The Bridge

Oligocene

When I was young I used to see these things float down in front of my eyes, but I knew they were inside my eyes and that they moved the same way that pretend snowflakes move in one of those little snow scene ornaments. Never could work out what the hell they were (I described them to the doctor once as looking like roads on a map - I still know what I meant - but they'd be better described as looking like tiny twisted glass pipes with bits of dark matter stuck in the tubes), but they never seemed to cause any real problems so I paid them no attention. Only years later did I find out they were quite normal; just dead cells from the top of the eye floating down through the fluid. I believe I did once worry about them silting up, but I guessed there was some bodily process that went on inside my eyes which would make sure it didn't happen. Shame, really; with an imagination like mine I think I'd have made a great hypochondriac.

Somebody told me something about silt; that little dark fellow with the stick. Said the whole thing was sinking; they'd taken so much water from artesian wells, and so much oil and gas too, that whole bits of the thing were just sinking into the water. Quite upset about it, he was. Of course there's a fix; you pump in sea water. More expensive than just sucking out what you want, but you don't get anything for nothing (although, of course, there are margins, which come pretty damn close).

We are rock, part of the machine (what machine? This machine; look, pick it up, shake it, see the pretty patterns form; watch it snow, or rain, or blow, or shine), and we live the life of rocks; first igneous as children, metamorphic in our prime, sedimentary in our sedentary dotage (back to the subduction zone?) In fact the literal truth is even more fantastic: that we are all stars; that we, all our systems and this single system, are the gathered silt of ancient explosions, dying stars from that first birth, detonating in the silence to send their shrapnel gases spinning, swarming, collecting, forming (beat that, mean 'magined monks).

So we are silt, we are precipitate, we are leavings (cream and scum); none the worse for that. You are what has gone before, just another collection, a point on a (stretched) line, just the wave-front.

Shake and jostle. A machine within a machine within a machine within a machine within a - you want me to stop here?

Jostle, shake. Dreams of something long ago, something lodged in the brain somewhere, finally coming to the surface (another shrapnel, more splinters).

Jostle shake jostle shake. Half awake half awake.

Cities and Kingdoms and Bridges and Towers; I'm sure I'm heading for them all. Can't go for long without getting somewhere, after all.

Where the hell was that dark bridge? Still looking.

In the silence of the speeding train, I see the bridge pass. At speed, the secondary architecture can almost disappear at times; all that is visible is the bridge itself, the original structure, flashing red criss-crossing, in its own lights or the sunlight. Beyond, the blue firth, shining under a new day.

The slanted girders pass like forever chopping blades, dimming the view, sectioning it, parcelling it. In the new light, and in the haze of the day, I seem to see another bridge, up river; a grey echo, a shadow-ghost of the one bridge, towering out of the mists above the river, at once more straight and less so. Ghost. Ghost bridge; a place I knew once but know no more. A place to -

On the other side, down-river, through the cutting dark lines of the structure, I can see the barrage balloons, hanging blackly in the sunlight like obese submarines, dead and bloated with some corrupting gas.

Then the planes come, level with me, flying alongside me; they are heading in the same direction as the train, overtaking it slowly. They are surrounded by black clouds; dark bursts of smoke detonate in the sky all around them. Their own pulsed signals mingle with the black smudges of the bridge's reactivated anti-aircraft defences, scrambling the already nonsensical message trailed behind the craft still further.

Invulnerable, uncaring, the silver planes fly on through the furious hail of exploding shells, their formation perfect, their sky writing as neat and precise as ever, sunlight glinting over their sleekly bulbous bodies. All three, from boss to skid, look quite undamaged; their flush-riveted lines are unmarred even by soot or oil stains.

Then, when they are almost too far away for me to see them clearly through the angle of increasing structure, when I have determined they must be really invulnerable, or at least that the bridge's guns are firing smoke charges, not shrapnel or even impact rounds, one of the aircraft is hit. Hit in the tail. It is the middle plane. Immediately it starts to slow down, dropping behind the other planes, grey smoke pouring from its tail, the black puffs of its message continuing for a while, then growing fainter as the plane drops further and further back until it is alongside the train. It does not peel away or take any other evasive action; it keeps the same steady course, but slower now.

Its tail disappears, consumed by the smoke. Still it flies, straight and level. Gradually the fuselage is eaten away. The plane keeps pace with the train and does not deviate from its course, though black anti-aircraft bursts still swarm around it, damage or no. Half the fuselage is gone; it has no tail. The grey smoke starts to eat into the trailing edge of the wing roots and the rear of the cockpit canopy. The plane cannot be flyable; it should have tumbled out of control the instant it lost its tail surfaces, but it flies on, still accurately level with the racing train, and matching its speed. The thick cloud of grey smoke eats fuselage, cockpit, wings, then thins out as they disappear; only the engine cowling and the near-invisible line of the propeller remain to be consumed.

A flying engine; no pilot, no fuel, no control surfaces, no means of lift. The cowling disappears, exhaust by exhaust. Only a few puffs of black smoke bother to follow it. The engine has vanished; the propeller disappears in a sudden thick pulse of grey, then only the boss is left, quickly shrivelling to leave a thin grey line; then it is gone. Just blue sky and balloons beyond the whirling verticals and slants of the speed-blurred bridge. The train jostles and shakes me. I am half awake. I go back to sleep.

On the journey I had strange recurring dreams of a life lived on land; I kept seeing one man, first as a small boy and then as a youth and finally as a young man, but I did not see him clearly at any stage. It was as though all of it was through some mist, and only in black and white and cluttered with things that were more than just visual images but less than real, as if I watched that life on a distorted screen but at the same time could see into that man's head, see the thoughts inside, the associations and connections, conjectures and imaginings all bursting from him and onto the screen I was watching. It all seemed grey and unreal, and I could sometimes spot similarities between what happened in this odd, recurring dream and what really did happen while I lived on the bridge.

Perhaps that was reality, my damaged memories just restored enough to put on some sort of disordered show and doing their best either to entertain or to inform me. I recall that I did see something that looked like the bridge at one point in my dream, but only from a distance, from a desert coast I think, and besides it was far too small. Later I thought I might have stood underneath it, but again it was too small, and too dark; a minor echo, no more.

The empty train I had stowed away on moved for days over the bridge, sometimes slowing but never stopping. I could have jumped from it a couple of times, but I might have killed myself, and I was still determined to reach the end of the structure. I had the run of only three deserted carriages, two passenger cars - with seats and small tables and sleeping compartments - and one dining-car. But no kitchen-car, no galley, and locked doors at each end of those three carriages.

I hid most of the time, slouched down in one of the reclining seats so that I could not be seen from outside, or lying in a sleeping compartment top bunk and peeping out through half drawn curtains at the bridge outside. I drank water from the toilet washbasins, and day-dreamed or dreamt about food.

The carriages were unlit at night, haunted by the flickering beams of yellow-orange light from outside. It grew gradually warmer with each passing day, and the sunlight outside became brighter. The overall shape of the bridge outside the windows did not seem to change, but the people I glimpsed occasionally by the trackside did alter; their skins became different colours, darker as the sunlight increased.

After some days, though, everything seemed to get darker again, as I lay, faint with hunger, rattled like something loose in a long, reclined seat. I began to believe that the light had not changed at all, and that it was something inside my eyes that made the people look like shadows. Still, my eyes hurt.

Then one night I awoke, dreaming of the last meal I had had with Abberlaine Arrol, and saw that it was very dark, both inside the carriage and out.

No glow of light came from the bridge outside, no chrome edge of reflecting cabin fitments was visible; neither was my own hand when I held it in front of my face. I closed my eyes and pressed them, only then seeing the false nerve-light that is the eyes' reaction to pressure.

I felt my way to the nearest outside door, opened the window and stared out. A strange, thick, heavy smell came into the carriage on the warm air. It alarmed me at first; no smell of salt, of paint or oil or even smoke and fumes.

Then I saw a faint edge of light above me, moving very slowly. The train was still moving at close to full speed - the slipstream poured roaring through the window to tug at my loose clothes - but whatever it was I could see, the light was moving very slowly over it; it must be very far away. A cloudbank, I thought, lit by starlight, then realised I could see that outline of light continuously, without any interrupting beams and girders chopping the sight into flickering fragments.

A part of the bridge where the load-bearing structure was beneath the level of the rails? I started to feel faint again.

Then the train slowed for some points, and before it speeded up again I could hear, through the lessened noise of its progress, the distant night noises of a dark, wild forest, and saw that the edging of the light I had mistaken for a cloudbank was a raggedly wooded ridge a couple of miles away. I laughed, delirious and delighted, and sat by the window until the dawn came up and made the green forest steam with fragment mists.

That day the train slowed, and entered the outskirts of a sprawling town. It wound sinuously, slowly, through a great marshalling yard towards a long, low station. I hid in a linen cupboard. The train stopped. I heard voices, the whirring noises of unidentifiable machines inside the carriages, then nothing. I tried to get out of the cupboard but it had been locked from the outside. While I was sitting wondering what to do next, more voices sounded through the cupboard's metal door, and I formed the impression that the train was filling up with people. After a few hours, the train moved again. I slept in the locked cupboard that night and was discovered by a steward the next morning.

The train was full of passengers; well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who looked as though they came from the bridge. They wore summer suits and dresses; they sipped cocktails chinking with ice at little tables in the observation cars. They looked vaguely disgusted when they saw me led through the train in my crumpled, stale clothes, a railway policeman's hand forcing one of my arms painfully high up my back. Outside, the countryside was mountainous, full of tunnels and tall viaducts spanning boulder-torn torrents.

I was interrogated by one of the train's deputy firemen, a young man in a sparkling white uniform which seemed rather inappropriately spotless given his rank. He asked me how I came to be on board; I told the truth. I was taken back through the train and locked in a bare, barred section of a baggage car. I was fed well, on galley leftovers. My clothes were taken from me, washed and returned. The handkerchief Abberlaine Arrol had monogrammed, and on which she had left a smudged red image of her lips, came back quite thoroughly clean.

The train moved for days through mountains, and then across a high, grass-covered plain where distant herds of animals scattered and fled on its approach and the wind blew continually. Beyond the plain it started to climb towards another range of mountains. It unwound its way through those, across more spindly viaducts and long tunnels, descending all the time and stopping at small, quiet towns along the way, amongst forests and green lakes and rock spires plinthed in scree. The barred and rattling little cell had only a single small window two feet long and six inches high, but I could observe the scenery well enough, and the fresh, rarefied smells of the mountains and the plateaux leaked through the large baggage door at one end of the car, wrapping me with the scents which I seemed, tantalisingly, to recall from long ago.

I had other dreams, besides the recurring one of the man in the severely beautiful city; I dreamt one night that I woke up and went to my small window and looked out over a boulder-strewn plain, and saw two sets of weak lights as they approached each other over the moonlit wasteland. Just as they stopped, facing each other, the train roared into a tunnel. On another occasion I thought I looked out during the day, while the train ran along the top of a great cliff facing a blue, glittering sea; the cliff-edge was strung about with puffy clouds which we continually plunged into and rushed out of, and a few times in the clear spaces, through a haze of heat, far below on the surface of the sun-burnished sea, I thought I saw two ships of the line sailing alongside one another, the space between them filled with puffs of grey smoke and darting flames. But that was a day-dream.

They left me here eventually, after the mountains and the hills and tundra and another, lower, colder plain. Here is the Republic, a cold, concentric place once known, they say, as The Eye of God. It is reached, from the barren plain, by a long causeway which divides the waters of a huge grey inland sea. The sea is almost perfectly circular, and the large island at its centre is also very close to that same geometric shape. The first I saw of it was the wall; the grey sea wall skirted by low surf and topped by low towers. It seemed to stretch curving away for ever, vanishing in a haze of distant rain squalls. The train clattered through a long tunnel, over a deep moat of water and then another wall. Beyond lay the island and the Republic, a place of wheatfields and wind, low hills and grey buildings; it seemed at once rundown and full of energy, and those grey buildings gave way, every now and again, to immaculate palaces and temples of an obviously earlier age, perfectly restored but seemingly unused. And there was a graveyard, a cemetery miles to each side, packed with millions of identical white pillars spread geometrically across a green sea of grass.

I live in a dormitory with a hundred other men. I sweep leaves from the broad paths of a park. Tall grey buildings rise on all sides, bulking square shapes against the grainy, dusty-blue sky. There are spires and thin towers on top of the buildings; banners I cannot read fly from them.

I sweep the leaves even when there are no leaves to sweep; it is the law. I formed the impression when I first came here that this was a prison, but this is not the case, at least not in the obvious sense. It seemed then that everybody I met was either a prisoner or a guard, and even when I was weighed and measured and inspected and given my uniform and taken by bus to this large, anonymous town that nothing had really changed. I could talk to relatively few people - this came as no surprise, of course - but the ones I did talk to seemed delighted that I could speak to them in my strange, alien tongue, but also rather guarded when talking about their own circumstances. I asked them if they had heard about the bridge; some had, but when I said I came from there they seemed to think I was joking, or even that I was mad.

Then my dreams changed, were taken over, invaded.

I woke up one night in the dormitory; the air was sick with the smell of death, and choked with the sounds of people moaning and crying out. I looked through a broken window and saw the flashes of distant explosions, the steady glow of large fires, and could hear the crump of falling shells and bombs. I was alone in the dormitory, the sounds and smells came from outside.

I felt weak and desperately hungry, more hungry than I had felt on the train which had taken me away from the bridge. I discovered I had lost almost half my weight during the night. I pinched myself and bit the inside of my cheek, but I did not wake up. I looked round the deserted dormitory; the windows had been covered in tape; black and white tape made X's all over the rectangular panes. Outside, the town was burning.

I found some ill-fitting shoes and an old suit where my standard-issue uniform should have been. I went out into the town. The park which I was supposed to sweep was there, but covered in tents and surrounded by ruined buildings.

Planes droned overhead, or came hurtling down out of the cloudy night sky, screaming. Explosions shook the ground and air; flames leapt into the sky. Everywhere was rubble and the smell of death. I saw a dead, skinny horse, fallen in its traces, the cart behind it half-covered by the ruins of a fallen building. The horse was being carefully butchered by a group of thin, wide-eyed men and women.

The clouds were orange islands against the ink-black sky; fires reflected there on the hung vapour, and sent huge columns of their own darkness into the air to meet them. The planes wheeled, like birds of carrion over the burning town. Sometimes a searchlight would pick one out, and a few black puffs of smoke would darken the sky around the plane still further, but it seemed that otherwise the town was defenceless. Occasionally shells shrieked overhead; twice explosions nearby made me duck for cover as debris - dusty bricks, shards of stone - fell pattering and thumping around me.

I wandered for hours. Towards dawn, as I was returning to the dormitory through this unending nightmare, I found myself behind two old people, a man and a woman. They were walking along the street, each supporting the other, when the man suddenly crumpled and fell, taking the old lady down with him. I tried to help them up, but the man was already dead. There had been no bombs or shells for several minutes, and though I thought I could hear distant crackling small-arms fire, none of it was near us. The woman, almost as thin and grey looking as the old dead man, cried hopelessly, sobbing and moaning into the worn collar of the old man's coat, slowly shaking her head and repeating over and over some words I could not understand.

I did not think the shrivelled old could contain so many tears.

The dormitory was full of dead soldiers in grey uniforms when I returned. One bed was unoccupied. I lay down on it and woke up.

It was the same peaceful, intact town, with the same trees and paths and tall grey buildings. I was still here. The buildings I had seen in flames or in ruins were those that overlooked the park where I worked. When I looked carefully though, in some places I found stones which had not been restored, and which were part of the original buildings. Some of those blocks were chipped and scarred with the distinctive, but weathered, marks of bullets and shrapnel.

I had similar dreams for weeks; always much the same, never exactly similar. Somehow I was not surprised when I discovered that everybody had these dreams. They were surprised; surprised that I had never had such dreams before. I cannot understand, I tell them, why they seem frightened of their dreams. That was the past, I say, this is the present; the future will be better, it won't be the past.

They think there is a threat. I tell them there isn't. Some people have started to avoid me. I tell the people who will listen that they are in prison, but the prison is in their own heads.

I sat up drinking far too much spirit with my workmates last night. I told them all about the bridge and that I had seen nothing threatening to them on my long journey here. Most of them just said I was crazy and went to bed. I stayed up too late, drank too much.

I have a hangover now, at the start of the week. I pick up my brush from the depot and head into the chilly spaces of the park, where the leaves lie, damp or frozen on the ground according to where the sunlight falls. They are waiting for me in the park; four men and a big black car.

In the car two of them hit me while the other two talk about the women they screwed that weekend. The beating is painful but not enthusiastic; the two men administering it seem almost bored. One of them cuts a knuckle on my teeth and looks annoyed for a moment; he takes out a knuckleduster, but one of the other men says something to him; he puts it away again and sits sucking at his finger. The car screams through the wide streets.

The thin, grey-haired man behind the desk is apologetic; I wasn't supposed to be beaten up, but it's standard procedure. He tells me I am a very lucky man. I dab at my bloody nose and puffy eyes with my monogrammed hanky - still, miraculously, not stolen - and try to agree with him. If you were one of ours, he says, then shakes his head. He taps a key on the surface of his grey metal desk.

I am somewhere in a large underground building. They blindfolded me in the car, on the road between the town and whatever city this is. I know it is a city because I heard its noises, and we drove through it for an hour before the car dipped into some echoing underground space, spiralling down and down into the earth. When it stopped I was led out of the car and along innumerable curving corridors to this room, where the thin, grey-haired man was waiting, tapping his grey desk with a key and drinking tea.

I ask him what they are going to do with me. He tells me instead about the combined prison and police headquarters I am now in. It is mostly underground, as I had guessed. He explains, with genuine enthusiasm, the principles upon which it has been designed and built, warming to his subject as he goes on. The prison/HQ is in the form of several tall, buried cylinders; inverted circular skyscrapers interred together beneath the surface of the city. He is deliberately vague about the exact number, but I form the impression there are between three and six of these close-packed cylinders. Each of these huge sunken drums contains many hundreds of rooms: cells, offices, toilets, canteens, dormitories, and so on, and each cylinder can be individually rotated, like some immense battleship magazine, so that the orientation of the corridors and doors leading into and out of each drum can be changed almost continually. A door which one day leads to a lift or an underground car park or a railway station or a certain place in one of the other cylinders might on the following day lead to a completely different cylinder, or to solid rock. From day to day, even - in conditions of high security alert - from hour to hour, this massive gearbox of revolving drums can be moved either at random or according to a complex, coded pattern, thus totally confounding the planning and execution of any attempted escape. The information necessary to decode these erratic transformations is distributed to the police and staff strictly on a need-to-know basis, so that nobody ever knows in exactly what new configuration the composite subterranean complex has been arranged; only the very highest and most trusted officials have access to the machines which set up and oversee these rotations, and the machinery and electronics which are its muscles and nerves are so designed that no engineer or electrician working on any conceivable fault or failure could possibly gain a working overview of the whole system.

The fellow's eyes are bright and wide as he describes all this to me. My head hurts, my vision is blurred and I need to relieve myself, but I agree, quite honestly, that it is a considerable work of engineering. But don't you see? he says, don't you see what it is, what it is an image of? No, I don't, I confess, ears ringing.

A lock! he says triumphantly, eyes flashing. It is a poem; a song in metal and rock. A perfect, real image of its purpose; a lock, a safe, a set of tumblers; a safe place to store evil.

I see what the man means. My head throbs and I black out.

When I wake up it is on another train and I've peed my pants.

Miocene

'Versions of the truth disseminated, To the flock like plastic shrapnel, Getting under the skin of most, And on the nerves of some. - Another chip off the old blastema, Another symptom of the system; The bloom and sump of your diabetical materialism.

'Come give us your excuses, Explain why you did what you had to do; Tell us of your hurting to be kind. You talk of: Bloody Sundays. Black Septembers, And all the time you're wasting.

'We'll smile, dissemble, Case the joint for barricades, Count the weapons, Cost the operation, And mutter back meantime "I believe that's just the way it happened. I'm sure it's exactly as you say."'

'... Oh well, very radical. Lot of street cred there.' Stewart nodded. 'I've always said a good poem's worth a dozen Kalash-nikovs.' He nodded again and drank from his glass.

'Look, asshole, just tell me if you mind the bit about "Diabetical Materialism".'

Stewart shrugged, reached for another bottle of Pils. 'Doesnae bother me, pal. You just go ahead. That a new poem?'

'No, ancient. But I'm thinking I might try to get some printed. Just thought you might be offended.'

Stewart laughed. 'God, you're a daft bugger sometimes, you know that?'

'I know that.'

They were in Stewart and Shona's house in Dunfermline. Shona had taken the kids to Inverness for the weekend; he'd come over to leave their Christmas presents and talk to Stewart. He needed somebody to talk to. He opened another can of export and added the ring-pull to the growing pile in the ashtray.

Stewart poured the Pils into his glass and took the drink over to the hi-fi. The last record had ended a few minutes earlier. 'How about a blast from the past?'

'Yeah, let's wallow in nostalgia. Why not.' He settled back in the seat, watching Stewart thumb through the collection of records and wishing he'd been able to think of something more imaginative than record tokens to give the kids. Well, it was what they'd both asked for. Ten and twelve; he remembered he'd bought his first single on his sixteenth birthday. These youngsters already had their own album collections. Oh well.

'Good heavens,' Stewart said, taking out a blue and grey cover and looking slightly shocked. 'Did I really buy Deep Purple In Rock?'

'You must have been stoned,' he told him. Stewart turned round and winked at him as he took the record out. 'Oh, eh? Was that a little flash of wit there?'

'Merely a scintilla; put the goddamn record on.'

'Well it hasn't been played for a while, just let me clean it here ...' Stewart cleaned the record, put it on: Can't Stand The Rezillos. My God, he thought, that was from 1978; a blast from the past already, indeed. Stewart nodded in time to the music, then sat down in his armchair. 'I like these gentle melodic songs,' he shouted. The track he'd put the stylus down on was Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight.

He raised his can to Stewart. 'God almighty, seven years!' Stewart leaned forward, a hand cupped at one ear. He pointed at the turntable, shouted, 'I said seven years ...' He nodded towards the hi-fi. 'That: seventy-eight.' Stewart sat back, shaking his head emphatically.

'Aw naw; thirty-three and a third,' he shouted.

I am reduced to telling stories for my living. I raid my dreams for tasty morsels to feed my jealous Field Marshal and his motley band of vapidly murderous ancillaries. We hunker down round a fire of fallen flags and precious books, flames glinting on their bandoliers and bayonets; we eat long pig and drink rough whisky; the Field Marshal boasts of famous battles he has won, all the women he has fucked, and then, when he can think of no more lies, he demands a story from me. I tell him the one about the small boy whose dad had a pigeon loft and who later as a man never felt happier than when his proposal of marriage was turned down, at the top of a pigeon-loft folly of monumental proportions.

The Field Marshal looks unimpressed, so I go back to the beginning.

By the time I recovered from my melodramatic swoon in the office of the grey-haired man with the tapping key and the grey desk, the train I'd been put on had crossed the rest of the Republic, steamed across the causeway to the far shore of the nearly circular sea, and travelled some way across a cold waste of tundra.

I had another new set of clothes; a uniform for the train. I was in a small bunk and I'd wet my pants. I felt terrible; my head was pounding, I ached in various places, and the old circular pain in my chest had returned. The train rattled around me.

I was to be a waiter; one who waited. The train contained various elderly officials from the Republic who were on a peace mission - I never did discover exactly who they were or what sort of peace they envisaged - and I, along with an experienced chief steward, was supposed to wait on them in the dining-car, serving them drinks, taking their orders, bringing their food. Luckily they were drunk for most of the time, these ageing bureaucrats, and my initial gaffes went mostly unnoticed as the steward trained me. Sometimes I had to make beds too, or sweep and dust and polish in the sleeping compartments and public carriages.

If this was a punishment, I thought, then it is very mild. I found out later all that had saved me from a much worse fate was the fact that I was - to these people - illiterate, dumb and deaf. Because I could not understand any conversations I heard, or read any papers left lying about in the cars, I could be trusted and used. Of course I did learn something of the language, but my vocabulary was mostly limited to table matters and the decoding of signs saying Do Not Disturb and the like. I did my job. The train rolled through the windswept tundra, passing flat towns and camps and army posts.

The composition of the train gradually changed. As we went further from the Republic the attitude of the officials on the train gradually moved from drunken relaxation to drunken tension; slow columns of smoke climbed blackly on the horizon and occasionally a flight of war planes would swoop, sudden and screaming, across the train. The officials at their tables ducked instinctively when the planes flashed over us, then laughed, loosened collars and nodded appreciatively at the fast-receding dots of the flight. They caught my eye and snapped their fingers commandingly for more drinks.

First we had a couple of flat cars with two four-barrel antiaircraft guns on them, one just ahead of the engine, one at the back of the guard's van, then later a carriage to accommodate the gun crews and an armoured wagon full of extra ammunition. The military tended to keep to their own carriages, and I was not called on to serve them.

Later, a couple of the public cars were taken off at a small town where sirens and klaxons blared in the distance and a large fire burned near the station. The cars were replaced with armoured carriages containing troops. Their officers took over some of the sleeping cars. Still the people on the train were mostly bureaucrats. The officers were polite.

The air changed; snow fell. We passed by the side of gravel roads where burned-out trucks lay at angles in ditches, and the trackside and road were pitted with craters. Lines of troops and poor-looking civilians pushing prams loaded with household goods started to appear; the soldiers going in either direction, the civilians only in one; the opposite to ours. Several times the train stopped for no apparent reason, and often, in a siding, I would see a train pass us, carrying sections of track, and cranes, and wagons full of small stones. Often the bridges over the snow-covered tundra were built on the ruins of older bridges, and manned by sappers. The train crossed these bridges at a crawl; I got down and walked alongside to stretch my legs, shivering in my thin waiter's jacket.

Almost before I realised what was happening there were no more civilians on the train; only officers and men and the train crew. All the carriages were armoured; we had three armour-plated diesel locomotives in front and another two behind, there were anti-aircraft flat cars every three or four carriages, covered wagons holding field guns and howitzers, a radio car with its own generator, several flat cars with tanks and staff cars and artillery tractors, many conscript-crammed barrack cars, and a dozen or so wagons full of oil drums.

I now served only officers. They drank more and tended to damage things, but were less likely to throw cutlery if one dropped dirty plates.

The sunlight grew less, the winds colder, the clouds darker and thicker. We passed no more refugees, only the ruins of towns and villages; they looked like charcoal sketches: the black of soot-covered stones and the empty white of clinging snow. There were army camps, sidings full of trains like ours, or trains with hundreds of tanks on flat cars, or gigantic guns on articulated many-axled cars the length of half a dozen ordinary wagons.

We were attacked by planes; the anti-aircraft platforms crackled with noise and sent clouds of acrid smoke drifting down the side of the train; the planes attacked with cannon shell, smashing windows. Bombs missed us by a hundred yards. I lay on the floor of the galley with the chief steward, hugging a box of finest crystal glasses while the windows splintered around us. We both stared in horror as a wave of red liquid spilled from round the galley door, thinking one of the chefs had been hit. It was only wine.

The damage was repaired; the train rolled on, into low hills under dark clouds. The hills were blown clear of snow in places, and though the sun now never rose very far in the sky, the air became warmer. I thought I could catch the breath of the ocean; sometimes there was a smell of sulphur. The army camps grew larger. The hills gradually became mountains, and I saw the first volcano one night while serving dinner; I mistook it for some terrible night attack in the distance. The soldiers gave it only the most cursory glance and told me not to spill the soup.

There were distant explosions all the time now; sometimes volcanic, sometimes man-made. The train rolled and whined over newly repaired track, crawling past long lines of grey-faced men with sledgehammers and long shovels.

We ran from attacking planes; dashing along straights, hurtling round bends - carriages tipping sickeningly - then plunging into tunnels, braking furiously, everything clattering and crashing^ the tunnel walls flashing with the light from our howling brakes.

We off-loaded tanks and staff cars, we took on wounded; the debris of war was scattered over these hills and valleys like rotting fruit in an abandoned orchard. Once, at night, I saw the glowing remains of tanks caught in a ruby-red flow. The lava rolled down the valley below us like burning mud, and the wrecked tanks - tracks undone, gun barrels tilted crazily into the air - were borne down on that incandescent tide like strange products of the earth itself; infernal antibodies in that red stream.

I still served the officers their meals, though we had no wine left and our supplies of food were reduced both in quantity and quality. Many of the officers who had joined the train after we entered the battle zone would stare at their plates for minutes at a time, gazing incredulously at what we'd put before them, as confused and disturbed as if we'd just ladled a bowlful of nuts and bolts onto their plates.

Our lights blazed all day; the dark clouds, the vast rolling billows of volcanic smoke, the low sun which we could go days at a time without seeing; all consipired to turn the wreckage-strewn mountains and valleys into a land of night. All was uncertainty. A horizon of deeper darkness might be raincloud or smoke; a layer of white on a hillside or plain might be snow, or ash; fires above us might be burning hill forts or the side vents of great volcanoes. We travelled through darkness, dust and death. After a while it began to seem quite natural.

I believe that if we had gone on, the train - lava-spattered, dust-caked, dented and patched - would have accumulated so much cooled lava on its carriage roofs that from above at least it would have had a form of natural camouflage of rock; an evolved skin, a protective layer grown in this harsh place, as though the metals of the train's own articulated body were spontaneously returning to their original forms.

The attack came in the midst of fire and steam.

The train was descending from a mountain pass. In a shallow valley to one side a loose lava flow ran rapidly, almost keeping pace with the train. As we approached a tunnel through a spur of rock, a vast rising veil of steam reared in front of us, and a sound like a gigantic waterfall slowly drowned out the noise of the train. On the far side of the mist-filled tunnel, we saw that a glacier was blocking the lava flow's way: the ice sheet extended from a side valley, its soiled meltwaters feeding a broad lake. The lava had spilled into the lake, forcing a huge steaming wave of water-cooled debris in front of it.

The train rolled hesitantly forward towards another bank of thick mist. I was making beds in one of the sleeping cars. When the first small rocks started to roll down the mountainside I left that side of the carriage and watched through an open door as larger and larger boulders came crashing down the mist-shrouded slope into the train, bouncing up to break through windows or battering against the carriage sides. One vast boulder headed straight towards me; I ran down the corridor. The air was full of crashes and thuds and the sound of distant, confused, undirected gunfire. I felt the train shake, then a tremendous bang obliterated every other noise; the lava vaporising the lake, the gunfire, the small rocks whacking onto the sides and roof. The entire carriage flicked to one side, dashing me against the window and then over on my back as the car lights flickered and went out, a breaking, smashing sound seemed to come from all directions at once, and the buckling carriage roof and walls batted me between them like a ball.

Later, I discovered that the carriage had broken free from the rest of the stricken train and rolled down the slope of scree towards the boiling waters of the lake. The Field Marshal's men, looting and murdering their way through the cars, came upon me, mumbling to myself in the wreckage and - so they tell me, though they'd say anything-attempting to put the chief steward's head back onto what was left of his shoulders. I had stuck an apple in his mouth.

Language saved me again. The men speak the same tongue as I do; they took me to the Field Marshal. He was in a small train just up the line.

The Field Marshal is very tall and heavy, with long, disproportionate legs and a huge backside. He has a broad, round face and lank hair, dyed black. He favours garish uniforms with a very high albedo. He was sitting at a desk in his carriage, listening to music on the radio and eating crystallised quinces from a small plate when I was ushered before him, still half unconscious. He asked me where I came from; I vaguely recall telling him the truth, which he found extremely funny. You'll be my valet, he told me. I like a good story at dinner. I was locked in a small cell in one of the carriages while the Field Marshal's men completed their looting and killing. When I was searched, my handkerchief was taken from me. I saw the Field Marshal blowing his nose on it, some days later.

I watched the blood-splashed irregulars of the Field Marshal's force come back from my old train, carrying weapons and valuables; a wind came up and stirred the steam in the valley's cauldron. The lake was almost dry; lava flow and glacier finally met in a series of tremendous explosions which sent chunks of ice and rock hundreds of feet into the air. Our small train escaped, clanking and clattering, away from the wreck on the track behind us, and the elemental cataclysm beyond.

The Field Marshal's train was shorter and less well equipped than the one his men had ambushed. We moved only at night unless there was heavy cloud cover, hiding in tunnels during the day or covering the train with camouflage netting. For the first few days there was an air of tension in the train, but despite a narrow escape from a strafing fighter-bomber, and a hair-raising traverse of a great curved viaduct which was already damaged and under continuing heavy-artillery attack, the atmosphere amongst the motley-uniformed rabble perceptively lightened as we moved away from the scene of the ambush.

The volcanic activity also decreased; now there were only fumeroles and geysers and small lakes of boiling mud to betray the depths of fire beneath these freezing lands.

It was the Field Marshal's conceit to house the dozen or so pigs he possessed in fine state carriages, while quartering his human captives in a couple of muck-filled cattle trucks at the rear of the train. The pigs were bathed every week in the Field Marshal's own whirlpool bath, which took up a large part of his own carriage. Two soldiers were on permanent pig-husbanding detail, employed to keep clean the nest of sheets and blankets which the animals made of their beds, bring them their meals - they ate the same food as the rest of us - and generally look after their welfare.

Throwing captured soldiers into pools of boiling mud was a comparatively common occurrence, and done just for sport. The Field Marshal could tell I found these practices distressing. 'Ore,' he would say (tjiis was how he pronounced my name), 'Ore, don't you like our little games?' I would smile, dissemble.

The days grew lighter, dormant volcanoes gave way to low hills and savannah. Deprived of his boiling mud, the Field Marshal devised a new sport; he tied a short rope to a man's neck and made him run in front of the train. The Field Marshal took the controls, giggling as he opened the throttle and chased his quarry. They usually lasted a half mile or so before they tripped and fell across the sleepers, or tried to jump to one side, in which case the Field Marshal just opened the throttle and dragged them along the edge of the track.

At the last pool of boiling mud, he had a rope put round the victim, and once he was cooked, dragged him out, covered in a baked layer of mud; he had his men shovel more mud over the twisted figure, then when it had dried left the resulting gnarled statue standing on the ash shore of a salty, foul-smelling inland sea.

We were crossing the floor of a drained sea, towards a city set on a great circular cliff, when the bombers appeared. The train increased speed, heading for a tunnel set underneath the ruined city; the train's few anti-aircraft guns were manned.

Three medium bombers flew straight up the track towards us, not a hundred feet above the rails. They started dropping their bombs, trailing plane first, when they were quarter of a mile away. I was watching from the protruding perspex roof of the Field Marshal's observation car, where I'd been opening a bottle of eiswein. The driver braked, throwing us forward. The Field Marshal pushed past me, kicked open an emergency exit and threw himself out. I followed him, thudding into the side of a dusty embankment as the line of bombs stamped down the carriages like a soldier's boots on a train set. The embankment bounced like a trampoline; stones and fragments of train showered from the sky. I lay curled up, fingers in my ears.

We are in the abandoned city now, the Field Marshal, myself and another ten men; all that survived. Some weapons we have, and one pig. The ruined city is full of echoing, flag hung halls and tall stone spires; we camp in a library because it is the only place we can find anything which will burn. The city is built of stone, or a dark, heavy wood which refuses to do more than glow dull red, even if ignited with powder extracted from rifle cartridges. We get our water from a rusty cistern on the roof of the library, and catch and eat some of the city's pale-skinned nocturnal animals, who flit like ghosts through the ruins, looking for something they never seem to find. The men complain that these shy but gullible creatures make for poor hunting. We finish our meal. The men pick at their teeth with bayonets; one of them goes to a book-lined wall and knocks down some ancient tomes from this productive face. He brings them back to the fire, twisting their spines and ruffling their pages so that they'll burn better.

I tell the Field Marshal about the barbarian and the enchanted tower, the familiar and the wizard and the witch queen and the mutilated women; he likes that one.

Later, the Field Marshal retires with two of his men and his last pig to his private room. I clean the dishes and listen to the men complain about the monotonous diet and dull sport. They might mutiny soon; the Field Marshal has had no good ideas about what to do next.

I am called in to the Field Marshal's quarters; an old study, I believe. It contains many tables, and one bed. The two men leave, grinning at me. They close the door. Put this on, the Field Marshal says, smiling.

It is a dress; a black dress. He shakes it at me, wiping his nose on the handkerchief he took from me when I was first captured. Put it on, he says.

The pig is lying belly-down on his bed, snorting and squealing, its legs tied with rope to each of the bed's four posts. There is perfume in the air. Put this on, the Field Marshal tells me. I watch him put my handkerchief away. I put the dress on. The pig grunts.

The Field Marshal undresses; he throws his uniform into an old chest. He takes a large machine-gun from a book-covered table and shoves it into my hands. He holds up the long chain of cartridges as though it is a thick gold necklace to go with my long black dress. Look at these bullets (I look at the bullets); they are not blanks, see? See how much I trust you, Ore. Do just as I say, the Field Marshal tells me. His broad face is slicked in sweat; his breath is fetid.

I am to poke the machine-gun between the cheeks of his bum while he mounts the pig; this is what he wants. He is already excited, just at the thought. He covers one hand in gun oil and climbs onto the bed over the squealing pig, which he slaps between the legs with his oily hand. I stand at the foot of the bed, gun ready.

I detest this man. But neither of us is stupid. There were faint, regular score-marks round the shoulders of the brass cartridges; they have been held in the jaws of a wrench; opened and emptied of their powder. Probably the caps have been fired off too. There is a pillow by the pig's head. The Field Marshal lowers himself over the animal; they grunt together. One of his hands rests near the side of the pillow. There is another gun under there I think.

'Now,' he says, grunting. I grasp the gun barrel with both hands, lift it overhead and in the same movement bring it down like a sledgehammer on the Field Marshal's head. My hands, my arms and my ears tell me he is dead even before my eyes do. I have never felt or heard a skull smash before, but the signal came quite distinctly through the metal of the gun and the perfumed air of the room.

The Field Marshal's body still moves, but only because the pig is jerking about. I look under the pillow where human blood and pig spittle combine and find a long, very sharp knife there. I take it and open the chest the Field Marshal put his uniform in; I take the pearl-handle revolver and some ammunition, check the door is locked, then change back into my waiter's uniform. I take one of the Field Marshal's great coats as well, then head for the window.

The window's rusty frame squeaks, but not as loudly as the pig. I have both feet on the window-sill when I remember the handkerchief. I take that from the dead man's uniform, too.

The city is dark, and the confused, wandering men who inhabit it bolt for cover as I run softly through the ruins.

Pliocene

She came back. So did Mrs Cramond, looking smaller and older. He had expected Mrs Cramond to sell the house, but she didn't; instead Andrea moved in with her, selling the flat in Comely Bank which had been let out to students in the intervening years. Mother and daughter got on remarkably well. Certainly the house was big enough for them both. They sold off the large basement as a self-contained flat.

It was a good time, after she came back. He'd stopped worrying about his bald patch, work was going well - he was still thinking about joining the other two in a partnership - and his father seemed quite happy on the west coast, spending most of his time at a club for pensioners where he apparently attracted the attentions of several widows (it was only with the greatest reluctance he could be tempted to Edinburgh for even a weekend, and once there would sit looking at his watch and complaining that now he was missing his card game with the lads, and now his bingo, or the old-time dancing. He would look down his nose at the best food Edinburgh's top chefs could provide, and pine volubly for the mince and tatties the others would he having).

And Edinburgh might start to be a capital, albeit in a limited way, once again. Devolution was in the air.

He noticed a little excess weight; just a slight jiggling at waist and upper chest whenever he ran upstairs, but something that had to be dealt with; he started playing squash. He didn't like it though; he preferred to have his own territory in a game, he told people. Besides Andrea kept beating him. He took up badminton, and went swimming at the Commonwealth Pool two or three times a week. He refused to go jogging though; there were limits. He went to concerts. Andrea had returned from Paris with catholic tastes. She would drag him to the Usher Hall to listen to Bach and Mozart, play Jaque Brel records when he stayed at the house in Moray Place, buy him Bessie Smith albums as presents. He preferred the Motels and the Pretenders, Martha Davis singing Total Control and Chrissie Hynde saying 'fffUCKoff!' He thought the classical stuff was having no effect until one day he found himself trying to whistle the overture to The Marriage of Figaro. He developed a taste for complicated harpsichord pieces; they made good driving music, providing you played them loud enough. He heard Warren Zevon for the first time, and wished he'd heard the man's album when it first came out. And he found himself jumping and pogoing like a teenager to the Rezillos at parties.

'You what?' Andrea said.

'I'm going to get a hang-glider.'

'You'll break your neck.'

'The hell with it; it looks like fun.'

'What, being in an iron lung?'

He didn't buy a hang-glider; he decided they weren't safe enough yet. He went parachuting instead.

Andrea spent a couple of months refurbishing the house at Moray Place, overseeing decorators and carpenters and doing a lot of the painting herself. He enjoyed helping her, working late into the night in old clothes covered in paint, listening to her whistling in another room, or talking to her while they both painted. There was one night of panic when he felt a tiny lump in her breast, but it proved to be harmless. His eyes got tired sometimes at work, looking at plans and drawings, and he was putting off going to the optician because he suspected he'd be told he needed glasses.

Stewart had a brief affair with a student at the university which Shona found out about. She talked about leaving Stewart, virtually threw him out. Stewart came to stay at his place, worried, regretful. He went to see Shona, driving to Dunfermline to try to smooth things over, describe Stewart's distress and the way he himself had always admired them and even envied the air of calm, steady affection they gave off when together. It felt strange, sitting there trying to persuade Shona not to leave her husband because he'd slept with another woman, almost unreal, almost comical at times. It seemed ridiculous to him; Andrea was in Paris that weekend, doubtless shacked up with Gustave, and he'd be seeing a tall, blonde parachutist in Edinburgh that night. Was it the slip of paper that made the difference, the living together, the children, or just the belief in the vows, the institution, in a religion?

Probably no thanks to him, they patched it up. Shona would only mention it occasionally, when she was drunk, and with less and less bitterness over the years. Still, it proved to him how fragile even the most secure-seeming relationship would be, if you went against whatever rules you'd agreed.

Oh, what the hell? he thought, and went into partnership with the other two. They found offices in Pilrig, and he had to find an accountant. He joined the Labour party; he took part in letter-writing campaigns for Amnesty International. He sold the Saab and bought a year-old Gold GTi; he mortgaged the flat.

When he was cleaning out the Saab before taking it to the dealer he found the white silk scarf they had used that day at the tower. He hadn't wanted to leave it lying around for somebody to find, so he'd rinsed it in a burn when they got back down but then lost it; he thought it must have fallen out of the car.

It turned up, crumpled and grubby, beneath the passenger seat. He washed it and managed to get all the footprints off, but the blood stain, dried in a rough circle like some incompetent piece of tie-dying, wouldn't shift. He offered it to her anyway. She told him to keep it, then changed her mind, took it away and returned it a week later, spotless, nearly as good as new, and monogrammed with his initials. He was impressed. She wouldn't tell him how she and her mother had cleaned it. Family secret, she said. He kept the scarf carefully, and never wore it when he knew he'd be getting really drunk, in case he left it lying in some bar.

'Fetishist,' she told him.

The Fabulous Make-Your-Mind-Up Referendum was, effectively, pochled - rigged, in English. A lot of carpentry work in the old High School went to waste.

Andrea was translating Russian texts and writing articles about Russian literature for magazines. He knew nothing about this until he read something of hers in the Edinburgh Review; a long piece on both Sofia Tolstoy and Nadezhda Mandelstam. He was confused, almost dizzy, when he read it; it must be the same Andrea Cramond; she wrote as she talked and he could hear the rhythm of her speech as he read the printed words. 'Why didn't you ever tell me?' he asked her, feeling hurt. She smiled, shrugged, said she didn't like to boast. She'd written a few pieces for magazines in Paris, too. Just a sideline. She was taking piano lessons again, after giving them up in high school, and going to night classes to study drawing and painting.

She was also in a partnership, of sorts; she'd put some money into a feminist bookshop a couple of her old friends had started; other women had come in on the project and now there were seven of them in a collective. Financial madness, her brother called it. She helped out in the shop sometimes; he would go there first when he wanted to buy a particular book, but he always felt vaguely uncomfortable in the place, and rarely browsed. One of the women denounced Andrea at a meeting for kissing him goodbye once, after he'd bought some books; Andrea just laughed at her, then felt very unsisterly. She apologised for the laugh but not the kiss. After she'd told him this, he was careful not to kiss or touch her when he visited the shop.

'Oooohh, shit,' he said, as they sat up in bed in the small hours watching the election results come in. Andrea shook her head, reached for the Black Label on the bedside cabinet.

'Never mind kid; have a whisky and try not to think about it. Think about your top rate of tax.'

'Fuck that; I'd rather have a clear conscience than a healthy bank balance.'

'Tut; you'll have your accountant turning in his filing cabinet.'

Another returning officer announced another Tory win; the Ya-hoos ya-hooed. He shook his head. 'The country really is going to the dogs,' he breathed.

'Certainly gone to the bitch,' Andrea said, swirling her whisky round in her glass and looking at the television through it, brows creased.

'Well... at least she's a woman.' he said glumly.

'She may be a woman,' Andrea said, 'but she ain't no fuckin' sister.' Scotland voted for Labour, with the SNP a close third. What it actually got was the right honourable Margaret Thatcher, M.P.

He shook his head again. 'Oooohh, shit.'

The business did well: they had to turn contracts away. Within a year his accountant was telling him to buy a bigger house and another car. But I like my little flat, he complained to Andrea. So keep it, but buy another house, she told him. But I can only live in one at a time! Anyway I've always thought it was immoral to have two houses when there's folk going homeless. Andrea was exasperated with him: 'So let somebody live in the flat, or in this house you're going to buy, but remember who'll get all those extra taxes you'll be paying if you don't do what your accountant says.'

'Oh,' he said.

He sold the flat and bought a house in Leith, near the Links and with a view of the Forth from the top storey. It had five bedrooms and a big double garage: he bought a new GTi and a Range Rover, to keep his accountant happy and fill up the garage: the four-wheel drive was useful on business trips when they had to visit sites. They were doing a lot of work with firms in Aberdeen that year, and he dropped in on Stewart's people. On a later trip, he ended up in bed with Stewart's sister, a divorced teacher. He didn't ever tell Stewart, not absolutely certain whether he might mind or not. He did tell Andrea. 'A school teacher,' she grinned. 'An educational experience?' He told her about not wanting to say anything to Stewart. 'Kid,' she said, taking his chin in her hand and looking at him very seriously, 'You're an idiot.'

She helped him decorate the house, bullying him into a complete new scheme.

He was up a ladder, painting an elaborate ceiling rose one evening, when he felt a sudden, dizzying surge of déjà vu. He put the brush down. Andrea was in the next room whistling away to herself. He recognised the tune: The River. He stood on the ladder, in the echoing, empty room, and remembered standing in a wide room full of sheet-draped furniture in the house in Moray Place a year earlier, dressed in the same paint-spotted clothes, listening to her whistle in another room, and feeling enormously, simply happy. I am a lucky bastard, he thought. I have so much, so much around me that is good. Not everything; I still want more, I probably want more than I could handle; in face I probably want things that would only make me unhappy if I had them. But even that's OK; that's still part of the contentment.

If my life was a film, he thought, I'd roll the credits now; fade on this beatific smile in an empty room, the man on a ladder making things better, renovating, improving. Cut. Print. The End.

Well, he told himself, it isn't a film, laddie. He was filled with a surge of pure joy, simple delight at being where and who he was and knowing the people he did. He threw the paint brush into one corner of the room, jumped off the ladder, and ran through to Andrea. She was rolling paint onto a wall. 'God, I thought you'd fallen off the ladder. What's the cheesy grin for?'

'I just remembered,' he said, taking the roller out of her hand and chucking it behind him, 'we haven't christened this room.'

'Well, neither we have. Must remember the smell of paint does this to you.'

They screwed up against the wall, just for a change. Her shirt stuck to the wet paint; she laughed until the tears ran down her face.

He had become a film buff. During the last festival they'd both gone to more films than plays or concerts, and he suddenly realised he'd missed out on hundreds of films he'd heard of and wanted to see. He joined a film society, he bought a video recorder and scoured video shops for films. Whenever business took him down to London he'd try to cram in as many cinema visits as possible. He liked almost everything; he just liked going to the cinema.

A Scottish group called the Tourists had some chart success; their lead singer went on to become half of the Eurythmics. People would ask if he was related to her. No such luck, he sighed.

There were soft voices, nice bums. Andrea had her various flings, and he tried not to feel jealous. It isn't jealousy, he told himself; it's more like envy. And fear. One of them may be a nicer, kinder, better man that I am, and more loving.

She was out of circulation for almost two weeks once, having some sort of time-lapse relationship with a young lecturer from Heriot Watt which went from love-at-first-sight to slammed doors, thrown ornaments and smashed windows over the space of twelve days. He missed her, while all this was going on. He took the second week off and headed north-west. The Range Rover and GTi had been supplemented by a Ducatti; he had a one-man tent, a Himalayan standard sleeping bag and all the best hiking gear; he took the bike roaring up to the western highlands and spent days walking alone in the hills.

When he got back, she'd finished with the lecturer. He talked to her on the phone, but she seemed curiously reluctant to see him; he worried, he didn't sleep well. When he did see her, a week later, there was a fading yellow stain round her left eye. He only noticed it because she forgot to keep her dark glasses on in the pub. 'Ah,' she said. 'Is that why you wouldn't see me?' he asked her. 'Don't do anything,' she said. 'Please. It's all over and I could happily throttle him but you lay a finger on him and I'll never speak to you again.' 'We do not all,' he told her coldly, 'resort to violence quite that quickly. You might have trusted me; I've been worried sick the past week.' Then he wished he hadn't said that, because she broke down, and hugged him and cried, and he realised something of what she must have gone through; he felt mean and selfish for adding to her cares. He stroked her hair while she sobbed into his chest. 'Come on home, lass,' he said to her.

He took to the hills a few more times, using the occasions when she went to Paris to get away from Edinburgh and out to islands and the mountains, stopping off to see his father on the way there and back. He was camped one sunset on the slopes of Beinn a' Chaisgein Mor - there was a bothy nearby, but he preferred to pitch the tent if it was good weather - looking out over Fionn Loch and the small causeway he'd be crossing tomorrow to the mountains on the far side, when he suddenly thought: just as he hadn't been to Paris, in all these years neither had Gustave ever visited Edinburgh.

Ahhh. Maybe it was just the effects of the last joint, but in that instant, though they were a thousand miles apart, and all those unshared years away, he felt curiously close to the Frenchman he'd never met. He laughed into the cool highland air; the breeze moved the flanks of the tent like breath.

One of his earliest memories was of mountains, and an island. His mum and dad, his youngest sister and he had gone to Arran for their holidays; he had been three years old. As the steamer paddled down the glittering river towards the distant blue mass of the island, his dad had pointed out the Sleeping Warrior; the way the mountain range at the north end of the island looked like a helmed soldier, lying over the landscape, mighty and fallen. He'd never forgotten that sight, or the medley of accompanying sounds: calling gulls, the slap-slap of the steamer's paddles; an accordion band playing somewhere aboard, people laughing. It also gave him his first nightmare: his mum had to wake him up, in the bed he was sharing with his sister in the guest house; he'd been crying and whimpering. In his dream, the great stone warrior had woken up, and come slowly, terribly, crushingly, to kill his parents.

Mrs and Ms Cramond made the most of their big house; they had social evenings, they entertained; their parties became moderately celebrated. They would put people up; poets giving readings at the university, a visiting painter trying to sell some work to a gallery, a writer the book shop had invited to a signing session. Some evenings there would be a whole circle of people he didn't recognise at the place; they usually looked less well-off than Andrea's friends, and tended to eat and drink a lot more. Mrs Cramond spent half the day, it seemed, baking cakes and quiches and bread. He worried that even in her widowhood Mrs Cramond was still spending all her time in her kitchen making things for people, but Andrea told him not to be stupid; her mother loved seeing people enjoy something she'd made. He accepted this but watched some of the itinerant denizens of the house stuff cakes and the odd bottle of wine into coat pockets with a nagging sense of vicarious exploitation.

'These people are intellecutals,' he told Andrea once. 'You're starting a salon; you're becoming a goddamned blue stocking!'

She just smiled.

Andrea bought a litter of four Siamese cats from a friend. One died; she renamed the two males Franklin and Phineas and the sleek female Fat Freddie; damned nostalgia, he called it. Somebody gave Mrs Cramond a King Charles spaniel; she called it Cromwell.

Just getting ready to go round to the house was enough to make him feel good; driving there would produce an almost childlike thrill in him; the house was another home, a warm and hospitable place. Sometimes, especially when he'd had a few to drink, he had to fight an absurd feeling of sentimentality at the bond between mother and daughter.

He added a Citroen CX to the GTi and the Range Rover, then sold all three and bought an Audi Quattro. He went out to Yemen on business, and stood once in the ruins that had been Mocha, on the shore of the Red Sea; he saw the warm wind from Africa move the sand grains round his feet, and sensed the steady harsh indifference of the desert, its calm continuance, the spirit of those ancient lands. He stroked his hand over the age-worn, pitted stones, and watched where the waves fell blue, exploding white fists of silk thunder on the open, golden palm of the shore.

Things went on; Lennon got shot, Dylan got religion. He could never decide which depressed him most. He was working in Yemen when the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon because a man was shot in London, and when the Argentinians went ashore at Port Stanley. He didn't learn that his brother, Sammy, was with the Task Force until after it had sailed. When he got back to Edinburgh he argued with his friends; sure the Argentinians ought to have the bloody islands, he said, but how the hell could revolutionary parties support a fascist junta's own little piece of imperialism? Why did there always have to be a right side and wrong one? Why not just say, A curse on both your houses?

His brother came back, unhurt. He still had arguments about the war; with Sammy, his dad, his radical friends. By the time the next election came round, he was starting to think maybe his pals had been right after all.

'Awww, come on!' he said, despairing. Another healthy Labour majority wiped out, votes leeched by the SDP; another surprise Conservative win. The pundits were predicting the Tories would get less of the vote than last time, but increase their majority by a hundred seats, perhaps more. 'Aww fuck!'

'This is becoming monotonous,' Andrea said, reaching for the whisky. Margaret Thatcher appeared on the television screen, glowing with victory.

'Off!' he screamed, hiding under the sheets. Andrea stabbed at the remote control unit; the screen went dark. 'Oh ... God," he said from beneath the sheets. 'And don't talk to me about my top rate of tax'

'Never said a word, kid'

Tell me it's all just a bad dream.'

'It's all just a bad dream.'

'Really? Is it?'

'Hell no, it's real; I was just telling you what you wanted to hear.'

'Those idiots!' he fumed to Stewart. 'Another four years with that dingbat in charge! Christ al-fucking-mighty! A senile clown surrounded by a gang of xenophobic reactionaries!'

'Unelected xenophobic reactionaries,' Stewart pointed out. Ronald Reagan had just been elected for another term; half the people who could have voted in the election, hadn't.

'Why don't I get a vote?' he raged. 'My dad lives spitting distance from Coulport, Faslane and the Holy Loch; if that buffoon's liver-spotted finger hits the button my old man's dead; probably all of us are; you, me, Andrea, Shona, and the kids; everybody I love ... so why the fuck don't I get a vote?'

'No annihilation without representation,' Stewart said, thoughtfully. Then, 'Still, on the subject of unelected reactionaries, what d'you think the Politbureau is?'

'A fucking sight more responsible than that squad of gung-ho shitheads'

'... Aye, fair enough. Your round."

The house at Moray Place, residence of Mrs and Ms Cramond, was now quite well known, especially at festival time. You couldn't walk into the place without tripping over some up-and-coming artist, or an authoritative new voice in Scottish fiction, or some moody kids with acne who dragged synths and practice amps from room to room, and commandeered the Revox for days at a time. The Last Chance Salon, he called it. Andrea had settled down to a life she found thoroughly fine; still working in the shop, translating Russian books, writing articles, playing the piano, drawing and painting, socialising and partying, visiting pals, holidaying in Paris, going to films and concerts and plays with him, and to the opera and ballet with her mother.

Meeting her one day at the airport, after another jaunt to Paris, he watched her; she walked confidently, head up, out of Customs; she wore a broad, bright red hat, brilliant blue jacket, red skirt, blue tights and shiny red leather boots. Her eyes sparkled, her skin glowed; her face broadened into a wide smile when she saw him. She was thirty-three years old and she had never looked better. He felt, at that instant, an odd amalgam of emotions; love certainly, but also envious admiration. He envied her her happiness, her assurance, her calm way with the troubles and traumas of life, the way she treated everything as one might treat a child making up a story the child really believed in; not patronisingly, but with the same mock-serious frown, the same mixture of ironic detachment and affection, even love. He remembered his talks with the advocate, and could see something of the old man's personality in Andrea.

You're a lucky woman Andrea Cramond, he thought, as she took his arm, there in the airport lounge. Not because of me, and not as lucky as me in one way, because I have more of your time than anybody else, but otherwise ...

Let it go on, he thought. Don't let the idiots blow up the world and don't let anything else terrible happen. Steady, kid; who are we talking to here? He sold the bike soon afterwards. His father fell and broke his hip that winter. He looked very small and frail when he visited him in hospital, and much older. In the spring he needed a hernia operation, and fell again, not long after he'd left hospital. He broke a leg and a collar bone. 'Have tae take mair waiter with it,' he told his son, and refused to come and live with him in Edinburgh, because his friends were here. Morag and her husband also offered to take him in, and Jimmy wrote from Australia to say why didn't he come out for a few months? But the old man didn't want to move from his own area. He was in hospital for longer this time, and when they let him out he couldn't put back on the weight he'd lost. A home-help came round every morning. She found him, apparently asleep, by the fire one day, a small smile on his face. It had been his heart, too. The doctor said he probably hadn't felt a thing.

He found himself organising everything, not that there was very much to do. His brothers and sisters all made it to the funeral, even Sammy, on compassionate leave, and Jimmy all the way from Darwin. He had asked Andrea if she minded not coming; she said no, and understood. Once it was all over, it was good to go back to her, back to Edinburgh and work. He never did entirely lose the feeling of numbness which crept over him when he thought about the old man, and though he shed no tears, he knew he'd loved him, and did not feel guilty about that dry grief.

'Ah, my poor orphan,' Andrea said, and was his comfort.

The company expanded; more people joined. They bought grand new offices in the New Town. He argued with the others about their employees' salaries; they should all have a share, he said; they should all be partners.

'What,' the other two said, 'a workers' collective?' They smiled tolerantly. 'Why the hell not?' he said. They were both SDP supporters; worker participation was one of the ideas the Alliance liked. They said no, but started a bonus scheme.

Then one day Andrea got off a Paris flight and she wasn't smiling, and his guts seemed to lurch. Oh no, he thought. What is it? What's wrong?

She wouldn't talk about it, whatever it was. She said there was nothing wrong but she looked very solemn and thoughtful most of the time, laughed little, and would often look up, distracted, say sorry and have to have repeated to her the last thing somebody had said. He worried. He thought about phoning Gustave in Paris and asking what the hell was wrong with her, what had happened, there?

He didn't call. He fretted, and tried to entertain her, taking her out to dinner to see a film or over to see Stewart and Shona; he tried to organize a nostalgic evening, eating at the Loon Fung, near his old flat in Canonmills, then taking a taxi to the Canny Man's, but nothing worked. He couldn't decide what it was. Mrs Cramond and he worried together, and individually tried to get the truth out of her. It was the mother who did, though only after three months and another two visits to Paris. Andrea told her mother what was wrong, then went back to France again. Mrs Cramond rang him up. MS, she told him. Gustave had multiple sclerosis.

'Why didn't you tell me?' he asked her.

'I don't know,' she said, listlessly, eyes dull, voice flat. 'I don't know. And I don't know what to do; he's got nobody to look after him, not properly ..." When he heard those words, a chill settled in him. Poor guy, he thought, and meant it; but once found himself thinking, It's so slow, why couldn't he die quickly? And hated himself for the thought.

Another argument; during the '84 strike he refused to cross a miners' picket line; the company lost a contract.

Andrea spent more and more time in Paris; less people came to the house at Moray Place now. She looked tired whenever she came back from France, and though she was still slow to anger, and still easy with people, she was slow to laugh now as well, and guarded about taking any enjoyment at face value. When they made love, he thought he could detect an extra tenderness in her, and a sense of how precious and impermanent such moments were. It was less fun than it used to be, but somehow the act had gained an extra resonance, become in itself a sort of language.

Sometimes when she was away in Paris he would get lonely sitting in the big house by himself, reading or watching the television or working at the drawing board; if he'd had less than the legal limit to drink he would take the Quattro out and drive to North Queensferry to sit beneath the great dark bridge, listening to the water lap against the stones and the trains rumble overhead; he would smoke a joint or just breathe the fresh air. If he felt pity for himself, it was only one timid, tentative part of his mind that felt so; there was another part of him which seemed like a hawk or an eagle; hungry and cruel and fanatically keen-eyed. Self-pity lasted a matter of seconds in the open; then the bird of prey fell on it, tearing it, ripping it.

The bird was the real world, a mercenary dispatched by his embarrassed conscience, the angry voice of all the people in the world, that vast majority who were worse off than he was; just common sense.

He discovered, to his knowing, almost righteous dismay, that the bridge was not painted end-to-end over a neat three-year period. It was done piecemeal, and the cycle lasted anything between four and six years. Another myth bites the dust, he thought; par for the course.

Andrea was away in Paris almost half the time now. She had another life there, another set of friends; he'd met some of them when they'd come over to Edinburgh; a magazine editor, a woman who worked in UNESCO, a lecturer who taught at the Sorbonne; nice people. They were all friends of Gustave, too. I should have gone over, he told himself, I ought to have gone, made friends. Too late. Why am I so stupid? I can design you a structure to withstand hundred-foot waves for thirty years or more and make it as sturdy and safe as any other designer could for the weight and the budget, but I can't see my hand in front of my face when it comes to doing sensible things with my own life. If there is a design to my own existence it escapes me. What was that old Family song? The Weaver's Answer. Yeah, well; where's mine, Jimmy?

He bought a Toyota MR2 as well as the latest model Quattro, he started flying lessons, he built up a sound system based on Scottish-made components, he bought the Minolta 7000 camera as soon as it came out, added a CD player to the hi-fi and thought about buying a power boat. He went sailing with some of Andrea's old pals, from the marina at Port Edgar, on the south bank of the Forth, upstream from the two great bridges.

He grew restless with the Quattro and the MR2. There was always some better car; a Ferrari or an Aston or a Lambo or some limited edition Porsche or whatever ... he decided to stop competing and go for timeless elegance instead. He found a well-looked-after MK II Jaguar 3.8 through a local dealer; he sold the Audi and the Toyota.

He had the Jag re-upholstered in red Connelly leather. A specialist tuner dismantled the engine, blueprinted it, changed the cams, pistons, valves and carbs and fitted electronic ignition; they completely revised the suspension, fitted beefier brakes, new wheels and asymmetric tyres, plus a new gearbox to handle all the extra torque. He had it fitted with four new seat belts, a laminated windscreen, more powerful lights, electric windows, tinted glass, a sunroof, and anti-theft devices he'd have trusted a Chieftain tank to (but which he kept forgetting about). The car spent three days at another specialist firm having a new sound system installed, complete with CD player. It can make your ears bleed, he told people; I haven't even found all the speakers yet. Half the boot seems to be amplifier; I don't know which is going to give way under the vibration first; my ear drums or the outside paint job (he'd had it rustproofed and repainted; twelve coats, hand-painted). 'Good heavens,' Stewart said when he told him how much the ICE equipment had cost to install, 'You can buy a new car for that.' 'I know,' he agreed. 'You could buy a new car for the cost of a year's insurance and a new set of tyres for the thing as well. More money than sense.'

Nothing seemed to work quite perfectly. The car had annoying rattles, the house CD player had an intermittent fault, the camera had to be replaced and almost all of the records he bought seemed to have scratches on them; his dishwasher kept flooding the kitchen. He found himself becoming short tempered with people, and traffic jams infuriated him; a sort of pervasive impatience seemed to fill him, and a callousness he could not evade. He gave money to Live Aid all right, but his first thought when he heard of the Band Aid record had been about the revolutionary adage which compared giving to charity under capitalism to putting a Band-aid on a cancer.

The 1985 Festival couldn't even revive his spirits. Andrea was there for part of it, but even when she was with him, in the next seat at a hall or cinema, or in the passenger's seat in the car, or beside him in bed, she wasn't really with him, not all of her. Part of the woman's thoughts were not free, not for him. She still didn't want to talk about it. He heard circuitously that there were complications to Gustave's MS; he tried to bring the subject up but she would not co-operate. It dismayed him there were things they could not talk about. It was his own fault; he never had wanted to talk about Gustave. You couldn't change the rules now.

He had dreams about the dying man in the other city, and sometimes thought he could see him, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines.

Andrea went back to Paris half-way through the Festival. He couldn't face the cultural equivalent of a thousand-bomber raid alone, so he borrowed a friend's Bonneville and took off for Skye.

It rained.

The company went from strength to strength, but he was starting to lose interest. What, in the end, am I really doing? he asked himself. Just another fucking brick in the wall, just another cog in the machine, if a little better oiled than most. I make money for oil companies and their shareholders and for governments that spend it on weapons that can kill us all a thousand times over instead of just five hundred; I don't even operate at the level of an ordinary decent worker, like my dad did; I'm a fucking boss, I employ, I have real drive and initiative (or I used to); I actually make it all run just that little bit better than it might if I wasn't here.

He cut the whisky out again, spent some time drinking only mineral water. He gave up dope almost completely once he realised he wasn't enjoying it any more. The only time he did smoke was when he went over to see Stewart. Then it was like old times.

He started to take coke regularly; it got to be a Monday morning ritual and the natural start to an evening out until one night he was watching the television news and cutting up a couple of generous lines before he went out drinking. There was a follow-up report on the African famine being shown. He looked away from a child with dead eyes and skin like a bat's wing; he looked down to the mirror on the table he was hunkered over and saw his own face looking back at him through the shining granules of white powder. He'd stuffed three hundred pounds' worth of this stuff up his nose the previous week. He threw the razor down. Shit, he said to himself.

A bad year, he told himself. Just another bad year. He started smoking cigarettes. He finally accepted he needed glasses. The bald patch on his head was the size of a bath plug-hole. He seemed to feel the restlessness of youth and the last-chance urgency of age at the same time. He was thirty-six years old, but he felt like eighteen going on seventy-two.

In November Andrea told him she was thinking of going to stay in Paris, to look after Gustave. They might have to get married, if his family insisted. She hoped he understood. 'I'm sorry kid,' she said, dull voiced.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Me too.'

Ah shit, I suppose I canny really complain; I've had a good innings and all that stuff, but Jeez I don't feel like giving it all up right now; once a swordsman always a swordsman, I gess. Bloody few get to this age, let me tell ye; I'm ecxeptional; it's a fact. Suppose I might no have made it without the wee bam on the showlder, but I don't let him know that; he's uppity enough without me swelling his head even more so. Still, he didn't come up with a solution for our little problem though; namely, growing old. Wee bugger wasn't that clever.

Anyway, here I am, sitting up in the bed, watching the closed-circuit TV screens and thinking dirty thoughts, trying to get a hard-on. I'm remembering Angharienne and what we used to do. The stuff we used to get up to! Ye'd hardly credit it, but when you're young you'll try anything. Ah well, you're only young once, like they say (the wee familiar disagrees with this, but he's yet to prove otherwise). I suppose three hunner odd years is no a bad score, but bugger it, I still don't feel ready to die, but it looks like I've got no choyce in the matter. The familiar tried a few things (no choyce for him either; he's stuck with me), but nothing's worked so far and I think the wee bastard's run out of ideas; trust him to bugger things up now, when I could really do with his help. He says he's still got some irons in the fire, whitever that's supposed to mean. Either giving up golf or thinking about torchering somebody. Wee barn's sitting on the table by my bed; all shrivelled up and grey looking, so he is. He hasn't sat on my showlder since we got the flying castle (he calls it a ship, but then he likes confusing things; calls the bedroom the ship's bridge, too). What happened was, we got back to the sorcerer who'd helped me get into the Underworld, and the two of them - the sorcerer and the wee familiar - had a battle; hammer and tongs stuff it was and I had to watch from on corner, frozen stiff from some spell the bloody familiar had cast over us. Eventually the familiar won, but then, just when I might have got rid of the wee bugger, he found he couldn't do what he wanted to, which was take over the body of the sorcerer; seems that wasn't possible; against the rules, sort of thing; I could bring him out of the Underworld, but he couldn't take over a living body; had to stay in an inannimate object. That was him; totally scunnered and bombed-out. Trapped in the wee familiar-body, so he was, and no way out of it. He got all upset and started breaking up the sorcerer's magic celler, and I thought he might start on me for a while, but he didn't, he calmed down after a while like and came back to my showlder and released me from the spell. Explained that we really were stuck with each other for good or ill, and we'd both just have to make the best of it, this time.

Maybe it was for the best, you never know. Doubt I'd have lived this long without him; some of his ideas were pretty smart. His first was to go back to see that young witch I'd been doing the business with no long before I rescued the familiar from Hades. Angharienne, that was her name; the familiar thought me and her might be able to come to some sort of arrangement, he said. She was pretty duebious at first, thought the familiar was trying to pull a fast one, going to try and take over her body or something like that, but they had this dead complicated talk, and they both did some magic, and went into one of them trances (dead bloody boring that was); they woke up all smiles and agreement. Familiar told me that we were going to have a trial troylistic arrangement. OK, I said, as long as there's nothing dirty involved. Anyway, I gess that was how I got be an old swordsman.

'What are you doing? Trying to raise the dead already?'

'Shut up you; none of your business.'

'Of course it is my business; what if you have a heart attack or something?'

'Well why no magic up one of them whouris for me then?'

'Certainly not; you'd be sure to peg out then. Just stop that; it's so unseemly in a man of your age. Your brain may still be retarded but your years are advanced.'

'It's my willy and it's my life.'

'It's my life too and you can't play with one if it means playing with the other as well. Have a sense of proportion, man.'

'Och, I'm no really wanting a wank, just to see if I can get it up still. Go on; show us a dirty video, eh?'

'No. Keep watching the screens.'

'What for?'

'Just keep watching. You never know what might happen. All is not yet lost.'

'We should have kept looking for that Fountain of Youth, so we should.'

'Ah ... you'd probably just have pissed in it.'

'Aw, fuck,' I says, and just lie there with the arms folded feeling sorry for myself.

The flying castle is sitting on this hillside; we landed it here weeks ago after visiting this planit where they claim to be able to make people live for ever. Whatever they did, it didn't work on me and the wee familiar (they said they'd no ecxperience with something like us, a swordsman and a familiar). I wanted to go to one of these fancy cities here on Earth and take some of those magic drugs they've got nowdays; a few weeks of fun burning yourself up like a young man, then you pop your clogs, quick and painless and you've had a lot of fun in the innterim, but the familiar wasn't having it; pilated the castle here to the middle of nowhere, on this cold and windy hillside, and dismissed all the guards and servants and that and even shooed offa couple of the great-grandchildren and gave away half the magic gear that we had - crystal balls that fortel the future, enchanted sub-machine-guns, magic missiles and that sort of stuff. Seemed to want to give everybody the impression we were getting ready to die, but didn't give all the good stuff away; kept the flying castle itself and some bits and pieces like a jacket that flies, the Universal Translator and a few tonnes of invisible platinum in the hold. Even found some new batteries for the old dirk; the 'knife missile' as the familiar calls it. Its batteries ran out about a century ago and it was just a no very sharp knife after that what I kept for sentimental reasons. Wee familiar was dead snooty about it at the time 'Just a cheap copy, I told you so,' it said, but it found new batteries for it just reently and put it in charge of security, guarding the flying castle's door. Fuck knows why; maybe the familiar's getting ecsentric in its old age.

Still canny stop thinking about the wife. Popped her clogs nearly half a century ago, but I can still see her bonny face like she'd just croaked yesterday. Turned out she wasn't as young as she looked; never did find out how old she was, but the familiar thinks she was a thousand or so at least. She wouldn't grow old slowly, like even witches are meant to; did the magic on herself so that she stayed looking just out of her teens until right to the end; burned herself out staying young; can't say I blamed her but it catches up on ye in the end. She became a statue; a wee dark wooden carving, all hard and dark and old-looking; left instructions she was to be planted in this forest near where she was born, where she's become a wee tree, no long since. The familiar says the tree will probably go from being wee and shrivelled to big and tall and younger, and then shrink like it's going back in time until it becomes a sede, and after that even it doesn't know what'll happen. It seems sad when it tells me all this, because it knows that when I die - when we both die, because it can't live without me - it'll just disinntigrate into dust and that'll be that; no even an existence in the Underworld for it after that. Tough titty; I'll probably no even be allowed in to hell after what happened the last time I was there; the wee familiar still chuckles when we talk about the old days and me rescuing him; seems they had to alter the whole rejeem down there after that bloke Charon turned into stone; couple of characters called Virgil and Danty took over temperarily and they're still there. Fuck knows what sort of receptcion I'll get when I turn up at the perilly gates or whatever it is they've got now. Probably let me in all right but have something really nasty arranged, I'll bet. Ye can see why I'm no so keen on kicking the bucket, anyway.

'Ah-ha.'

'Ah-ha whit?'

'I thought you were supposed to be watching the screens.'

'I am, I am, I just - aw wait a minute! Who the fuck's that?'

'No one who wishes us well, that's for sure.'

'Aw shite!' Coming down the hillside there's this muscley punter with blond hair and a fucking great sword. Bloody great broad shoulders and sort of metal straps all over his body, big boots and a wee sort of loin cloth thing. Some sort of helmet on his head with a wolve's head on it, snarling like. I sit up in bed, feeling scared already; I'm dead stiff these days (all ecsept the bit I'd like to be), and what with the roomatism and that, and the way my hand shakes nowdays, and needing glasses and so on, I really don't fancy squaring up to some young fit warrior with a dirty great sword. 'Whit happened to the fucking total exclusion zone then, eh? I thought people were meant to fall asleep if they tried to come up to the flying castle!'

'Hmm,' the familiar says, 'must be that helmet he's wearing; probably contains some neuroscreening device. Let's see if the laser can deal with the fellow.'

The big berr with the muscles marches on down the slope, staring up at the castle, big blond brows knitted together, muscles rippling, the big muckle sword swinging. Suddenly he looks surprised, and starts swinging the sword even faster, so it's a blur all around him; next thing I know there's a flash and the screen goes dead. 'Aw naw! Whit now?' I'm trying to get out of bed, but my old muscles seem to have turned to jeely or something, and I'm sweating like a pig. The screen comes alive again, showing the door of the castle from the inside.

'Hmm,' the wee familiar says again, as though it's dead impressed or something. 'Not bad. Some sort of limited prescience involved there, I'll warrant; he knew the laser was about to fire on him. Probably only a few seconds into the future, but enough; he's going to be difficult to stop. Nice trick with the laser too; probably some sort of mirrorfield in the sword. Reflecting the light back into the cameras might have been coincidence, but if not then it was very cheeky. Quite an adversary, what?'

'I canny move! Do something! Fuck being a wonderful bloody adversary; get us away from that bastard! Get the castle moving!'

'Not enough time, I'm afraid,' the wee familiar says, calm as ye like. 'Let's see if the knife missile can stop him.'

'Fuckin marvellous! Is that all we've got between us and him?'

'I'm afraid so. That and a couple of not very intelligent or strong airlocks.'

'Is that it? You stupid bastard; why the fuck did you let all the guards go, and the-'

'Error of judgement, I suppose, old son,' the wee familiar says, and yawns. He hops onto my shoulder and we both watch the inside of the castle door. The tip of a sword appears through the metal and cuts a circle out of it; it falls to the floor and the big blond bastard steps through. 'Fields,' the familiar says quietly, nodding by my ear. 'That airlock door had monofilament reinforcing; cutting it cold like that would need some pretty neat blade-fields. Quite some weapon the lad's equipped himself with ... though it could be the other round, of course.'

'Where's that wee bastard of a dirk?' I'm shouting now; bloody petrified, ready to shite the bed so I am. The big blond bastard is tramping down the castle hallway, looking dead wary but all determined like, and swinging the sword like he means business. He looks to one side and glowers.

The wee dirk comes at him, but far too slow; almost like it was hesitating. Blondy keeps glowering at it. The dirk stops in mid air, then just falls to the floor and rolls away into a corner. 'Aw naw!' I'm shouting.

'Told you it was a cheap copy; they had to equip it with an IFF circuit. Probably our chum's sword - or that helmet - fed it a fake Friend signal. The real things are free agents, smart enough to make up their own minds ... which is why they're quite useless for the likes of you or me, of course.'

'Stop talkin like a fuckin arms salesman and dae something!' I scream at the wee familiar, but it just shrugs its wee grey shoulders and sighs.

'Too late, old son, I'm afraid.'

'You're afraid!' I yell at it, shouting into its face. 'You're no the one they're waiting fur doon in Hades pal; three hunner years they've had to think up somethin really sore and nasty fur me; three hunner fuckin years!'

'Oh calm down man; can't you face death with some dignity?'

'Bugger dignity! Ah want tae live!'

'Hmm. Good,' the wee familiar says, as the big blond bastard disappears from the screen. There's a banging noise somewhere outside the door of the bedroom, and the floor shakes. 'Aw naw!' I wet the bed; just like that; canny stop myself. 'Mammy, Daddy!'

The door bursts open. The big blond bastard stands there, filling the doorway. He's even bigger than he looked on the screen. Fucking sord must be nearly as long as I am. I cringe doon in the bed, whole body shaking. The warrior has to duck as he comes through the door, to avoid banging the wolf-head helmet on the roof. 'Wh-wh-what's yer problem, big filla?' I says.

'Now problem moy son,' the bloke says, and comes up to the bed. Bloody man-mountain. He raises the sord up over me.

'Aw geese a brek pal, please; ye can have anythin ye -'

Wallip.

Shock like nothing I've ever felt in my life before, like God slappin ye, or a billion volts going through ye. Stars and light and dizzyness. I can see that sword falling towards me, flashing in the light, see the look on the big bastardin warrior's face, and hear a wee noise at my ear; a wee funny noise, like a chuckle; I'd swear ... like a chuckle, honest.

The auld punter in the bed wiz deid; skul split open like a rottin coconut. That wee thing on his shoder vanishit in a puf aw smoake. Ah felt ded dizy an ah saw stars and stuff. Ahd sware the giy in the bed lookd difrent from when ahd cum intae the room; his herr hadnae bean that sorta blond-grey culur, had it?

'Well ... heck and hot-dickety, damn transference worked. How're you feeling, bonehead?' It wiz the helmet tolkin. Ah sat doon on the bed an took it of to look at the woolfs heid. 'Ahm feelin a bit funy,' ah toald it. 'Not yourself,' it sed, an the wee woolfs heid noddit at me, an grind. 'Hardly surprising. You'll come to; my vast intellect has survived the transcription perfectly whole and intact, so I can't imagine that such an enormous library of a mind having been faithfully transmitted there is even the remotest possibility that your pamphlet of a consciousness hasn't come through undamaged. Anyway, back to business; the ship's circuits have finally woken up to the fact that there's an interloper aboard; they won't accept that you're the rightful owner, and I still need a little more time to re-arrange the telepathic circuits in this ridiculous helmet, so let's depart before the ship scuttles itself; that involves a thermo-nuclear explosion as I recall, which I doubt even I or that wonderful sword you're holding can protect you from at quite such close range, so, time to go.'

'Fare enuph pal,' ah sez, an gets up, puttin the helmet bak on. Felt grate apart from ma heid; wiz like ahd had a dream but ahd just woke up, ye ken. Sumthin abowt bein an old man; like the wan in the bed. Nevir mynde. Wurk it oot layter. Bettir get oot the cassil if the woolfs heid sez so. Ah liftit up ma sord an ran fur the ootside door. Nae fukin tresshir agen, but ye canny win them aw. No tae wury; plenty mair cassils an majishins an auld barbareyins an whitevir ...

Whit a life, eh? This is the gemm!

Quaternary

'You know I had that damn record for three years before I realised Fay Fife's name was a pun; you know; 'Where are you from?' "Ah'm fay Fife."' he told Stewart, shaking his head.

'Aye,' Stewart said, 'Ah ken.'

'God I'm so stupid sometimes,' he breathed, gazing sadly at his can of Export.

'Aye,' Steward noded. 'Ah ken,' he said, and rose to turn the album over.

He looked out through the window to the view of the town and the distant bare trees of the Glen. His watch said 2:16. It was getting dark already. He supposed they were near the solstice now. He drank some more.

He'd had five or six cans, and it looked like he'd have to stay over with Stewart, or get a train back to Edinburgh. A train, he thought. He hadn't been on one for years. It would be good to take a train from Dunfermline and go over the old bridge; he could throw out a coin and wish that Gustave would kill himself, or that Andrea would find herself pregnant and want to bring her child up in Scotland, or -

Cut it out, you idiot, he told himself. Stewart sat down again. They had talked about politics. They'd agreed if they were sincere about what they said they believed in they'd be out in Nicaragua, fighting for the Sandinistas. They'd talked about old times, old music, old friends - but never about her. They'd talked about Star Wars - SDI - which Britain had just signed up for. It wasn't that distant a subject for them; they both knew people at the university who were working on optical computer circuits; the Pentagon was interested. They'd talked about the new Koestler chair of parapsychology at the university, and about a programme they'd both seen on television a few weeks earlier, on lucid dreaming; and also about the hypotheses of causative formation (he said sure it was interesting, but he could remember when Von Daniken's theories had been 'interesting').

They'd talked about a story mentioned on television and in the press that week, about an émigré Russian engineer living in France who'd crashed his car in England; a lot of money had been found in the car and he was under suspicion of having committed a crime in France. He had apparently gone into a coma, but the doctors seemed to think he was faking. Devious bastards us engineers, he told Stewart.

They had talked, in fact, about almost everything except what he really wanted to talk about. Stewart had tried to bring the subject up, but each time he had found himself sliding away from it; the programme on lucid dreaming had come up because it was the last thing he had had an argument with Andrea about; the causative formation hypothesis because it was probably the next thing they'd argue about. Stewart hadn't pressed him on the subject of Andrea and Gustave. Maybe he just needed to talk, about anything.

'How're the kids anyway?' he asked.

Stewart had something to eat and asked him if he wanted anything, but he didn't feel hungry. They had another joint, he had another can; they talked. The afternoon darkened. Stewart felt tired after a while and said he'd have a snooze. He'd set the alarm and be up to make the tea later. They could head out for a pint after they'd eaten something.

He listened to some old Jefferson Airplane on the headphones, but the record was scratched. He looked through his friend's collection of books, drinking from the can and finishing off the last joint. Finally he went and stood by the window, looking out across the slates to the park, the glen, the ruined palace and the abbey.

The light was slowly going from the half-clouded sky. Streetlights were on, and the roads were filled with parked or slowly moving cars; doubtless full of Christmas shoppers. Light-sapped skies hung over the glen. He wondered what this place looked like when the palace was still a place for kings.

And the Kingdom of Fife. A small place now, but big enough then. Rome had been small too, to start with, and it hadn't stopped her; what would the world have been like if some part of Scotland - before such a state existed - had blossomed the way Rome did ... No, there wasn't the background, the legacy of history here at that time. Athens, Rome, Alexandria; they had libraries when all we had were hill forts; not savages, but not civilised either. By the time we were ready to play our part it was already too late; we were always too soon or too late, and the best things we've done have been for other people.

Well, sentimental Scottishism, he guessed. What about class consciousness rather than nationalism? Well, indeed.

How could she do it? Never mind that this was her home, that this was where her mother lived, her earliest friends, where she had so many of her earliest memories formed, and her character; how could she leave what she had now? Forget about him; he would willingly leave himself out of the equation ... but she had so much, to do and to be ... How could she do it?

Self-sacrifice, the woman behind the man, looking after him, putting herself second; it went against all she believed in.

He still hadn't been able to talk to her properly about it. His heart beat faster; he put the can down, thinking. He didn't really know what it was he wanted to say, only that he wanted to talk to her, to hold her, to just be with her and tell her everything he felt for her. He ought to tell her all he'd ever felt, about Gustave, about her, about himself. He should be totally honest with her, so that at least she would know exactly what he felt, be under no illusions about him. It was important, damn it.

He finished the can, put the roach into it, then folded the red tin neatly. A little beer dribbled onto his hand from the folded corner of aluminium. He wiped his hands. I ought to tell her. I ought to talk to her now. What was she doing this evening? They were at home, weren't they? Yes, they both are; something I was invited to, but I wanted to see Stewart. I'll call her. He went to the phone.

Engaged. Probably another hour-long call to Gustave; even when she was here she still seemed to spend half her time with him. He put the phone down and paced the room, his heart thumping, his hands sweating. He needed a pee; he went to the bathroom, washed his hands afterwards, gargled with some mouthwash. He felt all right. He didn't even feel stoned or drunk. He tried the phone again; same signal. He stood at the window. The Jag was visible, if he stood close to the glass and looked right down. A white, curved ghost on the dark street. He looked at his watch again. He felt fine; perfectly straight. Just ready for a drive.

Why not? he thought. Take the albino Jaguar off into the gloaming; head for the motorway and blast over the road bridge with the sounds cranked up high as they'll go; an arrogant grin and a blast of aural pain for whatever poor bastard takes your toll ... shee-it; very Fear and Loathing, very Hunter S. Thompsonish. Belay that, laddy; damn book always did make you drive just that little bit faster afterwards. Your own fault for listening to White Rabbit a few minutes ago; that's what's done it. No, forget about driving; you've had too many.

Aw hell; everybody does it at this time of year. Damn it, I drive better drunk than most people do sober. Just take it easy; you can make it. Isn't as though you don't know the road, after all. Drive real careful in the town, just in case some kid runs out in front of you and your reactions are affected, then nice and easy on the motorway; legal limit or even less, none of this blowing away the local boy-racer in his Capri or giving nasty surprises to glassy-eyed BMW drivers; just don't get intimidated, just maintain concentration, don't think about Red Sharks or White Whales, testing the suspension over concrete walls or controlled drifts round an entire clover leaf. Just take it easy, listen to the sounds. Auntie Joanie maybe. Something soothing; not soporific, but steady, not too exciting, not the sort of the thing the right foot just hears and floors on; nothing like that...

He tried the phone one last time. He went through to see Stewart; he was sleeping quietly, and rolled over when he looked in, away from the hall light's glow. He wrote him a note and left it by the alarm clock. He took up his old biking jacket and the monogrammed scarf and let himself out of the flat.

Getting out of town took a while. There had been a shower; the streets were wet. He was playing Steeltown by Big Country as he edged the Jaguar through the traffic; it seemed appropriate, in Carnegie's birthplace. He still felt fine. He knew he ought not to be driving, and he dreaded to think what he'd register on a breathlyser, but one - undrunk - part of him was watching and evaluating his driving; and he'd do, he'd get by, providing his concentration didn't slip and he wasn't unlucky. He wouldn't do it again, he told himself as he at last found a clear stretch of road, heading for the motorway. Just this time, because it is important after all.

And I'll be very careful.

It was dual carriageway here; he let the car leap forward, grinning as his back pressed into the seat. 'Oh I just love to hear that engine snarl,' he murmured to himself. He ejected the Big Country tape from the Nakamichi, frowning at himself for exceeding the speed limit. He let the car's nose drop again, slowed.

Something not too raucous and adrenalin-encouraging for the approach and traverse of the great grey bridge. Bridge Over Troubled Water? he thought to himself, grinning. Haven't had that in the car for yonks, Jimmy. He had Lone Justice, and Los Lobos' How Will the Wolf Survive? on the other side of the tape; he picked it up, glanced at it as he approached the motorway itself. No, he wanted the Texican boys right now, and he didn't want to wait for it to spool back. Just have to be the Pogues then. Rum Sodomy & the Lash; fuck nice steady driving tunes. Nothing wrong with a bit of raucousness. Keeps you awake better. Just don't try to keep pace with the music all the time. There we go ...

He joined the M90, heading south. The sky was dark blue above the patchy clouds. A very mild evening; hardly even cool. The road was still wet. He sang along to the Pogues and tried not to go too fast. He felt thirsty; there was usually a can of Coke or Irn Bru in the door pocket, but he'd forgotten to replace the last one. He was forgetting too much these days. He put his main lights on after a few people flashed him.

The motorway crested a hill between Inverkeithing and Rosyth, and he could see the road bridge's aircraft lights; sudden white flashes on the spires of the two great towers. Shame, really; he'd preferred the old red lights. He pulled over into the nearside lane to let a Sierra past, and watched the tail-lights disappear, thinking, You wouldn't get away with that normally, chum. He settled back in the seat, his fingers on the small steering wheel beating in time to the music. The road headed for a stepped cutting through the rocks which formed the small peninsula; the sign for North Queensferry flashed by. He might have gone down there, to stand under the rail bridge again, but there was no point in making this journey any longer than it had to be; that would be tempting fate, or irony at least.

What am I doing this for? he thought. Will this really make any difference? I hate people who drunk-drive; why the hell am I doing it? He thought about heading back, taking the road down to North Queensferry after all. There was a station there; he could park, take the train (in either direction) ... but he'd passed the last turn-off before the bridge. The hell with it. Maybe he'd stop on the far side, at Dalmeny; park there rather than risk this expensive paint job in the pre-Christmas Edinburgh rush. Come back for the damn thing in the morning and remember to set all the alarms.

The road cleared the cutting through the hills. He could see South Queensferry, the marina at Port Edgar, the VAT 69 sign of the distillery there, the lights of Hewlett Packard's factory; and the rail bridge, dark in the evening's last sky-reflected light. Behind it, more lights; the Hound Point oil terminal they'd had a sub-contract on, and, further away, the lights of Leith. The old rail bridge's hollow metal bones looked the colour of dried blood.

You fucking beauty, he thought. What a gorgeous great device you are. So delicate from this distance, so massive and strong close-up. Elegance and grace; perfect form. A quality bridge; granite piers, the best ship-plate steel, and a never-ending paint job ...

He glanced back at the roadway of the bridge as it rose slowly to its gentle, suspended summit. The surface was a little damp, but nothing to worry about. No problems. He wasn't going all that fast anyway, staying in the nearside lane, looking over at the rail bridge downstream. A light winked at the far end of the island under the rail bridge's middle-section.

One day, though, even you'll be gone. Nothing lasts. Maybe that's what I want to tell her. Maybe I want to say, No, of course I don't mind; you must go. I can't grudge the man that; you'd have done the same for me and I would for you. Just a pity, that's all. Go; we'll all survive. Maybe some good -

He was aware of the truck in front pulling out suddenly. He looked round to see a car in front of him. It was stopped, abandoned in the nearside lane. He sucked his breath in, stamped on the brakes, tried to swerve; but it was too late.

There was an instant when his foot was jammed down as hard as it would go on the brake, and when he'd pulled the wheel over as far as it would go in one twist, and he knew there was nothing else he could do. He would never know how long that instant was, only that he saw the car in front was an MG, and that there was nobody in it - a ripple of relief on a tsunami of fear - and that he was going to hit it, hard. He caught a glimpse of the number plate; VS something. Wasn't that a west coast number? The octagonal MG sign on the boot of the broken-down car floated closer to the Jaguar's mascotless snout as it dipped, dug in and started to skid all at once. He tried to go limp, to relax and just go with it, but with his foot jamming the brake to the floor that wasn't possible. He thought, You foo-

The customised white Jaguar, registration number 233 FS, smashed into the rear of the MG. The man driving the Jaguar was thrown forward and up as it somersaulted. The seat belt held but the small steering wheel came pistoning up to meet his chest like a circular sledgehammer.

Low rolling hills under a dark sky; the undersurface of the lowering, ruddy clouds seems to mirror the gentle contours of the land below. The air is thick and heavy; it smells of blood.

It is soggy underfoot, but not with water. Whatever great battle was fought here, over these hills that seem to stretch for ever, it drenched the land with blood. There are bodies everywhere, of every animal and every colour and race of human, and many others besides. I find the small dark man eventually, attending the corpses.

He is dressed in rags; we last met in ... Mocca? (Occam? Something like that), when he was beating the waves with his iron flail. Now it is bodies. Dead bodies; a hundred lashes each, if there's anything left to lash. I watch him for a while.

He is calm, methodical, beating each body exactly one hundred times, before proceeding to the next one. He shows no preference concerning species, sex, size or colour; he beats each with the same determined vigour; on the back if possible, but otherwise just as they lie. Only if they are fully armoured does he touch them, bending stiffly to pull back a visor or disconnect a chest-strap.

'Hello,' he says. I stand some distance away, in case he is under orders to whip everybody on the field, regardless. 'Remember me?' I ask him. He strokes his bloody lash.

'Can't say I do,' he says. I tell him about the city by the sea. He shakes his head. 'No, not me,' he says. He digs into his filthy robes for a moment, then comes out with a small rectangle of card. He wipes it with one strip of his rags, then holds it out. I step forward warily. 'Take it,' he nods. 'I was told to give it to you. Here.' He leans forward. I take the card, step back. It is a playing card; the three of diamonds.

'What's this for?' I ask him. He just shrugs, wipes his flail-hand on one tattered sleeve.

'Don't know.'

'Who gave it to you? How did they know-'

'Is it really necessary to ask all these questions?' he says, shaking his head. I am shamed.

'I suppose not.' I hold up the playing card. 'Thanks.'

'You're welcome,' he says. I had forgotten how soft his voice was. I turn to go, then look back at him.

'Just one more thing.' I nod at the bodies littering the ground like fallen leaves. 'What happened here? What happened to all these people?'

He shrugs. 'They didn't listen to their dreams,' he says, then turns back to his task.

I set off again, for the distant line of light which fills the horizon like a streak of white gold.

I left the city in the dried sea basin and walked the railway track away from it, heading in the same direction as the Field Marshal's train before it was attacked. There was no pursuit, but I heard the sound of distant gunfire coming from the city as I walked.

The landscape changed gradually to become less harsh. I found water and, after a while, fruit on trees. The climate grew less bleak. I saw people sometimes, travelling alone like me, or in groups. I stayed away from them, and they avoided me. Once I found I could walk without danger, and find food and water, the dreams came every night.

It was always the same nameless man and the same city. The dreams came and went, repeating and repeating. I saw so much, but nothing clearly. Twice I think I almost had the man's name. I started to believe that my dreams were the genuine reality, and woke each morning beneath a tree or in the lee of some rocks, fully expecting to wake into another existence, a different life; just a nice clean hospital bed would be a start ... but no. I was always here, on temperate downlands that eventually became a battlefield, and where I have just met the man with the flail. Still, there is light at the end of the horizon.

I head for that light. It looks like the edge of these dank clouds; a long lidded eye of gold. At the top of a hill I look back on the small, misshapen man. He is still there, whipping at some fallen warrior. Perhaps I ought to have lain down and let him lash me; could death be the only way I might awake from this terrible, enchanted sleep?

That would require faith. I do not believe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don't know what the rules are here; I can't risk throwing everything away on a long shot.

I come to the place where the clouds end and the dark downs give way to a low cliff. Beyond, there is sand.

An unnatural place, I think, looking up at the edge of dark cloud. It is too distinct, too uniform, the boundary between the shadowy downs with their fallen armies of dead and the golden waste of sand too precisely defined. A hot breath from off the sand blows away the stale, thick smells of the battlefield. I have a bottle of water, and some fruit. My waiter's jacket is thin, the Field Marshal's old coat dirty. I still have the handkerchief, like a favour.

I jump from the last hill over the hot sand, down into the golden slope, ploughing and sliding towards the floor of the desert. The air is hot and dry, devoid of the corrupting odours of the rolling battlefield behind me, but full of another sort of death; its promise in the very dryness of that air moving above a place where there is no water, no food, no shade.

I start walking.

Once I thought I was dying. I had walked and crawled, finding no shade. Finally I fell down the slip face of a dune and knew I could not rise from there without water, without liquid, without something. The sun was a white hole in the sky so blue it had no colour. I waited for clouds to form, but none came. Eventually dark, wide-winged birds appeared. They started to wheel above me, riding an unseen thermal; waiting. I watched them, through half-glued eyes. The birds flew in a great spiral over the desert, as though there was some immense, invisible bolt suspended over me, and they were just scraps of black silk stuck to its spiralled plane, moving slowly as that vast column turned.

Then I see another man appear at the top of the dune. He is tall and muscular and dressed in some savage's light armour; his golden arms and legs are bare. He carries a huge sword, and a decorated helmet, which he holds in the crook of one arm. He looks transparent and unsubstantial, for all his bulk. I can see through his body: perhaps he is a ghost. The sword glitters in the sunlight, but dully. He sways as he stands there, not seeing me. He puts one hand shakily to his brown, then seems to talk to the helmet he holds. He half-walks, half-staggers down the slip face towards me, his booted feet and thickly muscled legs plunging through the baking sand. Still he does not appear to notice me. His hair is bleached by the sun; peeling skin covers his face and arms and legs. The sword drags in the sand behind him. He stops at my feet, staring into the distance, swaying. Has he come to kill me with that great sword? At least it might be quick.

He stands, still swaying, eyes fixed on the hazy distance. I would swear he is standing too close to me, too close to my feet; as though his own feet were somehow inside mine. I lie, waiting. He stands above, struggling to keep on his feet, one arm going out suddenly as he tries to balance himself. The helmet in the crook of his arm falls to the sand. The helmet's decoration, a wolf's head, cries out.

The warrior's eyes turn up into his head, going white. He crumples, falling towards me. I close my eyes, ready to be crushed.

I feel nothing. I hear nothing, either; he does not fall onto the sand beside me, and when I open my eyes there is no trace of him or the helmet he dropped. I stare into the sky again, at the entwined double-spiral of circling birds that are death.

I used the last of my strength to peel open my coat and jacket and bare my chest to the invisible, turning bolt in the sky. I lay, spreadeagled, for some time; two of the birds landed near me. I did not stir.

One of them swiped at my hand with its hooked beak, then jumped back. I lay still, waiting.

When they came for my eyes I took them by their necks. Their blood was thick and salty, but like the taste of life to me.

I see the bridge. At first I am certain it is a hallucination. Then I believe it might be a mirage, something which looks like the bridge reflected in the air and - to my parched, obsessed eyes - taking on its form. I walk closer, through the heat and the slopes of clinging, flowing grains. I have the handkerchief over my head, shading me. The bridge shimmers in the distance, a long rough line of summits.

I come slowly closer to it throughout the day, resting only for a short while when the sun is at its height. Sometimes I climb to the tops of the long dunes, to reassure myself it is there. I am within a couple of miles before my confused eyes admit the truth to me; the bridge is in ruins.

The main sections are largely intact, though damaged, but the linking sections, those spans, those little bridges within bridges, they have collapsed or been destroyed, and large parts of the section extremities have disappeared along with them. The bridge looks less like a succession of laterally stretched hexagons and more like a line of isolated octagons. Its feet still stand, its bones still rise, but its linking arms, its connections - they have gone.

I see no movement, no sudden glints of light. The wind sighs sand over the edges of dunes, but no sound comes from the tall ochre skeleton of the bridge. It stands, blanched and gaunt and jagged in the sand, slow golden waves lapping at its granite plinths and lower buildings.

I enter its shadow at last, gratefully. The burning wind moans between the towering girders. I find a staircase, start to climb. It is hot and I am thirsty again.

I recognise this. I know where I am.

Everywhere is deserted. I see no skeletons but I find no survivors. The train deck holds a few old carriages and locomotives, rusted to the rails they stand upon; finally part of the bridge. Sand has blown up even here, shading yellow-gold into the edges of the rails and points.

My old haunt, indeed. I find Dissy Pitton's. It is a fallen place; the ropes which used to attach tables and chairs to ceiling have mostly been cut; the couches and seats and tables lie sprawled over the dusty floor like bodies from long ago. A few hang by one edge or corner; cripples among the dead. I walk to the Sea View Lounge.

I sat here once with Brooke. Right here. We looked out and he complained about the barrage balloons; then the planes flew past. The desert is bright under the high sun.

Dr Joyce's office; not his. I do not recognise any of this furniture, but then he was always moving. The blinds, blowing in and out gently behind the broken windows, look the same.

A long walk takes me to the Arrols' abandoned summer apartment. It is half-submerged in the sand. The door is open. Only the tops of the still sheet-covered pieces of furniture are visible. The fire is buried beneath the waves of sand; so is the bed.

I climb slowly back to the train deck and stand, looking out over the shimmering sands which surround the bridge. An empty bottle lies at my feet. I take it by the neck and throw it from the train deck. It curves, end over end, glinting in the sunlight, towards the sand.

A wind comes up later, screaming through the bridge; scouring me, flailing me. I hug myself in a corner, watching the edge of the wind strip paint from the bridge like some endless rasping tongue. 'I give in,' I tell it.

The sand seems to fill my brain. My skull feels like the bottom of an hourglass.

'I give in. I don't know. Thing or place; you tell me.' I think this is my own voice. The wind blows harder. I cannot hear myself speak, but I know what I am trying to say. I am suddenly certain that death has a sound; a word which anybody may utter which will cause and be their death. I am trying to think of this word when something grates and swivels in the distance, and hands lift me away from this place.

Let's get one thing absolutely straight: it's all a dream. Either way, whatever. We both know that.

I have a choice, however.

I am in a long, hollow, echoing place, lying in bed. There are machines around me, drips into me. People come and look at me, occasionally. The ceiling sometimes looks like white plaster, sometimes like grey metal, sometimes like red brick, sometimes like riveted sheets of steel painted the colour of blood. Finally, I realise where I am; inside the bridge, within its hollow metal bones.

Fluid seeps into me through my nose and out again via a catheter. I feel more like a plant than an animal, a mammal, an ape, a human. Part of the machine. All the processes have slowed. I have to find a way back; blow the tanks, pull the cord; floor the throttle?

Some of these people look familiar.

Dr Joyce is here. He wears a white coat and he makes notes on a clipboard. I'm sure I saw Abberlaine Arrol, just fleetingly, a while ago ... but she was dressed in the uniform of a nurse.

This place is long and echoing. Sometimes I smell iron and rust, and paint and medicines. They took away the card I was given, and the scarf... I mean the handkerchief.

Ah, coming round, are we? Dr Joyce smiles at me. I look up at him, try to speak: Who am I? Where am I? What is happening to me?

We have a new treatment, the doctor says to me, as though to a particularly dim child. Would you like us to try it? Would you? It might make you better. Sign this.

Gimme gimme. In blood if you like. Give you my soul if I thought I had one but never mind. How about a tranche on a few billion neurons? Nicely run-in brain here doc; one careful owner (ahem); didn't even take it to church on Sundays... Bastards; it's a machine.

I have to tell everything I can remember to a machine which looks like a metal suitcase on a spindly trolley.

It takes a while.

Just me and the machine now. There was a sallow-faced lad in here for a while, and the nurse, and even the dear good old doctor, but they've gone now. Only me and the machine left. It starts to speak. 'Well,' it says -

Look, anybody can make a mistake. Isn't this meant to be the season of - naa, forget it. OK already; I was wrong; mea fuckin' culpa; Joe Contrite here. You want blood?

'Well,' it says, 'your dreams were right in the end. Those last ones, after you left here. That really is you.'

'I don't believe you,' I tell it.

'You will.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm a machine, and you trust machines, you understand them and they don't frighten you; they impress you. You feel differently about people.'

I think about this, then try another question: Where am I? The machine says, 'Your real self, your physical body is now in the Neurosurgical Unit at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow. You were moved from the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh ... some time ago.' The machine seems uncertain.

'You don't know?' I ask it.

'You don't know,' it tells me. 'They moved you; that's all we both know. Might have been three months ago, might have been five or even six. Whenever; in your dream it was about two-thirds of the way through. The treatments and drugs they've been trying out on you have scrambled your sense of time.'

'Do you - do I - have any idea what date it is? How long have I been under?'

'That's a little easier; seven months. The last time Andrea Cramond visited you she mentioned something about it being her birthday in a week and if you were to wake up it would be the best-'

'OK,' I tell the machine. 'That makes it early July; her birthday's on the 10th.'

'Well then.'

'Hmm. And I suppose you don't know my name, do you?'

'Correct.'

I say nothing for a while.

'So,' the machine says, 'you going to wake up then?'

'I don't know. I'm not sure what the alternatives are; what's the choice?'

'Stay under or surface,' the machine says. 'Simple as that.'

'But how do I surface?' I was trying to do that on the way here, before I reached the desert. I tried to wake up into -'

'I know. I'm afraid I can't help you with that one. I don't know how you do it, I just know you can if you want to.'

'Hell, I don't know; do I want to?'

'Your idea,' the machine points out, 'is as good as mine.'

I don't know what they're pumping into me, but everything's hazy at the moment. The machine seems real, when it's here, but the people don't. It's as though there's a fog inside my eyes, as though the fluid in them has darkened, as though they have finally silted up. My other senses are similarly affected; everything I hear sounds mushy, distorted. Nothing smells or tastes of anything very much. I think even my thoughts are slowing down.

I lie, a shallow man breathing shallowly and trying to think deeply.

After a while, nothing. No people, no machine, no sight or sound or taste or smell or touch, no awareness of my own body. Greyness everywhere. Only memories. I fall asleep.

I wake up in a small room with one door; there is a screen set in one wall. The room is cubical, finished in grey, windowless. I am sitting in a large leather armchair. The chair looks familiar; there is one like it in the house in Leith, in the study. There should be a tiny burn on the right arm where a bit of dope fell out of ... no; not there. Must be a new chair. I look at my hands. A little scar tissue on the right one. I'm wearing Mephisto shoes, Lee jeans, a checked shirt. I have no beard. I feel thinner than I remember.

I get up and look round the room. Blank screen; no controls. Concealed lighting round the top of the walls. Everything in grey concrete; feels warm. No seams in the concrete; not a bad pouring job at all; I wonder vaguely who the contractors were. The door is ordinary, made of wood. I open it.

There is a similar room on the other side of the door. It has no screen and no armchair; just a bed. It is a hospital bed, empty; crisp white sheets and a single grey blanket pulled back at one corner, as though in invitation.

A noise comes from the room I've just left.

If I go through there, I think, and find an old guy who looks like me, I'm going to get out of there somehow and find that machine and complain.

I go through to the room with the armchair. I do not find Keir Dullea in make-up. The room is empty but the screen has come to life. I sit down in the armchair and watch.

It's the man in the bed again. Only this time everything's in colour; I can see him better. He is lying on his front, for a change, in a different bed in a different room. A small ward, in fact, with three other beds, two of them occupied by older men with bandaged heads. There are screens round my man's bed but I am above him, looking down. His bald spot is quite visible. I reach up to my own head; a bald patch. Sure enough, the hairs on my arms are not black but muddy brown. Shit.

It all looks more cosy that I remember. There are yellow flowers in a vase on the small bedside cabinet. There's no chart hanging on the bottom of the bed; maybe they don't do that these days. There's a plastic bracelet on the man's wrist. I can't read what it says.

Noises in the distance; people talking, a little female laughter, bottles or maybe something metallic clinking, and what might be a set of wheels squeaking on a floor. Two nurses appear; they go inside the screens and turn the man over. They plump up his pillows and sit him up a little, chatting to each other most of the time. Infuriatingly, I can't hear what they're saying.

The nurses leave. People start to drift into the picture, approaching the other two occupied beds; ordinary people; a young couple for one elderly man, an old woman talking quietly to the other old chap. Nobody for my man yet. Doesn't look as though he cares.

Then Andrea Cramond appears. She looks odd from this raised vantage point, but it's her all right. She wears a white trouser suit of raw silk, red high heels, red silk blouse. She puts the jacket - didn't I buy that for her in Jenner's last year? - down at the foot of the bed, then she goes to the man, and bends to kiss him, on the forehead, then lightly on the lips; her hand stays a little while, stroking hair back from his brow. She sits in a chair on one side of the bed, legs crossed at the knee, elbow on thigh, chin in hand. She stares at the man. I stare at her.

A few more lines on that calm but troubled face, just starting; maybe. Those little crinkles under her eyes are still there, but there are slight shadows underneath them now. Her hair is longer than I recall. I cannot see her eyes properly, but those cheekbones, that elegant nose, the wide dark eyebrows, the strong jaw and soft mouth ... those I can see.

She leans forward and takes his hand, still gazing at him. Why is she here? Why isn't she in Paris?

Scuse me darlin'; you come her oftin?

(Is this now? Is this in the past?)

After a little while, still holding his hand and staring at his white, expressionless face, she slowly lowers her head to the white, turned-over sheet near the man's hand, and buries her face in its starched whiteness. Her shoulders shake; once, twice.

The screen in here goes dark, and then the lights go off. The lights in the room next door with the bed in it stay on.

My subconscious, I suspect, is trying to tell me something. Subtlety never was its strong suit. I sigh, put my hands on the arms of the leather chair, and slowly rise.

I dump my clothes on the floor by the bed. There is a short, rear-fastening cotton night-gown laid out on the pillow. I put it on, climb into bed, fall asleep.