Mefisto

14

O LAMIA, MY DEAR, my darling, Lamia, my love. How diligent you were, how well you cared for me. I can see you still, your smooth skin of tenderest mauve, your insides white as white, your name in wonderfully clear, minute print, and that coy little letter R, enclosed in a ring, like a beauty spot on your glossy cheek. You melted under my tongue, you coiled yourself around my nerves. What would I have done without my Lamia, how would I have borne my season in hell? There were others that ministered to me, but none that gave such succour. Here is Oread, white nymph of forgetfulness, and Lemures, the deadeners, like little black beans, and skittish, yellow-hued Empusa, hobgoblin to the queen of ghosts. They are angels of a lesser order, but precious for all that.

I slept, it was a kind of sleep. Deep down, in the dark, an ember of awareness glowed and faded, glowed again. A word would enter, or a flash of light, and ramify for hours. I was calm, mostly, feeling nothing. Outside the dome of numbness in which I lay I sensed something waiting, like an animal waiting in the darkness. That was pain. Pain was the beast my angels kept at bay.

They came to me, my guardians, in endless file down their transparent ladder, into my arm, when at last I opened my eyes I saw the sun shining in the plastic bag above me, a ball of white fire streaming outwards in all directions. The room was white, a thick cream colour, really, but it seemed white to my eyes, so accustomed by now to black. Splinters of metallic light coruscated on walls and ceiling, like reflections from a glittering sea.

Water. The thought of water.

At first I was a mind only, spinning in the darkness like a dynamo. Then gradually the rest of me returned, rolling up its sleeves and spitting on its hands with the grim enthusiasm of a torturer. I watched the liquid in the plastic tube, a fat tear trembling on its steadily thinning stalk. Then the stalk snapped, the drop fell. Pain pounced.

How to describe it? Not to. I was Marsyas, lashed to my tree, the god busy about me with his knife, whistling through his teeth as he worked. I was alone, no one could help me. The difference, the strangeness. This was a place where I had never been before, which I had not known existed. It was inside me. I came back each time a little more enlightened. Now for the first time I saw the world around me radiant with pain, the glass in the window suffering the sun’s harsh blade, the bed like a stricken ox kneeling on its stumps, that bag of lymph above me, dripping, dripping. The very air seemed to ache. And then the wasps dying, the moths fumbling at the window, the dog that howled for a whole night. I had never known, never dreamed. Never.

The loneliness. The being-beyond. Indescribable. Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand. I clung to her, dangling above the abyss, burning.

Never known, never dreamed.

Never.

Scorched hands, scorched back, shins charred to the bone. Bald, of course. And my face. My face. A wad of livid dough, blotched and bubbled, with clown’s nose, no chin, two watery little eyes peering out in disbelief. Yes, they let me see myself. That was later. They gave me a hand mirror, I wonder where it came from? It was round, with a pink plastic handle and a back in the fan shape of a sea shell. I don’t think, no, I don’t think it belonged to her, though it was she who put it into my swollen paw. When I had finished marvelling at my face I angled the glass downwards, and was dazzled by the glare of metal.

— Tinfoil, Dr Cranitch said. To prevent heat loss. A new technique.

But that was later again.

I liked the nights. The silence was different than by day, when it was not really silence, but suspension, as if things around me were holding their breath, appalled, speechless with wonder. At night a great nothingness blossomed like a flower. The room was faintly illumined. When I turned my head, when I was able to turn my head, I could see the open doorway, and then another room, or a corridor, in darkness, at the far end of which there was a desk, and someone sitting at it, dressed in white, who never moved, but kept her vigil all the long night long. A green-shaded lamp stood on the desk, throwing its rays downwards, only her shoulders and the sleeves of her white coat could be seen, and something around her neck that shone. A path of light lay along the polished floor, like a shimmer of moonlight on black water.

By day my door was kept shut. I strained to catch the vague hubbub from beyond it, voices and footsteps, the hum of machinery. There was a stairs nearby, and overhead people walked up and down. How busy they seemed! Once someone cried out, a long, desolate wail that rose up and up, like a red rocket, then wavered, and sank back slowly to a gurgle. That was the apogee of those days, the day of the scream. I was not alone.

I howled too, making someone else’s day, no doubt, bringing him a little solace, a sense of companionship. It was clear then I would survive: if I could scream, I would live. She came running at once, on her rubber soles, and emptied an ampoule of double-strength Lamia into my dripfeed. It was night when I woke again. She was at her desk, as always, headless in the lamplight. I imagined it was always she. All hands were her hand, all voices her voice. It was a long time before I began to distinguish the others, to distinguish them from her, I mean. I took scant notice of them in themselves. It was she who had kept me alive. She held on to me, and would not let go her grasp, until at last I scrambled up, out of the pit.

Weeks, weeks. I could feel the summer passing by outside, the slow days falling, one by one. At evening the visitors came. I heard them traipsing along the corridors, their heavy, swinging tread. I thought of a religious procession. Sometimes I even caught a whiff of the flowers they brought. They did not stay long, and passed by again, with a lighter step. A few stuck it out until the bell went. Then the tea was brought around, the skivvies singing. A mutter from the chapel as the rosary was recited. I listened, hardly breathing. I thought of the others, for I knew there must be others, straining like me after these last sounds, these last few drops, dripping into the sand.

Now I could not sleep, I who had slept for so long. I built up walls of number, brick on brick, to keep the pain out. They all fell down. Equations broke in half, zeros gaped like holes. Always I was left amid rubble, facing into the dark.

Father Plomer visited me. I opened my eyes and there he was, sitting beside my bed, with his legs crossed under the shiny black skirts of his cassock and his large, pale, hairless hands clasped on his knee. He smiled at me, nodding encouragingly, as if he were a hypnotist, and I his subject, coming out of a trance. I could not see his eyes behind the flashing lenses of his spectacles. He leaned forward, with a confidential air, and spoke softly.

— And how are you, young man?

— I want to die, I said.

— What’s that?

I tried again, getting my blubber lips around it.

— Die, I said, I want to die.

— Oh now. They tell me you’re doing fine.

In sleep the sirens had sung to me, I could still hear their sweet song.

— Don’t die, the priest said, and smiled blandly, gently wagging his head at me. Not a good idea.

The nurses were cheerful, cheerful and brisk, or else preoccupied. Not she. She moved with slow deliberation, saying little. Her hands were broad. She was young, quite young, or not old, at least. It was hard to tell. They laughed at her behind her back, called her a cow. She spoke to them quietly, in a stiff, formal tone, never looking at them directly. Yes, matron, they would say primly, their lips tightening. And she would turn away. Her face was covered with freckles, big coffee-coloured splashes, the backs of her hands too. She wore a cross on a fine gold chain around her neck. It dangled above me the day she cut me out of my metal wrappings. It took a long time. She plied the scissors and then the swab, turn and turn about. Her face was impassive, fixed in concentration. I could hear no sound anywhere around us, as if the whole hospital had been emptied for the occasion. Full summer sunlight streamed in the window. A nickel dish glinted. The tinfoil crackled, a cocoon breaking open. I wept, I moaned, I pictured a ribbon of raw, red stuff winding endlessly out of my mouth. Dr Cranitch appeared above me, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

— Well, he said. You’ve pulled through.

15

A RIVEN THING, incomplete. Something had sheared away, when I pulled through. I was neither this nor that, half here, half somewhere else. Miscarried. Each day when I woke I had to remake myself, build myself out of bits and scraps, of memories, sensations, guesses. I knew how Lazarus must have felt, standing in the blinding light of noontide in his foul cerecloths, with a headache, confused, suspicious, still vividly remembering the other place, unsure that it was not better there than here.

— You were lucky, Dr Cranitch said in his jaded way. Full-thickness burns like that, they destroy the nerves.

— But I can feel, I said.

— What? Where, show me.

He hitched up his glasses and peered where I pointed.

— No, no, he said. Impossible. That’s phantom pain.

He sat beside my bed on a swivel stool. He was on his rounds, he wore a tweed suit, a tie with a narrow knot. Tall, thin, pale as a sea-washed bone. An air of remote amusement. That wan smile, as if he were remembering an old and feeble joke. He laid his cool hands on me, turning me this way and that, a sculptor with a dollop of clay. The blind was down, the air was close.

— We’re very hopeful, he said. Aren’t we, matron? Yes, very hopeful.

She said nothing. A sharp breeze fingered my flayed back.

— Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow we make a start.

I remember the steely clink of instruments, the sharp, chemical smell, the cluster of faceted lights above me, like a bright sun shining through rain. I was conscious through it all, day after day. The atmosphere in this high room had a curiously neutral feel, as if the air itself had been treated with a mollifying gas. At intervals one of the nurses would remove Dr Cranitch’s spectacles and wipe the lenses, while he stood vague-eyed, his hands limply lifted. Then he would lean over me again, deft, mild, faintly abstracted, sometimes humming under his breath. His students looked on, stealthily jostling. I thought in amazement of people outside in the streets, going heedlessly about their business. So I too, before, while worlds thrashed in agony.

Grafts. Forceps. Gauze. Such words, I tremble still.

Now came a new kind of pain, pain’s big brother, it caught me in its burly grasp and pulled me this way and that, it would brook no nonsense, even my ministering angels threw up their hands before its masterful onslaught.

This was recovery.

— Yes, Dr Cranitch murmured, it’s knitting nicely.

I could not lift my left arm higher than my shoulder, my right was a hinged brown stick. I had no nipples. Half the skin of my stomach had gone to patch my legs, my back. My face now was a glazed carnival mask, with china brow and bulging cheeks, hawk nose, dead eye-sockets. Above it the skull was a tufted leathern helm, the skin taut and glassy, like dried-over slime.

— It will heal, Dr Cranitch said. As good as new, almost.

But I was different. I was someone else, someone I knew, and didn’t know. I had stepped into the mirror. I frightened myself. That mad face. Those eyes.

My first, faltering little steps. I shuffled crabwise to the door, hands flapping in fear, stood panting there, eyes shut, then in panic staggered headlong back to the bed, missed it, fell on the floor. Followed by a quaking bout on the bedpan. For a minute, though, I had forgotten the pain. It came back now, bounding and barking, and licked my livid face into flame again.

She held my hand, my elbow. Her mannish grasp. She watched my feet, in old grey felt slippers, inching along.

— Come, she said quietly, under her breath. Come along.

What a pair we must have been, this big, broad, sad woman, and I, bent and hobbling, hairless as a babe.

— Can’t. Can’t.

Stopped, stood still, would not go on, or back. She waited, saying nothing, she had seen it all before. We reached the window. She parted the venetian blinds, the crackle as the blades bent made me grind my teeth. Bright sunshine outside, a bank of barbered grass sloping away to railings and a wall, then in the distance the city shimmering in a blue haze. The city! Too much, too much. At the window-sill a fuchsia bush with wasps. Too much. I lay down on the floor and sobbed, pressing my pitted cheek to the cool rubber tiles.

— Come along, now. Come along.

Her freckles, my burns.

I began to explore my little world. There was a wooden locker beside the bed, a metal chair, a waste bin lined with a plastic bag. In an alcove there was a washbasin, and a mirror screwed to the wall. A rich, deep, silver crack ran athwart the glass, slicing my face diagonally in two from temple to jaw. The locker was empty, except for a shrivelled brown apple core and a holy medal on a pin. And the black notebook. The cover was scorched. I shut the door on it.

Miss Barr was a big blonde person with ruddy cheeks and prominent, pale blue eyes. She wore a white tunic and starched white trousers, and white ankle-boots with thick crêpe soles. Her straw-coloured hair was tied back tightly in a knot, I imagined her, first thing out of bed each morning, gathering it up and giving it a good, hard wrench, stretching the skin at her temples, making those eyes bulge. She smelled of soap, lint, liniment. I used to dream about her. My sleeping self quailed before her, weak with anticipation of exquisite harm. The first day she came into my room she rolled up her sleeves and said briskly:

— Right, my man. Physio for you.

I thought she was mad, I did not know what she was talking about. She seized my arm, my leg, peering.

— Golly, she said, you certainly made a bags of yourself. But fear not, we’ll soon set you to rights.

We heaved and hauled together, like decrepit wrestlers, groaning. She had a tendency to fart. She told me about her childhood, spent mainly among horses. At once I pictured her, a sort of centaur, flying over the greensward, snorting. Sometimes I pictured myself too, astride her, the breeze in my face, hearing the thunder of hoofs, feeling her great heart hammering under me. She put her knee in my spine, sat on my chest, bent me over her shoulder.

— Pull, pull! she shouted. Get those sinews stretched! We’ll make a new man of you yet.

The day I left my room. That was a day to remember. I sat cross-legged on the bed, with my hands in my lap, my eyes fixed on the door, then saw myself, as if it were someone else, rise and turn the handle and walk out. A long, low ward lined with beds, with figures in them, sitting up and looking at me. All those eyes! I had expected a vast emptiness, huge halls, the odd, solitary figure turning away. A small man in slippers and a sort of smock approached me. Smoked skin, sallow eyeballs, a lick of greased black hair. He greeted me with easy familiarity, grinning on one side of his sharp little face.

— Well well, he said, our mystery man.

He led me along the beds, introducing their occupants. He did not ask my name. He was a card, with a brisk line in raillery. Old chaps chortled, young ones smirked. All tried not to see me, my scabs.

— I’m for the knife, myself, he said, indicating the smock.

Some beds he passed by in silence. Bandaged skulls, wax faces, dazed, impenetrable eyes.

— Brain cases, he whispered darkly. You want to watch them.

His name was Sykes, Stokes, something like that. He offered me a plum from a bag on his locker.

— Had an accident, did you? he said.

Next day when I came out he was gone. The sheets had been stripped from his bed, the door of his locker stood open. Only a plum stone remained, stuck to the bottom of a tin ashtray. The knife had done for him. My cicerone. No, my Virgil. For this is hell, after all.

Sighs, groans. Shouts in the night. An old man puking up gouts of green stuff, leaning over the side of the bed, a young nurse holding his forehead. Slow, wet coughs, like the noise of defective suction pumps ponderously labouring. In the huge, white-tiled bathrooms, little labels exhorting patients not to spit in the handbasins. Everywhere the same thick cream paint, smooth as enamel, clammy as skin. I wore a mouse-coloured dressing-gown with faded red piping. Someone had died in it, I imagine, before it passed to me. I walked and walked, slouching along the vermiform corridors, dragging one foot. People looked away from me, visitors especially, the uninitiates. Young doctors frowned, a sort of bland grimace, as at a show of bad taste. I passed on, hauling my pain behind me.

Pain had a smell, flat, grey, faintly sweet, I imagined a mixture of scurf and faeces. It was how I recognized my fellow sufferers, the ones for whom pain was a constant presence, a sort of second, ghostly self. There was the silence too, a special kind. We would sit in what was called the recreation room, a group of us, doing nothing, not saying a word, and yet communing somehow, like participants in a seance.

There were times when I fancied I was only this ectoplasm, floating, transparent, invisible to the hale. One day I found my way on to the maternity ward, and stood at the glass wall of the nursery, gaping at the rows and rows of prune-faced mites in their plastic cots, and was for a moment baffled, an old ghost stumbling on a new world. They looked like me! I pressed my forehead to the glass, yearningly. A mother in a pink bed-jacket glanced up from her babe and shrieked, and I was led away, shaken, speechless, that one foot dragging behind me, in the grave.

I thought of all my dead. I thought of Sykes, or Stokes, who had gone under the knife. He was not anywhere any more. Oh, part of him was still about, in the morgue, probably, and probably still in better shape than I, with half my flesh fallen from the bone. But the rest of him, that grin, the sharp glance, the jokes, where was all that? Gone. That was death. No cowled dark stranger, no kindly friend, not even empty space, with all the potential that implies, but absence, absence only. The nothing, the nowhere, the not-being-here. But how then this something, wafting me onwards irresistibly, as if all around me a great, slow breath were being indrawn?

— Don’t die, Father Plomer said. Not a good idea.

He sat beside the bed, regarding me gaily, with his legs crossed, swinging one large, black-shod foot. He was the hospital chaplain. He had an aura of shaving balm and warm wine.

— Of course, he said comfortably, life is a wretched thing, and practically worthless. Yet we must live, all the same.

I was tired of him, his big smooth face and plummy voice, his genial detachment.

— For what? I said.

To laugh was complicated, with my face, I did not do it often. He smiled, compressing his lips, as if he were nibbling a tiny seed in his front teeth.

— Why, he said, to practise for the eternal life to come!

Now it was his turn to laugh, he leaned back, his glasses flashing, ha, ha, haa! A vision came to me of his face peeling from the skull, the crimson flop, the sinews, gleet, glint of bone, the eyeballs wallowing.

— I think we have a young pagan here, matron, he said. Oh yes, I shall have to take him in hand.

She stopped behind him and looked at the back of his head in silence for a second, then turned away. He laughed his laugh again, a series of soft, plosive puffs, his lips pursed as if he were blowing smoke rings.

He taught me to play chess. He had a plastic travelling set, we balanced it between us on the edge of the bed. It did not take me long to learn. It was a kind of moving geometry. He played a ramshackle game, swooping about the board, making sudden, lunging moves and then taking them back again with a giggle, only to get himself at once into a worse muddle.

— You’re better now? he said to me, frowning over a tangle of pawns. Improving, I mean? Check, by the way. Or is it? No.

He stared owlishly at the board, humming unhappily under his breath. His last remaining bishop made a bolt for freedom. He had not noticed my knight.

— Yes, he said distractedly, life, life is the …

The knight reared, slewing sideways, stamped to a stop.

— Mate, I said.

He gave a little shriek of surprise, throwing up his hands.

— Why, so it is! he cried, laughing. So it is!

Go out, they told me. Take a walk, yes. Go into the city, see the sights, mingle. Simple, ordinary things. It’s all there, waiting for you, your birthright. Be one of the living, a human being. They gave me clothes, a shirt, shoes, trousers, a coat. When I dressed I felt a sort of excited revulsion, as if I had put on not only someone else’s outfit, but someone else’s flesh as well.

16

ON THE HOSPITAL steps I stopped. A high gold autumn evening was sinking over the rooftops. Forever after I would think of the city like that, like a waste of magnificent wreckage, going down. My hands shook, stuffed into these unaccustomed pockets. Such space, such distance. I was dizzy, I felt that if I fell I would fall upwards, into the limitless air. A panic of disconnected numbers buzzed in my head. Grass, trees, railings, the road. The road! A bus hurtled past, swaying on the bend. It might have been a mastodon. The evening visitors were arriving. I turned my face away from them and plunged off down the drive.

Oh, that first autumn. Vast tender skies, branches soot-black against blue, a sense of longing and vague hurt in the dense, luminous air. I wandered the streets like an amnesiac, everything was new and yet unaccountably familiar. I recall especially that brief hour at the exhausted end of evening, when the shop workers had gone home, and everything was shut, and a mysterious quiet settled everywhere. Then the beggars and the drunks came into their own, the dustbin-pickers, the frantic old women who lived out of shopping bags, and those ragged but strangely robust young men with blue chins and crazed eyes, marching headlong down the middle of the pavements, swinging their arms and furiously muttering. They seemed to know something awful, all of them, some secret, the burden of which had blighted their lives. And I was one of them, or almost. An apprentice, say. An acolyte. I stalked them for hours, loitering behind them on canal bridges, or under archways, where the pigeons strutted, and dust and bits of paper swirled in eddies, and everything was spent and grey and heart-breaking. I can’t explain the melancholy pleasure of those moments, from which I would turn away lingeringly as the last light of day drained down the sky, and the street lamps came on fitfully in the blued autumnal dusk.

Oh, the squares, the avenues, the parks. A smoky, sunlit morning, smell of washed pavements, fish, stale beer. A carthorse clops past, dropping dark-gold dungballs. Snarl of traffic. A sudden dark wind, making the day flinch. Then rain. In the park the dripping trees circle slowly around me, halt when I halt. The spidery dome of the bandstand teeters, threatening. Sun again, a drenched glare. Stop on this corner, by this bridge. A butcher’s shop, a greengrocer’s, a red-brick bank like a child’s toy house, with gold lettering in the windows and a big hanging clock. A workman with a ladder strapped to his bike waits at the traffic lights, whistling. A lorry shudders to a halt with a gasp of brakes. What is it, this sense of something impending, as if a crime is biding its time here, waiting to be committed? The lights change. I detect the slow ruin of things, the endless, creeping collapse.

And then the nights, silver and burnished black, the shadowed buildings crouched under a tilted moon. A neon sign flicks on and off, on and off, in strange silence. Somewhere a woman laughs. In a windswept street by the river two old men in rags are fighting. They caper weakly, panting, swinging their arms, their coat-tails flying. Thick smack of fist on flesh and one goes down, the other takes aim, kicks, again, then hard again. The wet street gleams. A newspaper blows along the pavement, plasters itself against a grille. A huge seagull alights on the road, fixing me warily with one round eye. I pause in a doorway, wait, eager and afraid. Some dirty little truth is being wearily disclosed here. The gull flexes one wing, folds it again. The tramp on the ground coughs and coughs, holding his face. The other one has run away. Foul breath of the river, dark slop of waters, slide, and slop again. Hush! What conjured spirit …? Hush!

I was sitting on a park bench when I met him, when he met me. It was an October twilight, the grass was grey with dew. I was listening to the trees, their fretful rustlings. He walked past once, came back and passed by again, returned again more slowly, stopped. Thin foxy face and widow’s peak and thin, sly smile. He put his hands in his pockets, arched an eyebrow.

— I say, he said, do I not know you?

He studied me, my bird-boy’s profile.

— I never forget a face, you know.

He chuckled. I was not surprised to see him. He sat down beside me, settling the wings of his old coat. I told him my story. He listened, motionless, hands folded on one bony knee. Darkness advanced across the park. The bells of the city were ringing, near and far.

— All that time in the bonehouse, eh? he said. But look at you now, a new man.

A bat flitted here and there above us in the violet air.

— Help me, I said.

He gazed out over the darkening sward, nodding to himself.

— Oh, Caliban, he said, you should have come with me when I asked you. Didn’t I tell you it was all finished there, didn’t I warn you? And see what happened.

He sighed. A band of masked children ran out of the bushes, shrieking. I put a hand up to my face.

— Help me.

— You want to be a real boy, eh?

He sat back on the seat and crossed his legs and gazed up into the shadowy branches above him.

— We had some fun, didn’t we, all the same? he said. High times. It seems so long ago, now, all of it. Still at the sums?

— Yes.

The laughing children returned, and ran in a circle around the bench where we sat.

— I think they want you for a guy, Felix said.

He rose, and they fled away into the bushes. He stood a moment, looking about him pensively in the dusk. Then he produced a scrap of paper and a pencil stub and scribbled an address and handed it to me.

— I’m there sometimes, he said. In the evenings. It’s not far.

He walked off a little way, stopped, came back.

— You see? he said. I told you, I never forget a face.

Chandos Street was a decaying Georgian sweep with a Protestant church at one end and a railed-off green square at the other. I loitered there night after night, pacing under the streetlamps, watching the house, one of a tall terrace, with worn granite steps and a black front door. People came and went. No, no one came, no one went, the door never opened. Sometimes a lame whore sat on the steps, tipsily singing. Once she asked me for a match, and called me a cunt when I said I had none. We were not the only loiterers. A couple appeared on the corner by the church, at the same time every night, a sick-looking young man with the shakes, and his shivering wraith of a girl, straggle-haired, with matchstick legs. They would hang about for an hour, peering anxiously up the ill-lit street, then turn and shuffle away miserably. The young man took to saluting me, touching a jaunty finger to his forelock and trying to grin. One night he stopped me, put a shaky hand on my arm and looked behind him carefully, as if he were about to impart some valuable secret. Instead he asked me for money. The girl stared blankly at my midriff. I gave him a handful of Empusa tablets. He looked at them in wonderment and whistled softly.

— Fucking ace, pal, he said. I’ll offer up a novena for you.

And there was another girl, skinny also, with skinny legs and a pinched face and pale, narrow wrists. She wore a plastic raincoat and white shoes, and clutched a white plastic handbag. She smoked cigarettes, and paced from one trembling patch of lamplight to another, watching the street, the houses. She ignored me. The young man with the shakes approached her, his hand out, she ignored him too. She smoked and paced, smoked and paced. One night I tried to follow her. After we had gone a street or two she turned aside suddenly and jumped on a bus. I shrank back in the darkness and watched as she was borne past me, sitting up very straight at the window, her sharp little stark white face and cropped, crow-black hair.

At the end of a week Felix appeared at last, strolling up the street with his coat open and his hands in his pockets. The girl walked across swiftly and accosted him on the steps. He stopped with his finger lifted to the bell and retreated a pace. She spoke to him quietly, fiercely. I crossed the road and stood below them on the pavement. The girl immediately fell silent. Felix looked over his shoulder.

— My dear fellow, he said, there you are.

The girl turned an inch in my direction, but kept her eyes lowered. There was a silence. Felix glanced from one of us to the other.

— Are you together? he said. No? What a coincidence, then.

He rang the bell, but no one came. He rang again. We waited. Then the girl, with a furious gesture, opened her bag and produced a key. Felix grinned at her. She ignored him, jabbing the key into the lock.

A gaunt, dim hall, olive walls, a dirty lightbulb in a brown paper shade. The stair carpet was threadbare. In silence we ascended into the gloom. Felix smiled to himself, whistling softly. The girl walked ahead of us. Her hair stuck up in tufts at the back, as if someone had tried to pull it out in handfuls. She knocked at a door on the third floor, but it was only a gesture, she had a key for here as well. Inside was dark save for a faint sodium glow seeping down through the tops of tall windows. Felix switched on a light.

— What ho! he called. Are you there, truepenny?

No one answered.

There were cardboard boxes on the floor inside the door, and piles of books, and a black overcoat and an umbrella hanging on a peg. The kitchen smelled of gas and oilcloth and something going bad. Felix lit the stove, opened a cupboard. The girl walked into the front room. I followed her. She stood at the window looking out. The church spire loomed in the dark against an acid sky. Clutter here as well, more boxes, books, soiled plates on the table. The girl was lighting a cigarette. The match flame shook.

— You followed me, she said. That night.

She went on looking out the window. Her mind seemed to be on something else.

— You shouldn’t follow me.

Felix came in, carrying a teapot.

— Now! he said brightly. Nice cup of tea.

He was wearing an old raincoat and scuffed, sharp-toed shoes. He set the teapot down on the table, sweeping aside smeared plates and scattered cutlery.

— Getting acquainted, you two, I see, he said.

He carried three cups to the fireplace and emptied their dregs into the littered grate.

— I don’t want any of that stuff, the girl said.

He frowned, looking about him in exaggerated puzzlement.

— Stuff? he said. Stuff? Oh, the tea, you mean. Oh.

He laughed to himself and went back to the table, shaking his head. He poured three cups of tea, and handed one to her. She took it.

— Did you know, he said to her, our young friend here has been in hospital too. Did he tell you?

For the first time now she looked at me directly. She had small, dark eyes, close-set, with a slight cast. She studied me for a moment, biting her lip. Her plastic raincoat was buttoned to the throat.

A door behind us opened, and a small, fierce-looking man came in. He was wearing long woollen underwear, with a blanket draped over his shoulders. His hair stood up in sprouts of ginger bristles, and he had three or four days’ growth of reddish beard. He began to say something but sneezed instead. His bare feet were small, with horny, yellow nails.

— Ah, professor, Felix said. We thought you must be out.

The little man glared at him.

— I am sick, he said.

As if for emphasis, he sneezed again violently. Felix pointed to the blackened pot on the table.

— Some tea, professor.

This time the little man ignored him. The girl had turned back to the window. He hitched up his blanket, looking at her, and then at me.

— Who are you? he said.

Felix coughed.

— This is the one I told you about, he said. You remember.

The professor opened his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. We waited, but the sneeze did not come.

— Ah, he said sourly. The prodigy.

His name was Kosok.

17

HAVE I MENTIONED the buses? I liked them, the way they trundled through the streets, gasping and shuddering, like big, serious, labouring animals. I would board one at random and ride to the end of the line, hunched in the front seat upstairs, watching the city unfurl around me, the tree-lined avenues and the little parks, the domes and turrets and curlicued façades. A hoarding would slide past, then a burnished stretch of river, then a dead-end street with parked cars and children playing ball under a rusted railway bridge. I got to know the top half of things, the shabby upper storeys of smart shops, the fire escapes, the pots of geraniums in little sooty windows, the faded signs on brick walls for carbolic soap and plug tobacco and ship’s chandlers. And then the suburbs, the windswept wastes of housing estates, with straggly gardens, and toddlers dabbling in the gutters, and the sudden, quicksilver flash of a mirror in the drab depths of a bedroom window.

When I think of those aimless, dreamy journeys, I think always of the girl. When she left the flat that first night I went with her. We walked through the dark streets in silence. When the bus came we were the only passengers, except for a drunk slumped on the bench seat at the back. We watched the glossy darkness sliding past the window. She smoked a cigarette. Her name was Adele. She looked at me sharply.

— I’m not a Jew, you know, she said. You needn’t think I’m a Jew.

The conductor told her she was not to smoke. She paid him no heed. She held the cigarette aloft in her thin, white fingers, flicking the end of it with a bitten thumbnail. We went by the river, under the jagged shadows of warehouses and cranes. The drunk woke up and shouted for a while, then fell into a stupor again. The conductor walked up and down between the rows of seats, chewing a matchstick, getting a good look at us, my face, her frantic hair, grinning to himself. Adele kept her eyes fixed on the window, flicking her cigarette, flicking, flicking, vibrating faintly, as if a thin, continuous current were passing through her.

— I hate him, she said. That hair. The way he walks, as if he had no backbone.

I knew who she meant.

Suddenly she laughed, a brief, psittacine cry. Then she frowned, and stood up quickly and pressed the bell. The drunk mumbled in his sleep. We alighted at a deserted corner, under a leaning lamp. There was a bit of broken wall painted blue, and a high rickety wooden fence with things scrawled on it, names and curses and hearts with arrows in them, and a bulbous, cleft woman drawn in chalk. Adele looked about her with a preoccupied expression, clutching her handbag to her narrow chest. Her lips were black in the lamplight. The silence of the night arranged itself around us.

— Is this where you live? I said.

She looked at me in surprise.

— No, she said. Why?

A dull pain throbbed in my right arm, like an old dog yanking at the leash. I swallowed a pill.

— Where do you get them, she said, those?

I offered her one. An Oread, the last of my supply. She examined it, and put it in her mouth and swallowed it carefully, as if it were not a pill but a bit of my pain itself I had given her. For a second time she looked at me directly.

— Gabriel, she said. Is that your name?

She never smiled. She had only that laugh, and now and then a sort of grin, wild-eyed, distraught. There was a bus coming on the other side. She put her head down and walked away from me quickly across the road, the heels of her white shoes tap-tapping the asphalt. The headlights of the bus caught her briefly. She got on board and it churned away, trumpeting, into the darkness.

I went down the quays again next morning, but everything looked different by day, I could not find that corner with the blue wall and the wooden fence. The cranes and the blank sides of the warehouses had the look of things turned away, smirking in derision.

Felix came with me to the hospital for my weekly visit. We had to wait a long time, sitting in a row of wooden benches in the outpatients’ hall. There were mothers with cowed children, raw-faced young men in suits, and doll-like girls with impossible hairstyles, their mouths painted scarlet. All stared before them with the same expression of mingled boredom, disbelief and fear. At intervals a door in front of us would open and a nurse would appear and call out a name, and a boy in splints would get up, or a rheum-eyed old fellow with the shakes, and shuffle forward meekly. Then all would shift, sliding sideways, and the one at the end of each row would nip into the place vacated on the bench in front. Felix laughed.

— Like a little chapel, he said. And we’re all going to confession.

He sat at ease with his legs crossed and one arm draped along the back of the bench, smiling about him at the whey-faced coughers and the painted girls. He nudged me and whispered:

— What a bunch, eh?

When my turn came he rose eagerly to accompany me, but the nurse prevented him. He got to the threshold of the consulting room, and managed a good look inside before the door was shut in his face.

— Such cheek! the nurse said.

But she smiled all the same.

The place was busy as always, assistants in white coats walking about hurriedly with files under their arms, the consultants at their tables, magisterially bored, half listening to whispered tales of frights and night-sweats and sudden, astounding pains. An old chap was being weighed, standing atremble on the scales, clutching the waistband of his trousers in a bony fist. In a curtainless cubicle a fat old biddy sat on the side of the bed fumbling with her suspenders, while a nurse stood by, tapping one foot. Dr Cranitch looked at me blankly, then consulted his file.

— Ah, yes, he said. Swan. How is it?

I showed him my arms, my shins. The grafts had held, new skin was spreading, a roseate lichen. He nodded, humming. I asked him for a prescription. He pursed his lips and looked past me as if he had not heard.

— I can’t sleep, I said.

He nodded.

— Perhaps, he said absently, you’re meant to stay awake.

He flexed my right arm, studying the action of the joint.

— Much pain?

I didn’t answer. He let go my arm, and leaned over my file and wrote in it, in his slow, meticulous hand.

— You can lead a normal life, he said. There is no reason not to.

He didn’t look up. He had a way of speaking, toneless and dispassionate, as if he were alone, trying out the words just to see how they sounded.

— Give me a prescription, I said. Help me.

But he went on writing, slowly, carefully.

— I have helped you, he murmured.

Felix was not in the waiting room. I found him in the corridor, smoking. He asked me what the doctor had said, and when I told him he cackled, and threw his fag-end on the floor and trod on it. Then we went upstairs, and matron gave me a pocketful of pills. She looked at Felix in silence. He grinned. On the way out he said:

— That stuff, she just gives it to you, does she, no record of it or anything?

November rain in the streets, the traffic fuming and snorting. He liked to hear about the hours I had spent on the operating table, about the tinfoil bandages, the swabs and the scissors. He would wince, gritting his teeth and shutting one eye, waving his hands at me, pretending he wanted me to stop.

— But they brought you back to life, he said. And then you met up with me again. You see how things fall out? The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

The lights were on at noon in the flat. Professor Kosok was pacing the cluttered front room. He wore black tubular trousers, boots with laces, a greasy bow-tie. He had an angry, waddling walk, his fat legs jerked, he twitched his arms, as if he were constricted at the groin, the armpits. He fixed me with his clouded small dark eyes. Adele sat in an armchair by the fireplace, wearing her plastic raincoat, leaning forward intently with her arms folded on her knees, staring at the single bar of the electric fire in the grate. There were dark shadows under her eyes. The fire had brought out a diamond pattern on her shins. An ashtray beside her on the floor was full.

— Well! said Felix happily, looking around at us and rubbing his hands. Here we are again!

Adele showed me places in the city I had never noticed, walled gardens in the midst of office blocks, odd-shaped little courtyards, an overgrown cemetery between a bakery and a bank. She walked quickly through the streets, canted forward a little, her sharp little face thrust out. Now and then she would stop and look about her searchingly, as if to verify something, some detail of the scene. She hardly spoke to me, glancing sidelong at my knees. We went into the big department stores and wandered along the brightly lit aisles, gazing in silence at the racks of gaudy clothes and toiletries and packaged foods as if they were artefacts in a museum, the works of an immemorial golden age. People stared at us, children tugged at their mothers’ skirts and pointed, avid and agape. Adele took no notice. She lived in the city as if she were alone in it, as if it were somehow hers, a vast, windswept pleasure garden, deserted and decayed.

We dined in cheap cafés, sitting at plastic tables behind fogged windows, amid the smells of boiled tea and fried bread and fags. I watched the people around us, the raw-eyed lorry drivers, the dumpy girls with dyed blonde hair and laddered stockings, the gaunt, watchful young men in raincoats too small for them. They ate with a kind of dogged circumspection, crouching over their plates, their jaws working in a rhythmic, circular motion. They had a dull, shocked look about them, as if they were survivors of some enormous accident. Covertly I studied Adele too, her pinched, heart-shaped face, her chilblained hands. She hardly ate at all, but smoked without pause, drinking cups of thin, grey coffee. When she put the cigarette to her mouth she shut one eye, as if in pain, and drew in deeply, with a harsh little sigh. Sometimes she would talk, quietly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on the steamy window beside her. People followed her, she said, men stalked her at night through the streets, sat beside her on buses and touched her, murmuring things. A woman with red hair had come up behind her one day and cursed her, shrieking and spitting in her face. Then there were the tramps, the tinkers with their wild eyes, looking at her. A negro had stood behind her in a crowded shop and pressed himself against her.

— He had perfume on him, she said. The palms of his hands were pink.

Then she gave her high bird-cry of a laugh, and fixed me with that fraught, off-centre stare.

I showed her my old haunts, the alleys and archways, the streets by the river, the clay paths along the canal, where I had stalked the beggars and the madmen in those first, heady days of an autumn that now seemed an age ago. She grew restless, turning vaguely this way and that, as if she were looking for a way to escape. Sometimes still she would walk away from me abruptly, as on that first night on the quays, and jump on board a bus, or disappear down a sidestreet. She did it not from anger, or even rudeness, I think it was just that now and then my presence beside her somehow slipped her mind. I might not see her at all for days on end. I don’t know where she went. She must have had a room somewhere. She insisted she did not live at the flat in Chandos Street, though she often stayed there, sleeping in one or other of the dingy back bedrooms. She kept her things there too, dispersed among the general clutter. There was a suitcase stuffed with clothes, which would make its way from the bedrooms through the front room to the hall, and then all the way back again. Everything shifted around like this, the professor’s belongings too, the place always seemed as if a large untidy family had just moved in, or was about to move out. Adele picked her way through the jumble with her sleepwalker’s frown, as if she had been looking for something and had forgotten what it was. One evening she showed me her syringe, a big old-fashioned thing with a calibrated glass barrel and a plunger with a steel thumb-hole. It had its own special box, like a jewel case, with a lid that snapped shut, and dark-blue velvet lining.

— He got it for me, she said.

We leaned over it, our foreheads almost touching, contemplating it in silence. Then she sighed and shut the lid on it, and took it with her out of the room. I stood at the big front window. The winter evening was drawing in. I could hear the distant blare of rush-hour traffic. The remains of one of her cigarettes smouldered in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. She never managed to extinguish the stubs completely, no matter with what force she crushed them out, her mouth working.

She was in the big, bare room at the back of the house. There was a narrow bed in a corner, a single dim bulb dangling from the ceiling. A gas fire hissed. The great windows were curtainless, looking out on a drab confusion of gardens. Night like a dark gas was seeping down on the city out of a luminous, mauve sky. She sat on the side of the bed, her head bowed, one hand hanging, the other resting palm upward across her knees. She had taken off her dress. One strap of her slip had fallen down her shoulder. She lifted her head when I came in, and cast about her vaguely, with a blank gaze. She ran a hand through her hair.

— I cut it all off, she said, one time. It grew back.

She blinked, frowning, and shook her head. Then she stood up, and drew the slip over her head and let it trickle through her fingers to the floor. Frail wrists, frail ankles, meagre flanks. Her delicate, glimmering shoulders. She had a plaster on one of her toes, where a chilblain had burst. She walked here and there about the room, shedding the rest of her things absent-mindedly as she went. She looked strange to me now, that known head on this unfamiliar, thin, almond-white body. There was a little triangular space between her legs, below the smudge of black hair. She lit a cigarette. When I touched her she turned quickly, startled. Her mouth was open, I kissed her clumsily, tasting smoke. She did not shut her eyes.

She turned off the light, and we lay down together on the narrow bed. She was trembling. Gradually the dim shapes of the room came forward out of the darkness, like creatures gathering silently around us. She clasped me tightly in her arms, yet at the same time seemed to hold me off from her, as if part of her attention were elsewhere, concentrating on something beyond me. The sheet was clammy. I was cold, and burning. My hands shook. I licked her eyelids, her armpits, I put my tongue into her ears, her navel, into the cool little cup at the base of her throat. When I made to delve in her lap, however, she drew away from me, and there was a sudden, frightening silence. Cautiously I tried again, but again she drew back. She would not be penetrated, at least not where I wanted most to penetrate her, and at last, with an impatient sigh, she turned away from me.

She lay on the edge of the bed, crouched and tense, staring away into the darkness like an animal listening, ready for danger. I held one of her cold, small breasts in my hand, my mouth was pressed to the nape of her neck. Her skin had a tawny, schoolgirl smell. I was shivering. The evening was still. The windows stared out into the darkness in blank amazement. An aeroplane flew over, its engines laboriously beating, I glimpsed its ruby wing-light sailing across the corner of the window above us. I was thinking of a moment from long ago, when I was a child, there was nothing in it, I don’t know why I remembered it, just a moment on a bend on a hill road somewhere, at night, in winter, the wet road gleaming, and dead leaves spinning, and the light from a streetlamp shivering in the wind. Absence, I suppose, the forlorn weight of all that was not there, I suppose that’s what I was remembering.

We dressed in silence. The gas fire sang its tiny song. My hands still trembled. Adele paced, frowning, from room to room, looking for something. She was hungry, she announced. We went out, and she bought a bag of chips, and stood on the pavement outside the chip shop and devoured them, her eyes fixed in concentration on the ground before her, as if she were feeding not herself, but some starving thing inside her.

We went for a walk. It was a raw night, tempestuous and clear. A full moon dived and wallowed amid scudding clouds. We saw a fight outside a pub, and met a little woman pushing a little dog in a doll’s pram. On a patch of waste ground a family of meths drinkers sat around a fire like a circle of decayed stone statues. We stood on a bridge and watched a barge slide past beneath us, dark and silent, on the dark river. When we got back to Chandos Street the sick-looking young man was there, waiting on the corner, huddled in his coat against the wind, with his scrawny girl beside him. He attempted a sporty grin, his mouth twitching.

— Hello, chief, he said. Any stuff tonight? Listen, we’re in a bad way, real sick.

I offered him a phial of Lemures. He snatched it from me, but when he read the label I thought he would weep.

— Not that, he said, that’s no good. That other gear, you know? Like the last time?

He was sweating. The girl began to whimper. He turned and shouted at her to shut up, his voice cracking. Adele had walked on, with her head down.

— I haven’t any, I said, backing away from him.

He came after me, rooting in the pockets of his coat, and brought out a wristwatch and thrust it under my nose.

— I’ll give you this, he said. See, this? It’s gold.

I put a hand in his chest and pushed him away. He stood, crestfallen, watching me retreat. He gave a sort of sob and stamped his foot.

— Christ, pal …

Adele was at the door. As I came up the steps she went inside and shut it quietly in my face.

18

FELIX WAYLAID ME one evening in the hall. There was something he wanted to say to me, it was time we had a talk. A door opened above us somewhere, he took my arm and drew me hastily behind him down a gloomy passageway beside the stairs. We stepped out into a yard. There were dustbins, and a dank smell. He peered over his shoulder cautiously, then winked at me, digging his tremulous claws into my arm.

— Have to be careful, he said. He’s always on the watch.

— Who?

He laughed.

— Who? Who do you think?

I followed him down the narrow garden. Everything was overgrown with bindweed and briars. Tall skeletons of last year’s thistles stuck up starkly. The backs of houses rose all around us. The sky was still light. A new moon was visible above the chimney-pots. Felix put his hands in his pockets and stopped to survey the scene.

— There is order in everything, he said. Isn’t it wonderful? Look at this place. It seems a wilderness, but underneath it all there’s a garden.

He looked at me sidelong, smiling.

— What do you say?

I said:

— I don’t know.

He took my arm again.

— Oh but you do, you do know, you of all people.

We walked along a weed-grown path, and came upon a dark pool overhung by a stunted, bare tree. Dim forms moved in the depths of the water. We stopped, and leaned to look, and slowly the fish floated up, like something in a dream, lifting weak, hopeful mouths, their pallid fins feebly beating the moss-brown water. Felix’s face grinned up at me, with a fish-mouth for an eye.

— What are numbers, after all? he said. Music, that kind of thing, it’s all sums, isn’t it?

The bronze reflection of a cloud sailed on to the surface of the water, the arabian moon was there too, a horned sliver, glimmering. The fish sank again slowly, into the deeps.

— Come on, Felix said, let’s go for a stroll. I have to see a man about a horse.

Dusk was settling in the streets, the lamps were coming on. There was a bitter wind, and patches of damp on the pavements. We walked by the railings of the square, under the dark trees. Felix pointed to the gutter.

— Ever wonder, he said, who it is removes squashed cats from the road? There was one run over there this morning, now it’s gone.

He halted, cupping a hand to his ear. Music sounded faintly in the distance, a tinny blare.

— Hark! he said. The herald angels.

The office workers were going home, flitting like shadows through the brumous twilight, hurrying away to their unimaginable lives. We crossed the road, past great pillared arches and granite façades, and turned in the direction of the river. Two figures in long overcoats stood under a lamp-post, examining a bottle in a brown paper bag. Water was bubbling out of a crack in the paving where a pipe had burst. For an instant suddenly I saw into the dark heart of things, and a surge of mad glee rose in my gullet like waterbrash.

— The professor, now, Felix was saying. A hopeless case, I tell you, I’ve given him up for lost. Blind chance, he says, blind chance, that’s all. As if chance was blind. We know better, don’t we, Castor?

We passed under a railway bridge. An alleyway exhaled the sour stink of the river. The tide was high. We picked our way along the quay, over the slimed cobbles, and stopped by the side of a rusted cargo ship. The curved prow jutted above us, keen as an axe-blade. Felix peered up into the darkness and whistled softly. Running clouds were spilling past the rail up there like luminous smoke. He whistled again, and this time there was a faint answering note. A head appeared, and a hand waving, and presently two figures came down the gangway, hurrying silently on tiptoe. Felix started towards them, but paused and turned back to me.

— By the way, he said, the old boy wants you to work with him, did I mention it?

The sailors were hardy little men with bandy arms and legs. One wore a leather cap with a peak. His name was Brand. He had a big pink face, and eyes set so close together they were almost one. He said nothing, only grinned, showing a mouthful of broken teeth. His companion was called Frisch. He had a high forehead and a prominent nose and hardly any chin.

— Dear friends …! said Felix.

Frisch made a chopping gesture with the edge of his hand.

— Ruhe! he snarled. You want everyone to fokken hear?

We went to the Star of the Sea, a low, smoky dive with plastic seats, and yellowed prints of sailing ships on the walls. The bar was loud with merrymaking. We sat at a table in a corner, and Felix bought brandy for the sailors and sat and watched them drink, tapping his fingers on the table and smiling. Frisch, who seemed to regard everything with a profound, angry scepticism, buried his seal’s snout in his glass and looked about him grimly at the weeping walls and the prints and the strings of coloured paper decorations. He eyed me too, and said to Felix:

— This is your tester, eh? Your Chemiker?

Felix laughed blandly.

— Oh no, he said, no. My … partner.

And he winked at me.

— Ja, Frisch said sourly, that is what he looks like.

They began to argue about money, or at least Frisch did, while Felix sat and smiled. Among the crowd at the bar someone fell over, and a cheer went up. Brand was peering about him out of his cyclop’s eye with a kind of happy wonderment, lifting his leather cap and scratching his straw-coloured hair, as if he had never seen such a place before, with such jolly people in it. He drank another drink, and banged his glass on the table top and sang:

Es war eine Ratt’ im Kellernest,

Lebte nur von Fett und Butter,

Hatte sich ein Ränzlein angemäst’t

Als wie der Doktor Luther.

— Good man, Lars, Felix said. Sing up!

Die Köchin hatt’ ihr Gift gestellt,

Da ward’s so eng ihr in der Welt,

Als hätte sie Lieb’ im Leibe.

Then there were more drinks, and Frisch’s rancorous mutterings grew slurred. Brand stood up, and put one foot up on the table and reached a lighted match between his legs and farted, igniting a brief blue spurt of flame. He sat down with a sheepish grin, rolling his shoulders bashfully, and pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes.

— Bravo, old firebrand! Felix said.

— Arschloch, Frisch mumbled, and curled his lip.

Brand grinned again, and ducked his head.

— Drink up! said Felix. Pip pip!

Frisch was growing increasingly angry, glaring about him unsteadily with a murderous eye and talking to himself. Brand began to sing again, but could not remember the words. His mood turned glum. Felix made a sign to me and rose, and after a moment I followed him. He was waiting for me in the street. He took my arm without a word and walked me around the side of the pub. In a moment Frisch came out and stood looking up and down the quay, shouting drunkenly. Then Brand stumbled out, and took a gulp of night air, and immediately vomited on the pavement. Felix chuckled. We retreated down a lane.

— The people one has to do business with! Felix said.

The moon was high, a black wind scoured the streets. We arrived at a corner and found ourselves on the quay again. There was a broken blue wall, and a wooden fence, and a swollen woman drawn in chalk. We stopped under the street light.

— You see what fun you can have when you stick with me? Felix said. New friends, night rambles, interesting times. There’s only one condition.

He was peering off into the darkness.

— That you don’t, he said, lead a normal life.

And he laughed.

Two figures approached, going unsteadily, I thought it was Frisch and Brand, but it was not, it was the shaky young man from Chandos Street and his skinny girl. Felix went forward to meet them, taking something — something, that’s rich! — from the deep inner pocket of his mackintosh. He and the young man spoke together briefly. The girl hung back. Then they went off again into the darkness, and Felix returned.

— As I say, he said. The people!

We walked along by the river, and crossed the bridge. There were not many abroad in that cold night. A group of youths stood in a shop doorway bawling out a carol. Chains of coloured lights were strung between the lamp-posts, dancing and rattling in the wind. Under the dark façade of a huge shabby office building Felix stopped and said:

— Well, here we are.

He laughed at my baffled look.

— I told you, he said. He wants you to work with him. I promised him you would. Now you won’t let me down, will you?

He pointed to a flight of steps descending to a door in the basement of the building. He was smiling. Afar in the tempestuous night a peal of joybells sounded.

— Don’t worry, he said. It’s the season for beginnings, after all!

He skipped down the steps, his coat-tails flying, and pressed the doorbell with a flourish.

The door was opened by a plump young man in a yellow cardigan and suede slippers and a silk cravat. He had curls, and a broad soft sallow face, and a moist little mouth like the valve opening of a complicated inner organ. His name — let me have done with it — was Leitch. He looked at Felix with distaste and said:

— He’s not here.

Felix only smiled at him, and after a moment’s hesitation he shrugged and stepped back to let us pass. When I came forward into the light he laughed.

— Who’s this? he said. The Phantom of the Opera?

Felix smiled again, with lips compressed, and wagged a finger at him in playful admonition. We were in a long, bare, clean corridor with white walls, and white rubber tiles on the floor. The air vibrated with a dense, soundless din that pressed upon the eardrums. We walked towards another door at the end of the corridor. Leitch padded behind us, I could feel his hostile eye. He was first at the door, though, skipping ahead of us on his slippered feet, like a corpulent ballet dancer, one plump hand preemptively lifted.

— Allow me, he said with a venomous trill.

The room was an immense, rectangular box with a low ceiling made of blocks of some white synthetic stuff. The floor here too was clad with white tiles. There were no windows. The machine was housed in big grey steel cabinets, they had about them a faint, pained air of startlement. They were so grand, so gracefully arranged, they might have been interrupted in the midst of a stately dance. For a moment even Felix hesitated on the threshold. This was their room. We were the wrong shape.

— Come in, Leitch said. Meet the monster.

He grinned scornfully, his pink mouth puckering, and started to walk away.

— Hang on, old chap, Felix said mildly. Aren’t you going to show the new boy around?

Leitch looked from him to me and back again with deep dislike. It seemed he would refuse, but something in Felix’s smile checked him. He shrugged, tugging angrily at his cravat.

— What does he want to see?

Felix laughed.

— Oh, everything! he said, and turned to me. Isn’t that right? You want everything!

The machine was a Reizner 666. I had never seen anything like it in my life, had not known such a thing could exist. Yet I recognized it. It hummed in the depths of its coils, dreaming its vast dream of numbers. It had a brain, a memory. I recognized it. Leitch showed me the rudiments of its workings. I hardly listened to him. The thing itself spoke to me, I touched its core and it quivered under my hand. When I pressed the keys on the console the print fell across the page with a soft crash. At my shoulder Felix chuckled.

— What a gadget, eh? he whispered.

Professor Kosok arrived, with his black coat and his hat and his badly furled umbrella. He stopped inside the door and stared at us. Then he took off his coat and threw it on a chair, and came and looked at the figures I had printed.

— What is this game? he said. This is not a toy.

It was Leitch he looked at. The young man scowled. Felix said:

— Well, I’ll be off.

And with a wink he departed.

19

PROFESSOR KOSOK always worked by night. Often I had come upon him in the daytime in one of the bedrooms in Chandos Street, asleep on a bare mattress in a bundle of blankets and coats, only the top of his head and his nose showing. Now I too began to live a life at night, in that white room. The professor took scant notice of me. He existed in a constant state of angry preoccupation, stumping about in his waistcoat and his bow-tie, snorting softly to himself and rubbing a hand on his tussocky scalp. The machine was connected to others like it in other parts of the world, suddenly in the middle of the night the printer would spring to life of its own accord, rapping out peremptory, coded questions, like a medium’s table. He would rush to the console and start excitedly to reply, but he could not work the keyboard properly, he kept making mistakes, to the growing annoyance of the machine, which would chatter and snap at him, and then retreat abruptly into a silent sulk, until Leitch, with a bored sneer, came and punched in the correct codes. Then, for hours, sheet after sheet of figures would fall into the wire tray, each one folding on to its fellows with an identical, silken sigh. When the transmission was finished Leitch and I would take the figures and sift through them for days, searching out intricate patterns of correspondence and repetition. Sometimes it was no more than a single repeating value that we hunted.

— Truffles, the professor would say, with a smile that twitched. And you are the pigs.

It was his one joke.

But he seemed to want only disconnected bits, oases of order in a desert of randomness. When I attempted to map out a general pattern he grew surly, and threw down his pencil on the console and stamped away, fuming. I turned to Leitch. He put on a pensive frown, pressing a finger to his forehead.

— We’re searching for the meaning of life, he said.

And then laughed. He looked at me with contempt.

— How do I know what he’s doing! he said. You’re supposed to be the genius, you tell me. Statistics, probabilities, blind chance, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him? He’s half cracked, anyway.

But there was no asking anything of the professor, he would pretend he had not heard, and turn away, muttering.

Leitch’s animosity was pure and disinterested. He directed it equally at all who came near him. It was like a task that had been assigned to him, irksome, and thankless, from which he was not allowed to relax. His name was Basil. He suffered from attacks of breathlessness, which he tried to hide from me. His feet were bad too, something was wrong with the arches, he walked in his slippers with a rolling gait, the voluminous seat of his trousers sagging. He had a painful, polished look that spoke of long sessions in the bathroom, of dousings and dustings, and ashen gloomings into a cruel mirror. He wore a gold chain on his wrist, and a ring with two gold hands holding a gold heart. He consoled himself with food. He ate alone, a lugubrious sybarite, sitting in a far corner of the room with a plastic bag open in his lap and a paper napkin tucked under his cravat. He had sandwiches, meat pies, cakes, cold chicken legs. I pictured him, bent at a table in a greasy room somewhere, some other Chandos Street, slicing and buttering, as the light faded on another solitary winter afternoon. Yet there was something almost impressive in his intransigence and grim self-sufficiency. Sucking at a bruised peach, or gobbling a fistful of purple grapes, he had the air of a ruined emperor, with those curls, that great pallid face, those wounded, unforgiving eyes.

— Just do your job, will you? he said. Just do your job, and leave me alone.

I had hardly spoken a word to him all night.

— What job? I said. Is this a job?

He turned to me with blood in his eye.

— You’re here, aren’t you? he snarled. What more do you want?

Nothing, I wanted nothing, I was almost happy there. How calm the nights were, with only the hum of the machine, and the professor’s soft mutterings, and all around us the darkness. We might have been a mile under the ocean. We saw no one. We lived in downtime. The machine’s real users were those who came here during the day, from the offices above. I wondered about them, and searched for their traces. Sometimes there would be a coffee cup left behind, or an ashtray in which a half-smoked cigarette had burned itself out, leaving a fragile fossil of ash and a smear of tar. One night I arrived and found a yellow cardigan draped on the back of a chair, where someone had forgotten it. We did not move it, even Leitch avoided touching it, and as the night wore on it became a more and more insistent, numinous presence, unsettling as a pair of golden wings.

The machine was a presence too, a great tame patient beast, tethered in its white cage. It had its voices, the faint flutter and tick of the memory bank scanning, the printer’s crash and clatter. One of the storage discs produced an unaccountable, piercing shriek when it was first switched on. And always there was that dense hum, that made the very air vibrate. Sometimes, in the early hours, when one or other of my limbs began to sing, like a burning stick singing in a fire, I would seem to hear a sort of chime, like a small, sustained chord, as if the machine’s voice and the voice of my pain had found a common note. When something went wrong we were supposed to call for an engineer, but we never did. Instead, Leitch would get out his forceps and his probes and delve into the delicate innards of the machine, past the lattice of switches and bundles of wires fine as hair, down into the secret core itself. Then for a moment, forgetting himself, he would be transformed, kneeling there in the midst of that white light, absorbed, intent, like an attendant figure in the foreground of a luminous nativity. He talked to the machine in a fierce undertone, cursing and cajoling it. Always it gave in. He would sit back on his heels then, grey sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, wiping his hands, his fat shoulders drooping and his eyes going dead.

I brought in the black notebook, and in idle hours went over again the old, insoluble problems, playing them over, move by move, like drawn grandmaster games. Infinity was still infinity, zero still gaped, voracious as ever. The professor stopped behind me, and peered over my shoulder.

— Pah, he said. Antique stuff. History.

At dawn, without a word, the three of us went our separate ways, the professor bundled in his black coat, Leitch with his empty foodbag under his arm, and I behind them, dawdling. I liked to walk the streets at that early hour. The wind rustled over pavements hard and grey as bone, and gulls scavenged in the gutters. Traffic lights blossomed from green to red and back again, silent as flowers. A solitary motor car would pass me by, the driver propped like a manikin behind a windscreen flowing with reflections of a cold grey sky and paper-coloured clouds. Sometimes I went to Chandos Street, in hope that Adele would be there. Instead I would often find the professor, sitting at the table by the big window in the kitchen, still in his coat and hat, gazing out at the street, a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. These encounters were faintly, inexplicably embarrassing.

Adele never asked where I went at night, as I never asked where she was when she disappeared for days on end. I think when I was away from her she forgot about me. Oh, I don’t mean forgot, exactly, but that she lost hold of something, some essential of the fact of my existence. For that is how it was with me, when she was not there, something of her faded in my mind, she became transparent. Even when she was in my arms she was also somehow absent. I never had, not for an instant, her entire attention. Perhaps it is as well. It occurs to me I might not have survived the full force of her presence. What does that mean? I don’t know, I don’t know — there’s so much darkness here. She regarded my injuries as if they were not part of me, as if they were something that had attached itself to me, like a stray dog. She would raise herself on an elbow and study me, touching my withered arm, or running a finger over the knots and whorls of my chest, frowning to herself. What was she thinking? I never asked. She would not have answered. One day she said:

— Did you think you were going to die, when it happened?

She was sitting up in bed, with a blanket around her shoulders, and an ashtray on the mattress beside her. The day outside was bitter under a louse-grey sky, down in the garden the bare trees shuddered. I think of that moment, and I’m there again.

— Something inside me is wearing out, she said. Some part, wearing out.

I had met her in the hall. She was in fur boots and a beret, and a moth-eaten fur coat. Her mood was frenetic she fixed her icy fingers on my wrist and laughed, and a bubble of saliva came out of her mouth and burst. Upstairs I took her coat. Slivers of the cold air of outdoors fell like silverfish from its folds. In bed she held my sex in her chill hand and laughed and laughed, throwing back her head and offering me her throat to feed on. She would not let me inside her, shut her legs. I clutched her against me, muttering and moaning, and at last, to placate me, she knelt impatiently and put her head in my lap, and I spilled myself in a series of voluptuous slow shivers into the hot wet hollow of her mouth. Her arm lay across my chest, with its track of puncture marks running from wrist to elbow, like the stippled scar of a briar scratch, and I thought of childhood.

Felix was in the front room, lounging on the horsehair sofa reading a newspaper.

— Ah, there you are, Grendel, he said. How are you? Sit down, talk to me. We haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ve been neglecting your old friends.

I sat down at the table. A pigeon landed on the sill outside and looked in, the wind ruffling its neck feathers. Felix tossed the paper aside and leaned forward with his hands pressed between his knees. He was wearing his mac, and a flat cap pushed back on his head. There were shallow indents at his temples, I had never noticed them before. Sometimes when I looked at him closely like this he seemed a stranger.

— How goes the great work? he said. Is the prof treating you right? And what about the fat boy, does he stick to you, hey?

Adele came from the bedroom, barefoot, in her fur coat. Seeing him there she paused, then came to the table and searched in her bag for a cigarette with one hand, holding her coat shut with the other. He grinned at her, bending low to look up into her face. She said:

— How did you get in here?

— Ah, he said. Good question.

He went on grinning. There was silence. Adele smoked, frowning vaguely, her eyes fixed on the table. Felix looked from her to me, and then at her again. He chuckled.

— Having fun, you two, are you? he said. Fun and games, yes?

The pigeon flew from the sill with a clatter of wings. Felix leaned back on the sofa, one ankle crossed on a knee, and fished out his tobacco tin.

I said:

— Why did you say that he wanted me to work for him?

He lit up a butt, and blew two thick cones of smoke from his pinched nostrils. He looked at me narrowly and smiled.

— Because he did, he said. Why else?

— He doesn’t say a word to me.

— Ah, but that’s his way, you see.

Adele went and sat in front of the electric fire, holding up one bare foot and then the other to the heat. The last wan light of day was fading in the window.

— It’s true, Felix said, I may have exaggerated a little. But I didn’t say he said it, did I? I only said he wanted you, and that’s different.

He rose and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to the room, looking out into the winter twilight.

— People don’t recognize what it is they want, he said. They have to be shown. I have to … interpret.

He glanced at me merrily over his shoulder.

— Oh, yes, Pinocchio, he said. By jiminy, yes.

Adele suddenly laughed, one of her brief, high shrieks, and threw her cigarette into the grate and lit another. Then she put a hand to her forehead and bowed her head. Felix was smiling back at me still. Darkness advanced into the room.

20

I ONLY WENT TO the hospital now when I needed a new supply of pills. I avoided Dr Cranitch. Matron looked at me with her sad eyes, saying nothing. I gave all my attention to the notices on the walls in the dispensary while she filled up the little mauve phials for me. She put a fresh wad of cotton wool in each one, and wrote out new labels in her neat, schoolgirl’s hand. Miss Barr was asking after me, she said, Father Plomer too. She did not look up. Through the window behind her I could see down into the grounds. A wash of sunlight fell across the grass and was immediately extinguished. An old man on a crutch was hobbling up the drive. I picked up the pills. She watched my hands, and then she turned away.

At the gates a car pulled up and Felix stuck out his head and hailed me.

— What a lucky chance, he said. Hop in, we’re going to a party.

The car was a shuddering, ramshackle machine, coughing and farting in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. The young man with the shakes was at the wheel. His girl sat behind him in the back seat, huddled against the window. It was starting to rain.

— Come on, Felix said to me, don’t be a spoilsport.

The young man’s name was Tony. When I got in he turned and winked at me.

— Hiya, pal, he said.

There were livid bags under his eyes.

We crossed the river. Gusts of wind were smacking the steel-blue water, and pedestrians on the bridge walked at an angle, their coat-tails whipping.

— There are these people, Felix was saying, we’re to meet them at the Goat …

Tony laughed, a high-pitched whinny.

— The Goat! he cried.

The girl shrank away from me, staring out the window beside her with a fist pressed to her mouth. She had a blank white face and frightened eyes and a tiny, pink-tipped nose. Her name was Liz. Big drops of rain swept against the windscreen.

— Fucking wipers, Tony said.

Then abruptly the rain stopped, and there was sun. We drove along by the canal. The poplars were still bare. Great bundles of cloud were sailing across a porcelain sky. Felix turned around in his seat to face me.

— Seeing the lady in white, were you? he said. Wangling bonbons out of her again? Let’s have a look.

He held the little bottle of Lamias aloft between a finger and thumb, squinting at it as if it were a rare vintage, and shook his head in laughing wonderment.

— Do you know what these things are worth? he said. Do you?

— They’re gold, pal, Tony said, nodding at me in the driving mirror. Pure gold.

He wanted to take one. Felix laughed.

— Anthony, is that wise?

— Fuck wise, said Tony.

Beside me Liz was rolling a cigarette in a little machine. Twice she had to stop and start all over again. Then she spilled a box of matches on the seat. For a moment it seemed she would cry. I tried to help her gather up the matches, but when I put out a hand towards her she flinched in fright and went suddenly still, averting her face from me, her little pink nose twitching.

We were heading towards the mountains.

Tony was bouncing in his seat, beating a tattoo with the flat of his hand on the steering wheel.

— Whoo! he said. That stuff!

He looked at me in the mirror again, his eyes wide and shining bright.

— Gold! he said, and the wheel wobbled.

— Calm yourself! cried Felix, laughing. We’ll all be killed.

We left the city behind, and climbed a long hill, the old car groaning, then crossed a bare brown plateau. Sunlight and shadow swept the far peaks. Sheep fled into the ditches at our approach. Tony was crooning quietly to himself.

— Ah, how good it is to get into the open, Felix said. The mountains, the mountains, I’ve always felt at home in the mountains.

We descended a winding road and stopped at a little oasis of wind-racked pines. There was an ancient pub with fly-blown windows, and an antique petrol pump in front of the door. Chickens scratched about on a patch of oil-stained gravel, among a dozen or more parked cars. I stepped out into the cold, sharp air. Water was running over stones somewhere close by. A flush of wind shook the pines, and all at once it was spring.

The pub was dim inside. A wireless muttered somewhere. Vague figures inhabited the gloom, they eyed us cautiously as we entered. A fat man in a dirty apron emerged from a door behind the bar, chewing. He wiped his mouth on his apron, and put his big hands on the counter and loomed at us with an expression of mingled servility and craft. Felix grandly smiled.

— Dan, my friend …

I was looking at the other customers, gathered there behind us like shades, watching us. They too had come here from the city. They had something about them I seemed to recognize. There were girls who looked like Liz, and ragged young men like Tony, but that was not it. I thought of my time in the hospital, the hours I had spent among the brotherhood of the maimed. That dulled, neuralgic air of waiting, suspended. That silence. They shuffled closer. Felix turned and surveyed them, smiling, one heel hooked on the foot-rail and his elbows planted on the bar.

— Look at them, he said in my ear. They know the doctor’s arrived.

Tony went off to the lavatory. Others followed, in ones and twos. He did not come back for a long time. The afternoon was ending, the setting sun glared redly in the window, then faded. Liz sat on a bar-stool, drinking glasses of stout. She smoked and coughed. I caught her watching me. This time she did not look away. She asked for one of my pills. When I took out the phial Felix put a hand hastily over mine, looking about us sharply.

— That’s gold, remember, he said with a smile, and this is Outlaw Gulch.

A sort of groggy gaiety began to spread. Two young men linked arms and danced a spidery jig. A girl laughed and laughed. Dan the barman stood behind his cash register and watched with a worried eye the traffic coming and going in the passageway out to the lav. Felix sighed happily and softly sang:

O God, how vain are all our frail delights …

Then Tony came back with his hands stuck in the pockets of his tight trousers, grinning and twitching.

— Surgery over? Felix said. Everybody cured?

— Except me, Tony said.

The twitching had spread from his jaw into his arms, now one of his legs began to shake. Liz was pawing at his sleeve.

— He gave me, she said, giggling, he gave me one of …

He flung her hand away.

— Get off me! he shrieked. Jesus.

He was sweating. He looked into Felix’s face imploringly, with a broken smile. Felix laughed and turned to me.

— The doctor is sick, I think, he said.

— Come on, Tony whispered, gritting his teeth. Come on, don’t …

Felix turned back to him blandly.

— But Anthony, tell me, who’ll drive us home, if you get well?

The two young men who had been dancing had fallen down now, and lay on their backs waving their arms and legs feebly in the air. One of them seemed to be weeping. Tony put a hand to his forehead. Liz was watching him with a sort of glazed curiosity.

— I’ll be all right, he said. Honest, I’ll be …

Felix waved a hand.

— Oh, go on, then, he said, heal thyself.

Tony carried himself off to the lavatory, plunging sideways through the dimly milling crowd. A fight had broken out, there were screams and curses, and Dan lumbered from behind the bar, bellowing. A girl with a bleeding eye fell headlong on the floor. Someone kept laughing. Liz got down from the stool with a thoughtful, ashen look.

— Oh, she said, I think I’m going to spew.

Then suddenly I was outside in the cold black glossy night, under an amazement of stars. I could smell the pines, and hear the wind rushing in their branches. My head swam. Something surged within me, yearning outwards into the darkness. And all at once I saw again clearly the secret I had lost sight of for so long, that chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. Wind, those stars, that water falling on stones, all the shifting, ramshackle world could be solved. I stumbled forward in the dark, my arms extended in a blind embrace. On the gravel by the petrol pump a woman squatted, pissing. The fight was still going on somewhere, I could hear cries and groans. Felix rose up in front of me with a dark laugh.

— Creatures of the night! he said. What music they make!

We climbed the winding road to the crest of the hill. From here we could see afar the glittering lights of the city. The wind drummed above us, beating through the hollows of the air.

— Consider! Felix said in a loud voice, as if addressing a multitude. Is it not meet, is it not worthy, this world?

A pared moon had risen, by its faint light I could see his smile. He took my arm.

— Haven’t I taken you places, though, he said. Eh? And shown you things. Blessed are the freaks, for they shall inherit the earth.

Tony came up the hill in the car then, crouching haggard-eyed over the wheel. Liz was slumped asleep in the back. Felix got in, but I lingered on the dark road, drunk on the knowledge of the secret order of things. The wind swirled, the stars trembled. I seemed to fall upwards, into the night.

21

EVERYTHING HAD brought me to this knowledge, there was no smallest event that had not been part of the plot. Or perhaps I should say: had brought me back to it. For had I not always known, after all? From the start the world had been for me an immense formula. Press hard enough upon anything, a cloud, a fall of light, a cry in the street, and it would unfurl its secret, intricate equations. But what was different now was that it was no longer numbers that lay at the heart of things. Numbers, I saw at last, were only a method, a way of doing. The thing itself would be more subtle, more certain, even, than the mere manner of its finding. And I would find it, of that I had no doubt, even if I did not as yet know how. It would be a matter, I thought, of waiting. Something had opened up inside me on the mountain, some rapt, patient, infinitely attentive thing, like a dark flower opening its throat to the right. Now, as spring quickened around me, the city came alive, like a garden indeed, flushed and rustling, impatient and panting, with vague shrills and swoopings on all sides in the lambent, watercolour air. I put aside the black notebook, it annoyed me now, with its parade of contradictions and petty paradoxes, its niggling insinuations. Why should I worry about the nature of irrational numbers, or addle my brain any longer with the puzzle of what in reality a negative quantity could possibly be? Zero is absence. Infinity is where impossibilities occur. Such definitions would suffice. Why not? I went out into the streets, I walked and walked. It was here, in the big world, that I would meet what I was waiting for, that perfectly simple, ravishing, unchallengeable formula in the light of which the mask of mere contingency would melt. At times it felt as if the thing would burst out into being by its own force. And with it surely would come something else, that dead half of me I had hauled around always at my side would somehow tremble into life, and I would be made whole, I don’t know how, I don’t know, but I believed it, I wanted to believe it. The feeling was so strong I began to think I was being followed, as if really some flickering presence had materialized behind me. I would stop in the street and turn quickly, and at once everything would assume a studied air of innocence, the shopfronts and façades of houses looking suspiciously flat and insubstantial, like a hastily erected stage-set. More than once I was convinced I had seen a shadow of movement, the fading after-image of a figure darting into a doorway, or skipping behind the trunk of a tree. Then for a second, before I had time to tell myself I had imagined it, I sensed with a shiver the outlines of another, darker, more dangerous world intermingled invisibly with this one of sky and green leaves and faded brick.

Everything must change. What had I ever done but drift? Now at last I would have purpose, order. Felix approved.

— That’s it, he said, be positive. What did I tell you? I knew we were alike all along.

Suddenly I had seen the error I had been making. I had mistaken pluralities for unities. For the world is like numbers, the things that happen in it are never so small they cannot be resolved into smaller things. How could I have lost sight of that? I rummaged through the recent past, looking for the patterns that I must have missed. But, as once with numbers, so now with events, when I dismantled them they became not simplified, but scattered, and the more I knew, the less I seemed to understand.

I threw myself into work at the white room with a new passion. What more likely place for the light of certainty to dawn? The professor flew into one of his sudden fits of irritation.

— What is exact in numbers, he said, except their own exactitude?

— No, I said, no, not the numbers themselves, but …

He folded his stubby arms and glared at me like a vexed owl. His right eye-socket was larger than the left, it always made him look as if he were wearing a monocle.

— Well? he said. What, tell me.

— I don’t know, I said. Something else.

He snorted.

— What else is there, but numbers?

The printer sprang into clattering life, he turned to it with a scowl. Leitch looked at me sidelong and sneered, slipping a piece of chocolate into that little pink prehensile mouth.

That was the night Miss Hackett came to see us. She was a thin tall woman of middle age with a prominent sharp face and lacquered brass hair. She put her head around the door that led from the offices upstairs, with a smile that was at once both arch and roguish. Leitch, slumped at the console, sat upright hastily and stared at her. She came in and shut the door behind her and advanced on him purposefully, with a hand thrust out, still playfully smiling, her lips compressed, as if we were children and she had slipped into the nursery to bring us a treat. She wore a tweed business suit and a white blouse with ruffles at the throat. She had a mannish walk, her high heels coming down briskly on the floor in a series of sharp, smart blows. Leitch got to his feet, stuffing the empty wrapper from the chocolate bar into his pocket with surreptitious haste. She stopped in front of him with a snap.

— Mr Cossack, she said brilliantly. I’m Hackett. So pleased.

There was a smear of lipstick on one of her large front teeth. Leitch tittered in fright and put his hands behind his back.

— Oh! he said. No, I’m not …

A tiny flaw appeared in Miss Hackett’s smile, like a hairline crack in a china cup. She cast a questing glance about her. She had already taken me in, without quite looking directly at me. Professor Kosok came in from the lavatory in the corridor, still fumbling with his flies. For a moment he did not notice her. She waited, beaming, as he shuffled forward. When at last he saw her he stopped short, rearing back a little, his wide eye growing wider. She seized his hand and shook it violently once, as if she were cracking a whip. She seemed to think he must be deaf, for when she spoke she shouted.

— Hackett! she said. Thought I’d just pop in and say hello!

He continued to regard her with a grim surmise. She heaved a brisk little sigh and glanced about her brightly.

— Well! she said. And how goes the good work?

Leitch and I looked at each other, and immediately a truce was tacitly agreed between us. In the face of all the possible things Miss Hackett might represent, even Leitch felt in need of an ally. She carried a briefcase under her arm, a wafer-slim pouch made of burnished soft leather, it bespoke a marvellous importance. She fixed on the console, pointing a finger tipped with gules.

— This must be the nerve centre, I suppose? she said. It looks so complicated!

There was a brief silence. The professor grunted, and turned his back, motioning at Leitch with a cursory wave to show her the machine. Leitch put on a sickly smile and cleared his throat. Before he could speak, however, Miss Hackett held up a hand to silence him.

— Yes, thank you, she said quickly, with a sort of steely graciousness. I’m afraid I’m a feather-head when it comes to these contraptions.

The professor was poring over the printer. He was in his waistcoat and shirt-sleeves, the tabs of his braces on show. With her head on one side she considered him, taking aim at him between the shoulder-blades.

— I’m just here for a chat, she murmured. Just a chat.

She went and stood at the printer, and for a moment both of them watched in silence the sheets of figures coming up.

— How fast it goes! she said, leaning to look more closely. And so much of it! You know, we’ve been so impressed with the quantity of the material you produce here.

Professor Kosok grunted again, and again walked away from her. She continued to watch the print-out, shaking her head in a little show of admiring wonderment. The professor sat down at the console, breathing hard, and started to stab at the keys with two stiff index fingers, like an amateur pianist in a temper. Leitch and I stood on either side of him. Miss Hackett came and hovered at his shoulder. It was like a little recital, we might have been gathered around the parlour piano.

— Of course, Miss Hackett said with a silvery laugh, we have noticed a certain lack of … well, of results, shall we say?

She waited, but he went on hitting the keys as if he had not heard. She took a deep breath, and grasping my arm she moved me firmly aside, and executed a swift little twirl that brought her to a half-sitting position against the console, facing him, with her arms folded and her ankles neatly crossed. She flashed her nursery smile again, and inclined her head and peered into his face, twinkling at him.

— The minister, you know, she said in a playfully menacing tone, the minister likes results.

He lifted his hands at last violently from the keyboard, and turned around in his chair and looked up at Leitch with a harsh laugh.

— Results! he said. She wants results!

He turned again and glared at her.

— What are you talking about? he said. What do you mean, what results are these, that this minister expects?

She pounced, leaning forward with sudden force and bringing her hands together in a soundless clap.

— But that’s the point! she cried gaily. That’s what we want you to tell us! You see?

Leitch, for some reason, laughed.

She rose from her perch on the console, tucking her briefcase more firmly under her arm, and stepped past me. She was careful not to touch me this time, no doubt recalling, more vividly than she would have wished, the feel of that stick-like thing inside my sleeve. She walked off a little way, head bowed in thought, then turned and retraced her steps slowly.

— We are all aware, she said, what an honour it is that you are working here, a person of your … your … And of course, in such a case the cost is not a large consideration.

— Cost, what cost? the professor cried. This is nighttime.

Leitch coughed.

— Downtime, he said softly.

The professor turned in his chair again and glared at him. Miss Hackett waved away these interruptions, frowning, making a great show of following her train of thought.

— But we have our masters, you see, she said, even the minister is accountable.

She stopped in front of him, smiling down at him pensively, letting her gaze wander over his irate brow and pop eye, his clenched jaw with its ginger bristles, his bow-tie, his boots. Then in a flash she had drawn up a chair and plumped down on it, pressing her briefcase firmly on her knees, with an air of setting all constraints aside and getting down finally to the real business.

— My dear sir, she said. Listen. When you came to us first you spoke of conducting certain studies. I have the documentation here.

She gave the briefcase a friendly smack, as if it were the head of a trusty hound.

— It’s vague, she said. The documents are vague. We were vague, at the time. You, forgive me, were vaguest of all.

The professor stood up abruptly and stamped away from her, rubbing a hand over his scalp, his short legs working angrily.

— Studies, yes! he said. I am conducting studies! You think I lied?

Miss Hackett shook her head, still blandly smiling.

— No no no, she said soothingly, with pursed lips. What an idea! Of course there is no question of … fraud. Only, this machine, you see, it costs such a lot of money to run, even in …

She looked to Leitch, who breathed, fawning.

— Downtime, he said.

She thanked him with an almost coquettish little bob of her head, her brazen waves tossing.

— Cost! the professor said. Pah!

Miss Hackett with a deft glance consulted her watch, then drew a breath and tried again. She spoke in a soft voice, slowly, giving a pert, interrogative flick to the ends of her sentences.

— We’re only asking, she said, the minister is only asking, for some sort of statement of your precise aims in this programme? Everything you show us seems so … well, so hazy, so … uncertain?

At this the professor made a violent whooshing noise, like a breathless swimmer breaking the surface, and turned on her in a fury.

— There is no certainty! he cried. That is the result! Why don’t you understand that, you you you …! Ach, I am surrounded by fools and children. Where do you think you are living, eh? This is the world, look around you, look at it! You want certainty, order, all that? Then invent it!

He flung himself down on his chair, fuming, twisting his head from side to side and yanking at his bow-tie, his legs furiously twitching. There was a silence. Miss Hackett gave a delicate cough and touched a hand to her hair. She glanced at Leitch, at me, even, with a brittle, brave little smile, to show us how patient she was, how dauntless, then she considered the professor again, chidingly, as if he were a big, recalcitrant baba.

— I’m sure I didn’t mean to make you angry, she said. I only came to have a friendly chat. The minister wanted to send someone else, but I said no, no need for that, yet. Let me go, I said, he’ll talk to me. After all, I am a statistician, in a manner of speaking.

The professor waved a weary dismissive hand.

— Oh, statistics …! he murmured, shaking his head.

— But I see, Miss Hackett went on, I see I was mistaken. In fact, I’ve wasted my time, haven’t I. And now it’s late, and I must leave you.

She stood up, smoothing her skirt, and tucked her briefcase under her arm. Leitch wallowed forward, for a second it seemed he might pick her up and carry her, in apology and reverence, to the door. Suddenly the professor gave another of his brief harsh laughs, and rose and pushed his face up into hers, pointing a finger at me.

— There! he said. Him! He is the one you need, he thinks that numbers are exact, and rigorous, tell your minister about him!

They turned, all three, and gazed at me for a moment in silence. Miss Hackett frowned. The professor shook his head again.

— And look at him, he said. Just look.

They might have been standing on the edge of a hole, peering in. Then Miss Hackett roused herself, and summoned up a last, steely smile.

— Well, she said to the professor, goodnight, no doubt you will be hearing from us, in due course.

Halfway to the door she halted, Leitch shambling at her heels almost collided with her. She looked about the room, wrinkling her nose, as if she were noticing the place for the first time. The printer nattered, the air hummed.

— What a dungeon this is, she said. How you can stand it …!

When she was gone Leitch looked at the professor with a vengeful eye.

— You’ve done it now, he said. Oh, you’ve done it now, all right.

Things were never to be the same again between Leitch and me after that night. It was as if we had been caught up together in some desperate, accidental drama, and the shared danger had forced on us an intimacy as awkward as it was inescapable. He became talkative. He complained about the professor, called him an old fucker, told me of other enormities he had committed before that night. He sat hunched over the console, fat and venomous, muttering. Somehow Miss Hackett’s visit had lanced the boil of his bitterness, now the poison all came pouring out. He had not been treated right, he had never been treated right. They were all against him, people, all against him, just because — but there he broke off, and cast at me a narrow, distrustful look. His eyes were haunted, sunk in their pools of violet shadow, turbid, and somehow sticky, like two brown water-snails. He talked about Miss Hackett too, softly, in a sort of reverie of disgust. He made up jokes in which she suffered the most intricate indecencies. His knowledge of female anatomy was impressive, Felix called him a spoiled gynaecologist. He would put a warm hand on my wrist, chuckling, and lean his head at my ear and whisper another good one. I could never manage more than a wan smile in response, but it did not matter, he hardly noticed, he only wanted to hear himself saying the words. When Felix was there, though, he kept silent. Felix watched him, delighted with him, his slippers and his cravat, his bloated belly, that wary, aquatic eye.

— I say, Basil, he would say, what’s a gay blade like you doing in this queer hole, eh?

And he would wink at me, with an artful smile, and put up his feet on the console and light a butt from his box.

We waited for what would follow Miss Hackett. Leitch expected the worst, though he never said exactly what he thought the worst would be. One night the telephone rang, until then I had not even noticed it was there. Professor Kosok answered it, and stood and listened to its tiny, irate voice for a long time, pulling at his lower lip and scowling. He said little, and at last slammed down the receiver. When it rang again he left it off the hook. Then the volume of transmissions began to slacken, it was hardly noticeable at first. Sometimes the printer would stop abruptly, in the middle of a line of figures, and sit in silence for minutes on end, with an uncanny air of smugness and knowing. Leitch insisted he could find no fault, that they must have stopped sending at the other end, and the professor would shout at him, until at last the printer started up again, as if nothing had happened. The day-people were staying later and later, once when I arrived they were just leaving, I spotted a hand closing the door, and heard them laughing on the stairs. The seats of the chairs were still warm.

Felix dropped in at all hours, arriving sometimes in the early morning, when we were finishing. He always looked as if he had been up all night, doing things. He and I would go out together into the dawn, and walk along by the grey river, in the mist. I remember those mornings with peculiar clarity, the silence over the city, the gulls wheeling, the pale spring sunlight struggling through the grime, that particular shade of lavender in the dense air above the rooftops. He talked about the professor, asked in an offhand way about the work we were doing. I think he thought I was keeping things from him, he would give me a long look, quizzically smiling, his head thrown back and one rufous eyebrow arched. I told him about Miss Hackett, and he laughed.

— So they’re on to him, eh? he said. Better take care, Philemon, that you don’t get washed away along with him.

22

IT WAS ON ONE OF those mornings with Felix that — no, he wasn’t there, it was just a morning, in April. The professor was away too, I don’t know where, it doesn’t matter. The flat was silent. There was the remains of a meal on the table in the front room, and a brimming ashtray. I stood at the window, not wanting to leave, not wanting to stay either. Pain had started up its thrumming tune, as it did at this weary hour every morning, I imagined something inside me, all knees and terrible elbows, plucking at my nerves. The street was deserted. In one of the houses opposite I could faintly hear a telephone ringing, it went on and on. The silence congregated at my back, it was like some large mute beast, nudging at me gently, with a kind of mournful insistence. I did not like to be alone like that, in a room not my own, I felt as if I were a stranger, I mean a stranger to myself, as if there were two of us, I and that other, that interloper standing up inside me, sharing in secret this pillar of frail flesh and pain. But then, I was not alone.

She was in the dingy bathroom on the landing, I found her when I tried to open the door and something was stopping it. She lay in a huddle with her knees drawn up to her chest and one bare arm flung out. She was wearing her plastic raincoat over her slip. One of her bare feet was wedged against the door, I had to hold my breath and squeeze sideways through the opening. When I knelt beside her she stirred and gave a fluttering, vaguely protesting sigh, like a sleeping child unwilling to be wakened from a dream. Her hands were icy, she must have been lying here for hours. There was a blue bruise turning yellow in the hollow of her elbow.

— Adele, I said. Adele.

It sounded foolish.

I gathered her up in my arms. She had wet herself. She was unexpectedly heavy, a chill, clammy limpness that I could hardly hold. Her raincoat squeaked and crackled when I lifted her. I got my foot around the door to open it, but lost my balance and swayed off to one side, like a caracoling horseman, and for a moment I was trapped there, with one foot in the air and my shoulder pressed to the wall. A tap was dripping in the handbasin. The window behind the lavatory was open, down in the garden a blackbird piped a repeated, liquid note, that too was like water dripping. When I turned my head a magnified eye, my own, loomed at me in a shaving mirror. I looked at things around me, that tap, an old razor, a mug with a toothbrush standing in it, their textures blurred and thickened in the ivory light of morning, and I felt for a second I was being shown something, it flashed out at me slyly and then was gone, like a coin disappearing in a conjuror’s palm.

I got her to the front room and put her on the sofa, propped against the armrest. Her head kept slipping down. I must have stood there for a long time, transfixed, just looking at her. Then I strode into the kitchen and back again, to the bedrooms, wringing my hands, looking for I don’t know what. I brought her ragged fur coat and wrapped it around her. I think I was talking to her all the while, I recall dimly the dull blare of a voice in the background, cajoling and hectoring, it can only have been mine. I recall too the Parisian delicacy of the spring morning, with faint traffic sounds and the clatter of pigeons, a puff of white cloud in the corner of the window, that big pale parallelogram of sunlight on the floor at my feet.

Then the ambulance arrived, and a curious, dreamy lentor took hold of everything. I suppose I expected a great commotion, sirens and the screech of brakes, boots on the stairs, shouts. Instead there was a polite ring on the bell, and two cheerful, burly men in uniform came in, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. They had an air of having known exactly what they would find. They went to work calmly, one wrapping Adele in a red blanket while the other unrolled the stretcher. Then together they lifted her deftly from the sofa, and fastened a leather strap across her shoulders and another across her knees, and one of them leaned down and brushed a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She was so pale, so peaceful now, like an effigy of a martyred child. Down in the street the radio in the ambulance muttered at intervals. They set the stretcher on the pavement while they got the back doors open. Adele woke up and looked about her wildly. She clutched my sleeve.

— What have you done? she said in a hoarse, weak wail. Oh, what have you done …

They put her in the ambulance then and took her away. In the building opposite that telephone was ringing again.

There was only one hospital she could go to, of course. I walked, silent as memory, along those familiar corridors. All was still. There were moments like that, I remembered them, when things would go quiet suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the busiest morning, and calm would spread like ether through the wards. A radio somewhere was playing softly, and down in the kitchens a skivvy was singing. They told me Adele was sleeping, that’s how they said it, she’s sleeping now, as if sleep here were a special and expensive kind of therapy. And they gave me a cold look. But when I came back that evening she was awake, sitting up straight in a white bed, like an eager bird tethered to a perch, with her thin hands clenched on the counterpane and her neck stretched out. The room smelled of milk and violets, her smell. Felix was there, and Professor Kosok. The professor sat with his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on his knee and looking at the ceiling. I paused in the doorway.

— Here’s bonny sweet Robin, said Felix. What, no sweetmeats for the fair maid, no flowers fresh with dew?

Adele’s eyes were feverishly lit, and she kept laughing.

— Look at this place, she said, what am I doing here, I’m perfectly all right.

Her gaze slid past me, it would fix on nothing. There was an angry patch of red at the corner of her mouth, she scratched it with her fingernails, scratched and scratched. She was still in her slip, with her fur coat thrown over her shoulders. She had been pulling at her hair, it stuck out, blue-black and gleaming, like a tatter of feathers. Felix spoke to me behind his hand with mock solemnity.

— She is importunate, indeed distract.

He chuckled. Light of evening glowed in the window. Outside was the top of a brick wall, and a flat expanse of roof with a chimney like a ship’s funnel, belching white smoke. The professor shifted on his chair and sighed.

— It’s late, he said to no one in particular. I have to go.

But still he sat there, with eyes upcast, his fingers drumming, drumming. A moment passed, like something being carried carefully through our midst. Then Felix laughed again softly and said:

— Yes, boss, come on, it’s time we went.

At the door the professor hesitated, pretending to search for something in his pockets. He frowned. Adele would not look at him. Felix gave him a playful shove, and winked at me over his shoulder, and then they were gone.

I watched the blown smoke outside. The evening sky was pale. In the distance I could see the faint outlines of mountains. Adele kept her face averted. I tried to touch her hand but she took it away, not hastily, but with firmness, like a child taking away a toy.

— I have no peace, you see, she said. No peace. And what will I do here?

She sighed, and shook her head, with an air of mild annoyance, as if all this were just something that had got in the way of other, infinitely more important matters that now would have to wait.

— I’m sorry, I said.

Distantly in the sky a great flock of birds soared and wheeled, dark flashing suddenly to light as a thousand wings turned as one. Icarus. Adele looked about her vaguely.

— They took away my cigarettes, she said. You’ll have to bring me some.

And for the first time since I had come there she looked at me directly, with that fierce, strabismic stare.

— Won’t you? she said. You’ll have to …

The door behind me opened, I turned, and matron stopped on the threshold and looked at us.

Order, pattern, harmony. Press hard enough upon anything, upon everything, and the random would be resolved. I waited, impatient, in a state of grim elation. I had thrown out the accumulated impedimenta of years, I was after simplicity now, the pure, uncluttered thing. Everywhere were secret signs. The machine sang to me, for was not I too built on a binary code? One and zero, these were the poles. The rushings of spring shook my heart. I could not sleep, I wandered the brightening streets for hours, prey to a kind of joyless hilarity. I was in pain. When I lay down at last, exhausted, watching the sky, the fleeting clouds, a dull, grey ache would lodge in the pit of my stomach, like a grey rat, lodging there. At ashen twilight I would rise, my eyelids burning, and something thudding in my head, and set off for the hospital.

There too a frantic mood held sway. I would arrive in Adele’s room and find her with Felix and Father Plomer, all three of them bright-eyed and breathless somehow, as if at the end of some wild romp. The priest was a frequent visitor, he would put his head around the door with a conspiratorial smile, and enter on tiptoe, plump and large in his black suit and embroidered stole, his glasses flashing. He clasped his hands and laughed, showing his white teeth and gold fillings. He was like a big awkward excited girl. He loved to be there. Let’s have a little party! he would say, and he would get one of the kitchen girls to bring up a pot of tea and plates of bread and butter. Before he sat down he would remove his stole reverently and kiss it, closing his eyes briefly. Then he would lift his hands heavenwards and softly say:

— Ah, freedom!

Felix he treated with a sort of tremulous familiarity, prancing around him nervously and tittering at his jokes.

— Oh, you have a wicked wit, he would say. A wicked wit!

And Felix would look past the priest’s shoulder and catch my eye, smiling, his thin lips stretched tight.

Adele sat up in our midst, with her stark white face and her fright of hair. She had changed her slip for a satin tea-gown with roses and birds, it made the room seem more than ever like an aviary. She laughed more and more too, but more and more her laughter sounded like the first startled screeches of something that had blundered on widespread wings into a net. Her eyes grew dull, a faint, whitish film was spreading over the pupils. She complained about the light, it was not bright enough, but when the venetian blinds were drawn up, or another lamp was brought, she covered her face and turned away from the glare.

Outside her door after one of our visits Father Plomer hung back with an air of solemn excitement and spoke to Felix and me.

— I mean to save her, you know, he said. Oh yes, she’s agreed to take instruction.

Felix reared back from the priest in wide-eyed wonder.

— Oi vay! he breathed, and put up a hand to hide the thin little mocking smirk he could not stifle.

Then for a while that romping air I used to find when I arrived in her room gave way to a tense, reverential atmosphere, in which something seemed to vibrate, as if a little bell had just stopped ringing. Once I even came upon them in the act of prayer, the priest down on one knee, a hand to his forehead and his missal open, and Adele lying back on the pillows with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes cast upwards, wan and waxen in her satin gown, like a picture of a drowned maiden laid out on the flower-strewn bank of a brook. But it did not last. One day she snatched the prayerbook from him with a laugh and flung it across the room, and although he hung about in the corridor with a wounded look she would not consent to see him any more.

— Don’t worry, padre, Felix said to him jauntily, she’ll find her own way to the light.

That night she was gay, she sat with her ankles crossed under the covers and an ashtray in her lap. She had put on lipstick and mascara, and painted her fingernails scarlet. She waved her cigarette about, fluttering her lashes and pouting like a vamp.

— He tried to put his hand under my clothes, she said. Imagine!

Felix fairly whooped.

— Oh my, oh my! he cried, clutching himself. So much for salvation, eh?

When he was gone she sat and plucked at the bedclothes, frowning. She would not meet my eye. She picked up a magazine and flipped through it distractedly.

— Listen, she said, you’ll have to get me something. That bitch will only give me that stuff, that method stuff, what do you call it, it’s no good.

She ceased turning the gaudy pages and sat quite still, her head bowed. There was silence. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and watched with narrowed eyes the thin blue plume of smoke pouring upwards.

— I can’t, I said. How can I.

For a moment she said nothing, and did not stir, it was as if she had not heard.

— Yes, she said quietly. That’s what he says, too. And then he laughs.

She looked up at me and tried to smile. The sore patch at the corner of her painted mouth was raw. Her lower lip was trembling.

— She gives you things, doesn’t she? she said. Pills, those things? You can ask her. You can say it’s for yourself.

She struggled up, overturning the ashtray, and knelt on the edge of the bed and clasped her arms around my neck and pressed her trembling mouth on mine. She began to cry. Lipstick, smoke, salt tears. That taste, I can taste it still.

— I’ll let you do it to me, she moaned. Everything, everything you want. Everything …

23

I STOLE IT FOR HER. I knew where to look, what to take. Matron was not at her desk, the key to the dispensary was in her drawer. I walked upstairs. It was teatime, no one paid me any heed. In a hospital even I could go unnoticed. I locked the dispensary door behind me. How quiet it was there suddenly, like being underwater, amid all those shelves of greenish glass, those phials brimming with sleep. I found what I had come for, but still I lingered, leaning by the window. It was a gusty twilight. A sky full of wreckage flowed overhead in silence. Down in the grounds a cherry tree whipped and shuddered, its fallen blossoms washing in waves back and forth over the grey grass. How many moments had I known like this, when everything faltered somehow, like a carousel coming briefly to a stop, and I saw once again with weary eyes the thing that had been there all the time. I pressed my forehead to the glass. To stay here, to stay here forever, like this. To have it over, finally. She was up pacing the floor, holding herself tightly in her arms. She flew at me, where had I been! I handed her the tiny plastic ampoules. She thrust them into a pocket of her gown and stood a moment motionless, with a sort of vacant grin, gazing at nothing. Then she frowned. No, she muttered, no, the room wasn’t safe, there was no lock on the door, anyone could walk in. Besides, her things were not here, she had hidden them. She paced again, talking to herself, one hand stuck in her hair and the other tearing at the sore on her mouth. Then she halted, nodding.

— There’ll be no one there, she said. There’s never anyone there at this time, it will be all right.

She clutched my arm.

— Yes, she said, yes, it will be all right.

It strikes me suddenly how like cloisters were those corridors, with their arched ceilings, their statues and their lilies, that quiet that was not quite silence. She hurried ahead of me, keeping to the wall, a barefoot wraith. She led me to the chapel. It was a little vaulted cell hung with flags and pennants and holy pictures in big brown frames. A stained-glass window, from which the last light was fading, depicted the assumption of the Virgin in pinks and gaudy blues. There were daffodils on the miniature altar. A brass oil lamp with a ruby-red globe was suspended from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The place, festooned and dim, had a jaded, vaguely sybaritic air, like the tent of a desert chieftain. There was a smell of wood and wax. The silence here too was somehow murmurous, as if thronged with lingering echoes. Adele reached behind a picture of a skewered St Sebastian and brought out a plastic bag that had been taped with sticking plaster to the back of the frame. We stood for a moment in the holy hush, with our heads together, admiring her treasures. There was a little bottle and a spoon, a rubber dropper, and a disposable syringe, its needle bent, that she had salvaged from a waste bin. I was thinking of another occasion, when we had stood like this, in each other’s warmth, our breath mingling. Outside the wind was blowing. Her hands trembled. The wounded saint considered us with his level, sad, lascivious gaze.

She knelt at the step in front of the altar to blend her brew, while I sat on a bench and watched. She worked with loving, rapt attention, biting her lip and frowning, forgetting herself. I hardly knew her, kneeling there, transfigured, lost in her task, a votive priestess. Now and then she had to stop and wait for the shaking in her hands to subside, and looked about her dimly, with unseeing eyes. She lit a stump of penny candle and set it on the step and warmed the mixture in the spoon. Then she sat back on her heels and rolled the sleeve of her gown to the shoulder. Her naked arm glimmered in the fading light. She found a vein, and squeezed and squeezed until it stood up, plump and purple, gorged with blood. At first the needle would not penetrate, and she prodded and pushed, making a faint mewling sound and arching her back. Then suddenly the tip went in, and the swollen skin slid up around it, like a tiny pouting mouth, drawing the fine steel shaft deep inside itself, and she pressed the plunger slowly, while the pulsing vein sucked and sucked, and at last she leaned her head back, her eyelids fluttering, and exhaled a long, shivering sigh.

I knelt on the cold floor and held her. She stared at me sightlessly. Her hand, still holding the syringe, lay limply beside her on the step. I crushed the chill silk stuff of her gown in my hands.

— You promised, I said. You promised.

I lifted her up and walked her to the door, and made her stand with her back to it so that no one could come in. She put one arm across my shoulders, and with the other held my head in a fierce embrace, grinding her chin into my jaw. Her thighs were cold. I listened in vague wonder to my own hoarse quickening gasps. The back of her head beat dully against the thick oak door. She was laughing, or crying, I don’t know which.

— You’ll get more for me, won’t you, she said into my ear. Say it, say you’ll get more.

— Yes, I said, yes.

But I did not have to get it, I had it already, enough to keep her going for weeks, it was still in my pocket, enough to keep us both going, for weeks.

And so at the same time evening after evening we came there to the chapel, and I gave her that day’s ration of peace, and in return she opened her gown and briefly held me, gasping, pressed to her shivering flesh. I recall the quiet around us, the light dying in that garish window, and the smell of the place, like the smell of coffins, and the vague clamour of teatime outside in the wards, a noise from another world. Afterwards we would sit for a long time together in the dim glow of the flickering altar lamp, as another day died and night came on. Sometimes an old woman in a dressing-gown would creep in and kneel for a while, sighing and mumbling, with her face in her hands. She paid us no heed, perhaps she never noticed us. It was May, the month of Mary, fresh flowers were placed on the altar every day, daffodils, and tulips, and lilies of the valley. Adele sat with head bowed and her hands in her lap, so still she seemed hardly to breathe. I told her about numbers, how they worked, how simple they were, how pure. I do not know if she was even listening. I told her too about that moment on the mountain, how it had come to me afresh, with more weight than ever, that under the chaos of things a hidden order endures. A kind of rapture thickened in my throat, I gagged on it as if on grief. She leaned her shoulder wearily against mine.

— I have to get out of this place, she said. Help me.

A bell was ringing, they would come in soon to say the rosary. I rose to go. She looked up at me, out of her dark, dazed eyes.

— Help me, she said.

Felix listened to me, he understood. That’s it, he said, that’s it! smiling and nodding, urging me on. To know, to do, to delve into the secret depths of things, wasn’t that what he had always urged on me? And now he would help me. He had contacts, he had influence. There were people other than the professor, there were other machines, too, bigger, and better, oh yes, yes, he would show me! I liked to listen to him talk like this, it set up a kind of excited hum inside me that had alarm in it, and presentiment, and dark pleasure. And if now and then I looked up unexpectedly and caught him watching me with a merry eye, smiling that artful smile of his, well, I didn’t care.

In the afternoon sometimes I walked about the city with him. We went to the zoo, one of his favourite haunts. He found everything irresistibly funny there. He would stand in front of the tiger’s cage, or in the torpid gloom of the alligator house, and fairly split his sides. The animals in their turn watched him with what seemed to me a puzzled, wary eye. Oh look, look! he would cry, in a transport, clutching my arm and pointing a trembling finger at a baboon picking at its purple arse, or a hippo trying to mount its mate.

— What a strange old world, all the same, he said, that has such monsters in it, eh, Caliban?

He met people there, they would step out from behind a tree, or lower a newspaper and look at him with a humid stare. There was something about them, an air of tension and vague torment, that fitted with the place. They might have been peering through invisible bars. When he spotted them he would laugh softly to himself and walk over rapidly and talk to them, keeping his back to me. He never referred to these encounters afterwards, but fell into step beside me again and blandly took up talking where he had left off. But some days I noticed him looking about with a watchful eye, and a trace of strain crept into his smile, and he kept to open ground.

— If you ever have to look for me, he said, you know where I’ll be, don’t you?

We were walking by an ornamental lake. The day was overcast, the air a sheen of damp pearl. He was eating a pink ice-cream cone, and kicking idly at the ducks crowding the churned mud of the water margin.

— I mean, he said, if you can’t find me, if I’m not around. When matters become complicated, a period of withdrawal is the best thing, I find.

He glanced at me and grinned. A black swan sailed past us in silence, with its chaste, bashful mien. The ducks gabbled. He tossed the last of his ice-cream into their midst and there was uproar. On a little island in the lake a pair of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches of a dead tree.

— We should stick together, Felix said. We’re two of a kind, you and me.

He linked his arm in mine then, and we went through the gate and up the hill to the bus stop. The city was below us, crouched under a lowering sky. We were stopped in traffic by the river when the rain came on, rattling against the side of the bus. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and a pale wash of sunlight fell across the rooftops and the shining spires, and at a great height a solitary white bird soared against a bruise-coloured wall of cloud. How innocent it all was, how unconcerned, I remember it, the drenched light, the spires, that bird, like a dreamy background, done by an apprentice, perhaps, while in front horses plunge and blackamoors roll their eyes, and a poor wretch is dying tacked to a tree.

In Chandos Street we found Liz huddled on the steps outside the front door. When we approached her she flinched and put up her arms to protect her face. There was a livid bruise under her eye, and her lower lip was split and caked with blood. She would not stand up, but cowered against the door with her knees pressed to her chest. I knelt beside her, but she turned her face away from me with a sob. Felix stood before her with his hands in his pockets, tapping one foot.

— Tony being impetuous again, is he? he said. That boy is so excitable.

Liz mumbled something. One of her front teeth had been knocked out, it was hard to understand her.

— Come again? Felix said, leaning down with a hand cupped to his ear.

— He’s gone! she cried.

There was silence, save for her muffled sobs. It was growing dark in the street. Felix considered her pensively, jingling coins in his pocket.

— Gone? he said softly. How do you mean, gone?

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming. Her lip had begun to bleed again. She held herself by the shoulders, trembling.

— They were waiting for us on the corner, she said. They made him go with them.

Felix looked up and down the street, then leaned down to her again, with his hands on his knees, and smiled.

— They, now, he said. Who were they, exactly?

She shook her head.

— Ah, he said. Strangers. Tell me, my dear, would you say they were, perhaps, seafaring gentlemen? Yes?

He glanced at me, still smiling.

— Well well, he said, a pair of jolly tars, no less. I wonder, now, who they can have been.

He skipped down the steps and stood on the pavement, peering about the street again, more carefully this time. Then he came back. He examined Liz’s face closely, squatting on his heels in front of her and shaking his head.

— You don’t look at all well, he said, do you know that? Not at all well.

She watched him warily, snuffling, running a hand through her matted, ash-coloured hair. He smiled at her and lifted his eyebrows, holding his head to one side.

— Tell you what, he said, how about a treat, to make it all better. What do you think? Wouldn’t that be nice?

He brought out from an inside pocket a tiny square plastic envelope and held it up for her to see, wagging it gaily under her nose. At once she sprang at him and tried to snatch it, but he drew back, grinning.

— Ah ah! he said. First, a question. What did they want, precisely, these sailor laddies?

She watched the little envelope, licking her broken lips.

— You, she said. It was you they were looking for.

He stared in mock astonishment, clapping a hand to his heart.

— Me? he gasped. Me? Good gracious!

He laughed, and rose from where he had been squatting and turned away from her. With a cry she scrambled after him on her knees, clutching at the tail of his mackintosh. He paused.

— Oh, your fizz-bag, yes, he said. Here.

He tossed the envelope on the step. She grabbed it, and clawed it open, and with her fingers drew down her swollen lower lip and shook the contents into the crevice between lip and gums. Then she crawled back and sat down at the door again, hugging her knees to her chest. She was crying, we could hear her as we walked away into the dusk.

At a phone box on the corner of the square Felix stopped. He cradled the receiver under his chin, holding the door open with his knee and winking at me as he spoke.

— Yes, Chandos Street, yes. I think she must have taken something, she looks very … What’s that? Me, officer? Oh, just a citizen, doing his duty. Bye bye, now.

He let the door bang shut behind him, and turned up the collar of his coat and rolled his eyes.

— The plot thickens, he said, eh, Watson?

It was in the final editions, foul play down the docks, the body of a young man taken from the river, severe injuries to head and face, unrecognizable. Police were keeping an open mind.

24

THE CITY I HAD THOUGHT I knew became transfigured now. Fear altered everything. I scanned the streets with a sort of passion, under the glare of it things grew flustered somehow, seemed to shrink away from me, as if stricken with shyness. They had never been noticed before, or at least not like this, with this fierce, concupiscent scrutiny. I saw pursuers everywhere, no, not pursuers, that’s not it, that’s too strong. But nothing was innocent any more. The squares, the avenues, the little parks, all my old haunts, they were a façade now, behind which lurked a lewd, malignant presence. Panic smouldered in me like a chronic fever, ready to flare up at the smallest fright. Walking along the street I would suddenly speed up my steps, until I was flying along, head down, heart hammering, my breath coming in little cries, yet when I stopped at last, exhausted, and looked behind me, there was never anything there, only a sense in general of low, gloating laughter. Twilight I found especially alarming, that hour of shadows and dim perspectives, I fled from it into the fluorescent sanctuary of the white room, where everything seemed its own source of light, and surfaces were impassive, without deceptive depths, and the atmosphere was neutral and inert, like a thin, colourless gas.

There was little to do there now. The transmissions from abroad had ceased altogether. The professor paced and scowled in furious silence, a man betrayed. The telephone was left permanently off the hook. Some nights he did not appear at all, and Leitch and I were left alone in a fraught, uneasy intimacy. Leitch was restless too, he prowled about softly in his slippers, his hands stuck in the drooping pockets of his trousers. No matter where he was in the room I fancied I could hear him breathing. He told me his jokes, and offered me choice tidbits from his foodbag. I had preferred the old animosity to this somehow menacing warmth. I felt as if I were holding on to a tether in the dark, at any moment what was at the other end might rear up and savage me. He tended the machine now with a kind of frenzied vigilance, watching over it like a thwarted, jealous parent, cursing it, kicking it, throwing crusts of bread at it. The thing suffered these affronts in silence, dully, its attention somehow averted, as if it were thinking about something else entirely. It maddened him, its imperturbability, its complete, ponderous, irredeemable stupidity.

— It knows nothing, the professor said, nothing it has not been told.

Leitch drew his great head down into his shoulders, his bruised dark gaze wandering here and there about the room.

— Yes, he said bitterly under his breath, just like us.

One night he came up behind me in the lavatory and put his arms around my waist. I tried to free myself, and we tussled briefly, rolling from side to side in a sort of laborious hornpipe. We staggered out the door into the corridor, where our grunts and gasps echoed like the sounds of a real fight. I got an elbow into his chest at last and gave him a tremendous push. He fell back, winded, and leaned against the wall with his mouth open and a hand pressed to his breastbone. His cravat was twisted under one ear, and he had lost a slipper. He glowered at me with a smeared eye.

— What’s up with you! he said. He told me …

He paused.

— He told you what, I said. He told you a lie.

I wanted to kick him, I could almost feel my foot sinking into that soft belly, could see him on all-fours puking up his sticky supper. I was angry not because he had laid hands on me, but because I knew that now I could not be there any more.

— Look at you, he was saying, Jesus, what a freak.

He turned his face to the wall and wept, in sorrow and in rage, his chubby shoulders shaking. I went out into the night. The air was black and wet, foghorns were blaring in the bay. The building towered above me, seeming to topple slowly in the drifting mist, all windows dark. No one was about. I walked away. Another sanctuary was gone.

Adele sat on a chair beside her bed, brushing her hair with slow, stiff strokes. She was wearing an old dressing-gown tied with a frayed cord. Her face, bare of make-up, was pale and blurred, as if she had scrubbed at it so hard the features had become worn. She gazed before her dully. Father Plomer stood at the window, facing the room, with his arms folded and his head thrown back. Behind him the sun shone on the flat roof and the smoking funnel, and far away a tiny aeroplane glinted, crawling athwart a clear blue sky. His face was in shadow, the silvery lenses of his spectacles gleaming like coins. Matron was there too, standing behind Adele, quite still, and leaning forward a little, in that way she had, her arms hanging. They seemed posed, the three of them, as if they had been placed just so, for a group portrait. Adele did not look at me, as if she did not know that I was there. I had brought cigarettes for her. Matron put out a hand silently and took them.

— Adele has given up smoking, Father Plomer said. Haven’t you, my dear? A new life. She’s going to lead a new life.

And he smiled, blank-eyed and bland. Adele went on pulling the brush through her hair, stroke by stroke. Matron continued to look at me for a moment, then turned away, for the last time.

When I went to the chapel that evening Adele was not there. I was not surprised. She was in her room, asleep, stranded among the tangled sheets as if a wave had deposited her there. I sat for a while in the stillness, watching her. It was bright yet outside, but the blind was shut, a grey half-light suffused the room. Twilight, her hour. Hers too that lost, wan, tender shade of grey. Her lips were open, one hand lay on the pillow beside her cheek. I put the ampoules into the pocket of her dressing-gown and went out quietly and shut the door behind me.

The bus swayed and pitched along the narrow roads, wallowing on the bends, the gears roaring. Trees advanced at a rush into the headlights, their branches thrown up in astonishment, then plunged past us into the darkness again. I was in the seat by the door, near the driver, a lean, pale, taciturn man who sat with his bony knees splayed, turning the big flat steering wheel with a rolling motion of his arms, as if he were hauling in a rope. At the stops he would lean forward and rest his elbows on the wheel, his wrists crossed, and suck his teeth and gaze out at the road. We went through a village, and halted at a dark crossroads where an old man with a crutch got on. He paused on the step and looked at me, panting, his old mouth open toothlessly at one side. We climbed for a long time, then bounced across an open plateau, I could see faint stars low down to right and left, and a gibbous moon perched on the point of a far peak. Sometimes too, when the road wound back on itself, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the city far off in the distance behind us. Then we rolled down into a hollow and stopped, and the driver looked at me.

Different air, and the smell of pines, and a crisp wind, and stars. I watched the bus depart, the rear-lights weaving slowly up the side of the hill. Then quiet, and the sound of water. A dim light burned over the door of the pub, and there was a light in the dirty window too. I walked across the gravel. He must have heard the bus stopping, or maybe he was watching from the window. He hung back in the darkness of the doorway until he had got a good look at me, then he came forward with a hand lifted in greeting.

— Ah, Melmoth, he said softly. We’ve been expecting you.

When I think of that second visit to the Goat I imagine a long, low, turf-brown tavern with oil lamps and glinting copper mugs, and hams and things hanging from the rafters. The picture only needs a pot-boy in an apron and a merry old codger with curly side-whiskers and a meerschaum warming his shanks in the inglenook. Where do they come from, these fantasies? When I entered first the place seemed deserted. Fat Dan stood behind the bar, picking his side teeth delicately with the nail of a little finger. He wore a shirt without a collar, and a green sleeveless pullover, tight as a harness, that stopped halfway down his belly. He greeted me with a large, slow wink, involving less the closing of an eye than the opening sideways of his mouth.

— A hot toddy, Dan, for the traveller, Felix said.

We sat on stools at the bar. As I became accustomed to the gloom I picked out a few other customers here and there, big silent countrymen in caps and long, buttonless overcoats, whose eyes veered away like fish when they met mine. Felix watched me as I supped the steaming liquor. He was wearing plus-fours and argyle socks, and a cloth cap with a button in the crown.

— I’m glad you’ve come down, he said, really I am. It gets awfully monotonous here.

I told him Tony’s body had been found. He put a finger quickly to his lips and cast a meaning glance in Dan’s direction.

— Yes, he said quietly, I saw that too. Most sad. I was shocked, I can tell you.

I said nothing. He studied me with a rueful little grin.

— I say, he said, I hope you don’t think I was to blame, do you? I didn’t lead them to Chandos Street, after all. It wasn’t me they followed.

He took out his tobacco tin and lit up a butt, and watched me through the smoke, still smiling.

— Now don’t get down in the dumps, he said. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a sort of accident.

— An accident, I said.

He tittered.

— But of course, he said, you don’t believe in accidents, do you, I forgot. Everything is a part of the pattern. Well, perhaps poor Anthony’s demise is indeed a link in some grand plan, or plot, but that still doesn’t mean that anyone is to blame, now does it?

He smoked in silence for a while, brooding, then laid a finger on my wrist and said:

— And you’re not to worry, either. Just remember, ships must sail, eventually.

— They come back, too, I said.

He laughed.

— Oh, yes, he said. Die ewige Wiederkunft, eh?

Fat Dan approached, and leaned a forearm on the bar and inclined his head towards me in a confidential manner. Would I be wanting to stay? he wondered.

— Any friend of Mr Felix is welcome here, he said, breathing warm sincerity and smiling.

He led me up a narrow stairs, his great shiny backside swaying ahead of me. I remember him holding a candle, but surely that’s another fantasy. At the back his hair was shaved to the top of his head, where a boyish little lick stuck up. His neck was a big wad of red fat with bristles. On the landing he paused, panting softly, and looked at me with a sort of ogling grin, as though there were some faintly scandalous secret unspoken between us. He nodded back down the stairs, in the direction of the bar, and said:

— He’s a queer card, all the same though, what?

He showed me into a tiny room with a low, sagging ceiling, a single small square window, and an enormous brass bed. The wallpaper, embossed with flower shapes, had once been white, but was now a sticky amber colour, it seemed to have been varnished. The wainscoting was brown, the paint combed to look like grained oak. Dan stood gazing a moment in the doorway with a solemn air.

— This used to be the mammy’s room, one time, he said quietly.

He sighed, and more quietly still he added:

— Before she fell into flesh.

When he was gone I put out the light and sat on the bed in the dark for a long time. The moon was higher now, riding in a corner of the window. I could see the vague shapes of pines outside, swaying in the wind, and beyond them, far off on the sides of the surrounding hills, the little lights of cottages and farms dotted here and there, frail beacons in the midst of so much darkness. I heard the last of the drinkers leave and tramp away along the hill road, and then the sounds of Dan locking up for the night. A dog barked for a while in the distance, listlessly. My scars ached.

What was I thinking about?

Nothing. Numbers.

Nothing.

We tramped the hills for hours, Felix and I, day after day. The weather was windy and bright, the last of spring, the flushed air rife with the singing of larks. It made me giddy, to be for so long up so high. Everything tended skywards here, as if gravity had somehow lost its hold. White clouds would fly up from behind a granite peak, billowing upwards into the zenith. There was nothing to hold on to, all around us as far as the horizon stretched the browns and flat greens of bracken and bog. Then suddenly we would come to a turn in the path and find ourselves on the edge of a stony crater, with a steel-grey lake far below us and a little puff of pale cloud floating in midair.

— Ah, wonderful! Felix cried. Doesn’t it make you feel like something out of Caspar David Friedrich?

He laid a hand on his heart and breathed deep, smiling for bliss, his eyes closed and nostrils flared. He was wearing his plus-fours and his cap, and carried a tall spiked stick. I watched shadows streaming like water down the far flank of the crater.

— What did you say about me to Leitch? I said.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me in exaggerated startlement. Then he broke into silent laughter, the tip of his tongue coming out and quickly vanishing again.

— Why? he said slyly. Worried for your reputation, are you?

— That was a place to be, I said. Now I can’t go there any more.

At that he laughed out loud, striking his stick on the stony ground.

— Boo hoo! he said, sneering. Listen, that place is finished, you know it. They thought the old boy was doing something brilliant, until they found out he was using their precious machine to prove that nothing can be proved.

He walked to the edge of the path and lifted hieratic arms above the abyss, thrusting the alpenstock aloft.

— O world in chaos! he intoned. Blind energy, spinning in the void! All turns, returns. Thus spake the prophet.

He came back, hobbling and wheezing, a bent old geezer now, using his stick as a crutch, and squinted up into my face.

— Here’s place enough, and time, he said.

Wind swooped past us down the slope and wrinkled the steely surface of the lake. The sunlight sparkled. He took my arm and walked me along slowly, with priestly solicitude.

— Put yourself in my hands, he said. I have high hopes for you, you know. Really, I have.

We rounded another turn in the path and came out on a rocky ledge. From here we could see in the distance a dense blue smear of smoke that was the city. Below us was the pub, and the road winding away. He squeezed my arm against his ribs.

— What do you say, eh? he said. Think of the times we’ve had, you and me. And think of the future.

I went ahead of him, down the side of the hill. On the bridge over the little stream behind the pub I paused to swallow a pill. He stopped a pace behind me, with his head on one side, smiling faintly and scraping in the dust with his stick.

— And behold, he said, angels came and ministered unto him.

I left that night. Felix and I waited in the bar for the time when the bus would arrive. The setting sun blazed briefly in the window, then the shadows gathered. Fat Dan was offended that I would not stay. He wiped the top of the counter with slow strokes of a dishcloth, glancing at me soulfully now and then. In the end, though, curiosity overcame his sense of umbrage, and he edged closer and closer, wielding the cloth in ever narrowing sweeps, and spoke at last.

— Them burns, he said, did you get acid on you, or what?

Felix rolled his eyes.

— It’s the mark of Cain, Dan, he said.

I told my tale. Dan was enthralled, he had never heard such a thing, grafts, tinfoil bandages, all that. He folded his arms on the counter and leaned his plump breasts on his arms and gazed at me in awe, as if it were some marvellous feat I had performed.

— Holy God, he said, you’ve been through the wars, all right.

— And now he’s banished, in the land of Nod, Felix said.

Dan paid him no heed, but glanced about the bar, as if there might be someone who would overhear, and leaned closer to me with a portentous air.

— Come here, he said, come on here, now.

He took down a big iron key from a hook behind him, and lifted the flap of the counter and stood back to let me enter. I looked at Felix. He shrugged.

— Go ahead, he said. There are some things even I don’t know.

Dan led the way through a door behind the bar into a narrow, dim passageway with cluttered shelves and crates of bottles on the floor. There was a musty smell of apples and of clay. For a moment I felt I had been here before, long ago. We came to another door. Dan paused with the key in the keyhole.

— I knew you weren’t like them others he brings up here, he said. I knew you were different.

And he smiled and winked.

The room was small, and filled with things. A banked-up coke fire throbbed in the grate. By the fire, in a vast armchair, a vast woman sat. She had a great round head, like the head of a stone statue, and ragged sparse white hair. Her bloated face glistened in the glare of the coals like a glazed mask that had begun to melt. She wore a sort of gown of some heavy shiny black stuff, and a knitted jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape.

— This, Dan said, is Mammy.

Out of that swollen mask two tiny glittering eyes fixed on me an avid, unwavering stare. She did not speak. A window at the far side of the room looked out on to a scrubby bit of garden where a few hens were scratching in the dirt. The jagged tops of the pines stood stark as black teeth against the sky, as if a huge mouth were closing slowly around us. The hour was growing dark. Dan brought a chair for me and I sat down. Mammy smelled of peppermint, and of things that had been worn for too long next the skin. Each breath she took was a deep, harsh draught, it shuddered into her, subsiding, and then she was still for a moment, until the next one started. Dan sat down beside me, rubbing his palms on his knees, his big face shining.

— There’s not many are let come in here, he said loudly. Isn’t that so, Mammy?

He smiled sheepishly, gazing at her proudly, as if somehow she, not he, were the offspring. She ignored him, he might not have been there. Her hand lay on the armrest beside me, stuck like a stopper into the end of her fat arm. Her face was almost featureless, nose, mouth, cheeks, all had melted into shapeless fat. Only the eyes remained, undimmed. Since I came in her gaze had not shifted from me for an instant, it was at once remote and intent, as if she were not used to looking at human creatures. The air thudded softly, heavy with heat. The room crowded around us. There was a table, cabinets, cupboards, a brass coal scuttle, a sofa with its stuffing coming out, two china dogs eyeing each other on the mantelpiece, a porcelain ballerina in a tutu made of real lace, a silver cake-stand, a bookcase without books, a glass globe with an alpine scene inside it and stuff that would make a snowstorm, a bow of crimson satin saved from a chocolate box, a pair of toby jugs, a ship under full sail in a bottle, a coloured picture of Mary, the Mother of God, with a dagger piercing her heart. Dan was talking away, but I was not listening. The darkness deepened, the fire shone red. I wanted to leave, to get away, yet could not, a kind of voluptuous lethargy had taken hold of me, my limbs were leaden, like flasks filled with heavy liquid. And it seemed to me that somehow I had always been here, and somehow would remain here always, among Mammy’s things, with her little unrelenting eye fixed on me. She signified something, no, she signified nothing. She had no meaning. She was simply there. And would be there, waiting, in that fetid little room, forever.

The bus was late. Felix and I paced up and down outside the pub. The night was clear and starry. Felix was pensive, whistling softly through his teeth. He didn’t know why I was going, he said, why I wouldn’t wait a few days more. He would be leaving too, then. We might have gone together. He glanced at me sideways, trying to make out my expression in the darkness.

My expression.

— Can’t tempt you, eh? he said. Well, there’ll be another time.

I gazed away up the road. He touched my arm lightly.

— Oh, yes, he said, there’s always another time.

Then he walked off, laughing, into the night.

The hill road gleamed, the pines sighed, the light from the lamp over the door of the pub shivered in the wind. Absence, absence, the forlorn weight of all that was not there.

25

THE LILAC WAS IN bloom in the hospital grounds. The first frail venturers of the season were out in their slippers and their dressing-gowns, holding up their shocked ashen faces to the sun. On the roof gay puffs of white smoke streamed away in the wind, they made the building seem for a moment a great ship bounding through the blue. The entrance hall was a glare of light. A sparrow had got in somehow, and was beating its wings against the glass in the corner of a high window, I can hear it still, that tiny, frantic commotion. They stopped me at the desk.

— Are you a relative? they said.

A shaft of sunlight thronged with dust-motes stood aslant the stairs, like a pillar falling and falling.

Mother.

I walked down a corridor, waited in a room. There was a table, plastic chairs, a vase of dried flowers. Time passed, an age. I was there, and not there. At last Father Plomer arrived, and stood before me with his soft hands clasped. He was not wearing his spectacles, without them his eyes had a raw, damaged look. He shook his head, as if over some mild disappointment, or some inclemency of the weather.

— I’m sorry, he said.

Icarus. Icarus.

Full is the cup.

I wanted to see her room. The bed had been stripped, the waste bin emptied, the locker door stood open. And yet, for me, she was there, there in all that was missing. Had it ever been otherwise? I leaned my head at the window, watching the smoke on the roof, the little clouds, the far, shadowy hills. A frozen sea was breaking up inside me. Father Plomer paced softly, his leather soles creaking.

— She was found in the chapel, you know, he said. I take that as a great sign, that she would go there, to be at peace.

He paused and looked at me, with that naked, groping gaze, then paced again, creaking.

— Of course, the question is, he said, where did she get that awful, awful stuff, and so much of it. The powers that be have their suspicions, and if they prove right, a certain person, I can tell you, will be losing her position here, and very soon, at that.

Again he glanced at me, with a meaning look, and nodded slowly once. Do I imagine it, or did he rub his hands?

I found Professor Kosok at the flat in Chandos Street. He was sitting by the window in the kitchen, in his overcoat and hat. One fist lay clenched before him on the table. His eyes were red, fat tears rolled down the greasy sides of his nose. They had given him her things in a plastic bag: her handbag, her fur coat, her flowered tea-gown. He looked at me wearily.

— Where is your order now? he said.

She was his daughter, did I mention that?

I walked through the bedrooms at the back. How grandly the sun dreamed here, falling down through the great windows, light from another time. I stood and wept. Summer! The garden was in blossom. A pigeon landed on the sill, spoke softly, and flew away again.

When I left I took her syringe with me, in its velvet case, as a keepsake.

A part of me, too, had died. I woke up one morning and found I could no longer add together two and two. Something had given way, the ice had shattered. Things crowded in, the mere things themselves. One drop of water plus one drop of water will not make two drops, but one. Two oranges and two apples do not make four of some new synthesis, but remain stubbornly themselves. Oh, I don’t say I had not thought of all this before, only that now I could not think of anything else. About numbers I had known everything, and understood nothing.

I lost the black notebook, misplaced it somewhere, or threw it away, I don’t know. Have I not made a black book of my own?

Grief, of course, and guilt. I shall not go into it. Pain too, but not so much as before, and every day a little less. My face is almost mended, one morning I’ll wake up and not recognize myself in the mirror. A new man. I stay away from the hospital. What is there for me there, any more? I want no protectors now. I want to be, to be, what, I don’t know. Naked. Flayed. A howling babe, waving furious fists. I don’t know.

Have I tied up all the ends? Even an invented world has its rules, tedious, absurd perhaps, but not to be gainsaid.

Sometimes still I have the feeling, I think I’ll never lose it, that I am being followed. More than once, as well, I have turned in the street at the sight of a flash of red hair, a face slyly smiling among the faceless ones. Is it my imagination? Was it ever anything else? He’ll be back, in one form or another, there’s no escaping him. I have begun to work again, tentatively. I have gone back to the very start, to the simplest things. Simple! I like that. It will be different this time, I think it will be different. I won’t do as I used to, in the old days. No. In future, I will leave things, I will try to leave things, to chance.