My Idea of Fun

CHAPTER SIX. THE LAND OF CHILDREN'S JOKES

The Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs dabbles its soot-stained foundations in the dry gulch of Hampstead Road. It is a confused structure, for the most part laid out like an expanded collection of Victorian alms houses, but in the thirties it was book-ended with further accretions.

To the rear of the hospital, facing the low bluish bulk of Euston Station and bounded by the rentable air-conditioning of the Kennedy Hotel, there is a tangled garden. This space was set out with aristocratic beneficence, to provide the staff and patients with a gentle gravelly progress around a pattern of beds and lawns. Over the years the funding has trickled away, to be replaced — in the garden at least — by dead leaves and sodden pieces of moulded foam, the remains of some forgotten, but no doubt essential, act of packaging.

If you face it from across the Hampstead Road the thirties accretion to the left of the hospital resembles nothing so much as a banking blockhouse. With its facade of grey-yellow dressed stone it would be right at home among similar on Lombard Street. Set into the very corner of this annexe is a solid oaken door. It has no nameplate next to it and there is no other sign to indicate whether this is a subsidiary entrance to the hospital, or nothing to do with it at all.

Behind the oaken door is a reception area divided by two high steps. Beyond this, spreading out higgledy-piggledy along the level are a collection of sepia rooms with distempered walls. The carpet-tiled floors of these rooms are studded with large metal ashtrays that look like tissue boxes that have been mysteriously galvanised. Connecting the rooms are short corridors, their linoleum floors so scarified by cigarette burns that the black gouges give the semblance of a pattern. Off these corridors are urine-scented toilets, equipped with white bars that can be pulled away from the wall should you require assistance in standing. Clamped to the walls of these toilets are white metal boxes that dispense with unflagging regularity, absolutely nothing.

For six years this unprepossessing domain had been the fiefdom of Dr Hieronymus Gyggle, psychiatrist, specialist in addictive behaviours and — as he liked to style himself-practical philosopher. Where other people would have seen only the dregs of humanity, their faces and hands scuffed and broken by the hard labour of intravenous drug use, Gyggle saw chirpy Cockney junkies. As his great ginger beard escorted him around the premises he always half expected his clientele to leap up, stick their thumbs in their braces and break into song, ‘Consider yerself at home, consider yerself part of the fa-mi-ly.’

Then Gyggle was no ordinary shrink — as we know — and on this particular hot Friday afternoon in late summer, his activities, in their peculiar diversity, served to underscore this fact.

He was dividing his precious time between three ongoing projects. Firstly, in one of the sepia rooms sat six of his junkies, talking their way through a group therapy session. Gyggle made attendance at these groups mandatory for anyone who wanted to get on the ninety-day methadone reduction programme.

Secondly, in a plastic-curtained cubicle right at the back of the unit lay Gyggle's protégé, his oldest patient, a tall, plump marketing consultant by the name of Ian Wharton. Gyggle had brought Wharton with him from his last job as student counsellor at Sussex University, much in the way that a lesser doctor might have transported a favourite desk ornament or a collection of sporting prints.

Lastly, in the great man's office, which looked myopically through dirt-filmed windows on to the gardens described above, there sat a young woman, one Jane Carter. Jane was fidgeting, searching out the split ends that destroyed the precise line of her bobbed hair. She was also waiting for Gyggle, waiting for him to come and assess her suitability as a voluntary worker.

Gyggle strode through the drug dependency unit. His beard was so long and so rigid that it scouted out the corridors in front of him, possibly trying to draw sniper fire. Every so often he would stop to exchange cheery words with one or other of his colleagues. The smack heads, thought Gyggle bustling on, can wait and so can Ms Carter — what I must get under way is Ian's deep-sleep therapy. He paused and consulted a fake diver's watch which was shackled to his bony wrist. It's four now. I'll have to wake him by four on Sunday afternoon, or else he'll be too dopey for work on Monday and we wouldn't want that, oh no.

The plastic curtain pulled back and Ian looked up from where he lay on the examination couch, outlined in the long thin gap was the long thin form of Dr Gyggle. Gyggle propped himself in the gap, he dangled from the curtain rail on his mantis arms. He was chewing gum and the long fan of the beard swished across his shirt front with each chew. ‘Ah, Ian,’ he fluted. ‘Been here long? Nyum-nyum.’ Swish-swish went the beard.

‘Long enough.’

‘Feeling a little nervous, are we, or just sarky?’

‘I don't know what you mean.’

‘Sarky it is. Look, I want it clear, Ian, that I'm not pressurising you to do this. You can get up off that couch and go home if you want. I don't even want to put you under if you haven't got the right attitude.’

‘Oh, and what is the right attitude?’

‘Well, here's how I see it,’ and just like any other ghastly enthusiast Gyggle propped one of his infinitesimal buttocks on the side of the couch and hitched up his trouser legs, preparatory to delivering his lecture. ‘Deep sleep is a logical extension of the role of psychiatrist as shaman. If we consider the act of interpretation — as in either psychoanalysis or dynamic psychiatry — as analogous to the forms of auspication practised by such individuals, then the deep-sleep experience can be equated with their summoning up of a possession trance.

‘In traditional societies the possession trance is invoked to purge demons by putting the subject in touch with his tutelary spirit. So, what I'm hoping for from this is that through protracted exposure to dream sleep your psyche will realise, and then dissolve the cathexis you have built up around this mythical character, this “Fat Controller”.’

‘Please,’ said Ian, hefting himself up on one elbow: ‘You must refer to him as “The Fat Controller” and it's important to capitalise the definite article — even in thought. ‘

‘You see!’ Gyggle exclaimed. ‘You see what a hold this still has on you. Don't you want to be free of him?’

‘Oh for Christ's sake, you know I do.’

‘Well then, the therapy is worth a try. Now slip out of your things, I'm going to give you a pre-med shot.’

‘What?’

‘We'll put you under and keep you there with a sedative, but the sensation of losing consciousness can be unpleasant, so it's a good idea for you to be relaxed beforehand. Now do what I say, Ian, and don't quibble.’

While Gyggle busied himself with ampoule and syringe Ian took off his clothes. Standing naked save for his boxer shorts he felt a chill run through him, despite the fusty warmth of the cubicle. ‘Am I going to have to lie on that bloody bench all weekend?’

Gyggle had loaded the hypodermic and was fiddling with the drip and catheter that dangled from a hook above the couch. ‘Nyum-nyum’ (swish-swish) ‘no, of course not, when the unit closes this evening you'll be moved over to the main hospital and put in a bed there. I've arranged for one of the nurses to keep an eye on you, maintain your sedative and nutrient drips until I come on Sunday afternoon to, as it were, call you back from the land of shades.’

‘And you say I'll be all right for work on Monday?’

‘Oh absolutely, you've an important job on at the moment, haven't you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Now turn on your side, I'm going to give you the pre-med.’ Ian felt Gyggle slap his buttock and then the apian sting of the needle. Warmth started to seep over him, spreading from a patch at the base of his spine. It was like being lowered into a warm bath, or reentering the womb. By the time he had turned back over on the couch Gyggle was standing once more in the artificial entrance. ‘Relax, Ian. I have to deal with something and then I'll be back to put you right under, OK?’ He turned and was gone.

* * *

Meanwhile, in one of the rooms at the front of the unit that faced the Hampstead Road, Gyggle's neglected group therapy session was under way. The six junkies were engaged in an investigation of the nature of the generic. Gyggle would have been pleased if he could have heard them, for their deliberations were carried out according to guidelines laid out by him in his self-appointed role as practical philosopher.

‘Like “Hoover”,’ said John, his dirty fingernail tracing the line of bubbling melted flesh that edged his jaw. ‘I mean to say, no one talks about a “domestic cleaning appliance” when what they mean is an ‘oover, now do they?’

‘Nah, nah, ‘snot like ‘oover at all, ‘cause ‘oover is like a manufactured thing, innit, not just. . a. . err— ‘

Well?’

‘A product!’

‘Tch!’ John waggled his head from side to side, heavy with disdain. His interlocutor, Beetle Billy, was a small black man wearing a green piped jumper, the frayed cuffs of which came half-way down his hands. Beetle Billy's voice had an irritating lispy component- he was agreed almost universally to be a waste of space and deeply stupid.

‘Or Magimix,’ John went on, warming to his theme. He sat forward in his chair and began to chop at the air with his thin, blue-tattooed forearms. ‘People still fink of Magimix as a company name, as well as a product, don't they?’ The question hadn't been intended as rhetorical but Beetle Billy wasn't living up to his role in the symposium anyway; as for the other junkies they seemed oblivious to what was going on. Someone at some time, probably a probation officer or a social worker, had been foolish enough to tell John that he was ‘highly articulate’. As a result a lot of non-professional people had been suffering from his articulacy ever since.

He went on, ‘Of course they do but let me tell yer, in a few years’ time no one will say “food pro-cess-or”, iss too long for one fing, “foo-ood pro-cess-or”.’ He drew it out for all it was worth. ‘Nah, they'll say magimix wiv a little “m”. Now Billy in some ways the whatsit, the thingummy, the whosie, the how's-yer-father, the anything happening? the some, the stuff, the gear, iss jus’ like that, like the magimix, or the ‘oover, for that matter. Soon no one will see it as anyfing but the product, the only one, not just one of a number of types — ‘

‘But, John,’ Billy broke in, making a late bid for casting as Glaucon. ‘Like, there are different kinds of gear, aren't there, mate?’

‘Yes, Billy, there are, just as there are different kinds of domestic cleaning device.’ Then, as if this gnomic comment somehow managed to sum up the whole conversation, John sat back, clasped his hands behind his head and sank into a reverie.

Beetle Billy seemed unconvinced; he fidgeted with the frayed cuffs of his jumper and regarded John balefully. With his silvery hair scraped back severely, his thin nose, high cheekbones and dark eyes, John looked vaguely aristocratic. This was an impression swiftly cancelled whenever he opened his mouth, whereupon spindly yellow canines, knocked in and blackened, slid from behind his lips. There was that demerit and there was also the way the skin of one of his cheeks was all bunched up around his jaw. It looked as if someone had stuck a ratchet into the crease at the top of John's neck and then twisted it. Somebody else — or maybe the same sadist — had then gently smoothed over the spiralled web of fleshy folds with a soldering iron, or at any rate some implement that seared — but slowly.

‘John.’

‘Yes, Billy.’ Billy was canted forward, his face grey with concentration.

‘You know Tony?’

‘Yes, Billy.’

‘Tall Tony?’

‘Yes, Billy.’

‘He told me to come up to Bristol, like — ‘

‘Recently?’

‘Nah, last year.’ John sighed. It was going to be a long story. ‘He knew some bloke from that portis place near Bristol— ‘

‘Portishead?’

‘Is that it? Yeah, anyways, Portishead. Tony and this bloke had done a chemist's the night before and had the cabinet in ‘is ‘ouse, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So Tony called me and told me to drive up an’ get it, on account of how this bloke was like known and he thought the old bill would come an’ see ‘im about it cos this bloke, he was like —’

‘The natural suspect?’

‘Thassit. Anyways, I drove up there. Took me ages cos the only V-dub I had had a leaky case. I was stopping every twenty miles to put in more oil an’ that. Mind d'jew, I managed to sell it on to that dozy brass Ethel the following week — ‘

‘And?’

‘Yeah, well, I got there, like, and it took me ages to find the place, it was right on the edge of town in this little sort of crescent. When I came round the corner I saw that the old bill was there already, parked up right in front of the ’ouse. So I just floored it and kept on going, started looking for the way back to London.

‘I was driving along this road, going past some football pitches, when I saw Tall Tony and this bloke — funny-looking geezer wiv’ an awful squint — they were in the middle of one of the pitches carrying the cabinet between them. Some kids there having a kick-around but they'd stopped, like, to see what Tony and the squinty bloke were doing.’

‘What did you do?’ John yawned the question.

‘I got out of the motor an’ ran out into the middle of the pitch after them. Tony saw me an’ started cursing me for being so late. “Where's the car?” he screams and I point it out to ‘im. “You two break the effing lock on this thing and get the right stuff out of it, I'll pull the car round the other side of the pitch. “

‘So thass what we did. It was comical really cos it took ages to break the lock and all the kids came over to look. Turned out that the bloke with the squint's kids went to this school, so there's these kids saying fings like, “What yer doin’, Mr Anderson, what yer got that bloody great box for?”

‘We got the cabinet open, at last, and everything fell out on the ground. We ‘ad to grovel in the mud trying to work out what was what — by the time we got back to the car we were in a right state, I can tell you. Tony's sitting behind the wheel. “Got it?” he says. “Yeah,” says I and I show him some of what's stuffed in my pockets. “What's that crap?” he says. “Dikes and rits,” says I. “You said just bring the stuff.” Then he explodes like, “Not that stuff, you effing berk, the amps, the fucking amps! The whole thing was full of dry amps you stupid fuck!” He was gutted, wouldn't talk to me for months after that.’

‘Who?’ said John, whose attention had wandered somewhat.

‘Tall Tony, of course, not the squint bloke. I wouldn't of wanted to talk to him again anyway, he was off his trolley on whizz, had the horrors. All the time we were driving round this Portis place, laying low to avoid the filth, he kept blathering on telling me how — if he had a long enough line — he could catch ships in the fucking Bristol Channel by casting from the top window of ‘is ’ouse. ‘

Beetle Billy lapsed into silence, as if the point of this story were self-evident. No one broke it. John was staring up at the ceiling, his lips moving as he counted the fire-resistant tiles. The other junkies might have been dead for all the movement they made. They were all quiescent, locked into the private purgatory of withdrawal, save for one, a lank thing with greasy hair and bifocals who looked like an electrical engineer fallen on hard times. This character was smoking a cigarette with great concentration and using its glowing tip to reduce a Styrofoam cup to a charred lattice. The only sound in the room besides a bluebottle nutting the dirty windowpane was the faint fizz the fag made as it touched the flammable stuff.

‘So?’ said John eventually.

‘Well, the story, Johnnie-boy, it's like, it's like. . err — a whatsit. ‘

‘An example?’

‘Yeah, thassit, an example, cos he said “the stuff’ and I didn't know what he meant. So it can't be true that gear is like whatsit. ‘

‘You mean like the word “Hoover"?’

‘Yeah, thassit, like ‘oover.’

There were several very good reasons why Hieronymus Gyggle had decided to operate from within a drug dependency unit. As he had admitted to Ian Wharton, he viewed the junkies themselves as little more than cannon-fodder to be sent over the top and out on to the battlefields of insanity. However, more importantly, Gyggle needed the junkies the way that a queen bee needs her workers. In their metrical journeyings around the city's dealers and chemists, its shooting alleys and front lines, they collected a property that he required for his more intensive, more unusual incubations.

For the states of consciousness attained by humans in deep sleep or extreme narcosis are not mere brain events, fleeting coalescences of neurones, they are concrete things. Once abandoned by their original occupants these artefacts are left lying about our crowded universe waiting for new tenants to inch into, grubwise. There were plenty of these kicking around the DDU, they were as much a part of the detritus of the place as cigarette butts and the plastic containers used for urine samples. Fortunately they were far more difficult to remove. These cubicles of catalepsy thronged the stairwells and, being negatively buoyant, clustered under the strip lights like invisible cauls.

Ian Wharton, the Omnipom beginning to course through his body, took flight. His dormant psyche drifted up and was netted by the defunct dreamscape of Richard Whittle, one of Gyggle's junkies. It was a fresh reverie, only recently deposited at the DDU, and as such particularly potent, nightmarishly sappy. It acted as a portal, a gateway to the plains of heaven, the awful demesne where his mind — unfettered by identity — could roam where the wild things were.

Richard was struggling towards consciousness but his way was blocked. The world had chosen to interpose some myriads of dynasties of encrusted dreams between Richard and wakefulness. Both dreams that operated within dreams and dreams that were themselves fragmentary evidence of some long lost hypnogogia, which had enabled opaque archaeologists to reconstruct elements of this prehistoric dream, then put it on show in the clear glass cases, that were themselves the relics, the sacrosanct vessels, of another culture that was itself a dream.

Richard lay on his back (as did Ian) and felt the collar of his anorak slick against his neck. (For Ian read paper antimacassar, scratching.) He was gazing through a rain-flecked window. Looked at upside-down the terrace of houses opposite was entirely strange and disembodied. Enormous, its pastel façade shiny after showering, the vast bulk of the terrace, its crenellation of chimneys festooned by spidery antennae, seemed to glide through the sky below. It was moving rather than the ragged cloud behind it. The whole terrace, like an urban liner, was cruising off along the street.

There was the soft sound of sock scuffed on carpet. Richard looked up as Beetle Billy and Big Mama Rosie swam into view. (Gyggle and his corrupted charge nurse were back in the cubicle, the nurse adjusted the spigot on a bag of clear fluid and dangled it from the hook above the couch.) They came into the room and stood — in so far as their numbers allowed it — around where Richard lay.

‘Come on, luvvie,’ said Big Mama Rosie, her very flesh wobbling from side to side, working hard to justify its owner's sobriquet.

‘Martin's here,’ said Beetle Billy and his dumb mouth drooled, his saliva spelling out the implication.

Richard tilted forward until he was upright. By the time he got there the couple had gone. He hadn't heard them leave but now their low murmurs welled up from the kitchen downstairs. Big Mama Rosie and her husband Martin lived in a maisonette of bewildering proportions. Richard thought that the gaff might have as many levels as it did rooms. Long, slightly warped passageways with bulging walls connected dusty half-landings curtained off by heavy drapes of plush and velvet. Progress around the maisonette was mediated by swishing, and each swish brought forth another fluff ball from the train of a drape. The maisonette was close, sultry even, but sultry with swaddling, not with heat. There was never any money for heat.

Richard wandered down the stairs. The bottom half of the staircase was open to the room it entered. Richard sat half-way down observing Martin, Big Mama Rosie and Beetle Billy. They were working around the kitchen table. Their work was hurried but efficient. It involved fire and liquid, crucibles and filtration, yet the impression Richard had was of mechanics at a pit stop, rather than of chemists, such was their mania.

Big Mama Rosie looked up from the syringe she was priming. ‘Wait in the kids’ bedroom, Richard, I'll be right up.’

Richard eased himself back up the stairs on his bum. He made a promise to himself that he would reach the kids’ bedroom without rising to his feet, he'd go the whole way backwards on his bum. Already his wrists ached, it was going to be really difficult but the task was magically important, or so Richard told himself. If he could do it the hit would be good and everything would be all right, the wars would end and the starving children would be fed.

He reached the top, then went up and over a raised landing. He hustled quite quickly down the passageway, scampering backwards on heels of hands and heels of feet, until he collapsed giggling at the door of the bedroom. Richard fell on to the top bunk and lay there. His breath came in disordered gasps, each one dislodging a little nugget of nausea which travelled up his gullet and spilled into the back of his throat. He felt the prickle of sweat moving across his brow and top lip. He wiggled his fundament, pressing it into the thin foam mattress. Was that tortured squeaking the bed springs, or his own rusted pelvis?

Richard's feeble attention wandered off; even the involuntary action of moving his eyes felt hobbled with resistance. They staggered a few inches, then settled on the spatter of sticky decals and cartoon pictures that Big Mama Rosie had stuck up above the kids’ bunk bed. Richard lost himself in the contemplation of Goofy and Pluto's distant Korean cousins. They had bodies the colour of passion fruit and snouts as bulbous as breasts. Their feet were cloven into two rounded toes, and their paws into two soft digital prongs which could surely never oppose or, as in the example of a lime-green creature lingering behind some two-dimensional grass, lift a cup of tea to lines-for-lips.

Richard was wholly sucked into this world of forms. Forms that had set off from the idea of the human body and driven as far and as fast as they could, back towards the moment of conception. Until they reached this world, a world of the foetal. This was the joke bestiary that children could relate to. Creatures with vestigial limbs, omnipotent capabilities and no genitals, only rounded furry mounds, impossible to penetrate.

Big Mama Rosie came into the kids’ bedroom with Beetle Billy's broad brow poking over her shoulder. He was reciting some interminable tale to her back. ‘And then we was, like, wedged into the alley, cos he hadn't thought of that. It was easy to get the cabinet thingy down the coal chute but we couldn't lift it over the bloody wall and anyways the dog was barking, Fucker Finch's dog, a pit bull— ’

‘Shut up, Billy!’ Billy was Rosie's brother. Rosie waddled to the window and yanked the curtain to one side.

Dusk had come like a thick yellow discharge across the sky. Rosie's dark brow reflected this yellow and also the orange of her tubular skirt. She extended jaundiced hands towards the cold glass while flicking the barrel of the syringe she held pinched between finger and thumb. Puny bubbles dislodged themselves from the fluid and floated up to join the scud of scum that rested at the syringe's collar. (Gyggle drew up 5 mls of liquid Valium into the large barrel. He had already inserted the catheter in the back of Ian's hand, taped it in place and stoppered it.) She flicked and flicked, then pushed in the plunger until a pee-stream of liquid arced up to hit the plastic curtain rail.

Beetle Billy hovered dronishly in the background, uncertain of whether to stay or go.

Leaving the window, Rosie came to join Richard where he lay on the top bunk. She mounted the first step of the flimsy midget ladder. She paused, wobbling. One hand held the syringe, the other plucked and then began to hoist the stretchy orange cloth up over her knees, revealing firstly fat calves, secondly fat knees and latterly the tedious gusset of her voluminous pants. A knee came on to the bunk. Rosie straddled Richard and pushed herself down on to his crotch. All he could feel now was the muddled ridged cloth of his trousers; there was no other sensation.

As Rosie unbuttoned the cuff of Richard's shirt, he turned his face away. Beetle Billy had settled himself on top of a white chest of drawers with pseudo-brass knobs. He was reading an old copy of the Beano with total absorption. Over the cretinous mechanic's shoulder Richard could see the darkened corridor, bulbless these last four months, and thought — but perhaps only imagined — that a figure lurked there.

Rosie's quick hands, as deft as blind rats in a sewer, had discovered the pit of Richard's elbow and found also his tiny, flaccid, invulnerable penis. She held his penis like the syringe, tightly, and eased both in together, the needle into Richard's arm, his penis over the elasticated rim and into her damp maw.

Big Mama Rosie began to truffle and muffled champings fell from her mouth. She moved over Richard like a planetoid blob, pumping at the syringe with one hand, until his red blood joined the orange fluid in the barrel. He made the effort and lifted his free arm up into the air; it floated away from him, ethereal and unconnected. He pawed weakly at Rosie's T-shirt, pulling the damp fabric away from. her chest. Rosie's breasts were like two sweating blancmanges. They lay on her rib cage, depressed and puddingy — the nipples were recessed. Richard tried to pull these fly-speck currants out of their soft surround, the virulent pink slab of yesteryear's dessert.

There was a ‘lumpa-lumpa’ noise in the air, a deafening heartbeat. Richard looked down at the crook of his arm and saw that a massive thrombus had blown up in the vein; it bulged beatingly, uncontrollably: ‘lumpa-lumpa, lumpa-lumpa’. Richard tried to call out to Rosie, to tell her to cease with her injecting of him into her and her into him. It was no use, her eyes were glazed and rolled back in their sockets, she stared sightlessly up at the ceiling where Spiderman hung from his plastic web. The ‘Iumpa-lumpa’ grew, filling the cold closeness of the room. Outside the streetlamps came on, each one an island. ‘Lumpa-lumpa, Iumpa-lumpa.’ And still the lump grew and grew in the crook of his arm, grew until it eclipsed the arm itself. And still Rosie pumped up and down. Richard tore with his nails at Rosie's breast, feeling the skin pucker and give, like the wrinkled rubber of an old party balloon.

The breast exploded. The thrombus exploded. Suddenly the air was full with a spray of orange droplets; gouts of pussy fluid spurted out from arm and chest. The tattered skin of Rosie's breast fell slack against the exposed radiator of her rib cage. Richard stared down at his arm. Corners of flesh and skin curled away from the ragged hole in the crook of his elbow. Exposed to view, in the very core of his arm, were the crude struts and wonky rivets of his Meccano anatomy, lain bare for all to see.

A huge bald man came in from where he had been loitering in the passage and stood over Richard. He was wearing an immaculately tailored pin-stripe suit. The bald man mopped the orange gunk from his lapels and brow with a silk paisley handkerchief. Then he reached his hand down towards Richard's face, middle fingers and thumb bent in, index and little fingers extended, warding off the evil eye. With the two outstretched fingers he teased down Richard's eyelids and pressed him back once more, down into the orange darkness.

('He's right under now,’ said Gyggle.

‘An’ I suppose you want me to change his bloody pee bag an’ that.’

‘Well, yes. I do think that constitutes part of your duty as a nurse.

‘Usually there's a good reason for why a patient is unconscious for the whole damn weekend.’

‘Ours not to reason why — ‘ Gyggle shot over his shoulder, and was gone, off to interview his volunteer.)

Ian was in the Land of Children's Jokes. His gummy eyes prised themselves open to see a garish room full of clashing primary colours, post-box reds, viridian greens and cerulean blues. It was a large room and the furniture was all fungal. There were giant toadstools instead of chairs and grossly distended puffballs in place of sofas. Tall mushrooms gathered together, their slick flat caps grouping to form the surfaces of what might have been tables. The close air in the room was meaty, yeasty, damp and beefy.

There were two men in the room with Ian. One, who was plump and pink, squatted naked in the corner. The other wore a purple suit of satin covered with large black spots and moved about, stepping between the unusual soft furnishings. Every third step he twirled on his heels and as he did so struck an attitude, the cane in his right hand held aloft at an angle. Ian could hear him muttering to himself, ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ the emphasis always on the last ‘cha’.

‘Are you awake, dearie?’ said the pink man in the corner. He spoke without moving, but it was clear to Ian from the way that his flabby thighs quivered that the man was finding it difficult to hold his position. As if to confirm this every few seconds a little clenched hand would shoot out from his lap and drop to the carpet, steadying his wavering bulk. ‘Doh err!’ exclaimed the pink man. ‘I'm not: sure I can hold out like this for much longer. ‘

‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The character in the polka-dot suit shot between them, pirouetting. As well as the cane he sported a top hat made from the same shiny material, and in the same pattern — this he now began to raise and waggle, keeping time with his Terpsichorean promenade.

‘It's my balance, you see,’ the pink man went on. ‘It's by no means as good as it used to be, not at all as good, not at all.’ To underline the point, he then nearly fell right back on to his bum, only saving himself by grabbing the thick stem of a fierce three-foot-high fly agaric. ‘Oof! I wonder if it's worth it, it used to take a couple of days but now it can be a month or more.’

‘What?’ asked Ian.

Speaking had to have been a mistake. Before he spoke Ian could as much believe that the room and its occupants were a hazy figment as a real situation, but with speech came focus and precision: the sharp tang of a fresh crop of mustard and cress that spread across the rotting pile of the damp carpet; wan heaps of daylight that fell in from a tall triptych of sash windows at the far end of the room; Pinky's voice, which resolved itself into a soft-accented bucolic burr; and the ‘Cha, cha, chal’ that came rattling in between them defined itself as precipitate, intrusive, urban, American.

‘What only used to take a couple of days?’ asked Ian again. While it was quite true that he was riven by fear and wrapped around with the nauseous sensation of so much fungus in an enclosed place, his salvation still clearly lay in conversation.

‘To get the worms out, of course.’ Pinky essayed a gesture towards the puckered base of his body but his little arm could only reach half-way down the side of one haunch. There it rested, the index finger crooked inwards toward his hidden portal. ‘I'm sure it's not these, because they're just as good as they ever were. Why, they're even doing a special offer at the moment, you get twenty-five per cent extra — absolutely free!’ He was genuinely delighted by the bargain, his gently weathered features creased up with joy.

Ian propped himself up on his elbows as best he could. This motion set off waves of infective pollenation in the organic bed — spores the size of dragonflies lifted off in a puff of oxidised dust from around his neck and shoulders. The experience was truly appalling but there was some pay-off, for his semi-recumbent position allowed Ian to see beneath Pinky's bum. A Mars Bar lay on the carpet. It had been cut open and the chocolate coating prised apart to reveal the stratification of toffee, caramel and nougat within.

‘For the worms, you see,’ Pinky explained. ‘They love a Mars Bar more than anything else, although that being said, they'll usually take a Snickers or a Bounty as well.’

‘So what's the problem?’ Ian felt genuinely curious.

‘Oh! Do you really sympathise, do you really? Do you think you could really care? He never even asks what the situation is’ ('Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!') ’he's completely absorbed in his own problems. But if you're interested I'll tell you.

‘You see, the cycle normally lasts about a week. First there's a funny pain, in a sort of a band around my tummy, then come the cramps and the squits. But it's when I actually start to lose weight, that's when I know that the worm is back for certain, that's when I have to act.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Well, here's how it is. I usually push a Mars Bar up my bum every day for three or four days. On the fourth day — and mark my words, this has never failed before- I just lay the Mars Bar on the carpet and sort of squat over it. When the worm peeks out of my arsehole to see what's happened to his elevenses, I grab him by his neck and drag him right out! But this time things aren't going so well — I've been at it for two weeks and there hasn't been any sign of him. ‘

‘How do you know he's still in there?’

‘Oh my dear — I can feel him, of course. I can feel him right now, coiled up in me. His body fills me up, the end of his tail is jammed at the base of my gullet and his wet wormy head is questing in my colon even as we speak. Oh, I had so hoped that he would come today.’

While describing this acute parasitical predicament, Pinky fell to running his little hands over his tummy, seeking out and emphasising the shape of the worm within him by bunching up and pulling at his flesh. The exercise made the baby-soft man wobble and puff, so much so that at the end of his speech he finally tumbled back on to the carpet with an ‘Oof!’ and a stifled squeak.

Ian relapsed as well, thrusting himself down into the mulch of the big bed. He shut his eyes and struggled to escape the Land of Children's Jokes. He clenched himself, both mind and body, with the effort and dived down and down and down through internal layers, each one successively darker, until he was nothing, just a stray seed in warm soil, or a plastic bottle bobbing in the wake of a ship.

‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha! Not so fast, kiddo.’ An acute finger probed at the bottom of Ian's eyelid, then pushed it up, peeling back in the pale, early-morning light. ‘Don't even think of leaving us just yet, kiddo, not before the main event anyways — Cha, cha, chal!

The thin man span away from the bed and stopped a few feet off. Ian could not forbear from looking at him. ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man danced a little jig. He had a long skinny face dominated by a sharp nose marbled with broken blood vessels. His tiny avian eyes flashed and, as he waggled his head from side to side, first one and then the other ear, both of them thick slabs of knotted cartilage, poked into view, jammed down at a forty-five-degree angle by the shiny rim of his shiny topper.

‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ the thin man plain ted in nasal tones. He seemed to Ian to be mimicking the voice of a fiddling entertainer in an auld country bar. With each new phase of the jig he flourished his cane in the air and then brought its fob neatly to rest on the chin in question. ‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye — ‘ He broke off abruptly.

‘Well? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ He brought his frightening face down to Ian's and menaced him with it. ‘What d'ye think of it, my little love?’ The thin man wore satin gloves; he palped his chin with one slippery digit. On the very prong end of the chin there was a button of flesh, a soft whorl with a dimpled crater. ‘Come now!’ exclaimed the thin man. ‘D'ye like it or no? Say now!’ The barbed finger poked towards Ian's throat.

‘I–I like it very much,’ he stuttered. ‘It's it's terribly nice.’

‘Ahhh, but now, d'ye recognise it, lad? D'ye know what it is now? Say what it is now, come on, say!’

Ian stared at the chin. The thin man held himself trembling, angled over Ian like a gantry. He continued to agitate his queer chin with his slick finger, flipping the curlicue of skin first to one side and then to the other. Ian couldn't imagine what the thin man was getting at but he understood the importance of the question all right. The thin man was plainly dangerous, there was no telling what he might do if Ian failed to come up with the right answer. For some reason the phrase ‘hair matted with blood’ kept running through his mind.

‘Say now!’ Everything about the thin man was thin. Ian could make out every ridge in his tormentor's windpipe. In the deep gulf underneath his plastic jaw there was a pulse beating like the pedal attachment on a drum kit. The tendons of the thin man's neck were stretched so tight that they could have been twanged, or even strummed. They formed flying buttresses, supporting the gullet where it broke to accommodate the large irregular Adam's apple that was lodged in the thin man's craw.

His neck was long. There was as much of it below as above the Adam's apple. It descended and descended, until it disappeared into the celluloid of a cheap dicky-bow arrangement. Down there, pushing out against the knot of the thin man's spotted bow tie, something stirred. There was a living root amongst the scrawny hairs poking from the pit of his neck, a projection of flesh, which humped back on itself and dived beneath the white rim of the collar.

‘I know!’ Ian was startled by the squeakiness of his voice. ‘At least, I think I know. ‘

‘What d'ye know? Say it, say it now if ye know anything. Come now, have no more ado.’ The thin man span away from the bed and went back to his dance, weaving in and out, and round and around the leguminous furniture of the dank room. ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man wiggled his head and his hips in opposite directions, he wiggled and waggled like a novelty marathon runner. At a stroke and with complete certainty, Ian knew that the thin man wouldn't hurt him after all.

‘The thing on your chin — ‘

‘Yes, lad?’

‘It's your belly button, isn't it? Your navel, isn't it?’

The thin man didn't reply, he just kept right on cha, cha, cha-ing as if nothing had been said. Then, suddenly, ‘Ta-taa!’ he cried, striking a pose at the foot of the bed. He threw his arms right up and back and thrust his chin forward. The belly button dimple stood out, white and tuberous from its stretched bloody surround, but there was’ worse, far worse below. For, sprung free from the confining collar, a flaccid penis dangled down, flipping and flopping from lapel to lapel of the thin man's spotted satin suit. Its fluid animation contrasted outlandishly with the bow-string quiver of the thin man's pose.

‘I bet you can't guess what happened, though? Now can you? I bet you can't tell me why it should be this way, now can you?’ The thin man was menacing Ian again. As speedily as his sense of safety had arrived it departed again. The thin man dropped his knife-edged knees on to the bed, one either side of Ian's feet, and then his sharp hands came forward and rested on either side of Ian's thighs. The thin man began to edge up the bed on all fours, plunging first one and then another of his implement limbs into the doughy mattress, like spades biting into loam. The action rocked Ian from side to side. The thin man began to mutter, but his words were clearly addressed to himself rather than Ian.

‘He guessed my precious. . Guessed. . How could he now? Rumpelstiltskin is my name, gold thread is my game. . How could he have guessed my little secret, my sorry tale — precious?’

With each lunge forward that the thin man made, the penis at his throat flipped and flopped again. It was quite a small penis, a rather delicate young penis even, and where the foreskin curled back at the tip, the helmet beneath was a deeper pink. A drop of semen glistened in its eye, stretched to a tear and then dropped on to Ian's chest with a warm plash. He wasn't afraid any more as the thin man's thin lips came down to touch his forehead.

Meanwhile, back in the waking world, the no-nonsense world, the nylon-sheet world that snags the hangnails of cogitation; that hated, empty-swimming-pool world; the one that is mere infill, a dusty rubble of time sandwiched between eternities, Gyggle's volunteer is still sitting, still waiting.

Waiting. That is the point of her. She's always waiting for men, this woman, this Jane Carter. And on this summer afternoon at the DDU she cannot complain, because she is now so ingrained, so conditioned, that she's actually volunteered — to wait, that is.

Sitting there, staring out through those murky windows, cataracted with dirt, Jane felt within herself the line of least resistance tethering her to her past. It stretched back into her memory, drawing with it the peculiar torsion of her being. Necessity or contingency, contingency or necessity, which of these had provided the half-twist of fate that had brought her to this strangest of places?

For all her long childhood Jane Carter played on a broad lawn dappled with sunlight. Jane and her brother in matching outfits, she in a plaid pinafore dress, he in plaid trousers, both of them shod in patent leather. Jane chucked the garish rubber ball to Simon and Simon hurled it back, boy-hard.

In tan jodhpurs and red pullovers, they sat in the back seat of the estate car as Mummy drove them to the stables. Later still there was tea, biscuits on a plate, orange squash in a glass, the frosted aluminium struts of garden furniture cool to the touch.

It had a new-world flavour, this childhood of Jane's, an Eisenhower quality. Her parents lived in a detached house, set on the low hills that ranged from London's southern underbelly.

It was a house detached both from other houses, and detached even from time and from place. It was here that the moneyed people had patented their place. They had spread themselves beneath the oaks and chestnuts and planted the green banks with tussocks of crocuses; it was more like some exercise in trichology than horticulture.

The brown tarmac of the suburban roads held oven heat in summer and they seemed, to Jane, to be infinitely slow-moving lava flows, pouring out from some resurfacing volcano. You never forget the kerbstones of early childhood, do you? The under-fives nose their way along the moss-edged paving; they sell lemonade on warped card tables and set out toys in the lost world of grass.

Jane loved Simon, loved him to distraction. In return he tortured her. He sat on her chest, twisted her nose, applied Chinese burns to her thin wrists. He kicked and pummelled, punched and spat. Older and stronger than Jane, he extended his domain into the world of imagination. Even aged six, he was already remorselessly didactic, a cruel version of the kind school teacher he later became.

‘Who's that?’ He examined her engine knowledge.

‘Gor-on,’ she lisped.

‘And that?’

‘Henwy.’

‘And that?’

‘Redward.’

‘S'not “Redward”, you stupid little girl. Try not to be a stupid little girl. Now who is it?’

‘I–I — I dunno — ‘

‘It's James. Now remember that. James is red and has a brass thingy on top. Edward is blue. Get it right or I'll have the Fat Controller brick you up in a tunnel.’

A bit of sibling bullying never really hurt a child. Not a child as well-loved as Jane. And she was — loved, that is. Her parents were solid people, protective of Jane and Simon. They kept the world of pissy alleyways and shitry behaviour at bay. Jane went to quiet private schools where discipline was unquestioned and the results invariably more of the same. Friends came to play on the great dappled lawn, they peed in the pampas grass as the clouds were peeled away from the sky, rolling back the years.

Aged five, Jane saved up her lemonade pennies for her adored brother. She knew just what he would want for a special present. Not a birthday present or a Christmas present, but a gift to show him just how much she loved him. Mummy took Jane to the toy shop and there it was, a little painted tin figurine, only a couple of inches high. His cut-away coat was black, as was his top hat. His waistcoat was yellow and his trousers grey. Jane extracted the pennies, three pences and sixpences from her horseshoe-shaped leather purse, one by one. The shop assistant interred the metal minikin in a brown paper bag. She locked him in there with a transparent band of Sellotape. Jane bore him home in her lap, aching with anticipation.

‘Whass this?’ said Simon, the understudy of ungraciousness.

‘It's a present, a present for you.’

‘S'Fat Controller? Yeah, well, I've got one already, you can keep it.’

Jane did keep it. Not literally, of course. The little tin figurine of the Fat Controller became just a part of the toy-box flotsam and jetsam, recognised by Jane again and again over the years, each time with a shock of humiliation. But in some other place, very near to her yet inaccessible, a big hard presence sprang into being and remained there, like the black nimbus surrounding the sun, or the dark shadow that flirts at the very edge of your eye.

Jane grew up and the presence grew up with her. It was a masculine presence, of that much she was certain, but beyond that she could not characterise or even picture it. It was just the thing that lingered, the thing that was behind you when you backed behind the tree to hide, leaving the everyday world of children and dogs cavorting on the grass in the sunshine. It was the ineffable sensation of loss that visited Jane on waking from profound sleep. It was the muscle-packed mass, the amorphous leviathan, that nipped around her ankles, under the sloping surface of the sea, as she swam off the beach, at Poole, at Polzeath, at Brighton.

When she reached puberty and moved from the dames’ school to the ladies’ college at Reigate, the presence went with her. By now the presence was not simply masculine — it was a man, of sorts. Jane was a bright thirteen year old, advanced for her years. She had been brought up in the light of day as far as matters sexual were concerned; her romantic tendencies were circumscribed by clear information. She correctly identified the presence for what it so clearly was, the anima, the Dionysian other, Pan, Priapus.

Not that Jane actually conceived of the presence as being endowed with a penis. For some reason she couldn't quite formulate this idea. No, the presence was rounded but firm and impenetrable.

Jane grew up to be an attractive young woman, not striking, because that would have given her an unsuitable complex. Of medium height, with broad hips and heavy breasts, her black hair was usually cut in a neat bob. Her complexion, although sallow in winter, tended to a pleasing olive whenever the sun could get at it. She was demure, attentive, modest, passive, intuitive, all the crap qualities that are ascribed to cipher women, the way rhythm is drummed into the blacks and miserliness deposited with the Jews. And still the presence hovered in the wings.

Christmas in Surrey and some relations have gathered in the overstuffed drawing room. Jane, aged sixteen, heads out to the kitchen for more cheesy balls. The presence is so clearly in the pantry she can feel him, behind the door waiting and watching. She puts the bowl down gingerly, the cheesy balls rock to a standstill, and sliding across the lino, jerks the door open. Nothing, or maybe not quite nothing, maybe an outline of city shoes on the flour-fall floor.

After leaving school Jane got a job in a wool shop. That's what interested her, knitting, crochet, appliqué, tapestry, quilting. Any craft that involved the plaiting of strands, their twisting, their knotting. The interior of the wool shop was itself woolly, the atmosphere cloyed with millions of millions of sequacious filaments. Jane sat there on a squishy stool waiting for customers and sensing the presence watching her from behind the ranks of shanks and balls.

Nice boys asked this nice girl out. Took her to films, to discos, to parties. They returned her home to Mummy and Daddy punctually at eleven, after petting sessions on sofas, banquettes, the back seats of cars. What a disappointment, those gauche hands, clumsily clutching at her sensual synchromesh. Jane connected this with the presence. The presence, Jane felt, wouldn't stall in this fashion.

On account of still living at home with her parents, her virginity was lifted in broad daylight rather than hustled away in fumbling darkness. The boy concerned thought he had achieved a great victory, arguing her into it. But, as is always the case, it was her decision alone and he was merely lust's Sooty swept along. Looking down to where their bellies married under the cover Jane was conscious of his thrusting into her as pure carpentry, tongue and groove. Later they went for coffee in a local cafe. She watched while the fat cook scraped grease from the range with a spatula.

The following morning Jane awoke in the half-light. She knew the presence was with her first, even before she was aware of the sucking thing fastened on her vagina. There was this awful weight pressing down on her and she had no real sensation in the lower half of her body. She couldn't vocalise either; she was powerless, impotent. The thing, whatever it was, sucked at her with the mechanical insensitivity of a domestic appliance. She cried out, but the scream travelled nowhere, it couldn't even squeeze out of her larynx. The thing went on devouring her vagina. Was it a person, an animal? She couldn't tell, all she could see was a globular object, a head or a ball. Her whole pudendum was being drawn up inside this thing, slurp-slurp-slurp. Metrically, in humanly.

When she awoke properly, came to consciousness fully, she was screaming and her father was in the room already, with an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Her mother was standing, bleary in night weeds at the open door. How had they both got there so quickly?

After this nightmare Jane found that she felt somehow traumatised, sexually constrained by something that lay outside herself, that wasn't part of her at all. The trauma had alighted on her, like the incubus itself.

She started to create her own patterns. She got a job writing a column on knitting crafts for a women's magazine. Soon after that a friend in television asked her to audition for a programme. She did well. Her low brow was comfortable for the camera and her clear voice recorded excellently. She left home on the strength of the television contract and bought a flat in London, closer to the studios. Daddy dealt with the conveyancing.

Jane thought of herself as sexually aware. Not liberated, but aware. She had managed to resist the Moloch of promiscuity, in some sense to save herself. For what she wasn't quite sure. Twice a year or so she would contract for a mismanaged relationship of some kind, with a young man of some description. They would go through the tired motions of discovering their basic incompatibility with one another, then, at the very point that this fact had been fully realised by both, they would finally consummate their affair, set a sexual seal on its redundancy notice.

Jane, naturally enough, connected this with the presence. She could endure a man's touch, a man's stroke, a man's gyrating push. She could just about cope with the mornings, the solicitous apologies, the well-bred regrets. But she could never, ever, ever, let one of these nice young men go down on her. Not since the nightmare. That was the forbidden zone.

So this is the kind of a young woman that was waiting for Gyggle — a Good Young Woman, cap. ‘G’, cap. ‘Y’, cap. ‘W’. Kind and well motivated. She had a friend who worked for the probation service and it was he who awakened her hibernating social conscience. As an adolescent she had helped out at a unit for autistic children run by one of her mother's friends. This was the accepted Surrey way, showing the normal ones their quaking, gibbering accompanists. The righteous feelings engendered by holding these poor souls tight, grasping the writhing uncomprehending terror of their lives, had never really left her. Career established, now was the time to help someone else out. She applied to the probation service and they sent her to Gyggle.

Coming up Hampstead Road, clouds boiling on the smoked-glass surfaces of the office blocks and the snaggle-toothed row of commercial premises forming a carnivorous urban scape, Jane felt the presence again. She felt it more strongly than she had for years, it was nearly as strong as it had been that dawn in the parental home. She was keenly aware of it as she waited for Gyggle, its bulk was treading cautiously around the DDU, proceeding down the carbolic corridors, pausing in the littered flower beds. The presence pressed its carcass cheek against the window.

Gyggle came in and without saying anything to the young woman in the heavy black denim dress, inserted his spindly limbs, first one then the next, down the crack between his desk and the wall. He appeared to Jane, at this first encounter, just as he had to Ian Wharton all those years before at Sussex — an arch of tatty ring binders marched up and over him, making a framework of dirty marbling. Outlined like this Gyggle appeared Byzantine, iconic.

Jane stared at Gyggle's beard and until he spoke roamed its bouncy crevices. Once again, like Ian before her, Jane had a strong urge to detach the beard from Gyggle's face. She longed to lean forward and touch the beard, stroke it a little, then maybe grasp it on either side — near the bottom where it swept the desk — and yank very hard. She was convinced that the beard would come away in her hands, it was just too splendid, too cinematic, to be actually rooted in sorneone's face. Jane sat tight while Gyggle read the letter the probation service had sent him about her.

At last Gyggle spoke. ‘Have you any idea, Miss Carter, why the probation service should feel that you would enjoy working with addicts?’

‘Well, I don't think enjoy is quite the right — ‘

‘Maybe not.’ Gyggle didn't cut in, he oozed in. His voice was painfully soft, iterative cotton wool with a needle in it. ‘But there must be some reason why they sent you here, the service is very careful about who they select for sensitive voluntary work. ‘

‘Um, well. . You have my CV there.’

‘Yes, yes. And I've read it. You seem to have done a bit of work with the mentally ill, Miss Carter.’

‘I was a voluntary worker with autistic children for about four years.’

‘Do you imagine that addicts are somehow like autistics? Forgive me for asking — but I myself cannot perceive such a connection.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Perhaps you think that addicts are cut off — like autistics — trapped inside a private world that we cannot access, that they are partaking of some complex but entirely unknown reality?’

‘No.’ Jane was emphatic. ‘I don't think that they're anything like autistics.’

‘Actually, you could be wrong there,’ Gyggle mused; he seemed unaware that this was a rebuttal of his own opinion. ‘Maybe the two syndromes are in some way related.’ He scrunched out from behind the desk and stood, knees pressed between the Gothic iron pleats of the cold radiator. He stared out of the window, eyes tilted above the station roof beyond the hospital garden, and went on speaking, as if reading psycho-news from some autocue in the sky. ‘Addicts are psychopathic, regressive, they have enfeebled affect. Nevertheless, it could be argued that their stereotypical behaviour is a kind of photograph of normalcy, an eidetic image of what it might be like to be sane, hmm?’

‘I'm sorry, I don't quite understand you.’

‘Oh well, oh well, no matter — no matter.’ Gyggle grabbed the scruff of the beard and used it to drag himself back to his seat. ‘Anyway, that's besides the point, which is not theoretical but practical, namely, what are we going to do with you?’ He flipped out his bony wrist and shamelessly examined his petrol-station-gifted diver's watch.

Jane grew a little irritated. ‘I don't want to keep you from your work— ’

‘No, no. Please, no.’ Gyggle attempted what might have been a smile, butJane couldn't be sure, because not even a millimetre of lip was freed from its hairy purdah. Gyggle turned his attention to Jane's CV again. ‘You're available for twenty hours a week. That seems like rather a lot of time.’

‘I don't need much time for my job. I've made a commitment to myself to spend twenty hours a week on voluntary work.’

‘It's lucrative then, your, your’ — he glanced at the CV ‘ knitting programme?’

‘Yes, it is. ‘

‘Still, criminals, Ms Carter,’ Gyggle piped, ‘not victims but perpetrators. What do you think is wrong with addicts, Ms Carter?’

‘I'm not so sure that they aren't victims as well, Dr Gyggle. Perhaps addiction is a disease.’

‘If it is, have you any ideas about how it should be treated?’

‘I wouldn't presume — ‘

‘Oh, come now. It's a field in which my profession hasn't had conspicuous success. They say failed doctors become psychiatrists, and failed psychiatrists specialise in addiction. Have you heard that before?’ Gyggle's dulcet tones threw his patronising manner into still sharper relief.

‘No, I haven't. I don't really have any formed opinions on the subject.’

‘Very well, very well, perhaps another time. ‘ Gyggle shuffled the papers on his desk, then swivelled round and started to run his finger along the sloppy rows of ring binders ranged on the shelves. He pulled one down and opening it, extracted a buff folder. ‘I'm going to drop you in at the deep end,’ he went on. ‘I do this with all the volunteers who come here. It's not strictly professional. Some might say that it's not even ethical but it gets results. I've tried supervised sessions and induction groups but really, if a volunteer worker is any good, they can do without them. ‘

Gyggle held the folder vertically and tapped it on the desk for emphasis, ‘These are the case notes of a young addict called Whittle. I want you to have a go at befriending him. He's on a reduction course of methadone, which he collects daily, here at the DDU. He's due for a court appearance in about three weeks. You can help him out, try and keep him straight. ‘

‘Why Whittle?’

‘Put simply, Ms Carter, it's a quality of life decision. Unlike many of my clients, Whittle has a chance of rehabilitation. He has some solid assets, such as being white, middle class and reasonably educated. ‘

‘Is that it, are those the assets?’

‘In our society, Ms Carter, they are the only ones that matter.’ He chucked the folder at her. ‘Here you are.’ He clocked his watch again. ‘I must leave you now, I'm supervising a group therapy session, as well as an important experiment. Read the notes, go and see Whittle, if you make out all right I'm certain I'll see you again. If not, well, it's been nice making your acquaintance.’

He rose. His height made it impossible for him to move with any ease and his departure was in the manner of a removal, his body a piece of furniture positioned vertically for manoeuvring through the door. ’Au revoir then, Ms Carter. I do hope it is au revoir.’

Jane said, ‘I'm sure it will be, Dr Gyggle,’ but wasn't at all.

‘And Ms Carter, just copy down Whittle's address from the folder. Leave it on the desk when you've finished and make sure the Yale is sprung when you leave. The clients here, as we have touched upon, tend to be a tad light-fingered. ‘ He went out.

After the shrink had gone Jane sat for a while and read the folder. It consisted mainly of appended psychiatric evaluations and medical notes. Whittle was, Jane reflected, some kind of a healthcare recidivist. He had had more ear, nose and throat infections than a school full of Nepalese. He was also partial to abscesses and abrasions, burns and lacerations, cysts and cuts, of a bewildering multiplicity. It was as if his ambition in life were to attain a regular pattern of scar tissue over his entire body.

She sighed. The atmosphere in Gyggle's office was becoming oppressive. As soon as he had exited, the presence had sneaked back to the window. Outside the sun was shining, emphysemic pigeons landed hacking on the windowsill and then dropped off. Jane sat, trying to imagine that this moment was pivotal, that it meant something. Like a child playing with a 3-D postcard, she flicked it this way and that, from destiny to contingency and back again. This was a big mistake.

CHAPTER SEVEN. ‘YUM-YUM’

Now things speed up. Time is a battered old accordion, abused by a sozzled busker; haplessly it wheezes in and out, bringing events into tight proximity, and then dragging them far, far apart again. And, of course, time is also like this metaphor itself, formulaic, flat, and ill contrived. Time flirts with us in this fashion, entertaining all of us with an inductive peepshow, where cause's coin invariably produces the same routine of cheap effect.

Ian Wharton and Jane Carter are driving along loving laser beams, straight towards each other. They're hurtling heart-on; their three-millimetre-thick emotional bodywork is about to be buckled, sundered, raggedly split, in the car crash of sexual love. But they know nothing of this yet.

Loveless, alone, Ian Wharton awoke in the chronic ward of the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs. It was Sunday afternoon — forty-eight hours had elapsed since Gyggle and the sullen nurse had put him under. Coming to was sweet relief for Ian. His experiences in the Land of Children's Jokes remained with him, coherent and narratively intact, in a way that dreams just shouldn't. Around him on the ward, the dying alcoholics mewled like caged kittens. To Ian's right a man with a cirrhotic liver as large and heavy as a bowling ball groaned and thrashed from side to side of his iron cot. His nose was so networked with exploded blood vessels that it resembled nothing so much as a punnet of raspberries, squeezed to a pulp. His hands, Ian noticed, were swathed in mittens of surgical gauze.

Gyggle entered the ward from the far end, and proceeded towards where Ian lay, barging several spectral forms in hospital-issue dressing-gowns out of his way. The chronics, brains floating in their liquor-filled pans like whitened specimens in formaldehyde, offered but feeble resistance. Gyggle put his bony hands on the rail at the end of Ian's bed and idly scanned the clipboarded notes that dangled there.

Ian's lips were numb, safety bags that had self-inflated around his risky mouth.

‘Bhat bhe buck bas bat ‘bout?’ he mouthed at Gyggle.

‘Here, have some water,’ said the shrink. ‘Your mouth is very dry.’ He passed over a plastic beaker, which Ian swilled, cold droplets falling on his neck and chest. ‘Well!’ Gyggle's eagerness was boyish, crass, irritating. ‘Tell me about it, were there any intimations of our old adversary?’

‘B-no.’ Ian numbled.

‘But dream experience of a very vivid kind — am I right?’

‘B-yes.’

‘And?’

‘Some sort of a place or realm,’ said Ian, clearly now, his lips coming back to life. ‘Difficult to describe, but you know, very obviously how can I put it? Meaningful?’

‘Tell me more.’

Ian told him about Pinky, the Mars Bar gimmick, the Rumpel-stiltskin guessing game, and his subsequent close encounter with the thin man.

‘Did you recognise any of these people?’

‘N-no. Though it was strange, because I did feel that I might somehow come to know them — ‘

‘In the future?’

‘That's right. In the future. But I understood where I was even as it was happening. You see, the Mars Bar gimmick and the man with his penis pulled up around his throat, they're nightmare figures culled from old children's jokes. You know, the sick kind, the kind that depend on such awful visualisations.’

‘I see, I see, of course, this is brilliant.’

‘I knew that it was the Land of Children's Jokes instinctively.’

‘Yes, yes, I'm certain we're on to something here. I'm sure that we've begun to penetrate this damaging cathexis of yours. I'm convinced that we must go on.’

‘I don't want to go on — it's scary.’ Ian was struggling up from the bed. He still felt very woozy; hardened sleepy dust crackled on the skin around his eyes.

‘Oh but you must,’ said Gyggle, ‘you must. Remember, no catharsis, no full genitality. Got that? Got the photo?’ Gyggle was already walking when he said this; he threw it over his handlebar shoulder as he rode his spoke legs off down the ward. Ian couldn't have been certain, but he thought Gyggle also made a peculiar gesture, curling his thumb and his two middle fingers into the palm of his hand, then poking the index and little fingers towards his own testicles. Then he was gone, through the cat-flap doors.

Monday morning. In the purulent heart of the city heat is smell and smell is heat. The hot haunch of the late-summer day is brazenly insinuating itself against the pallid flanks of the office blocks around Old Street Tube Station. The diurnal heat is crudely importuning ‘Software House'; ‘Television House'; ‘Polystyrene House’ and all the other sad sack commercial premises.

Ian Wharton popped out of the subway like a champagne cork. He was bounding this morning, full of enthusiasm, geared up for the fray. This was Ian's work self, quite distinct from his haunted other self. No one at work knew about his problems. At D. F. & L. Associates, whereto Ian was bounding, he was perceived as a solid type, a Roseland man, a regular middle-class guy, full of bonhomie and jocularity. He was also a successful marketeer, and on this particular Monday morning there might well be an important new account for him to begin work on. An account that had been provisionally named ‘Yum-Yum’.

Ian veered off the roundabout, down a path that led in the general direction of Norman House. The path became a passageway that traversed a bomb site between two high wooden fences. To the left of the fence the site had been cleared and building work was in progress, hard hats and JCBs were grunting and grubbing in the dirt, but the site to the right of the fence hadn't been cleared yet. Through chinks in the fence Ian could see a tangle of stringy privet, lanky nettles, wild flowers and triffid weeds, all forming a fuzz of camouflage over the sunken foundations of the bombed-out building. He took a deep breath and sighed. What a marvellous morning to be so stylishly suited and on his way to a stylish job.

Norman House, which contained the offices of D. F. & L. Associates, was set between two similar, somewhere to the north of the twisted rectangle formed by Old Street, City Road, London Wall and Shoreditch High Street. In truth, the only thing Norman about the building was the pseudo-Bayeux lettering on the doorplate that proclaimed ‘Norman House’. Otherwise it was an undistinguished six-storey smogscraper, faced in London brick, its eighteen rectangular windows projected out by double surrounds of leading and yellow stonework.

Ian bounded up the three steps to the glass doors and pushed them open. In the cramped vestibule by the lift, he encountered Dave, the porter, with his hairy chest oozing up from behind his collar, like some mutant merkin.

‘Morning, Mr Wharton,’ said Dave.

‘Morning, Dave,’ said Ian, punching the lift-call button.

‘Going to be another hot one today.’

‘So they say, so they say.’

The lift doors peeled back on the third floor to reveal the reception area of D.F.& L. Behind a brushed steel bulwark, Vanda, the statuesque black receptionist, sat stroking the keys on her Merlin console. The laquered busby of her hair hid a combined mouth-and-earpiece set, so that, to Ian, it appeared as if she were talking to some spirit guide, deeply familiar with the London club scene.

‘Morning, Vanda.’

‘Morning, Mr Wharton.’

Ian barrelled through the reception area and headed on up the stairs. The decor of the D.F.& L. suite was unremarkable, beige-corded carpets and utilitarian strip lighting. The walls were hung with framed display advertisements the agency had been responsible for commissioning, alongside various marketing-award certificates. Set here and there, on the stairs, along the corridors, were freestanding glass cabinets, filled with other kinds of awards. These were symbolic bibelots, pseudo-products. Brushed steel and cedarwood pediments jostled on their baize bottoms, pushing forward on spindles of acrylic tiny metalicised examples of packaging, little rubber stoppers, assortments of diminutive clips, valves and widgets. In amongst them Ian spotted the award given to D.F.& L. for one of its most successful campaigns, the Painstyler.

The Painstyler was a kind of tool, that could be used by amateur decorators to tease the surface of a particularly thick, plaster-enriched brand of paint into a landscape of petrified fronds. The Painstyler — God knows why — had caught on in a major way. The D.F.& L. billings had been massive, and, as an expression of gratitude, Hal Gainsby, the American senior partner, had the entire offices painstyled. Every single ceiling and vertical surface was fluffed up in this manner, so that to progress around the corridors was to feel one's self to be some kind of human bolus, being peristalsised along a giant gut.

The employees couldn't abide the painstyled surfaces, which were by way of being a hideously itchy incentive to the scratching and picking of apathetic fingernails. No desk or work station in the whole suite was without its accompanying snowfall of chipped-off paint fragments. This progressive distressing of the office environment sent Gainsby into bubbling furies; some employees had their wages docked, others were fired. The very success of the Painstyler had started to scrape away at the corporate fabric.

Ian Wharton absorbed all of this and looked out for fresh little snowfalls as he bowled down the corridor towards the fifth-floor conference room. He pushed the heavy door open and confronted his colleagues.

Together with Hal Gainsby there were Patricia Weiss, Customer Account Manager; Geoff Crier, Media Buyer; and Simon Arkell, Planner. Gainsby, a plump little man who endlessly sought out any point of potential height-advantage, was on top of the air-conditioning unit, set beneath the rectangular window. His rear end pincered by its two slabs, he was being subjected to a chilly blast, and as his fashionable Barries’ shirt turned into a chilly shroud, he bitterly regretted the posture.

That was Gainsby all over. He was a man whose millisecond to millisecond disposition was bounded by posture regret. The most obvious form of this was physical, but it extended through his career, on to his anglophilia, and terminated in a sadly pointless emotional loneliness. As it goes, the same was true for the rest of them, these other three marketeers.

Patricia Weiss was a German-Jewish bombshell, an antithetical Leni Riefenstahl. Her swarthy face was hidden behind a life mask of thick caramel foundation. Her big eyelids were enpurpled, their faux lashes gooey with mascara; her severe lips were raw red and a lurid beauty pimple formed a trigonometric point on the hard plain of her cheek.

If Weiss's jewellery indicated membership of a yet-to-be-created tribe of millennarian Amazons, her couture was contrawise: a set of vampish relics left over from the fifties. Under a black cuirass jacket there was no blouse, only a heavily reinforced brassière that coned her breasts into Strangelove projectiles. Weiss's legs were thrust beneath the blond-wood conference lozenge, but anyone could have told you that her stockings were sheer, sheer, sheer, and that her legs were sheerer still. Her skate-blade feet were rapacious and violent to look at, spiked by patent leather at toe cap and high-heel.

Gainsby may have been sad, but Patricia Weiss thought herself a truant from feeling and that was worse, far worse. Originally married to a bibulous Big Blue manager, she had left the Havant household under a hail of blows from the pissed brute. Then he had the gall to hit her in the divorce court with a desertion rap. The judge was a misogynist and delivered the kids to Daddy and destruction. Consumed with self-hatred Patricia blew for London and had a butterfly tattooed in her groin. The boy and girl were now six and nine respectively. She couldn't stand the blame in their eyes when she fought her way back in to see them. At the bottom of her meticulous heap of hair, the idea fermented that only another child could save her, a new birth.

Patricia tried to be tough and sexy. She vamped men in, vogued them, cranked them up and then vroomed them out again. But each new coupling brought only fresh despair. Inside her marvellous chest a post-coital she-spider feasted on her dead man's heart.

Geoff Crier reminded Ian of Hargreaves, his tutor at Sussex. Crier had the same all-over brown beard, which strongly implied the necessity of a daily razure around his raw eyes. He was a throwback to the dandy Ogilvy days of British advertising when copywriters, marketing men, even people in production, sported colourful bow ties, and affected the manners of artists who chanced to be commercial. Crier was none too bright. Life, he contended, kept on crossing the road when it saw him coming. In his late-forties now, the oldest of the three, he was beginning to grow ungracefully young and chippy, like an adolescent on the make. His girlfriend couldn't have been said to be long-suffering. For she was blissfully unaware of how the Crier frustration was strained through the colander of his personality, until all that was left was a stock of watery pretension.

On this ovenready morning, already damp in his fashionable black shorts (by Barries’ of the King's Road), Si Arkell, the youngest of the three marketeers, was labouring hard at his covert daytime job, the relentless struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. He tried to think of sleeping with men as just something that he did, in much the same way that other people went to the football or faked up corn circles, but it didn't feel like that at all. What it felt like was that his homosexuality had somehow chewed its way through his very being. A cancerous solitary piranha, that was now eating up all his fixity, any ability he had to concentrate.

At night, in the minimalist desert of his fashionable Bayswater apartment, Arkell mugged up on genetics. Each new theory that advanced a structural brain differential for inverts left him feeling queasier and queerer. The more he read, the more alarming the clarity with which he could picture his brain. In dreams, like a toy diver, he swam around its coral-reef efflorescence, observing the mutant formations and the parasitical encrustations that made him what he was. In the morning he awoke sweating — his dreams had been so vivid and so exhausting that he found himself hardly rested.

From time to time poor Arkell would crack, go out cruising, score. Usually with a man he didn't even fancy. He'd let them bugger him, or he'd suck them off. Often they would beat up on him for finishers. So even getting what he wanted was turned into a variety of humiliation. Poor Si.

All of them, all of the marketeers, had compensated for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches. These were Ian Wharton's ideal confrères. For, like him, their cerebella had been fashioned into frozen gondolas, crammed full of frosted thought-items. Theirs was a mental mise-en-scène within which aspirations, yearnings, dreams, ethical confusions, had all become just so many product placements, each jostling for its paid-for moment in the viewfinder of consciousness.

They subjected themselves to marketing methodologies relentlessly and avariciously. They divided themselves internally into socio-economically classifiable sub-sets of assertive homunculi, which were compelled to complete notional surveys, attend focus groupings where phenomena were assessed, and then witness hamfisted demonstrations of the next Little Idea. The marketingspeak had invaded their very ordinary language. Thus, they had adapted the folksy homily to their own usage, proclaiming, ‘There are no such things as strangers, only prospects that we haven't converted, yet.’

These were Ian's colleagues and in his perverse way, the only people he really felt comfortable with.

‘Morning, Hal, Pat, Si, Geoff — ‘

‘Morning, Ian,’ they chorused.

‘Ian, I'm glad you're here. I've had the most extraordinarily good news.’ Gainsby gestured at the surface of the conference table where, Ian now noticed, there lay in front of each of the marketeers a D.F.& L. Associates pitching document. ‘We've won the Bank of Karmarathon account!’ His peculiar Bostonian accent warbled over the exclamation, and at long last he felt able to free himself from the air-conditioner. He took a seat at the head of the table. Ian sat as well.

‘Hal, that's amazing news, congratulations, you deserve every credit.’

‘Nonsense, Ian, this wouldn't have been possible without all of us. We worked well as a team, now I think we're going to be rewarded — handsomely. They've agreed to the budget we proposed for the product launch without any reservations. I don't need to tell any of you that our fee as a percentage of that budget will be very considerable.’

‘What a relief!’ Ian sank heavily into his allotted chair, then instantly regretted it. The chairs were another of the fruits of D.F.& L.’s labour and Hal Gainsby's unfortunate loyalty to the products he marketed. The aluminium S-bend design was ubiquitous, but this particular version had a major fault. The tensility of the aluminium used had been too great; anyone who forgot this fact found themselves bouncing to a standstill as if on a trampoline.

When he had finally settled Ian went on, ‘So what now? How quickly do they want us to proceed?’

‘Well, that's just the thing. I had a call at 4 a.m. this morning from Nat Hilvens in NY. Karmarathon want to push the launch forward to January of next year, which gives us only six months to do all the softening up.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Geoff Cryer muttered. ‘That's going to present huge logistical problems. There's the financial press to be dealt with, for a start. I'd thought that we'd have time to organise quite a number of informal seminars, in order to introduce them to the idea.’

‘Y-yes.’ Arkell was squirming in his seat, thin fingers holding each opposing wrist.’ What about these standing booths we were going to erect? I've only just put the whole thing out to tender, I've no idea how we'll manage to organise the permissions and get them actually built before January.’

For no good reason silence fell around the conference-room table. Ian idly scanned the juncture of the cream skirting board and the beige carpet, noting the druff-falls of paint and plaster fragments, another failure by the staff to keep their itchy fingers away from the Painstyler decoration. Under his own broad palm he could feel the slick folders, the phallic pilots’ pens, the plastic-encapsulated microchip butties, that bulked out his soft, calfskin portfolio. Ian's attention first wavered, then wandered, away even from the silence itself. Outside in the other world of the street, vehicles oozed through the soupy air, a jack hammer drummed on the cakey crust of the earth.

This wouldn't do. He normally felt bound-in here at D. F.& L., secure in his trade persona. In his work he intuited the universe of products as a primary construct, a space-time configuration upon which consciousness-at-large had engrafted itself, like wisteria choking a trellis. That is why — he believed — one's own mind fitted so well into those of others. Every dove of consumer cogitation could marry a tail of vendor awareness. The communality of products was stronger than that of language, of television, of religion, of party, of family, of primogeniture, of Heimat, of Medellin, of retribution, of clout, of face, of latah, of the Four of Anything, of off Broadway, of any of the consistencies that had been used to establish the increasingly arbitrary character of the cottages that made up the global village.

Ian thought for the first time in years of the concept of retroscendence. How it might be possible to enter into the very history of a product, any product, the Porsche or the crisp packet, and flow down its evolutionary folkways, zoom back to the point where it was as yet undifferentiated, unpositioned, unintentional, and therefore not about anything. In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to. . Gainsby was saying something ‘. . feels that he was crucially involved in, so to speak, factoring this to us. It isn't something I've spoken of to you before — ‘

‘No, you haven't, Hal, you haven't seen fit to.’ Patricia Wieiss's voice was snappy, more than piqued.

‘I don't know the guy.’ Hal was unhappy, his voice teetered up a half-octave. ‘I've got no idea of how he could possibly even know about us, but he does. Or at any rate he says he does. He's got some interest in Karmarathon, of course — ‘

‘That's right, of course he bloody does. Isn't that bloody brilliant. This agency limps along, constantly in danger of going out of business altogether. Then finally, at long last, we land something that looks as if it might be a decent account, something that will really underwrite us, not just some fucking wing nut or minority-interest hair cream. And immediately we start to get yanked around, like a toy poodle on a leash. And who's doing the yanking? Some funny-money man, some wheeler-dealer, an asset-stripper, a fat cat, Mister bloody Samuel North —’ Ian didn't hear the last syllable, but he knew what it was. It was the cliff he came from, the one chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea.

Before he could register how he had got there he was in the tiny toilet on the half-landing. He did know this much, that he hadn't actually bolted out of the room, he had made some kind of an excuse. But for all that, the need to get out had been overwhelming.

He was back. Ian didn't believe in coincidence, only shit-smelling serendipity. The big man was all around now. It was he who hummed through the Vent-Axia, he who wheedled shut the composite door on its oily pneumatic arm. Glancing around the smallest room Ian was seized with his tormentor's ubiquity. For, while it was certain that he was with Smallbone in Devizes, at one and the same time, possessing full simultaneity, he was a fly on the wall, scampering between the plaster fronds. His city shoes held him level, as securely as any insect's suckers or gooey-glue secretions.

Such arrogance! Such disregard for the Painstyler effect. He was swinging from one frond-tree to the next, open-handed, like some throwback. And as he swung each one broke in turn, leaving in his wake a trail of dusty puffs.

Truly, as he might well have said of himself, he was the Dharma Body of the Dull. He was in the lino, he was in the soap, he was in the Toilet Duck. He stared out from the windows of the branded monads. He was exactly where Ian didn't want him to be. The world of products was not the encompassing quiddity Ian had so resolutely built it up to be. Above it and beneath it, swirling, involuting, forming screwed-up eyes of howling force, there was another determinant, another primum mobile. And Ian was reaching an understanding of what it was. If Samuel Northcliffe was involved, money couldn't be far behind.

Back in the conference room things were picking up. Papers had been spread out on the table, biros scratched and circled. Ian reentered the room casually and sat himself down again.

‘OK?’ asked Gainsby.

‘Fine, fine.’

‘Good. Look, Ian, I think that first and foremost we're going to have to deal with this naming problem. We've already fallen into the habit of calling this thing “Yum-Yum” amongst ourselves, and it just won't do.’

‘Even the client calls it “Yum-Yum” — ’

‘Be that as it may, what they're paying us for is to come up with an entire image, a personality, for this product. No one is going to sell a financial product called “Yum-Yum” to anybody. So I want a new name for it, and I want it fast.’

‘I'll do that. I'll set up a naming group for next week.’

‘Excellent. Geoff is going to organise the press end of things, starting off with a series of advertorial pieces in the relevant publications. Si is working flat out rejigging every single schedule to fall in line with the new launch date. Once he's got that in hand we'll have a better idea of how we're going to manage it.

‘For the moment, since there isn't much client liaison involved in this one, Patricia will be on hand for ad hoc support. OK? Oh, and one last thing, I think it would be a good idea if we all put in a showing at Grindley's tonight for the S.K.K.F. Lilex launch. I realise it's not our product but we do other things for them and I know that Brian Burkett feels attendance at these dos kind of shows agency loyalty.’

There was a scattering of groans and ‘Oh no's from around the lozenge. Gainsby ignored them, scooped up his share of the wasted paper, and puckering up his already puckered seersucker suit still further, headed for the door.

Jane Carter and Richard Whittle had got on like a recently doused chip-pan fire. Such was the drenched and oleaginous quality of their meeting.

On the Friday afternoon, Jane left the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs clutching her heavy handbag, and feeling her heavier heart burn in her chest. Whittle's address had been difficult to decipher from the notes Gyggle gave her. He seemed almost peripatetic. In the space allowed, address after address had been written in and then deleted with firm strokes. She finally managed to get it down, thinking all the while: What's the point?

A double-decker bus picked Jane up and like Sinbad's roc carried her up the hill through Camden Town, towards Gospel Oak and the mansion-house block of apartments on the edge of the Heath, where Whittle lived. Winging up the High Road, slumped back into the bench seat, Jane had once again sensed the presence near by. The sweat-dampened fabric of her skirt, stretched between her unhosed legs, offered up — or so she felt — an opening, a lobster-pot ingress to the interior of her body. She pulled the skirt down tight and stared out the window, thrusting the presence off and away from her.

Out in the street, under the reddening afternoon sun, a spectacle of ineluctable commerce greeted her. Everywhere Jane looked someone was selling something to someone else. It was as if exchange had replaced language as a primary form of communication, and people were selling to one another in order get a hold of some words. A braiding of gestures: one hand proffering money bill-like to another repeated itself, hither and thither, stitching up the ragged braid of the shopfronts. And the shops themselves, departmental, electrical, grocery, clothing, fast food, DIY, furniture. All had spilled out on to the pavement; the goods inside were falling over one another in their desperation to find a potential purchaser. Once in the open air, they mingled with the street traders, costermongers, fly pitchers and hawkers who plied this grungy souk. On whatever point Jane's eyes rested, through whichever line her gaze ran, she saw cheques being signed, credit-card counterfoils being scrawled across, standing orders being arranged, and cash — wholesome dosh, ponies, monkeys, oncers, coins of the realm — flowing around like mercury, like some element.

Whittle had swum towards her, his form undulating through the wrinkled hide of toughened glass, as she stood on the cool stone stairs. In the hidden crevices of the apartment block she heard children's voices, the whirring industry of domestic cleaning, large dogs barking in small places.

‘Yes?’ Richard was pulling Ian's two days of sleepy dust from the corner of his eye — it even felt that way to him, the solidifying gunk of another's oblivion. The doorbell had hooked Richard, then reeled him in from riverine sleep. It had landed him here, back on the mud bank of his own life.

‘Oh — hello,’ said Jane, taken aback, struggling to compose herself. No matter that she had prepared herself for this, the Whittle face was still an awful sight, a collection of weeping infections, hot-pus springs boiling in slow motion. ‘I'm from the DDU. I'm not a social worker, or a psychiatrist, I'm a volunteer. Dr Gyggle sent me to see if I can help you in some way, but I can come back another time if now isn't convenient, or not at all if that's what you'd prefer — ’ The words had spilled out of her, precipitate, stupidly revealing.

Richard was disarmed — and laughed. ‘. . I see. You'd better come in and have some. . have some — tea!’

Improbability had piled upon improbability, as Jane's skinny junky host came up first with tea, then with milk, and finally ever-so refined sugar. Given his circumstances this was as preposterous as if he had produced a willow patterned plate piled with neatly decrusted cucumber sandwiches.

Seated in the resolutely unfitted kitchen, they had eyed one another over mismatched cups. Whittle was brown-haired, with close-set green eyes, a snub nose, low brow and an undistinguished little pointy chin. He surprised Jane by making conversation, asking her about her work, her flat, whether she had a boyfriend. He seemed pathetically unaware of the awful impression he made, with his spotty face, his greasy unkempt hair, and his outfit of dirty striped pyjamas and an American collegian's sleeveless kapok anorak.

Tiring of it she had cut across his chatter. ‘Dr Gyggle tells me that you have a court case coming up — when is it?’

‘Not for another four months. If they're lucky I might kark it before they have to hear it. That would save them both the trouble and the cost.’ He had smirked, a little boy still finding his own cynicism profound. Jane bit her lip — did she need this? Was this really someone who either wanted or deserved to be helped?

‘I don't think that's either a clever thing to say, or true.’

‘What exactly do you know about me, Jane Carter?’ He had addressed her thus, using both her names, as if somehow to place her more exactly, define her as a player.

‘Only what Dr Gyggle has told me.’

‘The man is a fucking charlatan.’ He was vehement, but didn't raise his voice. ‘All the fucking DDU people are charlatans. All of them posturing, getting their pro-fess-ion-al kicks from lording it over scum like me — smackie scum.’ He reached his striped arm across the table at this point, and freed a filtered cigarette from a prison of ten. Jane caught sight of some more of the scar tissue that featured so prominently on Richard Whittle's medical record.

‘But you're kicking the habit, aren't you? Isn't that right?’

‘Yeah, then I'm going back into the wine business. I'm gonna be a master of wine. Go every summer to fucking Jerez, to the Dordogne, to Bordeaux, every-fucking-where, tasting, living it up.’

‘Is that what you really want to do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you had any experience?’ Even to her own ears Jane sounded oppressively schoolmarmish. There couldn't be more than five years separating them in age.

‘I used to work in an off licence in Richmond. I know all about wine, I read about it all the time.’ He pointed in the corner where there was a stack of glossy magazines. Jane had followed his finger and spotted, next to the battered meat safe on the grot-speckled work surface, a glass in which there rested the powerless trinity of teaspoon, squeezed bit of lemon and holy hypodermic syringe.

‘I see,’ she had said, and then, trying to be oblique, ‘Are you taking methadone?’

‘No, but I brush my teeth with fluoride fucking toothpaste.’ Whittle tittered annoyingly, sillily, and revealed long-unbrushed teeth, coated with green plaque. Jane had felt that enough was enough. She commenced the search for her heavy handbag, with every intention of quitting Richard Whittle's life for ever.

But then, he got up and as he wonkily orbited the kitchen, said, ‘I'm sorry. You see I can't really talk much more about all of this.’ He shaped a hand, encompassing the kitchen's work surfaces, like some junky lecturer telling the story of his short unsuccessful life, with the assistance of a series of horizontally mounted exhibition boards. ‘I'm all talked out. I talk to my parents, I talk to my brother, I talk to Giggly — the prat, I talk to my GP. I've got nothing left to say. For fuck's sake, I even have to talk to people in my dr—’ He stopped abruptly, a cautious look coming over his face.

‘People in your what?’

‘No, no, no one else. I just talk to all these people — and it never does any good.’ Whittle let his eyes fall forward, and, surveying a callus on his palm, he made ready to pick at it. A silence had welled up to cradle them, while outside on the sunny Heath, Jane could hear children screaming and screaming and screaming.

‘So you don't see a lot of point in talking to me?’

‘No, not really.’

Then the strange unknowable thing had happened. There was a scatter of very loud, clacking footfalls, which sounded on the parquet floor of Whittle's hallway right outside the kitchen. Next, the front door slammed with a rattling bash of glass and wood. Without having been conscious of making the decision to do so, Jane found herself running behind Whittle's slack behind, as he bolted towards the break-out.

They had both ended up jammed against the banister, leaning over to catch sight of the intruder as he fled. The sharp footfalls were still ringingly loud, like steel on stone, but it wasn't until whoever-he-was gained the penultimate flight of stairs that Jane caught sight of him. Later, attempting to recall precise detail, she could only picture the man's head — or at any rate the hat he wore. It was so distinctive, so bizarre. A shiny purple hat, covered in black polka-dots. A top hat.

All over London The Fat Controller's creatures, his confrères and familiars, his agents and accomplices, his licentiates and legates, were stirring. They were feeling his presence — or maybe it was the anticipation of his presence, as it were, his pre-presence — as someone might sense the coming of a thunderstorm. First the fall in air-pressure, then the build up of humidity, then the agonising apprehension that everything presages something else, that all there is is this awful, close waiting. But when at last it comes — what a disappointment. Rain is, after all, only rain. Sky piss. And thunder is, after all, only thunder. Just God, like a troubled pensioner, a little bit ‘confused’ and indulging his second adolescence by imagining that a rearrangement of the serviced flatlet's furniture will somehow engender a new charisma.

Harumph! D'ye see what's happening? It's time for you to retroscend again, you, Belial's babies, the cuties of the cabal, toddling down the diminishing aisles of Mothercare. It's time for you to join me, pick out a man-made thing and follow its course, use it to plot history's convention. Naturally, I don't want to give you the hard-sell on this. It could be that you have better things to do with your time than scour out the commercial scorings, follow the shooting stars of shelved lives. Nonetheless, I do guarantee some insights that would not be forthcoming were you not to indulge me. Indeed I offer, Free And With Absolutely No Obligation Whatsoever, twenty-jive percent more in the way of insights than you gained the last time you were compelled to retroscend.

If these insights aren't forthcoming, if you feel shabbily treated once you have retroscended, then please let me draw your attention to the one hundred per cent Full Redemption Clause. At any point you can ask for your time back, ask for the time back that you feel has been wasted retroscending. Go on, ask for the time back at the counter on your way out, then by gad you'll regret it! For the time that will be returned to you isn't eventful time, it isn't even time in which seemingly unrelated dull little happenings are building up to something else, it certainly won't be three hours of segued orgasms. Oh no, this is untenanted time, boarded-up time, odds and sods and little dog ends of time. Time spent staring at the half-moon of rust on the side of a rivet implanted in the bodywork of a tourist coach, while you wait at a traffic light; time used up irritably flicking at the pointy point, where, in theory, the sticky surface should peel away from its backing; time disposed of drumming your fingers; time fecklessly wasted waiting for your number to come up at the delicatessen counter. That's the sort of time I'm talking about. So, on balance, it's probably worth your while sticking around to retroscend.

Another thing, that semantic incongruity my licentiate drew your attention to earlier, well now here's your opportunity to join in. Participate in meaning's floor exercise as it tumbles diagonally across the mat. The moment has arrived when you must abandon your armchair assertorics, wind up your after- TV-dinner speeches, and feel the sick pit of your stomach gyrate.

Steve Souvanis, proprietor and sole trader, sat in the offices of the enterprise he — and he alone — commanded. Dyeline Constructions of Clacton. He had just put down the telephone after a short and bewildering conversation with Si Arkell, planner at D.F.&.L. Associates. For no good reason that Souvanis could discern, Arkell had asked him to quote on the production of some perspex point-of-sale modules, which sounded truly preposterous. These modules were to be free-standing transparent booths, octagonal, seven feet high, and containing sort of mini-lecterns, where the booth users could stand and write, whilst both watching the world and being observed by it.

Arkell had told Souvanis that he wanted a quote for sixty of these ‘standing booths’, as he termed them, to be constructed, and then erected all over London before the end of the year. Souvanis couldn't believe his ears. True, he had done work for Arkell in the past but nothing on this scale. Souvanis specialised in the production of perspex modules that were designed to dispense leaflets and other kinds of promotional material.

In the warehouse space next to the cubbyhole office where Souvanis sat there was a ghostly jumble of these things, stacked about seemingly higgledy-piggledy. There were leaflet dispensers shaped like cake stands, like books, like racks of various sorts, like miniature suspension bridges, like famous monuments, like vehicles, like spaceships and submarines, like hatstands and coat racks, cabinets and bookcases. All of them were made out of perspex, or transparent acrylic. The overall effect was of a space filled up with insubstantiality. The display modules were not real objects hut the pale shadow of them, as platonic forms are to their derogated copies.

That morning, sitting on his bed, the previous night's alcohol converted to goo in ear, gum in eye, slurp in chest, Souvanis had struggled to fasten the waistband of his trousers. I'm struggling to fasten the waistband of my trousers, he had thought to himself. Wedging his plump little feet into his loafers he had thought to himself: Ooh, how these insteps cut in. Then, no more of it. He had breakfasted with his wife, as usual, and set off from the Barking house for the Clacton works.

Every mile or so, self-consciously, Souvanis glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Same moon face, same missed tussocks of black facial hair, same browning pate, same laugh and same frown lines. What was it that felt different?

Now, in the warm confinement of the warehouse, with its paper and plastic odours commercial in their sheer intensity, it began to dawn on him. He reached, or rather snatched, for the packet of BiSoDol on top of the littered desk; and clawing it open, pushed a couple of the chalky tablets out of their cellophane sachets. Why have I got indigestion, thought Souvanis, when I even skipped lunch? He tried to ease a hand between the waistband and his belly, but couldn't.

A couple of days previously an item on the leveraged buy-out of a giant American tyre company had caught Souvanis's eye as he was flicking through the financial pages of a newspaper; a week or so earlier, he had seen an ominously familiar silhouette slide between two robed princelings, as the television news covered the denouement of a Middle-Eastern conference. Well before that, almost a month ago now, coming out of his little terraced house, Souvanis had looked up to the sky, unbidden, to find hovering there, perhaps only one or two hundred feet overhead, the Goodyear Blimp. Which, as Souvanis gawped at it, bobbed a greeting — seemingly to him alone — in the clear sky.

These several events now crammed themselves together in Souvanis's mind, forming premises like stepping stones leading to only one possible conclusion. That the man the world knew as Samuel Northcliffe, financier, bon viveur, éminence grise of geopolitics, and whom Steve Souvanis knew as The Fat Controller, was back.

Acid and antacid ran together, fire streams in his volcanic stomach. How like The Fat Controller to announce his arrival thus, with a supernatural attack of indigestion. Souvanis felt that his fat and flab were being addressed at some profound level, a level of primary starches, carbohydrates and sugars, by other, more potent fat, of a great lunar significance, fat that pulled his very girth around in its sweating skin girdle producing measurable torque.

The unusual request from D. F. & L. Associates was now easily explained. It was down to Northcliffe. Souvanis had learnt long long ago, when his association with The Fat Controller had begun (and who could say when that was? Perhaps the tubby little boy had been tumbling around the dusty streets of Nicosia when he tried to snatch a camera from a soft, old tourist and found that the tourist was neither soft, nor old. But speculation isn't in order here, Souvanis's relationship with The Fat Controller belongs to a narrative other than this), that almost anything unusual, anything that disturbed the even tenor of his life, could be put down to his mentor.

Souvanis sighed heavily. He looked around the empty cubby-hole and jerked his head in an explanatory fashion, at the nobody that was there. Whatever was coming his way, part of it would be good. Part of it would relate to these ‘standing booths’ required by D. F. & L. So he'd better get on and quote for them. Like some horrible kind of modern tinnitus, the fax machine in the next room started to whirr in Souvanis's head; the brush-fringed mandibles seemed to nibble at his inner ear. That would be Arkell's diagram of the booth.

‘So, if they want a quote’ — Souvanis spoke aloud, projecting his voice into the sample-clogged warehouse — ‘they can have their quote.’ He rose and went next door to receive his message.

After a long hot day in the office, the last thing Ian wanted to do was attend the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launch at Grindley's. He knew exactly what it would be like, all the rest of the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launches he had attended at Grindley's. These bloody companies seemed so certain that all they had to do was douse a crowd of hacks in lukewarm Asti Spumante in order to get a good write-up. They couldn't even be bothered to vary the venue, to try and add some spice to the dousing.

And what a day! Pouring over the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon's ridiculous documentation, trying to get to the nub of exactly what it was their financial engineers meant by ‘an edible financial product’. What was ‘Yum-Yum'? Why, it was a credit card and a current-account banking facility; it was a share-watch service and a brokerage facility; it was a telephone-banking service and a secure-deposit facility with a high-interest yield. As he worked his way through the dull copy, the designations tumbled around one another, ‘facile service’, ‘serviceable facility’ — what possible difference could it make? So what if the dividends accruing to the customer could be transformed either into foodstuffs or foodstuffs options? So what if the very materials that made up the documentation for the product — chequebooks, credit cards and so forth — were actually, in and of themselves, edible. None of it cut any ice with Ian. He'd seen them come and seen them go, these revolutionary new personal banking products. Not one of them had had any impact on the increasingly unknowable, dilatory even, quality of money itself.

At this fag end of the millennium money had begun to detach itself from the very medium of exchange. Money was lagging behind. Ian knew — because he had read about it in the press — that there was aproximately $800 trillion that had simply winked into existence. It had never been earned by anyone, or even printed by any government. Everywhere you looked you saw advertisements screaming: ‘Value for Money’. That such an obvious non sequitur should have become a benchmark of credibility was beyond Ian's, and indeed anyone's, understanding. This ‘value’ was as insubstantial as the $800 trillion. It was linked to no commonly perceived variable; instead it was chronically relativised. The merchant banks and brokerage firms that made up the City had long since given up on employing even the most flamboyant and intuitive of economic forecasters. Instead they had fallen back on the self-styled ‘money critics’, refugees from the overflowing newsprint sector, who offered their services to provide ‘purely aesthetic’ judgements on different mediums of exchange.

But business was still business. So, together with his co-marketeers, Ian levered his sweating bulk into the black cab that stood, coughing and heaving, outside Norman House.

‘Grindley's,’ said Hal Gainsby to the cabby.

‘You'll be going to the S.K. K. F. Lilex launch then,’ the cabby replied.

‘How did you know?’ Only Si Arkell was young enough and curious enough to bother with a query.

‘Oh, I take a keen interest in any new ulcer medication that comes on the market,’ said the cabby, powering the cab away from the kerb and straight into a snarl of traffic. ‘It goes with the job.’

The city was hot, the cab was close. Inside the five marketeers’ deodorants competed with one another for olfactory supremacy. Si Arkell's ebulliently tasteless sandalwood talc won the day. By the time they had struggled across the Old Street Roundabout, battled through Hatton Garden, fought their way down High Holborn — the cabby dispatching challengers to the right and to the left, with ‘Fuck off's and klaxon honks — and gasped betwixt the raffia of metal that held Trafalgar Square in its vice, Ian was about ready to expire. They all dived out of the sweaty confines of the cab. Gainsby paid the cabby off, while Ian stared up at the mock-Regency portico of Grindley's, which loitered under the dusty plane trees along Northumberland Avenue.

The presence had been with Ian all afternoon as well. It was a sinister afflatus, hissing a welcome in his ear. At any moment Ian expected everything to come tumbling down around him. And that — in a manner of speaking — is exactly what did happen.

CHAPTER EIGHT. REENTER THE FAT CONTROLLER

Early on the morning of that same day the travellers’ message board at Heathrow's Terminal Three had begun to clog up with a large number of notes, petitions and billets-doux. All were written in different hands and all were addressed to a variety of individuals, but every single one was intended for the same man.

The Fat Controller was arriving from America. From New York City, to be precise. It was a characteristic of The Fat Controller that he was always arriving from somewhere and yet it was never actually possible to conceive of him as being anywhere else other than exactly where he was. At any rate, not possible for those who knew him. Perhaps somewhere, on some other planet, for example, there may be a race of highly advanced coenobites, whose entire purpose it is to spend their reclusion collectively visualising The Fat Controller in those places from which he is forever arriving. If so, they must be very highly advanced indeed.

The Fat Controller came wheeling through the swing doors that lead from the customs area to the main concourse of the terminal. He was wearing his travelling kit, Donegal tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and brogues. Over his bolster arm he had draped one of those American trench coats that are furnished with more button-down panels, straps and belts than are strictly necessary. Trailing behind him like a faithful little dog, came a brown Sansomite suitcase. The Fat Controller tugged somewhat erratically on its lead and the thing waggled along, as if it were an afterthought.

The Fat Controller reached the end of the handrail that separates the arriving passengers from the friends and relations that have come to meet them. Here he halted and turned, the better to observe the rendezvous of his fellow travellers. The Fat Controller always did this. He always got off the flight as quickly as possible and rushed through immigration and customs, so that he could witness this moment.

‘It's a very important moment indeed,’ he was fond of saying. ‘A very emotional and naked moment. When people greet one another, after an absence — particularly in airports, where the overhead strip lighting is so poorly modulated — they are rendered transparent to one another. An unfaithful husband's guilt passes across his face like a shadow, in the nanosecond that it takes him to place a welcoming smile on his face for his waiting wife. Two lovers meet and both their expressions betray the certainty of their eventual parting, in the very instant before they touch. Ungrateful brats debouch from their cheap holiday in someone else's misery and their tired parents try desperately to summon up joy out of indifference. These are the very moments that I treasure! For I am a traveller in feeling and a trafficker in souls — so flitting and spindly-legged are the examples I seek that I may style myself a very entomologist of the emotions!’

The Fat Controller would roll these phrases around in his mouth, together with some single malt whisky and a coil of smoke from his habitual cigar, before expelling them at his audience. The Fat Controller was very fond of pontificating, although all too often compulsion was his only way of ensuring listeners.

On this occasion he stayed for five minutes and ten times as many such ‘naked moments’ before his sentimental voyeurism was sated. Then he headed off towards the bank of electronically operated doors and the taxi rank, passing the wailing wall of the noticeboard without even a glance. The suitcase followed him.

Whenever The Fat Controller came to London he put up at Brown's Hotel in Piccadilly. The Fat Controller liked Brown's for a number of reasons. He felt inconspicuous there — there were so many other fat people of indeterminate age in residence, many of them sharing his taste in tweed and Burberry. Another plus was that quite a lot of minor American celebrities — actors, producers and directors from the cinema and musical theatre — tended to stay at Brown's. There wasn't an hour of the day when you couldn't find one of these people, tucked into a corner of the chi-chi lobby, being interviewed by an English hack about their latest production. The Fat Controller got a vicarious sense of notoriety from coming and going amidst this continual press call. He did like to think of himself as a celebrity of sorts. Although, more than most people, he appreciated that being the object of other people's attention was at best a transitory and unrewarding experience, and at worst, a positive damnation.

That's why, rather than actually being a celebrity, The Fat Controller preferred to adopt a celebrity demeanour. The kind of carriage and countenance that made at least one in three people who he passed by think to themselves: I'm sure I recognise that man but I just can't place him. He must be someone famous. This was the kind of renown that The Fat Controller desired. An uncomplicated way of being the talk of the town, without obligation and honestly ephemeral.

Outside, in the already tired atmosphere of the late-summer morning, The Fat Controller paused, surveying the hideous jumble of concrete buildings that constituted the airport. Why travel, he thought to himself, when you merely arrive back at where you started from? He was thinking of the other people who thronged the airport precincts, not himself. For The Fat Controller all modern westerners were essentially the same, conforming to the small number of stereotypical characters that had been allotted them. He opined that, were a suburb of Scranton NJ to be swopped in its entirety for one in Hounslow Middlesex, hardly anyone in the areas abutting them would even notice. All of these people, he mused, his frog eyes flicking hither and thither, are in transit from some urban Heimat, an ur-suburb, a grey area. They are like colonists who have set out en masse, lemming-like, uncomprehending, obeying an instinctive need to buy a newspaper in another country.

The next cabby in the rank pulled forward and tucked his Standard away on top of the dash. The electric window slid down.

‘Where to, Gov?’

‘Brown's Hotel, Piccadilly,’ said The Fat Controller.

Then there was an uncomfortable hiatus, a strange pause. He made no move to enter the cab. The cabby sat and waited. After a while the cabby barked at him, ‘Well, aren't you going to get in?’ The Fat Controller pushed his porcine head through the window of the cab, pressing four pounds of cheek against the already clicking meter. ‘Not,’ he boomed, ‘until you get out and pick up my bag.’

The cabby's eyeballs bulged with rage. He felt his gorge rise up his neck, bitter, bilious and sarcastic. Foolishly — as it transpired — he choked it back down again. He quitted the cab and came round to where The Fat Controller was standing. By now, some of the other cabs in the rank had loaded up with passengers and were hooting to get away. The cabby gave The Fat Controller a long and penetrating look, intended to intimidate him. Then he picked up the brown Sansomite suitcase and placed it in the back of the cab. He held the door open for The Fat Controller, who took his time getting in, settling himself, and wedging trench coat to one side and Herald Tribune to the other.

They were on the M4 heading towards the Chiswick Flyover, when The Fat Controller lit his first cigar since clearing customs. It was the flaring trumpet of an operatic Tosca. He stuck the cheroot in the corner of his wide mouth and applied the guttering flame of his convict-built lighter to its organic end.

A comic scene ensued as the cab plunged up the flyover ramp. Suddenly, The Fat Controller and his driver lifted off from the scrublands of Hillingdon and Hayes. They were floating on a carpet of tarmac high over the blue haze of the city. The vast ocean of London lapped around them. Ahead, the flyover snaked its way between corporate blocks. Where the roadway drew near to the fourth or fifth storey of each edifice, a digital clock and thermometer had been placed. These disputed with one another: 11.44, as against 11.43; 32° celsius, as against 33. The Fat Controller sucked an inverted blast on his Tosca and considered the vicissitudes within the secret lives of products, the serendipitous occurrence of both siting and style that had allowed the Brylcreem and Lucozade buildings to end up thus, their neon fifties’ logos flashing in anachronistic opposition to one another, across the Chiswick Flyover.

‘Can't you read the sign?’ The sliding window separating him from the cabby had been torn open, shattering The Fat Controller's reverie. He fanned away the thick coif of blue-brown curls that had formed in front of him, bringing into view a prominent ‘No Smoking’ sign.

‘I can.’

‘Whassat?’

‘I can read the sign.’

‘Well, why don't you do what it effing well says then?’

‘I don't choose to.’

‘Don't choose to? Don't fucking choose to!’ The cabby was trapped, driving along the flyover. He couldn't stop, he couldn't turn around, he wasn't even able to wave his arms about. He vowed to himself that he would eject The Fat Controller as soon as he possibly could.

The cab sped on along the elevated roadway. The Fat Controller puffed contendedly on the stinking instrument in his mouth and meditated on whether or not this wasn't an altogether purer way of tormenting someone than applying physical force, or more obviously contrived psychological pressure.

The cab canted down on to the straight that leads to the Hogarth Roundabout.

‘Hn, hn!’ grunted The Fat Controller, thinking aloud. ‘A fine Rake's Progress and no mistakin’.’

‘Whassat?’ barked the cabby, alive to the possibility of some fresh insult.

‘Oh nothing, nothing — don't trouble your little head.’

As soon as he safely could, the cabby pulled over into the nearside lane and then turned off down a side street. The cab came to a rest with a squeal, under a sticky plane tree. The cabby leapt out and came round to the back door, which he yanked open.

‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, get out!’ he reiterated. The Fat Controller dropped the upper edge of his Herald Tribune and regarded the cabby from the vantage of several millennia of cold neutrality. He really did look rather revolting, arms akimbo, breasts bulging under a green T-shirt, which had the silky half-sheen that is rendered near-transparent by sweat. Further down, his plump, white, hairless thighs fell gracelessly from the rucked crotch of his day-glo football shorts. The Fat Controller noted that, in the colonial way, the cabby was wearing lace-up shoes and white knee-socks.

‘No,’ said The Fat Controller, glancing around at the empty residential street. ‘You get in.’ Then, with a fluidity of motion that was rendered all the more unnatural and frightening by his bulk, The Fat Controller lunged forward, grabbed the cabby by the throat and pulled him straight down on to the floor of the vehicle. Like a conjurer, he flicked a silk paisley handkerchief from his jacket pocket and thrust it into the cabby's gasping mouth. Next, still grasping his prey like some gargantuan trout that he had managed to tickle from the urban mill race, The Fat Controller proceeded to torture him gently. Taking another pull on his Tosca, he applied the glowing tip of the stogie to the white billow of occupational lard that had emerged from beneath the cabby's T-shirt. He didn't leave off until he had managed to create a neat line of blisters.

Still hunched over, one hand on the cabby's gullet, The Fat Controller used the other to free the knot of his green mohair tie. This he then looped around the cabby's neck. Substituting a knee for his other hand, he tied a slip knot in it and settling back in his seat said, ‘Now, my good man, I think you are probably in a better position than formerly to judge what manner of personage you have for a passenger. No, no, don't trouble yourself to apologise’ — the cabby was gurgling for breath — ‘it isn't necessary. I am not a vindictive man, sir, I have no place for such feelings in my nature and indeed I resist such impulses whenever they arise. However, that being said, I engaged you to drive me to Brown's Hotel and that is what I want you to do. In a moment I will release you and we shall resume our journey. But make no mistake about it, should you prove fractious again, I shall not hesitate to utilise this neckwear in garrotting you. Got that?’

The cabby coughed assent. He wasn't a particularly observant man, but one thing he had noticed during the sickening shock of the last few minutes was a peculiarity of The Fat Controller's fingertips. They had no whorls or indentations and, therefore, they would leave no prints.

Released, the cabby worked his way back to the front of the cab and got in. The Fat Controller fed the woollen garrotte through the sliding window and they set off again. The Fat Controller reclined, smoked and read the paper. The cabby, on the end of his lead, drove.

They had the run of the traffic and within thirty minutes the cab was rounding Berkeley Square. The Fat Controller sat forward and, siting a girder-sized arm over the cabby's shoulder, said, ‘Pull down into that underground car-park.’ The cabby did as he was told. The entrance was a long, choking, oily shaft that ran down into the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. At the bottom the attendant's kiosk was empty. Even so, The Fat Controller dropped down in his seat by way of a precaution.

‘Take the ticket.’ Once again, the cabby did as he was told. ‘And pull over to the far side of the level.’ The cab stopped in the concrete corner, which was dark, quite hidden from the kiosk's view by a panel truck. The Fat Controller garrotted the cabby, quickly and with merciful efficiency. ‘I would wager, sir’ — The Fat Controller addressed the cabby's slumped corpse, whilst pulling his suitcase from the back of the cab — ‘that that was as good a death as you could reasonably have expected to have.’ His huge palm essayed an expressive flutter, as he leant in through the driver-door window and contemplated the deflated face. ‘Granted that I can have no idea of what your prospects might have been, but on the sound principle that every man is responsible for the nature of his own countenance, I would wager, sir, that you would never have become a creature capable of those nice distinctions, the contrivance of which serves, as it were, to define refinement.’

With this euphonious eulogy The Fat Controller set off back across the oil-stained floor of the underground car-park, towards the lift. The brown Sansomite suitcase went with him.

Someone had once told The Fat Controller that he bore a distinct resemblance to the character of Gutman, as played by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. This he relished. The truth is that the similarity was quite superficial. Like the Fat Man, The Fat Controller had an interesting bulk, an unusual kind of fatness. However, while it could conceivably be said of Greenstreet, as it is often said of the fat in general, that he was ‘amazingly graceful’, or ‘surprisingly light on his feet'; and indeed that those feet were ‘really quite elegant’, none of these descriptions could have been applied to The Fat Controller, who really was fat. Fat in a heavy and unrelenting manner. Programmatically fat. Fat as if his mammoth aspect were the result of several, consecutively successful five-year eating plans. Wherever he went The Fat Controller's fat surrounded him and marched with him, like a tight huddle of violent men wearing overcoats.

Another point of dissimilarity; unlike Gutman, The Fat Controller was not a true connoisseur — ultimately he gained no more joy from things than he did from people. Whereas Gutman was prepared to spend a lifetime recovering the black bird, The Fat Controller would have eliminated the entire cast within the first half-reel of the film. The Fat Controller's attitudes were born of an uncompromising pragmatism, which those who met him felt as a peculiar sort of emanation. Whilst Gutman had a magnetic quality that he bolstered with rhetorical flair, The Fat Controller was banal. And if you allowed him the chance to get going in his affected way, he became downright boring very quickly.

The desk clerk at Brown's Hotel was certain that he had seen The Fat Controller somewhere before. There was something familiar but unplaceable about the big man's face. He waited, pen poised over register, while The Fat Controller moved towards him in his gang of flesh.

‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such weather, and in England of all places.’ For an instant, the desk clerk tried to imagine The Fat Controller in still sunnier climes — for some reason he couldn't manage it.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ The desk clerk was easy, consummately so.

‘Oh yes, oh yes indeed.’ He paused, clearly trying to remember some important fact, like his name, for example. He ran the five-pack of wieners that constituted his hand around his collar. ‘I have a reservation.’

‘In what name, sir?’

‘Northcliffe, my man, Samuel Northcliffe. Take a look in your little book.’

Jane Carter was crying in her West Hampstead flat. Crying as the evening sunlight fell in gay bars across the flat's bright patterned interior. She breathed heavily and the mucal reeds lining the wet passages of her head gave off little clarinet cries of loneliness. The tears were prompted by an indigestible bubble of self-pity, which had been swelling up in her all afternoon. Now they had started, the tears steadily gained fresh impetus. Like boulders being pushed down a mountainside, they came rolling and tumbling out from her ducts, each one powered by a different slight, a different hurt, failed relationships and relationships that never were but might have been.

At her feet a mess of knitting fell out from the lip of a plastic bag; blue, green and yellow threads forming a soft circuitry. Thrusting out from amongst them, a wooden knitting needle caught her attention. She snatched it up, losing several hundred careful stitches as she freed it from its fluffy embrasure. Taking the knitting needle in her right hand, like a dagger she pulled up the hem of her black denim dress. Her thighs appeared monstrous to her, damning evidence of her failure to achieve sylph-hood. ‘You're fat! Fat! Fat!’ she exclaimed, with each ‘fat’ digging the sharp tip of the knitting needle into the horrible stuff. The final dig drew blood — and enough pain to stop her crying.

She stood up abruptly and began to dance around the flat, singing discordantly, ‘Oh, I'm so a-lone, so a-lone, so bloody fat and a-lone,’ and as she sang, she wished. Wished for a lover, any lover, a daemon or an incubus — the presence could take her now come what may. She didn't care any more. What do I matter? she concluded. I'm a zero, another poor cow in the herd. I wear certain clothes and certain shoes, I put on certain make-up and use certain sanitary towels and I go to a certain dentist and a certain doctor, because of my bloody certain daddy and certain mummy. That's for sure! With this bleak summation she began to dance, kicking out first one fat (according to her) leg and then the other. In this pitiful self-absorption, she felt herself to be just one amongst a multitude of Janes. All of them standing on their oval crocheted rugs, in their recently converted flats. They all looked the same, they all faced in the same direction and they all threw up their arms. They formed the most highly dispersed Busby Berkeley-style chorus line ever — this phantom army of high-kicking Janes.

The phone rang. ‘Jane?’ It was a woman's voice.

‘Yes?’

‘It's Beattie.’ Beautiful brittle Beatrice, the PR girl.

‘Oh hi, Beattie, how're you?’

‘Fine, Jane, and how are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Jane —’

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered if you were doing anything this evening?’

‘Why?’ Jane, however fat and ugly she felt herself to be, wasn't about to admit her unpopularity.

‘Um, well, OK, it's pretty boring really, but I need a favour — ’ She ran on, sensing that Jane was about to interrupt, ‘. . I'm organising this press launch for S.K.K.F. and I haven't been able to get as many people along as I'd hoped for. The company's entire marketing department will be there — it could be very bad news for me if I can't up the body count.’

‘So, you want me to pretend to be a hack from the medical press?’

‘That's right.’

‘And what is this product they're launching? Is it something I should know about?’ Beattie twittered with laughter, Jane held the phone away from her ear until it had ceased.

‘Not exactly. Though it is rather brilliant, revolutionary even. Lilex is a brand-new drug for the relief of peptic and duodenal ulceration, it's prepared in easy-to-swallow tablets and presented in two by twelve plasticised pop-out packs.’

‘Oh really.’ Jane was underwhelmed by Beattie's enthusiasm. She had seen it before. With every new account, every new product to be launched, the PR girl shifted her allegiance radically and completely. Her belief in a product was a total thing, real and encompassing. It didn't matter if it was a cosmetic or a patent medicine, a motor car or a fashion accessory. Hers was a metempsychosis of novelty, her mind a vapid thing until animated by the next absolute conviction.

‘Look, Jane.’ Beatie was conciliatory. ‘Just do me that favour, will you. You're a journalist. Come along with your notebook and pretend to copy down whatever Wiley — that's the S.K.K.F. marketing manager — says. Then I'll take you out to eat, OK?’

‘Oh, all right. But don't make a habit of this, Beattie, my self-esteem is already quite low enough, without my only invitations being to the press launches for new ulcer medications.’ They both laughed and hung up.

For the next couple of hours Jane operated on her body. She cleaned it and scraped it, patted it and pushed it, painted it and prinked it. She hated herself for deploying these mortician's skills on the lumpy carcass, but what option did she have? She had put herself into two entire outfits then torn them off again, before she was finally satisfied and able to set out for Grindley's. In the end, she went dressed as she had been all that hot day.

Coming out of Trafalgar Square Tube Station, Jane picked her way through the throngs of pigeons and tourists. She found Beatrice half-way up the wide stairway of Grindley's, handing out press packs. Jane's friend was so neat and pretty that she looked as if she might have been plastic-encapsulated along with her name badge.

‘Here,’ she said, thrusting one of the folders at Jane. ‘I think the speeches are about to begin. If you go on up to the Regency Room I'll join you in a moment.’

Jane did as she was told. In the Regency Room she positioned herself by the marble mantelpiece, under the huge gilt-framed mirror, and scanned the other launchers, the apparatchiks of the ulcer.

Jane was still feeling fat. Fat and sweaty. What a delicious irony, feeling fat and attending a press launch for ulcer medication. It wasn't lost on her. Wiley, the Marketing Manager, at least that's who she assumed it was, was droning on about Lilex. Jane couldn't concentrate. She flicked through the press pack, pausing only to admire a photograph of the S.K.K.F. chief executive, with his hands buried in what, according to the caption, was deep-frozen canine semen. She stared up at the ceiling and allowed her eyes to roam across the inverted landscape of plaster furbelows and flutings that gave the Regency Room its name. In these moments of absolute inattention, the presence that haunted her whole life had never been further from her mind.

‘Are these peanuts dry-roasted?’ Someone was talking to her.

‘Oh, err — I don't know. Does it matter?’

He laughed shortly and said, ‘I can't stand the dry-roasted ones, they're coated with all sorts of E-additives and crap, give me the sweats. Are you with the PR agency? I don't think I recognise you.’

He was a large man, Jane noted, with regular features tending to plumpness and square-cut mousy hair. There was something candid in his tone; this inspired candour in Jane. ‘My name's Jane Carter. To tell you the truth I haven't got anything to do with this. My friend just asked me to come and make up the numbers.’

‘Snap,’ he said. ‘My name's Ian Wharton, how do you do?’

Interlude

This is where The Fat Controller's brand of elective affinity leads to.

They were in a darkened corridor. It was musty with old carpet smell. They were naked. Standing like this, close to her, made him feel sharply the different sex that shaped their bodies. He felt that whereas her body was naturally shaped, her round hips and full bottom giving her an appropriate centre of gravity, his was just a long strip dangling from his head and only tentatively anchored to the dark floor. That was that then.

He had an erection. It was a latex thing, bouncy and ductile. She manoeuvred herself around so that she was side-on to him, then grasped his penis, grasped it in the way that she might a kitchen implement, a meat tenderiser or a rolling pin. She pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks, pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks. His penis oscillated upon its root, her buttocks wobbled. She had assaulted them both with the possibility of penetration. It was a moment of loss.

Ian and Jane found themselves sitting opposite one another in the Yellow Moon on Lisle Street. Goofy bent-over waiters leant against the half-bar. The tablecloth between them was stained with exactly the kind of yellow additives that gave Ian the sweats. At the next table a German tourist was listing his itinerary with wearying precision: ‘Thaan I haaf a daay foor Haamptoon Coort, yes?’ He was a Swabian, the hayseeds of Germany, and his voice looped the tonal loop like a stunt kite. Ian and Jane exchanged conspiratorial and chauvinistic looks.

‘Do you really believe in marketing?’ Jane asked, thinking to herself: I may as well establish if this man is a complete jerk before we get any further.

Ian took a while in answering, then said, ‘That's a difficult question. At the risk of seeming pedantic, of course I believe in the fact of marketing. I'm not sure that I think it's necessarily a good thing, or even necessary at all.’

‘Well, why do you do it then?’

‘It's all that I know how to do,’ he sighed. ‘I don't think I'm clever enough to do anything else now, even if I wanted to.’

‘What are you working on at the moment?’

‘Oh, something called “Yum-Yum”. It's an edible financial product — ’

Ian was interrupted by the waiter who cocked his ear in the general direction of their table, by way of indicating that he would like to take their order. They told him what they wanted. He didn't write it down but listened inattentively, exchanging an occasional Cantonese bark with his colleagues. When they'd finished he sidled off towards the kitchen without having said a word in English.

‘Service isn't exactly the strong point in these restaurants,’ said Ian, who for some reason felt embarrassed, as if the waiter had been a relative or a friend.

‘Oh I know.’ Jane laughed. ‘That's what I like about them. Everywhere else the waiters pretend to care, when really they couldn't give a shit. It's only the Chinese who refresh you with the sincerity of their contempt.’

‘I'm not sure that it's just contempt. A few months ago a man in the one next door had his arm hacked off by the chef, who was armed with a kitchen cleaver.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he kicked up a row over not being allowed to pay for his meal with a credit card.’

‘But everyone knows that these places are strictly cash. Something to do with the tongs, isn't it?’

‘He was a tourist.’

Their eyes met again, just as the German at the next table launched in on another swooping speech. This time they both laughed. For Ian, this felt as if a wave were breaking against his heart, a wave of warm human contact. He could actually feel this wave pushing out towards his extremities. Strange to relate, Jane could feel it too.

‘You were talking about an “edible financial product”. What the hell does that mean?’

‘The product is edible in two senses: the actual physical material associated with the product comes in an edible form and the interests and other disbursements come to the customer solely in the form of foodstuffs futures.’

‘So, it's a sort of ethically sound investment idea?’

‘Only if you're very greedy. But look, let's not talk about me, let's talk about you. What do you do?’

‘Oh I knit and crochet; and I do macramé and patchwork and appliqué and tapestry and a bit of embroidery and macramé — have I said that before?’

‘I think you might have.’

‘And I write about it for specialist magazines and do a television programme — ’

‘Oh, so I'm dining with a celebrity?’

‘Hardly, but it pays the rent.’

The waiter came back with a whole crispy duck. This he started to shred with mechanical efficiency, tearing at the thing with two forks. Both Ian and Jane felt embarrassed now. There was something venal about this shredding. Ian excused himself and went back through the restaurant to the toilet. He locked himself inside and propped his throbbing head against the paper-towel dispenser.

He thought about his nemesis, he-who-should-not-be-named, he of the capitalised definite article. Was he back? Perhaps this was the elective affinity he had always spoken of, always promised to Ian? Ian hadn't felt so safe in his attraction to anyone for a long time. Not since The Fat Controller had snapped his cigar in two, all those years before at Cliff Top. And even if this isn't arranged by him, thought Ian, why should I hold back now? What if what Gyggle says is true — he never really existed. I can't go on like this any longer, I can't go on feeling this way. If I don't get another person's hands on my body soon, I'm going to cease to exist. He had a vivid sensation of this, his body, like a giant continent, unmapped, unsurveyed, its further portions starting to fade away.

Back in the restaurant, Jane Carter was imagining what it might be like to have Ian Wharton's hands surveying her, touching her intimately. What would it feel like to have that big blocky body lying on hers? Could she tolerate it? She decided that she could — just about.

They drank too much saki, which tasted like hot sweat. And, after Ian had insisted on paying the bill, they walked out into the close night and went to a bar. Here there was an outsized television screen, which was so sited that the American footballing gladiators who were projected on to it looked as though they were dancing on the patrons’ heads.

They drank some more. The way that they began to laugh at each other's jokes was tenderness itself, as were the numerous glances, the manifold shared references. These were shy pointers to the evening's conclusion but they were hedged with some maturity, some acceptance that things might not work out after all.

Jane couldn't really say that she wanted Ian to fuck her. Her lust was a diffuse longing that boiled into being in the wake of sex, not in its anticipation. She knew that she could bear Ian's body, bear its weight on hers, bouncing, but what about the morning? She winced into the glass she was sipping from, remembering what it was like to have an unwanted man in her flat. Naked men were like great white spiders in the morning, caught by the taps in the glare of the bathroom light, their limbs flailing as they washed themselves down the emotional plug hole.

‘Where do you live?’ He sounded nervous.

‘Up in West Hampstead.’

‘Let's get a cab, I'll drop you off.’

‘Is it on your way?’

‘Not exactly.’

In the street they were gripped by the delirium of people who feel certain they are on the verge of full genitality. Delirious, because no one can ever know such a thing, no one can ever know what another thinks. They cleaved unto one another in Old Compton Street. Her belly was like unto a heap of meat, or so he thought. She was that animal, that immediate. A piss head, purple cleft actually hammered into his brow, suppurating, of course, begged from them. Ian gave him a pound for his troubles, thinking: If they're only worth a quid, a Mayfair town house should retail for 50p.

In the cab they started snogging. She's my diesel dyke — oh BurgerLand! thought Ian, restraining himself. Her lips were so tacky and soft, they excluded the draught from his mouth, the afflatus from his mind. At the junction with the Euston Road an old finned Ford Zephyr cut them up as the lights changed. Two lads, dark like gypsies, whooping and hollering. Ian didn't even notice.

Actually, Jane wasn't finding the kissing that unpleasant either: Then perhaps I'm drunk? She was. She didn't even notice the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs as the cab cruised by. Ian did. Was Gyggle in there, pacing about? Ian thought he saw a light and imagined Gyggle, doing what? Reading an academic paper? Or putting another patient under for DST, sending another sucker to the Land of Children's Jokes? It would have been so much better if Jane had seen they were passing the hospital, because she would have said brightly, ‘That's where I went for my assessment for voluntary service this afternoon — ’ And then some shit would have come down. Better then than later.

The cab rocked off the Finchley Road by Habitat, tipped behind the big block, then stuttered to a halt outside Jane's flat. Ian paid the cabby off.

In the small vestibule Ian smelt the tang of the lime in the fresh plaster. Jane fumbled with the key, resting her pounding heart against the entryphone. She felt his body press against her from behind. She yielded. She could feel his penis, hard in the small of her back. His hand pushed up the thick denim of her dress, smoothed up her thigh, came to catch and pull at the thin elastic lip of her pants. She sighed as his sodden face came down to nuzzle at her neck and his other hand moved up from her waist, to the carapace of her shy breast.

In counterpoint now, his two hands unbuttoned the heavy brass buttons that ran up the front of her dress. He felt her stomach, the tops of her thighs, the crinkly embroidery of her brassière. His face was coming around the corner of her cheek; their tongues touched awkwardly as they tried to enter each other's mouths from the side.

Then they stopped feeling one another out as they felt each other up and went looking for climax.

Before going up on the figurative pedals, so as to run into her at a sprint, Ian paused. He looked her in the eye and mentally apologised for the horror he might be about to inflict. Then he pushed on in — expecting the worst.

There's no better psychological check against premature ejaculation than the fear that your penis might break off inside someone.

A while later he was really fucking her. Fucking her in the way that men do when they have lost all sensation, when their cocks have been battering away for so long that they've abandoned conscience and created a battle zone of frightening ignorance from which no intelligence is available. When at last they came it was with a thin-lipped finality, as if they were a put-upon company secretary winding up a pointless board meeting.

Yet afterwards, when they lay, she face down, he with his big leg pinioning her buttocks, they both thought: This could be love.

Steve Souvanis stood awkwardly by the reception desk at Brown's Hotel. He knew he looked conspicuous and down-at-heel in his cheap suiting. He was sweating in the heat and his belly was distended, uncomfortable. Outside, through the swing doors, he could see the winking hazard lights of his car. It was impossible to find a meter in this part of town — if a traffic warden or a rogue clamping crew came along he was screwed. He tried not to look too flustered, too ill at ease. He was feigning interest in some flyers for Barries’, the posh King's Road menswear boutique, that had been deposited on the reception desk.

‘Yes?’ The concierge took him for a cabby.

‘I've come to see one of your guests.’

‘Yes?’

‘A Mr Northcliffe.’

‘And you are?’

‘Mr Souvanis.’

‘Ah yes, Mr Souvanis, I have a message from Mr Northcliffe for you. He's at Davidoff's. Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes, I know.’ Souvanis broke away and headed to the door. The concierge called after him, ‘Left along Piccadilly and then right by the Ritz.’ It was insulting, a calculated snub, implying that Steve was pretending or something.

He left the car, a large estate, in the underground car-park on the Piccadilly side of Berkeley Square. He was so preoccupied that he didn't even notice the red-and-yellow tape stretched everywhere and the signs reading ‘Crime Scene Keep Out’. Back up at ground level he ploughed along the pavements, perspiring and fulminating. It was so sunny, the glare bit right into him. In the heat and haze the architecture of London looked Byzantine, immemorial. His eyes were drawn upwards to the pinnacled and domed tops of the buildings. He turned right past the Ritz and saw Davidoff the cigar merchant's across the road.

The shop was lilac-carpeted and humming cool. The smell of tobacco was as muted as expensive perfume. Steve Souvanis knew he was conspicuous once again, poor and oikish. The sales assistant was a duplicate of the concierge at Brown's.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you have a Mr Northcliffe with you?’

‘Yes, he's in the humidor room. Can I tell him who's calling?’ Souvanis told him and he glided off.

‘Who's calling, who's calling’ — Souvanis was incredulous. ‘Christ! How ridiculous. It's not as if he's staying here, he hasn't rented out the humidor room — ’

‘Sir?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘This way.’ The sales assistant directed Souvanis to the corner of the room, where there was a large glassed-in cabinet. ‘You'll pardon the formality, sir,’ he said. ‘Mr Northcliffe has rented the humidor room for the day and he's very particular about his privacy.’

The glass door swung open and with it came a pungent tropical blast of strongly vegetative tobacco smell. The Fat Controller was sitting on a large reproduction-Empire armchair. He was surrounded by cigars and cheroots, shelf upon shelf of open boxes. The cigars were of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the automatic clips of small-calibre Brazilian cheroots, through the bandoliers of Honduran panatellas, to the big ones, the bazookas and groud-to-air missiles of Cuban full coronas, each one housed in its aluminium launcher.

In his hand The Fat Controller held an Upmann number one the size of a baby's arm. He was dressed formally, like an old-fashioned British civil servant, in black-and-white needle-striped trousers and a black frock coat. The Windsor collar made his immense head appear, more than ever, like a football placed for kick-off. On the floor next to his chair there was a top hat.

‘Is that you, Souvanis? Come in, man! Don't hover like that, you're letting all the goodness escape.’ The door swung shut and the two of them were left alone together, in close damp proximity. The Fat Controller immediately grabbed a fold of Souvanis's belly, quickly and adroitly, the way that any other man might snatch up a poker card. ‘Getting a little tubby, aren't we,’ he snarled. ‘Have you heard me talking to you?’

‘Ow! Yes.’

‘Good. Talking to you through your fat — that's the ticket, eh? Splendid, splendid. And have you tendered for the D.F. & L. job?’

‘Yes, I have. Please let go.’

The Fat Controller released him and fell to examining his cigar. ‘Big, isn't it?’ he said at length.

‘Yes, it is rather — look, what's this all about, sir?’

‘Don't call me “sir”, Souvanis, you're not at school now. We're colleagues. You can call me “Master” if it makes you feel more comfortable.’

He put the Upmann back in its box and pulled a small cardboard packet of Toscanelli cheroots from the watch pocket of his waistcoat. He stuck one in his mouth. It was dwarfed by the smooth expanse of his face, rendered as tiny as a toothpick.

‘Match me, Sidney,’ said The Fat Controller.

‘But, Master,’ said Souvanis without quite knowing why he dared, ‘I thought connoisseurs always lit their own cigars.’

‘Harumph! Well, I suppose strictly speaking that is true. However, it's a mistake to assume that sensual experiences are merely enjoyable; they can have wider importance, a political significance even. In this case you are not simply lighting my cigar, you are paying homage. Now do it, match me!’ He did so. The Fat Controller inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out hard, strafing the room. He watched it billow about the discreet strip lights set into the top of the cigar shelves. Watched it critically, rapt, as if in the throes of some profound aesthetic rumination.

‘I'll tell you what this is all about, Souvanis,’ he resumed. ‘It's about a man's soul, a man's moral faculties, a man's inbuilt reason, his intuition, his sensibility and his self-esteem. In short, it's about his fate.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘No, you don't see, Souvanis, and you never will. For twenty years now I have cultivated this man, pruned and shaped him, submitted him to a kind of metaphysical topiary. Now it is time to take stock, to, as it were, tie up some loose ends.’

‘So how has D.F. & L. got anything to do with this? What's with this “Yum-Yum” and these standing booths —?’

‘Booby! You know I cannot abide a booby. It's not for you to speculate on my methods, my little playlets, my masques and contrivances and conceits. You are nothing but a familiar, a fat little cat.’

‘Yes, Master.’

‘I have need of you, Souvanis, to be my bag man, my button. So, you had better get that brother-in-law of yours in to run Dyeline. I'll be needing you for the next few days. And now’ — he stood up — ‘I've booked a table at the Gay Hussar — let's eat.’

Souvanis didn't really want to eat at the Gay Hussar. The very thought of all that paprika made him feel dyspeptic. He tried framing a statement of the form: ‘Actually, I'm not really that hungry, why don't I have a cheese sandwich somewhere and join you later?’ but looking at The Fat Controller gnashing his black fang of a cigar, Souvanis thought better of it.

At the end of that week, when Ian went for his next DST session, Dr Gyggle found him much changed. The marketing man had a sloppy grin on his face and he was lying sensuously on the examination couch in the little cubicle as Gyggle swept in, hypo in hand.

‘Well, lan, you look very comfortable.’

‘I am.’

‘Not worried about the DST? About going back to the Land of Children's Jokes?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, and why's that?’ Gyggle supported the axle of his pelvis on the couch and peered down at Ian.

‘Because I don't think I'm going back. I think I've cracked it. You see’ — he blushed — ‘I met this girl — woman — and well, you see, we made love. And it didn't happen. It didn't come off.’

‘I do see,’ said the shrink, a smirk oozing out from behind the beard. ‘That is interesting. But there's a lot more to achieving full genitality, Ian, than the one apparently successful roll in the hay. You appreciate that, don't you?’

‘Yes, of course, that's why I'm here. I've got something to live for now, something other than products. I want to be one hundred per cent fit — ’

‘Rid of all the old bugaboos?’

‘Exactly,’ said Ian, grinning at Gyggle's use of language.

‘Good. I'll give you the pre-med then.’

There are many different ways of using drugs, many giddy variations on the basic theme of intoxication. Who can doubt that a vicar sipping a gin and tonic in the rectory garden isn't a million miles away from the urban crack head, searing his flesh with flaming acetone? Or that the psychotropic trances of the Sibundoy Valley shamans are not separated by many worlds of possibility from the monoxide-promoted drone of those who take the Silk Cut challenge? That being noted, The Fat Controller used drugs in the only way that really matters, to manipulate and distort, to retard and stunt, to cajole and control. He had a kind of drug-thing going in London. It was useful to him and it involved Richard Whittle, Beetle Billy and all the other no-hopers who hung around Gyggle's DDU. They were unruly participants, unsurprisingly. But that wasn't a problem, for he had one of his most trusted confrères in situ.

As Ian lay on the couch feeling Gyggle's Omnipom flood into him, Richard Whittle and Beetle Billy were coming out of the Tube at King's Cross. They found themselves bang in the middle of the wide-paved apron that runs in front of the station and along the Euston Road. It was covered in people, paper sellers, commuters, art students, immigrants, refugees, justices of the peace, articled clerks, nutritionists, cricket fans, loss-adjusters, cooks and junkies. Junkies singly and in huddles, junkies walking briskly on serious business and junkies idling, mooching along trying to appear relaxed, interested in their surroundings like ideal tourists.

Within twenty yards Richard and Beetle Billy were accosted by a short Italian with a knife-slash on his cheek and an English brass on his arm.

‘You lookin'?’ asked the Italian out of the corner of his mouth. He had the occupational skill of street junkies the world over, an ability to project his voice into another junky's ear from some distance, whilst remaining inaudible to the general public. Richard looked at Beetle Billy — the stupid car-repair man was wise to at least one event. His conjunctival eyes looked at Richard and filmed over still further.

‘Nah,’ said Richard.

‘Whassermatter!?’ the brass screeched after them. ‘Iss reely good gear an’ that.’ But they were already too far off.

They strode towards the corner. The Pentonville Road ski-jumped away from them, lifting off towards the Angel. On the other side of the road in front of the bookie's, there was a mêlée of low-life. Even so, the junkies were holding themselves aloof from the dossers. The dossers had no pride. They built lean-tos out of plastic milk crates, right on the pavement. Then they got inside and pissed themselves. No, those dossers had no pride. But those junkies, on the other hand, what a fine upstanding bunch. There they all were, wavering in a line, necks craned to catch the junk messages from the hot ether. A dosser stands out a mile but a junky is a member of the plainclothes division of debauchery. Officers in this elite echelon are trained to recognise one another by eye-contact alone.

Beetle Billy pointed at a figure in the line. ‘Thass Lena, man, she steers for one of those black geezers from the East End, less give her a try.’

‘You lookin'?’ asked the smallish blackish girl.

‘Yo’ where y’ at, girl? Don’ recognise me nor nuffin’. Iss me, Beetle Billy.’ The girl sighed. ‘Leroy ‘bout, girl?’

From nowhere — or so it seemed to Richard — an immaculately dressed, coal-black young man appeared. Without saying anything, just by little jerks and nods of his flat-topped head, he piloted them across the road and towards the Midland City Line Station. They turned right past the Scala Cinema, crossed the Gray's Inn Road and then dived down a side street.

The coal-black man started to talk. ‘Less get a ways off,’ he said. ‘There's a lot of bother an’ that around an’ I don’ hold wiv it. No, man, no way, no, sir.’ He turned to Richard flicking a penetrating stare. ‘I'm Leroy, man, I'm Leroy, Le-roy. Remember that name, man, because I am the original Leroy, man — don’ ‘cept no substitute an’ that — ‘ cause others may imitate but I o-rig-in-ate. Me come fe’ mash up de area — ’

‘Blud claat, Ras claat!’ exclaimed Beetle Billy. They stopped and gave each other five.

‘Now, what you want, boys?’ Just like that Leroy switched back from patois to Cockney. They were walking through a small estate of four-storey, red-brick blocks. Leroy drew them into a recess where huge rubbish canisters crouched on three-wheeled bases.

‘We just want a bag thanks, Leroy,’ Richard replied.

‘Hey, I like you, man. You remember my name, man, that shows some respect, y'know, you ain't dissin’ me an’ that.’ While he was talking a little white bead or polyp of plastic appeared between two of the gold rings on his hand. He proffered it to them. ‘There you go,’ said Leroy. ‘Thass why I like to get a ways off. So my punters can see what they're gettin’ an’ that, yerknowhatImean?’

‘I can't look at this, Leroy,’ said Richard. ‘It'll take me half an hour to get the packaging off. Why can't you guys ever put your stuff in a good old-fashioned paper bindle?’

‘Hey! You know why that is, man. Anyways you ain't buying the stuff on account of its packaging, now are you?’

‘No, that's true but every product has some kind of packaging and you could say that that effects its saleability — it may even represent added-value to the customer.’

The dealer paused for a moment, obviously taken by Richard's observation on the mechanics of his marketing. There was silence in the garbage recess, except for the faint ‘chk-chk’ noise made by Leroy's rings rubbing together and the distant grating of the traffic.

‘I hear you, bro’, said Leroy at length, ‘but a bit of gear ain't really a product as such. I mean it's not like a Custard Cream or a Painstyler, it's not an original created product. It's just — like — well — “gear”, innit?’

‘Yeah,’ Beetle Billy joined in. ‘Iss like a whatsit, a generik, innit.’

‘A generic?’ queried Richard.

‘Yeah, like an ‘oover. An ‘oover was just a product to begin wiv’. But now everyone calls any thingy thass like an ‘oover, an ’oover.’

‘I see, I see what you mean,’ mused Richard. Leroy shifted uneasily in his penny loafers, his expensively suited shoulders rubbed ‘shk-shk’ against the brickwork. ‘But, Billy, the Hoover was created as an individual product and then through its very ubiquity it became a generic term. Now this stuff’ — he pointed at the bead of heroin between Leroy's knuckles — ‘has a proper name but there are numerous slang terms that refer to it, neither as a product nor as a generic — ’

‘Of course it's a product,’ Leroy broke in. ‘Sheee! Someone grow it, right? Someone pro-cess it, right? Someone even im-port it, right? I know, sure as fuck that someone whole-sale it, right? Now I'm tellin’ you people,’ and here he paused and ran a fluttering hand around the space between the three of them, ‘that I am re-tailin’ this ‘ticular pro-duct. So if you want it — pay for it, an’ if you don't — say so, man, ‘cause I've got to get back out to the front of the store.’

Richard and Beetle Billy scrunged in their jeans’ pockets and pulled out bank notes like used handkerchiefs, together with some pound coins and other change. Leroy stood and withered at them while they accumulated the score for the score. They gave him the money — he gave them the scag. Then he disappeared, evaporating into the thick fructifying air as suddenly as he had materialised in the first place. Further up the courtyard a four-year-old child was ejected from a flat and started to howl.

Some time later Richard was back on his dead bed, staring out over the Heath where schoolchildren screechily played. He set down the 2 ml syringe on the cardboard box that served him as a bedside table and fell back, his mind nuzzling in on itself. He was stoned enough to be blissfully unaware of his role as pacemaker, psychic vanguard, racing ahead of Ian Wharton, back to the Land of Children's Jokes.

CHAPTER NINE. THE MONEY CRITIC

Dreamless sleep. No sensation even of having slept. Sleep simply as a gap, an absence. Sleep so blank and black that it shatters the cycle of the eight thousand moments that make up the waking mind. Hume spoke of consciousness as analogous to inertia, transmitted from moment to moment as force is transferred from one billiard ball to the next. In this instance a white-gloved hand of more than average size had come down to seize the pink.

Ian woke up and knew this before he opened his eyes. Then he opened them and found himself back in the Land of Children's Jokes. Pinky stood like some mutant Bonnard in the wash of lilac and lemon light that fell from the tall unshuttered sash windows. He was eating a Barratt's sherbert dip, using the stick of liquorice that plugged the cylindrical paper packet to dig out the yellow powder. He sucked the stick then plunged it back in and each time he drew it out more of the dusty stuff adhered. Pinky was eating the sherbert dip with great concentration and attention to detail but quite clearly he wasn't enjoying it. It was a task for him, to be carried out with diligence and application; nonetheless he had noticed Ian waking up.

‘Are you with us, dearie?’ said the gloriously nude man, and turned to confront Ian with his stubby cock and Tartar's-hat muff of white pubic hair.

Ian kept silent. The last time he visited the Land of Children's Jokes he had an awful time. The key to refusing entry into the delusion — or so he imagined — was not to manifest any kind of lucidity. That had been his downfall before, so he resolved to stay silent.

But then something moved in the corner of the room. It was too dark there to make out colour, or even shape, but something moved and abruptly.

‘What's that!’ cried Ian involuntarily, lifting himself up on his elbows. It was too late. Although the whatever-it-was had stopped moving he still found himself embodied, centre stage in the awful land.

‘I see you are with us again, dearie, now that the cat has left off your tongue.’ Pinky was welcoming enough, if guarded. He turned back to face the window and went on with his thrusting of liquorice stick into sherbert pond. Ian took a look around the room.

It had changed. It was recognisably the room in which Pinky and the thin man had entertained him before — there were the same high sash windows and there was the same fungal smell. The bed was also the same — huge with curling prows for the foot and headboards. It was even set in the same position, at right-angles to the window. But everything else was different.

The fungus was all gone. The button mushrooms that had clustered in fairy rings on the damp carpets had been dusted up. The giant toadstools and fly agarics that served as tables and chairs had been uprooted and removed. The enormous puff balls, which Ian remembered as being fully six feet across, had been rolled out from the corners of the room and disposed of. Indeed, now that Ian looked more closely, he could see that the room hardly had corners any more to speak of. He had the impression that the room's space had been translated into a vacancy within a far larger structure, some kind of barn, perhaps, or giant warehousing unit. The prevailing colours of the land were now slurry-greys and dried dirt-browns. The air had a sharp tang of high octane and there were lumps of formless detritus scattered around on the carpet.

‘What is this place?’ asked Ian aloud. ‘And why am I here?’

Pinky turned from the window and came and sat on the bed beside him. He went on eating the sherbert dip. On his face brown liquorice stains and plashes of yellow powder had combined, making it look like he'd been subjected to an attack with some new and vile kind of chemical weapon. He regarded Ian with an open but searching expression, not unlike that of a provincial bank manager. ‘I cannot say why you are here.’ He spoke softly. ‘This is not something that can be said. That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’

‘Wittgenstein,’ said Ian — it was one of the few quotations he knew.

Pinky flew into a rage. ‘It wasn't! It wasn't! The frigging little pansified bitch!’ He shook with anger, his ample bosoms swinging from side to side. ‘He stole everything, absolutely everything. All my best lines, all my best gags!’ He was like a child having a tantrum, a tantrum that departed as suddenly as it had arrived.

‘I'm sorry,’ said Ian, ‘I had no idea it was your line.’

‘No, no, it's my fault, I overreacted. I'm sorry, things haven't been going too well with the worm recently and you know how little sympathy I get from him.’

Ian glanced around quickly, Pinky had given such emphasis to the ‘him’ that he assumed the thin man was about to burst forth, twirling his cane and chanting his mantric ‘Cha, cha, cha!‘ but there was no sign of him. ‘What's the problem with the worm?’ Ian asked. By way of answering Pinky opened his mouth wide and indicated that Ian should look inside. He bent forward. In the red-ribbed recesses of Pinky's gullet he caught a glimpse of something with an alien's head. It was white and diffidently questing. ‘Is that it — is that the worm?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Pinky. ‘He won't have anything to do with chocolate now and he won't deign to come out of my bum any more either. It has to be my mouth and sherbert fountains are his preferred tipple. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the things, they make me feel quite quite nauseous.’

‘What's your name?’ Ian broke in, keen to change the subject.

‘Pinky,’ said Pinky.

‘I knew that,’ said Ian and then, ‘What is this place, Pinky?’

‘This,’ said Pinky, getting up and turning a full circle with his flabby arms outstretched, ‘is the Land of Children's Jokes.’ His Hottentot buttocks hung behind him like a sack. ‘And your host for this evening is — ’ The thing in the corner that had stirred before moved again. ‘The one and only man in the Land of Children's Jokes with a spade in his head. Yes, Ian, with a spade actually in his head. Will you put your hands together, please, and give a big welcome to — Doug!’

Without quite knowing why Ian found himself applauding. His cold hands banged flatly against one another and the split-second echo bounced off the metal walls with a tuning fork's whine. The thing in the corner shifted again, resolving itself into a shape that then took on extension and colour, until it finally became the figure of a man. The man stepped forward — he was in the middle of his middle years and conventionally dressed in a worn but still serviceable single-breasted pin-stripe suit. He was taller than average and slim with sandy hair cut en brosse, his features were symmetrical and fine, his countenance pleasing. Ian found him instantly reassuring.

‘I'm Doug,’ said the man, still standing in the shadows. ‘I've come to give you a look-see around the Land of Children's Jokes, if that's all right with you?’

‘Um, well, err — absolutely.’ Ian struggled to find the words.

‘Good, good, but before we set out I need to — how can I put it, let me think — ’ There was a long and considered pause, clearly Doug wasn't the sort of man to rush into anything. Ian felt relaxed just being in his presence, it was such a contrast to Pinky. So much so that he wasn't surprised when he looked round and saw that Pinky had gone, taking his sherbert fountain with him.

‘I need to familiarise you with my condition,’ Doug said at last.

‘What exactly do you mean?’ Ian was bemused. Doug stepped back further into the shadows and Ian could make out one arm going up to fidget in the sandy hair.

‘You heard what my colleague said?’

‘Oh, you mean about the spade in your head.’

‘Exactly. It's not pretty but there it is and we have to get on with things. It's just that one's first sight of it can be a little disturbing.’ With this he stepped right forward into the wash of light from the high sash windows.

He really did have a spade in his head, a large garden spade. It was the kind with a blond-wood varnished shaft, a two-tone metal blade and a galvanised rubber handle. This was the part of the spade that was furthest from the ground, for the thing had obviously been plunged into the top of Doug's head vertically, as if some sadistic gardener had stood on his shoulders and started digging. The spade's blade ran perpendicular to Doug's forehead like a surreal coxcomb or hair-parting device. Surrounding the point of entry there was about an inch of corrupted flesh, a ditch and dyke of purpled pus, garnished with matted hair and what might have been brain.

Ian gagged and then, sprawling over the side of the great bed, vomited on to the carpet.

‘I am sorry,’ said Doug, who had by now moved right up to the foot of the bed, where he stood playing with his watch chain, ‘but there's very little that I can do to lessen the impact of the thing. It's useless trying to warn people or explain to them what they're about to see.’

Ian couldn't look at him, he looked at the carpet instead and said, ‘Impact would have to be the operative word.’

‘Quite so,’ said Doug. And suddenly Ian found that he could look at the man with the spade in his head, that it hardly bothered him at all.

‘Are you feeling a little better now?’ Doug was solicitous. He had the old-world charm Ian associated with British civil servants of the pre-war period. His mien was compounded of concern, probity and duty, more or less in equal parts. There was also something peculiarly affecting about the waxy patina of his sticky-out ears. ‘You're so right to remark on my use of the word “impact”. You know, I hope I may speak frankly to you, Mr Wharton, for without a certain frankness what is the point of conversation? You see I find this image — ’ he gestured towards the implement buried in his cranium — ‘to be almost integral to any understanding of the modern world. Metal into flesh — the impact of metal on flesh. Isn't that the whole of progress in a nutshell — a spade in the head? I only have to contemplate the world to feel it entering into me as steelily and as surely as this spade bisects my skull. Do you follow me?’

‘Why yes,’ said Ian. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘I'm dreadfully sorry to bang on about it like this — you must think me a frightful bore but it's so rare that I get the opportunity to talk to anyone.’

‘What about Pinky?’ said Ian with a creeping sense of déjà entendu.

‘Oh my dear boy, he's far too tied up in his own problems to have any concern for mine. Somehow that's the way that things tend to be here. Come now, get up and I'll take you for a bit of a tour — you'd like that, wouldn't you?’

Doug gave Ian his smooth hand and assisted him to stand. Throwing off the covers, swinging his legs sideways and then standing up, these actions brought Ian still further into the reality of the Land of Children's Jokes. He found himself upright, fully dressed, next to the man with the spade in his head, within the bounds of the fan of light that spread out from the windows across the lumpy floor. Still holding him by the hand, Doug led him away into the dark.

Doug wouldn't let go of Ian's hand. He pulled him gently but firmly into the crepuscular hinterland of the giant shed, if that's what it was. From somewhere in the distance Ian could hear faint noises that might have been cries but they were too indistinct to make out.

‘I ought to warn you,’ Doug threw over his shoulder, ‘we're going to see some things that may disturb you.’ Ian grinned to himself, he was beginning to get the hang of the Land of Children's Jokes.

At that moment there was a squeal in a dark corner some twenty yards off to their right. Ian jumped. ‘What's that!’

‘The first of them, I suppose, come on, we'd better take a look.’ The man with the spade in his head pulled a torch from his pocket and, using its pencil beam tentatively, guided them through the maze of rubbish that littered the floor.

They rounded a low bank, which as far as Ian could make out was composed of tumbleweeds of swarf, dripping with oil and frosted with sawdust. Behind it there was a bloody baby. Doug's torch gave the baby's head a weak yellow halo. It was around nine months old, wearing a terry-towelling Babygro and sitting solidly on its broad-nappied base. Its chin, its hands, its Babygro, even the beaten floor beneath it, were all covered in blood. Something glinted in the baby's tender pink paw, something bright which travelled towards its budding mouth.

‘Jesus!’ cried Ian. ‘That baby's got a razor blade!’ But immediately he saw the stupidity of saying it, for scattered at the baby's feet were ten or fifteen more razor blades, all within easy reach. While they watched the baby raised the blade to its mouth, opened wide and inserted it vertically. The baby's blue eyes twinkled merrily at Ian as it bit down on the blade, which straight away sliced through lip and gum at top and bottom. Ian could see the layers of flesh and tissue all the way to the bone; he screamed weakly and Doug squeezed his hand as if to reassure. Thick plashes of blood gave the baby a red bib, but it continued to sit upright and was even happily burbling.

‘What's red,’ Doug asked, ‘and sits in the corner?’

Up above them some sort of dawn had begun to break. In the vaulting of the high ceiling Ian could descry rhubarb girders bursting from a piecrust of concrete. ‘Come on.’ Doug tugged at his hand. ‘There's someone else who wants to meet you.’

They walked for what seemed like hours through the echoing space, sometimes crossing wide expanses of concrete, other times crouching to make their way through twisting tunnels lined with chipboard, or Formica. Everywhere there was evidence of failed industry. Defunct machinery lay about, dusty and rusty. Bolts, brackets, angle irons and other unidentifiable hunks of metal were scattered on the floor; a floor that changed from concrete to beaten earth and in places disappeared altogether underneath a foot or more of water.

The Land of Children's Jokes was locked in the bony embrace of winter, the limitless building must have central unheating, Ian reflected miserably. It was also awkward walking hand-in-hand with Doug, who often had to proceed with extreme caution in order to avoid knocking the spade in his head. Eventually they came to a tunnel that was different to all the others. This one was tiled. It was, Ian realised as they splashed through a footbath, set in its slippery floor, the sort of tunnel you go through on your way from the changing rooms to a public swimming pool.

He was right. When they emerged they were standing at the side of a swimming pool, an old-fashioned thirties’ pool with magnolia tiling everywhere, a couple of tiers of wooden seats for spectators and green water lapping at its sides. Doug said, ‘I have to go on a bit and check that everything has been prepared. If you don't mind I'd be obliged if you'd wait here for a while.’ Before Ian could object, or remonstrate with him in any way he was gone, back through the footbath.

Ian sat down in one of the seats. This, he thought to himself, is no dream. It's too cold, for a start, never mind its terrible lucidity. There was a splash and an explosion of breath from the pool — there was something, or someone in it. Ian rushed down to the edge and peered in. Nothing. The greenish surface of the water lapped towards him and then away from him again. But then he saw something move, right down towards the deep end where the gently sloping bottom suddenly took a dive. It looked like a piece of statuary, a bust or torso of some kind, although not quite the right shape; and anyway, Ian observed, a trail of tiny air-bubbles linked it to the surface.

It lurched, then shot up from the bottom of the pool in a shroud of air and water — whoosh! Ian recoiled, it was bobbing in the open air, the torso of a man, quite a small man with collar-length dark hair. The armless and legless man wriggled his torso feverishly to remain upright in the water, his breath came out in hard ‘paffs’.

Ian was a little blasé by now. ‘You must be Bob,’ he said.

‘Aye — that's me,’ replied the quadra-amputee, still jerking spasmodically. He had a pronounced Strathclyde accent. His limbs had been chopped off right at the joins, shoulder and groin. Ian could see distinct ovals of recently grafted skin framed by the empty legs of his blue swimming trunks. For some reason the most revolting thing about Bob was this, that he had troubled to clothe his bottom half; the empty legs of his trunks stretched down from his groin, under his perineum and up his arse cleft at the back, framing the scar tissue with shocking clarity in spite of the ultramarine wavering.

Bob had managed to stabilise himself. He was sufficiently buoyant to prevent the water from coming above his nipples and he was now keeping himself upright with nice twitches of his hips and buttocks. Ian examined him more closely. He had the sharp features of a Gorbals hard man and the razor scars to go with them — thin blue capillaries radiated across his face from his nose. His narrow hairless chest — and indeed the rest of his body from what Ian could see of it — was packed with taut muscle under a pale freckled skin.

‘Did yer mother never teach you that it's rude to stare like that at the disabled?’ Bob snapped.

‘Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm a bit disoriented, you see. I've no idea either how I got here or what the hell it's all about.’

‘You can be forgiven for that,’ said Bob, mellowing. ‘I dinna’ ken anyone who rightly knows how he came here.’ He moved his head around to indicate the place they found themselves in. It was an amazingly expressive gesture, as if his neck were an arm and his face a hand he could talk with. ‘Ahm from Scotty Land — originally like.’

‘Oh,’ said Ian.

‘D'ye ken it?’

‘Well, I went when I was a child, to Edinburgh on a school trip.’

‘Edinburgh! Pshaw! Edinburgh! Thass no more Scotty Land than the bloody Tyne, man.’

‘Where are you from?’ asked Ian, sort of knowing that this was the right thing to do.

‘Glasgie, man, Glasgie, not that that's necessarily yer real Scotty land, ahm not claiming that because anyone from north of the Gramps always says that they're the real Scotties and I can see their point.’ Bob finished this speech by arching his pale body right out of the water like some hideous Rainbow trout, then he plunged his head down into the pool, so that his foreshortened rear end shot up in the air. The arch was followed by another and then another. Ian watched dumbfounded as the amputee propelled himself the length of the pool by exercising this limbless butterfly stroke.

Bob reached the shallows and regained his equilibrium in the far corner of the pool, his narrow shoulders jammed up against the rails of the ladder. There was a splashing from the footbath — Ian turned and saw Doug emerging spade-first.

‘About bloody time!’ hooted Bob.

‘I'm sorry?’ said Doug, urbane as ever.

‘You leave the bloody man in my pool without so much as by your leave — what kind of manners are those then?’

‘It was only for a couple of minutes — ’

‘Dinne give me that crap, many mickles make a muckle; and you can tell his fucking nibs from me, that ahm no afraid of him neither. There's little else he can do to hurt me, now is there?’

‘I'm sorry if I offended you,’ said Ian. He couldn't say why but he rather liked Bob. There was something truly admirable about the way the spunky Scot had overcome his terrifying disability.

‘Oh dinna you worry, lad, I was jus’ letting off some blather. You run along now; and as the medieval knights used to say to one another on parting, “Be-sieging you!” Ahahaha! Hahah'ha!’

And it was this cackling laughter that followed Ian as he splashed his way back through the footbath behind Doug.

But either it wasn't the same footbath, or else someone had been indulging in scene shifting on a prodigious scale, for this time, after tramping through some changing rooms, they emerged into what was clearly the reception area which properly belonged to the swimming pool. A long low space, a checkerboard of blue-and-brown carpet tiles spread out towards a row of glass doors at the far end. There were cork boards all the way along the breeze-blocked walls and attached to them the usual notices advertising the times for the Junior Ducklings Club, aerobics classes and the water polo heats.

It was as if the swimming pool had been some kind of air-lock in between the Land of Children's Jokes and a less problematic reality, the reception area was so mundanely institutional. And for Ian, underscoring this paradigm shift was the sight of two familiar figures, sitting on a couple of tiny chairs that were set beside the information desk near the glass doors. One of the figures was Dr Gyggle and the other was The Fat Controller.

‘What's your name?’ called The Fat Controller, turning to face them.

‘Doug,’ Doug replied.

‘Of course — ha, ha! — “Doug”, that's rich. All right, Doug, bring him over here and then lose yourself, exit, scram, got the ticket? Good, good, in fact, capital!’

Ian took his time strolling down to meet his two mentors. He knew now that he had all the time in the world.

‘Come on, Ian, don't dither,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘We haven't got all the time in the world, you know. What's that you say?’ Poor Doug had banged the haft of his spade against a fire bell; it was this tinging noise that The Fat Controller was responding to.

‘Sorry,’ said Doug, ‘I didn't say anything, it was just my spade. .’ He trailed off and gestured up to the ceiling in a rather helpless fashion.

‘I thought I told you to go away, Dougie — so do it — and on your way back give that coon-boy a shake, got that?’ barked The Fat Controller, who had a charmingly off-hand sort of way of voicing racist sentiments.

‘So here we all are,’ said Ian once Doug had departed. ‘All together at last.’ He pulled up a tiny chair for himself and sitting down went on, ‘I'd like to take this opportunity, Dr Gyggle — if indeed that is your real name — to thank you for all the wonderful help you've given me over the years. I don't know what I would have done without you.’ Gyggle shifted uneasily on his dwarfish seat — it was so low that his bony knees were stuck right up inside the billowing end of the beard.

‘Don't get chippy, Ian, there isn't any call for it. Hieronymus Gyggle is a trusted confrère of mine and I was hardly likely to leave you unsupervised while I was away, now was I?’

‘S'pose not.’

‘“S'pose not” isn't good enough, it never is. It wasn't good enough when you were a spotty little twerp and it isn't any better now that you're a grown man. I do wish that you'd buck up a bit, Ian, and face your responsibilities. You aren't the only person in the world that matters, you know, and anyway, we aren't here to maunder on about your distinctly minor problems, we're here to talk product.’

‘Why? Why bother?’

‘Because your agency D.F. & L. Associates has been contracted to handle the marketing for my new financial product, which as you know is beset with numerous problems, not least among them this naming business. Have you managed to do anything on that yet?’

‘I've set up a naming group.’

‘Oh good, well that's all right then, you've set up a naming group, how perspicacious of you. Cretin! Fool! Booby! When did a naming group ever settle a problem like this, I ask you, you're no better than your father the Essene.’

‘Well, we came up with the name for the Painstyler in one of these groups and I've managed to get the same people along again.’

‘Harumph! Well, I admit that does sound a bit more promising — pass me that ashtray, will you, Gyggle.’ The lanky shrink handed him one of the tinfoil doilies that pass muster for ashtrays in such places and The Fat Controller stubbed out his Voltiger. The three of them sat in silence while he invented fire with his primitive lighter and then used it to light another.

‘Now, Ian,’ he resumed, thick smoke gushing from his rapacious mouth. ‘There are several tricky aspects to all of this and although I don't expect you to follow the many dizzy twists and scale the haunting crags of my reasoned plotting — genius is after all a lonely estate — I do expect you to apply yourself.

‘Firstly the matter of this young woman — what's her name, Gyggle?’

‘Jane,’ said the shrink. ‘Jane Carter.’

‘That's right. Now this Jane Carter, you can have her if that's what you want — you can even marry her for all I care. Of course, you'd be wise not to tell her about your little outrages, I don't think she'd take too kindly to them, it might put a bit of a crimp on your relationship, hmm?’

‘Little outrages? I'm not sure I follow you.’ Ian was non-plussed.

‘Well, the woman you killed with the poisoned umbrella at the Theatre Royal for a start; and then there was that other chit, what was her name? Ah yes, it's coming to me now, June. Jane and June, not very imaginative when it comes to your playmates’ nomenclature are you?’

‘I don't know what you're talking about. I never killed anybody, you killed the woman at the Theatre Royal and I never did anything to June — ’

‘You sexually assaulted her.’

‘No I didn't.’

‘Did.’

‘Didn't.’

‘Did!’

‘Gentlemen, perhaps I could assist?’ Gyggle had regained his professional composure and was speaking once again in the honeyed tones of his consulting room. ‘Ian, I do think Samuel is being a little unfair to you but I'm afraid that the substance of what he says is true. The only way I can explain this to you is to adopt a schema from somewhere else — the cinema or detective fiction, perhaps. You see, Ian, all your adult life you have been committing these little “outrages”. It has been Samuel's — and latterly my own — responsibility to cover things up, to clear up the mess. I don't mean literally, of course, although many of your activities have left quite a few stains, I mean clear up the mess in here.’ And then Gyggle made a gesture identical to the one The Fat Controller had, all those years ago. He tapped his temple with his bony finger, forcefully, as if requesting admission to his own consciousness. ‘We didn't want you to suffer the torment of your own behaviour, Ian, because you had no option. You are, I fear, chronically ill equipped in the self-control department but you do have a conscience — ’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘And that does mean that you would have found your own behaviour pretty upsetting.’

‘Wait a minute, you're saying that you two have brainwashed me in some way, is that it?’

‘Oh absolutely,’ The Fat Controller broke in, the beginnings of one of his mirth eruptions starting to rumble. ‘Ha, ha — ahahahahaha! Oh my word yes! We had to wash your brain, Ian, because it was dirty! Hahaha!’ He spewed laughter and smoke.

‘This is cheap,’ said Ian. ‘I would have expected better of you.’

This pulled the fat man up short. ‘Whassat!’ he barked. ‘You dare to impugn my behaviour in this way, as if I were some pettily corrupt bureaucrat and you an ethical ombudsman? Come, come, I have never made any secret to you of how I regard my position, I have always told you that I hold myself to be above mere human concerns. Why would you imagine that this didn't extend to enmesh you fully — even your very sense of self? Come, come, it's you who are being cheap. Anyway, all of this jawin’ is too, too fatiguin’ — we're not at a college debate. It would all be far better explained by a spot of retroscendence, eh?’

‘I don't want to retroscend,’ said Ian. ‘I don't want anything to do with your banal psychobabble and your hypnotic games. In fact, I don't want anything to do with you at all.’

The Fat Controller didn't respond in quite the way Ian expected to this monumental cheek. For the first time ever Ian saw the big man looking discomfited, a little ashamed even. ‘I don't think,’ he said softly, ‘that that's something you have an option about but perhaps it will be clear to you after the retro, hmm?’ He came over and placing Ian's neck in the iron maiden of his hand said, ‘Let us consider the history of this suit, for example, shall we? Fashionable item, isn't it, I especially admire the leather pocket-facings. I hear they're all the rage at the moment. From Barries’, isn't it, on the King's Road?’

‘It's mine.’

‘It is now but it used to belong to a man called Bob Pinner. Let me explain — ’

And then they retroscended.

Ian Wharton was lying in among the dirty bushes that skirt the easterly edge of Wormwood Scrubs. It was only nine-thirty in the morning but the late-summer day was already prematurely aged and complaining with the heat. In the direction he faced, the cracked ground humped away in a sweeping undulation towards the prison, pushing up a single nodulous copse between the defunct goalposts.

Ian lifted himself up on his elbow and, turning his head, looked out from his enclave towards the corner of the Scrubs. Here, tucked into the elbow of the road where it chicaned under the railway bridge, was a derelict house. It was there that Ian had spent the previous night.

The house had been intended for one of the park-keepers who used to work on the Scrubs. It was a solid manse, three-bedroomed, pebbledashed, with diamond-patterned mullions in the windows and green coping over the doors. The house belonged with others of its own kind in some quiet suburb. It hardly deserved its expulsion to this ragged corner of the urban veldt.

Ian had come to the house at nightfall — leading Fucker Finch's pit bull by the scruff of its thick neck. He had prised away a slab of chipboard from the front door and gone into its warm mustiness. The house was empty save for the banked-up dust of insect and rodent activity. The walls had been worked over by the artistry of decay, wallpaper falling away from wallpaper falling away from wallpaper; flock, patterned in roses, patterned in stripes. Here and there delinquents had used Magic Markers and the ends of charred sticks to describe their zig-zag graffiti.

Ian went from room to room dragging the big black dog. Whenever it tried to bite him — which was often — he cowed it simply and efficiently with a stunning dead-fist thump to its iron skull.

All night long Ian had tortured the dog. He burnt it with matches, lighting them against its eyes. He cut it and scratched it with the old masonry nails he had found in the corners of the empty rooms. He shut it up in cupboards, leaving it to piss itself with terror; and then, when he released it and it ran at its tormentor again, slavering with the eager freshness of poor memory, Ian had beaten it into submission once more. Beaten it with great clouts to the head and shoulders, clouts of an unnatural strength.

The pit bull must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Its taut back and humped shoulders were stuffed with giblet muscle; and when it cried out, yowled with brute incomprehension in the face of this pain, this outrage, its cries were piercing.

As the city put away its toy cars and settled down for the night, Ian had begun to worry that some late walker — or wanker of a policeman beating the cooling meat of the pavemen — might hear the dog. So he waited and listened, listened for the trains, the whisper of grating metal that heralded their coming slowly rising to a howl and then the deafening change in pitch as the coaches exploded on to the bridge next to the derelict house, before being fed, screaming, into the maw of Wilsden Junction.

Ian learnt to anticipate their arrival and he used it to mask the sound of his activities. And so he had worked at his persecution of the dog, as if it were some spy or agent that he had to break — giving it the time off between trains to consider whether or not it should tell him what he wanted to know; break its silence and grass on its species.

At dawn Ian had led the dog, which was by now blinded and shambolic with pain, out of the house and into the bushes. There they had lain together for three hours while the red ring of the rising sun reheated the left-over city. They reclined in each other's legs and paws and as the dog slowly died Ian savoured its meaty breath.

Ian let himself down off his elbows and settled his chest and abdomen deeper into the crushed dry grass. He was sucking on the pit bull's penis, a knotty sea slug of gristle which he eased in and out of his mouth with a combination of suction and jaw movement. The penis was detached from the dog.

It was a placid scene. The pink tip of the dog's penis pushed out from Ian's mouth at the same time as it emerged from its black foreskin, so that the whole motion had a secondary mechanical phase to it, as if the penis were a piston and Ian's jaw the engine. The pit bull itself lay on its back some twenty yards off, hidden deeper in the bushes. Ian had disembowelled it after it had died and its guts lay on the dry grass like coiled grey sausages. In death the dog's fleshy neck and heavy jowls had fallen away from its jaws, which were bared as if in exasperation at this undignified, unmartial end.

Ian went on toying with the pit bull's penis while a little van came bobbing over the grass from the direction of the West London Stadium. The van was rusty red and faintly emblazoned with the Hammersmith Council logo. Two solid men were up in the tiny cab, both talking very loudly. ‘I see the fuckers gone done burn another fuckin’ trash can,’ said one, a dour, heavyset Jamaican.

‘What you expect, man?’ replied his companion, a more sanguine Trinidadian.

‘Ay-yai-yai — ’

‘Leastways they ‘ficient ‘bout the pro-cess.’

The men pulled up about forty feet from where Ian lay in the scrub and got out of the shoebox vehicle. They wore short-sleeved white shirts with epaulettes and serge trousers. ‘See ‘ere.’ The Trinidadian slapped his palate with his tongue. ‘Tch’, tch’, tch’, they put down gas an’ fire lighters, they even pile up some trash jus’ to make sure.’

‘Oh yeah, nex’ ting you say dis ‘ere is a fuckin’ community service.’

‘Sheee, mebbe.’ They fell to with spades taken from the back of the van and began to dig out the melted base of the rubbish bin, where it had sunk down into the knobbled earth.

Ian had had enough, he spat the pit bull's penis out with a sharp ‘floop’ noise. The two men left off digging for an instant and then fell to again, striking up the dust with their spade strokes. Ian waited until he was certain that the ‘floop’ was forgotten, then, raising himself on all fours while keeping his focus on the park-keepers, he travelled backwards with extreme rapidity through the undergrowth. He emerged still moving backwards, at the point where the scrub finished and a potholed cinder track bordered the road. There he stood up, dusted himself down, tucked in an errant rabbit's ear of shirt and walked off towards the M40 intersection.

Ian Wharton dropped off the back platform of the bus and fell on his feet in the City Road. He was still wearing the rumpled cavalry twill trousers and filthy Viyella shirt he had spent the night in. There were fragments of dog gristle on his chin and watery brown smudges of blood lurked around his generous mouth. The other passengers who got off the bus at the same time as him rapidly dispersed. Mingling with the heavy foot traffic, they skirted Ian, suspecting him of being a tramp or a schizophrenic.

The object of their repulsion sauntered off towards the Old Street Roundabout; he loosened his cramped shoulders as he walked and took deep breaths of the stale air the city had imprisoned. At the roundabout he veered down a path that led in the general direction of Norman House; the path became a passageway that traversed a bomb site between two high wooden fences. To the left of the fence the site had been cleared and building work was in progress, hard hats and JCBs were moving grunting and grubbing in the dirt, but the site to the right of the fence hadn't been cleared yet. Through chinks in the fence Ian could see a tangle of stringy privet, lanky nettles, wild flowers and triffid weeds, all forming a fuzz of camouflage over the sunken foundations of the bombed-out building.

As Ian walked he tested each section of the fence with his shoulder. Almost half-way along one of the boards flipped obligingly upwards and he scrunged his way through the gap. Ian found himself in a little lost world. The vegetation hummed with insects, spiders had festooned everything with their sticky threads, the leaves were serrated with bites and in amongst the greenery he could make out the cradled pupae of thousands of caterpillars. ‘Perfect,’ said Ian to himself, ‘couldn't be better.’ He turned back to face the fence and squatted down so as to peer through a knothole.

The suit wasn't long in coming. To begin with it only existed in the eye of its psychopathic beholder. Ian scryed his suit into existence. Eyes shut, Fantasia-style, he projected a long tongue of red catwalk into a purple void. Along this catwalk came the shape of the future, the suit shape. To be specific it was a sort of trendy blue suit shape; to be even more accurate, more precise: a blue linen suit, with a light check pattern, single-breasted with narrow un-notched lapels falling cleanly to a single button. The trousers were high-waisted with eight pleats and straight, sharply creased legs. The pocket-facings and cuffs of the suit were reinforced with some kind of soft leather, chamois or Moroccan.

The suit, grotesquely animated, paraded up and down. It raised an arm nozzle and sucked a cream-coloured shirt out of the void, then a leg rose agape and received boxer shorts striped like mattress ticking. Next, pale-blue socks glided down to slot beneath the suit trousers — they were already shod in black leather; finally a tie dropped down from the darkness, like a snake falling from a branch, and garrotted the empty neck. ‘Perfect,’ said Ian again, ‘it couldn't be better.’ He switched his attention to the path once more.

This conduit across the vacant lot was a short-cut for some four thousand workers, all of whom alighted at Old Street and made their way into the outback of office space. They walked through the passageway, men and women of all shapes and sizes, all tripping neatly and quickly. From where Ian squatted he could observe each and everyone of them through his knothole lens, their heads and shoulders encircled by a creosote stain.

Ian savoured the tension, knowing that he had at best a half-hour to come up with the suit, or he would be late for the meeting that was scheduled. Suit succeeded suit succeeded suit, each one unsuitable. Not this chalk stripe, not this stuffy tweed, not this grey serge — yech! Cop that! And then, there it was, the suit hove into view, this time animated by a flesh-and-blood occupant rather than Ian's scrying mind.

Bob Pinner was late for his own meeting. An importer of nusimatical curiosities that were encased in plastic by sweated workers in a tin shed outside Kuala Lumpur, Pinner was on his way to consult with his marketing agency, not D.F. & L. but not dissimilar. Pinner was stunned by the morning sunlight and thinking about nothing at all except the sound that his feet — shod by Hoage's — made on the tarmac.

“Scuse me.’ Pinner heard the voice but couldn't see where it came from. “Scuse me, mate.’ One of the fence boards tilted upwards to reveal the face of Ian Wharton who looked up at Pinner. All the plastics manufacturer could make out were the brown stains around the mouth, the bristle of gristle on the chin and the good trousers gone to seed.

Pinner bent over and said, ‘What d'you want?’ He was irritated, he prided himself on giving money away freely when asked but like a lot of middle-class people he also wanted his acts of beneficence to be on his terms alone. Ian glanced up and down the passageway — fortunately there was no one in sight. They were no more than two feet apart when Ian's hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat.

In this action there was enormous force and precision, as well as speed. Ian clamped the pads of his thumb and index finger down hard on Pinner's cartoid artery, so hard that the plastics manufacturer nearly passed out, then, using the collar of his shirt as a tourniquet, Ian jerked Pinner sideways like a cowboy felling a steer by twisting it horns. Once Ian had got him far enough down he dragged the unresisting suit-donator through the gap.

Ian didn't let go of Pinner for a moment. He carried him into the undergrowth tucked under his arm like a roll of carpet. Pinner was a biggish man — about the same size as Ian — yet his feet didn't even trail. Ian pushed through the foliage until they reached the sloping side of the old building's foundation pit, then they slid down together. It was steep but every few feet or so there was a marooned lump of masonry studded with bricks, which Ian used as a brake. At the bottom the foliage resumed and with it the sharp tang of chlorophyll. Ian took his suit to the farthest corner of the pit from the fence and there attempted to hang it up. Irritatingly, he found that if he let go of the thing's throat it tried to crumple up. That wouldn't do at all, he had to hold it upright by the jacket collar while he talked some sense into it.

‘All I want is your clothes,’ said Ian to the suit. ‘Take them off and I won't hurt you but if you don't comply I'm going to err. . let me see. . I'm going to sexually torture and humiliate you. Then I suppose I'll have to kill you.’

Bob Pinner started to disrobe. Although he was in a red haze his muscles and his nervous system had understood perfectly the message of Ian's strength. He hadn't been carried in that particular way since he was three or four. The choked roaring transit from the fence to the bottom of the foundation pit, grasped firmly by his hip and his throat, had thrust him right back into childhood.

His impression of Ian was that here was a parental giant, carrying little Bobby half asleep, from the leather back of the car to the cotton and linoleum of his bedroom; a giant who moved with a sinuous fluidity, mounting the stairs without disturbing its warm cargo, only perturbing Bobby towards the orange border of sleep far enough for him to sense the slide back into dream.

Bob Pinner was still lost in the childhood memory — still standing thirty-five years ago in front of the one electric bar, he teetered tackily, damp foot suckered to the smooth floor, hand outstretched to grasp the giant's shoulder, and divested himself.

Off came the jacket (was it taken from him and hung in a cupboard or dangled from a projecting root?); off came the shirt, starched and still fresh; off came the trousers, this was tricky, Bobby wouldn't have managed it save for Ian's help (what would he do without Ian?); the damp socks were pulled inside out and the off came the shoes, babyishly, despite many hundred admonitions (but they do find laces so difficult at that age, don't they?), so that the creased half-moon of leather — marking where the toe of its fellow had been employed as a lever — eased slowly back up.

At last Bob Pinner stood naked save for his boxer shorts and his socks. He swayed from side to side, eyes shut against the light, waiting for the friendly giant to tuck him into bed. He could already feel the the tight cool confinement of sheets and blankets changing into a warm cocoon.

‘Oh dear, you've wet yourself,’ said Ian, not without a trace of affection. It was true, a grey patch was spreading out across the bucklered front of Bob's pants. Tut-tutting, Ian gave the crotch of the suit trousers a good feel. He sighed. ‘It's OK, these are quite dry, lucky we got them off in time, eh?’ Lids still clamped shut Bobby nodded mutely.

Ian dressed swiftly. He left the twill trousers and sweat-stained shirt lying where they fell. He kicked off his own fucked footwear and put on Bob Pinner's shirt, tie, stylish suit and shoes. All of them were an excellent fit but more than size, style was the factor that had brought them together.

Ian circumnavigated the foundation pit a few times, trying his new suit out in a variety of postures. He put his hands on his hips and adopted a serious, thoughtful expression. Then, coming over all casual, he slipped them into Pinner's trouser pockets and propped his foot up on a huge chin of cornice, still bearded with flower-patterned wallpaper after fifty years. The more Ian moved about in the clothes, the more he felt at home in them — he thought that their slightly flashy and unorthodox qualities were exactly what he needed to create the right sort of impression in business — and Barries’ had been his favourite designer emporium since he was at university.

A long, white, naked foot intruding into his visual field cancelled out Ian's reverie. Bobby was still swaying in shock, still lodged mercifully in the living past. Ian went up to him, his horrid anaconda arm extended, his fingers forked so as to ward off the evil eye.

One finger drove hard into each of Bob Pinner's eyes, breaking the balls so that fluid spurted out. Then drove on, carrying the tattered retinal pads along with them, following the squiggly calimari path of the optic nerves, straight into Pinner's brain. He was dead in under a second, although during the last quarter of it he suffered more pain than you can possibly imagine; and during the penultimate quarter-second more fear and apprehension than you can possibly summon up, even if you lie alone in a darkened room and contemplate, coolly and rationally, all the awful possibilities that may very well lie in store for you — and you alone.

‘So, that's how I got the suit,’ said Ian, and the strange thing was that he had no feeling at all for the man who had once worn it. ‘I suppose it beats shopping around.’ He gently shook his head and slapped his thighs to get the circulation going again; retroscendence could be a numbing experience.

‘Yes, that's how you got it, my dear boy,’ replied The Fat Controller.’ And now, if you're quite recovered, I think the three of us ought to get going. We have an appointment at the Barbican.’

‘Oh yes.’ Ian was curious. ‘Who with exactly?’

‘Why, with the Money Critic, of course, I want his opinion on “Yum-Yum”. You'll come with us, Hieronymus?’

‘Naturally,’ said Gyggle, ‘wouldn't miss it for the world.’ He stood and disentangled the beard from his pullover and shirtfront, to which it had become closely attached.

They stacked their tiny chairs with others the same behind a waist-high partition covered with finger paintings that divided the crèche off from the rest of the reception area. Then they walked to the glass doors and exited.

Outside it was daylight and the three Illuminati were instantiated in the Roman Road. ‘Hmm,’ Ian mused. ‘I see we're in the Roman Road.’

‘Yes, well.’ The Fat Controller was fussing around in the pockets of his suit, probably looking for a cigar. ‘While the baths are closed for renovation they're a convenient sort of a place to access the noumenal world, doncha’ know. I have an arrangement with a corrupt local councillor. Another bonus is that it's just around the corner from Vallance Road and I like to pop in on Mumsie from time to time. Not that she's good company or anything but I feel I ought to keep up with her if only for old time's sake.’

A balding overweight Greek Cypriot pulled up at the kerb in an estate car. ‘Sorry I'm late,’ he gasped as he reeled down the window.

‘Sorry isn't good enough, Souvanis,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘never is.’

The three of them got in, The Fat Controller in the front and Ian and Gyggle in the back, and Souvanis pulled back out into the stream of traffic.

For a while no one spoke. Souvanis drove well, breaking with the gears and accelerating smoothly. They crossed the Bethnal Green Road and headed towards Old Street. The Fat Controller smoked, Gyggle seemed to be examining split ends in the further reaches of the beard. Ian was thinking to himself how easy everything was once you began to see the world the way The Fat Controller saw it. ‘It is easier, isn't it?’ observed his mage.

‘Yes, so much less harrowing now that their flesh is as undifferentiated as that of fruit.’

‘Quite, quite — ’

‘But tell me, why didn't you let me realise my full potential earlier? It would have saved me an awful lot of agonising.’

‘My dear Ian, there are different degrees of initiation into these things, you can't simply leapfrog your way over them. And anyway you must remember, I am the very Gandalf of Galimatias conjuring grace out of gammon, how could I allow any aspect of your coming of age to be remotely straightforward?’

‘I see.’

‘But anyway, none of that matters now that you're happy. It amuses you, doesn't it?’

‘I love the utter pointlessness of my outrages, that's what I find so droll. The man killed for his suit; the old woman for her large-print book; the young student eviscerated because I didn't like the fraying of her cuticles — ’

‘Yes, very amusin’, very amusin’, and not forgetting the woman at the Theatre Royal — ’

‘You did set that one up for me, I was just a lad.’

‘I know, but what a lad, you took to the work like a duck to water. I hate to say it but really you're a chip off the old block.’ The Fat Controller struggled round as far as he could in his seat and placed an avuncular hand on Ian's knee. ‘Don't worry if you feel a trifle confused for a while,’ he went on, staring sympathetically into Ian's bloodshot eyes. ‘There are an awful lot of suppressed memories there for you to catch up on, a lot of little outrages for you to retroscend your way through, but in a couple of months you'll feel absolutely tip-top, yes?’

‘I'm sure I will.’

‘Capital, capital!’

No one other than Souvanis had been paying any attention to where they were. Now The Fat Controller noticed that they were hopelessly snarled in a jam that had lodged them in Finsbury Square for the past five minutes. A lot of the cars were honking and the street was overflowing with pedestrian commuters hurrying home, as well as the traffic. ‘What's all this, Souvanis? What's going on?’

‘I'm sorry, Master, there's nothing I can do, it's the sheer weight of traffic.’

‘Mere weight of traffic? Mere weight of traffic? What the hell are you talking about, man, there's nothin’ “mere” about this — we're completely hemmed in and’ — he checked his Rolex — ‘running late.’

‘I don't think you heard me correctly, Master, I said “sheer weight of traffic”.’

There was silence for two or three beats until The Fat Controller managed to take this on board and then, of course, he began to laugh. ‘Ahahaha! Hahahaha! “Mere” for “sheer”, ahahaha! That's very good — very fine, doncha’ think so, Hieronymus?’

‘It is extraordinarily diverting,’ Gyggle effused, ‘and it reminds me that we've yet to introduce our young friend to Mr Souvanis — ’

‘Oh, I know who he is,’ Ian broke in. ‘He does point-of-sale leaflet dispensers for D.F. & L., runs a little outfit in Clacton called Dyeline.’

‘That's right,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘And we're giving him the contract for the “Yum-Yum” standing booths. I do hope he'll be able to fulfil it — he's getting so chubby that I fear for his engorged heart; it may just pack up one of these days, or else he'll get some terrible cancer of the fat, disappear in a great greasy white truffle of sarcoma, yech!’

‘What he really needs,’ said Ian, choosing his words and placing them carefully in the car's close and hilarious atmosphere, ‘is an oinkologist.’

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ The Fat Controller went critical with laughter, his great neck swelling up redly, like Dizzy Gillespie's when he used to hit a high note. ‘Oh my God, don't! Hahahahahaha! It is too, too funny, “an oinkologist”. D'ye like that, Souvanis? You're a porky little bugger, aren't you?’ He grabbed a fold of the dewlap beneath the Greek's chin and started to tug at it, syncopating his tugs with his rap: ‘Piggy, piggy, piggy, oink, oink, oink — oinkology!’ After a while Ian joined in, grabbing a fold of Souvanis's neck, then Gyggle did as well; and that's how the three of them spent the rest of the journey, teasing and hurting the poor man.

The Money Critic squinted down from his window at the three men as they crossed the central courtyard of the Barbican in the late-afternoon sunlight. He knew the fat man who waddled in front as Samuel Northcliffe, banker and financier. The tall thin man with the preposterous ginger beard he knew as Hieronymus Gyggle, a psychiatrist with pretensions to understanding the psychology of the markets. The third man, who was much younger and whose face was rather unpleasantly soft and eroded at the edges, he didn't recognise.

The Money Critic turned from the window and picked his way across the main room of the flat to where the entryphone was clipped on the wall. He waited for it to buzz, his face drawn into a desperate predatory mien. He had made it very clear to Northcliffe on the phone, when he called to make the appointment: ‘Please be sure to give the buzzer the lightest of presses, don't push it right in — there's no need, one very light touch is all that's required. You must understand that the least sound is exquisite torture to me, I insist on silence, reverent silence.’ But despite this he was convinced that Northcliffe would forget his injunction — he wasn't mistaken.

In the nanosecond that had elapsed while he ran through this speech in his mind, the buzzer started to sound and to the Money Critic's ears it was horribly loud and insistent. (Although in actual fact he had had the mechanism adjusted so that the noise it made was no louder than an insect's agitated wing.) He fumbled in agony for the handset and, pressing it to his large, cartilaginous, sensitive ear, breathed, ‘Yes?’

‘It's Northcliffe here,’ bellowed The Fat Controller down the entryphone. ‘I've got Dr Hieronymus Gyggle and Ian Wharton from D.F. & L. Associates with me. May we come up?’

‘Oh yes, I suppose so but please, please remember — ’

‘I know, “the least sound is exquisite torture” to you, we know, don't rupture yourself over it.’

The Money Critic pressed the button to admit them to the block and retreated to the sanctity of his armchair.

There was barely room in the aluminium box for the three of them. As it accelerated upwards The Fat Controller expostulated, ‘Pah!’ and sprayed Gyggle and Ian with musty saliva. ‘Pah!’ he reiterated. ‘The man's an utter poove, “The least sound is exquisite torture to me”.’ He parodied the Money Critic's breathy tones. ‘I think the man's a complete fraud.’

‘Yes, yes, maybe — ’ Gyggle was staring at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘But fraud or not he is a successful one and people listen to him.’

‘Oh I know it,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘don't I just.’ The trio relapsed into silence. Alighting from the lift they proceeded to the door of the flat. The Fat Controller was just about to beat it down, his frozen turkey of a hand raised up for the task like a sledge hammer, when it swung open.

The Money Critic was wearing a floor-length djellaba of unparalleled richness, patterned with interlocking geometrical shapes and financial symbols. The robe was iridescent even in the muted light of the flat. As soon as he had opened the door he worked his way back to his high-backed Queen Anne armchair, where he picked up his bone-china cup and took a sip of a rarefied tisane. He didn't invite the trio to sit and indeed they couldn't have even if they had wanted to, for there were no other chairs.

Instead, the whole floor of the room which the front door opened into was covered with irregular piles and heaps of money. Money of all kinds: neat stocks of freshly printed bank notes as slick as stationery; plastic rolls of new coinage broken into elbows; used notes of all denominations and currencies, stacked in loose bundles; necklaces of cowrie shells; criss-crossed stacks of lead and iron plugs; notched bones; the filed teeth of narwhals; totemic spirit boards; myriads of different kinds of share-issue certificates, government bills, gilts, bonds (junk and otherwise) from all the two hundred and fifty-two countries of the world; dry-cleaning tokens; Indian State Railway chitties; Luncheon Vouchers; pemmican; piltjurri; balls of crude opium; pots of cocaine basta; gold (in HM Government ingots, also US issue from Fort Knox and Reichsbundesbank wartime loot still stamped with the Nazis’ bonnet mascot eagle); other ingots of precious metals; diamonds, pearls, emeralds and dustbin bags full of semi-precious stones; and all kinds of plastic — there was a great slick drift, made up solely of service-till cards, which flooded into the kitchenette.

Here and there, there was an item of what might of been furniture, faintly visible beneath the riot of dosh, but overall the impression the Money Critic's room gave was of a relief map of currencies, in which the lumpings and moundings of diverse kinds indicated their relative liquidity and value.

The Money Critic's room was the room of a man who criticised money with a vengeance; for into these expensive spits and promontories of pelf there was written clear evidence of careful lapidary arrangement. There was nothing in the least vulgar about this, rather, the same mind that had conceived of the collection as an opportunity to demonstrate the raw mechanics of money — its great gearing, both into itself and into the subsidiary world of things — had also chosen to regard the things-that-were-money as aesthetic objects in their own right. A lacy bridal veil pinned with high-denomination drachma notes was draped over the lampshade; the sunlight from the window fell through — and was filtered by — a collection of abacuses that were ranged along the sill, each one like a miniature Venetian blind.

‘Well, this is cosy,’ exclaimed The Fat Controller. He shouldered his way to the centre of the room and stood there breathing noisily through his shofar nose.

‘Please,’ said the Money Critic quaveringly, ‘I cannot work if there is any aural pollution —’ He broke off, a discreet chattering of metal on paper was coming from an adjoining room.

Ian looked towards the sound. At the end of the ‘l’ formed by the flat's balcony there was another smaller room, this was choked with softly chattering telex machines, gently grinding fax machines and a bank of VDUs, across the faces of which green and yellow figures played chicken with one another. An enormous tangled knot of printout jerked, waggled and then came towards them; underneath it was a ratty little man wearing an old-fashioned sharkskin suit. He rid himself of the bunch and then emerged from the telecommunications room clutching a fragment of this paper. Making his way to the side of the Money Critic's chair, he made a respectful obeisance before handing the fragment over.

The Money Critic examined the piece of paper for a long time, as if trying to divine its purpose, then he pronounced, ‘Peaty, mulchy, mouldy — almost tetanussy. .’ then fell silent. The little man shuffled back to the networking vestibule and tapped this verdict into the bank of machines.

‘What was that then?’ asked The Fat Controller, who was undeterred by atmospheres of sanctity.

‘Government bond, five-year, Papua New Guinea.’ The Money Critic sounded distracted; all too clearly he regarded it as hack work. His voice trailed away and he fell to regarding a large book of Vermeer colour plates that was propped on a strategically positioned lectern.

Ian stifled a snigger — it was unheard of for anybody to behave like this towards The Fat Controller, yet he seemed to be taking it. He drew a leather briefcase from under his hogshead of an arm and began to pull leaflets and forms out of it. It was, Ian realised, the material produced by D.F. & L. for ‘Yum-Yum’.

‘Well, here it is,’ said The Fat Controller, passing it to the Money Critic. ‘Tell us what you think; and mark my words, don't dissimulate in any way ‘soever. I shall know immediately if you do.’

The Money Critic gave him a withering look but said nothing. He started examining the documentation, occasionally sniffing one of the pages or taking a miserly nibble out of it.

While this was happening The Fat Controller had got out his gunmetal cigar case and opened it. ‘Erm.’ The Money Critic cleared his throat. ‘If you don't mind I'd prefer it if you didn't smoke.’

‘Can't smoke! Can't smoke!’ Despite all the poor man's injunctions The Fat Controller was now trumpeting, ‘What the hell do you expect me to do with myself if I can't smoke, eh? Are you afraid it'll get in your bloody ears?’

To his credit the Money Critic came back at him saying, ‘It's the cigar I object to, you're welcome to smoke a pipe of opium if you like, or a bidi.’

‘A bidi?’ The Fat Controller was nonplussed. The Money Critic gestured to his assistant who hurried off and returned with an ornately carved opium pipe about the size of a baseball bat. This he proceeded to prepare laboriously, taking ages to prime a little ball of grungy opium on a pin. When the mouthpiece was finally pointed at him by the Cratchetty figure, The Fat Controller took a vast neck-swelling pull on it and then exhaled, filling the room with the sweetly moribund smell of the smoke. He chucked the pipe to one side and it clattered amongst some bales of Jaquiri skins.

The Money Critic hadn't been paying any attention to this performance, he just went on reading, smelling and nibbling the ‘Yum-Yum’ literature; every so often he would write a note on a slip of violet paper with a gold propelling pencil.

‘Well,’ said The Fat Controller eventually, his voice a tiny bit calmer, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think it's a silly idea,’ said the Money Critic, ‘and it'll never catch on.’

Ian sidled over to the window and stood gazing out over the large courtyard. Near the entrance to the theatre, at the Moorgate end of the development, a small bar had opened for business although it wasn't yet five. Some twenty or thirty office workers had escaped to have a drink and they stood by concrete tubs full of shrubbery, clutching lagers in their hands. One of them, Ian observed, was a young woman not unlike Jane Carter. He pondered their future together, he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked forward to tearing both it and her, apart.

CHAPTER TEN. THE NORTH LONDON BOOK OF THE DEAD (REPRISE)

Jane and I were married within three months of that afternoon when I stood, staring out over the City and listening while The Fat Controller attempted to bully the Money Critic into giving a favourable verdict on ‘Yum-Yum’. Needless to say, the Money Critic's appreciation of it was right, ‘Yum-Yum’ was a total flop. The launch coincided neatly with a recession and a dramatic downturn in the demand for innovatory financial products.

The sixty standing booths commissioned by D.F.& L. and constructed by a team sub-contracted through Steve Souvanis had been erected all over London. For a while they were an oddity, commented upon in the local press. People would stand in them looking out through the perspex sides at the world passing by and grazing on the edible literature provided. But soon the booths became scratched, tarnished and conveniently whited-out, conveniently for the people who became their chief occupants, that is.

The capital's hardcore junkies had already sicked on to the useful character of the booths but once they were partially opaque they became a beacon for every street dragon-chaser, crack head and needle freak in the metropolis. The conveniently sited shelf was ideal for cooking up a shot, or assembling the fag ash needed for the base of a crack pipe; and the booths’ ambiguous transparency — it was far easier to look out of them than to look in — meant that the police could be spotted a mile off.

Soon it was so bad that the booths were overflowing with drifts of used syringes and crumpled up bits of tin foil. D.F.& L.’s site permission was revoked and Souvanis's team had the mournful task of doing the rounds disassembling them. They ended up, back with the other platonic forms, in the dusty Clacton warehouse.

Despite this The Fat Controller didn't give up on ‘Yum-Yum’. He was amused by the junkies’ occupation of the standing booths. In fact, he even encouraged it, exerting influence on his secret cabal of addicts via the redoubtable Dr Gyggle. He remained convinced that the whole débâcle was purely a function of the unfortunate way that ‘Yum-Yum’ had become fixed in the public's mind as a name for the first truly edible financial product and he continued to bully Hal Gainsby at D.F.& L. to set up naming group after naming group, in a vain attempt to come up with something better.

I wanted our wedding to be a subdued registry office affair but Jane's parents were set on a big bash. A marquee was erected on the spacious lawn of their Surrey home, caterers were hired and invitations printed for four hundred. There was hardly anyone that I wanted to invite — my life hadn't exactly tricked me out with a gallery of amusing pals, only a gallimaufry of grotesques.

Naturally Samuel Northcliffe came. He both escorted my mother and acted as best man. At the church in Reigate he stood rigidly next to me as we eyeballed the pained wooden Christ-figure nailed up over the altar. When I glanced down during the service, I saw that his left hand — as large and inert as a wheel of Gouda cheese — was casually arranged so as to ward off the evil eye from the approximate region of his testicles.

I didn't invite Gyggle — that would have been pushing it. Although Jane had never followed through with her voluntary work at the Lurie Foundation Hospital — her assessment having concluded in exactly the way he suspected it would — she'd have recalled him immediately. He's not the sort of man who blends into a crowd, however large and jolly it may be. I felt, quite reasonably, that Jane might be a little disturbed to discover exactly how it was that our particular affinity had been elected.

Jane was a beautiful bride, radiant in a cream satin dress she had helped to sew herself. At the end of the service when she lifted up her veil so that I could kiss her, I was struck anew by the absolutely trusting and direct expression on her face.

She was very excited — almost over-excited. It was a sunny enough day for it and the guests spread out from the marquee mingling on the dappled lawn; small children pissed in the pampas grass and tipsy elderly aunts either laughed or cried, as the spirit moved them.

The speeches were better than average. Jane's father, who was a stockbroker in the City before he retired, had made the classics his hobby, consequently his text was littered with clever literary allusions and poetical tropes. It went down very well, as did Samuel Northcliffe's.

If Jane's parents had had any doubts about their daughter marrying me — and I know for a fact that they did, they were as snobbish as any of the English and despite my mother's impeccable breeding, had hoped for a better match for their daughter than an hereditary marketing man — they were dispelled by the information that my guardian was Mr Samuel Northcliffe.

It must have been about the third or fourth time Jane took me back to her parents’ house for dinner when this came out.

‘Northcliffe, you say? Hmm.’ Mr Carter was prodding the unseasonable fire in the grate as he spoke, a sherry glass dangling from his signet-ringed hand. ‘I knew him slightly when I was in the City, he's prominent in a Lloyd's syndicate that I had connections with — a rather imposing man, isn't he?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘he can be a little overbearing, although he doesn't mean to be.’

‘And you say he was a friend of your father's?’

‘I believe so. They met when my father ran a marketing agency in the sixties.’

‘Of course, of course. And after your parents were separated he took an interest in your education?’

‘Oh very much so, in fact, I'd say I pretty much owe where I am today to him.’

‘Really, really.’ He dabbled some more with the poker while Jane and I exchanged the conspiratorial glances of lovers on the sofa.

When he finally showed up at the wedding, I could tell that my father-in-law-soon-to-be and his old City cronies were overawed by him. He was looking his chic best, immaculately attired in a sweeping swallow-tailed cut-away, a black cravat secured with a emerald stick pin, canary-yellow silk waistcoat, spongebag trousers and huge leather shoes complete with white spats fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons. My mother was on his arm and she too smart and elegant, having for so long been burnished by association.

I had been petrified about his speech but in the event the Procrustes of Piffle didn't let me down by waffling on for too long. Instead he spoke succinctly, standing erect, his shiny top hat still clamped on the belvedere of his head. He made a couple of good cracks about the institution of marriage, implied that I was a steady and reliable — although not too bright — sort of fellow, then sat down to applause that was all the more heartfelt because he had kept it to under five minutes.

After our honeymoon we moved to a house I had rented off the Edgware Road. It was a bit of a way from town but it wasn't intended to be our permanent residence. Jane scaled down her work. Her television series having ended while we were engaged, she kept on with a number of handicraft part works she did stuff for and used her free time to find somewhere nice for us to live. Meanwhile I carried on with my work at D.F. & L. Associates, struggling to figure a way out of the situation I had got myself into.

It could be argued that I should never have married Jane knowing what I did about myself. The trouble was, though, I wasn't exactly sure what that truth was.

After my last trip to the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller's retroscendent revelations of my murderous activities, the ‘little outrages’, I had become an effectively divided personality. It was a matter of conscious will. If I chose to be so I was his entirely. The events of my formerly fearful life were delightfully different from this perspective. It was I who had made all the running in our relationship, I who had persuaded him to intitiate me into the darker arts, I who had seized upon the poisoned umbrella when he offered it to me at the Theatre Royal, so deperate was I to prove that I could be worthy of his interest in me.

And later, I had happily joined him in mesmerising, drugging and then sexually assaulting poor June in my caravan. There was no mystery now as to why she could never bear to talk to me again. Despite being unconscious throughout, some ghostly memory of the experience must have stayed with her.

Once I reached London and its teeming anonymity, my activities blossomed. Not a week went by for over five years when I didn't commit some sort of an outrage. Murders, torturings, baby snatchings, assaults, pointless acts of blackmail, I turned my hand to anything. Under The Fat Controller's exacting tutelage I had developed an unnatural strength which I was able to deploy to such good effect when dispatching Bob Pinner for his suit and torturing Fucker Finch's pit bull. Nevertheless these acts were mere persiflage when compared to my better-scripted scenarios.

The outrage I was most proud of was when I tore the time-buffeted head off the old tramp in the Tube and then addressed myself sexually to his severed neck. Remember that? The train had stalled in the tunnel, half-way between Golders Green and Hampstead. I found myself alone in the carriage save for this dosser, who was sleeping off a dousing of some port wine or cooking sherry. It was just a little idea but the real fun of it was whether I could take my bow before we pulled in at Hampstead. I could.

Another champion bit of fun had involved following an elderly lady home. I conned my way into her flat, spinning her the line that the local librarian had told me that she had a book I desperately needed, something I had to read for my conscientious, socially useful work.

‘I've only got the large print edition, dear,’ she said. ‘I've such bad myopia that it's the only one I can manage.’

‘That's all right,’ I had replied, sipping the cup of tea she offered me. Then, once she had fetched it from the bedroom, I calmly and casually beat her to death with it. Ha! No wonder I always had a sense of being in the now, of a kind of alienation from history itself.

The greatest and sickest irony of my divided life was that if I acknowledged that it was I who had done these things, I was free from all remorse. Instead, like my mentor, I held myself to be beyond all morality, a towering superman whose activities could not even be observed from the grovelling positions of mere mortals, let alone judged. Yet it also remained perfectly plausible for me to deny that I had done any of these awful things at all. Most of the outrages had been committed during little odds and sods of borrowed time, they were will o’ the wisp happenings, scraps of the Holocaust, left-overs from the Gulag. Although I had liked to torture my victims, I seldom indulged in so long a session as I had with the pit bull. Usually I would call it a wrap, after a leisurely hour or so of soldering flesh, pulling nails and shooting up strychnine.

And if I willed it, really believed it, then the knowledge of the little outrages vanished from my memory, wiped out as surely as a computer file. Ah, but then the septic tank hit the jet turbine, I became craven, culpable and driven. More than worried for my own sanity. Perhaps I was the borderline personality Dr Gyggle had said I was, all those years ago at Sussex?

My eidesis, I now realised, had been upgraded. The next generation made my mind a cheap bit of virtual reality, allowing me only two basic game modes. I could play mad or I could play bad, and although the two simulations might parallel one another all the way to infinity, they would never touch. Moreover, unless I remained vigilant I would sneakily flit like a cheating kid between the two: mad/bad, bad/mad, mad/bad. It could be quite bewildering.

So you see, I thought by marrying Jane I would have the incentive to sort out once and for all what the truth was. Even if my love for her alone wasn't sufficient, I was certain that the prospect of children, of willing my peculiar characteristics on to a new individual, would force me to confront myself.

But really I didn't care anyway. The outrages had been good fun, a gas, providing plenty of stimulating footage for me to mull over eidetically in my leisure time. There's so little genuine abandon in modern society — why need I feel ashamed of my peccadilloes when wanton suffering is foisted on the world all the time, by people without even the wherewithal to enjoy it? Don't you agree?

I could style myself the very Demiurge of Dissociation, if I so chose, because of my delightfully separate centres of self; and when they commingled fully there was a sweet melancholia engendered alongside the terror of the dark and the arrogance of the justified sinner.

It only took two months for Jane to get pregnant. I cannot claim that this was because I was either particularly priapic, or especially fertile. No, the reason it only took two circuits of the pedals on her menstrual cycle was because Jane was determined and armed with a handy home kit that could detect when her progesterone levels started to surge up, prior to ovulation. She would call me at work, where I would be in the office, going over a proposal or talking to a colleague. The phone would ring: ‘It's Vanda in reception, Mr Wharton, your wife is on the line.’

‘Put her through then, it's OK, I'm not in conference.’

‘Ian, is that you?’

‘Yes, love.’

‘I'm surging, you'd better get home.’ Once she was surging we had only twenty-four to thirty-six hours to touch down a sperm capsule on her satellite egg. The sex was perfunctory — as soon as I could get it up again after the last moonshot, she would grab me, guide me back in.

When Jane was well and truly knocked up she relaxed, acquiring the self-satisfied countenance of pregnant women the world over. I watched her swell and one of my internal voices laughed while the other whimpered in terror at what might be about to emerge.

I've been an attentive father-to-be, going to ante-natal classes with Jane, helping her to learn her breathing exercises and making sure she doesn't get overtired. It's been a hoot, hanging out with all the other prospective parents, swapping tips on where to buy the best kit and comparing the relative merits of the maternity hospitals, while all the time thinking: If only they knew, if only.

We haven't seen a great deal of Samuel Northcliffe since the wedding. From time to time he drops round, usually unannounced but always bearing a gift for Jane, a bunch of flowers or a bottle of wine. Jane likes Samuel Northcliffe, she finds his quaint way of speaking amusing and thinks that he isn't nearly as ruthless a businessman as people like to say. She cites the ‘Yum-Yum’ affair as an example of how charmingly quixotic and dottily eccentric he really is.

With ‘Yum-Yum’ all but withdrawn from the market I didn't expect to come across him any more in my work; and with my soul, as it were, sorted, I felt certain that his interventions in my more personal life were over as well, over at a mundane level, that is. But this morning I had a call from him in the office: ‘You can call me the Tiresias of Transmigration,’ his oracular voice didgeridooed down the phone line, ‘for I understand the riddles of death's destructive art.’

‘Is it anything important?’ I said. ‘I'm rather busy.’

‘I thought you might like to come by the Lurie Hospital at lunchtime,’ he boomed. ‘Gyggle and I have orchestrated a little ceremony which you might care to witness. It's most instructive, a very efficacious ritual. We have drilled the jetsam for weeks and, now we are certain that they'll be able to handle it, we wish to proceed.’

‘With what exactly?’

‘Why’ — he sounded almost coy — ‘with the North London Book of the Dead, of course.’

Against my better nature I was intrigued. At noon I left off the marketing proposal I was writing for a new chain of restaurants to be called ‘Just Lettuce’ and took a cab over to Euston.

I found them both in Gyggle's office. The beard was looking rather greasy and bedraggled, he couldn't have been taking care of it. Gyggle was looking tired as well, so possibly it was the other way round, the beard hadn't been taking care of him. More shocking still was the appearance of my mage — he had reverted entirely to how I remembered him in the early-seventies, the period when he had first come to live at Cliff Top. He even had on the same snappy check suit, the one he was wearing on the day I first became his apprentice.

‘Ah, there you are!’ he bellowed. He was puffing on a cheap panatella and obviously not liking it too well. ‘Come in, come in, don't hover like that, boy, what's the matter with you? You look as if you've seen a ghost.’

‘Um, err, I don't quite know how to put it — ’

‘Is it my appearance that you're goggling at? Come on, lad, spit it out, vomit it forth, squeeze those lexical pips, in a word: tell me.’

‘Yes, yes it is.’

‘And you're wondering what it betokens, aren't you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well, all in good time but we're not here for that, we're here to watch Gyggle's junkies go through their paces — well, Hieronymus?’

‘Certainly, Samuel, they're all assembled,’ sibilated the hirsute soul doctor. ‘Shall we go through?’

He led us through the series of corridors, with their furrowed linoleum floors, and ushered us into a small, cubicle-like room, devoid of furniture save for a wonky table and a couple of institutional chairs moulded from heavy plastic. There was a speaker of some kind attached to the wall and next to it the door of a cupboard which was set in to the wall. Before departing Gyggle opened this door; behind it was an odd window, with longitudinal stripes running down it. ‘What's that?’ I asked.

‘A one-way window,’ he replied as the beard led him from the room.

Left alone, The Fat Controller and I sat down. He searched out a packet of cheap cellophane-wrapped panatellas and took one without even looking. He lit it, using a non-safety match which he struck on the sole of his shoe, and after slobbering on its end for a while said, ‘Filthy habit, I think I'll give it up soon.’

‘I'm sorry?’ I couldn't imagine what he was talking about.

‘Smoking, you booby, what the hell do you think I mean?’ But before I could digest this latest strangeness, there was a crackle from the speaker. We turned to the window and I saw that a group of Gyggle's junkies were assembled in the next room.

The voice that had triggered the crackle was Gyggle's — he was calling his group therapy session to order. Several junkies were sitting in a rough circle on tatty upholstered chairs. Their feet were propped up on the metal boxes that served for ashtrays at the DDU and they were all smoking, using three steepled fingers to bring the tortured filters to their bruised lips. Even I, who know little about drugs, could tell that they were all high on heroin. Several of them could barely keep their eyes open and one, a rather stupid-looking black guy, whom I vaguely recognised, was completely crashed out.

Gyggle was saying, ‘You're all familiar with the form here — let's go round the group and introduce ourselves, shall we? At the same time I'd like you to tell me what stage you're at in your detox, OK?’ The beard wavered around the circle like a bogus divining rod and settled on a thin-featured man who wore his hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘John,’ said the man, ‘eighty mls.’

‘I know who that man is,’ I whispered to The Fat Controller. ‘Can you see his jaw, where it's all kind of bubbling and melted — ’

‘Of course I can, I may be old but I'm not blind.’

‘Well, I did that.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah, I twisted all the loose skin round with a ratchet and then I smoothed over the folds with a soldering iron. Good, isn't it?’

‘It certainly looks like a professional job. I congratulate you.’

‘Billy,’ the next junky round was saying, ‘and I'm down to sixty mls.’ The words slurred together.

‘Now, Billy,’ said Gyggle sternly, ‘are you sure you haven't had any gear? Because if you haven't you're getting too stoned for someone on a reduction detox and we'll have to cut your methadone down a little faster, hmm?’

‘Uhn?’ grunted Billy, then as the realisation dawned on him that he was to be deprived of something, ‘Nah, nah, I'm not, honest, Doc. To tell the truth I'm sick today, I'm clucking.’ His grey-black hands went to his shoulders which he clutched spasmodically by way of illustrating this, but Gyggle had already given up on him and moved on round the circle.

‘I recognise him as well,’ I said, ‘that black guy, the one who's fallen asleep now.’

‘Well of course you do,’ replied The Fat Controller. ‘That's why I asked you to come. All of these junkies were used by Gyggle and me to construct the Land of Children's Jokes, my adipose little acolyte. A whack of heroin-induced hypnogogia is worth a whole year of ordinary dream states. It's because of this that Gyggle took the consultancy here, we wanted to have a good stock of it on hand.’

‘I see.’

‘The spotty one in the sleeveless anorak is Richard Whittle, it's him that your good wife was meant to be befriending. His mind is especially ductile and suggestible — ’

‘Yes, it's coming back to me, the plump woman in the orange skirt is Big Mama Rosie and the gypsy-looking type is her old man.’

‘Martin.’

‘That's right, Martin. It's strange seeing them all here in this place.’

‘Well, my dear boy, if you think that is strange, I wonder what you'll make of this.’ He was struggling to his feet as he spoke and with some difficulty — the plastic chair had become wedged on his behind. I helped him to free it and rise. It was the first time that I had ever seen the big man appear either absurd or ungainly.

He crossed to the other side of the little room and opened the door of another one-way window. ‘Come over here and take a decco,’ he said. ‘I think this will amuse you.’ Through this window there was a very different kind of group going on. Hal Gainsby was there, together with Patricia Weiss from the agency; they had a gang of the usual types who turn out for this kind of thing, a D.F. & L. naming group, that is. ‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘Rather droll, isn't it?’ he said, toying with another cut-price cigar. ‘In one room the junkies and in the other the marketeers. Quite a contrast on the face of it but fundamentally they're all engaged in the same activity — ’

‘We concede,’ Gainsby was saying, his Boston drawl only sounding marginally more distorted by the speaker than I knew it to be anyway, ‘that the test-marketing in London hasn't gone down too well but we don't accept that that has anything to do with the product itself. We feel certain that if we can only — ’

‘You don't mean to say you've set up another naming group for “Yum-Yum”, here at the DDU?’ I was incredulous.

‘I don't see what's so funny about that,’ he snapped. ‘The hospital has to pay its own way now, like any other opt-out trust. Gyggle organises a sideline in room rental which I informed Gainsby about. It's a perfectly convenient place to hold a naming group. Perhaps if you'd paid a little more attention to the edible financial product in the first place we wouldn't be still banging away at it. But this is all by-the-by, Gainsby's isn't the naming group I wanted you to see — ’

‘You mean there's another one?’

‘Oh yes indeed, most definitely, one I think you should sit in on, but we have to bide our time, we need a particular sort of introduction to this naming group.’ He turned back to the other window and sat down again. I joined him.

‘Nah,’ Big Mama Rosie was plainting. ‘Nah, I'm that far gone I can't find a vein any more.’ She regarded her arms balefully as if they had been foisted on her during the night by a wildcat team of transplant surgeons.

‘Bullshit,’ said Gyggle. ‘The only reason you can't find a vein is because you're too damn fat. Anyway, we're not here to talk about your drug taking, we're here for another purpose entirely. How's he getting on?’ He nodded to where Beetle Billy was slumped.

John got up and walked over to him, he reached down and peeled back one of Billy's eyelids with his thumb and then let it fall. Next he felt for a pulse in the VW repair man's neck. ‘He's fading fast,’ said John, ‘there's hardly any pulse.’

‘Excellent,’ said Gyggle. ‘Come on now, you all know what to do.’ The junkies shifted their chairs around until they were grouped in a circle at Billy's head.

I said, ‘What exactly is going on?’ but The Fat Controller just shushed me, one frankfurter finger to the roll of his lips. In the other room the junkies started to mutter — at first I couldn't make out what they were saying but then it began to dawn on me, they were reciting the names of products:

‘Band-Aid,’ said John. ‘Chap Stick,’ said Big Mama Rosie. ‘Hoover,’ said Richard Whittle. ‘Coke,’ said a stringy-looking type in steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘Dunkin’ Donuts,’ said a Lycra-wearer, ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Ethel the brass, ‘Dr Scholl's,’ said Dr Gyggle through the beard and then they went round the circle again: ‘Nintendo’, ‘Biro’, ‘Big Mac’, ‘Painstyler’, ‘Nescafé’, ‘Jiffy bag’, ‘Letraset’ and then again: ‘Perrier’, ‘Polaroid’, ‘Walkman’, ‘Xerox’, ‘Magic Marker’, ‘Visa’, chanting product name after product name until their voices merged into one incantatory hum.

Eventually I said to The Fat Controller, ‘I've got it, I know what they're doing, all these products are generics, aren't they?’

‘Quite so. This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying, in order that they should not return, in order that their immortal souls should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and erased utterly beyond recall. You see, my dear boy, as you have always suspected, I am the very Lama of Lost Souls, I reduce the human to the material, utterly and completely. And now, if I'm not much mistaken, we're ready for the off.’

The junkies had stopped chanting. John was feeling for Billy's pulse again. He straightened up saying, ‘He's had it, popped his clogs, karked it, he's run down the flag, he's retired to the pavilion, he's collected his watch, he's kicked the proverbial bucket and marked his mortal card, in short, he's elsewhere.’

‘Shall we join him?’ asked my guru.

And then we were back in the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller was saying to Doug, ‘Give that coon-boy a shake, will you, I can't stand people dropping off in my naming groups.’

‘Hold up,’ I cried, ‘we've been here before, I've heard you say that before.’

’Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose — what goes round comes around, my dear boy, must you be so obdurate?’ The new scene seemed to have perked him up a bit, he'd even managed to find an old Voltiger somewhere in the pockets of the decrepid check suit, which at least had the virtue of being to scale with his hand even if it was rather tatty and coated with lint. He lit it with the feeble flare of a cheap disposable lighter.

We were in the reception area to the Land of Children's Jokes, the swimming pool off the Roman Road that The Fat Controller had obtained the use of by corrupt means, for even more corrupt purposes. The same advertisements for children's swimming classes and work-out sessions were stuck up on the noticeboards, we were sitting on the same tiny chairs, eight of them had been pulled out to form a ragged circle.

Doug got up from where he sat opposite me and the poor man banged his spade on the fire bell again: ‘Ting!’. ‘Oh for Christ's sake,’ snapped The Fat Controller, ‘can't you mind out for that bloody thing? I would have thought you'd managed to get the hang of it by now — surely it's like judging the width of a car.’

‘Well no,’ Doug replied, ‘not exactly.’ The impact had shifted the spade in his head and he was clearly in pain; nevertheless he got up and walked round to where Beetle Billy sat dead to the world.

To the world maybe, but not to the Land of Children's Jokes. Doug shook him by the shoulder and he stirred, groaned, blinked a few times and then sat upright rubbing his eyes. ‘That's better,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘Now, are we all here, can we begin?’

I looked around the circle, they were all there. Besides Beetle Billy and Doug, there was Pinky, the thin man, the baby chewing razor blades and another baby I hadn't seen when I was there last. This baby was about the same age as the red one and was sitting in the corner over by the entrance to the changing rooms. I couldn't see its face because it had a plastic bag on its head, filmed with condensation and tightly fastened under its chin. Despite the suffocating hood the baby was still breathing vigorously. With each of its inhalations and exhalations the bag expanded and contracted. ‘Sweet, isn't it,’ said The Fat Controller indicating the poor mite with the wet end of his stogie.

‘S'pose so, but what's all this about anyway?’

‘We need to think up a name for you, Ian, that's what it's all about.’

‘Yes,’ chimed in Pinky. ‘Now you're coming here to stay, to be with us permanently, you need to have a proper designation like the rest of us — ’

‘After all,’ the thin man broke in his sharp tones, ‘you can't be called plain Ian, that won't do at all, oh no, my precious.’

‘Come on, come on, there's a proper way to do these things, I don't want you all blithering away like this to no effect,’ said the Lama of Lost Souls. ‘Moreover, it isn't only a name that we need for him, we need the right Sisyphean pose to lock him into, don't we?’

‘Call me the Prometheus of the Painstyler,’ I quipped. ‘After all, you've been scraping away at my liver now for years — ‘ I was going to say some even more trenchant things but at that moment the progress of my naming group was interrupted by a commotion at the far end of the reception area.

A group of young men wearing the loose cotton garb of hospital porters were trying to manhandle something out of the door to the changing rooms. The thing could have been a cricket bag, except that it was far larger. ‘Get a move on,’ shouted The Fat Controller to them. ‘We've started already, so bring it over here right away.’ They ignored him but his order did coincide with them all giving an almighty heave that dragged the heavy load out into the reception area.

It was rather like a cricket bag in shape, coated with PVC or some other slick substance and leaking water from its gaping lips. Along the side I could see the word ‘PortoDolph’ emblazoned inside a fish symbol and then I realised what it was, a container for transporting large fish, small cetaceans or any other animals that needed to be kept permanently moist.

There were four young men carrying the PortoDolph, one at each corner; they staggered the length of the room spilling water with every lurching step that they took. ‘Dump the thing there, Mandingo.’ He wasn't even looking at the lead young man — who happened to be black — when he said this, he just threw it out cursorily.

The four young men walked into the centre of the circle and dumped the PortoDolph so that the sides of the bag flopped open — inside was Bob the quadra-amputee, lying in a bedding of coolant bags. ‘Less of the thing, will'ya, laddie,’ he cried, addressing The Fat Controller. At the same time he was struggling to get some kind of purchase on his slippery container; the double pits of his shoulders were a bright violet in the artificial light. Amazingly he managed it and wedged himself upright in the sharp prow of the bag. ‘Allreet,’ he said once he was stable, ‘ahm ready now, let's get on with it.’

Now there was another diversion to cope with. The lead porter, the black one The Fat Controller had called Mandingo, after setting down his corner of the PortoDolph, had extracted a switchblade from his cotton blouson. This he now opened with a loud ‘click’, which echoed off the walls.

‘No one gives me that kind of dissin’,’ he said to The Fat Controller. ‘I'm gonna have to fucking cut you, old man.’ He went over to where the bully was sitting, plucked the Voltiger out of his hand and threw it away. The Fat Controller sat motionless, saying nothing. The porter stuck his knee in The Fat Controller's chest and placed the point of the switchblade at his bullfrog throat. The rest of us sat stock still as well; even the thin man had left off surreptitiously waggling his cane and muttering under his breath, ‘Cha, cha, cha!‘ I waited for the outrage I felt sure was about to happen. What would he do?

Well, in his situation I would have deprived the young man of his blade and used it to slit its owner from sternum to pelvic bone. Then I might have cut the throat of one of his companions and stuffed his dead head inside the knifeman's dying stomach. I would have left them standing like that as a sort of bio-mechanical sculpture, a tableau, intended to drive home the message of what you get if you diss’ The Fat Controller.

But he didn't do this at all. I looked at his face and it was white, not with rage, with something I had never seen in him before, a sense of fear? No, it couldn't be, it couldn't.

‘I'm very sorry if I offended you,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘It was crass and insensitive.’

‘It wasn't fucking crass and insensitive, it was very stupid, old man, an’ I don't care if you ‘pologise, if you grovel, I'm still gonna have to cut you.’

‘Ian. .’ The big man's voice quavered. ‘C-could you lend me a hand here?’

I got up from my tiny chair and crossed the circle. The man with the knife moved round behind The Fat Controller, keeping the digging point of his weapon dead against where the obese old man's jugular might have been. ‘Don't get any closer,’ he cried, ‘or he gets it.’

‘Oh don't worry,’ I replied, ‘I'm not going to do anything. I got up to leave.’ I turned to face the children's jokes. ‘Doug,’ I said, ‘Pinky, thin man, babies, I'll see you around.’ I turned back to the Great White Spirit, the Manitou of Maleficence. ‘And Mr Broadhurst, although it may not have been that nice knowing you, it's certainly been interesting.’

As I gained the glass doors that opened on to the Roman Road he called out, ‘Ian?’ I turned back once more. ‘My dear boy, I'm so sorry you have to rush off, I thought all of this might amuse you.’ There was a pathetic, abandoned sort of note in his voice, a wheedling that undercut its normal basso.

‘It's getting on,’ I said. ‘We're going out to dinner tonight and I'll have to check back at the office before I go home.’

‘Oh very well, very well, don't forget to pay my respects to your lady wife.’

‘I won't.’

‘Oh — and Ian?’

‘Yes.’

‘It has been fun, old boy, hasn't it?’

‘Oh yes,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘it's been lot's of fun — just not my idea of it.’

And then I was on the Roman Road, walking quickly towards Bethnal Green through the late-afternoon shoppers. The fruit and veg market was still going, the stall holders barking their wares: ‘Toms at 50p on the two poun’, come an’ load up, you luvverly ladies.’ ‘Orlrighty, what am I gonna’ get for this?’ This was a stuffed dog, covered in virulent synthetic fur.

You can see why I was tired this evening, why I couldn't concentrate at dinner, I'd had quite a day. I sat there drinking red wine and listening to them pass the wonky baton of conversation between themselves, like an ill-trained relay team. I ran over everything in my mind and concluded that perhaps the city itself had played some part in all of this.

London, or so its inhabitants like to claim, is a collection of villages. I don't see it like that at all. I see the city as mighty ergot fungus, erupting from the very crust of the earth; a growing, mutating thing, capable of taking on the most fantastic profusion of shapes. The people who live in this hallucinogenic development partake of its tryptamines, and so it bends itself to the secret dreams of its beholders. I was — I realised — tired of it. It was time to go.

As I was on the verge of leaving work this afternoon, Hal Gainsby came into my office and told me that there was an opportunity to go to New York. Someone is needed to work on the marketing for yet another financial product to be launched by the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon. I think I might take this offer up.

Oh, and before I go, I suppose you're wondering about Jane upstairs, curled up under the duvet, her full belly pressed into the mattress? I was a little inconsistent there at the outset, wasn't I? But then no one ever said I couldn't be.

Time for bed now, isn't it? Time to climb the angled stair and settle my accounts with my destiny. What's the line — ‘ripped untimely from its mother's womb'? That's it. In this case, however, we're talking about another kind of abortion, perhaps ‘sucked untimely with the mechanical insensitivity of a domestic appliance’ would be a better way of putting it. I believe that's the method they use in those private clinics up in Edgware. You sit in the waiting room with weepy girls from Spain and Ireland and every couple of minutes there's a whirring noise from the room above, like the sound of some enormous vacuum cleaner. It's eternity's housework.

I also happen to know that it's a particular private anxiety of my wife. Neat, eh?

You what? Oh yes, your opportunity to participate, silly me, I was forgetting. . Well, of course you may, if that's what you want but give it plenty of thought, don't rush into anything. Remember I may have killed, I may have tortured, I may have done all sorts of terrible things but it hurt me too, I do have feelings, as you know.

EPILOGUE. AT THE OYSTER BAR IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION

The shoeshine boys and the cops were hamming it up for the tourists outside of the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central Station. The shoeshine boys were sticking their legs out on the sidewalk, tipping themselves back and forth on their boxes and generally goofing. They were all loose-limbed and slap-happy guys, as supple as the chamois cloths they flicked in the faces of their potential customers.

The cops were just being cops, standing in that ass-out way that cops have, so that their cuffs and revolvers are thrown into as much prominence as possible. They were all elbows and shirt epaulettes, these cops, dead casual.

It was a muggy afternoon in late May and the cops wanted the citizenry to know that about the best thing they could be doing for them in this city of cracked-up serial psychokillers was to maintain a strong goofing-with-the-shoeshine-boys presence. That was their routine.

Yellow cabs kept on driving down the slip road from the elevated section of Lexington Avenue and dumping more travellers on the sidewalk outside the station. Down they came, nosing their way off the steep ramp with that sloppy undulant motion that New York cabs have, then they shouldered their way to the kerb.

Inside the terminus the vast booking hall was cool, a twenty-two-piece gamelan orchestra from Indonesia was playing over by the subway entrance and the liquid notes flowed up and away into the airy marbled recesses of the hall's cranial dome.

At the far side of the hall from the 42nd Street entrance, wide tunnels lined with dressed stone blocks led down to the station's subterranean tracks. The tunnels were big enough to accommodate a hundred Hittites dragging a tranche of clay bricks intended for some ancient ziggurat, and this served to point up still further the impression that the station belonged to a forgotten culture, to an age when monumentalism went along with king-worship and collective consciousness.

Outside it had begun to rain. The cops and the shoeshine boy wrapped up their act, the tourists, the travellers and the city people rushed for cover. It was heavy rain that seemed to fall from a great height. It's like that in New York, the skyscrapers give the lie to nature's majesty, pushing the puny clouds up higher and higher so that the drops plummet down from twenty storeys, fifty storeys, a hundred storeys. It's not like London, in London the rain is two storeys high, at best.

Down on the second level of the station, the Oyster Bar was open for business. Even in the mid-afternoon there were still plenty of people who wanted a platter of Coney Island blue points and a glass of Bud.

The maître d’ had taken a booking that morning for a kids’ party. He suggested to the caller — a secretary from some bank or other — that they might like to have a table in the main dining room, or even the Saloon Room. She opted for the main dining room and he had supervised the table-laying himself, making sure that there were a few decorations on the red checkered tablecloth.

He had been expecting a group of five or six, but when the party turned up there was only this one guy with a funny-looking kid. The man was tall, English and plump. He apologised profusely to the maître d’ and explained that his secretary had misunderstood. He gave the maître d’ ten bucks and asked whether, if it wasn't too much trouble, he and his son could sit at the long nickel-plated oyster bar itself? The maître d’ said wouldn't it be a bit difficult for the kid getting on and off the high stools? But the man — without consulting the kid — said he wouldn't mind.

Carlton, who cooked on one of three raised tiers set behind the oyster bar, thought them an odd couple as well. He stood, stirring a mussel chowder in the stainless-steel basin set on its fixed tripod and watched while the kid finished off his second dozen oysters. Christ! The kid was only about two or three. Carlton had never seen a child that age do anything other than take a bite of seafood from a parent's plate but this tubby little thing was wielding his fork like a connoisseur, dipping mollusc after mollusc into the sauces provided. And such a strange kid to look at, almost entirely bald save for a moustache of fine blond hairs that shaded the creases at the back of his thick little neck, no eyebrows to speak of and those bulging eyes.

Carlton didn't want to be saying anything to anyone. He wasn't that kind of a guy. Since he had arrived in New York he'd done his best to cultivate a steady demeanour — Jamaicans had a bad reputation in this town. Despite the fact that he had been a commis chef back in Kingston and knew just about everything there was to know about cooking seafood, it hadn't been easy to get a job at all. He didn't want to do anything that would call attention to himself. He wanted to work quietly, save enough money to bring his wife and child over.

But whether or not it would get him into trouble Carlton knew he'd have to say something to the maître d’, because once or twice he was certain that he'd seen the tall Englishman surreptitiously give his son a sip from his glass of rye, and now that the kid had finished his second dozen, he turned to his father and Carlton heard him say, ‘I suppose I shall have to adjourn to the water closet for my post-prandial cigar.’