too southern and they might spit in my glass. I had a double Kilmagoon and the most expensive cigar the bar could muster, Veronica ordered her Drambuie and soda, Mr. Meeks a ginger beer, and Ernie a pint of Angry Bastard bitter. The barman didn’t take his eyes off the TV—he got our drinks by sense of touch alone. Just as we took our seats in an alcove, a cyclone of despair swept through the bar. England had been awarded a penalty. Tribalism electrified the audience.

“I’d like to check my route. Ernie, the map if you will.”

“You had it last.”

“Oh. Must be in . . .” My room. Extreme close-up, Director Lars, of Cavendish realizing his fateful mistake. I had left the map on my bed. For Nurse Noakes. With our route marked out in felt pen. “. . . the car . . . oh, God. I think we had better drink up and move on.”

“But we’ve only just started this round.”

I swallowed hard. “About the, er, map . . .” I checked my watch and calculated distances and speeds.

Ernie was catching on. “What about the map?”

My answer was drowned in a howl of tribal grief. England had equalized. And at that exact moment, I fib not, Withers looked in. His Gestapo eyes settled on us. Not a happy man. Johns Hotchkiss appeared beside him, saw us, and he looked very happy indeed. He reached for his mobile phone to summon his angels of vengeance. A third lout with oil-stained overalls completed the posse, but it appeared Nurse Noakes had so far prevailed on Johns Hotchkiss to leave the police out of it. The oily lout’s identity I was never to discover, but I knew right then: the game was up.

Veronica sighed a frail sigh. “I had so hoped to see,” she half-sang, “the wild mountain thyme, all across the blooming heather, and it’s go, lassie, go . . .”

A drug-addled semilife of restraints and daytime programs lay ahead. Mr. Meeks stood up to go with our jailer.

He let out a biblical bellow. (Lars: zoom the camera in from the outside car park, across the busy bar, and right down between Mr. Meeks’s rotted tonsils.) The TV viewers dropped their conversations, spilt their drinks, and looked. Even Withers was stopped in his tracks. The octogenarian leapt onto the bar, like Astaire in his prime, and roared this SOS to his universal fraternity, “Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?”

A whole sentence! Ernie, Veronica, and I were stunned as mullets.

High drama. Nobody stirred.

Mr. Meeks pointed at Withers with skeletal forefinger and intoned this ancient curse: “Those there English gerrrrunts are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst dírely an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance!”

Withers growled at us: “Come quiet and face your punishments.”

Our captor’s southern Englishness was out! A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles. A crane operator stood by him. A sharky-chinned man in a thousand-quid suit. An axwoman with the scars to prove it.

The TV was switched off.

A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

Withers assessed the stage and went for a get real! smirk. “These men are car thieves.”

“You a copper?” The axwoman advanced.

“Show us your badge then.” The crane operator advanced.

“Aw, you’re full o’ shite, man,” spat Poseidon.

Coolheadedness might have lost us the day, but Johns Hotchkiss scored a fatal own goal. Finding his way blocked by a pool cue, he prefixed his distress with “Now you just look here, you grebo, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—” One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.) Withers caught and snapped an incoming wrist, hurled a wee Krankie over the pool table, but the ogre was one and his enraged foes legion. Oh, the ensuing scene was Trafalgaresque. I must admit, the sight of that brute being brutalized was not wholly unpleasant, but when Withers hit the deck and disfiguring blows began to fall, I proposed a tactful exit stage left to our borrowed vehicle. We departed via the back and scuttled over the blustery car park as fast as our legs, whose combined age well exceeded three centuries, could carry us. I drove. North.

Where all this will end, I do not know.

THE END

Very well, dear Reader, you deserve an epilogue if you’ve stayed with me this far. My ghastly ordeal touched down in this spotless Edinburgh rooming house, kept by a discreet widow from the Isle of Man. After the brawl at the Hanged Edward, we four blind mice drove to Glasgow, where Ernie knows a bent copper who can take care of the Hotchkiss vehicle. Here our fellowship parted. Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks waved me off at the station. Ernie promised to take the flak if the law were ever to catch up, as he’s too old to stand trial, which is ruddy civilized of him. He and Veronica were headed to a Hebridean location where Ernie’s handyman-preacher-cousin does up falling-down crofts for Russian mafiosi and German enthusiasts of the Gaelic tongue. I offer my secular prayers for their well-being. Mr. Meeks was to be deposited in a public library with a “Please Look After This Bear” tag, but I suspect Ernie and Veronica will take him with them. After my arrival at Widow Manx’s, I slept under my goosedown quilt as sound as King Arthur on the Blessed Isle. Why didn’t I get on the first train south to London, there and then? I’m still not sure. Maybe I recall Denholme’s remark about life beyond the M25. I shall never know what part he played in my incarceration, but he was right—London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here.

I looked up Mrs. Latham’s home number at the library. Our telephone reunion was a moving moment. Of course, Mrs. Latham smothered her emotion by lambasting me, before filling me in on my missing weeks. The Hoggins Hydra had ripped the office apart when I failed to show for my three o’clock castration, but years of financial brinkmanship had stood my redoubtable pit prop in good stead. She had captured the vandalism on a cunning video camera supplied by her nephew. The Hogginses were thus restrained: steer clear of Timothy Cavendish, Mrs. Latham warned, or this footage will appear on the Internet and your various probations shall hatch into prison sentences. Thus they were prevailed upon to accept an equitable proposal cutting them into future royalties. (I suspect they had a sneaking admiration for my lady bulldog’s cool nerves.) The building management used my disappearance—and the trashing of my suite—as an excuse to turf us out. Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans. Cavendish Publishing is currently run from a house owned by my secretary’s eldest nephew, who resides in Tangier. Now for the best news: a Hollywood studio has optioned Knuckle Sandwich—The Movie for a figure as senselessly big as the number on a bar code. A lot of the money will go to the Hogginses, but for the first time since I was twenty-two, I am flush.

Mrs. Latham sorted out my bank cards, etc., and I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, and I must say the future is not too shabby. I shall find a hungry ghostwriter to turn these notes you’ve been reading into a film script of my own. Well, sod it all, if Dermot “Duster” Hoggins can write a bestseller and have a film made, why the ruddy hell not Timothy “Lazarus” Cavendish? Put Nurse Noakes in the book, the dock, and on the block. The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. The minor matter of Johns Hotchkiss’s vehicle loan needs to be handled with delicacy, but fouler fish have been fried. Mrs. Latham got on the e-mail to Hilary V. Hush to express our interest in Half-Lives, and the postman delivered part two not an hour ago. A photo was enclosed, and it turns out the V is for Vincent! And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats. I’ll find out if Luisa Rey is still alive in a corner of the Whistling Thistle, my de facto office and a wrecked galleon of a back-alley tavern where Mary, Queen of Scots, summoned the devil to assist her cause. The landlord, whose double measures would be quadruples in management-consulted Londinium, swears he sees Her ill-starred Majesty, regularly. In vino veritas.

That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.