The Five Gates of Hell

Colours Everywhere

The moment Nathan saw Harriet step out of the taxi, he knew that they’d slipped up somewhere. In the five years since their mother died they’d had nine different au pair girls and every single one of them had been ugly. It was basically Dad’s idea. He thought ugly girls were less trouble. Nathan and Georgia would spend entire afternoons sifting through the pictures the agency had sent. It was a game to them, and they often went too far, choosing some girl with a broken nose or a moustache. Even though they were playing by Dad’s rules, it’d be Dad, in the end, who’d object. There’d have to be a compromise: they’d settle on some plain girl who’d grown up on a farm.

But there was Harriet, standing on the sidewalk in a pink sleeveless dress and white shoes with straps round the ankles. Her eyes sent out rays like cut glass turning in the sun. Her hair was light-brown, with a fringe that skimmed her eyebrows. Her limbs were slim and tanned. Nathan’s first thought on that warm September afternoon, and it may also have been Dad’s first thought, judging by the way his voice had lifted an octave in nervousness, was: She’s just not ugly enough.

She was smiling as they walked out to the street to greet her, and Nathan recognised the smile from her picture. Her two front teeth overlapped slightly like fingers crossed for good luck. A moment of carelessness in the construction of her face. The slip that made her beautiful. He watched her run a hand through Georgia’s hair. He still couldn’t understand how they’d come to choose her. It must’ve been an old picture, taken at an unflattering age. Either that, or she just wasn’t photogenic.

He carried her cases upstairs. She followed him. When he reached her room he put the cases down again and held the door open for her. It was a small room, but it faced west, over the garden. The hills rose in the distance, their browns and golds invaded by a wedge of black. There’d been a fire on the ridge that summer.

But she’d stopped inside the doorway. ‘Oh,’ she said, and turned to him. ‘There are bars on the window.’

He smiled. ‘There are bars on all the windows. It’s just the style of architecture. It’s sort of Spanish.’

She reached up, pushed a hand into her fringe. One silver bracelet skittered down her arm.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s not a prison.’

She sat down on the edge of the bed, tested the mattress with one hand. Then she smiled up at him. A wide, uncomplicated smile. ‘I’m glad it’s not a prison.’

She was like no au pair girl they’d ever had before. She couldn’t cook, she played the radio too loud, she went out dancing at night. The house seemed to be admitting more light than it usually did; it was as if someone had knocked a few new windows in the walls. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, though. Perhaps her beauty was, in itself, disturbance enough. Her six months passed and at the end of that time she did what au pair girls always did: she flew home.

Nathan hardly noticed. Not long after Harriet arrived, Mr Marshal had called Dad and asked him whether he’d thought of putting Nathan forward for the Moon Beach Lifesaving Club. Dad hadn’t, but he thoroughly approved of the idea; fitness, a sense of discipline, the ability to set a good example and, if need be, help others, these were all attributes that he held dear. As a result of that phone-call Nathan spent most of the weekday nights that winter training in the outdoor pool on Sunset Drive, and by the time Harriet left in the spring he was ready to apply for membership.

On the first Saturday in April he rode down to the beach to meet with the captain of the Club. It was still early, nobody much about, just a few old people from the hotels; he looked at each of them as a person he might one day save. As he headed across the warm sand towards the look-out tower he passed two lifeguards. He’d met them once, at the pool with Tip. One of them was called Finn, which was a good name for a lifeguard, he thought. The other one was Ade. He told them he was trying out for the Club. They wished him luck.

The captain was waiting by the tower, as arranged. He wore scarlet trunks and every time he moved you saw the muscles shift under his skin. He took one look at Nathan, then he turned his eyes out to the ocean, shook his hands on the end of his wrists. ‘You the guy who wants to join the Club?’

Nathan said he was.

‘Let’s go for a swim.’

They walked down to the waterline. Wave after wave slammed on to the packed sand. A dull hard sound, like a hand brought down on wood. The beach seemed to shudder every time.

‘Dumpers,’ the captain said. ‘Think you can handle it?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

The captain nodded. ‘You’ve got to get under the first wave. Then get your head up and grab yourself some air before the next wave hits.’

Easy to say.

Nathan beat the first two waves, and then he had to fight even to stay in the same place. Every time he dived under a wave he felt it haul him back towards the shore. He looked for the captain, but he couldn’t see that blond head anywhere. A wave high enough to cut the sun out curled above him. He dived too late. He was sucked down, spun round, the weight of water crushing the breath out of him. Somehow he found the surface for a moment, took in air, then he was rolled again. He fetched up in the shallows, blinded, coughing.

A hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘Yeah.’ But the salt burned the back of his throat; he could hardly speak.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to try again?’

‘OK.’

And the same thing happened, only this time he almost drowned. He came to the surface, too weak to breathe, and was sinking back again when the captain took hold of him, and it was like some passage from the Bible, he felt as if he’d been raised from the dead, lifted by some divine, invisible hand. He heard a calm voice above the crashing water.

‘Relax, just relax.’

And he relaxed. The captain was some kind of prophet.

‘You’ll be fine. You’re going to drink some water, but you’ll be fine.’

And he was fine. But it wasn’t prophecy. What it was, in fact, as he came to understand later, was knowledge.

Back on the sand he felt limpness and bruising in every part of his body. But even more painful than that was the shame in his head. He hadn’t even got past the third wave, he’d failed, they’d never take him now.

‘Thanks for getting me out.’

The captain grinned. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I’m all right in the pool, but this,’ and he glanced over his shoulder, ‘this is nothing like the pool.’

‘No kidding.’ The captain turned his grey eyes on the waves. ‘The spring tides’re on their way.’ He looked at Nathan as Nathan got shakily to his feet. ‘I like what you did out there. Most guys, they wouldn’t’ve gone in a second time.’

Nathan shrugged.

‘Come down tomorrow. We’ll see how things work out.’

Nathan heard a chuckle behind him. He turned to see Tip standing on the sand, his feet turned outwards, his arms folded across his chest.

‘You must’ve drunk about half the fucking ocean.’

Nathan just looked at him. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I was thirsty, wasn’t I?’

He almost died again on the way home. He jinked through the rush-hour traffic on the bridge, skimming down the outside of the fast lane, cutting back inside for the Blenheim exit. He reached the driveway breathless, threw his bicycle down, and ran into the house.

He found Dad sitting in his red chair.

‘You remember I had a trial for the lifeguards? Well, I’ve done it. I’m in.’

Dad was staring into the corner of the room, his spectacles dangling from one finger. ‘That’s good.’

‘For the Lifesaving Club, Dad. Just like you wanted.’

Dad just nodded. ‘Excellent.’

‘I almost drowned twice doing it.’

‘Well done.’

He sat down next to Dad and stared at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Dad sighed. ‘I’m in love with her.’

Nathan looked around the room. ‘Who?’

‘Harriet.’

‘Harriet?’

All his excitement dwindled as his mind whirled back three months to a shopping trip with her. When he climbed into the car, she was smiling at him in that sugary way that used to make his teeth ache. But he’d probably smiled back.

As she shifted into reverse she turned to him again. ‘Tell me, Nathan, have you ever made love to a girl?’

He looked at her quickly, then he looked down at his hands. That smile again. There was something greedy under the sugar, something predatory. He felt her words trying to open him up. It was like she had a can-opener and he was just sitting there, a can of something. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’

‘Probably.’

‘Probably? Can’t you remember?’

‘Not recently,’ he said. ‘That’s what I meant.’

She gave him a curious look and then smiled to herself. Looking back at the road again, she had to swerve to avoid a man on a bicycle. She was still smiling as she swerved.

‘You must tell me about it when you do,’ she said. ‘When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.’

He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week?

‘It’s so wonderful, it’s like,’ and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, ‘it’s like colours everywhere.’

Colours everywhere?

‘I want to know if you see those colours too.’ She was looking at him again. She seemed to have been looking at him practically the whole time. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t crashed yet, why they weren’t wrapped round a tree or a streetlight, why they weren’t, in fact, dead.

Still smiling, Harriet parked the car. She knew she’d embarrassed him. She even seemed to have enjoyed it. He’d thought she was prying at the time, and resented it. But now he saw her questions in a different light. Maybe she’d just been excited that morning, and her excitement had spilled over. Maybe she’d just seen those colours everywhere for the first time. Maybe it’d happened the night before.

He looked across at Dad.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ Dad said. ‘Not until I was sure.’

‘I never realised.’

‘You wouldn’t have. We were careful. And anyway, you were hardly here.’

‘What do you mean, you were careful?’

‘We took,’ and suddenly Dad looked furtive, almost guilty, ‘special precautions.’

‘What kind of precautions?’

‘We had a piece of string.’ Dad explained how he had run the string from under his pillow, across his bedroom, out of his window, along the back wall of the house (where it was lost among the branches of a lilac bush) and in through Harriet’s window, ending in a loop that Harriet slipped over her big toe when she went to bed at night. They always waited until Nathan was either out or asleep, then Dad tugged on the string, and Harriet tiptoed across the landing and into his bed.

Dad unlocked his desk and took out a ball of strong brown string. ‘There, that’s it.’ Just looking at the string reminded him of too much. His eyes moved beyond it, out of focus.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to ask her to come back and marry me.’

But he was more than twice Harriet’s age, as Harriet’s family pointed out, through Harriet, in her first letter. He wrote back, asking her whether she loved him. Of course she loved him, she said, but she had to think. He said that if she loved him there was nothing to think about. He told her he was going to drive into town and find a piece of string that was six thousand miles long, a piece of string that would reach right across the ocean, from his sad finger to her beautiful big toe. She wrote back saying how much she liked his last letter. She hoped he could find a piece of string like that. But then she said, ‘Maybe we need rope now,’ which only depressed him.

Towards the end of the summer he began to founder. He was still writing almost every day, but she was writing less. He felt a pain in his right hand that was caused, he said, by the great weight of his love passing from his heart into his pen. He also suspected that it might be arthritis. And then, a few days before his forty-ninth birthday, he received a letter, her first for over a week. She said she had a birthday surprise for him. She was coming back to marry him. He turned pale and almost fainted. Nathan had to reach up under his shirt with a towel and mop the cold sweat off his back.

Three weeks later, the marriage took place. Standing on the steps of City Hall for the wedding photographs in her navy-blue suit and her sheer black stockings, Harriet achieved a temporary sophistication. Dad stood beside her. He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it. After the ceremony they celebrated with lunch at the revolving restaurant on Sunset Tower. Forty-two floors up, a 360-degree view. One of the most exclusive restaurants in the city. Harriet ordered a bottle of champagne and four glasses.

‘I don’t think Georgia should —’ Dad began.

Georgia, nine years old, took out her sulking face.

‘Oh, but Jack,’ Harriet cried, the fingertips of one hand touching his lips, to silence him, ‘it’s a special day.’

‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘I suppose so.’

Georgia beamed and swallowed half the contents of the glass in a single gulp.

‘That’s all you’re getting, Georgia,’ Dad warned, ‘so make it last.’

And Harriet glanced at Nathan, a quick glance, the light in her eyes rocking like buoys in the harbour at night, she was recognising, even gently mocking, her husband’s sense of caution, caution on a day that was such a gamble for him. I’ve thrown it to the winds, her glance seemed to be saying, but look at him. Suddenly he felt as if the marriage was a confidence trick, a joke on someone; he felt as if he was being drawn into some kind of conspiracy. He shifted on his chair and looked away.

He remembered Yvonne’s reaction to news of the forthcoming wedding. She’d heard Dad out, then she’d sat back, her eyes focused on the top corner of the room, a cheroot rolling, unlit, between her fingers. ‘Just so long as you realise that she’ll want to change everything,’ she’d said. It was the first time that Dad had seemed worried since the arrival of Harriet’s letter. What he looked for in love, what he hoped to extract, was not change but stability.

Nathan let his eyes drift back to the table again. He watched Harriet carefully as, laughing now, she tilted her face towards a waiter. She wasn’t beautiful, he decided, that wasn’t it, but she seemed to give something off that, like a perfume, excited those around her. The waiters were attentive to the point of subservience. Especially the one with the black hair on the back of his hands, the Italian-looking one, ‘The kind of man,’ Dad whispered, ‘who makes you feel like washing.’

‘Like washing?’ Harriet didn’t follow.

‘Didn’t you see?’ Dad’s voice dropped again and they had to lean forwards to hear. ‘You could clean shoes with the back of those hands.’

Nathan and Georgia doubled up, but Harriet didn’t think it was funny. As for Dad, he’d have preferred not to have had to make the joke in the first place. He’d have preferred less conscientious service. He was the kind of man who was jealous of waiters.

He salvaged the situation by saying, ‘Did any of you hear the one about the string?’ and soon they were all laughing about the same thing, which was a far better way for a new family to start its life together.

Georgia drank a surreptitious glass of champagne, her second, and began to run round the restaurant with a wide, fixed grin on her face, her arms extended like the wings of a plane. They tried to persuade her to land, but she wouldn’t listen, she just went on running, round and round. Just before coffee was served, she threw up on Harriet’s new shoes.

‘My shoes,’ Harriet cried, and a flock of waiters swooped with paper napkins.

Dad mopped Georgia’s mouth. ‘I told you, George,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t listen, would you?’ Though, actually, he was talking to Harriet.

Georgia grinned out of her green face. ‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘Sick, sick, sick.’

‘She’s still drunk,’ Nathan said. ‘Don’t you think we’d better take her home?’

It was shortly after the wedding that he ran into Tip again. The summer holidays had just begun, and he was due back on the beach for his second season as a lifeguard. He was riding the bus down Central Avenue one morning when he saw Tip slouching in a doorway. It was only a split-second, and the windows were tinted green and bleary with diesel, but he was sure. The narrow eyes, the broad sloping shoulders. That white skin, hard as lard. He jumped off the bus at the next stop and ran back.

‘Tip,’ he said, and when Tip turned round his eyes were shut to slits against the morning glare, you’d have needed a knife to prise them open.

Nathan hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and he couldn’t believe the transformation. There were shadows the colour of musselshells both above and below his eyes. He wore a grey suit that was two or three sizes too big for him. It was a typical thrift-shop suit, it smelt of mothballs and piss, it smelt of death, which was probably its history.

‘Christ,’ Tip said. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘I saw you from the bus.’

Tip flicked at a scrap of paper with his shoe. The sole was coming away. The shoe seemed to be grinning. ‘So what’s up?’

‘Nothing much. I’m just going to the beach. You coming?’

Tip shook his head. ‘Don’t reckon so.’

‘How come?’

Tip shrugged. ‘Just don’t feel like it.’

‘They’ll miss you, Tip. They’ll want to know why.’

‘Tell them I’m sick.’ Tip looked away into the street. His narrow eyes followed cars as they passed.

‘Look, Tip,’ Nathan said, ‘you’re not doing anything. Why don’t you just come with me?’

Tip stiffened. ‘I’ve got to be going.’ He was looking past Nathan at something. Nathan turned round. Jed was standing right behind him.

Jed wore a cheap leather jacket with round lapels. The sun snagged on his crooked skin. Thumbs in his belt and eyes flickering behind those hostile spectacles.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘It’s Mr fucking Universe.’

Nathan just looked at him.

Jed held out a soiled bag. ‘Like one?’

‘What are they?’

‘Sugar Babies.’ Jed smirked. ‘Just about the sweetest thing there is.’

Nathan shook his head.

Jed rattled the bag under Nathan’s nose, then he spoke to Tip. ‘I’ve got it. Let’s split.’

Tip slowly detached himself from the wall. It was like watching a bandage being peeled off a wound.

‘Good to see you, Tip,’ Nathan said.

‘You want to see us again,’ Jed said, ‘we live in the Towers of Remembrance. You probably heard of it. Why don’t you drop in sometime?’

As they walked away, Nathan saw Jed say something to Tip and then tilt his head back and cackle. He had a pretty good idea what Tip had been waiting for, what Jed had brought. Somebody waiting in a doorway on Central Avenue, it wasn’t hard to figure out what they were waiting for.

He was sweeping the clubhouse later that day when the captain walked in. He told the captain that Tip was sick.

The captain gave him a sharp look. ‘He knows the rules. He gets sick too much, he gets thrown out of the Club.’

Nathan swam out to the buoys, about a hundred yards offshore. The sky was yellow that afternoon, the sea heavy and grey. He watched the solid waves curl away from him and slam against the land. Looking east he could see four towers rising and falling in the distance, the Towers of Remembrance, and he knew Tip was going under, Tip was drowning.

Two weeks passed and Tip didn’t show once. Nathan had the dream about the jets agan, only this time it was Tip’s hand that he was holding. The next day, after he left the beach, he caught the bus to Mangrove East. It was a long ride through all the bad sections. He picked at his fingers, and didn’t look at anyone. Slowly the bus emptied out. He’d only been saving lives for a few months, and wondered if he knew enough.

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty sidewalk, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn’t any gold. He moved quickly, head just ahead of his feet, feet in the shadows. Left down one street, right on the next, left down another, then he could smell the sea. He turned into Ocean Boulevard. Dented cars, flop motels, the Lucky Dip bar. Cars with no aerials, no hubcaps. Neon signs with half their letters missing. People disappeared here too.

The Towers of Remembrance stood back from the road, in a stretch of land that was paved, like a parking-lot, and lit by random floodlights. There were four grim towers set in a loose cross-shaped arrangement and linked by concrete walkways. They used to be cemeteries, high-rise cemeteries, but they’d been derelict for years. To the north and east there were housing projects. To the south, a road that led nowhere and, beyond that, the ocean.

He crossed the asphalt and passed under a walkway. Wind moaned in the passages, stirring bitter smells of urine and fish. He stood in the central area, a kind of concrete garden. A few stone benches, a fountain sprayed with first names, declarations of love, four-letter words. This would once have been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living. Squatters, mostly. Of all the towers, the South Tower seemed the brightest, the most inhabited. He would start there. But as he looked into the sky sudden clouds came speeding across the top of the building and the building seemed to be falling on to him. He ran towards the entrance, his insides turning over.

He began to climb the stairs. Six doors on the first floor, all locked. On the fourth floor he found a door that was open. Inside was one bare room. Light filtered through a narrow window. He bent down, felt around. Chips of broken china, plastic flowers, dust. China that might’ve been an urn. Dust that might’ve been ashes. Now he had dead people on his fingers. He left the room, climbed quickly to the next floor. Once again, all the doors were locked. He tried to remember what he’d heard. Some of the ‘graves’ were just cupboards. But others were like apartments. You could sleep there, keep watch over your dead. He shivered.

He climbed again, from the ninth floor to the tenth. He looked up once, and jumped. A man in a shiny suit was standing at the top of the stairs.

Nathan swallowed. ‘Do you know where Tip Stubbs lives?’

The man walked right past him.

‘What about Jed Morgan?’

The man turned the corner and vanished. Standing there, in the half-light, it suddenly struck Nathan that the man might not have been real.

‘Tip,’ he yelled into the stairwell. ‘Tip? Are you there?’

He ran back down the stairs.

Once outside, he stood in the wind. The desolation crept into his bones and he began to shake. What was he supposed to do now? He looked up at the tower. That vertigo again. He imagined opening a door and finding Tip. His eyes shut to slits. The eyelids burred. Like screws.

‘They’re going to throw you out.’

‘Let them.’

And Jed a shadow by the window, the inside of his jacket lined with needles.

He saw an old man’s face. Bald on top, strands of grey hair plastered to his neck. Mouth stretched in the strangest grin. Long teeth stuck into his gums like ice-cream sticks. And, behind him, a curving wall of fast green water. And such noise in his ears, like gravel spilling off a truck. He reached around the man’s head, took him by the chin — then he felt the man swerve away from him, and saw him swallowed by the water, swallowed whole. He tried to follow the man, but the wave broke and he was yards away. He swam back to the place. The man had gone.

Back on shore he ran to the captain.

‘It was a rip,’ the captain said. ‘Nothing you could do.’

‘One moment he was there and then —’ Nathan couldn’t go on.

‘Some people get away. It’s one of the laws of the ocean.’ The captain put a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. ‘You did your best, that’s all that counts.’

But you lost him.

Nathan couldn’t eat for days. He kept seeing that man’s face against a rising wall of water. It had happened six months ago, but some things stay fresh in your head.

The wind, sticky with salt, clung to his clothes, his skin. He was cold. He walked the half an hour to Mangrove Central thinking of nothing, and caught a train home. The next morning the captain called a meeting in the clubhouse, as Nathan had known he would, and announced that, in view of his recent poor attendance, Tip Stubbs was being expelled from the Club. This came as no surprise to most Club members. Someone who didn’t show up, it meant you weren’t carrying your weight, it was seen as an act of selfishness, a breach of trust. Tip had stayed away too long; he’d been written off, forgotten. The only surprise was to hear his name again and to think that he’d ever been one of them.

Towards the end of the day Nathan was changing in the locker-room when Finn walked in with Ade and a friend of Ade’s called Larry.

‘Hey, Nates, I almost forgot,’ Finn said. ‘Your stepmother was here yesterday.’

Nathan stared up at him. ‘When?’

‘In the afternoon. She dropped in to see you, but you’d already left.’

‘That was his stepmother?’ Ade let out a low whistle.

Larry called across the room, ‘I could use a stepmother like that.’

‘Use,’ Ade said, and smirked.

Nathan slammed his locker door back on its hinges. ‘For Christ’s sake. She’s married to my dad.’

‘Nates,’ Ade said, ‘we were just joking.’

‘Yeah, it was only a joke,’ Larry said. ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke?’

Nathan sighed. He didn’t understand what Harriet was up to. During her time as an au pair, her prying had been innocent, playful. Almost a year had passed since then, and now there was an edge. A persistence. There were some days when he felt as if he was under siege.

‘So tell me, Nathan,’ she’d asked him only the other day, ‘have you done it yet?’ They were in the car. On their way back from the supermarket.

‘Done what?’

‘Made love to a girl.’

He didn’t answer her. There was so much sugar in her smile, he felt ill. He thought it might be diabetes.

‘How old are you?’ she asked him.

‘Sixteen.’

‘Where I come from, boys’ve all done it by the time they’re sixteen. Where I come from, that’s normal.’

He wouldn’t look at her. He stared out of the window instead. ‘I’m thinking of becoming a monk,’ he said.

It was a mild, sunny day and Dad was sitting on the porch, waiting for their return. When he heard the car he stood up, smiling. ‘How did it go?’ he asked. As if shopping was a polar expedition. As if it could go wrong.

‘We had a great time,’ Harriet said. Then she turned to Nathan. ‘Didn’t we?’

But Nathan was already moving past her with the box of groceries. There was a ritual to the unpacking of the groceries. Dad always supervised, making certain things were put where they belonged. ‘You know where the tomatoes go?’ he’d say. ‘Third shelf down.’ Everybody knew where the tomatoes went, but Dad was simply expressing his pleasure at the presence of these new tomatoes, at their place in the order of things, at his own tight world. This time, though, Nathan left the groceries on the kitchen table and climbed the stairs to his room. He heard Dad and Harriet discussing him below.

‘What’s wrong with Nathan?’ Dad said.

‘Oh, you know,’ Harriet said. ‘Fifteen, sixteen. It’s a difficult time for a boy.’

A shoe bounced off his shoulder, and he looked up. Finn stood ten yards away, poised to throw the other one.

‘Lighten up, Nates,’ Finn said. ‘Lighten up or we’ll fucking tie you to a chair and paint you.’

Nathan looked round the room. Finn, Larry, Ade. They were all grinning and shifting from one leg to another. They were always so loose in their heads. If he’d been granted a wish right then, that’s what he would’ve asked for.

It turned into one of those nights. They all tumbled out of the clubhouse at the same time. Finn had someone’s black convertible. They drove through a sunset sky to the Vista Room on High Head. Finn knew the girl who worked behind the bar. They drank cold beer and played pool. Out in the parking-lot they smoked a joint that tied the two halves of Nathan’s brain together like shoelaces. He tripped and fell into the back of the car. They drove back downtown. Hard lights brushed across his face. They were talking about Tip. Words like loser. Words like sick. Laughter and he opened his eyes. He’d wanted to say something and couldn’t remember what. They were crossing the bridge now. Warm air. Arcs of metal dark against the brown sky. That harbour smell of concrete, vodka, seaweed.

Seaweed, concrete. Blenheim Point at midnight.

Sometimes he just had to get out of the house, and Blenheim Point was where he went. It was a floating jetty where you caught the ferry to the city. But at midnight the last ferry would’ve been and gone. There was never anybody there. He sat on one of the plastic beer crates that the fishermen had left behind and stared into the darkness of the harbour with its lights all prickling gold. Waves came from nowhere suddenly, and rocked the jetty: the tide on the turn. That place. It was his respite, his breathing-space.

And then, one night, a fat man in a dinner jacket and a black bow tie had lurched towards him out of the darkness, his appearance so unheralded, so unlikely, somehow, that Nathan almost laughed. It was like a magician’s trick, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to find a top hat in the vicinity. He watched the man bounce softly off a pillar; the man’s belly, barely restrained by a velvet cummerbund, seemed about to spill. It would have to’ve been a very large top hat.

‘How much?’ The man belched rather than spoke, his words reaching Nathan in a blast of alcohol.

‘How much what?’

‘How much for,’ and the man’s head swerved on his neck, ‘you know.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

The man leaned one hand on the pillar and swayed like a building in high wind. ‘Come on, sonny,’ he whispered, and he leaned down, leering, so Nathan could see the copper hairs bristling in his nostrils and the pale bumps on his left cheek, ‘don’t play games with me.’

Nathan tried to duck under the man’s arm, but the man chuckled and took hold of his shoulder carelessly and twirled him closer. Nathan pushed a hand into the man’s face. He felt the wetness of the man’s mouth, the sharpness of the man’s teeth. He pulled his hand back. Suddenly he noticed that the man was only six feet from the edge of the jetty, and he pushed the man again, in the belly this time, as hard as he could. The man staggered backwards, snatched one-handed at the air, as if the air was solid and might save him, and crashed on to his back. One roll sideways and he was in the harbour. It looked so casual, like an afterthought.

Nathan waited to make sure the man wasn’t going to drown. Then he bent close to the man’s face, but not too close, and said, ‘You’d better watch it, there’s sharks in there,’ and then he turned and ran up the steps to his bicycle and rode home. He hadn’t been back to the jetty since.

That fat man, he was like a flash from the past. A hallucination, courtesy of the Womb Boys. Guil-ty, Guil-ty. He could see Harriet smirking, all her suspicions confirmed. It seemed that no matter where he went he encountered the same innuendoes, the same violations. He felt hounded, quarried, cornered. There was nowhere left to go, and it was beginning to exhaust him.

‘It was only a joke, Nates,’ he murmured. ‘Only a joke.’

‘Now he’s talking to himself,’ someone said, and someone else laughed.

But it wasn’t a joke, whichever way you looked at it.

They hit the Oasis on C Street. They drank shots. Tequila, vodka, tequila. They met two guys who ran the ice-cream van on the pier. Their names drifted into focus and then out again. Larry and Ade evaporated with two blondes from a basement club called Six Feet Under. Finn was still around, still driving. Nathan took the front seat. A girl was sitting next to him, her eyelids two half-moons. She smelt like cucumber. So fresh and pale-green, so clean. He wondered what to say to her. Bottles knocked against his feet, as if shifting in the currents on the ocean bed. Every time Finn opened his mouth, smoke came out.

Her name, magically, was Lilah.

Have you done it yet?

‘Next stop the 22 Club,’ Finn screamed into the wind. More lights, Lilah’s eyes closed, his thigh against hers. It felt like the only part of him that was alive, that burning piece of skin, the rest of him was cold and nowhere. The 22 Club was a golden doorway framing a flight of stairs that was carpeted in red. Two men stood on either side of the door like pillars, one white, one black, both exactly the same height. Finn knew the black one. They were in free.

He was dancing. Two Oriental girls did delicate things with their feet. Their faces were blank. Like plates. Suddenly he couldn’t stand the place. A hand appeared on his shoulder. Ade. He was back. ‘Lilah says she likes you.’

He sat down. It was later, but not much. Their table was see-through, surfboard-shaped, its surface littered with ashtrays and drinks.

It’s a difficult time for a boy.

He reached out with his right arm and swept the table clean. Bottles and glasses shattered. There were screams. Through the crowd he saw the Oriental girls place their hands over their mouths like fans. Then he was seized by two men, one black, one white.

They dragged him across the Club, down the red stairs and out through the gold doors. They threw him into the gutter. He hit the base of a streetlight with his face and felt his lip split.

‘Don’t you ever fucking come back here again,’ the white man said, ‘all right?’

‘Don’t worry, he won’t.’ It was Ade. He must’ve followed them down. ‘This whole place stinks of shit.’

The white man turned. ‘And you,’ he said, levelling a finger. ‘I see your face again, I crush it in the ground.’

Nathan laughed.

Finn walked over. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘I never saw anything like that before,’ Ade said.

‘I saw it in the movies once,’ Larry said.

‘Where’s Lilah?’ Nathan asked.

Nobody knew.

Lilah could’ve saved him, but not any more.

It was time to go home, somebody said.

Colours everywhere. But there was only one colour he could see, and that was red.

Know Your Enemy

Jed stood outside the Central Theatre just east of downtown with a can of ice-cold soda. He was on his lunch-hour from the sound studio. He wore a black singlet, boots, fatigues. His baseball cap said AL’S BLANK TAPES. He took a long pull on the soda and sighed as it slid down. Years ago he used to come here with the Womb Boys. ‘Let’s go down the Central, let’s go look at the dead people.’ Vasco always went on about how important it was. He called it Know Your Enemy. His eyes would flick across the corpses, across the theatre the corpses were in, out to the street the theatre was on, and he’d say, ‘This is what we’re up against,’ and he’d swing his arm so hard he almost dislocated it, ‘all this.’

The Central had pale-blue columns on either side of the entrance and big gilt doors. A white neon strip, like that above a cinema, announced the current attractions. Sometimes it was a famous person. A sports personality, say. Or a movie star. Other times it was an ordinary citizen whose family had paid for the honour. Once he’d imagined that his mother might be displayed here, smothered in make-up and bits of radios. Today it said simply IDENTIFY THE MYSTERY CORPSE. $100 REWARD. Jed peered through the toughened glass. It was a tiny, shrunken old woman. The hill her feet made in the sheet that covered her came only halfway down the coffin. Pathetic, really. Unknown corpses were put on display by the parlours in the hope that someone would recognise them and pay for the funeral. The parlours made a lot of money that way. If a corpse remained unidentified, companies often took pity and stepped in, paying for the funeral themselves. They could call it charity, and charity was tax-deductible. What seemed concerned and altruistic on the surface was in fact exploitative and shabby underneath. This is what we’re up against.

Jed tossed his empty can of soda in the bin. What Vasco had been up against, at any rate. After all, it had been Vasco’s private war. To the other members of the gang, it had been a flirtation with danger, an excuse for violence; it had given them a cause, the semblance of a purpose. Where were they now? Cramps Crenshaw worked in hotel management. PS had joined a record company. Tip had recovered from his overdose and, the last Jed heard, he’d been taken on as an attendant in the aquarium. The Womb Boys had been aborted long ago. The Womb Boys were dead. Long live Moon Beach.

‘Well, well. Ugly as ever.’

The man who’d spoken to Jed had broad shoulders and black, wavy hair. He wore a lightweight camel coat. The face seemed different. Wider. Heavier. The guitar had become a double bass.

The man gestured at the mystery corpse. ‘Thought it was going to be me, did you?’

Jed smiled. ‘How many tattoos’ve you got now, Vasco?’

Vasco unfastened his cuff link and pushed the cuff back up his wrist. Jed saw the base of a gravestone just where a watch would normally be.

‘All the way up?’

Vasco nodded. ‘Both arms.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Jed asked.

‘I’m in the business.’

‘That’s a bit of a turnaround.’

‘Yeah, well. Went to so many funerals, thought I might as well start getting paid for it.’

Jed just stared at him.

Vasco slapped Jed on the shoulder. ‘Joke.’

‘Ha ha.’ But something was making Jed uncomfortable. ‘So you’re in the business,’ he said.

‘Everybody who’s anybody. What about you?’

Jed shrugged. ‘This and that. Bit of work in a sound studio.’

‘Still recording people fucking or’ve you moved on?’ Vasco laughed for both of them. ‘Listen, you want a real job?’

‘What’ve you got in mind?’

Vasco pointed at the long black car idling by the curb. ‘There’s a body in there. Right now it’s nice and cold, but if I don’t get it back to the parlour, it’s going to start getting warm again. You like to come along? We can talk.’

‘Sure.’

Vasco climbed in. Jed followed. There was enough space for half a dozen people in that car. There was a bar. There was air-conditioning. A whisper up your spine. Give me a job this cold. Give me a job with air-conditioning.

He looked round. There was a man sitting in the corner. The man had a shaved head and the long, pale fingers of a surgeon. He wore mirror shades.

‘This is McGowan,’ Vasco said. ‘A colleague.’

McGowan tipped his head back an inch and bared a set of sharp, uneven teeth.

As they drove through midtown, Vasco described the set-up. He worked for one of the directors of the Paradise Corporation which, as Jed probably knew, was the most prestigious funeral parlour in the city. The director’s name was Neville Creed. ‘You may’ve heard of him.’

Jed hadn’t.

‘He’s chief administrator,’ Vasco said. ‘His field’s co-ordination. Efficiency. The way things run.’ He stared out of the window, shook his head. ‘He’s rising so fast, sometimes it seems like there’s no oxygen. He’s going to be the first man to live for ever.’

Jed remembered the word spelled out in silver studs on Vasco’s back: IMMORTAL. ‘I thought it was you who was going to live for ever.’

But Vasco didn’t seem to have heard. ‘He’s going to freeze himself,’ he said. ‘While he’s still alive. It’s the only way, apparently.’

‘You mean, if you want to live for ever, you’ve got to kill yourself first?’

‘You could put it like that.’

‘How will he know when to do it?’

Vasco smiled. ‘He’ll know.’

Jed looked over his shoulder at the rectangular box in the back. ‘Shame he didn’t think of that.’

‘He didn’t have time. It all happened a bit too fast —’

‘Vasco.’ It was McGowan. A warning.

Vasco studied the rings on his left hand. ‘Keep your hair on, McGowan.’ Then he glanced at the man in the corner. ‘Oh sorry. You haven’t got any.’ Vasco turned to Jed. ‘McGowan’s so tough he never uses more than two words —’

‘Shut up, Gorelli.’

‘Well, sometimes,’ Vasco said, ‘on very special occasions, he uses three.’

A hiss from the corner of the car. The sound of brakes being applied to fury.

Then silence.

Efficiency, Jed thought.

He had questions, but he decided to store them for the time being. Your memory’s tape. Record now, play back later.

He stared out of the window. Mangrove West merging with the gritty downtown streets. Pawn shops, sex bars, drugstores. Windows glittering with guns and watches. Cops dressed as dealers. Drunks hardly dressed at all. Kids.

Suddenly he realised what had been making him uncomfortable. He shifted on his seat. ‘Vasco,’ he said, ‘about your brother —’

Vasco cut him off. ‘That’s all right. I know about that.’

‘You know?’

‘She didn’t let you see him. I know that. I checked it out.’ His eyes were soft, a strange contrast with the hand that gripped Jed’s shoulder. ‘Thanks, anyway.’

Another silence. The car floated across a canal bridge. Its engine sounded like air.

‘Can you drive?’ Vasco asked Jed finally.

Jed said he could.

‘Creed’s looking for a chauffeur. I think I could get him to see you. You be interested in that?’

‘I’d be interested.’

‘You’d be on the outside,’ Vasco said, ‘but who knows? Maybe you could work your way in. It’d be that kind of job.’

A glimmer from McGowan, a fractional tilt of the head. It was one of those looks. Over my dead body.

‘I’ll take it,’ Jed said.

‘You didn’t ask about money,’ Vasco said.

Jed fingered the sleeve of Vasco’s coat. ‘You look as if you’re doing all right.’

A grin split Vasco’s mouth open like water melon. ‘Fucking old Jed,’ he said. ‘Who would’ve thought it?’

Vasco talked some more about Creed. The facts, the rumours. The future. He gave Jed some advice on how to interview. Then they drew up outside a tall building of black glass. The Paradise Corporation. Vasco said they’d have to drop him here. He told Jed to expect a call. Sometime in the next two days.

‘Someone’ll be in touch.’ Vasco shook Jed’s hand through the window and the car moved down a ramp and into the darkness of an underground parking-lot.

From the little he’d heard about Creed and the little he’d seen of Vasco, Jed imagined that the interview would take place on the top floor of some high-rise office block downtown. Instead he was given the address of a funeral parlour in Mortlake, a suburb on the bleak northern edge of the city. When he first saw the place he felt conned. From the street it looked like a fast-food restaurant. White stucco walls, bright red-tile roof. All it needed was a giant Paradise Corporation logo on the sidewalk and a sign underneath that said 63 BILLION BURIED.

He pushed through double doors of glass and into a beige lobby. A rhinestone chandelier chinked and chattered in the draught. Red letters zipped tirelessly across a digital read-out screen above reception: SMOKING IN THE LOBBY AND CAFETERIA ONLY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. Jed scowled. He didn’t like being thanked for something before he’d even done it.

His appointment was for nine. It was only quarter to. A girl with ginger hair and a small mouth asked him for his name.

‘Take a seat, Mr Morgan.’

There were sofas of brown vinyl, arranged at right-angles to each other. Tall cylindrical ashtrays made of stainless steel stood in between. The place looked like an airport lounge. He counted the sofas. Fourteen. He counted the ashtrays. Twelve. They must do a lot of business, he thought. And the business they do must smoke a lot.

After ten minutes the girl directed him to Mr Creed’s office. ‘Down the corridor, last door on the right.’ It was a plain wood door. All he could think of was the word ‘efficiency’. Otherwise he was blank. He looked at his watch. One minute to nine. He waited. Thirty seconds to nine. Twenty seconds. Ten. He tightened his hand into a fist, knocked twice and walked in.

It was a small office. Wood-panelled ceiling, wood-panelled walls. There were no windows. One desk, one framed photograph of head office. One chair, which he sat in while Creed finished his call.

Creed.

Dark suit, white shirt, neat hair. Everything was ordinary, predictable, even slightly disappointing. Until he noticed the gloves.

Nobody had mentioned anything about gloves. They’d told him that Creed was going to live for ever. They’d told him that Creed cast a shadow, even when there wasn’t any sun. They’d told him that Creed was Latin for ‘I believe’. But they hadn’t told him about the gloves.

Bad circulation? A skin disease? Some fingers missing?

Then Jed remembered the advice that Vasco had given him, and he moved his eyes somewhere else. Somewhere safe. The window? There wasn’t one. The photograph would do. You didn’t act too curious, and you didn’t ask any questions. A driver was deaf and dumb. That’s what Vasco had told him. Did he want the job or didn’t he?

Creed hung up. He pressed a button and said, ‘No more calls for ten minutes.’ Then he looked at Jed and said, ‘I’m told you’re a good driver.’

‘I can drive.’

‘I need a chauffeur. It’s a twenty-four-hour job. Right round the clock. Not many people could do it.’ Creed’s eyes wandered across Jed’s face. ‘You can think about it if you like. You can have a couple of days to think about it.’

‘I don’t need to think about it.’

Creed smiled. ‘How do you know you’ll like working for me?’

Jed suddenly had the curious feeling that Creed was behind him, even though he could see Creed in front of him. The air in the small office seemed glassy, hallucinogenic. Breathing was like a pill on your tongue. Just breathing.

‘Don’t you think you should ask around?’ Creed was saying. ‘Find out what I’m like as an employer?’

Now Jed was looking into Creed’s eyes. He noticed how dark they were. You couldn’t tell where the pupils ended and the irises began. He stared at Creed, trying for a few long seconds to separate the two, then he became aware that he was staring, and he looked away, looked down.

Creed’s voice again. ‘You sure you don’t want to think about it?’

Jed nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

‘See my secretary on your way out. She’ll take care of the details.’

‘Is that it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘When do I start?’

‘Monday.’

Jed moved towards the door.

‘Before you go,’ Creed said.

Jed paused. ‘Yes?’

‘I expect loyalty from my employees. Do you understand what loyalty means?’

‘I think so.’

‘Perhaps you’d care to define it for me.’

‘Loyalty.’ Jed faltered.

His thoughts spilled in all directions like the beads of a necklace when it breaks. For some reason he thought of old Mr Garbett bending to gather the beads and suddenly he had the answer.

‘It’s silence. That’s what loyalty is. Silence.’

And, looking back across the office, he was sure that he was right.

‘Monday,’ Creed said, and turned back to his papers.

The secretary showed Jed round the office and introduced him to the staff. He was fitted for a chauffeur’s uniform: a dark suit, a pair of black shoes, a peaked cap with the Paradise Corporation logo printed on the front in red. He was taken through a familiarisation procedure for the car: the type of performance to expect, the kind of maintenance required. When he returned to the office two hours later he found Vasco lounging in a chair, one leg dangling over the arm.

‘Get the job?’

‘Looks like it.’

They walked back down the corridor together, Vasco’s arm round Jed’s shoulder. ‘You must come and have dinner sometime,’ Vasco said. ‘Meet the wife.’

‘You’re married?’

Vasco laughed. ‘Been married three years. Got a kid too.’

They reached reception. ‘This is Jed,’ Vasco told the girl at the desk. ‘He’s Creed’s new driver.’

‘I’m Carol,’ the girl said, and her small mouth stretched as wide as it would go.

Vasco showed Jed outside.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re one of us now.’

They stood on the neat green lawn in the sunlight.

‘Just like old times,’ Jed said.

Vasco smiled. ‘Just like old times.’ The same words, but they seemed spoken from a long way off. The same words, with distance added.

It was nothing like old times. Vasco worked for Creed. That in itself was something new. Creed existed inside a kind of magnetic field. It had a pull that most people, even Vasco, it seemed, found irresistible. But it was hard for Jed to adjust to the idea that Vasco had cut a deal, that he was no longer in control. And if it was hard for Jed, might it not also be hard, at times, for Vasco?

Jed wondered.

But he didn’t have the time to do much wondering. When Creed said it was a twenty-four-hour job, it had been no exaggeration. He only slept about three hours a night, usually between three and six. He must have some kind of technique, Jed decided. He’d read about it: you dropped down six or seven levels at once, you dropped straight into the deepest sleep, it was pure and concentrated, you didn’t need as much of it, and then you rose again, six or seven levels, it was like going up in an elevator, and you stepped out at the top, rested, immaculate, alert. Jed didn’t have a technique. He had to learn to sleep in snatches, ten minutes here, forty-five there, often sitting at the wheel of the car. At the same time he was trying to study. He’d bought the most detailed map he could find, and he was learning the city street by street, route by route. He was rewarded during his third week when Creed slid the glass panel open and said, ‘You seem to know the city pretty well.’ He felt this need to prove himself to Creed. He wanted to become indispensable.

The weeks passed and he began to make the job his own. Not just performing it to the best of his ability, but re-inventing it as well. There was a taxi-driver in Mangrove, Joshua, who’d warned him about piles and haemorrhoids and fissures of the anus. Jed’s first purchase was a scarlet velvet cushion. It protected him against discomforts of the kind that Joshua had mentioned; it also made him feel like royalty when he lowered himself into position behind the wheel. His eyes would suffer too, Joshua had told him. The constant sunlight, the glare. Jed found a pair of dark lenses in a run-down optician’s on Second Avenue. All he had to do was clip them over his glasses and the streets were instantly bathed in a deep and soothing green. It was during this time that he switched to a new brand of candy. He’d discovered Liquorice Whirls. Long-lasting, fresh-tasting, they were the ideal candy for a round-the-clock chauffeur.

Slowly he learned Creed’s ways. Slowly the patterns emerged. Creed used the limousine as a mobile office, and he was invariably accompanied by one or other of his personal executives, as they were called, sometimes by all four. These people didn’t work for the Paradise Corporation, at least not on paper. They were Creed’s inner circle. His bodyguards, his confidants. His eyes and ears. They protected him, they supplied his entertainment, they seemed bound to him, as if by some unpaid debt or hidden leash. Vasco was one. McGowan was another. Fred Trotter and Maxie Carlo made up the number. Trotter had been a docker, a mercenary, a security guard. He had one twisted arm, the result of a fall from the roof of a brothel when he was seventeen. He was fifty now, and hard as marble; his jacket always seemed to stretch too tight across his shoulderblades. Maxie Carlo was a court jester, a vicious clown, the Mortlake mascot. He wore a silk suit and kept a flick-knife up the sleeve. His small round head sat on his shoulders like a ball that might, at any moment, roll off and bounce around on the floor. He drank from Creed’s glass, he sang and danced on restaurant tables, he gave people names. McGowan was Skull. Trotter was Pig. And he’d dug deep into Vasco’s past and surfaced with Gorilla. He even had a name for himself. He called himself Meatball, on account of his oily complexion and his no neck. With the possible exception of Vasco, they’d all worked, at one time or another, as vultures. Now they ran teams of vultures, smooth-faced men in grey suits, men who didn’t balk at crime, not so long as there was some good commission in it. Jed began to understand the significance of Creed’s gloves. Probably he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.

For the first few months Jed was ignored. The only words he heard were the names of destinations. He was just ‘Morgan’ or ‘you’. Vasco’s words echoed like a sentence: You’ll be on the outside, but maybe you’ll work your way in.

And the look on McGowan’s face. Over my dead body.

And then it was a Saturday morning. Jed had rolled the car out of the garage and into the parking-lot; he was checking the fluids. It was still early, just after eight, and the sun hadn’t found its way round the edge of the building. The smell of hot dough and sweet syrup drifted through the wire-mesh fence from the YUM YUM DONUT place on the other side of the street. He heard a door slam and turned to see Creed walking towards him, flanked by all four of his personal executives. Their impeccable dark suits, their circus faces.

‘But what about Morgan?’ Creed was saying as he walked up. He stopped in front of Jed and stared.

Jed lowered the hood and wiped his hands.

‘We need a name for Morgan.’ Creed turned to Carlo. ‘But remember, no more animals. We’ve already got two animals.’

‘Only two?’ Vasco said. ‘I thought we had more than two.’

‘Jesus,’ McGowan said, ‘his old woman must’ve fucking threw his brains out with the garbage this morning.’

‘I mean, there’s Trotter, there’s me,’ Vasco said, and he turned to face McGowan, ‘and then there’s you. Isn’t there?’

McGowan took one step forwards. His teeth looked filed down. His eyes were mirrors. Watch yourself. Watch yourself die.

Carlo stepped between them, chuckling. ‘Maybe I should think up some new names.’ He lifted his dainty hands into the air, palms up. ‘Maybe we should all be animals.’

Vasco and McGowan were still staring at each other over Carlo’s head.

‘Over here, Meatball,’ Creed said.

Carlo went and stood beside Creed. They both studied Jed.

‘What do you think?’ Creed said.

Carlo’s head rolled sideways on his shoulders. ‘He’s so long and thin. Kind of looks like a bit of spaghetti.’

‘Spaghetti Morgan.’ Creed smiled. ‘I like that.’ He turned to the others. ‘You two. Skull, Gorilla. Spaghetti Morgan. What do you think?’

Vasco and McGowan turned to look at Jed.

‘Spaghetti?’ Vasco said. ‘That’s perfect.’

‘Goes pretty well with Meatball, anyway,’ Jed said in a dry voice.

That joke kept them going all day. They even had it for lunch, at a small Italian place on the east side. They all asked for Spaghetti with Meatball. Jed read their lips through the restaurant window.

‘Hey,’ Trotter said as they climbed back into the car afterwards, ‘that’s two foods we got now, isn’t it?’

‘You only just realised that?’ Carlo said. ‘You’re real quick, aren’t you, Pig?’

‘Don’t call me Pig,’ Trotter growled.

‘You’re growling,’ Carlo said.

‘Maybe I got the animal wrong.’ Maybe Vasco was right, Jed thought, as he drove them back into town that day. Maybe they were all animals. Trained animals, though. They snarled at each other, they scratched and bit, but one word from Creed and they were back on their tubs and ready to jump through hoops of fire.

Even with his new name Jed was still cut off. He was the driver, sealed behind a sliding sheet of glass. He was deaf and dumb.

But he didn’t lose heart. Inside him there was patience like a wide field. Inside him he could feel the slow, green pushing of the future.

The only person he was close to at all was Carol. His clip-on lenses made her laugh. So did his Liquorice Whirls. His scarlet cushion had her in hysterics. He liked to make her laugh because it meant that he could watch her mouth.

The first time he saw her mouth, that morning of the interview, he thought she must’ve had some kind of operation. It looked as if two people had been sewing it up from either end and then they’d both run out of thread. Every time he made her laugh he thought her mouth was going to tear at the edges. It was almost too painful to watch.

He didn’t realise she had a limp until they went out after work one day. Creed was out of town. He’d flown north for an international convention. Jed had a free night and no plans. Carol suggested a walk on the pier.

At first he thought her heel had snapped or something. Then she looked up into his eyes and told him that one of her legs was shorter than the other, and she was sorry if it embarrassed him. She’d had three operations, she said, all without success. Her father had taken her to specialists, physiotherapists, even a hypnotist once, but there was nothing anyone could do. Jed’s eyes scanned the faces of passing lovers, scanned the dark ocean beyond, but he was listening. He was definitely listening. It was like hearing a story about himself. Like looking at himself in one of those distorting mirrors. It was like some strange form of vanity. He recognised exactly what she was talking about. She mistook his silence for compassion, and tightened her grip on his upper arm.

They reached the end of the pier. It was a clear night. He could just make out a few faint lights in the distance. Those lights had names: Angel Meadows, Coral Pastures, Heaven Sound. The ocean graveyards, twelve miles out.

Carol shivered. ‘How do you like working for Creed?’

‘I like it,’ Jed said.

‘He scares me.’ She saw Jed’s face. ‘I know. I’m stupid.’ She shook herself, and turned her back on the ocean. ‘What about a drink?’

‘Where?’

‘Here.’ She pointed to the sign they were standing under. ‘The Starlite Bar.’

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, so she was leaning away from him, and her lips tipped upwards, they were so red and stitched in the white light of the naked bulbs that looped above their heads, they were the only colour in her face, but he looked away, it wasn’t embarrassment he felt, it was a kind of tortured fascination, but he didn’t want to kiss her, or even touch her, it would’ve felt like incest.

‘Let’s have two drinks,’ she said, ‘or maybe three.’

He smiled. She was making light of a moment that had been a risk for her. He took her arm and lowered his voice. ‘You forgot. I don’t drink.’

‘I never knew.’

He told her about the Towers of Remembrance. Thirteen floors up, misty plastic tacked over broken glass. Flap, flap, flap in the wind all night. Dreams where the skin was lifting off your bones. Ghosts above and ghosts below. He told her how he’d lost his seventeenth year completely. How the Towers of Remembrance became the Towers of Oblivion. A mixture of vodka, speed and glue. He’d been down and through and out the other side. He wasn’t interested in losing control any more. He wanted a mind that was sharp the way a diamond cuts glass. He drank soda now and ate candy, and that was it.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Your pockets crackle when you move.’

He laughed.

‘Coca-Cola,’ she said. ‘You can drink Coca-Cola.’ There was a power-surge behind her eyes, as if the voltage had increased. ‘It’s supposed to be very good here.’

They walked into the brash red and chrome of the Starlite Bar. Someone was playing an electric organ, and old couples twirled on a horseshoe of polished wood. He ordered a gin and tonic for her and a Coke for himself. They sat in a booth.

‘How come I never noticed before?’ he asked her. ‘That you’ve got a limp.’

She grinned. ‘Special shoes.’

‘So how come you’re not wearing them now?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged, sipped at her drink. ‘I don’t see why I should hide it all the time.’

Halfway through the second drink she said, ‘Do you want to look at my leg?’

A wave of heat rose through him. He glanced round.

‘You want to, don’t you? I can tell.’ And, lifting an inch off the seat, she eased her black tights down, so her legs were bare. Her right knee was ringed with scar tissue. It looked like a piece of red barbed wire.

‘Can I touch it?’

She nodded, her lips tight.

It felt like dried glue. Taking his finger away again, but still looking, he said, ‘They really fucked it up, didn’t they?’ but the way he said it, he might’ve been paying the surgeons a compliment.

She looked at it dispassionately, as if it was a ring on her finger, a ring she was trying on, a ring she might or might not buy. ‘I think it’s because they always cut in the same place.’ She emptied her glass. Ice-cubes knocked against her teeth.

‘They’ve tried to fix it three times,’ she said, ‘but I think they’ve pretty much given up now.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You told me.’

During the third drink she cried.

He dropped her at the taxi-stand outside Belgrano’s. She lived on the west shore, over the harbour bridge, and he had to drive east. She stood on the sidewalk, her wrists pressed tight against her thighs. She looked like a child, lost or shy.

He leaned across the passenger seat and looked up at her. ‘You going to be all right?’

A sniff, a nod.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He watched her limp towards a taxi, then he shifted into DRIVE and pulled away.

On his way home he had to stop for gas. As he was paying he noticed someone wheeling a Harley into the yellow light of the pumps. The owner of the bike had a pigtail and a black leather jacket with a death’s-head on the back. He couldn’t see the face, but he thought he recognised the jacket. He pocketed his change and walked over.

‘Mitch. That you?’

Mitch stared at him.

‘I came into your tattoo place once. With Vasco. It was years ago.’

Now Mitch’s face tipped back. ‘Fuck me, the blackmailer.’ His eyes travelled the length of Jed. First down, then up. ‘What’s the fancy dress?’

Jed grinned. ‘I’m driving for the Paradise Corporation.’

‘Same place Vasco works, isn’t it?’

‘He got me the job.’

Mitch had this way of squinting at you, as if he was looking directly into bright sunlight, as if he was having his picture taken. It was hard to tell exactly what it meant.

‘This is a bit out of your way, isn’t it?’ Jed said.

Mitch scowled. ‘Bike’s fucked.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Leave it here.’

‘You want a ride home?’

Mitch looked at his boots. They were smeared in grease and spilt gas. A breeze shuffled through the nearby palms. ‘You could do that?’

‘Sure.’

Mitch wheeled his bike to the back of the gas station and chained it to some railings. When he came back, Jed said, ‘You still living in the same place?’

‘I moved.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Rialto.’

Rialto was out by the river. North of Mangrove, west too. It would have taken anyone else half an hour, but Jed knew the shortcuts. He drove it in fifteen minutes. If Mitch was impressed, he didn’t let on.

As they turned on to Rialto Parkway, Mitch pointed through the windshield. ‘There it is.’

Mitch was still using the sign he’d used on Central Avenue all those years ago, the old gold sign that made Jed think of circuses. He pulled up outside, left the engine running.

Mitch shook his hand and opened the door. ‘Come round for a beer sometime. You know where I am.’

When Jed drove into the parking-lot behind the Mortlake office the next morning, Vasco was standing on the asphalt, hands in his pockets, black hair shiny as a polished shoe, the beginning of a wide grin on his face.

Jed leaned out of the window. ‘What’s so funny, Vasco?’

‘I hear you’ve been out with Carol.’

‘So?’

‘Cunning son of a bitch.’

Jed stared at him.

‘The chairman’s daughter,’ Vasco said.

‘What?’

‘Carol. She’s the chairman’s daughter.’

‘The chairman of what?’

‘The chairman of what. The chairman of the whole fucking corporation. That’s what.’

‘I didn’t know.’

But Vasco wasn’t being taken in so easily. ‘Of course you didn’t.’

‘I didn’t.’

Vasco didn’t believe him. ‘You cunning son of a bitch.’

So he was a cunning son of a bitch. Well, all right. That was what he was then. ‘If you know so much,’ Jed said, ‘maybe you can tell me who else I saw.’

Vasco frowned.

‘Come on,’ Jed said, ‘who else did I see?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They’re not that good then, are they?’

‘Who aren’t that good?’

‘Your spies. Your vultures. Are they?’

Vasco shrugged.

‘Mitch,’ Jed said. ‘You remember Mitch.’

‘Mitch?’ Vasco looked round. ‘Listen, Jed. How about you come for dinner tonight? You could see my house, meet the wife. We could drop in at Mitch’s on the way. I haven’t seen him for ages.’

‘What if Creed flies back early?’

‘I’ll take responsibility for that.’

It was like the old Vasco talking. Jed agreed, out of a strange sense of nostalgia.

They left the limousine in the parking-lot and took Jed’s car. After the Mercedes his Chrysler always felt so sloppy, it was like wearing shoes that were too big for you.

Vasco scanned the worn interior. ‘Some car.’

‘You don’t like it,’ Jed said, ‘you can always get out.’

‘I like it, I like it. I just said some car, that’s all. Jesus.’ Vasco looked across at Jed. ‘You’re too sensitive, you know that?’

And you’re not, I suppose, Jed thought.

He drove fast. In less than twenty minutes they were in Rialto.

‘This is unhealthy, this part of town,’ Vasco said. ‘This is very unhealthy.’

True enough. Rialto was a no-go area. Half black, half Hispanic. A pattern to the blocks: church club bar; church club bar; church club flophouse bar. A shooting every night. The signs on N.E. 139th Street told you everything: HOUSE OF JOY. Y-TEL MOTEL. LOU’S GUN HUT. EL FLAMBOYAN BAR. JESUS LOVE CHURCH. THE OASIS LIQUOR LOUNGE. BIG MAC’S SHOWGIRL REVIEW — TOTALLY NUDE — PROVOCATIVE. Mitch’s sign looked quaint among the stale neon. Jed reached the 11000 block and slowed. He couldn’t stop outside the tattoo parlour, so he took the next left, an alleyway, and parked in among a cluster of dustbins. This was where the Chrysler came into its own, in areas like this. Just another piece of scrap metal. Blend.

Vasco was thinking the same thing. ‘Good thing we didn’t come in the limo. You leave a limo round here, they’d strip it bare in five minutes.’

Jed followed Vasco into Mitch’s place. He heard the buzzing of the needle-gun. Mitch was working. A Latin kid sat on Mitch’s green chair, his arm braced on a steel table.

Without lifting his eyes, Mitch said, ‘Who’s dead?’

Vasco grinned. ‘Nobody’s dead, Mitch. This is just social.’

Mitch tipped his head to the left. ‘You want a beer, they’re over there, in the corner.’

Vasco opened the fridge and looked inside.

‘How’s the bike?’ Jed asked.

‘It’s fixed.’ Mitch glanced up at Jed. ‘It was nothing. Just a plug.’

Jed stopped his smile before it reached his face. Those few extra words, he knew they were the closest Mitch would ever get to thanking him.

Jed and Vasco cracked open a beer each. They sat on a vinyl bench against the wall while Mitch worked on the Latin kid’s shoulder. Slowly a skull appeared, slowly a blue snake slithered out through one of the empty eyes and coiled, like a turban, on the crown.

‘Haven’t lost your touch,’ Vasco said.

‘Do me a favour, Vasco,’ Mitch said. ‘Just shut up.’

Vasco glanced at Jed and shrugged. ‘Trouble with Mitch is, he works too hard.’

The sun dropped in the sky, gilding the dusty glass of the storefront. The horns of passing cars sounded pinched and distant. Jed opened another beer. He could almost have slept.

‘This place,’ he said, ‘it’s just like your other one.’

Mitch grunted. ‘Except I live here.’

‘Yeah?’ Jed looked round. ‘Where?’

‘Upstairs. Got a yard too. In the back.’

Vasco yawned.

More slow minutes passed.

After Mitch had locked the store for the night, he took Jed and Vasco out the back. They stood on the cracked, tilting concrete, cans of beer in their hands, and let the day go dark. A darkness threaded with the silver of sirens, a darkness heady with alcohol, exhaust fumes, river-silt. Once Jed turned sideways and saw Mitch in profile, the stubborn nose and chippy eyes, the pigtail, like a kind of Chinaman, his fat hand round the can and resting on his belly, he was so firm on his two feet, rooted and content, he had the peacefulness of a tree, the dusty fig tree that splayed above their heads, that rubbed against the windows on the second floor. Then a woman’s voice called out, ‘You down there?’

Mitch didn’t move or speak.

‘The guys’ll be here soon,’ the woman’s voice said.

‘Who’s that?’ Jed asked.

‘It’s his old lady,’ Vasco said. ‘He got married too, didn’t you, Mitch?’

Mitch didn’t say anything.

‘Well,’ Vasco said, ‘I guess we’d better be going.’

Driving through Euclid towards Highway 1 and the north-west suburbs, Vasco settled deeper in the seat, his head against the rest. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand that guy.’

‘What’s to not understand?’

‘All that dirt and grease all over, all that slow time.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t have any choice.’

Vasco rolled his head on the rest so he was facing Jed. ‘You’re doing something, it’s because you’ve chosen it.’

They didn’t speak again until they reached Vasco’s house in Westwood. It was a bungalow, if something that takes up half a block can ever be called a bungalow. Fake chimneys, walls clad in big square slabs of ochre stone. The place looked like it was made of Peanut Brittle. You could’ve snapped a piece off the porch and eaten it. But it was real estate. No question about that.

Jed peered through the windshield. ‘This all yours?’

Vasco sat back with a crooked grin.

‘Christ,’ Jed said. ‘What’s your wife like?’

She was like a woman with black hair that curved up and back from her forehead. She wore black high-heels and her tights hissed, but she walked stiffly, as if her hip joints needed oiling. She accepted a kiss from Vasco, and then she took his coat. She seemed too old to be his wife.

‘You’re Jed?’

‘Mrs Gorelli,’ he said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’

‘Oh no,’ and she waved her hand in the air, backwards and forwards, as if she was polishing it, ‘Vasco, he told me so much about you, when you were kids. You must call me Maria.’

They sat down to eat almost immediately. The dining-room was crowded with dark furniture. Sofas of velvet and leather, high-backed chairs of ornate, carved wood. The walls were hung with textiles, nudes in clumsy gilt frames, hand-painted plates. A colour TV stood on the sideboard. Every now and then Vasco reached out and changed channels with the tip of his knife.

‘There’s a remote,’ Maria said.

‘I don’t like remote.’ Vasco looked at Jed. ‘You like remote?’

‘I haven’t got a TV,’ Jed said.

‘Did you hear that?’ Vasco said to Maria. ‘He hasn’t got a TV.’ And changed channels again with his knife.

They talked about old times. Past facts were much easier, it seemed, than the ambiguities of the present. The past, it was so distant, they’d been different people then, they could point at themselves in astonishment, disbelief almost, they could view it all without becoming too involved, like some TV drama. It was clear that Maria knew next to nothing about Vasco’s activities. Nor had she any desire to know. So long as the money came in, she was happy. As to where that money came from, it was neither here nor there, it was geography, and geography, that was such a boring subject.

‘He was so bad in those days,’ she said at one point, lovingly, ‘so bad, weren’t you?’ her hand sliding across the lace tablecloth, covering his.

‘The things I did,’ and Vasco shook his head. ‘Jed too.’

‘Yeah,’ and Jed, too, shook his head.

After dinner Maria left them alone. Vasco moved to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a tumbler of brandy. He swallowed half of it standing up. Then he sat down in a maroon velvet armchair and began to chew his big square fingernails. He’d been drinking steadily throughout the meal, but he now seemed tenser than ever. Jed waited for Vasco to break out of his silence. He watched as Vasco’s rings threw splinters of rich light against the wall.

‘You wanted to talk to me,’ he said finally.

Vasco almost jumped at the sound of Jed’s voice. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

Jed waited.

‘It’s about the job I got you,’ Vasco said. ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ Jed said. ‘It’s a good job.’

‘I don’t know. I may’ve got you into something.’

‘How do you mean?’

Vasco swirled his brandy around. ‘Creed,’ he said. ‘He’s doing some pretty weird stuff.’

‘That’s nothing new, Vasco. We’ve always done —’

Vasco cut him off impatiendy. ‘I’m not talking about that kind of weird stuff.’

‘What then?’

‘Him and the Skull. They’re in it together.’

‘What kind of weird stuff, Vasco?’

‘It’s pretty sick.’ Vasco stood up. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, I just wanted to warn you, you understand?’

‘Oh sure,’ Jed said, ‘sure. I understand.’

But Vasco wasn’t listening. He’d gone to the window and parted the curtains with one hand, and now he was staring out, out into the darkness of the garden.

Jed drove home that night feeling like a man who’s been told he’s going to die but doesn’t know when.

Hard Water

Nathan had only been living in town for a couple of months when he met India-May, but he’d seen her around and he knew what they said. She smoked too much grass, she slept with black men, she wore a silver chain round her ankle that tinkled like the bell-collars you put on cats to stop them catching birds, but it had never stopped her catching anything, that was what they said. The town was called Tomorrow Bay, which was a strange name for a town that didn’t seem to have a future. But it was also the reason why Nathan was there; he’d seen the name on a map and liked the sound of it. So one afternoon he walked into a bar on the south side, one of those dive bars where the air smells singed and all the stools are painted black and smoke curls through their legs as if a dragon’s just breathed out, and there was India-May with her hand round a double gin and when she lifted the glass to her lips the rim hit her teeth and her bangles spilled down her freckled arm and her pale hair dripped into her eyes. She looked reckless and weary. She looked as if all the stories about her were true.

One of the stories happened to be standing right next to her. An old black man whose name, if Nathan overheard it right, was Twilight. He called himself Twilight, he was saying, because that was about where he was in his life, and she stood up and threw her arms around him and told him he was the fine high sun of noon to her, and he just looked at Nathan over her shoulder and rolled his eyes, much as to say she doesn’t know what time of day it is at all.

Twilight left soon afterwards, though she didn’t seem to want him to, and as she turned back to her gin she caught Nathan watching, and called across to him.

‘What’s that you’re drinking?’

‘Coke.’

‘You want a real drink?’

He smiled and shook his head. He told her he drank beer now and then, if he was thirsty, but that was about it. Mostly he stayed clean.

She seemed to be gathering him with her eyes, and then she took a spare strand of her pale hair and threw it over her shoulder, like it was salt or something, like it was lucky.

‘You’re unbelievable. How old are you?’

‘Twenty. Almost twenty-one.’

‘Most people your age, they haven’t even started getting dirty yet,’ she said, ‘and here you are, clean as a goddamn whistle. Unbelievable.’

‘I’m not that clean.’ He moved up the bar, took Twilight’s stool. He told her that he’d been so drunk once that he’d almost lost his teeth. He showed her the scar on his top lip where it hit the streetlight. She bought him another Coke.

India-May wasn’t her real name, it turned out. Nobody in that place seemed to have a real name. She’d changed it to India-May when she was seventeen. Just another way of leaving home, she said. Just another line drawn down the past. Talking of lines down the past, he said, he’d drawn his own. He told her about Moon Beach. How he’d left a year ago. How that place was dead for him. How it looked like a heap of rubble to him now.

She watched him with those blurred eyes of hers. ‘Where are you living?’

‘In town. A few blocks east of here.’

She began to tell him about a house she owned, it was an old farm, out past Modello. She said she had a spare room on the third floor. ‘If that’s any use to you.’

He hesitated. ‘Past Modello?’ Modello was north-east of Tomorrow Bay, about twenty miles inland.

‘Way past. You interested?’

‘Maybe.’ He’d been sharing an apartment with a surfer and the surfer’s girlfriend. Everything was like, totally intense. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take of it.

‘That black guy you saw, he stays there sometimes. A lot of people stay there sometimes, I guess.’ Then she seemed to tire suddenly, all the light and muscle spilling out of her, and she folded round her drink.

Soon afterwards he said he had to be going. She told him to think about it. Even gave him a number to call. He thanked her and walked out into heat and sunlight and stood laughing on the street. He’d forgotten it would be like this. So hot, so bright. Sometimes one world’s so new, it wipes the old one out.

Ten days later he called her and asked if the offer was still good.

‘I don’t say things I don’t mean. When d’you want to come out?’

‘As soon as possible.’

She didn’t miss a beat. ‘OK, this is how you find the house. It’s like I told you. It’s in the hills, north-east of town. Get on the highway going north, then drop down on to the Modello road. It starts off straight, then it gets to twist a bit, but there’s no cars and it’s real dreamy on the right, like you’re the only one alive. Just real dreamy. How are you coming?’

‘Bike.’

‘OK. Look for a tight bend about seven miles out of Broken Springs. You’ll know it when you see it because there’s a white cross there with BABY BOY SOPER painted on it. Some kid blew a tyre on the hill a few years back, the car flipped over, caught on fire, there was only his teeth left and a ring he’d just bought for his girl. So the story goes. Anyway. So right after the cross there’s a couple of trees. One of them’s deformed because of Baby Boy’s car tore a lump out of it on the way down. The track’s right there, no sign, just a track looking like it’s going nowhere. And it sort of is.’ She laughed from deep down in her throat. He thought she was probably stoned. ‘Five miles along that track you’ll see a grey roof. It’s the only house around. Kind of tumbledown. But there’ll be smoke in the chimney and beds with springs and dogs to keep the bogeyman away. But look, babe, you sure it’s what you want? It’s lonely as a grave out here and only the wind moaning and moaning all the time and you look like a city boy to me.’

City boy.

He rode up the next day, salt leaving the air as he climbed into the hills. Once he left the paved road he saw nobody. The track bucked and coiled through a landscape of smooth white boulders, grey pines, and cactus that twisted in the dust like a nest of snakes. After five miles — curiously enough she was accurate where he least expected her to be — he saw the house, crouching at the end of a ridge, just at the point where the track dipped down and hid. All loose tiles and cracked windows and walls patched up with sheets of tin, it used the colours of the land it stood in, grey and brown and yellow, so it had the look of a creature that should’ve been extinct, a creature that had only survived because it had a good disguise. It used to be a farm, he remembered her saying, and it still breathed like one. When he pulled into the yard, chickens ran off in straight lines through the dirt and dogs began to bounce around his tyres like ping-pong balls and people came round corners and leaned on things.

The place was cut off, true enough, but all that stuff about it being lonely as a grave, that was just her talking. She did a lot of that. She’d talk and talk, and make things bigger than they really were. Or sometimes she’d make them smaller. There was nothing lonely about it, unless you call living with six people lonely. There was Joan, a woman who was recovering from some kind of breakdown. There was an old man by the name of Fisher. There was a young married couple, Pete and Chrissie, and their baby. And there was Twilight, the old black man from the bar. That was six, not counting India-May herself and the family of gypsies who camped among the shredded tyres and blackened car-parts out the back. She surrounded herself with people, all different kinds, sometimes she was lucky, sometimes she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter to her. In her book the worst people were preferable to no people at all. She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. She’d been ripped off more times than she could remember. Jewellery, money, clothes. Even a car once. She was philosophical about it. She believed it evened out, either in this life or the next time round. She was always showing Nathan things that she’d been given. It always seemed to him, as he was asked to examine some painting or basket or packet of seeds, for Christ’s sake, that she’d been had, that she’d come off worse. But she’d be smiling, and she’d be tossing her hair over her shoulder like salt, and she’d be saying in that breathless voice of hers, ‘See, I told you. Isn’t it beautiful?’ Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would’ve been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.

She gave him a room on the third floor. Walls the colour of eggshell, a row of glass bottles on the mantelpiece, and a bed with springs, as promised. It was a spiritual room, she told him, it had been waiting for him, and standing at the window that evening he could almost believe it. He could see right down the valley. Tomorrow Bay glowed beyond the hills, an orange dome in the dark-blue sky, as if a spaceship had just landed. But the town seemed alien to him now, he felt no pull at all. He would be happy where he was. In the morning he sat down at the kitchen table and she explained how the house worked. All her ‘guests’ paid rent, some in money, some in kind. The old man mended shoes. The woman with the breakdown cooked the meals. And Twilight, well, she’d leave that to his imagination. ‘You choose how you want to pay,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’

He chose to pay in money. That year he was working at Seaview Lodge, a mock-Tudor hotel just off the highway as you headed north out of Tomorrow Bay. The people who stayed there were mostly in their sixties, and they preferred the sun-lounge and the tea-room to the beach. Only the fanatics swam, plunging their bald heads and tumbling flesh into the water at dawn. He arranged the deck chairs and parasols in the morning and folded them away at night. He collected litter on a pointed stick. He raked the sand. There was very little actual lifesaving to be done. He saved an heiress once, and almost wished he hadn’t. A miracle how her cramp disappeared the moment he took her in his arms. ‘He’s a hero,’ she announced to the small crowd that had gathered on the beach, ‘a gen-u-ine hero,’ and insisted on inviting him to dinner that night. Over dessert and coffee she told him about the pool she had at home. ‘It’s inlaid with gold mosaic. You never swam in anything so heavenly.’ And then she offered him a position as her own private lifeguard. Position. She actually used that word. ‘Money’s no object,’ she said. But he turned the offer down, making his excuses with a grace and tact that only served to enhance her admiration.

‘Do you know what she said?’ he told the waitresses later. ‘She said, “Money’s no object,” and do you know what I said?’

They couldn’t guess.

‘I said, “Nor am I.”’

‘You didn’t,’ they said.

He grinned. ‘I wanted to.’

For weeks afterwards the waitresses were always sidling up to him and whispering, ‘Money’s no object.’ The chambermaids teased him too. He was, in any case, a mystery to them. He was open and friendly, but he never focused his attentions on any one of them in particular (unlike his predecessor, who had focused his attentions on five of them, one after the other). They decided he must have some violent, jealous woman in the mountains, and he let them believe it.

The ride home took about forty minutes. He headed west on a slim dark road that arrowed across the coastal plain and up into the hills, where it began to come adrift. No cars suddenly. No light. Only thoughts for company, thoughts that jumped like colts from one piece of ground to quite another piece of ground altogether. The whistle of air in his helmet, the smell of the hot dust cooling. If he reached the top before sunset he would stop and watch the last light leave the ocean, the clouds above sweetening in colour, as if they were slowly being dipped in syrup. Real dreamy, just like India-May had said. The landscape was spoiled only by a pyramid of trash that rose into the sky some distance to the north. This was the municipal dump. Though it was situated five miles out of town, its sweet odour would carry along the beaches when the wind blew in the wrong direction, and had even been known, on occasion, to invade the corridors of Seaview Lodge. By the time he reached the farm, the dogs would be chained up for the night. They knew his bike and didn’t bark. He’d switch his engine off and listen to the black air buzz.

Once inside he’d climb the stairs to his room and close the door and gaze through the window at the sky. Still as deep water. Only the ripple of a car in the valley, a distant aeroplane. He’d lie on his bed under the roof and turn the leather bracelet on his wrist. He’d been given it by an old woman who played the flute. She sat under a palm tree just beyond the hotel fence. Her skin was olive, the colour of slow rivers, her limbs as thin as wire. She always wore the same red plastic raincoat. Every time it rained, which was most afternoons for about fifteen minutes, she played the flute. She always played the same piece. She seemed to have chosen it specially because it lasted the same length of time as the average shower. Sometimes she finished before the rain did, sometimes afterwards, and he’d never forget one afternoon when her last note coincided with the last drop of rain and he heard her laugh in astonishment. She had sounded, in that moment, like a young girl. He had to speak to her. Though all he could say, when he was standing in front of her, was, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ She reached into her pocket and handed him the leather bracelet, and he put it on right away. He’d worn it ever since. Sometimes it would seem as if the music rose out of the bracelet and, hands linked behind his head, he’d topple slowly into sleep, only to wake later, his arms numb, the moon caught in the window, and all his clothes still on. And voices drifted up from below, no words, just resonances, it was like the murmur of a plucked string, it was the same hum, like being inside an instrument. And sometimes he’d go downstairs and open the kitchen door, his eyes blinking against the sudden light, and he’d join the others in a cup of India-May’s herb tea.

It was on just such a night that he stayed up late and found himself alone with her. She was rolling a joint in her worn fingers.

‘So tell me, Nathan,’ she said, without looking up, ‘what is it you’re running from?’

He smiled. It was the kind of cliché you expected from her, but it was also the one question he’d always been asked and never answered. And so he smiled. Because he recognised it. Because he knew that, this time, he was going to answer it.

He began to talk. He didn’t know where the talk was taking him, he only felt that it was flowing, and knew that things which flowed were clean. And came quickly to one particular night, a night that had always been a secret.

He was sitting out by the pool at home. It was after eleven, a still, warm night. A tree had blossomed near the water, its white flowers breathing a perfume that was like magnolias. A faint click came from behind him. He looked round. Someone was standing on the terrace, a silhouette against the french windows. It was Harriet. She must’ve thought she was alone because she stretched in a way that seemed unfettered, private. Then she noticed him, he could tell because she went motionless, then she pushed herself forwards, hips first, into the moonlight.

She came and sat down beside him. ‘What are you doing out here, Nathan?’

‘Oh, just sitting,’ he said, ‘thinking.’

‘That’s the trouble with you. You think too much.’

He laughed softly. Maybe he did. But it was kind of ironic, really. He wouldn’t’ve spent half as much time thinking if she hadn’t been around.

‘I thought you were in bed,’ he said.

‘I stayed up to watch a show on TV.’

‘Any good?’

‘It was just a show. You know, music and dancing.’

She’d thrown the words out lightly into the darkness. But there was a wistfulness, a nostalgia. He remembered a letter that she’d written to Dad. Something about being tired of the bright lights. Even back then he’d thought it sounded strange; she was only twenty-one, after all.

‘Where’s Dad?’ he asked her.

‘He went to bed hours ago.’

A bird called from a tree at the end of the garden. A low, brooding murmur. Harriet stood up and began to unzip her skirt.

‘I’m going for a swim.’ She was laughing at her own impulsiveness.

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’ She looked down at him, the lower half of her face masked by her shoulder. ‘Join me?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t really feel like it.’ But he did. He could already feel that dark water creeping up over his body as he lowered himself in.

Harriet stepped out of her skirt. Then, crossing her arms in front of her, she lifted her blouse over her head and dropped it on top. She’d been lying in the garden all summer, and her skin looked almost black against her white silk underwear. He knew it was silk. She’d told him once in the car; she’d said she couldn’t wear anything else. He tried not to look at her. He didn’t want her to think he was interested. When he did look at her he concentrated on the flaws, the slightly swollen thighs, the stomach rumpled by childbirth.

Still, he thought she felt his eyes on her, he thought she liked the feeling, because she lingered at the edge of the pool, staring into the darkness, before she moved down the steps and into the water. She waded out of the shallow end, trailing her fingertips across the surface, then she gave herself, the water rustling as it accepted her, like a present being unwrapped. Halfway up the pool she turned and swam back towards him. ‘It’s so beautiful. Are you sure you won’t come in?’

It seemed so intimate, this invitation, with her face tipped up to his and Dad’s curtains closed behind her, but it was only a swim, what harm could it do? He stripped down to his shorts and slid over the side. He sighed as the water closed round him like a glove. Floating on his back, he stared up into the sky. The moon was sinking, yellow now. A plane droned overhead, one red light on its wing-tip winking. Trees bloomed dark at the edges of his vision. He’d almost forgotten that he wasn’t alone. Then the water rustled and a voice breathed into his ear. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

Harriet was standing beside him. He twisted sideways and his feet found the bottom. Now he was standing too. She took her hair in both hands and, looking at him, began to wring it out. Her bra had become transparent, and her breasts showed clearly below her arm, the nipples sharp beneath the wet cloth. She let her arms drop. The insides of her wrists knocked against her hips. She moved a step closer to him and seemed to lose her balance in the water. She put a hand on his chest, as if to steady herself, but then she left it there and reached up with her mouth. He felt his mouth drawn down to hers, he felt one of her thighs edge forwards, wedge between his legs. He pulled away from the kiss. Small waves scuttled to the side of the pool.

She seemed surprised. ‘What’s wrong?’

What’s wrong? He wanted to shout, but couldn’t. Those closed curtains. The man sleeping so lightly behind.

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘No,’ he hissed.

He could tell she didn’t believe him. But maybe when he turned away from her and swam to the edge of the pool and hauled himself out, maybe she believed him then. He didn’t bother to look round and find out. Snatching up his clothes, he walked back into the house and up the stairs to his room.

The next day, at breakfast, Dad said, ‘There was water all over the floor when I came down this morning.’

Harriet smiled. ‘I went swimming with Nathan in the middle of the night. I forgot to tell you.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

Harriet smiled. She’d known that Dad would seize on that particular aspect of the story. If something wasn’t part of his routine, he found it unimaginable, hugely eccentric, almost humorous. She’d known that. She was much shrewder than Nathan had given her credit for, and he now trusted her even less.

From that time on, she cooled towards him. Those sweet looks she’d always specialised in, they suddenly became barbed, like chocolates injected with poison. She was constantly asking him why he never brought girls home. She began to accuse him of having love-affairs with the other lifeguards. ‘I think homosexuality is a disease,’ she’d say suddenly, at breakfast. ‘What do you think, Nathan?’

He shook his head at the memory, looked across the table at India-May.

‘And were you?’ she asked him.

‘Was I what?’

‘Having love-affairs with lifeguards.’

‘No.’ He smiled. ‘She didn’t understand the bond. We were close, yes, but it was like brothers.’

India-May nodded slowly, tipped some ash into a saucer. ‘So you had to carry all this alone. Couldn’t you talk to anyone?’

‘There wasn’t anyone.’

There was only one person apart from Dad, and that was Georgia. She’d just turned thirteen. She wore her hair greased back and hung out a lot. Espresso bars, mostly. Sometimes he had to go and pick her up. He always rang the place first and told her he was on his way. He didn’t want her losing face with her friends just because her old man worried too much, and anyway he liked the air of conspiracy. He’d lean against a wall on the other side of the street and watch her. She’d be sitting at a table, gum tumbling in her open mouth, smoke rising from her hand, as if she was a puppet and that wavering blue thread controlled her every move. In her own time she’d slap some money on the table and then she’d kind of unfold, and the faces of the others would tip to hers. She’d push past some guy and his chin would tilt and his eyes would follow her as she left. She’d stand on the sidewalk, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, and Nathan would jerk his head, to tell her where the car was, and she’d walk down her side of the street and he’d walk down his, and it was only once they were in the car that anyone would’ve realised they were connected in any way, and by then it was too late, because nobody could see them. They’d always played games, this was just the latest.

But she was only thirteen. How could he tell her anything? All he could do was sit by and watch as she caught on.

He remembered her first outburst. It was lunchtime. He could still see Harriet putting her fork down and heaving a sigh of relief. ‘Well, at least Rona will be normal,’ she said, and turned to Rona who was knocking her spoon against her plastic bowl, ‘won’t you, darling?’

Dad frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

Harriet seemed surprised that he should ask. ‘You told me about Kay. You know, the madness in that side of the family. Poor woman,’ she said, ‘it must’ve been awful.’

Georgia threw her knife at her plate. A chip of white china hit the wall the same way a reflection does. ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘I’d rather have her blood than yours,’ and then, shoving her chair back, she said, ‘I’m not hungry any more.’ She stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

‘Georgia?’ Dad’s face paled. His hands fastened round the arms of his chair.

Nathan couldn’t bear to look at him. Suddenly Dad was stumbling about in a kind of no man’s land. In the place where he was he couldn’t possibly win. From now on there were only different ways of losing, different kinds of pain.

Without meeting Harriet’s eye, and in a low voice, Dad said, ‘I think you went a bit far, Harriet.’

Later that afternoon Nathan heard Harriet shouting in the bedroom. ‘Why don’t you ever stand up for me? You always stand up for them, never for me. Why don’t you stand up for me?’

And Dad was shouting too. ‘Stop it, Harriet,’ he was shouting. ‘Stop it, stop it.’

Nathan listened at the foot of the stairs. He was the toy soldier of all those years ago, but he hadn’t toppled over, he was marching from room to room, marching from the kitchen to the hall, the hall to the study, the study to the hall again, he didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t go upstairs and intervene, nor could he leave the scene of what felt like a crime, he was shaking with this terrible indecision. Those jets were flying again, tearing the air inside his head, he could only think one thought: He’s going to die. She’s going to kill him.

He saw the whole thing as a plot. The clothes Dad liked, the hair Dad liked. It had been so easy. A short skirt, a fringe, no make-up, and she was in. Then she could set to work. Wearing him down, wearing him out. Wearing him away to nothing. She was that dream of his come true, she was the planes made human. He imagined her standing in Dad’s bedroom at night, Dad asleep behind her. He watched her looking in the mirror. He saw her face begin to change. The whine of the engines, the slow turning on that one front wheel.

Upstairs Dad was still shouting. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it.’ He said it thirteen times, Nathan was counting, and then he couldn’t listen any more. He ran into the kitchen and pulled the cupboard open. He was doing everything as loudly as possible. He didn’t want to hear anything else from upstairs. Inside the cupboard was a stack of new light bulbs in their cardboard jackets. He stacked them in his arms and took them out into the yard. One by one he stripped their jackets off and hurled them against the outside wall of the house. A flat pop each time one exploded. Then a faint tinkling as the fragments of glass showered to the asphalt. Dad never said anything about the missing light bulbs. He simply put them on the shopping list the next Friday. ‘8 light bulbs,’ he wrote, ‘40-watt.’ Previously he’d always bought 100-watt bulbs, but 40-watt bulbs were cheaper and it didn’t matter how bright the bulbs burned if they were just going to be hurled at a wall.

They were still living in a sort of 40-watt half-light when Nathan followed Dad into the sitting-room one day and asked if he could speak to him alone. It was after lunch. He waited while Dad took his usual array of pills: first the flat white ones, then the round bronze ones, then the lozenges, half red, half black.

‘Have one of these,’ and Dad handed him a dark-green capsule the size of a pea. ‘It’s good for you.’

Nathan smiled and swallowed it.

‘So what is it?’ Dad said finally. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I’m going to stay with Yvonne for a few weeks.’

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘I don’t know. I think maybe after staying at Yvonne’s I’ll move on up the coast.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

Dad took off his half-moon spectacles. He leaned his head back and stared up into the corner of the room where the two walls joined the ceiling. ‘This is your home too, you know. I don’t like to think that you’re being driven out.’

‘I’m not. It’s just something I want to do.’

He was lying, of course, and they both knew it. Sometimes he thought of all the lies stored in his head. Or not so much lies, perhaps, as the truth held prisoner.

Dad brought his eyes down from the corner of the room. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said in a low voice, and quickly looked away.

Nathan broke off. He wasn’t crying exactly. It was just that there were tears dropping from his eyes.

India-May put her hand on his. ‘It’s all right, Nathan,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She went to the sideboard and poured a brandy. ‘I know you’re clean and all that, but I think maybe you could make an exception tonight.’

He drank the brandy down without a word.

Later he said, ‘You know, when I worked in Moon Beach, we used to make bets with each other, bets on who could get through the spring tides.’ He stared at the glass in his hand. ‘Those waves are high, you try and get through, but they’re hitting the beach and chewing it up, you dive, you come up, you dive again, you come up again, you’re getting nowhere, it’s hard water, it keeps knocking you down and pounding on you, but you can’t stop, if you stop, you’ve lost it, it rolls you right back to the shore, it throws you out on the sand like an old tin can, you’ve got to keep diving, that’s where your fitness counts, you dive, you come up, and those waves keep pounding on you, and then, finally, you come to the big one, you get under it, and you’re safe, you’re on the other side of the water.’ He laughed softly and said, ‘The other side of the water,’ and shook his head. ‘Next thing is, you see a nice wave and you think fuck it, I’m going to take that wave, and you take it all the way in, and you get out, and you hold out your hand, someone owes you, and everyone’s watching because the red flags are up and there’s nobody in that surf, nobody.’ He turned the empty glass in his hands. ‘Sometimes you come out of that water and you lie down on the sand and you’re so tired you just fall right off to sleep.’

A silence as she imagined it.

‘If you won the bet,’ she said finally, ‘what did you win?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, nothing. A hamburger, maybe.’

And they were both laughing. Laughing and laughing. More tears, of a different kind.

Afterwards she said, ‘You know, you’re lucky having all that. I think it’s wonderful.’

‘I wish Dad thought so.’

‘Doesn’t he?’

He shook his head. ‘He wants me to do something worthwhile.’

‘What could be more worthwhile than saving people’s lives?’ ‘He doesn’t see it like that.’

‘Well, I think it’s wonderful. The ocean, the beach, it’s like your own kingdom. Worthwhile,’ and she snorted through her nose, ‘that Dad of yours, he must be soft in the head.’

It was almost as if he’d had an ear to the ground. As if he’d picked up that tremble in the earth, that hushed drumroll: the hooves of the enemy. Still far away, but moving in his direction. When he came home after work the next day he found a letter waiting just inside the door. It was postmarked Moon Beach, but he didn’t recognise the handwriting. He took the letter upstairs and lay down on his bed and tore it open.

‘By the time you read this letter,’ it began, ‘I will have left your father.’ There followed three pages of bitterness and accusation, which ended with the words, ‘It will be your father who suffers, not me.’ Signed simply, ‘Harriet Christie.’

His own name thrown in his face like acid.

He let the letter slip to the floor. He tried to laugh, but his laughter sounded forced in that small room.

Loyalty Is Silence

There are times when your life seems to jump tracks. Slow train to fast, local to express. You have the sense that, from now on, you’ll be travelling on a different line, you’ll be seeing different views through the window.

It was November and Jed had just turned twenty-two. Creed opened the glass panel one morning as they were returning from the airport and said, ‘Where do you live, Spaghetti?’

‘Mangrove East.’

Creed shook his head. ‘I need you closer.’

It was exactly what Jed had been waiting to hear, but he kept his voice level. ‘Where’ve you got in mind, sir?’

‘The Palace.’

Jed’s heart lifted in his ribs. The Palace was where Creed lived, in a penthouse suite on the fourteenth floor, so the idea made perfect sense. But the Palace was also the most exclusive apartment hotel in the city. It was located on Ocean Drive, between C and D; it took up the entire block. With its two twin towers of baroque grey stone, it was just about the only building in Moon Beach that wasn’t either white or pale-blue. Its lobby was the size of a railway station, all peach marble and glass and gilded metal. The central chandelier was gold-plated and weighed, it was rumoured, something in the region of half a ton. Everyone had stayed at the Palace. Heads of state, movie-stars, tycoons. Just to be able to give it as your address!

‘You’ll be in the basement,’ Creed said, ‘but it should be adequate.’ He allowed himself a smile. ‘It can hardly fail to be an improvement on Mangrove East, in any case.’

Jed moved that same week. To reach his new apartment you had to use the old tradesmen’s entrance: past the service elevator, down four flights of stairs, along a corridor with a linoleum floor. The basement of the Palace was a lost kingdom of storerooms, washrooms and boiler-rooms. Fat grey pipes hugging the ceilings, dull yellow walls. The air smelt of lagging, paint, damp. And also, ever so faintly, and inexplicably, of marzipan. In the end you came to a door that said (and this was equally inexplicable) 3D. There was no 3C and no 3E. There wasn’t even a 3 A. 3D was unique and without context. It was another dimension. It was Jed’s new home.

There were two rooms, both painted a tired pale-green. There was a bed, a TV, a phone. There was air-conditioning. That was about it. If you parted the net curtains and peered sideways and upwards you could see one tiny piece of bright blue sky, but you might pull a muscle doing it. A constant clash and tinkle came from the kitchens across the courtyard, like the percussion section of an orchestra from hell. At night the boiler took over, roaring and trembling until dawn. During his first week in the Palace he hardly slept.

It was during the second week that Carol asked him to dinner at her parents’ place. As the taxi moved down off the harbour bridge and into the suburb of Paradise, he remembered what Vasco had said, and turned to her.

‘Your father,’ he said, ‘is he really the chairman?’

Carol looked embarrassed. ‘Yes.’

He sat back. Jesus. So her father really was the chairman. Her father was Sir Charles Dobson.

‘Why?’ Carol said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No, not really. Vasco said something about it, but I didn’t believe him.’

‘I thought everyone knew.’ And she gave him a smile that resembled gratitude. It was as if, in not knowing, he’d paid her a great compliment.

Sir Charles and Lady Dobson lived on Pacific Drive, a road that wound its way through the canyons, then doubled back towards the ocean to link, eventually, with the South Coast Expressway. The house was one of the white, wedding-cake mansions in the 10,000-block, high wrought-iron gates and video security, and just the hills rising in silence behind.

Jed paid the taxi and stood still. You needed millions to breathe this air. This air exactly, right here. Millions. And suddenly he took the rumours and put them on like a coat. Lifted and dropped his shoulders a few times, he’d seen people do it when they tried on clothes in stores. Not a bad fit. Maybe he really was a cunning son of a bitch, just like Vasco said he was. Certainly he was thinking all those thoughts. Jed Morgan, he was thinking. Chairman.

Dinner was plate after plate of food he’d hardly ever set eyes on, let alone eaten: caviar, bortsch, salmon, duck. And then, as if that wasn’t indigestible enough, the conversation turned to the subject of advertising. The new Paradise Corporation commercial had just aired the previous night. Jed had seen it. It opened with a black screen and a voice that said, ‘This is probably the most frightening place in the world.’ It pulled back slowly to reveal a fringe of green around the black. You were looking into an open grave. The voice went on to say that, when you were faced with something as frightening as death, you needed the right people around you, and the right people were the Paradise Corporation etc. etc. One of the papers had attacked the commercial for being too emotive. People at the dinner table were springing to the commercial’s defence, using words like ‘honest’ and ‘bold’.

‘Well,’ Jed said, speaking up for the first time, ‘at least there weren’t any tolling bells in it.’ All the talk around him suddenly subsided; he felt strangely shipwrecked in the silence. ‘I used to work on commercials for funeral parlours,’ he went on. ‘I used to think that if I heard one more tolling bell, I’d go out of my mind.’

After the laughter had died away, he told a story about one particular commercial that he’d worked on. It was a testimonial for a funeral parlour which had dealt with the victims of a forest fire. He needed the sound of a forest fire running under the voice-track, but he couldn’t find the effect on file. It was seven at night and the commercial had to be presented at breakfast the next day. In the end he had no choice. He had to create the effect himself.

‘How did you do that?’ Lady Dobson asked.

‘I’ll show you,’ Jed said, ‘but I need absolute silence.’

Out of his left pocket he produced a handful of candy-wrappers and, during the hush that followed, he created a forest fire for the Dobsons and their guests in the Dobson’s very own dining-room.

It was a great success.

‘And these are only Liquorice Whirls,’ he said. ‘In those days I was eating Almond Toffee Creams and they came in much cracklier paper.’

Either Sir Charles had forgotten what Jed did, or else nobody had bothered to tell him, because he now leaned forwards and, impressed, it seemed, by Jed’s ingenuity and verve, said, ‘Perhaps, young man, you should come and work for me.’

All eyes locked on Jed.

He waited three seconds. You have to time things.

‘But Sir Charles,’ he said, ‘I already do.’

He looked round. People were weeping with laughter. He caught Carol’s eye, and winked. His skin had picked up a glow from the lilies on the table. The candlelight had taken his cheap suit and made it over in some priceless fabric. The vintage wine had anointed his tongue with new and seductive language. He could do no wrong. When the meal was over, Sir Charles escorted him into the library.

He watched Sir Charles cut the tip off his cigar. Being old had done something to Sir Charles’s face, something that being poor sometimes did. It had sucked the colour out. Eyes, hair, skin: all different shades of grey and white. Distinguished, yes. But colourless. And cheeks with folds in them, like old wallets. He wondered how much Sir Charles was worth.

But now the cigar was lit and, turning to Jed, Sir Charles spoke through billowing smoke. ‘So who exactly do you work for?’

‘I work for Mr Creed. I’m his driver.’

Maybe it was only a coincidence but, as soon as Jed pronounced the name of his employer, the cigar fell from Sir Charles’s fingers. It bounced on the carpet, shedding chunks of red-hot ash.

‘God-DAMN.’ Sir Charles spread his legs and stooped. He flicked the ash towards the fireplace with the back of his hand. Then he stuck the cigar between his teeth and slowly sucked the life back into it.

‘Let me ask you something, Jed,’ he said, when the smoke was billowing once more. ‘Have you ever been to head office?’

‘I have, yes.’

‘What did you think of it?’

The head office of the Paradise Corporation, as Sir Charles knew perfectly well, was just about the most famous building in the city. Built entirely of black glass, it marked the beginning of what was known as Death Row, a stretch of downtown First Avenue where most of the big funeral parlours had their offices. All night long lights burned in the central elevator shaft and in the windows of the twenty-fifth floor. The result was a white cross that stood out among the familiar neon logos of airlines and oil companies. The cross was a landmark. You could even buy postcards of it. Jed had only been inside the building once, and all he could remember was the angel. She was part sculpture, part fountain. Her head and body were metal and her wings were water, water that was forced through holes in her back and lit from beneath so it looked solid, like glass. He remembered the hiss of those wings, the lick and swish of revolving doors, the warble of phones. All tricks a hypnotist might use. Forget your loss. Forget your grief. He remembered drifting, drifting close to sleep.

‘You walk into that building,’ Sir Charles said, ‘and you know you’re in capable hands.’ Clouds of smoke trailed over his shoulder as he paced. ‘You’ve got to win people’s trust. Trust is very important. Without trust,’ and he came to a standstill and tipped his chin into the air, the thought still forming.

‘Without trust,’ Jed said, ‘we wouldn’t be standing here now.’

Sir Charles swung round. ‘Precisely.’ For a moment he was rendered motionless by surprise, a kind of respect. But only for a moment. ‘What I’m trying to say to you is, this is a hard business. A cutthroat business at times. But you should always remember one thing. It’s people that you’re dealing with. People.’ He thrust both hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. ‘I’m sixty-nine and I’m still working. Nobody really retires from this business. It’s a way of life.’

He showed Jed to the door of the library. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, my boy?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

Then his face moved close to Jed’s, and he said, ‘Are you interested in my daughter?’

‘I’ll let you into a secret, Sir Charles,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not interested in your daughter at all. I’m just pretending to be. It’s your money I’m really after.’

Sir Charles stared at Jed, and Jed stared back; he wasn’t going to help Dobson out with this one. At last a smile began to pull at the folds in Sir Charles’s face, as if his cheeks really were wallets and his smile was going through them, looking for cash, then the smile turned to laughter, it pushed between his teeth, it was dry and rhythmic, it sounded uncannily like someone counting a stack of dollar bills. Jed saw Carol at the end of the corridor and began to walk towards her.

‘You remember what I said,’ Sir Charles called after him.

The next day Creed asked Jed to drive him out to the Crumbles. The Crumbles lay to the east of the city. All the land out there had been under water once. It was flat for miles. There were a few wooden beach huts down by the shoreline. Some old mine buildings in the distance, some gravel pits. Otherwise just shingle, grey and orange, and a soft wind tugging at the heads of weeds.

He followed Creed’s directions, leaving the road for an unpaved track that seemed to lead towards the ocean. The track widened and then vanished. Then they were driving over rough ground, loose stones popping under the tyres. He parked close to where the land sloped downwards to a narrow pebble beach, and switched the engine off.

Creed stared out of the window, his chin cushioned on one hand, his eyes doubly concealed, first by the tinted windows of the car, then by his sunglasses. Jed thought he understood. It was like Vasco and the mudbanks of the river. It was where Creed came to do his thinking. Where was Vasco? Jed wondered. He’d scarcely set eyes on him since the night they’d had dinner together at the house in Westwood. Nobody had mentioned him either, and Jed didn’t feel he should ask. He poured himself a cup of coffee from his private flask and watched the white gulls lift and scatter against the dull grey sky.

The glass panel slid open behind him.

‘I heard you were out at Dobson’s place last night.’

‘That’s right, sir. I was.’

He’d known Creed would find out. He’d even wanted him to. He wanted Creed to be amused, impressed even. A chauffeur at the chairman’s dinner table!

‘Any particular reason?’

‘Carol asked me.’

‘Carol?’

‘His daughter. The receptionist.’

Creed said nothing.

‘The one with the limp,’ Jed said.

‘I know the one.’

Another silence. Wind pushed at the car.

Then Creed said, ‘Dobson’s on his way out.’ The chairman? On his way out?

But Creed didn’t give Jed time to think. ‘When a ship sinks,’ he said, ‘that’s when you see who the rats are. What interests me is, which rats leave which ship.’

The glass panel slid shut.

One week later Sir Charles Dobson resigned as chairman of the Paradise Corporation. The decision had been taken, the statement said, ‘for personal reasons’. The new chairman, elected unanimously by the members of the board, was Mr Neville Creed. Jed read the statement three times while he was eating breakfast that morning. It sounded calm and measured, utterly reasonable. But he couldn’t make any sense of it. He saw Dobson standing in the library. Nobody really retires from this business. It’s a way of life. He couldn’t make any sense of it at all. And then he saw Creed sitting in the back of a black car parked on the Crumbles. Dobson’s on his way out.

From then on everything that happened seemed to jar. There were minor changes, subtle departures from routine. Creed called at seven. ‘Meet me in the parking-lot.’ Jed usually waited in the car outside the front of the hotel. Now it was the parking-lot. Underground. When Creed stepped out of the service elevator he wasn’t alone. Flack was with him. Flack was one of the corporation lawyers. It looked as if both men had been up all night. Except Flack didn’t have a technique. Flack’s skin glistened in the white, gritty light, his thin face tight with fatigue.

Jed held out a hand as Creed approached. ‘I’d like to congratulate you, sir.’

At close range Creed looked bright, jagged round the edges. As if he’d been cut out of tin. He was staring at Jed. He didn’t seem to know what Jed was talking about.

‘Your new appointment.’

Oh that. A nod, a quick smile. And then Creed ushered Flack into the car. It was as if Creed had something more important on his mind. But what could be more important than his appointment as chairman of the largest and most prestigious funeral parlour in the city?

Up the ramp and out into the light. That white winter sun, a magnesium flash. At the first intersection Jed snapped his dark lenses over his eyes. A calming green. He glanced at the two men in the back. Flack was crushed into a corner, gesticulating, a beetle turned on to its back. Creed leaned towards him, his hand palm-upwards in the air, the fingers curved and stiff like the setting for a precious stone, but no stone there. They were arguing — but what about? It was a question Jed had never allowed himself before. He saw old Garbett’s tape recorder, he saw the wheels turning. If only he could record what they were saying. He began to imagine how he would run the wires under the carpet, and had to stop before it became too real.

Flack was dropped in the city at ten. McGowan and Maxie Carlo took his place. Carlo pared his thumbnails with his knife. McGowan spat bits of words through pointed teeth. Creed stared out of the window, as if it was the Crumbles he could see. The mood was wrong, all wrong. Creed had been appointed chairman, yet there was no sense of celebration. The day was filled with whispers, echoes, nerves.

Towards midday they drove out to Dobson’s house on Pacific Drive. Carlo and McGowan waited on the steps while Creed went in. Creed was inside the house for almost an hour and when he emerged on the steps it wasn’t Sir Charles who was with him, but Sir Charles’s wife. At first Jed thought she was laughing. Maxie Carlo must’ve cracked a joke. But he saw her hand fly up and hold her mouth, he saw Creed slide an arm round her shoulder. It wasn’t laughter. She was crying.

The next stop was Butterfield, where they picked up Morton the embalmer. This, too, was curious: Creed never had anything to do with embalmers. In fact, Jed had only seen Morton once before. He’d spent an afternoon with Morton when he first joined the company, as part of his induction. He remembered the white room. The tinkle of calipers and hacksaws in the sterilising bowl, the naughty smack of rubber gloves. And Morton talking, talking. ‘I lie beautifully, that’s my job. Or not lie, maybe. Turn the clock back. Tell an old truth.’ A hole had opened in the floor and the naked corpse of a white woman rose into view. Later Jed had lost all sense of time as the external heart slowly pumped a solution of formaldehyde into the dead woman’s body, as the dead woman’s body began to blush. He couldn’t help thinking of his radios, the way they warmed up, that slow suffusion of light behind the names. Turn the clock back. Tell an old truth.

The four men had lunch in the Palm Court Motel on Highway 23. Jed waited in the car. Ate half a chicken salad sandwich, threw the rest away. Read the paper and couldn’t remember a word of it. He had no appetite. Couldn’t concentrate.

At two-forty-seven the four men pushed through the glass doors and out into the motel parking-lot. They stood on the warm asphalt. Creed opened one hand like a fan, words spilling sideways from his lips. Morton dipped his head, his face pulled wide, excited. Carlo and McGowan stood on either side of the embalmer, he might’ve been in custody. They all wore suits. They all had clean shoes and neat hair. He watched them walk towards the car. They looked like evangelists, or politicians. When they were ten yards away they stopped talking, and they didn’t start again till they were safely behind glass.

I need you closer.

That was a laugh. He’d never felt further away.

And then Sir Charles Dobson died. Just ten days after his resignation. Suddenly, at home. The papers bristled with tributes to ‘a man who stood for tradition and dignity in a business that has recently been rocked by scandal and corruption’. Creed received a good deal of spin-off publicity. The Herald called him ‘Dobson’s understudy’ and ‘one of the new entrepreneurs’. The Tribune said he exhibited ‘the cutting edge and thrust of an aggressive businessman on his way to the top’. It was clear from the cumulative weight of these reports that Creed had already arrived. Many of the papers carried photographs of Dobson and Creed side by side, Dobson’s arm around Creed’s shoulder, as if Creed was not only heir to the business, but also a son.

On the morning of Dobson’s funeral a bellhop knocked on 3D and handed Jed a big square box. There was a card taped to the box: TO 3D. A GIFT FROM 1412. 1412 was Creed’s apartment. Jed smiled at the anonymity. All letters and numbers. Like convicts. Inside the box was a black satin top hat. He tried it on. It fitted to perfection, it even seemed to match his scarecrow face. He decided to wear it for the rest of his life.

When he pulled up outside the Palace, Creed was already waiting by the entrance with McGowan, Trotter and Maxie Carlo (still no sign of Vasco). In their black top hats and tailcoats they looked more like vultures than ever. They studied him from their position high on the steps. Creed turned to Maxie Carlo.

‘What do you think of Spaghetti, Meatball?’

Carlo scarcely had to look. ‘Dressed to kill.’

Laughter jumped from face to face. Creed, Trotter; even McGowan. Then, just as suddenly, they seemed to remember that this was a serious occasion, they were on their way to a funeral, the funeral of a great man, the chairman, their founder and benefactor, and they fell silent again.

The first two cars held the coffin (solid bronze with 24-carat gold-plated hardware) and several close members of the family. Creed rode in the third car, flanked by two of the Corporation’s top directors, with Jed at the wheel in his new top hat. The vultures travelled in the fourth car, packed tight into the back, like pieces of a game. Creed had organised the funeral himself. The funeral to end all funerals. A motorcade through downtown Moon Beach, a twenty-one-gun salute, a memorial service in the cathedral. Creed had requisitioned an open car, and he stood for the entire procession, as a mark of his own personal respect for the deceased. From time to time Jed tipped the mirror to the sky to look at him. Hands clasped behind his back, face as grave as stone. Jed could sense a question running like a breeze through the rows of people who lined the streets: Who’s he? If they didn’t know now, Jed thought, they’d know soon enough.

There was a clever piece of stage-management on the steps of the cathedral. The city’s funeral barons had turned out in an unprecedented expression of their admiration and their sympathy, and Creed took full advantage of the fact. He engineered it so that he was standing head and shoulders above his rivals when they filed past to shake his hand and offer their condolences. It was a symbolic moment, duly captured and enshrined by the massed bank of press photographers. In the papers the next day it looked as if the funeral parlour heads were sanctioning the transfer of power, as if they were acknowledging Creed’s pre-eminence, as if they were paying homage. The funeral had become a coronation.

After the service Jed saw Carol walking across the lawn in front of the cathedral. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day before her father resigned. She’d left Mortlake suddenly, without saying goodbye. She wasn’t limping today, he noticed; she must be wearing those special shoes of hers. At that moment she caught a glimpse of him through the crowd and came over.

‘Jed,’ she said, ‘how are you?’

He caught Creed looking at him, frowning.

‘I can’t talk now,’ he said.

‘Can I call you?’

He gave her the number. ‘I’m not there much, though. Pretty busy these days.’

‘You’re doing well,’ she said, ‘aren’t you?’

He shrugged.

Her face bent close to his. To kiss him, he thought, and he shrank back.

‘This whole thing’s a sham,’ she hissed.

He stared at her, not understanding.

She nodded twice, almost to herself. ‘A sham.’ Then she was stumbling, legs of china, to her car.

The left side of his head began to beat. What did she mean, a sham? He saw one of her heels sink into the soft grass, she almost fell. She seemed so exposed, so ridiculous, he wanted to point and laugh. What did she know? The loss of her father had opened her up like a can of something and tipped her out. There was nothing holding her together. He couldn’t deal with that.

In the event he didn’t have to. She never called.

Vasco called instead. At least he thought it was Vasco. The voice just said, ‘Watch the papers,’ then it hung up.

He forgot about the call until the end of the week when the story broke. It broke in the tabloids first, where it would do the most damage. The Mirror’s headline was a classic:

FUNERAL BOSS DIED TWICE

According to sources that couldn’t be revealed, the Paradise Corporation had pretended that Sir Charles Dobson was alive for ten days after his death so that the leadership of the company could be handed over without shaking public confidence. In a move variously described as ‘ghoulish’, ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘sick’, Mr Creed, it was alleged, had orchestrated this posthumous resignation, instructing expert embalmers to preserve the corpse and even arranging a photo session two days after Sir Charles’s death (Sir Charles’s lifeless arm around Mr Creed’s shoulders) so a picture could be released to the press along with a transcript of the letter of resignation. Only once the transfer of power had been smoothly effected and accepted by the general public, the paper claimed, had Sir Charles Dobson been allowed to die.

These were extraordinary allegations and they turned the city upside down. For the first few days after the story broke Creed lived in the car. He banished his vultures. In the present climate of opinion they could only damage him. Flack was his adviser now. As they drove from press conferences to radio stations, from radio stations to television studios, Creed and Flack huddled in the back of the car hatching strategies. Creed’s statement seldom varied: ‘This entire story is a monstrous fabrication, an attempt to smear the good name of the Paradise Corporation.’ In between the public appearances, they were hounded by the press. There were two or three car-chases a day, with Jed using every hidden fold and secret pocket of the city to lose some persistent journalist or camera crew. They ate in the outskirts, obscure highway diners, and cafés in bleak residential suburbs. They hid in the city’s petticoats. They stayed awake. One night they almost snapped an axle when Jed’s eyes fell shut and the car left the highway and began to lurch across dry yellow grass. A strange closeness developed, a shorthand, a kind of telepathy. Jed began to know where Creed wanted to go without a word being uttered. There was the afternoon when he drove out to the Crumbles and they slept for three hours, the wind pushing at the side of the car like a crowd. He woke suddenly and turned. Creed was sleeping with his eyes wide open. Jed saw Creed wake. The only difference was a subtle shift in breathing.

‘I dreamt we were made of gold,’ Creed said, ‘and there were people trying to melt us down.’ One of his eyebrows arched ironically. As if anyone could melt them down.

Jed knew the story in the papers was true. He only had to remember the day after Dobson’s resignation. Creed’s distracted blankness in the parking-lot. Flack’s anxiety. The tension on the faces of McGowan and Carlo. Mrs Dobson’s tears. Morton’s jittery elation. I lie beautifully. All those ambiguous, jarring pieces fell into place. He remembered the picture in the paper. He remembered thinking that the smile on Dobson’s face looked false. And it had been, of course. Dead men didn’t smile. Not unless they fell into Morton’s hands. Turn the clock back. Tell an old truth. No, he didn’t believe in Creed’s innocence, not for a moment, but then innocence and guilt had never been the parameters, had they? There was only one question in his mind when he read the papers: had they taken the story far enough? It occurred to him as a possibility, for instance, that, prior to being ‘kept alive’ for ten days, Dobson might first have been murdered. Was that what Carol had been trying to tell him?

The days passed. Jed ate Liquorice Whirls, and virtually nothing else. He hardly slept. At times he felt himself departing into hallucination. The rumours were still flying, but the proof was lying low. Creed’s vultures were out there, Jed was sure of it, sealing lips and twisting thumbs. Sometimes Creed would turn his face to the window and smile. Just the flicker of a smile when he thought that nobody was looking (but Jed had practised the deft glance in the mirror and he didn’t miss much). Creed was like a gambler. Spin the wheel. If you lose, just spin again. There were always more chips. It was down to nerve. Who got chicken first. Which rats left which ship.

Silence was descending all over the city. The hollow roar of nothing being said. The Dobson story had yet to be substantiated, and the family were still unavailable for comment. The Paradise Corporation was suing three of the city’s leading newspapers. Creed met McGowan and Trotter at Papa Jim’s Bone-A-Fide Rib Place on the South Coast Expressway. A chequered tablecloth and lighting like melted butter. Jed could see them from the car, drinking beers and swapping jokes. It was real mood-swing. They looked like three guys relaxing after a ball game. Once again he wished he could’ve listened in.

Then, nine days after the story broke, the Tribune published a cartoon. It showed a coffin with the lid nailed down and two candles burning at the head. A voice-bubble rose from the inside of the coffin. It said, simply, ‘I resign.’

The morning that the cartoon appeared, Jed overheard Creed talking to Maxie Carlo. He had the paper in his hand. ‘The press are beginning to have fun,’ he was saying. ‘The worst is over.’

There was a new confidence. An air of leisure, recklessness, infallibility. McGowan was seen smiling. Maxie Carlo came to work in a yellow plaid suit. Creed gave Jed two nights off.

Jed drove down to Rialto to see Mitch.

‘Ask him,’ Mitch said as Jed walked in. ‘He works there.’

Some friends of Mitch’s had come round. A couple of them had ridden in the Moon Beach chapter together. There was a black girl there too. Her name was Sharon. She wanted to know what Jed thought about the Dobson affair.

Jed cracked a beer. ‘It’s all true,’ he said, ‘every word of it,’ and he sent Mitch a wink.

‘No, really.’

And suddenly he felt a slippage, a letting go. His nerves had been on hold for days. No sleep and all that road unwinding before his eyes, inside his head. It only took this one slight pressure when he was least expecting it and he came loose.

‘How am I supposed to know?’ he snapped. ‘I’m only a fucking driver, all right?’

The black girl shrank. ‘Christ. Sorry I asked.’

Jed drank two more beers and a couple of shots of tequila. Suddenly the room smelt of dead flowers and stale smoke, and it was loud, even during silences, with the ticking of Mitch’s clocks. He went to the bathroom, hung his head over the toilet bowl. The ammonia helped. This hunchback darkness on his shoulder and the room behind him, high and narrow. It was all the liquor, he wasn’t used to it any more. In the old days he could’ve swallowed a six-pack in half an hour and then gone out and walked a tightrope. Not any more. He shut his mouth and hung his head. Waited for the darkness to lift.

‘How did you get to be a driver, Jed?’

He slowly looked up. It was much later. He was back in the lounge. Mitch was rolling a cigarette, running the tip of his tongue along the shiny edge. ‘Somebody say something?’

‘How did you get to be a driver?’

Jed shrugged. ‘I’m pretty good mechanically. I don’t mind working long hours —’

The black girl cut in. ‘It’s his eyes.’

‘His eyes?’ one of the bikers said. ‘What d’you mean?’

She leaned forwards. ‘I’ve seen eyes like his in jails. Eyes that’ve killed. Or look as if they could.’ And she shuddered.

Jed stood up. He stared into the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece. He’d often asked himself the same queston. What had Creed seen in him? He thought he had it now. It was what that girl had said. It was what he looked like.

‘He never blinks,’ he heard her say. ‘It’s like those lizards.’

He was still looking at himself. His qualifications, so to speak. They were all there, in the mirror. A tall thin body built almost entirely out of angles. A body which, cramped in the black livery he wore, became still thinner, still more angular. His face was flaky in some places, the texture of dried glue, while in others it bore the pin-prick traces of acne. His glasses with their steel frames made his eyes look chilly, merciless. He was ugly, there was no denying it. He was verging on the grotesque. And yet, looking at himself now, he couldn’t help taking a kind of pride in his appearance. For as long as he could remember, people had stared at him. His ugliness set him apart; his ugliness had made him vain. He was smiling now. His lips didn’t curve or pucker when he smiled. They just lengthened. His smile seemed to prove the point.

Later the black girl came and sat beside him on the sofa.

‘I want to apologise,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be personal or anything.’

‘What’s your name?’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten.’

‘Sharon.’

‘I’m Jed.’

‘I know.’ She was staring at him intently. ‘Tell me something. Are you a virgin?’

She was close to him now. Her pink shirt blurred. Her breath smelt of damp hay, hay that had been stored too long.

‘You are, aren’t you?’

He admitted it.

‘You want to do something about it?’

He began to shiver.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘You cold?’

‘Yes.’

Her voice softened. ‘Well, you’re the driver. Why don’t you drive me home?’

They left in his Chrysler. At the first stoplight she leaned over and kissed him. Something flashed pale-mauve in the side of her teeth.

‘It’s amethyst,’ she said. ‘It’s my lucky stone.’

He was too drunk to be driving, he thought, angling a glance at her wide, sloping thighs on the seat beside him. Her breasts slopped like water under that pink shirt of hers. Like the bags of water you buy goldfish in.

Then a room with blue lights, the whining of a child. A swirl of orange as he lurched to the window.

‘Baker Park,’ she said.

Her voice, the room, tonight. All gritty and distant now. Dregs in the bottom of a bottle. One week when he was fifteen he’d slept under the pier. Seaweed dangling from the metal struts like matted hair, wind so rough against his skin. You could’ve used that wind to scour pans. And the dragging of the waves all night. Water like slurred words. The bottom of the bottle.

And then marooned on her black flesh, two circles round her throat, and her chin pointing at the ceiling like the toe of a boot on a corpse, one arm bent backwards, nothing on except the slacks around her ankles, but no way in, at least none that he could find, and the cheap carpet burning his elbows and his knees, and sleep beginning to ooze from her ridged lips.

He woke on top of her, she might’ve been a beach, he might’ve been abandoned there by waves. He rolled away from her and she woke too. One absent-minded hand moved up to scratch a breast.

‘Did we do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

She yawned. A mouth like ice-cream. Strawberry and chocolate. ‘Want to try again?’

‘When?’

‘How about now? Morning after’s always good.’ She reached for him with one blind hand.

He moved away, sat up. ‘Not now. Maybe tonight.’

Her eyes opened. She looked at him across her cheeks. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like me?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘You don’t like my body.’ She handled one of her breasts sorrowfully, the way you might handle a bird with a broken wing. ‘It doesn’t do anything for you.’

‘It’s not that. It’s just I’ve got things to do.’

It wasn’t true. He had the whole day off. It was just that everything seemed too close, like staring at a light bulb. He was looking down at her, and seeing green and purple on her skin.

‘I can’t figure you out.’

He buttoned his pants. ‘Where did I leave my car?’

She was lying on the carpet, the lips of her cunt, soft and blunt, pushing up through a mound of black curls. She shrugged at him, and he looked away. She was still lying on the carpet five minutes later when he left the apartment. He saw her knees and calves through the half-open door.

‘Well?’ she asked him, when he showed up again that night. ‘Did you find it?’

He scowled. ‘In the end.’

It had taken half an hour, the inside of his head fitting loosely, like a drawer in an old chest. He’d searched the streets around her house that morning. Streets scratchy with children, broken glass and weeds. He’d even searched the vacant lots. A trunk with burst locks. A drunk in a yellow armchair. Those things shouldn’t’ve been there, for some reason they’d infuriated him. The night before he’d driven drunk. OK, so he’d lost his virginity (well, almost). But he’d risked losing everything else too. His licence, his job. His entire future. When he found his car he sat behind the wheel, gripping it so tight he could’ve snapped it.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he told her.

‘You better get those pants off then.’

‘What’s that round your neck?’ He’d noticed it the night before. A small leather pouch on a string. It was the only thing she’d been wearing that hadn’t come away when they undressed.

‘It’s nothing you need know about.’

His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and entering. It was the first time he’d ever slept with a woman and it felt like burglary.

That night, back in the Palace, the phone rang. He switched the light on. It was after two. He thought it must be Creed and said, ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Christ, you even crawl in your sleep.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘Vasco. Where are you?’

‘I don’t think I should tell you that.’

‘Creed’s been looking for you.’

‘How about that.’ Vasco’s laughter sounded tight. ‘Listen, you’ve got to meet me tomorrow.’

‘I can’t do that. You know what my schedule’s like.’

‘Do this for me, Jed.’

‘I can’t.’

Vasco hung up.

Towards morning Jed dreamed he was waiting at a bus-stop. When the bus pulled in, hundreds of people pushed towards the door. He managed to force his way on. As the bus pulled away, he saw Vasco through the window. Vasco was trapped on the sidewalk. Vasco had been left behind.

That night the phone rang again. He didn’t want to answer it, thinking that it might be Vasco again, but he couldn’t afford not to. So he picked up the receiver and waited.

‘Spaghetti?’

It was Creed.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I want you to pick me up.’

‘Where are you?’

‘A place called the Box. It’s a club. You know it?’

The line was cluttered with background noise, and Jed had to ask Creed to repeat the address several times. At last he had it. 75 V Street. ‘I’ll be outside in half an hour.’

‘Don’t wait outside. Park the car and come in.’

‘Half an hour,’ Jed said, and hung up.

Ever since that story broke in the papers, Creed seemed to be testing loyalties. Pushing those around him to the brink and saying jump. Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn’t care, but you did and nothing could ever be secure again. The next time security appeared as a possibility, you smashed it yourself. And went on smashing it. That, he was sure, was how Creed felt. And the people round him weren’t jumping. Trotter had been away for two weeks. Something to do with that twisted arm of his. Meatball’s sense of humour was fraying. He still told jokes, but they were the jokes of a man who couldn’t see anything funny any more, the jokes of a man with one eye on the door. Vasco was nowhere. A voice on the phone at three in the morning. A dream in your head. Only McGowan had lasted. If Jed waited long enough, surely his moment would come. The days of liquorice were over. He’d started buying Iceberg Mints. They were clear and cool. They were how his thinking had to be.

He switched the light on and looked at the clock. Two-twenty. The smell of sex rose in a gust as he left the bed. Sharon didn’t wake. He thought he’d heard of the Box. It was down by the old meat-packing warehouses. It was one of the hard-core gay clubs.

75 V Street was a black door with a small glass panel at head height where you could see your own face reflected. A two-way mirror, presumably. The knocker was a nude male torso in brass. Jed took hold of the cold metal and knocked twice. The buttocks hammered at the door as if they were fucking it.

The door opened about six inches. A strong man with a beard stared down at him.

‘I’m with Mr Creed,’ Jed said.

The gap widened and he passed through. He paused inside, adjusted his top hat.

The strong man was still staring. ‘Like the outfit.’

Jed stared back. One thing he’d learned how to do. Learned early on and never forgotten. ‘I’m a chauffeur.’

‘That’s what they all say.’ The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn’t even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

‘Where is he?’ Jed said.

‘In the back.’

Creed was sitting in a booth. McGowan on one side of him, a young blond guy with cheekbones on the other. Creed told Jed to sit down. ‘This is Ollie.’ He meant the blond guy. ‘He’s a tourist. You know McGowan, of course.’

Jed looked at the tourist.

‘I’m pleased,’ the tourist said, ‘wery pleased.’

Jed was still looking. Weird stuff.

‘Sit down,’ McGowan said. ‘Have a drink.’

‘I’m driving,’ Jed said, ‘remember?’

‘Have some of this instead,’ and McGowan passed Jed a brown vial. ‘We’ll get home quicker.’

Jed took the bottle. ‘What is it?’ Though he already knew, of course. That little bottle with the plastic spoon attached, it had just taken him back about five years.

‘It’s powder,’ McGowan said, ‘for your nose.’

The tourist laughed.

Jed felt Creed’s eyes on him. He had two spoons, one for each nostril, and handed the vial back.

‘Good boy,’ Creed said.

‘You know Gorilla pretty well,’ McGowan said, ‘don’t you?’

‘Kind of.’

‘You’re a friend of his,’ Creed said.

‘I used to be. It was years ago. We were kids.’ It was so strange talking to Creed like this. They never talked like this. He felt as if all his teeth were stones.

‘You been seeing much of him recently?’ McGowan said.

‘Only in dreams.’

‘Only in dreams,’ Creed said, and laughed.

‘I’d keep it that way, if I was you,’ McGowan said.

‘Why?’

‘He’s been a bad gorilla.’ McGowan swallowed the rest of his drink. ‘He got a bit greedy. Too many bananas.’

‘That’s right,’ Creed said. ‘He’s been a bad gorilla.’ And he stared at Jed for a moment, then he smiled slowly.

Jed looked at McGowan, but McGowan was looking somewhere else. Riddles.

The tourist wanted to go to another club, but Creed insisted on a drink in his apartment. ‘You’re on vacation. Relax.’

At last the tourist gave in. Maybe he thought he was on to a good thing.

They took the scenic route back to the Palace. Down through the old meat-market streets, into the tunnel with its rows of lights like neon stitching and its shiny cream tiles, up into Venus, then round the western edge of the harbour and back over the bridge to C Street. The sliding glass panel was open for the first time ever.

‘He’s a romantic,’ Creed said. ‘He wants to see the sights.’

‘We’ll show him the sights,’ McGowan said, and he leaned back and laughed, and the city lights on his mirror shades looked like gold zips that had come undone.

The tourist laughed along with them. In his rear-view mirror Jed saw the vial being passed round. The tourist was sitting in the middle. He was getting twice as much as anyone else. No wonder he was laughing.

Slipping down into the parking-lot under the hotel was like being swallowed, the entrance a dark throat with the tongue cut out. Loyalty is silence. The tyres squealed as they braked, the concrete smooth as skin and slick with fluids that had bled from other cars. Jed parked next to the service elevator. He opened the doors.

And then Creed’s voice soft against his back. ‘Why don’t you come on up with us?’

Jed turned. ‘I ought to get some sleep,’ he said, but the coke had taken hold, it was lifting him, and he had such a good seat at the circus, he didn’t really want to leave.

‘Come on up,’ Creed said. ‘We should get to know each other better.’

The wallpaper in Creed’s lounge looked like zebra skin. The curtains, so blue that they were almost black, were drawn against the view. Creed gave Jed a drink. ‘After all, you don’t have to drive to get home any more, do you?’ and then he went and sat down next to the tourist. The tourist was talking about his homeland.

‘It’s not, you know, it’s not like here,’ and he waved a hand around to include the zebra-skin wallpaper, his new friends, the small brown vial on the coffee table. ‘It’s more like,’ and his face lit up as he remembered the word, ‘like a willage.’

Jed turned to McGowan. ‘Willage,’ he said.

McGowan tipped his head back. ‘He’s a long way from home.’

‘Maybe too far.’

Now McGowan turned to look at Jed and Jed saw his own face twice. ‘You don’t know how right you are.’

‘Don’t I?’

They stared at each other for another ten seconds, then McGowan smiled. There was nothing humorous or well-meaning about the smile. McGowan had simply chosen it from among a number of possible reactions.

‘You know something?’ Jed said. ‘I’ve never seen you without those glasses on.’

With one swift motion McGowan reached up, took the glasses off and tucked them in his pocket. His eyes seemed pinned wide open. Too much white. The irises looked oddly suspended.

Jed nodded. ‘Now I know why you wear those glasses.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You’d frighten too many people with them off.’

McGowan liked that. He liked it so much that he decided to laugh. Jed laughed with him. He looked at Creed. Creed had just produced a pile of leather stuff and dumped it on the coffee table. Handcuffs, harnesses, ankle-holsters, studded chokers, and a mask with no eyes and a zip for a mouth.

‘Uh-oh,’ McGowan said.

Reaching forwards, Jed picked up a see-through zip-lock bag. Inside was an assembly of metal rings and leather straps. The label said THE FIVE GATES OF HELL. Five? Why five? he wondered. Wasn’t one enough? And then he put the bag back on the table.

Creed was showing some of the pieces to the tourist and explaining how they worked. His tone of voice objective, dispassionate, as if they were kitchen implements or gardening devices. Then, without altering his voice, he picked the handcuffs up, snapped them on the tourist’s wrists, and flipped the key through the air to McGowan.

‘Uh-oh,’ McGowan said again.

‘Hey,’ the tourist said, ‘you guys are choking, right?’

Creed didn’t appear to have heard. He was looking at McGowan.

‘Choking,’ McGowan said. ‘We’re choking.’

‘Hey, come on, you guys,’ the tourist said. ‘Get me out of this, OK?’

McGowan reached out and picked up the mask. He dangled it from one finger, swung it slowly backwards and forwards in front of the tourist’s eyes. ‘Only if you put this on.’

Creed was nodding.

The tourist was well built, stronger possibly than either Creed or McGowan, but there was a pleading look in his eyes now, like a dog that knows it’s going to be kicked. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I put this on.’

Jed left the room to go to the bathroom.

When he returned, the lounge was empty. He walked down the hall and stopped by a door. Through the crack he saw McGowan holding the tourist down on a bed. The tourist was lying on his stomach, his face twisted to one side. He was naked, except for the mask. McGowan had a gun in his hand and he was pushing the muzzle through the zipper and into the tourist’s mouth. Creed sat on a chair by the window, gloved hands in his lap, one wrist resting on the other. His face had switched to automatic. He looked up and saw Jed standing in the doorway.

‘Want some?’

The tourist might’ve been cake. Jed shook his head.

Creed smiled. Not so much a smile, perhaps, as a slackening around his mouth.

‘That guy,’ and Jed nodded at McGowan, ‘he’s a psychopath.’

‘But he’s loyal,’ Creed said. ‘He’s very loyal.’

Jed turned. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Suddenly Creed was standing next to him. So suddenly that Jed jumped. He wasn’t sure how Creed had covered the distance between the window and the door.

Creed slapped Jed on the shoulder, a gesture straight out of the boardroom. ‘Get some sleep. I don’t need you till eleven.’

It was seven-thirty when Jed climbed back into bed. Sharon was still asleep. There was shine in the wings of her nose. Her breath came in puffs, ruffling her top lip. He lay down under the single sheet and closed his eyes. Sleep slipped through his fingers. His body itched where the cotton touched it. He had to keep scratching. Always a different place.

‘Where’ve you been?’

His cock tightened at the sound of her voice. ‘I had to drive somewhere.’

‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Eight.’

‘Christ.’ Both her eyes were still shut. One dark breast spilled sideways across the sheet.

He bent down. Bit the wide nipple. Tugged on that glossy skin until her eyes stretched wide and her chin tipped back. He slid between her legs.

She pushed a hand down. ‘I’ve got my period.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

But she twisted round and took him in her dusty hands, he felt the blood pump past her fingers. He heard a clock strike eight. And closed his eyes. Soft shapes colliding, exploding. One colour bled into another. Like bacteria. Her mouth round him now, her teeth grazing that tight skin. Her back so hot, and slick as ice. Their sweat pooling on the sheet. And then the slow ink spreading outwards and the wheels turning and a voice, it was Vasco’s, warning him. He must record. He must record again. To protect himself. To lay himself open. To what? From what? Which rat leaves which ship. That slow ink again. His vision flickering, black round the edges, gaps in the tape. Loyalty and silence. Two wheels, round and round, he couldn’t take his eyes away, and this time it’d be like worship, I dreamed that we were made of gold, he’d seen too much, his eyes were gold, they’d have to melt them down. Turn the clock back. Tell an old truth. Lie. Truth. Maybe it had been like worship then, worship that begins in love and dovetails neatly into hate. Bacteria and radios. Zebra walls. Leather masks and foreign names. Moscow. Brussels. Ollie. Vasco. Vasco? He called out, but the bus had gone. He was alone. Those five gates of hell, he’d be put through every single one of them. Would he? He couldn’t see round the next bend, he must record, tapes were periscopes, his only chance, and the slow ink stolen and the wheels turning, and everything remembered, everything proved, he was whispering now, ‘Why five,’ he was whispering, ‘isn’t one enough?’ and a voice came back, a woman’s, Sharon’s, ‘One what?’

Teethmarks

Nathan called Dad long-distance from Seaview Lodge. He didn’t say anything about the letter that Harriet had written him. In fact, he didn’t mention Harriet at all. He just said he was thinking of coming home for a couple of days, if that was all right.

‘Is that all you can manage?’ Dad said. ‘A couple of days?’

‘I’m working, Dad.’

‘Well, try and get here early. I go to bed at nine.’

He took the train down, even though it was twenty-six hours. He wanted to know exactly how far he’d come. He wanted the distance to count. They were held up just north of the city, repairs on the line, and by the time he reached the house on Mahogany Drive it wasn’t early any more, it was after midnight. He tried the front door. It was locked. He tried the french windows. They were locked too. He checked the other windows, knowing at the same time that it was pointless. Dad had always been fanatical about security at night; he even bolted the inside doors. Three years away, all those miles, and now he couldn’t get in. He had to laugh. But it wasn’t funny, not really.

When his laughter had gone, he realised that something was different: lights were showing in the windows. In any other house this would’ve been normal, but in theirs it was eerie, unnatural. Dad worried about electricity, how dangerous it was. He never went to bed without making sure that every single appliance had been switched off. He couldn’t sleep if he thought there might be a plug in a socket somewhere. He was always having visions of the house catching fire at night. All this light spilling on to the driveway, it just wasn’t like him. It was asking for it. Nathan’s heart began to jump. Suppose something had happened. Maybe that was why Dad wasn’t answering. He knocked on the door, but much harder now. And he was calling too. ‘Dad? Dad?’

Nobody came.

He ran round to the back of the house for the second time. He stood in the garden, at the edge of the pool, and looked up at Dad’s window. The curtains drawn, no light. Cupping his hands round his mouth, he called again. ‘Dad?’

He went over to a flowerbed and felt around in the mud. He came back with a handful of pebbles. He missed with the first. The second just touched the glass and fell away. The third almost shattered it. He waited. Nothing happened.

Moonlight lay on the glass roof of the sun-lounge, blue sheets of it, like lightning paralysed. The rain, still fresh on the grass, began to seep through the soles of his boots. He turned and stared at the pool. Those black patches on the surface, they’d be dead leaves. Every time he came home he had to scoop them off the surface. It was one of his jobs. But now the anger rose in him again. All this way and fuck it, I can’t even get in.

He ran round to the front door. This could go on till morning, it was ridiculous. He pushed the mailbox open, pressed his cheek against the metal, and yelled. ‘Dad? Dad? DAD!’

This time he heard a click and knew instantly what it was. That click was printed on his memory. It was the sound of Dad’s bedroom door. He took his mouth away from the mailbox, and put an ear there instead. He could hear Dad’s voice, distant, shaky.

‘Nathan? Is that you?’

‘Yes, it’s me, Dad. It’s only me.’

He saw Dad feeling his way down the last flight of stairs, the pyjamas, the slippers, the blue cardigan cut off just above the elbows, feeling his way through some kind of thick barbiturate mist. He heard keys turning in the locks, bolts being drawn. The door opened, and he moved past Dad, into the hall.

‘Sorry if I look odd, but I was dead out.’ Dad was bent over, locking the door again. ‘Sorry if I look strange.’

And he turned, shy, somehow, and they held each other. Nathan smelt warm sleep, clean skin. If someone had told him that he’d been angry a moment before, he would’ve denied it. ‘You go back to bed now,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Next morning, after breakfast, Dad said, ‘It was that calling, that word “Dad” in the middle of the night. It took me back all those years. You never forget it.’

They were sitting in the room that overlooked the pool. Dad had taken his pills, and now he was relaxing. Nathan sat next to him. He could hear the au pair girl washing dishes, the mutter of Dad’s radio. It was all so familiar and yet, at the same time, it was utterly remote.

‘When I arrived last night,’ he said, ‘all the lights were on.’

‘Were they?’ Dad was staring at the blank wall above the TV. ‘It must’ve been Helga. She’s new, you see. I haven’t trained her yet.’ He looked at Nathan. ‘Have you been eating properly?’ And then, before Nathan could answer, ‘You look thin to me.’

It was always the same when he went home: Dad didn’t stop talking until his voice hurt.

That morning Dad told his favourite story again, the story of his drive along the coast with Kay, only this time he took it one stage further, down from the cliffs and into the house. It had been lying empty for months, he said. It was almost derelict. A leaking roof, cobwebs slung across the rooms like hammocks, moss growing on the walls. People had broken in too. The downstairs was inches deep in sherry bottles, newspapers, strange men’s shoes, and someone must’ve lit a fire in the kitchen because there was a big black patch on the floor, as if a rocket had taken off. Later that day he found a letter for Kay’s mother lying in the hall. The address on the envelope was ‘Viviente’, 7729 Mahogany Drive, Moon Beach. ‘Viviente’ used to be the name of the house, Kay told him. It meant ‘full of life’.

‘And you know what?’ Dad turned to Nathan. ‘It was almost a miracle, really. The week after we moved in, we discovered she was pregnant. With you.’

‘I never knew that,’ Nathan said.

‘Well, there you are. You learned something.’ Dad sat back, looking pleased with himself.

Nathan smiled. It was no wonder that Dad went back over that day so often, especially in the light of present circumstances. He was returning to a world that had been kind to him, a past he could be sure of. His love for Kay was one love that had never spoiled. It was over, yes, but it would never end.

In the afternoon Nathan drove to Georgia’s. She had two rooms above a hardware store in Venus. The place was littered, as Georgia’s places always were, with science fiction, jewellery, sunglasses, invitations, tapes. From the window you could see one thin strip of blue between the houses opposite; her view of the harbour. She made coffee in a dented silver pot and served it in dark-green cups with gold rims and gold handles, cups she’d stolen from home. ‘They were Grandma’s, I think,’ she said. ‘You know, before she went mad.’ She was so jittery at seeing him, she couldn’t keep still. Everything he said, she talked over the end of it. ‘I think I’ll roll a joint,’ she said. ‘Might slow me down.’ She spread her materials on the floor, her legs tucked under her, her tongue stuck to the centre of her top lip. He remembered her painting on brown paper when it rained. It was the same look. It took her so long to roll the joint, she’d slowed down before she even put a match to it.

There was some party they had to go to. As the taxi jolted through the streets of Butterfield, she linked her arm through his and kissed him. ‘You’ve been away so long, I almost forgot what you smelt like.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘No, it’s good. It’s like,’ and she had to smell him again, to remind herself, ‘it’s like fruit.’

Smiling, he stroked her hair. In the three years since he’d last seen her she’d grown it halfway down her back.

‘Do you think Dad’s all right?’ he asked her.

She frowned. ‘It’s hard to tell. All he ever says when I go and see him is, why do have to wear all that stuff on your face, why can’t you be natural?’

He laughed.

She rested her cheek against his shoulder. ‘You know what I’d like?’ ‘What?’

‘I’d like to be your brother.’

He smiled. ‘Sister isn’t enough?’

‘That’s different.’

‘What’s different about it?’

‘Brothers tell each other everything.’ She nodded to herself. ‘Everything.’ And her dark eyes glittered and she ran her tongue over her lips, and then she said, ‘How about it?’

‘Nobody’ll understand.’

‘They never do, do they?’ She smiled up at him. ‘Give me something.’

He stared at her. They ran on parallel tracks, he knew that, but some nights, especially nights like this, she drew ahead of him.

‘You have to give me something,’ she explained. ‘To make it official.’

He unfastened the woven leather bracelet from around his wrist. She watched, eyes wide, as if he was performing magic. He reached into his pocket and took out a pen. On the inside of the bracelet he wrote, ‘To George, my brother for forty years.’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Put it on.’

She looked at it. ‘Is it special?’

‘It’s very special.’ He told her about the woman with the flute. He told her what he’d said to the woman and how stupid he’d felt. He told her that the bracelet had the woman’s music in it, and sometimes, if you waited for rain and then listened very carefully, you could just hear it, very faintly, like someone playing in the distance.

‘I don’t know.’ Georgia was looking at the bracelet the same way she used to look at the hill when she was five, she was in awe of it, it might be too strong for her. ‘Maybe it’s too special.’

‘Some things there comes a time when they have to go to someone else.’ It sounded exactly like something that India-May might have said. She must be rubbing off on him.

‘You wrote something on it, didn’t you?’

He nodded.

She read the words, then looked at him. ‘Why forty?’

‘It was the most I could imagine.’ He fastened the bracelet on for her. She sat back, looking down at it. Then, suddenly, she leaned forwards again and asked the driver to stop. ‘I’ve just got to get something,’ she told him. ‘I won’t be long.’

Nathan watched her run into a supermarket. Moments later she was out again. She didn’t seem to be carrying anything. She slid into the car and slammed the door. ‘OK, go,’ she said to the driver. ‘Go.’

When they’d turned the corner, she pulled out a bottle of champagne from under her coat. ‘I stole it,’ she said. She took off the wire that held the cork in position and put the bottle beside her, then she set to work. In five minutes she’d fashioned a ring out of the wire. She slipped it over his finger. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now we’re brothers.’ She glanced at the bottle thoughtfully. ‘I only stole it for the wire,’ she said, ‘but now we’ve got it I suppose we might as well drink it.’

They’d almost reached the place where the party was, but she told the driver to keep going. ‘Just drive around,’ she said. ‘Take us back in twenty minutes.’

They didn’t arrive at the party until they’d finished the bottle. They were both drunker than they’d been for years. She had a bracelet and he had a ring. They’d missed each other so much. The cab fare was thirty-three dollars.

The next morning Dad woke him at eight. ‘You were naughty last night,’ he said. ‘You woke me up.’

‘Did I?’ Nathan said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘It was your door. It made a noise.’

‘Sorry, Dad.’

‘You were very late.’

‘I know. I went to a party with Georgia.’

Dad sighed. He couldn’t understand why anyone went to parties. He even hated the word ‘party’. It was almost as bad as the word ‘hospital’. In his head you probably went straight from one to the other.

‘Don’t worry,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m staying in tonight.’

That evening Dad opened a bottle of wine. As a rule he only drank one glass, but that night he drank three, and when he noticed the full moon in the window he became excited, almost too much white in his eyes and a bulb of spit shining on his front teeth. He watched the moon rise through his binoculars. After a while he offered them to Nathan. ‘Do you want a look?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘Maybe later. When it’s higher.’

‘It’s so clear. You can even see the holes.’

The holes. It was the kind of thing a child might say. Rona, for instance. Yes, Rona might easily have said something like that. He looked at Dad, but Dad was unaware. Under the moon’s influence his mind had flown giddily on, like a witch straddling a broomstick. Here. He was turning again. With something else.

‘Did I ever tell you about Harriet and the spaceship? No? It was the strangest thing.’

Nathan could only stare. He hadn’t expected to hear her name mentioned at all. It had to be the wine. The wine and the excitement of having someone in the house to talk to.

‘I was down here one night, it was about nine, and there was a knock at the door. It was Harriet. She was wearing a dressing-gown, but it was hanging open, and underneath she only had a négligé on, one of those flimsy things, I could see everything. She said she was frightened. I asked her why. She said she’d seen a spaceship and it had frightened her.’

‘A spaceship?’ Nathan said.

‘That’s what I said. “A spaceship?” I said. “Where?” She said she’d seen it in her window. Her curtains were open and it went across her window in the sky. “Did it go fast or slow?” I said. “Slow,” she said. I asked her to show me where she’d seen it. She went to the window, that window,’ and he pointed to the french windows that led out on to the terrace. ‘We stood over there and looked for it. Of course there was nothing. We were standing very close, and I got the feeling that if I opened my arms she’d come inside. I didn’t know what she wanted. Me to kiss her or what. Anyway I put my arm round her. After a while I asked her whether she was all right and she said yes. Then she went back to bed.’ He sipped at his wine again, then put it down on the arm of his chair and, keeping a finger and thumb on the stem, twisted it one way, then the other. ‘At the time I thought it was so, I don’t know, romantic. Now, well. It seems so obvious.’ His excitement had gone. Now there was only bitterness. His binoculars lay abandoned on the floor.

Two nights later, on the train, Nathan remembered the last fragments of that conversation. His vain attempt to win Dad’s mood back.

‘It sounds romantic to me.’

Dad shook his head so violently, he might almost have been in pain. ‘I should never have trusted her.’

Like the hospital, Harriet had cut something out of him. He’d been exploited, hoodwinked, lied to. The whole thing had been an elaborate deception. He’d trusted for the last time. There’d be nobody else now. Nobody. He’d gathered his life around him like a cloak in which there was only room enough for one.

On Nathan’s last morning they’d driven down to the supermarket together. When they returned, there was the usual ritual of putting the shopping away. Dad squatted on the pantry floor and Nathan stood behind him, handing him the groceries.

‘You won’t be able to help me again,’ Dad said. ‘Not till the next time you come, anyway, and that might not be for ages.’

Nathan felt the guilt rise into his throat, bitter as some half-digested thing.

‘Hold on,’ came Dad’s voice from inside the pantry, ‘I’ve just got to clear a space.’ The shifting of packets and tins, and then a silence. Then a soft sound, like a gasp or a sigh.

‘What is it, Dad?’

Still squatting, Dad turned round. There was a block of raw jelly lying in the palm of his hand. The packet had been ripped open and a small bite was missing from one corner. You could see the teethmarks.

‘Rona,’ Nathan said, and Dad nodded.

She must’ve sneaked into the pantry one day when nobody was looking and taken a bite out of that jelly. Orange flavour had always been her favourite. Nathan looked from the jelly on Dad’s hand to Dad’s face, and saw the tears in his eyes.

Now, as the train swayed up the coast, there were tears in his own eyes too. He didn’t want anyone to see so he cupped his hand to the window and looked out. The tracks ran alongside the ocean here. He saw a pale strip of sand. The ocean heaving, unlit. No moon tonight. Tight in his hand he held the silver coin that Dad had given him at the front door. It was the same coin that Dad always gave him, every time he went away. It was just a small coin, worth practically nothing.

Worth everything.

You, Me, and the Chairman

It had been a normal day. In the morning Creed had a meeting with a city bank. He lunched with the police commissioner at a fish restaurant in Torch Bay. After lunch he spent half an hour with McGowan in an outdoor café by the river. Then, during the afternoon he put in a personal appearance at three of the funeral parlours that he’d recently acquired for the company as part of his new expansion programme. By late afternoon the sky was grey and the air seemed hard to breathe. As they left the northern suburbs, the car began to tremble in Jed’s hands. He touched his foot to the brake and slowed to about thirty.

Creed slid the window open. ‘Something wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jed said.

Then the streetlights began to sway. Dreamily, like charmed snakes.

‘Earthquake,’ Creed said.

They were on a raised section of the Ring, the road that acted as the circumference of downtown, and all Jed could see was freeway, sky, and rows of swaying grey poles. He wanted to get back down to ground-level.

Then it was over. Less than six on the Richter scale, he found out later, only a tremor, really, but it was enough to change Creed’s mind about returning to the office. He asked to be driven home instead.

Creed stood on the sidewalk outside the Palace Hotel. Jed watched him in the wing mirror, watched him without seeming to. Creed was looking into the sky as if scanning for omens.

Jed shivered. He couldn’t get that earthquake out of his blood. He kept seeing the streetlights again, those streetlights trembling, as if the whole world was scared. ‘Do you need me again today?’ he said. He hoped the answer was no. He wanted to go home and lie down.

Creed’s head turned slowly on his neck. Every movement seemed to be performed in a trance that day. Death had been and gone, but it was still in the air, like static. ‘I want you back here at ten. There’s something we’ve got to discuss.’

McGowan opened the apartment door that night when Jed buzzed. ‘Weird day,’ he said. He was gloating. It was going to get weirder, that was what he meant.

Jed’s eyes flicked round the lounge. He half expected to see some naked tourist in the corner, bound and gagged. McGowan closed the door and slipped a small glass vial into Jed’s hand. ‘It’s going to be a long night,’ he said, and he turned to Creed, who had just walked into the room, and smiled.

Jed glanced round the room again. Zebra walls, curtains drawn across the windows like a second night sky, carpet the colour of fresh blood. None of this was strange to him, and yet he sensed something different. A heightened atmosphere, an air of ceremony. The skin seemed looser on Creed’s face. Some kind of decision had been reached.

He’d known he was going to be tested, and he’d prepared himself. Mitch had given him the number of a guy called Turner. Turner worked in a security systems retail outlet on Rocket Boulevard. Jed had dropped into the store late one Saturday afternoon.

‘I’m doing a bit of surveillance,’ he told Turner. ‘Mitch said you might be able to help.’

Turner listened to Jed’s requirements, then he led Jed to a glass display case. ‘This is what you need.’ He unlocked the case and lifted out what looked like a Walkman with a small black box attached. A ballpoint pen slid into a hole in the box. ‘We call it the pen recorder,’ Turner said. ‘You take the pen out and it automatically activates the recording mechanism.’ He demonstrated. ‘Put it back again, and it deactivates the mechanism. It’s simple.’

‘How much?’ Jed asked.

‘Fifteen hundred,’ Turner said, ‘but since you’re a friend of Mitch’s.’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘I could do it for thirteen.’

Jed nodded. It was still expensive, but he couldn’t afford not to take it. Turner showed him how to wire himself up. The recorder slotted neatly into his jacket pocket. The mike clipped to the inside of his cuff. When Jed walked into Creed’s apartment that night he was, in Turner’s language, ‘live’.

He wanted to stay straight, but that small glass vial was always being pressed into his hand, it seemed bottomless, the hours passed and they never reached the end. They were everywhere that night. The Bar Necropolis. The Jupiter casino. A private party in some high-rise apartment block; looking down into the city from the forty-second floor, it was like being inside a radio, one of those old valve radios, and Jed almost told Creed what he thought, he almost blurted something Creed wouldn’t even have understood, You must’ve had radios thrown away some time, didn’t you? but the rush blew over and he was still staring down into the forest of lit buildings and he still hadn’t spoken. Another bar, further west, in Omega. It was like that game where you were blindfolded and spun round, and then you had to try and touch someone, Creed and the Skull, they were close one moment, then they were dancing out of reach, and nothing would sound like anything when he played it back, it would sound like interference, nonsense, silence, but he stayed with it, trips to the bathroom to sluice his nose and throat, more trips to replace the tapes, because he sensed they were leading up to something, there was something at the end of this rainbow of places, not gold but something.

At three in the morning everything suddenly moved back. A clearing in his head, a sudden loss of sound. It was a club. They were sitting at a round table. A candle in a red glass. Drinks. The faces of devils, all empty eyes and bright teeth. Creed was drinking water. He always drank the same brand. Drained from a glacier. Sodium-free. McGowan was talking. His words emerged from silence, as if they were the first words of the evening. Jed stared at McGowan’s face as it tilted and leered, all blocks of colour and deep shadows. Jed listened hard.

‘We pick them up,’ the Skull was saying, ‘they’re guys with no links, like on the pier or down in the meat streets, they’re always suckers for a few lines and a limousine. We pick them up, we take them somewhere, then we turn them blue. There’s a guy we know, works in the morgue, he gets the delivery. Few hours later he calls, we’re the funeral parlour, right? he’s recommended us, we do the honours, bury them,’ and his mouth opened like a grave, you could fall into that mouth for ever and ever, amen, and all those crooked grey teeth of his, no names that you could see, no names or dates, just blank, so nobody could find you, nobody could visit, nobody could leave flowers. ‘I mean, if you’re going to die you want a decent burial, stands to reason, doesn’t it, and who better to give you a decent burial,’ he said, ‘than the Paradise Corporation. You, me,’ and he levelled a hand at Creed, ‘and the chairman.’

Creed put his glass of water down. ‘Skull,’ he said, ‘just shut up, will you?’

That vial again. Some amyl too, which blew Jed’s head up like a mushroom cloud. In the distance, in a big gilt cage, he could see nude bodies gluing and ungluing, the sticky rhythmic contact of flesh. Male or female, he couldn’t tell. Did it matter? Flesh of some kind. Tourists, maybe. Kill them later. His vision shrank. Their table again. McGowan was running on about his gun collection.

It was after four when they reached the Palace. McGowan vanished with a couple they’d brought home in the car. A buzzing started up. Some kind of aid. That psychopath. Jed looked across at Creed and saw that Creed was already staring at him. Jed didn’t flinch. He remembered what Sharon had said about him, remembered the chill in his eyes. Eyes that’ve killed. He never blinks. It’s like those lizards.

‘You remember what you said about loyalty?’

Jed snapped back at the sound of Creed’s voice. ‘About it being silence?’

Creed nodded.

‘I remember.’

‘It’s kind of passive, silence,’ Creed said, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Well,’ Jed said, ‘you don’t do anything.’

‘That’s what I mean. So would you go further? Do something?’

There could be no hesitation here. ‘Yes.’

‘Make yourself comfortable, Jed. Take your jacket off.’

Jed’s stomach lurched. Had Creed suspected? ‘No, it’s all right. I think I’ll keep it on.’

‘What’s wrong? You cold?’

Sharon’s words. In Creed’s mouth. Did he have another virginity to lose? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just a bit.’

Imagine if he had to take his jacket off. All his insurance would be gone. But Creed had turned away and Jed breathed easier.

‘Do you know who talked to the papers?’ Creed said.

Jed shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘It was your friend,’ Creed said. ‘Your old buddy.’

Jed felt a trap closing. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Vasco Gorelli,’ Creed said. ‘It was Vasco Gorelli talked to the papers.’

‘How do you know?’

Creed traced the outline of his drink with one finger. ‘I put a couple of new vultures on it. You know what those new vultures are like. Keen isn’t the word. They get right down to the bones of things. They tear out the truth. Blood, guts, organs, the lot.’ He paused. ‘Gorelli said he was loyal,’ and he looked across at Jed and his eyes glittered.

Curiously it was Vasco’s advice that Jed remembered now. Be single-pointed. No grey areas. ‘He sold you out.’

‘He lost his nerve,’ Creed said. ‘But you,’ again that glitter in his eyes, ‘you’d do anything for me.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘You’d lie.’

Jed thought of that night at Mitch’s and what he’d said to Sharon. ‘I already have.’

‘You’d steal.’

‘No problem.’ He knew what was coming now. It was like counting down to an explosion. He waited for the blast. He braced himself.

Creed’s hand reached carelessly for his glass of water. ‘You’d kill someone.’

This had to sound right. First a chuckle, then the words, ‘Why? You got someone in mind?’

Creed didn’t lift his eyes from his drink. He was watching that pure water the way you’d watch a fire.

The dread rose through Jed’s body. He had to speak before he drowned in it. But he remembered to use names. He was taping this. He needed names. ‘It’s Vasco,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

Still Creed watched his drink. ‘Too obvious.’

Jed tried to think. His mind kept curving away, the way a golf ball curves when it’s sliced or hooked. That beautiful, lazy parabola into somewhere you don’t want to be.

‘Think sideways,’ Creed said. ‘I don’t want to kill Vasco, I just want him,’ and finally he raised his eyes and smiled, and the smile was almost benign. ‘I just want him to pay.’

Jed got it. ‘Vasco’s brother.’

Creed lifted his glass. ‘Congratulations.’

But Jed had to make sure. ‘You want me to kill Vasco’s brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How?’

‘Don’t you worry about that. It’s taken care of. It’s nice. Yes,’ and Creed leaned back in his chair, ‘we’re going to send Gorilla a little Christmas present.’

‘You’re going to send him his brother,’ Jed said, ‘dead.’

Creed smirked. ‘Something like that.’

Jed left the apartment at ten to six, the wheels still turning next to his heart. He couldn’t sleep now. He took the service elevator down to the parking-lot and got into his car. As he drove across Moon River Bridge, the day rose over the estuary, the colours you find in the skin of fish: brown and pink and palest blue. He stopped the car at the Baker Park end. Leaving the engine running, he went and leaned on the railings. The metal cool against his palms, his heart still pummelling, he drew the fresh dawn air into his lungs. The wind had blown the surface of the river into streaky lines, stretchmarks on the water’s tired skin. Gulls picked at the mudbanks where once he’d searched for jewellery. He heard a voice call Vasco’s name. It was Vasco’s brother, Francis. The boy behind the door. He turned to face the ocean.

Just before he left, Creed had given him the date. Next Wednesday. Exactly a week from now. And as he leaned against the railings he suddenly tasted it, the moment Creed had planned for him, the moment he’d always longed for, dreaded now, still longed for, and it was burnt sugar, sweet and caustic, on his tongue, it was like the flight of a bird across a window, it was there and it was gone, he couldn’t dwell on it, he couldn’t let the terror in, all he knew was what it would do for him, he knew that it would give him membership, he’d be past the sliding sheet of glass, he’d finally belong.

During the next week he concentrated on his job to the exclusion of all else. He was silent, deferential, precise — the perfect chauffeur. He didn’t need to wire himself. There was nothing being said, nothing to record. This was empty time. He felt close to Creed. Superimposed on him, somehow. Bound. He thought he recognised in Creed qualities that he had himself: the ability to wait and to charge the act of waiting with the current of anticipation, to check and double-check, so that when the waiting was over everything would go like clockwork. He knew that, if he ever told Creed the story of the radios, Creed would understand. It might even be something that Creed already understood, that he’d divined on their first meeting in the Mortlake office. It was something they recognised in each other and shared. It made them, Jed thought with satisfaction, extremely dangerous enemies.

Wednesday came around. When Creed called, Jed was watching a news report about a vulture who’d just been arrested on a murder charge. Apparently he’d brought the corpse in and then tried to claim commission on it.

‘It’s the big night,’ Creed said.

Jed waited.

‘There’s a warehouse in Mangrove. United Paper Products.’ He gave Jed the address. ‘Leave the limousine there. Be back here at nine-thirty. Under the building. We’ll be using your car.’

Jed wondered why Creed was dispensing with the limousine. Too conspicuous, he supposed. And, now he thought about it, he was glad. Using the Chrysler would be to his advantage. No glass partition, much less chance of Creed noticing anything unusual. Jed spent most of the afternoon in the parking-lot, wiring up the back seat.

At nine o’clock he drove to the gas station two blocks south of the hotel. He checked the tyres and the oil, and filled the tank. When he returned to the parking-lot, it was nine-twenty-five. Creed and McGowan were already waiting in front of the elevator doors. McGowan wore the faded blue overalls of a city sanitation man. He was holding a long canvas bag and a cardboard box.

Jed opened the door as usual, even though it was his own car. Habit. He watched McGowan lay the bag flat on the floor.

‘What’s in there?’ he asked.

McGowan grinned. ‘Tools.’

In the car Creed leaned forwards. ‘Gorelli’s brother lives in Los Ilusiones. Housing project on North East 27th. Lives with his girlfriend. You’re going to knock on his door and you’re going to bring him outside and you’re going to put him in the car.’

McGowan handed him a gun. ‘You might need this,’ he said, ‘to persuade him with.’

Jed put the gun in his jacket pocket. Though he hadn’t really looked at it, he was sure it was the same one that had been forced into the tourist’s mouth.

‘Then what happens?’ he said.

‘Then what happens is, we take him for a little ride out to the Crumbles.’ Creed paused. ‘You got that?’

Jed nodded.

He moved off. Past the security guard, up the ramp, out on to the dim street. It was 89 degrees. Clouds hung over the city. There were more of them than there used to be, he was sure of it. It was all the burning that was going on. Sea burials were as popular as ever, but they weren’t cheap. The poor were still being burned. And some of the crematoria were cutting corners. There’d been a thing about it in the paper. They were burning at temperatures of less than 1300 degrees, which meant that dioxyns were being released into the air. Sometimes he looked at the clouds and wondered what percentage ashes they were. Sometimes he wondered how many dead people there were to a cloud. How many dead people came down with the rain.

He was driving at a steady thirty-five. Down First, left along G, right into Central. They passed the viewing theatre. Another mystery corpse: YOUR LAST CHANCE TO IDENTIFY! $10 °COULD BE YOURS! Someone’s forgotten Grandma. Some runaway. Some drunk. More smoke for the chimneys. More clouds for the sky.

His throat was dry and he’d forgotten to buy any candy.

It was the big night.

They reached Los Ilusiones in less than half an hour. Creed directed him to a narrow sidestreet. He killed the engine and the lights. Latin music took over. Somebody’s radio.

Los Ilusiones was 99 per cent ghetto. It was bounded by Moon River in the east, and the suburbs of Mortlake and Rialto in the west and south respectively. It had pretty much the same kind of reputation as Rialto, only more so. A high-octane mix of racial minorities, a flair for riots and looting. Taxi-drivers wouldn’t take you there. The only whites in the area were winos and dealers, and they mostly ended up in the river. Jed wanted this part over with, and quick.

Creed leaned forwards and pointed through the windshield. ‘That’s the building.’

It was a five-storey apartment block built in a C-shape. The gap in the C faced the street. Concrete balconies ran the length of each floor. There was a courtyard below, lit by spotlights.

‘Looks like a fucking jail,’ came McGowan’s voice from the back.

‘It’s number 22,’ Creed said. ‘Second floor.’

‘You know which side?’ Jed asked him.

‘Take the stairs on the left.’

Jed stepped out of the car. He was only aware of two things now. The weight of the gun in his jacket pocket and the night air, thicker here than in the city centre, it was further from the ocean, you sometimes felt you couldn’t breathe until you found your way to the end of the land. He crossed the street. It was bright in the courtyard. Five cars. A burned-out motorbike. A drain. He turned left, walked close to the edge of the building. He sensed he was being watched, one of the balconies above, but he didn’t look up. He noticed the cars. A Mercedes. A Cadillac. This was cheap city housing, and cars like that could only mean one thing. Two things. Armed robbery and drugs. He suddenly felt he was facing impossible odds.

Once he reached the stairs he felt safer. The walls were brick low down, then pale-blue and scarred with graffiti: SEX and a phone number. He smelt meat frying, then urine, then washing powder. On the second floor he turned left. The first door he came to had lost its number. He swore under his breath. The second door said 20. That was good. It meant that number 22 would be close to the stairs. He could still feel eyes on him, they were like fingers, they poked him in the ribs, the shoulderblades, the neck, it was hard not looking round. He reached number 22 and knocked with the flap of the mailbox. He took the gun out of his pocket and held it at waist-level. That way it would be invisible to anyone watching from the other side of the building. The door opened. A man in a white vest, grey flannel pants. Ears like Vasco’s. Less fat on him, though. No rings.

Jed moved the gun one inch to the left and back again. ‘Out,’ he said. ‘Right now.’

Gorelli blinked. ‘What?’

‘You’re leaving.’ Jed grabbed Gorelli by the upper arm and spun him on to the balcony.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a face appear in the corridor. A girl in a yellow dress. Hands in the air beside her ears. Lives with his girlfriend. Girlfriend was about to scream. He slammed the door shut and shoved Gorelli along the balcony towards the stairs.

Gorelli turned. ‘What about my shoes?’

Jed shoved him again. ‘Keep moving,’ he said, ‘or I’ll blow your fucking kidneys out.’

They reached the ground and the screaming began.

‘Francisco! Francisco!’

The girl was swaying on the balcony above. Her yellow dress, her hands searching her black hair. For lice, Jed thought. Lice like Gorelli. His loyalty had come in a rush, like a drug, he had no doubts about which side he was on. They were all playing by the same rules. Gorelli, he’d won for a while, but now he was losing, and he was losing big. Jed had to hate him. It was the only way.

When Gorelli turned his face up to the balcony, Jed hit him on the shoulder with the gun. Gorelli yelped. His arm shrank, hung against his ribs. The girl on the balcony was still swaying, screaming. You want to do something about it, Jed thought, why don’t you jump?

He shoved Gorelli against the Chrysler with his gun and pulled the rear door open. He pushed Gorelli in. McGowan was still sitting in the back, Creed had moved into the front. Jed handed the gun to McGowan and climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘Nice work,’ Creed said. ‘Now drive.’

Jed let the clutch out and the Chrysler took off. He swung right and took a bite out of the kerb. The car rocked, straightened up. He beat a red light and turned right again, on to the parkway that led along the river to the bridge.

‘The Crumbles, right?’ he said.

‘Yeah, and slow down,’ Creed said. ‘We don’t want people smelling something funny.’

Jed slowed to thirty. The lights of Rialto slid by on the right. On the left: the boatyards, wire-mesh fences, metal gates. Then a stone parapet and bright white globes on poles like giant pearl hat-pins. The oily swell of the river beyond.

‘Who are you?’ Gorelli said.

‘You don’t know who we are?’ McGowan said. And then to Creed and Jed, ‘He doesn’t know who we are.’

‘He doesn’t need to know,’ Creed said. ‘Where he’s going he doesn’t need to know anything.’

‘Nothing,’ McGowan said, ‘nothing at all,’ and Jed could hear the cocaine in his laughter.

Jed glanced at Gorelli’s face in the mirror. It was grey, and strangely motionless, as if there’d been a sudden rush of concrete to his head.

‘I don’t understand,’ Gorelli said.

‘Ah,’ Jed said, ‘he doesn’t understand.’

‘I think he’s going to start crying,’ McGowan said. ‘Anyone got a Kleenex?’

Jed laughed.

‘Look,’ Gorelli said, ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement here.’

‘Arrangement?’ McGowan said. ‘What arrangement?’

‘We’ve already made all the arrangements,’ Creed said. ‘We’re funeral directors.’

Gorelli lunged for the door, but it was locked. McGowan clubbed him with the butt of the gun. Blood bloomed on Gorelli’s head, a dark rose appearing from nowhere, a magician’s trick. He slumped back in the seat.

‘Any time you want a headache,’ McGowan said, ‘Doctor.’

Creed turned to Jed. ‘Take the old coast road. Less traffic out there.’

Jed left the expressway at the Baker Park exit and cut down through houses of clapperboard and dull red brick. The old coast road ran parallel to the shoreline. All shale and weeds and winds that picked up speed as they swooped in off the ocean, this strip of barren land prepared you for the final desolation of the Crumbles. Baker Park faded. They passed a used-car lot, a twenty-four-hour café, a gas station, then darkness closed round the Chrysler like a fist.

After driving for about ten minutes Jed looked away to the right. The old gravel mine crouched against the sky. So still, so derelict, yet it looked capable of sudden movement. All those metal limbs and struts, all those tense right-angles. It could jump, land up fifteen miles away. It could carry fear with it, like disease. Some dead things seem more horribly alive.

Creed told him to take a right turn, down a narrow track that led towards the ocean. A gate barred the way. A notice hung on the gate and he read the words in the beam of the headlamps: DANGER. NO ENTRY WITHOUT AUTHORISATION.

‘Don’t worry,’ Creed said. ‘It isn’t locked.’

Jed got out of the car and opened the gate. He thought of the children buried alive at the bottom of the mineshafts. He heard the click of small bones.

The track beyond the gate was all potholes and ruts. He nursed the car along in low gear. After half a mile Creed told him to stop. He switched the lights and engine off. Wind pushed at the car with spread fingers, whispered across the hood.

Creed inserted his voice gently into the silence. ‘Get him out of the car.’

They walked Gorelli across the stones to the edge of a gravel pit. The moon dipped out of a cloud, and Jed shuddered. The walls of the pit were almost sheer, falling fifty feet to smooth, dull water that was jagged at the edges, like the top of a tin can. He looked into Gorelli’s face, the face he’d never seen, the face he’d only heard, and so many years ago. Gorelli was standing with his arms by his sides. He was looking at the ground, he seemed to be concentrating; he might’ve been trying to remember something. Then the moon went and Jed’s vision shut down. Then Creed’s voice:

‘Give him the gun.’

McGowan handed the gun to Jed. A sliver of white that must’ve been teeth. McGowan grinning.

‘I can’t see,’ Jed said.

Creed’s voice again: ‘Wait for the moon.’

He waited. The night slowed down. Time like a clock with its hands tied. He felt the water in the pit rise up to meet him. Rise up all silver, spill across the land. Into the hands of the dead, the clawing hands and shifting bones. Into their hands and never to return. The moon came on. He raised the gun and fired twice. So loud suddenly, so bright. A choir in his ears, a furnace in his eyes. When he looked again he saw a black shape on the ground, another black shape crouching over it.

He heard McGowan’s voice: ‘He’s dead.’ Then Creed’s: ‘Get the stuff.’

Jed lowered his arm.

McGowan walked to the car and returned with the long canvas bag and the cardboard box. He unzipped the bag and lifted out a chainsaw. A glimmer of silver as moonlight snagged on the serrated blade. Like holly, Jed thought. In two weeks it’d be Christmas.

When the motor started, distant and ragged, Jed looked away. The wind blew soft across his face. He was shivering. He’d never in his life felt colder. It wasn’t until Creed took his arm and he looked into those black eyes that he remembered where he was.

‘Throw the gun,’ Creed said.

He stared into those eyes.

‘The gun,’ Creed said. ‘Throw it.’

He pulled his arm back and hurled the gun towards the pit. He saw it drop out of sight below the lip. He didn’t hear it land. Creed held a tiny bottle under his nose and the world turned white. He gasped and shook his head.

‘Can you drive?’ Creed asked him.

Jed nodded. ‘I think so.’

When he climbed into the driver’s seat he saw that McGowan was already sitting in the back. The cardboard box sat next to him. Everything seemed so bland and ordinary now.

‘Where’s the rest?’ Jed said.

‘In the gravel pit,’ McGowan said. ‘With stones to hold it down.’

The clawing hands, the shifting bones.

Jed turned to Creed for solid ground. ‘Where now?’

‘The paper warehouse. Change cars.’

When they reached the warehouse, he opened the door for Creed and McGowan as usual. They climbed out and stood still. He moved towards the Mercedes, and then stopped and looked round. Creed and McGowan hadn’t moved. The canvas bag and the cardboard box stood on the concrete by their feet. He could see the blood on McGowan’s clothes.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘You’re not coming with us,’ Creed said.

‘I don’t understand.’ The words echoed. He wished he hadn’t said that. But it was too late.

‘You killed someone,’ McGowan said. ‘You best leave town.’

Creed walked towards him and handed him an envelope. ‘It’s the going rate.’

The going rate. Jed stared at the envelope.

‘But,’ how could he put this? ‘I thought we —’

‘We did,’ Creed said, ‘but it’s over.’

McGowan was smirking.

Jed walked to the door of the warehouse. He stared up into the sky, his vision pulsing. The stars floated free like buoys cut loose on a dark sea. No markings any more, no guidelines. Adrift.

He saw the streetlights again. It seemed as if they were laughing now. Rows and rows of streetlights shaking with laughter. It’s funny, he thought, it’s just funny, and he thought it hard to keep the fear and rage away.

A hand on his shoulder. A glove. ‘I’m asking you to do something for me. It’s the hardest thing I could ask you to do.’ A slight pressure from the hand. ‘I think you can do it.’

McGowan still smirking.

Lies. Not even clever. Not even beautiful. He felt the veins swell in his head. And cried, ‘Why me?’

That soothing voice again. ‘There was nobody else. Nobody we could trust. Nobody,’ a pause, ‘close enough.’

‘What about,’ and Jed turned and pointed at McGowan, ‘what about him?’

A sad smile on Creed’s face.

‘You used me,’ Jed said.

The same sad smile. ‘You’d better leave now.’

‘You, me, and the chairman.’ Jed’s lip curled. ‘Like fuck.’

McGowan took a step forwards.

‘You do this all the time, don’t you?’ Jed said. ‘Pick people up and throw them away.’

He drew his arm back and hurled the envelope at Creed. Money showered through the yellow air. One note paused on Creed’s shoulder, then launched itself again, one long swoop sideways, a flip, and it was lying on the ground.

McGowan positioned himself between Jed and Creed. ‘You better get going.’

Creed stood with his gloved hands clasped behind his back. There was no warmth left in his face. He could switch it on and off like central heating.

‘And don’t come back,’ McGowan said, ‘not ever.’

‘What if I do?’

McGowan took Jed by the arm and led him over to the cardboard box. He opened the flaps and reached inside. He pulled out a transparent bag and held it up in front of Jed’s eyes. Gorelli’s face stared at Jed through the bloodstained plastic.

Jed pushed past him. He got into his car and switched the ignition on. Without glancing at the two men, he drove out of the warehouse, through the metal gates and back on to the street. He drove very calmly, the way he drove when he was working. He even indicated. He stopped at the Palace to collect a few things. It took about twenty minutes. By the time he left the apartment, it was raining. That soft sound on the rooftops and the grass, someone putting a finger to their lips.

Instead of driving west, towards the expressway, he doubled back, crossed the bridge again, and cut down into Baker Park. He passed a police car on the bridge. It was parked in the safety zone with its headlamps off. His heart surged. The murder was still so fresh in his head, he felt that anyone could smell it. Some cop’s lucky night. But the police car shrank in his rear-view mirror, and the lights stayed off.

He reached Sharon’s house and then he wasn’t sure. He drove past once, then he drove past again, going the other way. The last time he’d seen her she’d been drunk, they’d had a fight, he’d left her sprawling on the carpet. There was too much to explain to her, and nothing he could say. As he pulled away, the leaves on the trees shuddered and the rain began to fall so hard that it jumped back off the tarmac, turned to mist. He had to hunch over the wheel to see anything. It was almost three. He felt he had to speak to someone before he left for good. He thought of Mitch. Mitch was often awake till dawn. Mending his clocks and drinking beer. He couldn’t sleep when it was dark. Something to do with what he’d been through in some war.

When Jed drew up in the alley behind Mitch’s place, he saw an oil-lamp glowing in the kitchen window. He parked his car and walked in through the yard. He knocked on the back door. Then waited, shivering, as the rain tipped off the brim of his top hat and spattered on the ground. He had to knock twice more before Mitch heard and opened up.

Mitch stood under the light in a tartan shirt and jeans that hung off his buttocks. Jed had turned up without knowing what he was going to say, but now he knew.

‘I know it’s late, Mitch,’ he said, ‘but could you do me a tattoo?’

‘What’s wrong with tomorrow?’

‘I won’t be here.’ He saw Mitch hesitating. ‘It’s a pretty simple job,’ he said. ‘No dragons or anything. No fish.’

Mitch stepped back from the door. ‘You better come in.’

Jed followed him into the kitchen. He was still shivering.

‘Go sit by the fire,’ Mitch said. ‘I’ll get the stuff ready.’

Jed took off his hat and sat down by the fire.

Taped to the wall above the mantelpiece was a large-scale map of Moon Beach. Mitch knew the city better than anyone. Jed had seen a street in Westwood that was called Success Avenue, and he’d told Mitch about it. Mitch said there was a street called Failure running parallel. The next time Jed drove through Westwood he looked for Failure, but he couldn’t find it. He reported back to Mitch. ‘There’s no such street,’ he said. Mitch just looked at him. ‘Of course there isn’t,’ he said. ‘Who’d live on a street called Failure?’

Mitch returned. ‘So what do you want done?’

‘You got a pen and paper?’

‘Hold on.’ Mitch rummaged in a drawer. ‘Here.’

Jed scribbled seven numbers on the piece of paper. ‘I want these seven numbers,’ he told Mitch. ‘I want a gap between the second number and the third, and another gap between the third number and the other four.’

‘What’s it supposed to be?’

‘It’s my birthday.’

‘Today’s your birthday?’

Jed nodded.

‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thanks.’

Mitch didn’t ask any more questions. They moved to the tattoo parlour. Jed sat on the green plastic chair while Mitch selected the needles.

‘Blue all right?’

‘Blue’s fine.’

‘Where do you want it?’

‘Here.’ Jed pointed at the inside of his right wrist.

‘It’s more painful.’

‘That’s the idea.’ One small pain to hide the larger one.

Mitch switched on the needle-gun. A buzzing. McGowan and his tools. Zebra walls and all that talk of loyalty. Why hadn’t he seen through it? But then, how could he have seen through it? There hadn’t been any cracks.

Mitch began to talk. About his time with the Angels, about the day he met his old lady, about tattoos. This was unusual, he almost never talked while he was working, but maybe he sensed that Jed wanted the silence filled and knew that Jed couldn’t do it on his own. Jed wasn’t really listening. Odd words and phrases came to him but, like sticks dropped into rapids, they were quickly whisked away. Sometimes he felt himself wince and it was strange because he couldn’t tell whether it was the needle or his memory. In his head he was already driving through heavy rain to a life he couldn’t imagine.

Cats for Drowning

Nathan had been living at India-May’s for almost three years when Donald moved in. Donald was about forty-five, with short hairless arms and a belly that looked hard. His face had an unpleasant shine to it, the kind of shine you get on the walls of places where they’ve been cooking in cheap fat since for ever. He just showed up out of the blue one day while Nathan was working. He’d taken a taxi out to Baby Boy’s grave, and then he’d walked the rest of the way. ‘Five miles along a dirt track in his city shoes, can you imagine?’ India-May had that glazed look, as if she was describing a miracle, a miracle that she’d witnessed with her own eyes. The arrival of somebody new, perhaps it was always a miracle to her. Donald sat beside her, listening with a modesty that seemed sly. A bandage round his head, a cup of tea in his blunt hands, he looked like the only survivor of some great catastrophe, and Nathan could understand exactly why he’d been able to move India-May to tears and why he’d been given a room on the first floor, one of the large ones, for nothing.

Donald came from an industrial town about fifty miles down the coast. It was a town of factories and bars, its streets laid out on a grid pattern, its air a crude blend of oil, salt and gas. (Nathan had passed it once, and remembered a sky lit by ragged flames, torches held aloft by the refineries.) He’d been some kind of engineer. Fifteen years working for the same company. Then a merger, cutbacks at the plant, and he was out of a job. When he walked through the factory gates that afternoon he’d walked away from everything. The wife and kids, the mortgage loan, the car payments. Down the chute with the lot of it. He bought a bottle of brandy at the first liquor store he found and he began to drink. Those bottles, strange how they multiply. He’d drunk his way right from the north end of town to the south, one night in some woman’s house, one night in jail, one night on the porch of a church in the rain. Then he remembered a woman he’d met once on a train, she was singing hymns to the window, he’d been embarrassed at first, half her fringe was missing as if someone had taken a bite out of it, only he knew she’d done it because she caught him staring and laughed and said, ‘I always cut it when I’m loaded,’ and he remembered something about a house, and because there was nothing left to cling to, because it was the only piece of wreckage left afloat, he remembered how to get there too, it was either remember or die.

‘You don’t want to think about that now,’ India-May told him. ‘It was bad, but it’s over.’ She patted his hand. ‘It’s cats for drowning, Donald. Just cats for drowning.’

Donald nodded.

He was quiet to begin with, he just stayed in his room. For days this hush lay on the house like dust. But a change was in the air, a season was drawing to a close. Twilight left, as if he could smell the storm coming. Pete and Chrissie’s baby couldn’t keep its food down. Joan, the mad woman, stopped cooking.

The first time Nathan knew for certain that something wasn’t right was when Donald smashed him over the head with a can of beans. He’d come in after work and found two cans of baked beans in the cupboard. He hadn’t eaten all day, so he opened one of them and cooked it up. He didn’t think twice about it. One of the house rules was, nothing belongs to anyone. That was why India-May could handle being ripped off all the time. So he was sitting at the kitchen table eating his plate of beans when Donald walked in. Donald stood just behind him, that place where you can’t see someone unless you actually turn round, that place where it feels as if someone’s going to sink a pickaxe into the soft part of your skull, Donald stood behind him and took a deep breath, as if he was about to dive under a wave, and said, ‘Those are my beans.’

Nathan stopped eating and thought about it. But there was really nothing to say. Donald knew the rules, same as everyone else. As he began to eat again he heard Donald move towards the cupboard. The next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, half stunned, beans everywhere. It’s not stars you see. You’re too close to them to call them stars. It’s more like planets.

His head buzzed and sang as if power was being fed into it. He saw Donald standing over him, a can of beans in his hand. Those cans of beans, he thought, they’re not safe. Then he thought he could smell Donald’s feet. He wasn’t particularly surprised. Some people, all you need is one look at them and you just know their feet are going to smell.

‘Don’t ever,’ and Donald took another breath, through his mouth this time, as if he’d only surfaced for a moment, ‘don’t EVER eat my beans again.’

That was the first time Nathan knew that something wasn’t right.

He spoke to India-May about it. She explained that Donald was going through a difficult time, ‘We all have our difficult times, right?’ and Nathan would have to be patient with him. Patient? He couldn’t believe it. How many times can you sit in your chair and let someone smash you over the head with a can of beans? Nathan reckoned about once. Definitely about once was the limit. But he gave Donald another chance. And wished he hadn’t because, two weeks later, Donald was holding him up with a sawn-off shotgun for an hour and a half. Nobody had called Donald down to supper, that was the reason, and he was holding Nathan responsible.

‘Why me?’ Nathan asked.

‘There’s no one else here.’ Which may have been the reason, but also sounded like a threat.

‘What about India-May? It’s her house.’

Donald jammed the shotgun into the crook of bone under Nathan’s jaw. ‘Shut up.’

Nathan wondered if the gun was loaded. No way of telling. But even if it wasn’t, Donald could still hit him with it. He hoped Donald wasn’t going to do that. He still had the bruise from that can of beans.

‘Next time,’ Donald said, ‘you CALL me, you understand?’

Nathan didn’t want to move his chin. But it’s hard to say something without moving your chin.

‘YOU UNDERSTAND?’

‘Yes.’ Nathan managed to squeeze that one word through his clenched teeth.

He went to India-May again, and told her of his fears. Donald was trying to take over. Donald wanted an empire of his own, like some kind of Napoleon or something. Donald would use force. India-May was stoned that night. She thought Nathan was making it up. ‘Napoleon?’ she said, and laughed until she couldn’t see. She said she was glad Nathan had moved in. She said it made a real change to have a bit of humour round the place.

‘He held me up,’ Nathan said, ‘with a shotgun.’

‘A shotgun? Napoleon?’ And she was off again, tears pouring from her eyes.

He could get no sense out of her.

Donald’s son came to stay at weekends sometimes. The boy was ten, and slight for his age. Shy too. He’d stand in the doorway and watch Nathan tinkering with his bike and then, when Nathan looked round, he’d step back into the shadows. One Sunday afternoon, as Nathan was leaving the house, he came across Donald and the boy in the yard. Donald had one hand in the boy’s hair, and he was whipping the boy with a leather belt. There was blood on the back of the boy’s legs. Nathan stopped ten yards away. Suddenly the sun felt raw against his neck.

‘What’s going on, Donald?’

Donald didn’t even break his rhythm. ‘Little bastard,’ he said, ‘he deserves it.’ The sweat evenly distributed on his face, as if he’d been greased.

‘What did he do?’

Donald’s mouth swerved in his direction. ‘Is it time to eat?’

‘No.’

‘Then fuck off.’

That night Nathan went to India-May for the third time. ‘You’ve got to throw him out,’ he said. ‘You’ve simply got to.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Imagine what it’d do to him.’

Nathan tried to hold his anger down. ‘What it’d do to him?’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, India-May. What about what he’s doing to everybody else?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘I think you’re over-reacting.’

He walked out of the room and slammed the door. He imagined Donald listening at the top of the stairs. He saw the smirk on Donald’s glassy face. He walked until the farm was two small lights in the darkness. Somewhere down the hill Lumberjack began to bark. India-May had called him Lumberjack because his bark sounded just like someone sawing wood. She called him Jack for short. Suddenly his frustration with her turned to pain. She was putting her trust in the wrong people again. Her trusting Donald like this, it was lessening the value of her trust in him. It made it so much cheaper, worthless even. He wanted her to know the difference.

Out on the ridge that night he decided there was nothing for it. He’d have to take the matter into his own hands. He went and knocked on the door of Pete and Chrissie’s room. Pete opened the door. Chrissie was sitting on the bed, the baby’s head resting sideways on her shoulder, a bottle of Infant Suspension beside her. The baby was whimpering. The room smelt chalky and damp. Sour milk. Vomit.

‘How is he?’ Nathan asked.

Chrissie sighed. ‘The same.’

They talked about the baby’s health for a while.

‘It’s weird,’ Chrissie said, ‘but the moment that guy showed up, she got sick.’

‘Which guy?’ Nathan asked, though he knew. He just wanted everything to be clear, like in a court of law. This was, after all, the judgement of Donald.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘Donald.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and Joan suddenly stopped cooking.’

Chrissie’s eyes opened wide. ‘That’s right.’ She turned to Pete. ‘You remember, Pete?’

Pete nodded slowly. He adored her. He’d remember anything if she asked him to.

Nathan told them about the can of beans, the shotgun hold-up, the brutal thrashing in the back yard.

‘We didn’t know,’ Chrissie said.

‘I did,’ Pete said. ‘I saw him beating one of the dogs.’

That clinched it. They sat up late, trying to work out how to get rid of Donald. He wasn’t going to go peacefully, that was for sure.

One evening a friend of Pete’s called Tommy came round with a bottle of something. Tommy had been a marine. Pete told him about Donald. Tommy listened, nodding, as if it was a story he’d heard before. When Pete had finished, Tommy said, ‘There’s only one way to do it, and that’s kill him.’

Silence in the room except for the bottle emptying into Tommy’s throat. It was strange but, since they’d started talking about getting rid of Donald, the baby had quietened down. Now it was sleeping on the bed. Tommy wiped his mouth and handed the bottle to Nathan, who passed it straight to Pete. Tommy bared his teeth. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Listen,’ Nathan said, ‘maybe we can do this without making any mess. Maybe we can do it clean.’ Though he hadn’t sampled the contents of Tommy’s bottle, he felt drunk.

‘What the fuck you talking about, clean?’ Tommy said.

So Nathan told him.

One night they were all sitting round the same as usual, in the kitchen this time, Pete and Tommy and a friend of Tommy’s, they were sitting round drinking the whisky Tommy’s friend had brought over when they heard footsteps in the yard. They all watched the door as it opened and Donald’s face poked round the edge, and then they all looked at each other and they all thought the same thought: Now?

There was a moment of absolute stillness. Nathan thought of the shotgun locked under his chin; he’d held himself so rigid that night that he’d ached for three days afterwards. Only Donald was moving in the room — lighting his pipe, shaking a paper open.

That was when they jumped him.

Suddenly Donald was tied to his chair with the flex from the lamp, the plug still attached. Pete gagged Donald with an apron that had a picture of a spaniel on it. Tommy set fire to some of Donald’s hair by mistake. It must’ve been the pipe. They spent some time telling him what they thought of him. Tommy had to make it up, because he’d never met Donald before. It’s strange to see someone crying without using their mouth. It’s hard to watch. They turn red and the tears fall out. There’s hardly any noise. It’s like those dolls.

They stood Donald in the back of Tommy’s pick-up truck, then they climbed into the cab. It was a thirty-mile drive. They took the side roads. They didn’t want any cops pulling them over and asking them what they were doing with a man tied to a chair in the back of their truck. Once they had to stop at a red light, and they heard Donald whimpering. ‘They’re all cowards,’ Tommy said. ‘Deep down they’re all fucking cowards.’ Most of the time they couldn’t hear anything because of the engine.

Then it began to rain.

It was after midnight when they reached the place. The gates were open so they just drove right in. They got out of the truck. That smell of rotten meat, and the warm rain running over their heads and hands. Tommy shot the bolts on the tailgate and let it drop. The chair had toppled over with Donald still attached. His cheek pressed against the studded metal. One eye blinked as the rain splashed into it. He must’ve thought they were going to kill him, but that was why they didn’t have to. The fear was the same. Tommy peered upwards, through the darkness. The pyramid loomed above.

‘On top, you said.’

Nathan nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘Right.’

A dead dog lay close by. Three of its legs had been sawn off. Tommy’s friend stood over it. ‘Who’d do that to a dog?’ he said. ‘Who’d do that to a poor, defenceless dog?’

Tommy took him by the arm and led him to the chair. ‘Get the front.’ He turned to Pete. ‘You help him.’

Tommy and Nathan lifted the back and, between the four of them, they half-dragged, half-carried Donald to the top. Once there, they set him upright. Stood back, breathing hard. There was a curious silence, a moment when it seemed that something might be said. But nobody spoke. The wind moved the hair on Donald’s head.

They ran back down, huge crunching strides. Tried not to think what they were treading on. When they reached the bottom they automatically looked back. Donald was an inch high. Nathan nodded to himself. It was right. Donald had wanted to rule. Well, he could rule that pile of trash. He could be Pharaoh of that pyramid, a Pharaoh with a crown of flies.

Tommy’s friend shuffled in the dirt. ‘Think the rats’ll get him?’

Tommy laughed.

‘What about the gag?’ Tommy’s friend said. ‘Think we should’ve taken the gag off?’

‘They’ll find him tomorrow,’ Nathan said. But it was hours till tomorrow. There was plenty of time for Donald to think things over. Smell the smell of his own foul behaviour.

Tommy looked up at the pyramid, then out towards the ocean. ‘Some view he’ll have,’ he said.

Then they drove home.

The next morning India-May wanted to know where Donald had got to.

Nathan looked her in the eye. ‘He left.’

‘He left late last night,’ Pete said. ‘He didn’t want to disturb you.’

India-May looked from one to the other, colour creeping up her neck. ‘Where’s my chair?’

‘What chair?’ Pete said.

‘You know what chair.’

‘I’ll get you another one,’ Nathan said.

‘I didn’t ask you to get me another one, did I? I said, where is it?’ Nathan shrugged.

India-May turned and whirled across the kitchen. Her dress shrieked as it caught on the corner of the table and tore. ‘Whose house is this,’ she said, ‘that’s what I’d like to know,’ and slammed the door behind her.

But they did get her another chair, and put it in the old chair’s place. She didn’t thank them, but she did start using it, and perhaps that was all the thanks they could expect. She was using it a week later when Nathan walked in through the kitchen door. It was close to midnight and India-May was the only one up. She was making necklaces, which was a form of meditation for her, a method of forgetting. Coloured beads mingled with flecks of tobacco and grass on the surface of the table, and the air was draped with smoke that smelt as sweet as creosote. Lumberjack sprawled on the tiles at her feet, whining sofdy in his sleep like a damp log on a fire.

Nathan sat down.

She looked at him, her fingers threading the beads blind. She might’ve been calculating something. The amount of trust she had left, the days till the end of the world.

‘What’s new?’

‘I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving.’

She nodded. ‘I had a feeling you were going to say that.’

He told her it was like the moment when the tide stops coming in and starts going out again. It seems like nothing, but suddenly everything’s different. And the longer you wait, the clearer it becomes. It was a pretty lie.

But she was nodding. She understood this kind of talk. He’d almost learned it from her.

‘Where will you go?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. Somewhere further up the coast.’

‘You going to work on the beaches?’

‘I think so.’ He pushed a bead around on the end of his finger. ‘What could be better than saving people’s lives?’

She recognised her own line and smiled.

He knew how their voices would sound from above. The hum of a plucked string. Like warmth, if you could hear such a thing.

‘I wish —’

‘What?’

He wished he could explain about Donald. But he knew she’d cut him off. That’s old history, she’d say. That’s cats for drowning. In any case, at some deeper level, perhaps she already understood. And in the future would remember.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Lumberjack’s paw tapped the floor. Lumberjack was dreaming. Once, last fall, he’d walked Lumberjack to the pine forest in the next valley. Lumberjack had started barking and then, just as abruptly, stopped again, and in the silence he’d heard a tree come down. Lumberjack had looked up at him, as if for approval, his tongue dangling from his jaws. No wonder there were no trees left standing round the farm. Lumberjack had sawed them all down with his voice. And now he was dreaming, dreaming of some great forest stretching out in front of him …

India-May lit a joint. ‘When I first met you, in that bar, you were all cut out round the edges, like something out of a cereal packet that doesn’t stand up when you’ve made it.’ She touched the tip of her joint to the ashtray and smiled. ‘You seemed, I don’t know, kind of brave, somehow.’

This woman, she was so vague, so blind. But she could surprise you with moments of sharpness. She was like a needle in long grass, a knife in fog.

The next morning he wheeled his bike out of the barn and into the winter sunshine. Lumberjack lay panting in the dirt beside him while he changed the oil, checked the tyre-pressures, adjusted the tension of the chain. In an hour he was ready, his map taped to the gas tank, his few possessions strapped on the seat behind him. India-May came outside to wave goodbye. She seemed to be frowning, but it was probably just a bad hangover and the white sun in her eyes. His rear wheel spun on the loose stones, searching for grip, then he pulled away. Lumberjack came leaping around his front wheel, and he had to go slow. As he topped the rise he let out the throttle. But Lumberjack was running alongside him now, a serious expression on his face, as if he saw this as a real test of stamina.

‘Go back,’ Nathan shouted, ‘go back,’ and he pointed behind him. But Lumberjack just leapt at his outstretched hand. It was part of the game.

After three miles Nathan had to turn round and ride all the way home again. India-May locked Lumberjack inside the house. As Nathan pulled away for the second time he could hear Lumberjack in the kitchen, frantically sawing the legs off tables and chairs. Somehow that was worse than anything.

But he rode hard to the end of the track and when he reached Baby Boy’s white cross he hesitated, then he turned right, into the mountains, something that he’d never done before.