The Five Gates of Hell

Old Friends

It was the Friday after the funeral, the day after the Day of the Dead. Nathan was sitting in Tin Pan Alley, an Irish bar downtown. He was waiting for Georgia.

He had spent most of the past forty-eight hours at Georgia’s apartment. Every time he thought of returning to the house on Mahogany Drive he thought of Harriet, and every time he thought of Harriet he saw her crouching on the floor in the summerhouse, dark eyes drifting in their sockets, a tissue in between her legs. If he was away for long enough, she might just leave, go home. After all, the funeral was over. There was no reason for her to stay.

He finished his second drink, bought a third.

Tin Pan Alley. Back of the bar the street sloped down to the harbour. The heart of the old meat-packing district. Cold storage, wasteground, stolen cars. Through the window he could hear the hiss of truck brakes on the hill.

Georgia had said ten, but he knew it wouldn’t be ten. She was out scoring something fast for them. He let her take care of that end of things. She knew the city better than he did, she knew the routines. No, it wouldn’t be ten. Nowhere near. She’d float in, midnight at the earliest. Flat eyes, numb lips. Head dipping left and right. What had she said once? ‘I’m like a chicken when I go in places.’ He smiled. There was no shortcut through this stretch of time and he wasn’t looking for one. He could wait for days, if need be. Mind on a slow burn, fingers cooled by the sweat of a glass.

He’d been there an hour when this guy pushed through the door. Tall, thin figure in black. Limbs you could fold away. Sort of creaky-looking. Just this one glance at him and something happened in Nathan’s mind, it was the same as when you put money in a pool table and all the balls come tumbling into the lip.

Nathan stared, but he couldn’t be sure. Someone he knew, or someone who looked like someone he knew? The tight black pants; the black jacket, too short in the arms; the black top hat. Like a drainpipe and a chimney-stack combined. The guy had Moon Beach tattooed all over him. Wrong end of the alphabet. Nathan watched as he ordered a beer, pushed small money around on his palm, lifted one curling finger to his ear and scratched. When the beer was set down in front of him, his lips reached out greedily for the rim of the glass. He gulped, sighed, wiped his mouth on his wrist. He’d been dying for that beer. Fingering those tiny coins all day. But then he must have sensed somebody watching him. His head veered round, he swivelled. Cold eyes, glasses, face as pale as ice. Now Nathan knew. And couldn’t believe it. All those years. Even the name came back to him. Jed Morgan.

‘Been a while,’ Jed said, ‘hasn’t it?’

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Nathan said.

‘Maybe I changed or something.’ Jed sipped his beer. ‘You still swimming?’

Nathan smiled. The reference wasn’t lost on him. ‘I’ve been working up and down the coast. As a lifeguard, mostly.’

‘So what brings you back?’

‘Somebody died.’

Jed’s head reared and twisted on his stringy neck. ‘You shouldn’t joke about that.’

‘I’m not joking.’

‘Who was it?’

‘My father.’

‘Sorry to hear it.’ Jed wasn’t sorry, not even remotely.

‘The number of times I’ve heard that recently,’ Nathan said.

Jed shrugged. ‘Somebody dies, that’s what happens.’

‘What about you?’ Nathan asked.

‘What about me?’

‘You been away too?’

‘You could say that.’ Jed’s lips seemed to be travelling towards a grin, but they never got there. His eyes were motionless, behind glass, like something in the reptile house. ‘It’s a long story, you know?’

‘Not yet I don’t.’

Jed jerked a thumb in Nathan’s direction and told the barman, ‘We’ve got a sense of humour here.’

The barman was grinning. Nathan was grinning.

Grins all round.

Nathan thought it strange that he was talking to Jed like this. He’d never liked Jed in the past, and he wasn’t sure he liked him now. Those eyes, that skin. Other times it would’ve put him off, but right now he was in too big a mood. It was going to be a long night. He was waiting for Georgia. The moment she pushed through those swing doors he’d lift like a jet at the end of a runway.

And so he could turn to Jed and look him right in the face and say, ‘You going to tell me or what?’

Jed reached a finger down, scratched the inch of white skin between his sock and the leg of his pants. It was his way of cocking the trigger on his story. Then he eased off his stool and used the same finger to point at the bench opposite Nathan.

‘Sure,’ Nathan said. ‘Sit down.’

Jed leaned both arms on the table and his eyes moved out into the bar. ‘I used to work for one of the parlours.’ His eyes flicked back, checking Nathan for a reaction. There wasn’t one. ‘I used to work for a guy called Creed. Maybe you heard of him.’

Nathan shook his head.

‘It was Vasco got me the job. Remember Vasco?’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Some guy killed his brother.’ Jed sucked down some more beer. ‘Last I heard, he went nuts.’

‘Christ.’

‘He was kind of nuts already. That family, they were all nuts. His uncles. One of them, he used to lock himself in his room all day. I lived there more than a year, never saw him once. The other one —’ and Jed stopped suddenly. He dropped his head down to his beer and gulped.

‘This guy Creed, though,’ and he leaned closer, lowered his voice as if it was suddenly a church they were in. ‘It was six, seven years ago. Back in those days there was this loyalty thing. We were all locked into it, it made us feel valuable. It was like being gold. Everyone wanted a piece of us. We used to cruise the city in a stretch hearse, the ones where the front goes round a corner and the back goes round about five minutes later. I was the driver. Black top hat, red velvet cushion to sit on like a king, pair of dark-green lenses for the glare. We cruised the city, this whole gang of us. We put the fear of Christ Jesus into people.’

He was talking from the deep past now, his voice rose up from the quarry of his memories. It felt much later than it was.

‘One time we’re driving along the promenade and these kids start giving us shit. McGowan, he rolls the window down and leans out, with his head all shaved and mirrors on his eyes, and he says, “You’re going to die,” he says, real quiet but so they can hear. “You’re going to die and we’re going to bury you.”’ Jed grinned and drained his glass.

‘Nice guy,’ Nathan said.

‘McGowan,’ Jed said, and shook his head. ‘We used to call him the Skull.’

‘How come?’

‘It was just the look of him. We all had names. There was the Skull, there was Pig, and Vasco was called Gorilla, just like in the old days. Then there was Meatball —’

‘Meatball? Why Meatball?’

‘No neck. His head just kind of sat on his shoulders. So we called him Meatball. He was there for entertainment.’

I was your entertainment once, Nathan thought. But he pushed the memory back.

‘What about you, then?’ he said. ‘What were you called?’

‘Spaghetti.’

Nathan laughed. ‘This guy, sounds like he could’ve opened a restaurant.’ He held up his glass. ‘Want another?’

Jed nodded. Nathan went up to the bar and came back with two more beers.

‘It was real power.’ Jed scraped at his cheek with one long fingernail. ‘The things we did then, they were on a different level.’

‘So I don’t get it. Why did you leave?’

‘I did a job for Creed. Job like that, you get your hands dirty. I had to leave.’

Nathan nodded as if he understood.

‘I ended up in a small town in the desert, you wouldn’t’ve heard of it. I worked in an ice-cream parlour. I sold ice-cream.’ Jed’s face opened like a cave, and Nathan felt a chill pass through. Old bones and spiders, centuries of damp. ‘Fudge Ripple, Swiss Chocolate Almond, Pecan Buttercrunch,’ Jed said, ‘you name it. I sold them all.’

Nathan couldn’t see it, somehow. ‘You like ice-cream?’

‘I fucking hate the stuff.’

They laughed over that for a while.

‘And now you’re back,’ Nathan said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Got anything planned?’

‘Yeah,’ and Jed leered, ‘I got something planned.’

But when he asked Jed about it Jed just shook his head and, lifting his glass again, tipped his chin into the air and slid the beer down his throat, it lay straight and gold along the side of the glass, it looked as if he was swallowing a sword. Then he put his hands flat on the table, stood up, walked over to the jukebox.

Nathan checked his watch. Almost twelve-thirty. When he looked up again, Georgia was sitting next to him. She was dressed for business. All in black except for a denim jacket and an amber necklace.

‘That guy you’re with,’ she said, ‘he’s really ugly.’

Nathan smiled. ‘I know.’

‘You been waiting long?’

‘About two hours.’

‘That’s not bad for me. I’m practically early.’ She sounded breathless, as if she’d been whirled round and round and bits of her were coming loose.

It was still the funeral, he thought. That was what a funeral did. It climbed down into your bones and hid. And every now and then it jumped back out again, took hold of you, and shook you till you rattled.

Jed slid back into his seat. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘new blood.’

‘Who’s this?’ Georgia asked.

‘We used to know each other,’ Nathan said. ‘Years ago.’

‘Old friends,’ Jed said.

Nathan turned to Georgia. ‘Did you get it?’

She lit a cigarette. ‘In the end. I had to go out to Sweetwater. Great name for nowhere, that. Hasn’t even got any water at all, let alone sweet. Who names these places? Jesus.’ She blew smoke across the room and shook her head. Then she seemed to realise it was over with, she’d got where she was going to. She slumped back in the seat, let her head slip sideways till it was resting against Nathan’s shoulder. ‘Sorry I was so long.’

He smiled. ‘Like you said, you’re practically early.’

‘Sweetwater,’ Jed said. ‘That’s a real dump.’

‘You know it?’ Georgia asked him.

‘Used to live there. Every time a plane went over, you had to shout. If you had a bath, you got waves in it.’

Georgia looked at him. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘They call him Spaghetti,’ Nathan said.

‘They used to call me that,’ Jed said, ‘but it’s not my real name.’

‘What’s your real name?’ Georgia said. ‘Lasagne?’

Jed’s smile was a thin flexing of the lips. You’re on the border, it said. Don’t step over it.

‘His real name’s Jed,’ Nathan said.

Georgia was frowning. ‘That’s not very Italian.’

‘Who said anything about Italian?’ Jed said.

‘So why Spaghetti?’ But her interest was fading, she was looking round. ‘I think it’s time for the bathroom.’

In two minutes she was back again.

‘So what are we doing?’ Nathan said.

‘Let’s go back to the house,’ she said. ‘There’s a pool. There’s videos.’ She took hold of Nathan’s arm. ‘We won’t have it for ever.’

‘What about Harriet?’ he said. ‘And Yvonne.’

‘They’ll be asleep, dummy.’

‘It’s a long way.’

‘We’ll get a taxi.’

‘We don’t need a taxi,’ Jed said. ‘I’ve got a car.’

Nathan turned to him. ‘You don’t mind?’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ Jed said. ‘I kind of like driving.’

They left the bar. Nathan waited on the sidewalk while Georgia bought a couple of six-packs from the all-night liquor store next door. He watched her gesturing under the harsh fluorescent lights. She was making the old man behind the counter laugh. He looked round. Jed was ten yards away, chin tipped in the air, fingers at his throat. Nathan could hear the scratching. Could almost see the dry skin floating to the ground. He walked over to the gutter. It was choked with debris from the day before: flowers, fireworks, skulls. ‘They’ll be asleep,’ he muttered, ‘dummy.’ He must be drunk, he thought, to be talking to himself like this.

Then Jed was standing next to him. ‘This house we’re going to,’ he said, ‘whose is it?’

‘It’s ours,’ Nathan said. ‘We’re selling it. It’s going on the market sometime next week.’

‘You got any spare room?’

Nathan looked up. ‘Why?’

‘Well, like I said. I only just got back. I haven’t found a place yet.’

Nathan nudged a skull with the toe of his shoe. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’

The door of the liquor store swung shut on muscular spring hinges. They looked up. Georgia was walking towards them with the beer. They crossed the street to Jed’s car. It was an old Chrysler with steel radials. Mud had dried in streaks behind the wheel arches. Jed must have been driving across country.

‘It’s beat up,’ Jed said, ‘but it goes.’

It looked like it went. The sprawling hood hinted at a powerful engine. The radiator grille had caught flies in its fierce, bared teeth. The numberplate said CREAM 8.

‘Nice plate,’ Georgia said.

‘Some people don’t get it,’ Jed said. ‘They think I’m in the dairy business. A milkman or something.’

Laughing, they climbed into the car. They sat in the front, all three of them, with Nathan in the middle. Jed turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled.

He seemed to know the city well. He took shortcuts all the way across town, streets that Nathan had never even heard of. He drove methodically, seldom raising his speed above thirty-five. Nathan smiled. He could feel Georgia shifting next to him, and knew it was only a matter of time. Sure enough, as they crossed the bridge, she leaned forward.

‘You drive very slow,’ she said.

‘It’s habit,’ Jed said.

She didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’

Nathan turned to her, smiling. ‘He used to drive hearses.’

There were no further questions.

When they reached Mahogany Drive, Jed didn’t want to leave his car on the street. He asked if there was anywhere more private. Nathan showed him the small courtyard behind the house.

‘It’ll be safe there,’ he said.

Jed gave him a smile that he couldn’t read.

They settled in the lounge. It had always been their favourite room. The french windows opening on to the terrace, the pool glittering beyond. Georgia cut some lines. Jed sat in Dad’s red chair and watched TV. He found the cartoon channel, said it was just the right speed. Georgia thought so too.

‘How did you two meet?’ she asked.

‘Mutual friend,’ Jed said. ‘When we were about twelve.’

‘You seen anything of Tip?’ Nathan asked.

‘I haven’t seen anything of anyone,’ Jed said. ‘I told you, I’ve been away.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not even back yet, not officially.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nobody knows I’m here.’

‘You on the run or something?’ And Nathan couldn’t help laughing.

Jed took the question seriously. He pulled his sleeve up. ‘You see this tattoo?’ he said.

Nathan leaned forwards. He saw a series of blue numbers on the inside of Jed’s wrist. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Your phone number?’

‘That’s a good one,’ Jed said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard that one.’ And his top teeth glistened and his mouth turned down at the corners. While the smile lasted, he looked exactly like his car. Nathan pictured dead flies spattered on his teeth.

‘So what is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s a date,’ Jed said.

‘The date of what?’

Jed leaned back in Dad’s red chair. He made them wait. ‘The date I killed someone,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ Nathan didn’t believe it. But then he thought back, all the way back to the shark run, the SUICIDE/YOU FIRST T-shirt, that sense of contamination, and then later, Central Avenue, his vision of the jacket lined with needles, and suddenly he did believe it.

‘Anyone we know?’ Georgia asked.

Jed ignored her. ‘You remember I told you I did a job for a guy called Creed?’

Nathan nodded.

‘Well, that was the job.’ Jed reached for another beer. A snap, a hiss. ‘All that stuff with the Womb Boys, that was just practice for the real thing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was.’ He stared at the can and then put it down. ‘I had to do things working for Creed, anyone who got close to him, they had to do things, that’s what Creed was like. I had to do things and then,’ and he looked up and suddenly his eyes looked too pale, almost blind, ‘and then,’ he said, ‘I had to leave.’ He took his hat off, turned it in his hands.

Nathan glanced at Georgia. Georgia shrugged. Nathan looked at Jed again.

Without his hat on, Jed looked curiously mutilated, raw, no longer whole. The hat seemed such a part of him, almost like a hand or a smile. His pale-brown hair lay flat and lifeless against his skull. A red line crossed his forehead horizontally as if the removal of the hat had been an operation and had left a scar.

For a while nobody spoke.

It was during this silence that Nathan heard a creak. He thought he recognised the sound. It had come from the hallway, it was one of the last six stairs. He looked round and saw the tail of the door handle begin to lift. The door had always been hard to open, ever since Dad had painted the leading edge. Even now, years afterwards, it often stuck. The crack it made as it was pushed from the other side made everybody jump.

The door opened and Yvonne stood in the gap. She had thrown a coat over her nightgown. Her copper hair lifted away from her head on one side where she had slept on it. She clutched her metal box of garlic in her hand. To keep the devils on their toes.

‘I heard a voice.’

She was staring at the red chair, and at Jed, because he was sitting in it.

‘I thought it was him. I thought he was calling me.’

Nathan stood up and walked towards her. ‘Sorry if we woke you, Yvonne.’

Yvonne looked at him. ‘What time is it?’

‘Four-thirty,’ Georgia said.

Yvonne nodded to herself.

Nathan put his hand on her elbow. ‘Come on, Yvonne,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you back to bed.’

At the top of the stairs she stopped and turned to him. ‘It wasn’t him,’ she said.

‘No.’

She gripped his arm. ‘But who was it?’

‘Just a friend.’

He helped her back into bed and drew the covers over her. She lay on her back, her eyes wide as a child’s.

‘I painted him a picture,’ she whispered.

‘I know.’

‘You think he would’ve liked it?’

‘Of course he would.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Now you go to sleep.’

Back in the lounge Jed was still sitting in front of the TV. Nathan sat down next to Jed, but found he couldn’t concentrate. Jed kept scratching himself. First the side of his neck, then an ankle, then his stomach. It was as if his whole body itched, but not all at the same time. Nathan couldn’t help watching. And as he watched he began to imagine the tiny flakes of dead skin building up around the legs of Dad’s chair. He stared at the piece of floor where the chair stood and saw the flakes of skin piling up like snow, and then drifting.

And suddenly he couldn’t watch any more. He had to say something. ‘Jed?’ he said. ‘You seen Georgia?’

Jed didn’t look away from the TV. ‘I think she went outside.’

Out on the terrace birds were beginning to call from the trees, hinges on the door that would soon let morning in. Georgia was sitting on the steps, one leg drawn up against her chest, her cheek resting sideways on her knee. Only the fingers of her right hand moved, twisting the chunks of her amber necklace. The pool trickled and dripped behind her.

‘How’s Yvonne?’ she asked.

‘She’s all right’

‘Her hearing his voice like that,’ and she shuddered.

He sat down beside her. ‘It was only us. She was half asleep and all mixed up. She’ll have forgotten by morning.’

It was still dark in the garden, but dawn had spilled across the sky like acid. It dripped down into the trees, eating night from between the branches. The hedge was no longer the silhouette it had been an hour before; hundreds of individual leaves stood out. When you had been up all night, dawn was like a magic trick: even though you knew what was coming, it still managed to surprise you. It was sinister too: you realised just how slowly the world turned, how slowly and relendessly; you realised there was no escaping it.

Georgia broke the pool’s dark surface with a racing dive. He saw her rise again, her black hair shining, tight against her skull. He looked back towards the house. There was a white face framed in the lounge window. It was Jed, he realised. But not before he’d gone cold. Dad used to stand like that. Stand at the window, looking out into the garden. Then he used to tap on the glass. He couldn’t shout. He had to save his voice, his breath. He couldn’t open the door either and come out. The air itself was dangerous. Too humid, too moist. It collected in his windpipe like moss, it blocked his narrow lungs. Nathan always thought it looked as if Dad was trapped, as if he wanted to get out, but couldn’t. Or he was dead already, under glass. Once, when Dad tapped on the window, Nathan had shouted, ‘Do you HAVE to do that?’ And then, when Dad had looked at him, wounded, he hadn’t been able to explain why he was angry.

The sudden sound of flung beads. But it was just the water spilling off Georgia’s body as she climbed out of the pool. She stood beside him, wrapped in a thick towel, her hands bunched under her chin. ‘I just remembered. He said he killed someone.’

Nathan smiled up at her. ‘It was probably just the coke talking.’

Jed was folded up in the red chair when they went in. One hand supporting his cheek, asleep. The TV was still on. A cartoon chipmunk danced across the lenses of his glasses.

Georgia tilted her head sideways, read the numbers on his wrist. ‘You’re probably right. It’s probably just some phone number.’ She yawned. ‘I’m going to bed.’ She kissed Nathan on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, afternoon.’

He waited till she’d left the room, then he looked down at Jed again. The early morning light caught on Jed’s skin like torn fingernails on wool. He touched Jed on the shoulder.

Jed’s eyes slid open. ‘What’s up?’

‘You did kill someone,’ Nathan said, ‘didn’t you?’

The laughter sifted out of Jed’s nostrils. ‘Where am I sleeping?’ he said.

And Spring Came For Ever

He shouldn’t have talked so much.

The lights turned red and Jed was so angry, he stamped on the brake much harder than he needed to. His bald tyres screeched on the hot asphalt. A woman almost toppled off her gold high-heeled sandals. She was wearing a T-shirt that said I CAME TO MOON BEACH AND LIVED.

BUT ONLY JUST, Jed thought, through gritted teeth. BUT ONLY JUST.

It was Monday morning. The sun cut down through the sky like a guillotine. He could still feel all that beer and cocaine behind his eyes, he could still feel them in his blood, like grit. His skin didn’t seem to fit this morning. He should’ve known better. He had to keep his eyes clear, his blood pure.

He drove down the promenade and parked close to the Ocean Café. This was where he was supposed to be meeting Carol. He was early. He sat behind the wheel, the radio murmuring. He watched people in bright clothes flash by like parts of a headache. Friday night. OK, so he’d talked too much. But really, who was going to remember? Nathan and that sister of his, they were both so trashed, he doubted they’d remember anything. And even if they did, what of it? Stories about murder and tattoos and gangs, who’d believe stories like that, specially in cold daylight.

He leaned back in his seat, tucked a piece of candy into his cheek, sucked on it thoughtfully. Stories were his ticket to places, they always had been. Now they’d taken him to Blenheim. The word brought a smile to his face. Say there actually were vultures on his tail. They’d never dream of looking in Blenheim. It just wasn’t him. It wasn’t anything like him. He’d really landed on his feet this time.

He celebrated by putting 50 cents in the parking meter when he got out of the car. It always amused him to obey small laws.

Nathan slept badly. All night the sheets felt rough against his body, and when morning came the glare seemed to reach through his eyelids with metal instruments. In a dream he saw Jed at the bottom of the garden, a wheelbarrow beside him. He was shovelling his dead skin on to the bonfire. He was burning the dead parts of himself.

When Nathan woke he went straight to the window, expecting Jed to be standing below, a spade in his hands. But there was only bright sunlight and green grass. He rubbed his eyes. His skin stretched taut and thin across his face, the tail-end of all that cocaine rattling like a ghost train through his blood. It was Monday. He looked at the clock. It was almost eleven.

In the kitchen he found the one person he had been trying to avoid: Harriet. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

‘There you are,’ she said.

She had the face of a witch that morning. A shield of black hair and skin like candlewax. Her two front teeth were crossed swords in her mouth. He could no longer believe what had happened on the day of the funeral.

‘I’d like a word with you,’ she said.

He poured himself some coffee. ‘What about?’ He kept his hand steady, his voice even.

She glanced at the ceiling. Yvonne was moving about upstairs. ‘In the dining-room,’ she said. ‘I don’t want us to be disturbed.’

In the dining-room she lit another cigarette and stood by the fireplace. All the furniture had been sold. There was nowhere to sit.

‘That person who’s staying,’ she said, ‘who is he?’

‘He’s a friend.’

‘A friend.’ She gave the word some extra weight.

He knew what she was implying, but he didn’t rise to it.

‘This,’ and she paused, ‘friend, how long is he staying?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I want him out of here.’ She held her right elbow in the palm of her left hand and stared at him, her lit cigarette aimed at him and burning, like a third eye.

He looked at his feet. ‘This isn’t your house, you know.’

‘It isn’t yours either.’

‘You’re wrong. It’s mine and Georgia’s —’

‘And Rona’s.’

She didn’t know, he realised. She really didn’t know.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not Rona’s.’ He told her the story. He explained why the house had never actually, legally, belonged to Dad. ‘I’m sorry, Harriet,’ he said, ‘but that’s how it is.’

She walked to the window, stared out into the driveway. ‘Tell me something. Do you like this city?’

Her voice was thin now, a voice you could cut with. It would cut the way grass cut. First the pain and nothing to see, then the blood welling seemingly from nowhere.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘I could make things difficult if I wanted to.’

‘In what way?’

‘I could contest the will. It might take six months to sort out.’ She faced into the room again and smiled at him. ‘Maybe longer.’

‘I thought you said you were leaving after the funeral.’

‘I’ve decided not to.’ She walked to the fireplace and tapped half an inch of ash into the grate. ‘I’ve got my daughter’s interests to take care of. You see,’ and she looked up at him, ‘I’m not sure I trust you.’

It was so absurd, he had to laugh. But his laughter sounded false in the hollow room. ‘What about Yvonne?’ he said. ‘What’s she going to think about all this?’

‘Oh, hasn’t she told you? She’s leaving today. She’s driving back to Hosannah Beach. She said she had some things to do. You know,’ and Harriet sneered, ‘paint.’ She picked up her pack of cigarettes and her lighter from the mantelpiece, and moved towards the door. ‘In the meantime,’ she said, ‘I’m sure your friend can find somewhere else to stay.’ She gave him a mocking smile. ‘There are plenty of those men’s hostels on the west side.’

Nathan stood in the middle of the room. A thin spiral of smoke rose from the grate. It was Harriet’s cigarette. He went over and crushed it out under his heel.

From his table in the corner of the Ocean Café Jed watched Carol walk down a flight of steps, across the terrace, and through the glass doors. She was wearing a yellow shirt and black slacks. Her limp had got worse. She clung to the strap of her shoulder-bag with both hands, as if for support.

She stood beside the table, smiling uncertainly.

‘I’m late,’ she said, ‘aren’t I?’

She sat down. She unhitched her bag from her shoulder and put it in her lap. Her mouth seemed even smaller than he remembered. As if they’d stitched her up some more. As if they were trying to stop her talking altogether.

‘I’ve just been to the doctor,’ she said.

‘Is it your leg?’

‘Not my leg,’ she said, and she was still smiling, ‘no.’

A waiter arrived to take their orders. She looked up at the waiter, then she moved her head back down, moved it so fast that the smile flew off.

‘A tea,’ she said.

Jed ordered the same.

When the waiter had gone, Jed leaned forwards. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

She turned away from him.

‘You’re taking pills, aren’t you?’ He paused. ‘Aren’t you?’ He’d raised his voice. He didn’t know why he suddenly felt so angry.

She was staring out to sea. His anger didn’t touch her.

He was reminded of the old people who sat in rows behind the plateglass fronts of their hotels. Vasco used to call them pawns. They sat in rows all day, they watched the waves wrinkling in the distance like their own skin, and when they died it was as if death had come in from the ocean, come in on a surprising diagonal like a bishop, and suddenly there was a gap, someone had been taken, one of the pawns had gone.

‘What are you so scared of?’ he asked her.

‘The sun’s too bright. There are too many colours. Noises scrape at me.’ She turned to him. ‘I’m scared of feeling like me. Really like me, with no layers of anything over it.’

He didn’t want to hear this. This wasn’t what he’d come to hear.

She saw the look on his face. ‘You asked,’ she said.

He sipped his tea. It was cold already.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ she asked him.

‘What of?’

She shrugged. ‘They say people who aren’t scared, either they’re brave or they’re very stupid.’

‘That’s like saying nothing, isn’t it?’ he snapped. ‘That’s like saying precisely fucking nothing.’

She looked down at her hands. ‘Why did you want to see me, Jed? What do you want?’

‘I need your help.’

‘I don’t see how I can help you.’

‘I want to know what you meant that day.’

She frowned. ‘What day?’

‘The day of your father’s funeral. You came up to me and you said, “This whole thing’s a sham.” I want to know what you meant by that.’

She turned her cup on its saucer. Noises scrape at me.

‘Carol?’

She lifted the cup and sipped. ‘Why do you have to open all that up again?’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

‘Not for me it isn’t.’

‘It was years ago.’

‘I want to know, Carol. I need to know. It might help.’

She brought her cup down so hard, the saucer fell into two neat pieces. ‘You’re so selfish, Jed. You only want to listen now it suits you. You wouldn’t listen back then. Back then you were having too good a time, weren’t you?’

Too good a time. That was a joke. But he didn’t say anything. He just drank some more cold tea.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘suppose I tell you what I think you meant.’

She shrugged.

‘I think Creed was responsible for your father’s death,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what he did exactly. But he played a part in it, didn’t he, him and his people?’

‘You were one of his people.’

‘I was his driver. They never told me what was going on.’ He leaned forwards on the table. ‘I think maybe,’ and he paused, and lowered his voice, ‘I think maybe he was even murdered.’

Her face hardened. The bones showed white in the bridge of her nose.

‘You can think what you like,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make any difference now.’

‘It might make a difference,’ he said. ‘It could.’

She shook her head.

‘You’re not listening to me, Carol. You used to listen to me.’

‘You used to be funny. You’re not funny any more.’

He sat back.

‘I think I’d better go now,’ she said. ‘I only get an hour for lunch.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’d better go. You’d better go because it takes you longer than most people.’

She took her bag and put it over her shoulder, then she rose to her feet. She stood beside the table, looking at the ground. ‘It’s not good for me to see you,’ she said. ‘Don’t call me again.’ She moved away across the terrace. He wasn’t the only person who watched her go. It was the limp. It had definitely got worse.

He pushed back from the table suddenly, his chair shrieking on the tile floor, and she was standing in front of him, naked, her arms weighed down with fish. There were fish lying at her feet, some still twitching, some already dead. She looked different, her face seemed rounder and calmer, but he could tell it was her: her right leg was strapped into a metal contraption. He turned away, he looked at the ocean for a while, and when he turned back again, she had gone.

He returned to his car. He was just opening the door when the phone began to ring. He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Jed, it’s Nathan.’

‘What’s up?’

‘We’ve got a problem.’

‘What is it?’

‘Can I meet you somewhere?’

‘At the house?’

‘No.’ Nathan was silent, thinking. ‘Where are you?’

‘Outside the aquarium.’

‘I’ll meet you there. Say in about ten minutes.’

‘Meet me inside.’

‘Where?’

‘In front of the sharks.’ Jed switched his phone off and put it back on its cradle.

In front of the sharks.

His mouth widened an inch. That was a nice touch, that was.

Nathan saw Jed first.

Jed was staring up into the Deep Reef tank, his face close to the glass. It was a vast tank. A pillar of seaweed and kelp grew in the centre, twenty feet high and encircled, near the top, by fish of such untarnished silver that they might have been made of aluminium. Sunlight spilled from somewhere above, turning blond then green as it filtered down through the water.

Nathan moved closer. A shark approached. Swayed past. It moved the way some women moved. Almost as if it had hips.

Jed turned. ‘Leopard shark,’ he said. Then he read from the information panel at the base of the tank. ‘Electro-receptors in their snouts help them to home in on buried prey.’ His teeth glistened. He seemed to relish this notion of homing in.

The shark passed again, its skin a camouflage of beige and grey, its eye slit, bevelled, like the head of a screw. It was strange how the body seemed to move around the eye: the eye seemed fixed, the body seemed to swivel and rotate.

Nathan suddenly felt as if his throat was swelling. It was dark in the aquarium; the only light was the light shed by the tanks. There were so many people, there was nothing to breathe. His hearing began to swirl.

‘Not much air in here,’ Jed said, ‘is there?’

Nathan took a few steps back. He went and stood in front of another, smaller tank. It contained something called Moon Jelly. He heard a woman’s voice. ‘Make a pretty lampshade, wouldn’t it?’ He heard somebody laugh. He was finding air now, close to the glass, a down-draught. He was breathing slowly, cautiously. Soon he felt well enough to return to where Jed was standing. He couldn’t watch the sharks, though; the way they moved was a trigger for nausea.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jed said. ‘Don’t you like sharks?’

‘Tell me something,’ Nathan said. ‘If they’d asked you to do the shark run, would you have done it?’ He paused. ‘Or would you have chickened out?’

Jed smiled that even, unnerving smile of his. ‘I can’t swim,’ he said. ‘Now you tell me something. This problem we’ve got, what is it?’

‘It’s my stepmother. Harriet.’

‘What about her?’

‘She doesn’t want any strangers in the house.’

Jed opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. ‘She doesn’t want any strangers in the house.’ The way he said it, it sounded like a riddle.

‘That’s it.’

‘You want me to leave. Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.’

‘What about tonight?’

‘I’m sorry.’

Jed turned round. For a while he just looked at Nathan. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a piece of candy and put it in his mouth. Nathan heard the candy shatter between his teeth.

‘Like one?’ Jed said.

Nathan shook his head.

Jed seemed to lose interest in him. He stood close to the glass, his pale eyes tracking fish.

‘Where will you go?’ Nathan asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ Jed said. ‘Worst comes to the worst, I can always sleep in the car.’ Nathan nodded.

‘Can you lend me some money?’ Jed said.

‘How much?’

A shrug. ‘Ten dollars?’

Nathan felt in his pocket, pulled out a few squashed bills. He flattened them out, and counted them. ‘I’ve only got eight,’ he said. ‘Here.’

Jed took the bills and slid them into his back pocket. They walked to the exit. Jed got into his car and rolled the window down. He leaned his elbow on the window. One hand picked at the side of his neck, the other fitted a key into the ignition. A slow drumroll from the engine. ‘See you around,’ he said.

‘See you, Jed.’

Nathan sat on the pale-blue railings that ran along the promenade and watched the Chrysler pull out into the traffic. Though he felt guilty about throwing Jed out, he also felt a sense of relief. It was pretty ironic to think that he had Harriet to thank for this.

As he shifted his position on the railings he saw a man walking across the grass towards him. The man was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. A tie that had loosened slightly. Dark glasses. He was late thirties, early forties. Maybe it was his faintness earlier on, but Nathan seemed to be breathing pure oxygen now. He couldn’t account for this sudden alertness of his; it seemed to have no origin.

He expected the man to take the steps down to the aquarium, but the man stopped by the railings instead, a few feet away, and stared at the ocean. The man was wearing gloves on his hands. Fawn leather gloves with holes for his hands to breathe through. They must be for driving, Nathan thought. Driving gloves.

The man took a deep breath and then let the air out slowly. ‘You know, when my father died, he asked for the words AND SPRING CAME FOR EVER on his gravestone.’ He smiled faintly, sadly. ‘Maybe I’m sentimental, but I’ve always liked the words. They seem to be saying that death’s just a beginning. That there’s something fresh and new about it.’ He breathed in again, filled his lungs. ‘Days like today, with spring on the way, I can’t help thinking of him.’

A plane slid through the bright air, a finger tracing skin. The same care, the same slow pleasure.

‘Do I know you?’ Nathan said.

‘No.’ The man took off his dark glasses. He was smiling. There were traces of amusement, faint embarrassment. ‘I saw you from my window.’

‘What window?’

‘I live up there.’ The man pointed at the two towers of baroque grey stone that rose above the palm trees at the end of the promenade.

‘The Palace Hotel?’ Nathan said.

The man nodded. ‘You know it?’

Nathan had to smile. Everybody knew it. It was the most exclusive apartment hotel in the city. ‘Do you live there?’

The man glanced at his shoes. ‘I saw you from my balcony. I thought I’d come down and speak to you. If you were still here, that is.’ He looked up again. ‘I thought we could drink a cup of coffee together.’

It was Nathan’s turn to look away. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the man said. ‘A complete stranger asking you for coffee. But I meant what I said. A cup of coffee. No strings attached.’

‘No strings attached?’ Nathan said.

‘No strings attached,’ the man said, and lifted his gloved hands away from his sides, as if he might’ve been concealing the strings about his person. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Nathan.’

‘My name’s Reid.’

Nathan looked at him. ‘Strange name. Sounds kind of made up.’

‘Does it?’ Reid laughed.

They walked to the Ocean Café. They both ordered black coffee and sat facing the marina. Reid leaned back in his chair, right ankle on his left knee, hands folded in his lap. He seemed very calm and sure. The masts of yachts clicked in the wind.

‘You don’t seem very happy,’ Reid said.

‘Well, it’s strange what you were saying about your father,’ Nathan said. ‘Mine just died.’ He paused and then added, ‘Just when I least expected it.’

‘Isn’t death always unexpected?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, and found himself talking, though he hadn’t intended to.

Reid was the first person who hadn’t said how sorry he was. They’d moved on, beyond the conventional responses, and Nathan was grateful for that. No, more than grateful: refreshed. He felt Reid’s silence stretching under him like a kind of safety net, he felt he could say anything and not be hurt. That was how confession worked, he realised. We’re not important to many people. We rarely feel safe. He thought of India-May. She’d listened to him. The only difference was one of gravity: this man seemed more earnest, more concerned. Something struck him suddenly and he stopped in the middle of a sentence. ‘You’re not a priest, are you?’

‘No, I’m not a priest.’ Reid smiled. ‘But tell me, what is it that I don’t understand?’

Nathan began to explain how he’d grown up with the conviction that his father was about to die, that it could happen any moment. Some nights he’d lie in bed and imagine that it had already happened. It was practising. He’d see his father on the ocean bed. His father would be wearing the same cardigan he always wore, the one with holes in the elbows. His hair would be standing up on end. There’d be fish swimming in and out of his clothes.

Some nights they’d have conversations.

‘Dad?’ he’d whisper.

And Dad would whisper back, ‘Yes. I’m here.’ His voice sounded the same, even though he was underwater.

‘Can I come and visit you?’

There’d be a silence, and there’d be something sad about the silence, and then Dad would whisper, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Why not? We could just sit and drink a beer together and then I could rub your back. Does your back still ache?’

Another silence. Longer, sadder, then the last. ‘It’s better you don’t, Nathan.’

‘Just a beer, Dad. Just one.’

‘I’m sorry.’

When Nathan thought about it now, it seemed to him that he’d been practising for his own death, as well as for Dad’s. If Dad had really been dead, and Nathan had gone and had a beer with him under the sea, it would’ve meant that Nathan would’ve died too. That was why Dad had to say no.

‘Does that make any sense?’ Nathan looked at the man on the other side of the table, the man who wasn’t a priest but listened like one, the man with the gloves.

Reid tasted his coffee. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it makes sense.’

‘It wasn’t always sad,’ Nathan said. ‘Sometimes he’d produce a fish from his breast pocket like a magician. Or he’d do a trick with beer. Tip the glass upside down and nothing would come out. Other times he’d crack a joke. “The air’s much better down here.” Things like that.’ Nathan smiled. ‘In the mornings I’d always be surprised to see him sitting at the breakfast table with his hair all flat and not a fish in sight. He used to wonder why I was staring at him. I couldn’t tell him, of course.’ He looked up and his vision blurred. ‘Now he’s really there I can’t imagine it at all,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that funny?’

Reid leaned forwards. ‘If you need any help,’ he said, ‘any money.’

Nathan shook his head.

He let Reid pay the bill. They rose from their chairs.

‘Can I drop you somewhere?’ Reid said. ‘My car’s just over there.’

‘I’ve got a car too,’ Nathan said.

‘Oh yes.’ Reid smiled. ‘I forgot.’

They stood for a moment, looking in different directions.

‘I’d like it if we could see each other again,’ Reid said.

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s a bar called Necropolis.’

Nathan nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘I’ll be there on Wednesday night.’ Reid smiled again and walked away across the grass.

Wednesday night, Nathan thought.

What was today? Monday?

The Octopus Manoeuvre

It was no skin off his nose, being thrown out like that. After all, it wasn’t exactly the first time. He didn’t even need the $10 he’d asked for. He’d just asked for it on the spur of the moment, to see what he could get away with, to make Nathan feel guilty. And Nathan had given him all he had. Jed took his eyes off the road and glanced down at the crumpled money in his hand. $8. He tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the car. He didn’t need $8. He thought of the money he’d thrown in Creed’s face. He thought of Mario’s wheelchair stuffed with bills. $8. His laughter hammered at the roof like fists.

In half an hour he was in Rialto. He steered his car into the narrow, unpaved alley that ran behind Mitch’s place. The rumble of the engine seemed louder between these two high walls; the tyres munched on loose dirt and gravel. He parked up against Mitch’s garage. He switched the engine off and opened the door. Nothing moved in the alley. A tree reached its dusty branches over the red-brick wall opposite, as if it had died trying to climb out. Such heat. The sky was almost white. Telegraph poles wavered in the air like ribbon.

He walked up to Mitch’s back door and knocked twice. Some blue paint flaked away under his knuckles. The door opened inwards and Mitch stood in the gap. He had a can of beer in his hand.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ Jed said.

Mitch stared at him. He was wearing the same clothes he always wore: the faded tartan shirt, the jeans that hung off his buttocks. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘The ice-cream man.’

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Jed said.

‘I’ve been busy.’ Mitch turned round, shambled back up the passage. ‘Want a beer?’ he called out, over his shoulder.

Jed followed him into the house.

They sat on two wooden chairs on the back verandah, their feet propped on the railing. Jed cracked his can open, tipped some beer down his throat and sighed. Mitch’s back yard was small. It didn’t see much sun. Just shadow and cracked concrete and truck tyres stacked against the wall. The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

Mitch looked at him. ‘When did you get back?’

‘Few days ago.’

‘You staying long?’

‘I don’t know. Depends how long it takes.’

Mitch was still looking at him. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

Jed drank from his can instead of answering. Sure he knew.

‘Because it seems to me,’ Mitch went on, ‘that you’ve lost touch.’

Jed rested his can on his belly and scratched his ribs with his free hand. ‘What are you talking about, Mitch?’

‘I’m talking about maybe you’ve forgotten how this city works.’

‘I know how this city works. I was born here.’

‘I said maybe you forgot. You’ve been living out in the middle of nowhere selling ice-cream, for Christ’s sake.’ Mitch took a deep breath, let it out again. ‘When did you get back?’

‘I told you. A few days ago.’

‘How many?’

‘Four.’

‘Four days.’ Mitch nodded to himself. ‘They’ll know you’re back by now.’

Jed’s body seemed to freeze up. He stared into Mitch’s face and only his heart was moving. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mitch said. ‘You know what they’re like. They’ve got eyes in the back of their heads. You’ve been here four days and you’ve been walking round in that fucking hat and you think they haven’t noticed.’ He crumpled his can and threw it in the yard. ‘Shit. You want another beer?’

‘Sure.’

While Mitch was indoors, Jed thought back.

His first night. Thousands of tourists in town for the celebrations, the streets jumping with firecrackers, blue suits, the dance of death. Chaos: surely that was the best disguise there was.

Then three nights in Blenheim. There was nothing to connect him to that section of the city. Nathan was from the deep past. They were linked by the finest thread. Go back fifteen years and walk into a field and turn over the right square-inch of ground. It was that fine. No chance.

He’d talked, sure he’d talked, but he hadn’t given anything away, not really. He hadn’t told anyone his name, though he’d been tempted to. The more people who knew it, the less power it had. He’d remembered that. Ideally nobody should know. And, at the moment, nobody did.

He thought of Sharon and the pouch of soft leather she used to wear on a string around her neck. He’d asked her what it was for. He remembered how her eyes widened with suspicion and her hand moved instinctively to her neck. She wouldn’t tell him. He used the kind of arguments that other people used. Blackmail in its most trivial and vulgar form.

‘You’re holding out on me,’ he said once.

‘It’s like there’s something between us,’ he said some other time.

He kept on and on at her, and in the end, of course, she succumbed. She called it her magic bag, she said. She claimed it protected her. She made the mistake of telling him that nobody, nobody, had ever looked inside.

One night they were lying in bed. It was late, they were drowsy, it was after love. Light came from somewhere, blue neon light, the washeteria across the street? It switched parts of their bodies on and off.

‘That bag you’ve got,’ he said, ‘it’s shit.’

She rose out of the bed, the sheet clutched against her chest. ‘What did you say?’

‘I looked in that bag of yours when you were asleep. A few fish bones and some dust. What’s that going to do?’ He chuckled, leaned up on one elbow.

One of her breasts pushed past the sheet, the nipple wide and glossy, the blue light teased him with glimpses, he felt a shifting against the inside of his thigh, he wanted to take that nipple between his teeth, to run his lips across the soft, slack skin of her belly, to put his tongue between her legs and watch her eyes roll back, he’d lost all contact with what he’d said, the blue light, her body, now you see it, now you don’t, so when her fist sent flame through his head, it was as if she’d struck a match, it was suddenly too bright, then, just as suddenly, dark again, and he was on the floor, the force of the blow had lifted him right off the bed, tumbled him across the room.

She leaned over him, her breath stale with grass and cheap white wine. ‘I could kill you.’

He opened one hand, a feeble appeal. ‘A few fish bones,’ he muttered.

The breath gushed out of her. She wrenched at the bag. The string bit into her skin, drew sudden blood. She heaved the window open, flung the bag into the street below.

He understood it now, that rage of hers. He should have understood it then. When your magic was stolen from you, it left you open and alone, you were skin against knives and knives against stone. It blew air into the lungs of your nightmares so they grew tall and straight and walked through the dawn with you and on into the day. There was nothing between you and all the bad things. Maybe, in a way, he’d known what he was doing. Maybe he’d been trying to tell her something, trying to teach her a lesson. You can’t wear your magic on the outside. That’s just asking for it. You’ve got to keep it somewhere deep down and secret. He knew because it had happened to him. The radios. All those years ago, but still. He had new magic now — a name, that drop of rain, some bruises — and he wore it out of sight, under his skin, inside his head. It was safer there. Nobody could take it away from him because nobody could see it, nobody knew it was there.

Mitch came back with two beers. ‘You been thinking about what I said?’ He stood against the light, one hand tucked into the back of his jeans, feet spread wide on the warped boards of the verandah.

‘Yeah.’ Jed opened the can, swallowed a mouthful. The chill slid into him and spread.

But he was still thinking about the night Sharon threw her magic bag out of the window. They couldn’t have been in her apartment in Baker Park, he was thinking. There was a washeteria across the street from the apartment, but it didn’t have a neon sign. It had never had one. He thought hard. There had been storm-force winds that night. He could remember Sharon crouching on the bed. The building was swaying, she said. She had vertigo.

He swallowed another mouthful of beer. He had it now. That blue light wasn’t the washeteria. It was a strobe-light in the East Tower. The light wasn’t usually there, but there’d been a party going on that night.

It wasn’t Baker Park. It was the Towers of Remembrance.

The Towers of Remembrance.

When he left that place on the thirteenth floor he’d given it to Tip’s brother, Silence. He wondered if Silence was still living there. Silence. The youngest member of the Womb Boys. A deaf mute.

He was grinning now. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

He looked up and saw that Mitch had been watching him. ‘I’ve got one piece of advice for you,’ Mitch said.

Jed took the grin off his face. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Leave town.’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘Well,’ Mitch said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

Instead of driving south from Mitch’s place, towards the Towers, Jed drove west, into the setting sun. He might have been followed to Mitch’s and, if that was the case, then the trail had to end, and end suddenly.

As he drove he remembered the video he’d watched while he was waiting for Nathan in the aquarium. It was about an octopus that could take on the precise colour and texture of its surroundings. It could also move between its various disguises with extraordinary speed and guile. There was one sequence in the video when the camera found the octopus lodged in a bed of weeds. The octopus was almost invisible; its body had turned a dark-green, its tentacles drifted, blending with the strands of plant life. But as soon as it sensed the presence of the camera it reacted. One twitch and it was hurtling along the ocean bed. It seemed almost jet-propelled. Abrupt changes of direction. Sudden clouds of ink. Then it vanished. When the camera found it again, it was fifty yards away, masquerading as a piece of rock. This was pretty much the kind of manoeuvre that Jed had in mind.

He drove at a steady thirty-five; if anyone was following him, he would lull them into a false sense of security. When he reached Highway 1 he turned north. It was rush-hour. The air was fogged and glittery with exhaust. As he passed the Butterfield turn-off, the traffic slowed to a standstill and, just for a moment, Jed felt alone; just for a moment he wished that he too was leaving work after a hard day, that he too was heading for a cocktail and dinner in some comfortable house in the northern suburbs.

Then, as the traffic picked up speed and distances began to open between the cars, the sign appeared. Not green like the highway signs, but black and white. Discreet. Innocuous. STATE ABATTOIRS 1 MILE. Jed stamped on the gas and cut into the exit lane, his speed close to fifty now. This was the moment of acceleration, this was the cloud of ink. Down off the highway, round in a circle, under an overpass, and then he was slamming down the narrow road that led to the abattoirs: fifty, sixty, sixty-five. The mirror was empty. Two clangs as he cleared the metal cattle grilles. He swung left into an alley. Pipes coiled overhead, white steam gushed from vents. A sweet smell like beaten egg. A smell that sweetened and decayed. He saw row after row of animal hides slung over rails in an open barn.

The alley fed into a concrete yard. His wheel slithered on mud and straw. This must be where the animals were unloaded. He took a wood ramp that led down past a slaughterhouse and sent his car twisting and rocking along a dirt track. The buildings were behind him now. There were ditches on either side and stands of yellow weeds. Ahead of him, through the windshield, he could see a thin blue strip, a forgotten piece of the harbour. He gunned the car up a steep bank and on to a disused railway. His tyres crackled on chips of stone. In front of him was an old iron swing-bridge. A sign whispered DANGER in small red letters. The sign amused him. Danger was relative.

Not many people knew about the railway. If you didn’t know, and you consulted a map of the city, you could be forgiven for thinking that the line was still being used. On the map, the abattoirs looked like a dead end. To anyone following him, this detour of his would seem like a serious mistake — the result, possibly, of panic. That was the beauty of the manoeuvre. By the time they realised that the mistake was theirs, it would be too late.

He drove slowly over the bridge, the metal wincing under the weight of the car. Then down off the bridge, over wasteland, through the switchback streets of Venus. Down again, into the darkness of the harbour tunnel. In twenty minutes the Towers of Remembrance rose in his windshield. He checked his mirror. Still empty. He was seaweed in seaweed, rock on rock. They’d never find him now.

The Suit of Bones

Nathan heard the stairs creak, the front door slam. He reached the window in time to see Harriet climb into her car. She was wearing a dark coat, the same coat she wore to the funeral. Her face showed nothing. A sealed envelope. Her scarlet lips set hard, like wax.

It was Wednesday morning. He sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Tell me something. Do you like this city? Her threats stood around in his head like jailers with bunches of keys. I could make things difficult. The day before he’d asked Dad’s lawyer if it was possible to speed up the handling of the probate. Dad’s lawyer had given him a glance that barely cleared the rims of his spectacles. ‘There are very good reasons,’ he said, ‘why the law moves as slowly as it does.’ The fan turning on its long neck. The wall the colour of soiled shirt collars.

Nathan lifted his eyes from the table. Clouds gathered above the hills and the garden darkened. He saw the rain come swirling out of the sky. He watched the drops crawl down the window. Another six weeks, the lawyer had said. Minimum.

Morning tipped over into afternoon and still he’d done nothing. He moved to the lounge and stood with the french windows open and listened to the rain on the surface of the pool. He remembered days like this when he was young. They used to sit at the kitchen table and paint on sheets of shiny brown paper. Though he tried to paint blue skies, they always came out muddy. When he complained, Dad said, ‘Look at George, it doesn’t bother her.’ Of course it didn’t bother her. She never put any sky in her pictures, did she? She just left big patches of brown everywhere. If you asked her what the patches were, she’d say, It’s brown things. Brown things? It’s earth, she’d say. It’s a table. I don’t know. It’s dogs. She would always have an answer. She could always find a way round things.

He closed the french windows and turned back into the room. There was something he’d been meaning to do and he should do it now, while he was alone, with no excuses. He climbed the stairs and walked into the bedroom that had once been Dad’s and was now his. He took a key out of the bedside-table drawer and unlocked the closet. Inside were two rows of clothes. Old suits, mostly. Blazers, coats. Frayed at the cuffs and buttons gone. Epaulettes of dust. This part would be all right, he realised. If Dad had worn these clothes at all, he’d worn them before Nathan’s memory began; they preceded him and wouldn’t hurt. He emptied the closet of everything except the wire hangers and the sheets of Christmas paper. All he kept back were two suits and a jacket. The suits were for him. The jacket was for Georgia. He thought she might like it. It was brown.

The airing cupboard next. Here were the familiar parts of Dad’s wardrobe. Here, for instance, was the blue cardigan. Nathan lifted it out and touched it to his nose. It smelt so clean and warm, of talcum and vanilla, of his father. This was the cardigan Dad used to wear in bed. This was the cardigan he’d worn when he drank beer on the bottom of the sea. His face buried in the blue wool, Nathan thought of the nights he’d rubbed Dad’s back for him, that peculiar blend of smells, skin and eucalyptus oil, he could hear Dad’s voice rising drowsy from the pillows: ‘A bit further down, a bit further, yes, that’s it, that’s perfect.’

He looked at the clothes arranged in such neat piles in the cupboard, then he looked down at the clothes already packed into boxes at his feet, already creased and growing cold. He had to look away, through air that seemed warped. He folded the blue cardigan, put it back in the cupboard. He put the heels of his hands in his eyes and pressed. The rest of the clothes he sorted briskly, mechanically, as if they belonged to a stranger. He left no room for thoughts to start.

When the airing cupboard was empty, he dragged the boxes to the top of the stairs. He looked out of the landing window. Brown-paper skies and big silver raindrops sliding down the telegraph wires. No view of the harbour or the city, no sense of the time of day.

He reversed the car out of the garage and round to the front door, then he carried the boxes down the stairs and out to the porch, and loaded them into the trunk. At the gate he had to brake and wait for a car to pass. It was then that he noticed the man standing outside their house. The man was wearing a grey suit and holding a large black umbrella. Something told Nathan that the man had been standing there for quite a while. He couldn’t be sure, the rain was falling harder now, jumping back off the sidewalk, it was like looking through smoke, but he thought he recognised the man. In that same moment the man realised that Nathan had seen him. One of his shoulders twitched. He spun round and hurried away. It must be someone who’s heard about the death, Nathan thought. Another coffin chaser.

In ten minutes he was parking outside the local charity store. A sign hung in the window: CLOSED. He took his hands off the wheel, leaned his head back against the seat. He hadn’t expected this. It was more than dismay that he felt now. It was some slow disintegration; he felt as if he was gradually being crushed in someone’s fist. He couldn’t face taking the clothes back home again. He’d have to leave them on the doorstep and hope they were still there in the morning. He hated doing it, but he could think of no alternative.

He stacked the boxes against the door in two piles and ran back to the car. He sent swift glances left and right. Nobody had seen him. The rain was still coming down and the streets were empty.

Back inside the car he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even turn the key in the ignition. He could picture the clothes inside the boxes: how they were slowly losing their warmth, how they were slowly growing cold. Somehow it was worse than seeing Dad in that chapel. It was worse than seeing him dead. He reached up, touched his face. It was wet. He couldn’t tell where the rain ended and his tears began.

He didn’t know what to do next. A drink, maybe. Wasn’t that what people did? He drove south through Blenheim. The main street widened into highway; water jolted in the harbour, the masts of boats duelled against a low grey sky. When the arrow showed overhead, left lane for HARBOUR BRIDGE and DOWNTOWN, he thought of Georgia and took it. On the city side he dipped into the shadow of the bridge and stopped outside the first bar he saw. He walked to the back and found a phone. He dialled Georgia’s number, waited. The window next to the phone was open. Some gutter must’ve snapped and rain was splashing down into the dark yard. It sounded like a massage parlour. Hands on fat.

Georgia wasn’t answering. He walked back through the bar. He wanted a drink, but not here. In the car he remembered the man on the promenade. What was his name? Reid. He looked at his watch. It was just after six. He could drive to Necropolis and have a drink. If Reid turned up, then he’d have someone to talk to. If Reid didn’t turn up, he could try Georgia again.

Necropolis was a blood-and-sawdust bar on the waterfront. High ceiling, low lights. Tables the shape of tombstones. Famous names cut into the marble. Nathan ordered brandy, a large one. He sat on a stool and looked around. Always a real mix in here, everything from whores to millionaires, but no sign of Reid. In a way, he was glad. He’d wanted the advantage of arriving first. This time, perhaps, he could do some watching of his own. Those few seconds before someone sees you, they can give you leverage, they can let you into secrets.

He was halfway through his third drink when the door opened and Reid walked in. There was a glimmer of gold as, pausing just inside the doorway, he placed a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. It would have been hard to mistake him for a priest again, and yet he had this presence, he shone around the edges, it was as if he’d been standing at God’s right hand on high and some of that power and glory had rubbed off. When he walked towards the bar he seemed to occupy the air above his head, you might almost have said that he owned it. He passed close to Nathan, brushing Nathan’s left thigh with the tail of his jacket. He ordered bourbon on the rocks. Then, on second thoughts, a double bourbon, no ice. He skimmed a hand across his short black hair. He was still wearing those gloves of his. Nathan felt a slow fizzing begin inside him, as if he’d swallowed sherbet: an effervescence.

‘I didn’t frighten you off then.’

Nathan finished his drink. ‘Did you think you might?’

Reid ordered him another. There are people who know exactly what you want, and when. There are also people who time their evasions perfectly.

‘You must’ve used binoculars,’ Nathan said. Then, when Reid didn’t seem to understand, he said, ‘To see me from your window.’

Reid smiled.

‘Do you make a habit of watching people like that?’

‘Habit? No.’ But the word prolonged Reid’s amusement. ‘Sometimes there’s distance, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Sometimes that’s as close as you can get.’

‘Not much distance any more.’

Reid was still looking at Nathan, still amused. He lifted his glass to his lips and drank. He set his glass down again. ‘Why did you come?’

Nathan shrugged and looked away. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been here for ages.’ He looked at Reid again. ‘I suppose I felt like a drink.’

‘What else did you feel like?’

Nathan smiled to himself. He didn’t need to answer that. It wasn’t the kind of question you answered.

‘I mean, do,’ Reid said. ‘Do you feel like.’

Nathan’s smile lasted, but he was thinking now. This was a risk he was taking. Out on a limb and what if it was amputated? The future? It could be reward, it could be punishment. He no longer knew what he deserved.

Afterwards he couldn’t remember how Reid achieved it — a jerk of the head? a gloved hand on his forearm? — but suddenly they were leaving together. Outside the bar the night felt padded. Air so rich and dark, you could’ve cut it into slices like a cake. He felt his veins swell. A limousine slid past. The lick of tyres. Through open windows came staccato laughter, music, smoke.

He was steered towards a low car. Black or blue, he couldn’t tell. It looked fast. It could split the air in two.

‘Get in.’

He obeyed. The perfume of new leather. And, faintly, cigarettes. Reid lit one, switched the engine on. The car hissed like a jet. Turbo. Money. Death.

They were heading west on Paradise Drive. They took the long curve inland at the Delta, the knitting-needle click as the gear stick shifted in its metal gate, the engine spitting, fighting the drop in speed. They approached the Palace Hotel from the rear, dipped down a ramp, it was like being swallowed by an open throat, they were underground.

They crossed the parking-lot, footsteps echoing on concrete. They reached an elevator. Reid turned a key in a silver panel. The doors slid open.

‘My back door,’ he explained.

Once inside, he pressed 14. They didn’t talk in the elevator. Nathan tried to see his reflection in the scratched stainless steel of the walls. All he could see was a blur. The doors lurched open on the fourteenth floor and Reid stepped out. Nathan followed. He stopped just outside, looked round.

Such quiet corridors. The carpet was a burgundy red, interrupted every ten feet or so by a black oval containing the letters PH in ornate red script. All the doors were black. Glass globes fizzed overhead, leaking a low-voltage yellow glow. In the distance, the word EXIT in weak red neon. He’d always wondered what the inside of the Palace looked like, but something seemed held back: it was as if, in the act of revealing itself, it had become still more mysterious.

‘Is something wrong?’

Nathan had almost forgotten he wasn’t alone. He turned, saw Reid standing ten yards away, one hand fitted casually into his jacket pocket, a man in a clothing catalogue. ‘No,’ and he smiled, ‘nothing’s wrong.’

It was a long walk to Reid’s apartment. Every time they turned a corner they were faced with the same view, the same silence; each new length of corridor was like an echo of the last. They stopped outside apartment 1412. He waited as Reid unlocked the door. Inside, the air smelt warm, slightly acrid, a smell that was like new dollar bills. Lamps bloomed in the corners, showed him the room. Sofas of dark velvet and walls papered to resemble marble and mirrors with no frames. There were windows on two sides. One looked down on the promenade: car headlamps, lights looping through the palms, a white line where the waves broke. The other faced west: the harbour bridge spanning the narrow stretch of water that separated the western suburbs from the city; a golden clasp on a head of smooth black hair.

‘Some champagne?’

Nathan took the offered glass. ‘Thanks.’ He moved back to the centre of the room. It seemed to contain nothing that was personal. No books, no pictures, no flowers. It was an expensive hotel suite, somewhere you passed through, somewhere you never actually changed or even touched. It went with the gloves. This man leaves no trace of himself behind, he thought, not even fingerprints. If he was a criminal, he’d never be caught.

Reid leaned over and placed a white capsule beside Nathan’s champagne glass. ‘That’s for you.’

‘What is it?’ Nathan asked.

‘It’ll make you feel good.’

Nathan hesitated.

‘What’s the matter?’ Reid said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

Nathan smiled. ‘I don’t know you. Why should I trust you?’

‘You’re here. You might as well.’ Reid leaned forwards, opened his capsule and tipped the contents into his champagne. He raised his glass to Nathan and drank the champagne down. He poured a little more champagne into his glass, swirled it round. He drank that too.

Nathan nodded. ‘You’re right.’ He did exactly what Reid had done. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

Reid showed him.

When he switched the light on, it multiplied. There were mirrors everywhere. He could see himself from every side at once. If he stood in a certain position he could see clones of himself vanishing into misty green infinity. He felt an excitement building in him now. He’d been in this situation before, in the water. Sometimes you got taken by a current, a rip that ran at an angle to the beach. You didn’t fight the current, you went with it. You went with it, waited for a wave and then, when the wave came, you took it. You rode that wave right out. Out of the current, back to the shore. He’d done this kind of thing before. He could relax.

When he walked back into the room he was smiling. Reid was smiling too, his head resting against the back of the sofa, his face almost parallel with the ceiling. Smiling with lips that even now, somehow, Nathan knew he’d kiss. He sat down. The champagne had risen in his glass. He drank some.

‘You all right?’ Reid asked him.

Nathan sat down. ‘I’m better than all right.’

‘Is there anything you want to know?’

It was a strange question. Nathan couldn’t think. He looked at the man on the sofa instead. His hair, his tie, his smile, his suit, his gloves. ‘Those gloves,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to hide something?’

‘Not hide,’ Reid said, ‘protect.’

‘Protect?’

Reid rose to his feet, moved towards the drinks cabinet. ‘I’m a hand model. I have to protect my hands. And also,’ and he smiled, ‘I like the way things feel when they’re on.’

‘Things?’

‘Yes,’ Reid said, ‘things.’

He opened another bottle of champagne and brought it to the table. ‘You’ve probably seen my hands a hundred times without even knowing it. Holding an electric razor, lighting a cigarette, slipping a diamond ring on to a woman’s finger.’ His smile widened. ‘Nobody sees my hands,’ he said, ‘except the general public.’

Nathan was about to return the smile when something happened to the wall. It bulged as if it was only paper-thin and there was a great weight of water behind it. Or not water, maybe, but a heart. Because the wall was moving in and out. Some kind of massive heart sluggishly beating. Then darkness poured inwards from the corners of the room, until only he was lit, nothing else. ‘It’s dark,’ he said, ‘it’s getting dark.’

‘Don’t worry,’ came a voice, ‘it’ll soon be light again.’

And instantly the darkness began to lift. He could see the sofa again, his glass on the table, the man across the room. It was as if the voice had worked a miracle.

‘That was really strange,’ he said.

‘What was?’

‘The way you said that, and then it happened. That’s what I do when I save lives. Someone’s drowning and I swim out to them and I say, “Don’t worry, I’m here, you might drink a bit of water, but you’re going to be all right.” That’s sort of what you just did to me.’

‘I’m surprised the parlours haven’t made that illegal,’ Reid said.

‘What, lifesaving?’

Reid smiled. ‘It’s not exactly in their interests, is it?’

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ Nathan said.

‘The last time I saw you down there, on the beach,’ Reid said, ‘you were with a guy in a top hat.’

Nathan laughed. ‘Oh, that’s Jed.’

‘Kind of strange-looking.’

‘Yeah.’ Nathan had a sudden vision of Jed driving over the bridge at night. A dark-purple car, its pale driver wearing a top hat and a radiator smile, its back seat heaped with dead skin.

‘He a friend of yours?’

‘No, not exactly. I knew him years ago, when I was about twelve. I didn’t see him again till last week. Ran into him in a bar on Second Avenue.’

‘Small world.’

‘He acted so weird that night. He kept saying he’d got plans.’

‘To do what?’

Nathan shrugged. ‘He’s after someone’s blood or something. He came out with all kinds of stuff. Seemed like most of it was bullshit.’

‘He sounds like a pretty desperate character.’

‘You should’ve heard him. He stayed over last weekend. Told some big story about how he’d killed someone. He had this tattoo on his wrist. Said it was the date he did it. The hand he did it with.’

‘He’s not still staying, I hope?’

Nathan smiled at Reid’s concern. ‘No. We threw him out. Same day I met you. I expect he’ll be in touch, though. He owes me eight dollars.’

‘Maybe he won’t be in touch,’ Reid said.

Nathan grinned. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘It’s strange,’ Reid said, ‘some people just fasten on and you don’t feel a thing.’

Nathan leaned forwards, reaching for his drink. That feeling had returned. His head moving much slower than his body. He sat back again, without his drink. He felt dizzy, as if he’d stood up too suddenly. It was just another rush, he told himself. It would pass. He stared at the sofa. It was some dark colour, there were no patterns, it couldn’t play any tricks on him.

‘You know something else I noticed when I looked through the binoculars?’ came Reid’s voice.

He couldn’t look. He could manage only one word. ‘No.’

‘I noticed how beautiful you were —’

He could look away from the sofa now, back into the room. The blood was sprinting through his veins, it was like a relay race, he saw a runner kick off a curve, hand the baton to another runner, who kicked again, a relay race all round the tight circuit of his blood.

‘Your body—’

The room ballooned away from him, the walls were sails filled with wind.

‘— and your face —’

His skin beneath his clothes, so comfortable. And Reid standing over him. Hair like a cloud. Dark like a storm coming. The ceiling above him concave, domed, and one gloved hand reaching down.

And down again, on to a bed. He lay back, passive. Cool sheets under him. A gloved hand moved to his fly, he felt the metal button give, he heard the rasp as the zipper threads split open. He held his breath. Felt his cock lift and the caress of leather. And then, almost as if he had passed out, maybe he had, he was naked. He shut his eyes and listened to the passage of those gloves across his skin. It was so hot. He looked down. The gloves, their palms were dark, it must be the sweat from his body. He whispered it, and Reid said he’d never noticed that before; he liked it. Nathan lay back again, saw an open window with a surf beach beyond, it was somewhere that he’d been, it was the same sound. He saw the tops of trees hurled by the wind and didn’t remember this. And now Reid’s mouth closed over him, a tightness, slow and tight. A flickering, like leaves, on the soles of his feet.

Reid rolled him gently over, on to his belly, and he felt Reid slide between his buttocks.

He lifted his head, said, ‘No,’ and then louder, ‘No.’

Reid murmured something.

He turned on to his side, moved down the bed. He thought he heard music somewhere, asked what it was, but Reid said it was nothing. He took Reid between his fingers, between his lips, he did what he liked people doing to him. It was so strange being on the other side of things, he’d forgotten the salty taste of it, the power of those final moments just before it came, when the muscles arched and sang, the lick and snap of railway tracks when a train’s approaching.

Then only the darkness pressing against his ears and the pumping of his heart.

Later he woke, it was still dark, he saw his dreams. His dreams were red and gold. He lay without moving, almost without breathing. The milky oblong of a window. And light from the window catching something that was hanging on the door. A silk gown, a kind of kimono. A vulture embroidered on the back. Feathers of metal, breath flaring from its open beak, breath that was red like fire or blood. Eyes like stones in the white bowls of their sockets, dead grey stones. He lay without moving, almost without breathing.

This was the wave he had to take. This wave.

He slid out of bed and tiptoed to the window. He stared out at the black uneven trees and the dark grey sky. Was that the ocean, between the two, a shiver of silver, the blade of a knife seen sideways on?

It must be. Hundreds of miles of darkness and one pale strip where the moonlight fell. He turned back into the room, felt around the bed for his clothes. Reid’s breathing surfaced, sank again. He had to be so quiet. Or Reid would wake. Or the vulture would come screeching off the back of that kimono. Red Indian feet. Now more than ever. Now.

He couldn’t find his socks. His feet still bare, his arms stretched in front of him, he felt his way through the apartment. It was bigger than he remembered, but then he didn’t really remember, did he? Or maybe it just seemed put together in a different way. Like a puzzle there are two answers to.

He got the wrong door. Thought it was the front door, but it wasn’t. A cupboard. With a skeleton hanging inside. No head, just all the bones from a body. Sewn on to black fabric. A suit of bones. His heart slammed against his ribs, it seemed for a moment they might crack. He closed the cupboard, pretended he’d seen nothing. He found the front door. This time he knew he was right because of the locks. There were four different locks and it was minutes before he could align them correctly. Each time he turned a knob, it clicked and, sooner or later, he felt sure, one of these clicks would reach the bedroom. That kind priest’s voice behind him. That gentle hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know why he was frightened. Yes, he did. That kimono, that suit of bones. Why? They were the first personal things he’d seen, that was why. The first things he’d seen that belonged to Reid. A vulture and a suit of bones.

He saw himself in a mirror outside the elevator. His hair in his eyes, his shirt ripped. He looked as if he’d been attacked. The night porter was dozing. He crept past on bare feet, his shoes in his hand. One last wisp of steam drifted up from the cooling cup of coffee at the porter’s elbow. The clock behind his head said ten to five.

He walked down to the promenade and caught a cab at the all-night taxi-stand outside Belgrano’s. The driver wore a cap and a leather jacket. He wanted to talk. He tried a couple of subjects, but Nathan didn’t say much. He eyed Nathan once or twice in the mirror.

‘You’ve been fucking,’ the driver said, ‘haven’t you?’

Nathan turned and looked at him. ‘What?’

‘You heard me. Listen, I’ve been driving cabs for twenty-four years. I know who’s been fucking and who hasn’t. Know how I know?’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s five in the fucking morning, that’s how I know. Right? And another thing. You’ve got the look of fucking about you. You’ve got that look people have when they’ve been fucking, know what I mean?’

Nathan smiled faintly.

‘She all right, was she?’ The driver was rubbing his lips.

‘She nice?’

‘Yeah,’ Nathan said, ‘she was great.’

All Wins on Lit Lines Only

The Towers of Remembrance dated from a time when many of the city’s graveyards were full. A time of panic: suddenly there was nowhere for the dead to go. And then somebody said, ‘Let people be buried high above the ground, not six feet under it; let people be buried closer to heaven.’ It seemed like the perfect solution. The first high-rise cemetery in history. Original, dramatic, space-conscious. And also, unfortunately, doomed.

There had been a sudden reaction against the whole notion of burial on land. It was unhealthy, people said. It slowed the natural decay of the body. Hindered the soul’s transition. Sins collected, fouled the earth. Result? Psychic unrest, evil spirits, disease. And so, after an initial rush of enthusiasm, the Towers were left to rot. Windows were smashed. Graffiti blossomed. Ever since Jed could remember, the place had been a sanctuary for runaways, vultures, junkies. A lost generation. Not gone, but forgotten. He climbed out of his car and locked the door. The South Tower had been his home for three years. His own ghosts were here, among all the others.

It was almost dark now. A wind blew off the ocean. It was a warm wind, but the sound it made as it lunged down the concrete corridors was cold. He stepped into the central plaza. Something landed on the ground next to his left foot. A white frothy medal of spit. He looked up. Two children peered at him from the walkway twenty feet above. A boy with a crewcut and puffy eyes and a girl with heart-shaped sunglasses and white-blonde hair. Project kids.

‘Hey, mister,’ the girl called down, ‘why are you wearing that stupid hat?’

The boy grinned. ‘So we can’t spit on his stupid head.’ Their screechy laughter broke up in a sudden gust of wind.

Jed walked on.

He reached the foot of the South Tower. Steel doors slouched on their hinges, windows were holes with glass teeth round the edge. In the hallway the walls had been sprayed with the usual tangle of graffiti. The elevator was jammed open. He punched the button a couple of times, but nothing happened. He looked inside. Rectangular, for the coffins. A red smear on the dull metal wall. It could’ve been paint or blood. Blood, most likely: this was Mangrove East. He stepped back. Above the elevator was a notice: PLEASE SHOW RESPECT FOR THE DEAD. Bit late for that. He took a breath and started up the stairs.

By the time he reached the thirteenth floor he was winded. He leaned against the door until his heart slowed down, then he knocked. He waited, knocked again. At last he heard footsteps, the shooting of bolts. A woman’s face appeared. She wore her hair tied back in a ponytail. A baby sat in the crook of her arm. Jed just stared.

‘It’s a baby,’ the woman said.

Now Jed stared at her. ‘I’m looking for Silence.’

The woman jerked her head. ‘Come on in.’

He brushed past her. Stood in the corridor while she fastened an assortment of locks and bolts.

‘Not a very high-class neighbourhood,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I used to live here.’

She pushed past him. He followed her down the corridor. Boxes stacked against one wall, almost to the ceiling. He turned his head sideways, read a label. Videos. There must’ve been fifty of them. All the same make. Silence the fence.

He passed through an archway and into what had once been the memory room. This was where the ashes would’ve rested. This was where the family would’ve gathered to pay their respects. Silence rose from a deep leather chair. He was wearing a bright rust-coloured suit with a pale-blue pinstripe. Ten years didn’t seem to have aged him at all. He had the same round cheeks, the same slit eyes.

‘Like the suit,’ Jed said.

Silence smiled. They shook hands. Silence pointed at the sofa. They both sat down again, Jed on the sofa, Silence in his leather chair. Silence was watching a programme on TV.

Jed looked around. Silence had knocked through into the next grave suite, by the look of it, and turned the extra space into a kitchen and bathroom. He’d installed a cooker, fuelled by gas cylinders, and a hot-water heater. The electricity was being supplied by a portable generator. A bit of a change from the old days of fast-food and candlelight.

He touched Silence on the arm. ‘Real nice job you’ve done.’

Silence accepted the compliment with another smile and a slight bow.

Jed turned to the woman. ‘You live here too?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we’re just visiting.’ She opened the glass door to the balcony. It faced due north, towards the airport. ‘Bob likes it here,’ she said. ‘He sits here for hours drinking his milk and watching the planes.’

Jed stared at the baby again. It looked like a tortoise.

Silence tapped him on the arm and handed him a business card. On the blank side Silence had written something in block capitals: IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME.

‘No kidding,’ Jed said.

He held the card out for Silence to take, but Silence made a tearing gesture with his hands and pointed at the bin. Jed tore the card in two and dropped the pieces in the bin. He noticed that the bin was half full of identical business cards that had been torn in a similar way.

‘This all the things you say?’ Jed asked.

Silence nodded.

‘How long since you emptied it?’

Silence shrugged. ABOUT A MONTH, he wrote.

‘You don’t talk much, do you?’ Jed said. ‘I guess you never did.’

THERE’S TWO KINDS OF TALKING, Silence wrote. TALKING OUT LOUD AND TALKING IN YOUR HEAD.

Jed had to agree with that.

SO WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU? Silence wrote.

‘I need somewhere to stay.’

NO PROBLEM.

‘Something else,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not here, OK? If anyone asks, don’t tell them a thing.’

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THEM? I’M A DEAF MUTE, REMEMBER?

‘What if they tell you to write it down?’

Silence smiled and wrote, OW! I JUST HURT MY HAND.

Jed was given Tip’s old room. Eight feet by eight (in the old days they’d christened it the Cell). Now it was used for what Silence called ‘stock’: two rowing-machines, a stack of cordless phones, ten microwaves, and a mountain bike. There was just enough room left over for a bunk bed. Jed took the top bunk. He went to sleep early that night and woke before morning. He rolled on to his belly, stared out of the window. Dawn had driven yellow wedges into the darkness along the horizon. The city lay below, cool as ashes. He could hear no traffic, only the wind murmuring. He remembered the night Tip OD’d. High winds, storm-force. Clothes swayed on their rails, water see-sawed in the goldfish tank. Tip had shot up and tumbled sideways, his face grey, words like rubber. Jed called the ambulance, then he hid behind the sliding doors that used to house the altar and waited. It didn’t take them long. He heard boots on the floor, breathing, curses. And all the time the south wind moaning, like a choir of ghosts. That was where the ocean cemeteries were, south of the city, twelve miles out. When the wind blew from that direction, some people said it was the voices of the dead. The cops were so spooked that night, they didn’t even think to search the place. Lucky for him. That was the last time he saw Tip. He laid his head back on the pillow, watched the walls turn grey. There were ashes in urns on the floor above. There were fourteen people sealed into the walls downstairs. But you could flip fear over like a coin and then it meant protection. He was glad to be this high up, it made him feel out of reach, safe. And the wind? That was like airport music, it was nothing, it was just there. He fell asleep again and slept till midday.

He left for the asylum at five that afternoon. One phone-call had told him all he needed to know: the visiting hours (between six and eight) and the address (somewhere in Westwood Heights). From Mangrove he cut through the old meat-packing district towards the tunnel. It was a narrow road that ran along the southern lip of the harbour. No restaurants or stores here, just the steel-roll doors of warehouses, wide enough for trucks, and cobblestones instead of tarmac, and deep gutters for the blood to run down. When he reached the Helix, it spun him round till he was almost dizzy, then he dipped down under the harbour and rose again for air in Venus. He headed west on Highway 12. It was the same route he’d taken from Mitch’s place the day before, only now he was travelling in the opposite direction, away from the city. It was a gamble to be travelling at all, but it was one that he had to take, one that Mitch, for all his warnings, might understand. If anyone was going to understand what he was doing, it would be Mitch, he felt. He left the highway five miles further on, drove through Westwood and up into the foothills.

The location surprised him. He would’ve expected to find the asylum in one of the gloomier and more fetid sections of the city. But Westwood was a retirement suburb. Tree-lined streets, wrought-iron gates. Valets and video security. People died comfortably here, in monogrammed sheets, their heads wrapped in a soft cocoon of drugs. In fact, they didn’t really die at all; they ‘fell asleep’, they ‘joined their maker’, they were ‘called’. A death in Westwood was worth at least two or three in Mangrove. These had always been rich harvesting grounds for the Paradise Corporation.

It was dusk. He caught a glimpse of a building set high above the road and floodlit from beneath. That would be the place. He took a curve too fast and almost lost control. A black H showed in his headlamps. H for Hospital. He turned between stone gateposts. Another sign told him to go slow. After driving through acres of parkland, the grass turning blue as night came down, he saw a lawn. It was so neat, it frightened him. He’d met people like that. Suit on the outside, knife underneath. He reached into his inside pocket and took out a piece of candy. He tore the wrapper off and tossed it on the floor of the car.

In the lobby the girl behind the reception desk had fingernails that could have been his mother’s doing. An inch long and frosty-pink. The girl ignored him for a while. He had time to admire her crisp white uniform, to notice the glittery gold belt she wore around her waist.

He took his hat off, smoothed his hair. ‘I’m here to see Mr Gorelli,’ he said.

She glanced up at him and then her eyes slid sideways and came to rest on his right shoulder. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m here to see Mr Gorelli. I rang earlier.’

The girl lifted a white phone. ‘There’s someone to see Mr Gorelli.’ She replaced the phone. ‘Sister will be along in a moment,’ she told him. ‘If you’d like to take a seat.’

He crossed the polished marble floor and sank down into a soft pink sofa. There were three more soft pink sofas in the lobby. There was a white grand piano too, like something from a winter fairy tale. The girl with the gold belt was watching him. When the clock struck six, she’d change into a vulture. He let his eyes drift away from her and through the room. Money was seeds. People threw it around and places like this sprang up out of the ground. He wondered how Vasco could afford it. And then his chin jerked upwards like a fish on a line. Maybe Creed was paying the bills. He was perverse enough.

‘Are you the gentleman who’s come to see Mr Gorelli?’

One look at the Sister and he thought he’d better smile. She was about fifty. Her face seemed to hang from some invisible hook, all its weight gathered in the folds of her cheeks and the rolls beneath her chin. The skin under her eyes looked stretched. As if it was being pulled downwards. As if, at any moment, it might tear.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m the gentleman,’ and he rose to his feet.

‘This way, please.’

‘How is he?’ He thought he ought to ask.

She eyed him over her shoulder. ‘Pretty much the same.’

The same as what?

He tried to remember what Mitch had told him. All he could see was a man curled naked in a gutter. It didn’t even look like Vasco.

Sister pushed through some swing doors that were muffled, like her shoes, in black rubber. Everything about her was precise, hygienic. If she ever farted, he thought, it’d probably sound like someone slipping a note under a door.

‘Nearly there,’ she said.

They pushed through more swing doors and entered a long room with a wooden floor. There were ten beds on either side and bars on the windows. The air smelt faintly of ether.

‘Second bed from the end on the right,’ the Sister said. ‘Are you a relative?’

‘I’m a colleague. We used to work together.’

She nodded. ‘If you need me, I’ll be in the office.’

‘Thank you, Sister.’

Jed stood beside the bed, looking down. Vasco lay with his arms resting on top of the blankets, his hands loosely clenched. Those chunky rings he used to wear had been removed. But there was nothing anyone could do about the tombstones: two rows of blue tattoos that ran all the way from his shoulders to his wrists. And there was one, Jed remembered with a shiver, that covered almost the whole of his back. His eyes jumped to Vasco’s face. Masklike. All the blood seemed to have drained from his skin, and his hair, still black, looked stiff, fake.

Jed sat down. ‘Hey, Vasco,’ he said, ‘remember me?’

Vasco stared at the ceiling.

Jed shifted his chair closer to the bed. ‘It’s Jed,’ he whispered. ‘You know, Spaghetti. The ugly one.’ He leaned closer still, spoke right into Vasco’s ear. ‘So fucking ugly, I’m hardly human.’

There was a murmur at his shoulder. He looked round. An old man stood behind him, clutching a hymn book. The old man’s pyjamas had come undone and Jed could see his penis dangling like a piece of gristle in the gap.

‘He ain’t going to talk to you,’ the old man said.

Jed frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s been here five years. He ain’t talked to nobody.’

Jed turned away from the old man. Thinking back, he could remember other times when Vasco had seemed to go missing inside himself. On the mudbanks of the river once. Then that morning when they stood in the place where Scraper had been killed. And again the night they torched the construction site in Meadowland. It hadn’t mattered then: he’d always come back. This time, though, he’d gone further. Further than ever before.

Jed bent close to his friend. ‘I should’ve listened to you. You were doing the right thing. You were just clumsy, that’s all.’

He sat back. Dinner at Vasco’s house. A three-car garage, a flagpole on the lawn, a wife. Too many distractions. Vasco had tried to warn him that night, and he’d ignored it. He’d thought Vasco was being dramatic. But the drama only came later, when Vasco sold the story to the papers.

He bent close again. ‘That story you leaked, it never would’ve stuck.’ He shook his head. ‘You must’ve been crazy to try and pull something like that.’ He bent closer still. ‘You should’ve asked me, Vasco. I always had ideas. We could’ve done it together.’

No, no. That was just dream talk. He’d already been drawn into Creed’s magnetic field by then. He never would’ve taken sides against Creed. ‘Listen, Vasco. I want to bring him down. I want to break him. But I need your help. You helped me before. A couple of times. You can do it again. We can get him, but we’ve got to move now. It’s our last chance.’ He eased back slowly, hands braced on his knees. He waited. But Vasco wasn’t even there. Jed looked down. He didn’t know what else he could say.

‘You’re not the first one who’s tried.’

Jed spun round. It was the old man again. The old man took a step backwards, sniggered. ‘Others’ve tried, don’t make no difference.’

‘Others?’

The old man nodded.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t make no difference who. He ain’t going to talk is all. Me, I talk up a storm. Don’t get enough time for what I got to say. But him,’ and he pointed at Vasco with his hymn book, ‘he ain’t got nothing he wants to say, not to nobody.’

Jed stared at Vasco. Sharon had told him a story once. It was one of her typical tall stories, it belonged with her magic bag. And yet it seemed to have come alive in his head, and he found that he could remember parts he didn’t even think he’d heard.

It was about a man who lived in a small village on the other side of the world. This man had a pig that he wanted to sell. On market day he set out for the nearby town, but as he reached the gates of the town he fell down dead. His family buried him in sacred ground, which was up a mountain, Jed remembered, past some big trees.

Not long after being buried, the man rose up out of his grave and shook the earth from his limbs and walked through the big trees, back into the village. He told his family that he’d had a dream. In the dream he’d appeared at the temple of the dead, but the god who guarded the gate had denied him entry. ‘You’re not ready yet,’ the god had told him. ‘You must go back.’

How did the story go on? Something about the man turning strange. Something about him sitting outside his hut and staring straight ahead as if there was nothing in front of him, nothing for miles. Jed’s eyes drifted down to Vasco, and he shivered.

At first the man’s family let him be, but they soon got scared. They asked the wise men what to do. The wise men couldn’t really help. They said that the man’s soul had left his body while he was lying in the ground, and now he was trapped between two lives, just waiting to die. It was then that the mother had an inspiration. ‘We must sell the pig,’ she said. If they sold the pig, her son would have his last desire, and maybe then he’d find peace.

She put the pig up for auction. There wasn’t much interest at first. A pig, after all, was only a pig. It wasn’t even a very succulent pig; if anything, Jed remembered, it was kind of scrawny. But, all of a sudden, rumours began to fly through the village and the surrounding countryside. There was a pig for sale. The pig had some kind of magic power. Whoever owned the pig would never die. People came from far and wide, the bidding soared.

By the time it was over, the pig had fetched a huge price. The mother went to tell her son the news, but when she touched him on the shoulder he toppled sideways. She didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. The family buried him again, and this time he stayed in his grave, and his body turned black and sank into the earth.

Jed looked into Vasco’s eyes. Maybe the same kind of story had happened here. Maybe Vasco had asked for death, and been turned away. And so he’d walked naked through the big trees, and now he was sitting outside his house, waiting for some god to call his name. Jed felt like one of the family: invisible and scared. Like the mother, he had to think of something. He had to try and change where Vasco was.

‘You recognise me, don’t you, Vasco?’ He was so close, he could smell the stale urine, the antiseptic. ‘I can’t believe you don’t recognise me.’

The old man touched Jed on the shoulder and Jed looked round. ‘You want to hear a song?’ The old man was already fumbling through the pages.

‘No,’ Jed said. ‘Just leave us alone.’

‘I found a good one.’ The old man was holding the hymn book in both hands and shifting hopefully from one foot to the other.

‘I said, leave us alone,’ Jed snapped.

The old man backed away across the ward, his eyes skidding on the floor, the hymn book dangling against his thigh like part of a broken limb.

Some of the anger was still with Jed when he turned back to Vasco. He’d tried everything and got nowhere. He could only think of one last way he might get through. He put his mouth close to Vasco’s ear.

‘I know who killed your brother,’ he whispered.

He drew back. Nothing.

He leaned down again. ‘Your brother, Francis,’ he whispered. ‘I know who killed him.’

He waited. Still nothing.

‘It was me. I killed him.’

Suddenly those pale hands were fastened round his neck. The arms a blur of black hair, blue with all those deaths. Room for one more. Jed tried to break the hold, but the hands just locked and tightened. He was on the floor and Vasco was above him. He could see Vasco’s face and it was blank. Then black ink began to seep in around the edges of his vision. The stench of stale urine. Like old Mr Garbett. The soiled yellow cardigan, the dusty brown bottle on the floor. The click-click-click of a spool still turning when the tape’s run out. A pair of striped pants, an open fly. A shrivelled penis nodding in the gap. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. The click-click-click, won’t someone switch that off? Oslo, Hilversum. The penis uncurling, lifting, swelling. The black ink flooding through his head.

‘Are you all right?’ The Sister was kneeling beside him.

He sat up, touched his forehead. ‘My hat,’ he tried to say, ‘where’s my hat?’ but his voice didn’t work properly.

The Sister spoke to a nurse. ‘I think he wants his hat.’

The nurse handed Jed his hat. He took it, thanked her, put it on. Then brought one hand up to support his throat. He thought he could hear trees. Leaves rustling, leaves in wind. He looked up. Saw Vasco wrestling with three attendants. The struggle was taking place in near silence. That sound he could hear was the sound of their starched white uniforms. Vasco’s limbs twisted and convulsed, but his face was still blank. His eyes, also blank, were pinned on Jed.

‘It was Creed.’ Jed was trying to shout, but his voice would only crack and squeak. ‘Creed told me to do it.’

The Sister gripped him by the arm. ‘This way, sir.’

‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, Vasco. That’s why I came. I’m going to bring that bastard down, but I need your help —’

‘That’s enough.’ The Sister steered him towards the door.

‘He made me do it, Vasco,’ Jed croaked. ‘He made me.’ The doors swung closed. He could still see Vasco’s blank face framed in the square glass panel that made up the top half of the door. ‘Would you like a song?’ he heard the old man cry. A cackle, then he was round the corner, out of earshot.

The Sister took him to see the doctor on duty. After a brief examination, the doctor told him it was severe bruising, nothing more, and prescribed a course of pain-killers. The Sister had the prescription made up for him in the hospital dispensary, then she led him back to the lobby.

‘I think it would be better,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t visit Mr Gorelli again.’

Nobody was in when he got back to the tower. He went and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The ghosts of Vasco’s fingers had appeared on his neck. He stole a scarf out of Silence’s bedroom and wrapped it round the bruises. He’d tell Silence that he had the flu.

He heated a tin of vegetable soup, but he had to leave all the vegetables. He couldn’t eat, only drink. He couldn’t even swallow the pain-killers he’d been given. It hurt too much. He had to grind the tablets up with the back of a spoon and swallow the powder in a glass of water. He went to bed early and lay on his back in the dark.

He had a dream that night. He was standing in a garden. There was an old man lying on the branch of a tree. Another, younger man stood below him, listening. Jed spoke to them; they both ignored him. He was just turning away when a strange machine lumbered through the air towards him. It looked like the inside of a radio, but it was the size of a helicopter. He watched it knock against a building and veer sideways, narrowly missing a tree. Everybody on the lawn was scattering.

Then the machine swooped down and plucked the old man off his branch. At first he seemed to think it was fun, a kind of fairground ride. The machine jolted, twisted, groaned. It collided with everything in sight, but it always lurched back into the air again. Only gradually did it become clear that this was the machine’s way of killing people.

The old man’s friends managed to pin the machine to the grass. As soon as they’d released the old man they began to attack the machine with anything they could lay their hands on. Some had iron bars, others had planks. One had an axe. When the axe struck, the machine let out a scream, as if it was a human being in pain. Then something even stranger started happening. One moment it looked like valves and pipes and fuse-boxes, the next it looked like a heart, intestines, lungs. It flickered backwards and forwards between the two, it couldn’t seem to decide which one it really was. Still the blows descended, sometimes clanging against metal, sometimes splashing into flesh. Then, suddenly, it assumed its human form. There was even a head, though only the lower half could be seen. And with every second that passed less and less of the head was visible, it was as if it was escaping through a hole in reality, it seemed to be trying to draw its tortured body after it. One of the friends caught on. He swung the axe and severed the head from the body. A scream not of pain now but of rage and the body reared, stood up. It tottered across the lawn, blood spilling from its neck. It grew a new head, and the face was grey and mad. Blood fitted the scalp like a red skullcap. And then it saw Jed, he was hiding behind a tree, but it was no good, the tree was too narrow. It was turning now, it was bearing down on him …

He woke, the sheets cold with sweat. His neck pulsed. It was agony. He got up, went to the kitchen. Ground two more tablets into powder. Drank them down. He leaned on the window, still trembling from the dream.

He never dreamed, never. He thought dreams were bullshit, mumbo-jumbo, a waste of time. If somebody started telling him their dreams, he always switched off right away. That red giant, though. He was hard to shake.

The city lay below, a grid of orange lines, secret parcels of darkness between. He thought of his favourite slot machine. In the bar of the Commercial Hotel in Adam’s Creek. How long ago. All that had happened since. What did it say across the top? ALL WINS ON LIT LINES ONLY. It was the same here. The same now. He’d staked everything on this game. The lines were lit. The rest was up to him.

Red Flags

It was a battle to get in, the waves were strong, but soon he was lying on the other side of the water. The ocean cradled him. Moved him up towards the sky and moved him back again. The last twelve hours came to him in flashes. It had happened with such ease. Elation first, then pleasure. Lastly, fear. And there were gaps between, black enough to be unconsciousness. He remembered feeling he’d been taken by a current, remembered feeling he could wait for the next big wave and ride it to the shore; he remembered thinking he’d accomplished that. Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt as if he might still be in that current’s grip. Even now, he thought, those high-powered binoculars could be trained on him. He turned in the water. A wave lifted him and, looking back towards the city, he saw the grey turrets of the Palace Hotel. Even now, he thought.

When he walked out of the water, Harriet was standing on the beach holding his towel. She seemed to relish his surprise. He took the towel from her and began to dry himself.

‘You shouldn’t be swimming,’ she said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘The red flags are up. It’s dangerous.’

‘I’m a lifeguard,’ he said, ‘remember?’ He rubbed his hair, then pushed it back out of his eyes. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

‘That’s nice,’ she said.

He sighed.

‘I’ve come to take you to lunch,’ she said.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said and before he could reply she was walking away. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’

He took his time drying.

As soon as he got into the car, she started the engine and pulled out into the traffic. They drove along in silence for a while. Then, casually, like someone making conversation, she said, ‘You came home pretty late last night.’

‘It was pretty late,’ he said, ‘yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘I was out.’

‘Well, obviously.’

She turned the radio on. One of those easy-listening stations. All swooning strings and lush brass.

‘You mind if I change this?’ he asked her.

‘I like it,’ she said.

She tightened her lips, holding the smile inside. It showed only as a narrowing at the corners of her eyes, a kind of temporary roundness in her cheeks, as if she had fruit in there, or candy.

He looked out of the window. ‘Where are we going?’

‘A little place I know,’ she said. ‘It’s in Torch Bay.’

Torch Bay. He might’ve guessed. It was just about the most pretentious suburb in the city. White yachts, beauty parlours, haughty blondes in foreign cars. Some people called it TB, for short. Like the disease.

They pulled up outside a place called Maison something. Shrubs in tubs on the sidewalk. Coachlamps. Valet parking.

‘I’m not dressed for this,’ he said.

She slipped her feet into black suede pumps, teased her fringe out in the mirror. ‘You’re fine.’

As they entered the restaurant a waiter took her hand and bent over it, his hair swirling into the crown of his head the way bathwater disappears down a plughole. They were led to a table by the window. Nathan looked around. A peppermint interior. Air-conditioning on Hi-Cool. A woman perched on a stool at the bar in a lime-green jumpsuit, amethyst lipstick and enough gold chains to get her elected mayor. He turned back to Harriet. ‘So what was it you wanted to talk about?’

The waiter appeared at her shoulder.

‘I think we should order first,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’ She didn’t have to look at the menu. ‘I’ll have the avocado salad,’ she told the waiter, ‘and some mineral water.’ She turned to Nathan. ‘What about you, darling?’

‘I told you already. I’m not hungry.’

‘But you must have something.’

‘I’ll have some coffee,’ he said, ‘then I’d better go.’

‘Will you have the coffee now, sir?’ the waiter asked him.

‘Yes,’ Nathan said, ‘now.’

‘That’ll be all, thank you,’ Harriet told the waiter.

The waiter bowed once, backed away.

Harriet snapped her bag open. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. ‘You’ve lost all your nice manners,’ she said, and she inhaled, her pale lips tightening around the filter.

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

‘You never had much respect for me,’ she went on, ‘but at least you had nice manners. Now they seem to have completely vanished.’ She tapped her cigarette against the lip of the ashtray. ‘I don’t know what your father would’ve thought.’

She raised the cigarette to her lips, inhaled again. Then she turned her head to one side and blew the smoke across the restaurant. Her eyes never left his face. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that he would’ve been rather disappointed.’

He saw that she would always use his love for Dad against him. Almost as if she was jealous of it. ‘Is that what you brought me here to talk about,’ he said, ‘my manners?’

She laughed, but there was no amusement in it. This was something new, this sourness. It told of her many disappointments. It was their residue.

The waiter was back. Salad, fizzy water, coffee with a dome of froth. Nathan reached for a sachet of sugar. There was an advertisement on the back. THE HOUSE OF SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, it said. YOUR PEACE OF MIND IS OUR SATISFACTION. So they were even advertising on sugar now. The House of Sweetness and Light. They probably had a monopoly on everyone who died of diabetes. He tore the sachet open, watched the granules sink into the froth. He liked the way the froth seemed to open, swallow the sugar, and then close again as if nothing had happened.

‘Nathan?’

He looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘I’ve seen a lawyer.’

‘Oh. What did they say?’

‘They say the house belongs to you and Georgia.’ ‘That’s what I told you.’

‘They say Rona’s got no claim. None whatsoever.’

Nathan waited.

‘It raises a question.’

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘What question?’

‘The question of Rona’s share of the money.’

‘That’s all taken care of,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be invested. By the time she’s eighteen, it will’ve doubled.’

Harriet pushed a sliver of avocado around with her fork. ‘That’s nine years away.’

‘I know.’

‘She needs the money now.’

‘She can’t have it now. You know that.’

Harriet’s fork hit the edge of her plate. ‘You’re going to try and cheat her out of her money, aren’t you? You want to make her suffer, just like you made your father suffer. Christ, Nathan, you’re so selfish.’

For a moment he couldn’t move. Not his hands, not his face; nothing. It was hard for him to believe that she’d actually said what she’d just said. She could summon her venom with so little effort; it surfaced in such neat, numbing packages.

He forced himself forwards in his seat. He kept his voice low. ‘Dad left instructions in his will. He said the money was to be invested for her until she was eighteen. It’s the law, Harriet. All we’re doing is obeying it.’

She drank a delicate amount of mineral water and replaced the glass on the table. ‘You could still release the money,’ she said, ‘if you wanted to.’

He looked down at his coffee. The dome of froth had collapsed. ‘Why do you think Dad wrote it into the will in the first place?’

She speared a piece of asparagus. She held the fork just below her lips and waited for him to tell her.

‘He didn’t trust you with the money. Same as what you’re accusing me of. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it?’

She didn’t seem to think so. She placed the asparagus in her mouth and put her fork down. She chewed, she swallowed. She sighed. ‘I’m afraid I’ve talked to Georgia.’

He stared at her blankly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I told her what you did to me on the day of the funeral.’

‘What I did to you?’

‘What you did to me,’ and she paused, ‘against my will.’

‘You’re not serious,’ he said, and he began to laugh. But then he looked into her face and his laughter left him and he was cold suddenly. ‘You told Georgia that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Harriet shrugged. ‘She thinks she knows you. I thought I’d tell her what you’re really like.’

‘But it’s a lie.’

She turned a leaf of lettuce over with the tip of her knife. ‘Who says it’s a lie?’

He stood up quickly. Her glass slopped over. Water fizzed on the white tablecloth and was absorbed.

Harriet raised her hand. ‘Waiter?’

‘You should be careful,’ Nathan said, and his voice was quiet, uneven at the edges. ‘You should just be careful.’

On his way out of the restaurant he passed the woman in the lime-green jumpsuit. He heard her chains clink as she turned to watch him go. He stood in the bright sunshine, trembling. He went through his pockets. He had about a dollar-fifty. Just enough for a bus to Central Station. He could walk the rest of the way. He would’ve walked all the way if he’d had to. Anything rather than stay in that place a moment longer.

It took him five minutes to reach the centre of Torch Bay. He sat down on a bench and waited for a bus. The inside of his head was so tangled, he couldn’t get one straight thought out.

When the bus drew up, he moved all the way to the back and sat with his eyes fixed and the points of his knees wedged against the seat in front of him. I told her what you did to me. He watched the city pass in the window. Sky and buildings blurred under the swirly tinted glass. A city under the sea. What you did to me. Against my will. The bus lumbered on. It was so hot, he was sitting over the engine, his eyes seemed weighed down, down. Down. It was as if he’d toppled off a ledge and sleep was the drop. A long, sweet drop; a million miles.

Then somebody was shouting. ‘Central,’ they were shouting, ‘Central Station.’ And somebody knocked against his leg.

He hauled himself upright, stumbled down out of the bus, his hair sticky with salt, lunchtime seeming like a dream he’d just woken from. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. Downtown crowded in on him. Sirens, neon, liquor. Every time he saw Georgia’s face he shut the picture off. He didn’t dare imagine. He simply had to get to her. He took the quiet streets and almost ran. At last he reached the building. An old apartment block with a canopy, a doorman, a marble hallway. Georgia, she always landed on her feet.

‘I’m here to see Georgia,’ he said. ‘I’m her brother.’

‘Georgia?’ The doorman screwed his face up, as if he was trying to shift the whole of one side of it on to the other side. ‘Reckon she went out.’

Nathan sagged, his strings cut. ‘When?’

‘About an hour ago.’

‘Any idea where she went?’

‘Sorry, pal.’

‘I’ve got to see her,’ Nathan said. ‘I’d better wait.’

‘Whatever you say.’

Nathan sat on the steps. A tall building at the end of the street told him, in beads of golden neon, that it was 2.55. 103°. 2.55. 103°. 2.56. 103°.

‘Hottest day for nine years.’

Nathan looked up to see the doorman standing behind him. ‘Is that right.’

The doorman had a grey rag in his hand. He dabbed the back of his neck with it. ‘Just said so on the radio.’

‘Think it’ll rain?’ Nathan asked him.

There were clouds in the sky. Scalloped at the edges, like old postcards. Almost brown.

‘Too hot to fucking rain.’ The doorman tipped his face at the sky and slit his eyes. Then he shook his head and returned to the lobby.

No rain came. Only lightning, sheeting above the roof of the Hotel Terminal. As if some kind of press conference was being held in the next street.

Time went by, measured in golden beads. Dusty yellow curtains slouched in the open windows of the hotel. A lazy neon sign said V CANCIES. Couldn’t even be bothered with the A.

3.25. 104º.

Then, looking up once more, he saw a figure that he recognised. The black top hat, the cracked black shoes. Unmistakable.

‘Jed?’ he called out. ‘Hey! Jed!’

Jed stopped in his tracks, his body still facing forwards, and turned his head. Nathan ran across the street. When he reached Jed he didn’t know what to say. He found himself staring at the scarf that Jed was wearing round his neck.

‘You sick or something?’ he said.

Light trickled off the rims of Jed’s spectacles as he tilted his head towards the sky. ‘Sick? Heh.’ His voice creaked like a piece of wood furniture in an old house.

‘So how’re you doing?’ Nathan said. ‘Did you find a place?’

Jed nodded. ‘I found a place.’

‘Where?’

‘Round here.’ And Jed nodded again.

Nathan thought of the time he ran into Tip and Jed on Central Avenue. ‘I remember when you used to live in the Towers.’ He smiled. ‘I went there once. I looked for you.’ He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t find you, though.’

‘Must’ve been years ago,’ Jed said.

‘The place was like a maze,’ Nathan said.

‘By the way.’ Jed reached into his pocket and took out a bill. He smiled down at it for a moment, then he handed it to Nathan. ‘Here’s the money I owe you.’

Nathan stared at the bill. It was a hundred dollars. A hundred-dollar bill.

‘But,’ he said, ‘but I only lent you eight.’

Jed was still smiling, but the smile had altered. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘You were so kind, letting me stay and all.’

Nathan felt the change in that smile like a lowering in the temperature. He almost shivered.

‘Well,’ Jed said, ‘better be going.’

Nathan watched Jed as he walked away. Jed stayed in the shadows, close to the wall, the way blind men do. When he reached the corner he looked back over his shoulder. He didn’t make any sign or gesture, he just looked. Then he was gone.

Nathan returned to the steps and sat down. He looked at the hundred-dollar bill in his hand, could make no sense of it. Still, he felt easier now. Somehow his faith had been renewed. If Jed could come by, then surely Georgia could come by too. But he waited another hour and all that new faith drained away. It was 6.04. He left a message with the doorman, then he stood on the sidewalk, trying to remember Georgia’s favourite places, trying to think where she might be.

He worked his way through the neighbourhood. The bars, the cocktail lounges. By the time he’d finished, it was almost nine. Then he suddenly remembered. There was a place she sometimes went when she was depressed. The Starlite Rooms, on the end of the pier. She liked to watch the old people dance.

It was years since he’d been along the pier at night. So much junk on sale. Coffin-shaped ice-creams, T-shirts that said things like MOON BEACH — THE CITY THAT PUTS THE FUN BACK INTO FUNERALS, midnight cruises to the ocean cemeteries. There was even a DATE-OF-YOUR-DEATH machine. You put 50 cents in the slot, then you placed your hand in the machine and it told you how much longer you were going to live. ‘You’ll die tomorrow. Have a nice day.’ He kept walking. Up ahead he could see the pale dome of the Starlite Rooms. A white neon sign glowed above the entrance: DANCING NITELY. He could hear music now. An electric organ, a drum machine. A man’s voice singing. Something about turning off the sunshine. It sounded blurred and he thought he knew why. It was all the old folks singing along. Late on their cues and out of tune. It was as if the music was a ship and it was leaving a wake behind it in the air.

The doorman had a pencil moustache and a wide fierce nose. ‘Evening, sir,’ he said. ‘You dancing tonight?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m looking for my sister.’

The doorman sucked some air in past his teeth. ‘How old is she, this sister of yours?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘Ah, well. You won’t find her in there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘No one under fifty in there.’

A waltz started up inside. The doorman’s arms lifted away from his sides and curved to hold an invisible woman. He twirled her round the entrance hall. ‘Never could resist a waltz,’ he said, grinning over his shoulder.

‘I think I’ll just have a look, if you don’t mind,’ Nathan told him, and pushed through the mirror doors.

The place was lit like the inside of a fridge. A stage with a backdrop of spangled gold drapes. A horseshoe dance-floor. Hundreds of tables, all occupied. Nathan scanned the room, but the doorman was right. No one under fifty. Still, there was a chance she might turn up. It was only just after nine. He bought a drink and sat at a table with three old ladies in sleevelesss frocks. The waltz ended.

The man who was playing the organ tucked his chin into his right shoulder in a kind of shorthand bow. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I must say it’s a great pleasure to be here in the famous Starlite Rooms tonight …’

Maroon suit, green skin. Hair as slick and black as liquorice.

‘… my name’s Maxie Carlo … I play, you sway …’

The three old ladies tittered, winked.

The organ had a built-in drum machine. Maxie Carlo twisted a couple of dials and a new rhythm began.

‘… good to see a bit of spirit here tonight … I stick to lemonade, myself …’

Halfway through his second drink Nathan thought he’d try calling Georgia again. He found a phone near the men’s room. He dialled Georgia’s apartment, but there was still no reply. On the way back to his table, he bought another drink. He sat down again. The music had stopped.

‘Nathan, what a pleasant surprise.’ The voice was rich and cool, and came from his right shoulder.

He looked round. It was Maxie Carlo. Black hairs bristled in his nostrils. A damp top lip. No neck.

‘I would never have expected to see you here,’ Maxie said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’ Nathan could feel the blankness on his face.

‘I’m sorry, Nathan,’ Maxie said, ‘you don’t remember me, do you? I guess you were kind of preoccupied last night.’ Only his top row of teeth showed when he smiled. One of them was edged in gold, like a page from the Bible. ‘I met you in that bar on the promenade. You were with Neville.’

‘Neville?’

‘Oh dear.’ Maxie laughed. It didn’t make a sound. ‘Maybe you know him as Reid. That’s what he calls himself when he doesn’t call himself Neville. Except sometimes he calls himself Vince or Len. Or Eric. Once,’ and he ran the tip of his little finger round the curve of his nostril, ‘once he called himself Irv.’ That soundless laugh again. That gilded tooth.

Nathan didn’t say anything. He didn’t like this man leaning over him as if he owned him.

‘They’re anagrams,’ Maxie explained.

‘Anagrams?’

‘You know. Words you get out of another word.’ Maxie looked down at Nathan and affected great concern. ‘Dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘I can see you’ve fallen for the whole thing.’

There was a slow turning in Nathan’s stomach, a sense of unease that was massive and inexplicable, like the movement of galaxies. He felt slightly sick.

‘Well,’ and Maxie took his hand off Nathan’s shoulder and held it out, palm up, ‘the organ calls.’ And with another soundless laugh he slid away between the tables as if he’d been greased.

One of the old women reached across and touched Nathan’s arm. ‘You know Mr Carlo, do you?’

‘Not really,’ Nathan said.

‘He’s very good, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he is.’ Nathan looked towards the dance-floor. A man of about sixty stood in the spotlight, alone and blinking. He wore old brown chinos and a mustard-coloured cardigan.

‘Clive’s going to sing for us now,’ Maxie said, ‘aren’t you, Clive?’

Clive ducked his head.

‘What are you going to sing for us, Clive?’

Clive mumbled something.

‘Clive’s going to sing an old music-hall number for us.’ Maxie raised an eyebrow at the audience. ‘I can hardly wait.’

The drum machine started up, the organ came in. Clive shifted, crouched, found the position. Legs apart, eyes closed, one hand splayed, waist-level, in the air. He had the gestures down. The only trouble was, he couldn’t sing. It would’ve made a great comic act, Clive in his mustard cardigan, eyes closed, hand splayed, fucking terrible voice.

As Nathan walked back down the pier he heard a few whistles, some brittle applause. Clive must have finished his song. The ocean sighed and shifted under his feet. He’d only had three or four drinks, but his mouth felt loose and he was talking to himself.

He leaned on a railing. ‘It’s an anagram,’ he said. ‘An anagram.’ He laughed. ‘You know.’

He stared down at the tilting black sheets of water. ‘Once he was Irv,’ he said, and laughed again. When he stopped laughing he took a deep breath and called out, ‘George?’

He passed the gardens on the promenade. The strips of neat mown grass. The tight, bright symmetries of flowers. He walked on. There was a strange hollow rattling sound. A white car cruised by with a skeleton tied to its rear fender. The bones jumped and twitched on the road, as if possessed by fever. Then he was looking up at the façade of the Palace Hotel. He suddenly felt like talking to that man. Like being listened to. That man who acted like a priest. That man with all the names. He certainly didn’t want to go home. He saw a phone-booth on the corner of the street. He’d try Georgia one last time.

As he walked towards the phone-booth, the phone started ringing. He stopped, looked around. But there was nobody in sight. The phone was still ringing. He ducked into the booth and picked up the receiver. He didn’t say anything. He just listened.

‘You took your time.’

‘Who’s this?’ Nathan said.

‘One guess.’

Still holding the receiver, Nathan turned and looked up at the hotel. ‘Is that you?’

‘I saw you passing. Thought I’d give you a call.’

Nathan smiled. ‘Where are you?’

‘Where do you think?’

‘It’s funny, but I wanted to come and see you. It’s just I didn’t know how.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘No.’

A laugh. ‘I’m not surprised. It’s the fourteenth floor. Apartment 1412. Got that?’

‘I’ve got it.’ Nathan hung up. He left the booth and walked towards the hotel, the ocean crackling behind him like a policeman’s radio, like the scene of a crime.

Yoghurt, Ice-Cream, Minestrone

Jed couldn’t even swallow his own saliva. He had to keep a bowl beside the bed. He lay on his back all day, he saw the sun rise and fall in the window, he felt such anger that he hit the wall with his fist and burned the skin off his knuckles. He had to make that phone-call, and he had to make it soon, but he couldn’t do anything till he had his voice back.

At about midday somebody knocked on the door. Jed quickly wrapped the scarf around his neck. Silence stood in the doorway, wearing a pair of pyjamas and his suit jacket. He handed Jed one of his cards: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

Jed nodded. ‘It’s just a really bad cold.’ He couldn’t speak so he just mouthed the words. Not that it made any difference to Silence.

Silence produced another card: DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?

Jed shook his head. ‘I’ll be OK.’

One more card: YOU SURE?

Jed nodded. ‘I’m sure.’ Then he thought of something. ‘If you go out, could you get me some yoghurt?’

Silence looked puzzled. Maybe he hadn’t understood. Maybe the word was hard to read.

‘Yoghurt,’ Jed whispered. ‘Yog-hurt.’

After Silence had left the room, Jed lay back. He was curiously touched. Silence had prepared those three cards in advance. That was a lot of words for Silence. Maybe even a whole day’s worth.

He turned his thoughts back to Creed and, reaching into his jacket, took out his wallet. Inside the wallet was a newspaper article. He unfolded it and laid it flat on the pillow. And though he knew the article by heart he began to read it through once more:

RIDDLE OF MISSING STUDENT

A medical student was abducted from his Los Ilusiones apartment last night by several armed men.

Mr Francis Gorelli, 19, worked as an intern at the Moon Beach General Hospital, and was due to take examinations later in the year.

One of the armed men was about 25, white, and he was wearing a black suit and a black top hat. A dark car was seen leaving the area and police are still trying to trace the vehicle.

The family of the missing man refused to comment today. The abduction of Mr Gorelli is only the latest incident in a wave of violence that has been sweeping the notorious eastern suburbs of the city.

A pretty accurate description, considering. But maybe the shock had burned his image into that girl’s memory. Certainly he’d never forgotten her: her long black hair, her yellow dress; her screams. Creed had sent him into the building knowing that he’d be seen. Knowing also, possibly, that he’d be remembered. His face twisted in a sour smile. Even six years later it’d been something of a gamble, perhaps, to drive back to the city in a black suit and a black top hat, to drive back to the city in the same dark car.

Every time he read the article he had to admire Creed’s strategy. Two things. One: the murder of Francis Gorelli had driven Vasco insane and insanity, surely, was a far more effective, far more exquisite punishment than death. Two: the killing (or, as the papers understood it, the abduction) of an innocent man was a crime with no motive. It forced the police to generalise. Their conclusion only scratched the surface of the truth. The crime was part of ‘a wave of violence’. Its context had become its cause. Nor had the body (or, for that matter, any other evidence) been discovered. Not even a murder then. Not necessarily. Just another missing-persons case. A poster in a police station. An appeal on the back of a carton of milk.

Jed dozed through the afternoon. By the evening he needed more pain-killers. When he left his room he noticed that all the videos had gone; Silence must’ve been busy. He heard voices in the kitchen, and went and stood in the doorway. Silence was sitting at the table with a man. There were small transparent plastic bags scattered all over the formica. Inside were watches, lighters, rings. Sensing something behind him, the man swung round. ‘Who the fuck’s this?’

Silence showed him a card: FRIEND.

‘OK,’ the man said, ‘OK,’ and he turned to Jed and said, ‘Sorry about that.’

Jed nodded. He didn’t want to risk speaking. Not yet. He shook two tablets on to a piece of silver foil and began to grind them up with the back of a spoon.

The man had sandy-gold hair and tiny red veins below his sideburns. His hands shook. He was smoking menthol cigarettes. ‘What’s this you’ve got?’ he said, tapping a maroon box with one finger.

Silence snapped the lid open. He took out a gold pocket watch and handed it to the man. Jed saw the watch over the man’s shoulder. Its face was ringed with gems.

The man nodded. ‘Nice piece.’

Silence reached over. He flicked the back of the watch open with his thumb and held it to the man’s ear. It played ‘As Time Goes By’.

‘Ain’t that something.’ The man stared at Silence. ‘How’d you know it played a tune, Silence, you being deaf and all?’

Silence wrote, SOMEBODY TOLD ME.

The man guffawed. ‘And you trusted them?’

Silence wrote, DID YOU HEAR THE TUNE OR DIDN’T YOU?

‘I heard the tune.’

I MAY BE DUMB, Silence wrote, BUT I’M NOT THAT DUMB. Then he tucked the rest of his cards back into his pocket. Clearly that was all he was going to say on the subject.

Jed opened the fridge. There was a six-pack of plain yoghurt on the top shelf. Silence had come through for him. He stirred his crushed tablets into a yoghurt, then he found a piece of paper and wrote, THANKS FOR THE YOGHURT. On his way out of the room he handed Silence the message.

Silence smiled. YOUR’E WELCOME, he wrote.

‘You’re weird, you are,’ the man said. ‘Just plain weird, the lot of you.’

Jed went back to bed.

The next day he left the apartment at noon. He stood at ground-level and looked around. Heat rippled on the concrete, the horizon seemed alive with snakes. He walked past his car and out through the housing project. Smells came to him: warm garbage, tar melting, dead fish. There was nobody about. Days like this most people stayed home and stood in front of the fridge with the door open or something.

He was heading for the thrift stores in Mangrove South. He’d decided that if he walked he’d be less visible. It was only twenty minutes. He took shortcuts and kept to the shadows. Every now and then he spoke to himself. He was testing his voice. There was no danger in it. He was east of downtown and the only people on the streets were old men with bottles of sweet red wine. They talked to themselves all the time. He fitted right in. Christ, it was hot, though. He could feel the heat of the sidewalk through the soles of his boots.

He was almost there when he heard somebody call his name. He ignored it. Then somebody came running out of the sunlight towards him. It was Nathan.

‘You sick or something?’ Nathan said.

Jed touched the scarf at his neck. ‘Sick? Heh.’ That was one way of putting it.

‘So how are you doing? Did you find a place?’

There’d always been something manic about Nathan. Behind those green eyes, that blond hair. Behind that tan. He was like a dog with training that nobody can use.

Jed nodded. ‘I found a place.’

‘Where is it?’

As if he was going to tell him that.

‘Round here.’

Then Nathan said, ‘I remember when you used to live in the Towers.’ Straight out. As if he could see right into the hooded part of Jed’s brain.

Jed stared at him. But Nathan’s eyes had misted over; he seemed to have lowered himself into his own memory.

‘I went there once. I looked for you.’ He smiled. ‘Couldn’t find you, though.’

‘Must’ve been years ago,’ Jed said, still watching him closely.

‘The place was like a maze,’ Nathan said.

Still is.

Jed chipped at the wall with his boot. And began to smile, because he’d thought of something.

‘By the way.’ He took out one of Mario’s hundred-dollar bills and smiled down at it. He’d kept it as a kind of souvenir. But now he had a better use for it. He held the bill out to Nathan. ‘Here’s the money I owe you.’

It was worth $100 just to see Nathan’s face.

‘But,’ he was stammering, ‘but I only lent you eight.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Jed said. ‘You were so kind, letting me stay and all.’

And his smile began to twist on his face, he just couldn’t keep the sneer out of it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘better be going.’

And just walked away.

When he reached the corner of the street he glanced over his shoulder. Nathan was still standing on the sidewalk staring at him. Had Nathan guessed where he was living? No, he was thrown by the money. That was all it was. Jed shifted his shoulders inside his jacket. So he used to live in the Towers once upon a time. So what. He hadn’t told Nathan anything, had he?

He walked on. Two blocks west he found the thrift store he’d been looking for. Inside he moved from rail to rail. He began to assemble a wardrobe. It wasn’t easy. These were all dead men’s clothes. Why was everyone who died so fucking fat? You’d think a few thin people would die sometimes, but no. It took him fifteen minutes just to find a pair of pants and even then they were three inches too big around the waist and he needed a belt to hold them up. Still, it was a start. In half an hour he was standing in front of a full-length mirror. This was what he had on: a pale-blue turtleneck (it hid the ghosts); a pair of chinos in a kind of rusty ochre colour; brown leather sandals with rubber soles (he’d learned a thing or two from that Sister in the hospital); a grey fake snakeskin belt; and a maroon leather jacket with black buttons and scoop lapels.

‘A bloody Christian,’ he whispered. ‘A missionary.’ And laughed to himself. Because, after all, he was on a mission, wasn’t he? A mission of a kind.

He heaped his own clothes on the counter and explained that he wanted to trade them for the clothes he was now wearing. The woman who ran the place wore a cardigan draped over her shoulders. She shifted her arms inside the cardigan and looked at him sideways. Her jackdaw eye swooped on his most valuable possession. ‘What about the hat?’

He wedged the hat under his arm. ‘Not for sale.’

The woman shrugged. She began to sort one-handed through his clothes. Held a boot up between finger and thumb. ‘Don’t suppose you ever heard of polish, did you?’

‘They’re all black, the clothes,’ he said. ‘You should be able to shift them pretty quick in a town like this.’

‘That may be so, but look at the state of them.’ The woman lifted his frayed jacket and let it drop again. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘you leave your clothes plus fifteen dollars, on account of that coat you got there’s leather,’ and her eye hovered, gleaming, above his hat once more, ‘unless of course —’

He paid the $15 and left. On his way back to the Towers he had to stop in a supermarket and a pharmacy. By the time he reached the thirteenth floor he was drenched in sweat. Silence let him in. He went straight to the kitchen. Silence followed him, stood in the doorway. He began to unpack the bags he was carrying. A block of ice-cream. A tin of minestrone soup. A box of COLOR-U-BLONDE hair dye. A roll of silver foil. And two six-packs of yoghurt (one plain, one assorted-fruit flavours).

He turned. Silence was still watching from the doorway. Silence handed him a card: I WAS WORRIED FOR A MOMENT. I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT’VE FORGOTTEN THE YOGHURT.

Jed had to grin.

WHAT’S WITH THE SOUP? Silence wrote.

‘It’s my throat,’ Jed explained. ‘Yoghurt, ice-cream, minestrone. They’re the only things I can get down.’

Later that evening, when Silence had gone out, he locked himself in the bathroom. He took off his new blue turtleneck and wrapped a towel around his shoulders. He opened the COLOR-U-BLONDE, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and slowly, meticulously, applied the peroxide solution to his hair. Afterwards he covered his head in silver foil. Almost immediately his scalp began to burn. This reassured him. No change is possible, he thought, without pain. No change is real unless it hurts.

He walked out on to the balcony as the sun set. The city lay in its own haze, buildings dipped in spun sugar, they could melt on your tongue. The sting of peroxide balanced the ache in his throat, almost cancelled it. Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow he would make the call.

The evening passed. He stood on the balcony eating fruit yoghurt and watching the planes. A calmness eased into his bones. His blood slowed down. That tortoise, Bob, he was smarter than he looked.

Towards midnight he heard Silence return. He left his bedroom and joined Silence in the lounge. Silence was smoking a joint and watching TV. He offered Jed the joint. Jed turned it down. Silence was staring at him now. Silence put the joint down in the ashtray so he could stare better. Then he wrote on a card and handed it to Jed. Jed read the card and smiled. There was only one word on it:

EERIE.

The next morning he walked into the bathroom and saw a blond stranger in the mirror. ‘Jesus,’ he said. His voice didn’t sound bad. A bit croaky, but OK. He undid the scarf. The ghosts had changed colour. They’d achieved a curious yellow-brown. It reminded him of crème caramel, old banana skins. Or the thin band of pollution that sometimes circled the horizon.

He borrowed one of Silence’s cordless phones and stood on the balcony. The city was making that sound that cities make. Like if you’re told to breathe out slowly through your mouth. He sensed the first drop of rain on his shoulder, he felt it burn into his skin like acid, he heard it telling him that he was special, special. The sound of the rain in that word. The meaning of that word on his skin.

He dialled the Paradise Corporation.

The receptionist put him through to the chairman’s office. A secretary answered. ‘Mr Creed’s at home today. Can I take a message?’

‘No message,’ Jed said, and cut her off.

He dialled the Palace Hotel. ‘Apartment 1412, please.’

‘One moment.’

He could hear the phone ringing in Creed’s apartment now. Then it was picked up. ‘Yes?’

‘Mr Creed, please.’

‘Who’s calling?’

Jed recognised the voice on the other end. It was the Skull. Michael The Skull McGowan. So they were still working together. If that wasn’t loyalty.

‘Who’s calling?’ the Skull said again.

‘It’s Jed Morgan.’ There was a pause, then Creed was on the line. Jed could tell by the silence. He’d know that silence anywhere.

‘Creed?’

‘Spaghetti. How nice. I’ve been expecting your call.’

Jed’s hand tightened round the phone. You could never tell whether Creed was bluffing. ‘What do you mean?’

But Creed just laughed. ‘Your voice sounds terrible.’

‘I’ve had a cold.’

‘It doesn’t sound like a cold. It sounds more like someone tried to strangle you.’

His heart beat hard, the air thickened around him. He gripped the balcony with his free hand. How did Creed know all this? Did he know everything?

‘What do you want, Spaghetti?’ Creed was saying. ‘I’m a busy man. I haven’t got all day.’

He hadn’t thought this out properly. He hadn’t imagined the way it might go. He jumped at some words as they came into his mind. ‘I need some money.’

‘I didn’t think you were interested in money.’

‘I want half a million.’

‘You’ll only start throwing it around. Remember last time.’

‘Half a million. And I want it tomorrow night.’

‘What makes you think you deserve anything?’

‘I’ve got a tape. You want to hear it?’

‘What is it? Violins?’

Jed picked up his pen recorder and pressed PLAY. He held it over the phone. ‘You want me to kill Vasco’s brother? … That’s right … How? … Don’t worry about that … It’s taken care of … It’s nice …’ He pressed STOP. ‘There’s your violins, Creed. Did you like them?’

‘Tape doesn’t stand up in court, Spaghetti.’

‘How about the papers, Creed? Does tape stand up in the papers?’

A silence.

He had him. At last he had him.

‘How would it look on the front page, Creed? I can see the headline now. Funeral baron held on murder charge. Headline like that, you could sell a few papers, I reckon.’

Don’t give him time to think.

‘Midnight tomorrow. The West Pier. Just you and me. You got that?’

Another silence.

‘Jed?’

‘What?’

‘You’re still driving the same car.’

‘So?’

‘Bit risky, isn’t it, driving the same car? I mean, it could be seen as evidence, couldn’t it?’ A pause. ‘You know what they say about evidence. They say destroy it.’

‘What are you talking about, Creed?’

‘I thought I’d do a friend a favour, that’s all.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Why don’t you look out the window?’

‘I am looking out the —’

His car exploded with a dull thump. One hand on the balcony, he felt the building shake. Bits of chrome and glass scattered over the parking-lot. Flames reached arms out of the windows, clawed their way across the roof. The flames sounded like rain, he thought. Like rain. Then a fire alarm jangled and a baby started crying.

He dropped the phone and ran inside. Silence was standing outside his bedroom door in his pyjamas. The explosion must’ve woken him.

‘It’s my car,’ Jed said. ‘They blew up my car.’

He ran down the stairs, all thirteen floors. By the time he reached the ground his car was surrounded by kids from the project. Some were pointing, chattering. Others scoured the concrete, collecting bits of headlamp and mirror. He pushed to the front. You could no longer tell what colour the car had been. You could only just read the numberplate: CREAM 8. He’d had that numberplate since he was sixteen. He’d paid a fucking hundred dollars for that numberplate. He dashed towards it, hands outstretched, but a blast of heat threw him back with no eyebrows.

‘This your car?’ one of the kids shouted.

He didn’t answer. He could hear sirens whooping on Ocean Avenue. Weee-ooo Weee-ooo Weee-ooo. They’d be arriving any moment. He turned and made off in the direction of the project.

He ran up a flight of stairs and along a walkway, putting solid concrete between himself and his burning car. He glanced up once and saw the boy with the crewcut and the puffy eyes standing on a balcony above him.

The boy shouted something.

He didn’t hear it the first time.

The boy shouted it again. ‘Where’s your hat, mister?’

The Ocean Bed Motel

When Nathan woke in the morning, the bed was empty. Through the open door he could hear Reid talking.

‘You know what they say about evidence.’ A pause. ‘They say destroy it.’ Another pause. ‘I thought I’d do a friend a favour, that’s all.’

He could hear no second voice. It must be a phone-call. He eased out of the bed and pulled on his jeans. In the lounge the sun pressed against the drawn blinds. A few bright ribs of light thrown on the floor.

‘Why don’t you look out the window?’ Reid said, and then he hung up.

Strange way to end a phone-call.

Reid put the phone down with a smile. When he looked up and saw Nathan standing in the doorway the smile remained. Or rather, the shape of the smile remained. The content had altered. Where the first smile had been poisonous, the second was benign. And the transition was so effortless, so deft. Nathan knew he was supposed to be smiling back, but found that he could only stare.

‘I’d almost forgotten you were here,’ Reid said.

‘How could you forget?’ Nathan murmured. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was joking.

He watched as Reid rose from the sofa and moved towards him. He closed his eyes. He felt one gloved hand brush the hair back from his forehead.

‘You time things just right,’ he said.

He felt one gloved finger trace the outline of his top lip.

‘Like when you called me,’ he said. ‘Last night. On the street.’

Then he heard Reid’s voice, close to his ear: ‘I’m going to take you somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere special.’

Nathan opened his eyes again. Part of the wall seemed to move behind Reid’s shoulder and a second man moved across the room towards them. Nathan hadn’t even noticed him. But he must have been there the whole time. Must have heard them talk. Seen them touch.

He had a shaved head and mirror shades. An M-shaped vein pulsed high up on the left side of his forehead. Nathan looked at the man and saw himself twice.

‘This is McGowan,’ Reid said. ‘Otherwise known as the Skull.’ He laughed. ‘You can probably see why.’

The Skull tipped his head back a fraction.

Nathan nodded. He could see.

Putting his hand on the Skull’s shoulder, Reid steered him towards the door. Nathan went to the window. He picked up the binoculars and stared down at the promenade. He heard Reid say, ‘Me too,’ and then he heard the word, ‘Eight,’ then the door clicked shut. He watched a man and a boy playing football in the sunshine. The boy swung his leg and kicked the ball. The man trapped the ball and kicked it back again. The boy swung his leg again. This time he missed, the ball rolled past, he scampered after it. The man lay down on the bright grass. Nathan felt Reid behind him. Not a sound exactly. More like a displacement of the air.

‘Are you ready?’

Nathan put the binoculars down.

They took the elevator to the underground parking-lot. A black car crouched in the shadows on fat tyres. Nathan slid into the hard leather seat and pulled the door shut after him. It made that sound, he remembered it from before, somewhere between a crunch and a click. Such luxury in that sound.

But the unease was still with him. He felt robbed by that man’s presence in the apartment, and he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling. When he thought back he could sense the man gloating from the far side of the room. And then that supernatural moment when he detached himself from the wall and moved forwards.

‘Is something bothering you?’ Reid asked.

‘I didn’t see him,’ Nathan said.

Reid eased the car up the ramp and out into the sunlight. ‘I don’t follow you.’

‘That man,’ Nathan said. ‘I didn’t know he was there.’

‘Did it upset you?’

‘I just felt he saw everything.’

Reid reached for his dark glasses. ‘Well,’ he said with a smile, ‘there’s nobody to see us now.’

The knitting-needle click of the gears as he shifted into third for the slip-road that led to the expressway.

‘We’ll be there soon. You should take this.’ He passed Nathan a white capsule.

‘You really think I need it?’

Reid shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. It might relax you.’

‘I don’t know whether I want to relax.’

‘Please yourself.’

Nathan closed his hand around the capsule. He held it in his fist like a dice he might throw.

‘Where we’re going,’ he said, ‘is there a phone?’

Reid looked across at Nathan. ‘Where we’re going,’ he said, ‘there’s a phone with fish inside it.’

This brought a smile to Nathan’s face. He shook off his misapprehensions. Put the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

The car skated across three lanes, one crisp diagonal at eighty miles an hour, fast lane to slow. Out through Exit 6: Moon Beach East. In five minutes they were passing under a pale-blue archway. White letters on the curving crossbar: THE OCEAN BED MOTEL.

‘You been here before?’ Reid asked him.

Nathan shook his head. ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

You approached the motel from above, along a road that snaked through a landscape of spindly palms and boulders. It was a pale-blue building, two storeys high. There were waves on the roof, sculpted out of poured concrete. It looked like a cross-section of the ocean.

While Reid registered, Nathan looked round. There was a strong smell of seaweed in the lobby. This, he soon found out, was emanating from the motel restaurant where Today’s Special was Charbroiled Shark Steak with Hot Seaweed Salad. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble with the décor. There were racks of pink coral and treasure chests half buried in drifts of sand. There was dim, fathoms-down lighting. There were bits of ships lying about, rusting. The ocean bed. Replace the air with water and you’d be there.

‘What do you think?’ Reid asked him.

But he couldn’t answer. The drug was beginning to rush through him now and he was finding it hard to distinguish reality and hallucination. For instance: he was seeing mermaids everywhere. Cascades of blonde hair, bodies sheathed in silver scales from the waist down. Mermaids. There was something he ought to be doing, but it was as if he had his ear to a shell: he could hear the sea and all his other thoughts escaped him.

He saw the car that he’d left on the promenade. He saw it in detail — a city map on the dashboard, the groceries on the back seat. It had been there for at least twenty-four hours. The milk would be sour by now, he thought.

They were following a mermaid down dark-blue corridors with dark-green doors. Her sequins chinked and glittered.

She touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hear that?’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Listen.’

He listened. It sounded like doors being opened very slowly. Or the noise people make when they stretch. ‘What is it?’ he asked her.

‘It’s whales,’ she said. ‘It’s for atmosphere.’

Reid turned to him and smiled.

He keeps doing that, Nathan thought. Turning and smiling at me. Running his eyes over me like hands.

The mermaid stood by an open door, her nipples hidden in pale-pink shells. Smiling, she showed him into a room. One entire wall was an aquarium. The rest seemed plunged in darkness. But he could just make out a bed sunk in the floor. And there was a telephone beside the bed. It was made of clear plastic. There were goldfish swimming in the receiver. He bent down, watched the goldfish. Now he was smiling too. He could no longer remember what was so important about the telephone. All he knew was that Reid hadn’t lied to him. There was a telephone and it had fish in it. Reid had told the truth. That was the main thing.

Reid turned the key in the door.

‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.

Nathan looked across at him. ‘What about you?’

‘You first. I want to watch.’

Nathan began to undress. Soon he was naked except for a pair of white boxers. So white in the mauve light shed by the aquarium. He slipped his thumbs inside the elastic and was about to draw them down when Reid said, ‘Leave those on.’

Reid moved across the room. He covered distance the way other people altered the angle of their heads. He accomplished it with such tact, such grace. There were only two positions: over there and here, now. Nathan felt Reid’s clothes, the fabric coarse against his bare skin, and he was glad that Reid had told him to undress first.

‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’ Nathan murmured.

Reid nodded. ‘Many times.’

‘Always with boys?’

‘Always.’

He could hear the whales again. It sounded like something familiar slowed down. It sounded like curiosity.

The gloves lingered on his ribs, slid down his spine.

Only the rush of waves now. They rolled towards a reef, ripped open, spilled their foam. And then a wall built out of water, and fish trailing wakes of red and blue and gold.

There was a click. So precise in the haze of everything else that he was almost startled. He looked round. Reid was shutting his briefcase.

Reid handed him a mask. ‘I want you to wear this.’

He took the mask.

It was black leather, the shape of a head. Two holes to breathe through and a silver zipper for a mouth. No eyes.

‘I won’t be able to see,’ he said.

‘Just feel.’ Reid smiled. ‘Would you do that for me?’

He pulled the mask over his head and found that he could breathe quite easily. He lay back on the bed. The sheets were satin, cool against his forearms. The bed began to tilt and rock.

He reached out, found a body, touched it. Ran the tip of his finger all the way from the armpit to the anklebone. The same speed as a plane crossing the sky. He thought maybe you could learn to read a body blind. By touch. Like braille.

A moment of clarity, and he said, ‘I don’t know your body at all.’ And then, when there was no reply, ‘Are you there?’

‘I’m here.’ A pause. ‘Your skin, it’s so soft.’

‘How can you tell?’ he said. ‘You’re wearing gloves.’

‘You’re forgetting something. There’s my mouth.’

He felt his boxers being eased down, over his thighs, down to his ankles. His cock on a spring. This contact with the air was almost friction enough. Then the sudden warmth. A mouth.

His head locked in darkness, his body twitching like one of those fish you place on the palm of your hand to tell your fortune, they curl, they arch, sometimes they flip right over, but they’re never still, not unless you’re very cold, not until your fortune’s told.

He felt something push through the zipper and into his mouth.

‘Make it tighter.’

He did as he was told. It was taking a long time.

‘Use your teeth.’

And Reid’s body heaved and a sound was dragged out of him, it had notches, like a rack, and Nathan rolled on to his back and lay there, swallowing.

Soon afterwards he took the mask off. The room, it was so bright, it was like being inside a jewel. Reid stood by the window, parted the curtains an inch. Outside it was dark. The room was wearing a mask. Reid began to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Nathan asked.

‘Private joke.’

‘You’re not going to tell me?’

‘No.’ Reid had this way of standing so his face was always in shadow. When Reid turned to look at him, he could read nothing there. He just heard that soft laughter and felt a surprising lack of curiosity about its source.

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘I really don’t. I’m not interested.’

Reid laughed again. ‘That’s my girl.’

‘If I was a girl,’ Nathan said, ‘you wouldn’t look twice.’

Reid came towards the bed, both hands on the buckle of his belt. ‘Maybe not even once.’

Nathan watched him approach. ‘I thought you’d finished.’

‘I’m starting again,’ Reid said.

Afterwards he must’ve slept because everything went still, that stillness that seems sudden, that tells you time’s gone by.

‘We’ll need a boat.’ A silence. ‘Good.’

Reid was talking on the phone again. Nathan watched through half-closed eyes.

‘Just make sure it’s there. The West Pier, midnight.’

Nathan walked to the window. A flicker of silver on the ground outside. Like a thrown rope, a lasso. It took him a moment to realise that it was a reflection, that there was water out there. A pool.

He slid the window open and crossed the patio. When he dived in he hardly felt the transition from air to water. It was as if he was moving from one kind of air that was warm into another that was cooler. He surfaced, lay on his back. The palm trees were black silhouettes against a bright brown sky. We’ll need a boat. The West Pier. Midnight. He saw Maxie Carlo’s face close up. Maybe you know him as Reid. That’s what he calls himself sometimes. Maxie’s top teeth showed as he smiled, one tooth edged in gold like a page from the Bible. But which page? Not the Ten Commandments, that was for sure. Something from Revelation, maybe. The sound of a plane in the sky like paper being torn slowly. The red light winking on its wing-tip. Know what I mean?

He walked back through the sliding window just as Reid put the phone down.

‘How do you feel?’ Reid asked him.

‘Fine.’ Nathan sat down on the bed. ‘I ran into a friend of yours the other night.’

‘Really? Who?’

‘Maxie Carlo.’

‘Old Maxie. How is he?’

‘He said your name’s Neville.’

‘That’s my professional name.’

‘Professional name?’

‘I told you I was a hand model, didn’t I?’ Reid looked at Nathan, then he lit a cigarette. His face so smooth and still, the flame seemed nervous.

Nathan remembered a grey day on South Beach. This was a few months back, before Dad died. A storm was on the way and the red flags were up. Nobody was swimming.

Towards lunchtime a woman strode on to the beach with a towel and goggles. He hadn’t seen her before, but he knew the type. He knew she probably wouldn’t listen to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you can’t swim today.’

She continued buckling the strap of her bathing cap under her chin. ‘Oh? Why not?’

‘The flags are up.’

She smiled at him. ‘It’s all right, I’m a swimming instructor.’

In a strange way she reminded him of Yvonne so he was patient with her. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s my lunchbreak. If anything happens to you while I’m away it’ll be my responsibility.’

‘You go and have your lunch,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Sometimes you have an instinct for what’ll happen next. He knew this woman was going to get into trouble. He knew that if he left the beach she might even drown. He also knew that she had to find out for herself.

He waited at the top of the beach, under the awning of the kiosk that sold candy bars and soda. He watched her run towards the water. He saw the short arc her body made as she met the first wave.

It took a while. But then he saw one arm reach up, pale against the charcoal waves, pale against the sky, like a child asking a question in class.

When he brought her out of the water, she wouldn’t look at him. ‘I was wrong,’ she said. And then she said, ‘Thank you.’

He gave her a smile. ‘It’s my job.’

Almost every day after that she’d arrive with offerings at lunchtime, sandwiches or fruit or cold drinks, but that wasn’t the point of the story. The point was, he’d seen through something, and he’d been ready. He had the same feeling now. The feeling that he couldn’t go to lunch. Except there were too many people on the beach and he didn’t know which way to look.

‘What’s wrong?’ Reid said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

Nathan lay back on the bed. ‘I remember.’

He drifted off to sleep. He woke suddenly and his mind had jumped tracks. Georgia. It was a whole day later and he still hadn’t got through to her. He glanced at his watch. 5.45 a.m.

He reached out, picked up the phone. He dialled her apartment first. No reply. He dialled the house. He let it ring and ring. He was about to hang up when somebody answered.

‘Who’s that?’ he said.

‘It’s Georgia.’

‘You sound strange, George. Did I wake you up?’

‘Nathan?’

‘George, what’s wrong?’

‘I took some pills.’ Her words were slurred. It was hard to understand her.

‘What pills?’

‘Dad’s pills,’ she said. ‘You know. He’s got lots. I took some green ones, then I took some red ones, then I think I had a blue one —’

‘Where are you, George?’

‘I’m in Dad’s bedroom. On the bed. There’s bottles everywhere. Tiny little bottles —’

‘How many did you take?’

‘Don’t know. Didn’t count.’

‘George, listen. Don’t go to sleep, all right?’

‘Yeah. OK.’

‘I mean it. Don’t go to sleep.’

‘OK.’

He stood still for a few seconds, then he put the phone down and turned the light on. Reid’s eyes opened wide, as if he’d only been pretending to be asleep.

‘What are you doing?’

Nathan was already dressing. ‘I’ve got to leave.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘It’s my sister. She’s taken some pills.’

In five minutes they were walking out of the motel, the rising sun driving a thin wedge of orange light into the bank of dark cloud on the horizon.

Mackerel Street

That awful smell, it was his eyebrows. He touched one. It crumbled on the tips of his fingers like a kind of wiry dust. He could smell his own eyebrows, for Christ’s sake.

He couldn’t think about it, what was in that car. The sheet, his back-up copy of the tape. The numberplate. He just couldn’t think about it. His top hat was on the thirteenth floor. His wallet too. But he wasn’t going back, not now. Not with those flames crackling in his ears like rain, not to that mass grave. Even now, maybe, he was being watched. That kid with the puffy eyes and the crewcut, he was everywhere you looked. Maybe he even worked for Creed. Creed had kids all over the city. A line of speed, a limo ride, a smile, and they were his. Sometimes he used them for sex, sometimes for information. Sometimes for both. Jed looked round. The kid was still standing on the balcony, his face turned in Jed’s direction. A pale blotch, no features. The kid was still watching. Where’s your hat, mister?

He walked to the bus station in Mangrove East. He bought half a pound of Peanut Brittle on the way. It was how he felt. The wind moved past his ears and he thought of nothing. Rage filled him full, his skin felt tight with it. Instead of standing in line, he eased back against the wall, next to a fruit machine. Nobody came near him. Half a pound of Peanut Brittle and a head tight with rage. People know a force-field when they see one. He felt in all his pockets, pooled what money he had in the palm of one hand. Four dollar bills and some loose change. It would do. He waited till the Rialto bus pulled in, then he pushed through the crowd and climbed on board.

In ten minutes he was walking into TATTOO CITY. The walls were papered with the usual designs: anchors, roses, skulls. Nobody had numbers like he had. He could hear the buzzing of Mitch’s needle-gun. He stamped down to the workshop at the back. Mitch was working on a boy’s left shoulder. Jed waited for silence, then he bit off a piece of Brittle. Crisp as a bone snapping. It almost took his front teeth out. Then he said, ‘You set me up, Mitch.’

Mitch looked round. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

‘You fucking set me up. Admit it.’

The boy peered at Jed, mouth hanging open. Jed wanted to fill it with something. Liquid concrete. Manure. Glue.

Mitch spoke to the boy. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

The boy nodded.

Mitch put his needle-gun down and crossed the room. He stood in front of the door to his house, hands dangling against his thighs. ‘You want to talk or don’t you?’

Jed led the way into the house. One dark corridor, all the rooms on the left. He passed the kitchen. Mitch’s old lady was sitting at the table, hands clasped together as if in prayer. Wisps of black hair veiled her eyes. Jed paused, but Mitch pushed him between the shoulderblades.

‘In the study.’

The study was in the back. One small window looked on to the verandah where they’d drunk beer the week before. One wall was lined with shelves. Books, model boats, clocks.

Mitch took a pipe out of the rack on the mantelpiece and began to pack it with tobacco. Jed counted the clocks, trying to keep his anger down. There were eleven. Mitch sank into a leather armchair. Jed counted the clocks again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed any. He hadn’t.

‘You look pretty strange,’ Mitch said. ‘You look so strange, I didn’t hardly recognise you.’

‘I could be looking even stranger,’ Jed said. ‘I could be fucking looking dead.’

Mitch lit his pipe. He leaned forwards, tossed the match into the fireplace, leaned back again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘Why did you do it, Mitch? Why did you set me up like that?’

Mitch moved his eyes on to Jed’s face and left them there. ‘How do you know it was me?’

‘It must’ve been you. You were the only one who knew.’

‘You might’ve been followed.’

‘I wasn’t followed. I know enough about driving to know that.’ Jed looked into the fireplace. All Mitch’s dead matches. All at different angles. Celia would’ve found some kind of omen in those matches.

Celia.

And his voice became patient, as if he had time, plenty of it. ‘When I called them this morning, they knew where I was. They knew exactly where I was.’

‘How do you know they knew?’ Mitch said. ‘What makes you so sure?’

Jed’s temper flared. ‘Because they fucking blew my car up, that’s how.’ He catapulted out of his chair and kicked the wall. A black half-moon appeared on the faded paint.

‘Sit down, Jed.’

He did as he was told. All the air drained out of him. Suddenly he could’ve cried.

Mitch sucked on his pipe. Smoke moved through the room. It seemed to be constantly on the point of turning into something, of assuming some recognisable shape, but it would never quite commit itself.

‘You’re right,’ Mitch said finally. ‘I told them. But you know what? They already knew.’

Jed stared at him. ‘They already knew? How?’

‘Beats me. But they did.’

‘But you still told them, Mitch. How could you do that? How come you even talked to them?’

Mitch sighed. He put his pipe down on the hearth and rose to his feet. He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out a polaroid. He handed the polaroid to Jed and returned to his chair.

It was a picture of Mitch’s old lady. She was lying in a coffin. Her face was white, her eyes were shut. Blood had trickled out of the corner of her mouth and then dried. She looked dead. Jed turned the polaroid over. On the back it said CO-OPERATE AND IT WON’T HAPPEN.

He looked at the picture again. Nice make-up job. It was Morton’s work, no question about that.

‘What would you have done?’ Mitch said.

Jed looked up. ‘Is she all right?’

Mitch shrugged. ‘They held her for twenty-four hours. What do you want to hear?’

A silence. The ticking of eleven clocks.

‘You’ve got to be fucking out of your mind messing with those people,’ Mitch said.

Jed scowled. ‘I know what I’m doing. I worked with them.’

‘Worked with them?’ Mitch scoffed. ‘You drove.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You were nothing.’

‘I was NOT NOTHING.’

Mitch sighed. ‘You were nothing to them. That’s what those people do. They hang you on their Christmas tree, they put you where you look right, like one of those coloured balls, but pretty soon they get bored with you, your time’s over, they throw you out. Or maybe you break first. You’ve got some kind of shine, that’s why they choose you in the first place, but under that shine you’ve got you’re pretty fragile, pretty hollow. So you don’t last long. And people like that, they’re the ones that know it.’

Jed watched Mitch lean down and knock his pipe against the hearth. He eased out of the chair.

‘Look, I’m sorry about Anne-Marie,’ he said. ‘I’m going now.’ He stood in front of Mitch. ‘Can you loan me ten dollars?’

Mitch laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Jed asked him.

Mitch was still laughing. ‘Loan,’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘Pay me back? Sure you’ll pay me back. What are you going to do, leave me ten bucks in your will?’

‘Where’s your faith, Mitch?’

Mitch shook his head. ‘Not only dressed like a fucking preacher, talking like one too.’ He reached into his back pocket, snapped a twenty-dollar bill out into the air. ‘Here.’

‘I only asked for ten,’ Jed said.

‘Twenty’s all I’ve got.’

‘Thanks, Mitch.’ Jed stopped in the doorway. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘Yeah,’ Mitch said, ‘sure you will.’

Jed stood on the main street that ran through Rialto. The clouds that piled above the rooftops were veined like marble, almost green. The heavens would open before long. His lips tightened, taut as a drawn bow. He aimed a queer, crooked smile at the sky. It was the rain that had started it. It was the rain that told him he was special. So he’d lost everything. The car, his hat. The shirt off his back. So they knew his every move. So what. A fizzing began between his ribs. A fizzing that was like a lit fuse. He’d been underplaying it. He’d needed some final twist. And Mitch had handed it to him; he hadn’t meant to, but he had. Those people, they took blackmail and faded it to grey. It was a game for them. But he could use that game to draw them in. Then he could settle it, once and for all.

With Mitch’s $20 he could afford to catch a taxi to his mother’s place. He asked the driver to drop him at the top of Mackerel Street. It was habit, a ritual, left over from the days when he used to leave transistor radios playing in her front garden. Like fingers pointing. Like ghosts come back to haunt her. He’d always have a taxi waiting at the top of the street so he could make his getaway.

He began to walk down the hill. He could feel his right heel, the birth of a blister there. The new sandals didn’t fit quite as well as he’d thought. He turned the corner, into the part of the street that was dead-end. Houses the same colour as ice-cream. Lemon, peppermint, raspberry. Every flavour you could imagine. No trees, just streetlamps. And sidewalks inlaid with neat strips of grass. He was back in Mackerel Street, he was actually back. He wondered how long it had been. Curiosity, not sentiment. Was it twelve years? No, thirteen. Almost half his life ago. It was hard to believe. He looked up and found that his calculation had taken him all the way to his front gate.

He was just reaching for the latch when a movement in the corner of his eye distracted him. He turned in time to see the curtain swing back into place in the window of the house next door. It was that kind of neighbourhood. Every house hid the same voyeur. He was glad he looked so different. With his blond hair and his Christian outfit, there was little chance of being recognised by anyone. They would peer at him from behind their lace curtains and think: Stranger. The same way they had always peered at his mother and thought: Whore. He smiled grimly. In those days he would probably have agreed with them; he’d had good reasons for seeing her in that red light. Now? Who she was fucking was her own affair. He didn’t even care what colour their shoes were.

He brought his eyes back into focus. Noticed casually, almost incidentally, that his mother was standing in the downstairs window looking at him. There followed a curious interval during which they both stared at each other without any change of expression. Then, almost with a jolt, they came alive again and he saw her say, ‘Jed?’

He watched her approach, blurred and unidentifiable, in the frosted glass of the door. He couldn’t imagine what he was going to say to her. When the door opened, they both held their ground. They were searching each other’s faces, searching for words.

She found some first. ‘What were you doing,’ she said, ‘skulking in the road like that?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just thinking.’

‘I thought you were going to go away again.’

‘Would you have liked that better?’

‘Jed.’ The word came out sounding like cream poured over a spoon. That tone of voice, how well he remembered it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘would you?’

She sighed. ‘Are you going to stand on the doorstep all afternoon,’ she said, ‘or are you going to come in?’

It smelt synthetic in the hall. It was her own smell, she carried it around with her. If you boiled her down, reduced her to her essence, it would smell of air freshener, nail polish, fashion magazines, he was sure of it. He waited for her to close the door, then he followed her down the corridor and into the kitchen. She wore the same kind of clothes she’d always worn: a pink velour sweatsuit and a pair of trainers with plump white tongues. Her dry blonde hair tucked under her jawbone, curled into the nape of her neck.

‘How about some coffee?’ she said. ‘It’s fresh.’

‘Sure. Great.’ He sat on a stool while she poured. He looked around. A lot of red and pink, a lot of stripped pine. The same old bric-à-brac above the sink: a china doll, a dog with one paw raised, a matador. A small colour TV on low volume. The early-evening news.

She placed a cup of coffee in front of him with a waitress smile, then she sat down opposite him, on the other side of the breakfast bar. She held her own cup in both hands, just below her mouth. He could see that she had aged, even through the veil of steam. There were two faces, and one of them had slipped. A curious, smeared look. And nothing left of her eyebrows except two lines sketched in brown pencil.

But she didn’t want him scrutinising her. ‘You look so,’ and she quickly sorted through words, as if they were dresses, and chose one, ‘different.’

‘That’s the idea,’ he said.

She eyed him thoughtfully over the rim of her cup. ‘You should do something about your hair.’

He laughed, slopping his coffee over. ‘I’m not one of your fucking clients, mother.’

She went to the sink and came back with a damp cloth. ‘I’m running the place now, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s going very well.’ She lifted his cup and wiped the base, then she wiped the wood surface underneath.

‘That’s great.’ He couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. She was folding the cloth. Once, twice, three times. If she folded it much more, he thought, it might disappear altogether.

‘Did you come here to insult me, Jed?’ she said. ‘Is that why you came? Or was there something you wanted?’

A plane went overhead, almost scraping the tiles off the roof. Cups nodded on their red plastic hooks. When the noise had died away, it seemed as if another layer had been stripped from the silence.

‘You must have a reason,’ she said, ‘after all these years.’

‘It’s nothing to do with all these years,’ he said.

‘You were always so calculating. You never did anything without a reason.’

‘How come I need a reason?’ he said. ‘I’ve been away. I was away for a long time. I couldn’t’ve come to see you even if I’d wanted to.’ He thought of the phone-call he’d made from that booth on the highway. Six years ago. Henry, is that you?

She came and sat down. ‘You got into trouble again, I suppose.’

‘I went and lived in a town called Adam’s Creek,’ he said. ‘The name was a joke. There wasn’t any creek, never had been.’ He turned his cup on its base. ‘There wasn’t even an Adam.’

‘Adam’s Creek?’ she said. ‘I never heard of it.’

‘It’s in the middle of nowhere.’ He told her about the Commercial Hotel and THE WORLD OF 45 FLAVOURS. But he looked at her once and her chin was propped on the flat of her hand as if it was about to be served by a waiter and she was looking out of the window. She wasn’t listening, he could tell, so he just stopped. She looked back at him and sighed, a sigh that didn’t seem to have anything to do with him.

‘I think I’ll go and lie down,’ he said. ‘I’m really tired.’

She took his empty cup, put it in the sink with hers. ‘You can use your old room.’

He stood up, stretched.

‘Do you want me to wake you?’ she said.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to sleep for an hour.’

At the top of the stairs he stood by the window and looked out. This neighbourhood where he’d grown up, it was another world to him now, a world he had to search his blood for. This house was his home, that woman in the kitchen was his mother. He knew it, but it was a long time since he’d felt it. The feeling had gone, only the facts remained.

When he opened the door to his old room he found himself nodding. It was exactly what he might have expected. There were two twin beds. There was a lamp with a white shade. There were small bowls of dried flowers. It was immaculate, anonymous; neutral as a motel room. There was nothing to suggest that he had ever slept there, not a trace of his presence. There wasn’t even the ghost of a radio.

He took his jacket and his sandals off, and lay down on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest. He closed his eyes. Listened to the planes go over. That long slow rumble. His ribs vibrating gently. And he rose up over the rooftops of Sweetwater and beyond Mario’s handkerchief factory, beyond the river, he could see the tall white buildings of the city clustered tight as skittles, he could see Death Row and the slim black shape of the Paradise Corporation, like the shadow of a building, and the factory and the river vanished, and there was golden wood where they had been, a corridor of polished golden wood with gutters on either side, and he looked down at his hand and saw he was holding a huge black ball, and he took three steps forwards and swung his arm and let the ball go, and that long slow rumble in the sky, that was the sound of the ball rolling down the corridor of golden wood, rolling towards the cluster of tall buildings, plane after plane, and always that black ball rolling until at last he saw it slowly smash into the buildings, he saw the buildings stagger, topple over, every one of them, and there was no city any more, there was only a game that he had won, and the planes going over, they were the applause, a standing ovation, and he was turning away from that corridor of golden wood, one hand raised, a kind of hero now.

When he woke, it was almost dark. He could hear music downstairs, dance music. He had no idea where he was. Propped on one elbow, he saw a jacket and a pair of sandals that some stranger must’ve left behind.

And then he remembered; it all came back together slowly, like an explosion played in reverse. That music downstairs, that would be his mother’s radio. She always tuned in to Latin stations at night. She used to cook to the rhythms of the tango and the rumba, she’d snap her fingers, tilt her hips, and he’d be watching, embarrassed, through a jungle of fingers. This was no motel, this was his old bedroom, this was home, and as for that stranger with the jacket and the sandals, that stranger was him.

One of his knees had seized up. He eased both legs on to the floor and sat still. Then he buckled his sandals, wincing as the straps bit into his heels. He limped downstairs and into the kitchen. His mother was perched at the breakfast bar with a drink and a cigarette.

‘What’s that?’ he asked her.

‘Scotch and soda. You want one?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t drink.’

‘Did you sleep well?’

‘I woke up,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t know where I was.’

‘That’s not surprising when you think how long it’s been.’

‘I heard the radio, and I remembered how you used to cook with that music on, and then I knew.’

She smiled. ‘I still do.’ She folded her cigarette up in the ashtray. She’d smoked less than half of it. ‘Talking of that, are you staying for dinner?’

‘I need to stay the night.’ He watched her face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only tonight. Then I’ll be gone.’

‘Need to?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Need to.’

She took another cigarette out of her pack and looked at it as if she thought she might learn something from it. They were exactly the kind of cigarettes he would’ve imagined she smoked. Extra slim, extra mild. 100s. A delicate garland of flowers encircling the cigarette just below the filter.

‘You never told me anything, did you?’ she said.

‘You don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘you really don’t.’

‘That’s not giving me much say, is it?’

‘You lost the right to that a long time ago.’

This time she stubbed her cigarette out as if it was alive and she wanted it dead. ‘You’ll never forgive me, will you, for throwing your stupid radios away.’

‘I’m not talking about radios,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about you pretending I didn’t belong to you, you being ashamed. You still feel guilty about it. If you didn’t feel guilty, you’d already’ve thrown me out. But you haven’t and you won’t,’ and he looked at her, ‘because you’re guilty.’

She banged her glass down so hard it cracked. And she held on to it, the skin stretched tight between each knuckle. ‘Stop telling me what I feel and what I don’t feel, for Christ’s sake. What do you know about what I feel? You don’t know a thing.’ She let go of the glass, looked down at her hand. She’d gashed the mound at the base of her thumb. Blood slid along the fine grooves on the inside of her wrist.

She stood at the sink and ran cold water on to the wound. ‘I’m making hamburgers for dinner,’ she announced suddenly, without turning round.

She dabbed at her cut with a piece of paper towel. He couldn’t remember seeing her bleeding before, or hurt, not ever. Dealing with this damage to herself, she seemed tentative and clumsy. There was a despair about her, a kind of fatalism, as if she might at any moment throw in the paper towel and sit down on a chair and simply bleed. He stood up and fetched the first-aid kit from the cupboard. He placed it on the draining-board beside her.

‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

He watched her opening the kit and thought: I know a thing about you. Her drinking, her smeared face. A looseness in her head that could only be tightened by love. You’ve always chosen the wrong men, or let the wrong men choose you. Your life’s been one mistake after another. I’m only one of them.

She stuck a plaster over the cut and moved to the chopping-board. She lit a cigarette and put it straight in the ashtray. Then she began to chop onions. The cigarette burned all the way down to that delicate garland of flowers, she didn’t touch it once. When she’d finished the onions she reached for the whisky bottle and held it up to the light. Half an inch left. She tipped it into her glass, no soda this time. She stood the empty bottle on the floor.

‘If you want something to drink, there’s wine in the fridge,’ she said.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t drink.’

The smell of meat and onions frying began to load the air. He realised he’d eaten nothing all day.

‘Smells good,’ he said.

She crossed the room and opened the patio doors. She didn’t seem to have heard him.

They ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards they watched a movie on TV. It was about killer ants. There was one part where the ants were swarming across a blonde girl’s thigh while she was sleeping. A man, the hero, presumably, was standing on a beach with a gun in his hand.

Jed turned to his mother. ‘You seen anything of Pop?’

‘Oh, you know. He drops in from time to time.’

‘If you can call smashing the door down dropping in.’ Smiling to himself, Jed looked across at his mother and was surprised to see that she was smiling too.

They were both smiling, both at the same time.

She poured herself another glass of wine. ‘You know, you weren’t really a mistake.’

He was looking at the TV again. The blonde girl had just woken up. She was screaming.

‘You weren’t,’ she said. ‘We wanted you.’

‘Maybe I wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but you made me feel like one.’

She sighed and sipped her drink. ‘I was too selfish, but that still doesn’t mean you were a mistake.’

He nodded.

The hero was running up the stairs, but it was too late.

The blonde girl was dead.

His mother cleared the plates away, then she went and stood in the doorway looking out into the night. The wind swelled and the trees in the yard shook like tambourines. One of the patio doors slammed against the outside wall.

‘It’s going to storm,’ she said.

The wind pushed at her hair. A silence seemed to swoop down, and lightning burned the air behind her white. She seemed to have been drawn round haphazardly in black pencil. It made her look as if she would never move again. As if she would always be alone. In that moment he could see why they might laugh together, and why they might cry. Then she was pulling the doors shut, reaching up to fasten the bolt at the top, bending down to fasten the other bolt near the floor. She turned to him, her face dark with the effort. ‘I’m going up to bed now.’

‘What time do you go to work?’

‘About eight.’

‘Could you wake me?’

She nodded. ‘Goodnight, Jed.’

‘Goodnight.’

That green sky he’d seen earlier, it was over the house now, loud and poisonous. He was drawn to the window. Thunder hid the sound of planes. (Or maybe they weren’t taking off tonight, maybe the weather was too bad.) Lightning flattened itself against the glass, a face with no features only inches from his own, a boy shouting from a balcony. He stepped back into the room.

There was nothing much on TV, but he watched it anyway. Like water, it ran into every compartment in his head and left no room for anything else.

He went to bed at eleven. As he climbed the stairs, the rain came with a sudden loud sigh. The roof shook under the weight of it. He passed his mother’s bedroom. There was no strip of light under the door. She must already be asleep.

At three his eyes clicked open. He dressed in darkness, crept downstairs. The storm had passed on. It was quiet. A thick grey light lay on the furniture like a coat of dust. He felt his way into the lounge. There, in the corner, was the bureau desk that had belonged to his father. If he remembered right, the gun would be in the bottom drawer. He tried the drawer. Locked. Somehow that was encouraging. He reached underneath to see if the bottom could be removed, but it seemed solid. He’d have to force the lock. But what with? He crossed the hallway to the kitchen, returned with a pair of scissors, a chisel, some garden shears. He tried the scissors first. They bent. The shears next. Too big. He inserted the chisel into the gap and worked it back and forwards until he had leverage, then he began to push the handle of the chisel downwards, away from the desk. He could feel the sweat all slippery on his forehead and his throat. A crack suddenly, and he fell back. He thought the chisel had snapped, but it was the lock. He put the chisel down, pulled the drawer open and began to feel around inside. A pile of papers. A roll of Sellotape. More papers. It had to be there. Then his hand closed around a rectangular box.

He lifted the box out of the drawer and carried it to the window. He opened the lid. Grey light spilled along the smooth, tooled grooves of the gun. It had belonged to his brother, Tom. Tom had brought it round during the days when Pop kept showing up outside the house at night and shouting threats.

‘Taste of his own medicine,’ Tom had said. It was one of the few things Tom had inherited from his father, this love of guns; his mouth bent when he talked about them, the same way it bent when he talked about certain types of women.

Their mother was giggling nervously. ‘I can’t.’

‘Take it.’ Tom seized her hand and wrapped her fingers round the gun. One off her nails caught on the butt and snapped. But the gun was a piece of witchcraft and she hardly noticed. Her fingers opened again, slowly, like a door finding its natural position on its hinges, and they all stared down at the gun. Too big for her hand, too big and dark and blunt. When they looked up again, looked at each other, their eyes seemed to be the same colour as the gun, and capable of the same violence.

She did take it. But, as soon as Tom had driven away, she locked it in the desk. ‘I could never,’ and her shoulders rippled with disgust, ’never use something like that.’ Standing at the window with the gun in his hand Jed supposed he’d been relying on her to hold to that.

Suddenly the darkness shrank and he was blind. He turned, blinking. Saw his mother standing in the doorway, one hand on the light switch. She was wearing a nightgown with short, puffy sleeves. A knife glimmered in her other hand. She ran towards him and he felt the knife slide through the cheap leather of his sleeve, scorch the muscle of his forearm. He twisted sideways, snatched at her wrist. The knife dropped to the carpet. He pushed her away from him.

‘What’re you doing?’ he said.

She began to speak and her voice was thick as the light in the hallway, thick with pills. ‘You get out, you get out of here, get out —’ ‘You could’ve killed me,’ he said.

‘— you get out of my house, just get out,’ and then her voice lifted in pitch and volume, and she was screaming at him, ‘GET OUT, GET OUT, GET —’

He slapped her hard across the side of her head, and she stopped, right in the middle of a word, as if he’d switched her off. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he said.

She stood in the room, her shoulders hunched in the nightgown, her mouth wrenched out of shape.

‘I’ll take you up to bed,’ he told her, ‘then I’ll go.’

He took her by the arm and, turning her round, led her back upstairs. He helped her into bed and pulled the covers over her. ‘I’m going to turn the light off now,’ he said. He turned the light off and stood by the door, listening. Her breathing was steady; she was asleep. He wondered what she’d think when she found his empty bed in the morning. He wondered whether she’d remember.

Outside it was still dark. Rain scuttling in the gutters. When he reached the top of Mackerel Street he stopped and glanced up at the house on the corner. One light shining in an upstairs room made him feel that he was floating on an ocean, cut loose and drifting, but then he felt the weight of the gun in his jacket pocket, and it was a good purposeful weight, it was like ballast. There would be no drifting.

He eased his jacket off and inspected his arm. He’d been lucky. It had taken all the knife’s strength just to slice through the sleeve so the wound was superficial. A thin, dark line of drying blood, more of a scratch than a cut. He lifted his arm to his mouth, licked the wound clean.

He put his jacket back on. No lightening of the sky yet, but dawn could only be an hour away. There were blue flashes in the east, as if someone further down the coast was watching a giant TV. He decided to walk to the train station in Sweetwater. There used to be an all-night café under the platforms. He’d sit in the café and drink a cup of coffee and wait for the first train to the city. He searched his pockets for candy. Just a few fragments of Peanut Brittle and a handful of empty wrappers.

It was two miles to the station and as he splashed along in his sandals he could taste blood in his mouth. Sharon’s lazy voice came back to him: You won’t like it. Men don’t.

She was high that night, almost gone, otherwise she never would’ve let it happen. It was one of his rare nights off, and she’d come round to his two rooms under the Palace with a litre of mescal in a brown paper bag and half an ounce of grass in her bra. They were sprawled across his single bed, most of their clothes on the floor.

‘It’ll get everywhere.’ But she had this grin draped over her face.

‘It’s my place,’ he told her. ‘I don’t care where it gets.’

‘Well, all right. But don’t make a habit of it.’

He put his mouth to her cunt. People think blood always tastes the same. That’s because they don’t know. There’s sweet blood and there’s sour blood. There’s blood that’s old and blood that tastes brand-new. Sometimes blood tastes cheap, like tin cans or cutlery, other times it tastes as rich as gold. Sharon’s blood tasted sugary that night. But with an edge to it, like fresh lime. He was down there so long that she came twice just from his tongue. She said nobody had ever done that to her before. Then they fucked and she was right, it did get everywhere. The next day he had to throw half his bed in the garbage. It was only later, with Celia, that he took to keeping the sheets. That had been her idea. Towards the end she became almost religious about it. Blood as sacrament, an emblem of their union. Blood as affirmation. Blood as power.

The café was open. He drank a coffee and watched the clock go round. 4.55. 5.10. 5.23. Someone had left an early edition of the paper on the table next to him. He read it from front to back. 5.41. He thought of Sharon and her cunt brimming with that sweet, dark blood. Then he remembered how she’d rationed him. They’d been on and off for almost three years, and yet he could count the times. Once in the Palace, once in the storeroom. That was it. He wondered if Max liked it. Probably not. Men don’t.

The city train came in at 6.05. It was crowded. Hundreds of people with sleep in their eyes and their heads nodding on their necks. The train rattled over the river. Between the grey metal struts he caught glimpses of the Witch’s Fingers glistening in the grainy light. Sometimes Celia’s body had looked like that, when it was hot, a silvering along the edges of her skin. Don’t make a habit of it. Of course, with Celia, that was precisely what it had become. A habit. Same time every month. And that evening when she turned to him on their sheet that was stained with roses, the power station lit up behind her like a twisted heap of pearls, and she said, ‘You know the really weird thing? It takes the pain away.’ Something went through him in that moment, it moved so fast he only saw its heels, but now, thinking back on it, he thought it might’ve been the closest he had ever got to love.

A man fell against him, muttered an apology. He must’ve fallen asleep on his feet.

The train dipped underground at Y Street. The lights flickered on, they trembled on and off, like the eyelids of someone who’s dreaming. Three minutes later they were pulling into Central Station. One screech of the brakes, and a lurch that sent people staggering.

He bought two bags of Iceberg Mints at the news-stand, then he took the escalator up to the street. He thought he’d stroll down to the ocean, find himself a deck chair and a piece of shadow, doze for a few hours. Later he could breakfast at the Aquarium Café. He took the direct route, south from Central, through the M Street mall and down the hill past the Palace Hotel. He hadn’t meant to pass the Palace. He didn’t want any memories this morning. Not memories like that, anyway. They were knots in the smooth grain of a wood. They made the saw jump. You could lose a finger that way. He stared up at the building as he passed and knew why Creed had chosen it. The respectability, the grandeur, the sheer weight of that façade, they all told lies about him.

Lies.

His gaze dropped back to ground-level. The revolving doors began to spin, flick over, like the pages of a book, and out of the book stepped two figures, men.

Jed edged back into the shade of a tree. Without taking his eyes off the doors, he unwrapped a mint. Fed it into his mouth, crushed it to fragments with his teeth.

‘My Christ,’ he whispered.

One of the men was Neville Creed, the other man was Nathan Christie. They knew each other. They not only knew each other, they slept with each other too.

He remembered Mitch’s words: I told them. But they already knew.

They already knew.

‘No wonder,’ he whispered. ‘No fucking wonder.’

And his mind leapt across seventeen years, a spark jumping between two terminals. The shark run. Nathan Christie had been found guilty in that dark corner of the harbour. If he’d been innocent he would’ve drowned, and Jed would never’ve seen him again. Only the guilty came back.

He should’ve known.

And this knowledge, so late in coming, burst through his head, one explosion, then another, then another, it was like a match dropped in an ammunition dump, and he reached into his pocket, and his hand tightened round the gun.

3UR 1AL

It even looked as if something was wrong. When he ran up the stairs he saw that Dad’s bedroom door was open. All through his childhood he’d been taught to close that door. Pull it until it clicks, Dad used to say, he couldn’t sleep if he thought the door wasn’t closed properly. And now it was open, wide open, like a raided tomb.

‘George?’

She was lying stretched out on the bed, her head propped on a mass of pillows. She was watching TV. There were no other lights on in the room. Her face was flickering: bright, dark, bright, dark. The whites of her eyes were luminous and fierce. They looked washed clean, somehow. He had the feeling that she’d been crying.

He moved to the side of the bed. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘fine.’

‘You’re not dead or anything?’

She smiled faintly. ‘Look at this. It’s the wedding.’

‘Wedding? What wedding?’ He sat on the edge of the bed. She was surrounded by bottles of pills. The bed clicked and rattled every time he moved. ‘Where did you get all these pills?’

‘They’re Dad’s. They were in his drawer.’

‘How many have you had?’

‘Not many.’

‘How many?’

She shrugged. ‘About fifteen.’

‘Fifteen? Which ones?’

‘All different.’ She looked at him. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. They’re mostly stale. They don’t do much.’

‘Stale? How can you tell?’

‘The dates on the bottles. Some of them are ten years old.’

He looked at her dubiously.

‘For Christ’s sake, Nat,’ she said, ‘I’m ALL RIGHT.’

‘You sounded so strange on the phone. Like one of those movie-stars who takes an overdose and then they start making phone-calls.’

‘You called me, remember?’

‘I know. But, you know.’

‘Well, I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to sound like one of those movie-stars.’

It was so unlike her to be sarcastic, her face took on a shape he didn’t recognise. Waves of anger, and hurt under the anger like a reef. Uncomfortable, he turned to the TV.

City Hall on a bright day, the shadows almost purple. A scrap of paper went tumbling across the wide, stone steps. He could see Dad and Harriet standing just inside the entrance, Dad agitated, smoothing his hair. A chip of white flashed in the gloom. Harriet’s teeth. She must’ve been saying something. Then they emerged, arm in arm. Into the sunlight, blinking. Dad took her hand. Their smiles seemed slowed down. The veins showed on the back of Dad’s hand, stood out like weak ropes. Moored in his body, but only just. Dad and Harriet turned to face each other, they were supposed to kiss. A moment’s hesitation.

The tape ended suddenly.

‘There’s another one somewhere,’ Georgia said. ‘I’ve been watching them all night.’

‘So where’ve you been?’ Nathan asked her.

‘I don’t know. Around.’

‘I was trying to find you. Yesterday, it was.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘No, wait. It was the day before. I waited outside your place all afternoon.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘I wanted to see you. It was after I had lunch with Harriet.’

‘Talking of Harriet.’ Georgia reached down beside the bed and pulled out another video. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you put this on.’

‘What is it?’

‘Put it on.’

He took the video from her, pushed it into the machine, and pressed PLAY. He sat back on the bed. He glanced at her, but she wouldn’t look at him. He faced the TV again.

The back garden. A hot day. Every blade of grass caught the light. The lawn looked sharp, almost metallic. A bed of nails. Harriet lay in the distance, sunbathing.

And then close-up suddenly, everything tilting, seasick. Harriet was sitting on a blue towel in her bikini, a can of Coke beside her, a radio. She said something, then smiled. Then said something else. There was tanning oil trapped, like mercury, in the crease that ran across her belly.

Nathan turned to Georgia. ‘Why do you want me to watch this?’

‘Just wait,’ Georgia said.

Darkness now. Inside the house. The view from the hallway, looking up the stairs. He noted the banisters, the moon painting that Yvonne had given him, and, high up, the pale oblong of the landing window. The darkness was blue, as if lightning had struck and left a low electric charge behind.

And then a shadow passed the window, coming down the stairs. It was Harriet. At first he thought she was wearing that white silk underwear of hers. Then he realised she was naked. The white areas were the parts of her body that hadn’t been exposed to the sun. She came down the stairs, a smile held awkwardly on her face, as if balanced, her eyes lit with a strange glitter. He couldn’t take his eyes off her breasts, her groin. So white, raw somehow, almost painful. That smile, her nudity, the blue gloom of the house. He turned to Georgia. ‘I don’t think I want to watch this.’

She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘It’s nearly over.’

‘I don’t want to watch any more.’

She looked at him. ‘I thought you liked her.’

He shook his head slowly, a sad smile on his face. ‘That’s not why it happened, George.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I thought,’ and her voice shrank, ‘I thought we were brothers.’

‘We are brothers.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me, Nathan? Why did I have to hear it from her?’

He began to explain it to her. It had started so long ago, he said, long before they became brothers. He told her everything, and she listened carefully, her head lowered, her fingers wandering among the beads of her necklace.

‘It wasn’t like sex,’ he finished by saying, ‘not really. It was more like an exorcism or something. She’d screwed me up for so long. I had to get her out of my system.’

Georgia was silent for a while, then she lifted her head and a smile tiptoed on to her face. ‘You know what she told me?’

‘No. What?’

‘She told me you were lousy in bed.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I was.’ Then he began to smile.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking. She’ll never know.’

‘Never know what?’

‘How good I am in bed.’

She stared at him. ‘But I thought you said you —’

‘We did. But not in bed.’

‘Where then?’

‘In the summerhouse.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘We did.’ He looked at her and saw that she was laughing, and then he knew he had her back again.

But he hadn’t finished yet, he had to go on. This laughter of hers, it would seal her return to him.

‘In the summerhouse,’ he said, ‘with all those flowerpots and bicycle pumps. With all those watering cans.’ He shook his head. ‘I was just about to come and I knelt on a tomato.’

Tears were sliding down her cheeks. All the tiny bottles of pills tumbled off the bed and rolled across the floor.

‘I was lousy,’ he said. ‘I was really lousy.’

Towards midday she dropped into a deep sleep. He didn’t want to risk losing her again so he stayed beside her. Those jets were circling in the small sky of the room, circling like vultures, and he took her hand and held it while she slept. He watched TV, he listened to her breathing change. Then, as dusk fell, he grew tired too. He lay down beside her and soon he was asleep.

He woke once, sat upright. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘What?’ she murmured.

‘I thought I heard something.’

She turned over. ‘You’re getting as bad as Dad.’

He lay down again, and slept.

The next time he woke, his watch said eleven. He couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. He left the bed and crossed the landing to his old room. He switched the light on, and jumped. A thin man was sitting in the chair by the window. Blond hair, glasses, dark-red leather jacket. The man reached up and scratched his neck, just to the left of his Adam’s apple, with the first two fingers of his right hand. A few flakes of dry skin trickled down through the yellow air.

‘Jed?’

Jed just stared at him.

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Nathan said.

Jed looked down at himself, as if he’d forgotten, then he looked up again. ‘So what’s new?’ His voice was thin, whittled to a point, like a stick.

He was wearing different clothes. No black top hat, no black jacket. He looked like one of those street preachers, the ones who come by in the daytime and stick one foot in the door and tell you what hell’s like. Mostly they look like they’ve been there. They’re not easy to get rid of either. If you slam the door in their faces, they just walk right through the wall.

‘Who let you in, Jed?’

‘Nobody let me in. I broke in.’

‘What’s the idea?’

Jed reached into his pocket and took out a piece of candy. He unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. He dropped the wrapper, watched it see-saw to the floor. He smiled. ‘How’s Creed?’

‘Creed?’ Nathan swallowed.

‘How’s Neville?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t listen too well, do you?’ The candy grated against Jed’s teeth. ‘The first night we met I told you I used to work for a guy in the funeral business. I told you I did a job for him. I told you his name too. Creed.’

Nathan still didn’t see it.

‘Neville Creed,’ Jed said. He leaned back in the chair. ‘When I told you I’d killed someone, it didn’t seem to bother you much. I thought it was the coke, but it wasn’t that. You’d heard it all before, hadn’t you? You knew all about it.’

Jed stared at Nathan. There was a splintering as Jed bit clean through the piece of candy in his mouth.

‘It’s no use acting innocent. I know you’re sleeping with him. My hunch is, you’re working for him too. You’ve been working for him all along. You didn’t just happen to be in that bar that night. You’d been planted there. Old friend, small world, fuck,’ and Jed laughed, it was a bitter laugh. Nathan had heard Dad laugh like that on the night of the spaceship.

‘You’re not making any sense, Jed. I didn’t even know his name was Neville till a couple of days ago. I didn’t know he worked for a funeral parlour. He said he —’ And the whole thing came tumbling down, a set of dominoes stretching back into the past: that meeting on the promenade, the grey man under the umbrella, Reid’s casual questions about his ‘friend’. Maxie Carlo and his anagrams. All he could hear was one long, rippling crash as the dominoes fell. He’d been so fooled, so used. He stared down at the carpet. ‘Oh shit.’

‘Yeah,’ Jed said. ‘Oh shit.’

‘He really works for a funeral parlour?’

‘Look,’ and Jed’s voice softened with leashed rage, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories. It’s showdown time tonight. I’m meeting up with Creed and you’re coming with me.’

Nathan took a step backwards. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this.’

Jed reached into his coat. He pulled out a gun and laid it casually across the palm of his left hand. ‘Yes, you do.’

Nathan sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘What’s the time?’ Jed asked.

‘About eleven.’

‘All right. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get in your car and we’re going to drive down to the West Pier and then we’re —’

Suddenly Nathan remembered Creed’s phone-call. ‘Listen, Jed, when I was with Creed last night —’

‘Where’d he take you? The Ocean Bed Motel?’ Jed leered. ‘Christ, I’ve seen a million like you.’

‘He made a phone-call late last night. He said something about the West Pier. You be there with the boat, he said. I think it was-’

Jed uncoiled from the chair. ‘I said no more stories. We’re leaving.’

It was dark on the landing, and Nathan didn’t bother to turn the light on. He thought of Harriet walking down the stairs in that movie Dad had made. His movements seemed like some kind of replica or echo. He saw himself naked, bars of thick white paint splashed across his chest, across his groin, as if he was taking part in a tribal ceremony, an initiation, even, perhaps, a sacrifice, and he saw Jed behind him, dressed in his true clothing again, the clothing he wore under his skin, that black suit with the shiny elbows, shiny shoulderblades, that voodoo hat perched on this head, a medicine man whose medicine made you ill, not well.

They left the house by the back door. As Nathan unlocked the car, a bird called from a nearby tree. One low, reverberating call; a rolled R. If nostalgia had a sound, that would be it. It reminded him of Dad, and he wondered what Dad would’ve thought if he could’ve witnessed this scene. The mere fact of driving somewhere at midnight. Mad. And yet they’d been deceived in such similar ways. A different setting, that was all. A difference of scale. Like father, like son. And suddenly he relaxed, stopped caring. He smiled as he reached across and unlocked the door on the passenger side.

Jed slammed the door. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’ Nathan fitted the key in the ignition. ‘What happened to your clothes?’

‘I sold them.’

‘You think if you change your clothes people aren’t going to recognise you?’

‘Shut up.’

‘They’ll still — ’

Jed touched the gun to Nathan’s ear. ‘Drive.’

Nathan shrugged. He reversed out to the street. He looked left and right. No grey man tonight. They didn’t need any grey men any more. All thoughts were read, all movements known.

Blenheim slept. Only one take-out place was still open: HOT CHICKENS. COLD DRINKS. White neon and stainless steel. Two drunks in the doorway, sucking on bones. A faint rasping in his ear and he glanced sideways. Only Jed scratching again. The inside of his forearm this time. His nails left long red smears on the pale flesh. Jed had swopped his clothes and dyed his hair. Nothing he could do about his skin, though.

He drove through Blenheim towards the bridge. Towards what, though, really? He saw the dead skin falling in the car, falling as softly as snow. He’d have to vacuum in the morning. He kept his thinking light, skimming thoughts like stones across the black water of events, but he knew that sooner or later, no matter how many times they bounced, they’d sink into those depths, depths that held the unknown, the unforeseeable, they’d sink and maybe they would never rise again.

They’d turned all the lights out on the bridge. After midnight then. He saw the last ferry creep towards the M Street Quay. As he came down off the bridge he took the South Side Highway to the promenade. The West Pier lay off to the right, crouching over the ocean, unlit. It had been years since there had been any life on the West Pier. He looked across at Jed and knew that it was Jed who’d chosen the place.

The turnstiles were shackled with chains, so they had to climb over. The city council had put up a sign: WARNING. DANGEROUS STRUCTURE. DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT.

They proceeded.

Nathan looked down through the gaps between the wooden slats. The ocean unrolled on the beach fifty feet below. He saw the water shatter into froth and then slide backwards fast, sucking at the metal pillars. He thought he felt the pier shake, but it was probably just that notice, the drugs still running in his blood, imagination.

‘Hands behind your back,’ Jed said.

Nathan stared at him. ‘What?’

‘You fucking deaf? Hands behind your back.’ Jed began to unbuckle his belt.

Nathan clasped one hand with the other, held them against the small of his back. Jed stood behind him. Nathan felt Jed knotting the belt around his wrists.

‘Why are you doing that?’

Jed slid the barrel of the gun against Nathan’s cheek. It was cold as toothache. It smelt of oil, his sleepwalking days. ‘We’re going to meet your lover,’ Jed hissed. ‘Don’t want you getting carried away.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Nathan said. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? I’m on your side in this.’

‘Oh yeah,’ and Jed smirked, ‘I forgot.’ Then the smirk vanished and he slammed Nathan against the wall of the ticket booth. ‘Now listen, golden boy, and listen good. I don’t want another squeak out of you. Do you understand?’

Nathan nodded. There was no way of getting through to Jed. He knew that now.

They began to edge down the left side of the pier, Nathan in front, Jed just behind. DANGEROUS STRUCTURE was right. All the paint had flaked off or worn away, and most of what lay beneath had either rusted or rotted through. If you stood still you could feel the metal pillars totter, you could hear them wince and groan. It was no illusion after all. Nathan had to test every footstep before he took it or he could be plunging fifty feet into the ocean with his hands tied. Nor were the safety railings to be trusted. In some places they had buckled or bent. In others it looked as if someone had hurled themselves towards the ocean with such force that they had burst clean through; each gap had the ominous allure of a successful suicide atttempt. The West Pier was up for sale, he remembered. The asking price: $1. The catch was, whoever bought it had to spend a million restoring it to its original condition.

Nathan looked east, towards the City Pier. The casino was still open. Lights reached out across the water. If he slitted his eyes, the pier looked as if it was balancing on half a dozen golden springs. He wondered if Maxie Carlo was playing tonight. He stopped, cocked his head. Listened for the organ’s drone, the clip-clop of the drum machine. Instead, he thought he heard coins pulsing into a metal slot. A jackpot, by the sound of it. Somebody, at least, was winning tonight. Jed shoved him in the back and he moved on.

Halfway along the pier they passed close to a children’s funfair. They were about a hundred yards out now, and a warm breeze blew off the land, threading its way through the abandoned machinery, shifting anything that had come loose. The last curve of the helterskelter had snapped off; it hung at a curious angle, bent backwards, like a badly broken limb. The roundabout turned slowly, all by itself, as if ghosts were riding it.

At last they reached the end of the pier. An area of wooden slats with metal railings on three sides. On the fourth side, the side nearest the land, there was a weatherboard wall, once white, with a flight of steps rising to a balcony. This would be the back wall of the old ballroom. Nathan looked at Jed. Jed’s pants were too big in the waist. He had to hold them up with one hand.

‘Sure you don’t want the belt back?’ Nathan said.

Jed glared. ‘I told you to shut up.’

Nathan shrugged. He looked over the railings. There was a platform of studded metal below, and a winch that leaned out over the water. This was where you would’ve waited for your speedboat ride in the old days. Beyond that, just ocean. He turned back again, leaned cautiously against the railings, his numb fingers touching metal. Jed was standing with one hand in his pocket now. The other dangled next to his thigh, rose from time to time to scratch his neck, his ribs, the side of his face. Ten minutes went by. A clock struck something. One, probably. And as the last note warped in the air and faded, Nathan heard a faint clatter. Jed heard it too, and stiffened. Nathan eased forwards, away from the railings.

‘I thought you said it was just you and me.’

The voice had come from above. They both looked up.

A skeleton was standing on the balcony. It was Creed. He was wearing the suit of bones.

‘You must be out of your mind.’

Jed still hadn’t spoken.

‘To come back here?’ Creed slowly turned his head from side to side. ‘Out of your mind.’

He began to descend. The steps, though rotten, held. His eyes never left Jed’s face, not once. The bones clicked as he moved, like dice in a gambler’s hand. One throw. Death if you lose. Nathan glanced at Jed. Jed’s head moved in fractions of an inch, keeping Creed in his sights. He was shivering.

At the foot of the steps Creed stopped. He turned his eyes on Nathan. ‘This is a surprise.’ He didn’t seem surprised. But then nothing got to Creed’s face, not unless he wanted it to.

Nathan spoke up. ‘He thinks I’m working for you. He tied me up.’ And he turned his back, showed Creed his hands.

Creed just laughed.

Jed cut across the laughter. ‘Did you bring the money?’

Creed opened his briefcase and showed the inside to Jed. The money was stacked in neat, sarcastic piles.

Jed sneered. ‘You really think you can pay for what you did?’ He drew his gun.

Suddenly a hand reached through a gap in the slats and locked round Jed’s ankle. Jed tripped, fell. Creed stepped backwards, closing the briefcase, smiling. Then a man leapt over the railings, something black and springy in his hand. Jed twisted on the ground and fired at Creed. The sound of the shot was loud, contained, as if the night had walls. Then the wind snatched the sound away. Creed’s smile had shrunk, but he was still standing. The man struck Jed on the neck. A grunt and Jed’s head hit the wood. The hand holding Jed’s ankle vanished. A second man climbed through a gap in the slats. He was wearing a leather jacket and army boots. Nathan recognised him straight away. The Skull.

‘Hey, Angelo,’ the Skull said. ‘He dead?’

Angelo crouched over Jed’s body. ‘No. He’s just stunned.’

‘Good.’ The Skull reached into the bag that was slung over his shoulder. He took out a syringe. He tested it for air, then he rolled Jed’s sleeve and injected him in the arm. ‘That’ll keep him quiet.’ He looked up at Creed. ‘You all right?’

Creed was smiling, in a kind of trance. ‘I saw the bullet go by,’ he said. ‘It didn’t have my name on it.’

‘No bullet’s got your name on it,’ Angelo said. ‘He should’ve known that.’ Bending down he prised the gun out of Jed’s fingers and tossed it over the railings. A clang of metal on metal. A splash.

‘Smelt it too,’ Creed said, ‘just for a second. Like when you’re driving along the highway and there’s a dead animal.’ He was still smiling. ‘Someone else’s death, not mine.’ He stepped forwards, the bones on his suit clicking, loaded dice. His eyes passed from the Skull to Angelo and back again. ‘My bodyguards,’ he said. ‘My executioners.’

Angelo stood in front of Nathan. ‘Who are you?’ But there was nothing in his dark eyes, not even curiosity, and his voice was cold as lilies.

Creed answered for him. ‘He’s coming on the boat with us. He ought to see this.’

So there was a boat. Nathan looked down at Jed, his buckled limbs, his drugged blood. You should’ve listened. Now look at you.

‘We better get going,’ the Skull said.

‘Yeah,’ and Angelo scanned the air above his head, ‘maybe someone heard the shot.’

Nathan watched as they hauled Jed’s body down to the metal platform, then he turned to Creed. ‘See what?’

Creed didn’t answer. He just pushed Nathan down the stairs ahead of him. When Nathan reached the platform he saw another metal staircase, four flights down into the ocean. A white motor launch rocked on the black water.

The Skull and Angelo went first with Jed. They were none too careful. Blood ran from a gash on Jed’s left hand where it had caught on a nail. They laid him in the back of the boat, the place where you’d sit with a crate of beer and wait for the reel to spin, that whine and roar as your line payed out. Angelo climbed the ladder to the top deck and started the engines. The water churned into cream at the stern. Nathan sat down, his feet just touching Jed’s shoulder. Angelo opened the throttle and the note of the engine lifted an octave. Nathan looked round. Down here, under the pier, it was like a forest of metal. The boat slipped between two rows of pillars, evenly spaced, studded with barnacles and limpets, and wrapped in scarves of seaweed at the base. Then suddenly they were clear. In the open, the uncluttered darkness. The Skull stood next to Angel on the top deck, his forehead sloping. Angelo spun the wheel one-handed, his black curls swirling in the breeze. They were heading out to sea.

Creed was going through Jed’s pockets.

‘Could you undo my hands?’ Nathan spoke in a low voice so the others couldn’t hear.

‘I think you should stay like that,’ Creed said. ‘I like you like that.’

‘This is no joke,’ Nathan said. ‘My hands are numb.’

‘I said I like you like that.’ Creed was staring at Nathan as if he’d never seen Nathan before. This sudden detachment, a withdrawal that was both rapid and absolute, made Nathan feel almost dizzy, silenced him.

He watched Creed find something. Candy wrappers. Creed opened his hand and the wrappers fluttered away, swarmed up into the dark air, like butterflies, like dead skin, like fragments of Jed’s soul, and Creed looked at the sky, then at his hand, it was as if he suddenly regretted having let them go.

The Skull clambered down the ladder in his heavy boots. ‘You found the tape?’

‘Not yet.’

The tape was in Jed’s inside jacket pocket. Creed held it up for the Skull to see, and the Skull nodded and grinned.

‘Half a million dollars.’ Creed snapped the tape and fed it out into the wind. A thin streamer flickering behind the boat. Then he just flipped the whole thing over the side.

‘He had a question,’ Creed said. ‘He wanted to know how I knew.’ That soft laugh again. You might’ve confused it with a breath of wind. ‘He held no secrets from me. I put the food on his tongue. I put the dreams in his head. Everything he did was written in my book.’

It sounded like an epitaph. Nathan had a question too, but he was afraid that Creed’s short speech had answered it.

‘He called himself the Leech,’ Creed was saying. ‘Did you know that?’

Nathan shook his head.

‘He was going to bleed me dry,’ Creed said. ‘Now who’s doing the bleeding?’

The Leech, Nathan thought. He hunched over. Jed was still out cold. Some blood seeped from his forehead, from his hand. Not much blood, though, considering his name. It hardly stained the bottom of the boat. Not much of a leech.

In the end Nathan had to ask. ‘What are you going to do with him?’ And when Creed didn’t answer, he looked up. ‘You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?’

Creed was staring out into the darkness. ‘He already did that himself. All we’re going to do,’ and he smiled, almost wistfully, ‘is bury him.’

‘That’s murder,’ Nathan said.

Creed shook his head. ‘Burial.’

They stared at each other until Nathan had to look away. He couldn’t look into those eyes any more.

The boat lifted, spliced a wave. Spray flew past and nicked his cheek. His upper arms and shoulders ached as if his bones had turned to metal.

He faced into the wind. And there, across the water, less than a hundred yards away, he saw a white light glowing. At first he didn’t recognise it. Then, as they edged closer, he realised with a shiver where they were. They were approaching one of the ocean cemeteries, and that white glow would be a memory buoy. They shouldn’t be here, he was thinking, not after dark. These were the sacred territories, these were the pastures of the dead. He found himself remembering the shark run he had undergone all those years ago, the moment when he grew tired and his legs dropped. That deepness where anything you thought of became real.

They passed within a few feet of the buoy, their engines idling now. An angel knelt beside a cross, the whole tableau lit from the inside. Nathan leaned forwards to read the inscription: ANGEL MEADOWS. And then some quotation from the Bible, but he could only make out one word: SLEEP.

The Skull stood in front of Creed, hands on his hips. ‘I guess this’ll do, won’t it?’

Creed nodded.

Angelo flicked a switch inside the cabin and the lower deck lit up. There were colours where there’d been none before. The green and brown of the Skull’s fatigues. The red of Jed’s blood. The white of Creed’s face, the black of his eyes.

Angelo and the Skull began to load clear plastic bags of white stones into Jed’s pockets.

The Skull noticed Nathan watching. ‘We cleaned out the ovens yesterday,’ he said. ‘These are what you might call,’ and he grinned, ‘the leftovers.’

When they’d used up all the bags they hauled Jed’s body down to the stern.

‘Anyone want to say anything?’ the Skull asked.

Creed turned away. ‘Just drop him.’

There was a moment of stillness, unintentional, then the two men heaved the body over the side. Spray rose into the air and flopped on to the deck. Nathan watched as Jed floated just below the surface in the part of the water that was green, almost transparent, lit by the boat’s bright lamps. He saw Jed’s eyes flicker open, close, flicker open again.

He woke up and he was drowning.

It was as if he’d been born into a world where the only element was water. He struck out with his hands, kicked with his feet, but the water wrapped all his movements up, stole all their strength. He struck out, kicked again. Rose to the surface. Drank the black air down. Drank some water too. He could see lights, hear voices. They were talking about him. They were saying goodbye. Was he leaving?

‘Goodbye, Spaghetti.’

‘Spaghetti.’ A laugh. A laugh he recognised. ‘Place in lightly salted water. Cook for ten minutes.’

‘Lightly salted water?’ Another laugh. A different laugh.

And then another voice: ‘Place in lightly salted water. Cook for ever.’

It was like being food. And the cooks were all laughing, they were jolly men with big faces, they were in a good mood.

Then the waves swirled in his ears, and he was falling back. He reached for the surface again. Drank black air and water mixed. Drank it down like medicine and choked on it. He wanted to call out, but he had no space in his mouth for words. He began to see images. One flowed into the next, as if they were made of water, water of many colours, water that held shapes.

He saw a man rise up out of the ground like something growing. Rise naked from the ground, mud tumbling off his shoulders, off his belly, off his thighs. Stumbling back through the big trees, back into the village. He heard a woman’s lazy voice. ‘They didn’t have no room for him,’ she was saying. ‘It was like, wait for the next bus, you know?’ And her head tipped back, she was laughing. A glimpse of all her cavities. One molar filled with amethyst. He wanted to warn her. They’d lift that in the morgue.

He had other things to say, about the naked man, about the bus. He tried to shout, but his body turned over. He was under the water, his body rolled like gas. His ears were loud, his mouth was stopped with earth. He was heavy, dreamy, deaf.

He made one last effort to rise up, to throw off this cloak of water, cloak of mud. He was standing at the temple gates. He couldn’t see the guard, except as a shape. There were gloves on the guard’s hands. It must be cold in heaven. Then a still, calm voice. A voice you couldn’t disobey. ‘Enter.’

He found words. ‘I’m not ready.’

‘Why would you be here, if you weren’t ready?’

‘Tell me I’m not ready,’ he begged. ‘Send me back.’

‘It’s too late for that.’

‘Please let me go back. I’ll sit outside my hut. I won’t speak to anyone. I’ll be mad. Just send me back.’

‘It’s too late. You’re here. It’s your time.’

Then he was high up, on Blood Rock. The wind draped flags across his back, and Celia lay below him. Warm dust blew into her hair, her armpits, the corners of her eyes. He brushed the dust away. The blood had dried in brown streaks on the inside of her thighs. He moistened the blood with the tip of his tongue. Her hand flexed in his hair. He moved back up her body to her face. She gazed up at him with so much distance in her eyes that he felt like the sky, he felt that far away, he felt she loved him.

‘You’re doomed,’ she whispered. Her lips were hardly moving on her broken teeth. ‘You’re doomed.’

‘And you,’ he said, ‘what about you?’

‘That’s just the thing.’ The same whisper, the same slow-moving lips. As if she was very tired or weak. ‘I know I am. I’ve known it all along. But you. You don’t know, do you?’

He wanted to make light of this, he wanted to laugh like some brave warrior. Not even a smile came.

‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered, ‘do you?’

He was standing, he was walking in sand, he was standing still. He saw the drop of rain on his shoulder, crouching on his shoulder like a spider. He tried to brush it off, but it wouldn’t go. He ran, but it clung to him. He saw the drop of rain, as if he was outside himself, and suddenly he knew the truth about it.

It had never told him he was special, it had never told him that at all. He hadn’t listened properly, he hadn’t understood. He heard it speaking now, he heard it for the first time, the voice in the rain.

‘What are you doing here?’

That finger on his shoulder. You. You’re trespassing. You don’t belong.

You’re doomed.

A man walked towards him. Dark hair, black eyes, gloves. That still, calm voice again.

‘You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you?’

And his own voice, passive, ‘Yes.’

‘You’d lie.’

‘Yes.’

‘Steal.’

‘Yes.’

‘Kill.’

‘Yes.’

‘Die.’

His eyes were open now, and he was falling away. It was the clearest it had ever been. He could see a light, but he was staring up through dark air, air like green glass, the light seemed warm, it seemed to glow like the dial of a radio, but it was an old radio, someone had just switched it off, the light was slowly shrinking, the light was fading, slowly, slowly, he knew how they worked, he’d watched it happening so often, soon there would be nothing.

One moment Jed was floating in that transparent, green water, the next he sank out of sight, into water that no light could penetrate. It was as if he’d been sucked down by some immensely powerful magnet.

‘Goodbye, Spaghetti,’ the Skull said.

Creed consulted his watch. ‘We should be getting back.’

Angelo climbed back up to the top deck. He started the engines and swung the boat round in a tight circle. All Nathan could see, even when he closed his eyes, was Jed’s face in that lit water, Jed’s face held fast, as if in gelatine. There one moment, as if preserved for ever; gone the next, as if it had never been. Jed had done it all wrong. He should’ve slipped in like a dagger, between the ribs of the city. But no, he’d creaked and crackled his way down V Street, he’d swaggered along in his top hat and black suit, his purple car, and all the vultures there. Everything that happened afterwards had started in those first few moments of defiance: ‘It’s me. I’m here. I’m back.’ He’d worshipped Creed too long; the suicide was so deep in him, he didn’t even know it was there. In a way Creed was right when he said that Jed had killed himself. A sudden scratching sound. An echo of Jed’s fingers on some part of his pale, pocked body. He turned. But it was just the Skull scrubbing the deck, removing the last traces of Jed’s blood.

‘Nathan?’ Creed stood in the doorway to the cabin. He’d taken off the suit of bones. He was wearing his usual dark clothes again. The ceremony was over.

‘Come here, Nathan.’

Nathan stood up, walked across the deck. It was hard to balance without the use of his arms. The bones in his legs ached, the way they used to when he was fourteen. He wanted sleep.

Creed gripped him by the shoulder and steered him into the cabin. Once they were inside, he locked the door, then he turned. ‘You’ve been holding out on me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Nathan took a step backwards, and felt the wall of the cabin with his wrists.

‘Lie down,’ Creed said. ‘Face down.’

Nathan didn’t move.

‘You want me to get help?’ Creed said.

Nathan lay down on the bunk bed. He tried to focus on the sound of the ocean, he tried to use that sound as a key to open the cabin door, to rise into the air, to be somewhere else while this was happening. Because it was going to happen.

Cushions were placed under his head and chest so he was almost kneeling. The top cushion was a kind of green. A kind of blue. What did they call it? Turquoise. It was all he could see, this turquoise cushion, as it pressed against his left cheek. That and the fake teak of the cabin wall.

He gasped. That feeling of being filled in a place he’d never thought of as being empty.

Through the door, somewhere else, quick.

Somewhere far away. He saw black children dancing on sand. They were Twilight’s children. They had names like Morning, Noon, and Siesta (she was the lazy one), because that was where they were in their lives. And even though it wasn’t raining, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, he could hear the old woman playing her flute. And there were children dancing on sand, and their hair was tied back with ribbons and string, and they were pure.

It was only the burning that suddenly spread through him like something spilt that told him it was over. He curled up on his side, facing the wall. That safe, fake teak. A wetness spreading under him.

‘You’re lucky,’ Creed said. ‘I did it the nice way.’

Nathan didn’t answer.

‘You’re lucky I didn’t let the Skull loose on you.’ Creed unlocked the cabin door. ‘Skull?’ he called out. ‘Hey, Skull.’

The Skull’s shaved head appeared in the doorway. He grinned at the sight of Nathan, naked from the waist down.

‘He doesn’t think he’s lucky,’ Creed said. ‘Tell him how lucky he is,’ he said, ‘that I didn’t hand him over to you.’

‘No point you handing him over to me,’ the Skull said.

‘Why not?’

‘I had him already.’

‘That’s right. I forgot.’

Nathan spoke to the Skull. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘In the motel. You did it for me there.’

‘Did what?’

‘You know. Did it.’

‘But,’ and Nathan was talking to Creed now, ‘that was you.’

‘How would you know,’ the Skull leered, ‘with that mask on your head?’

‘That was you,’ Nathan repeated, appealing to Creed.

Creed snapped his lighter open, lit a cigarette. ‘Me once, him once.’ He snapped the lighter shut again, tucked it into his pocket. ‘Fair’s fair.’

The Skull was still grinning, knots of muscle standing out on his jaw, his teeth slick with saliva. It was true. That was what the truth looked like.

‘Creed?’ It was Angelo, up on deck. He sounded alarmed. ‘There’s a patrol boat coming.’

Creed spoke to the Skull. ‘Keep him quiet.’ He left the cabin, closing the door behind him.

A police voice came through a megaphone. ‘Cut your engines. We’re coming aboard.’

The Skull sat on the bunk opposite Nathan. He drew a four-inch knife out of his boot and tapped the blade against his palm. He tilted his head towards the roof. A vein pulsed in his temple.

The engines died. Only the slapping of waves and then a bump as the patrol boat tied up alongside.

Creed spoke first. ‘Good evening, Sergeant.’

‘What’s your business out here, sir?’

‘We had a report that one of the buoys had come loose in Angel Meadows. We’ve just been out to check on them. Here’s my licence.’

A silence.

‘That seems to be in order.’

‘If you need verification, just call Lieutenant Gomez down at O Street. He’s got the details.’

‘I don’t reckon that’ll be necessary. Sorry to trouble you, Mr Creed.’

‘No problem, Sergeant. Good night.’

‘Good night.’

Nathan heard the sudden growling of engines as the patrol boat swung away. He listened to the growling turn to purring and then nothing. The police had been tamed.

‘You’ve got the fairy dust, Creed,’ came Angelo’s voice. ‘You’ve got the fairy dust all right.’

‘Those water cops,’ Creed said. ‘You could tell them it’s Tuesday, they’d believe you.’

Then Angelo’s voice. ‘It is Tuesday.’

And Creed’s laughter.

The cabin door opened and Creed looked in. ‘Dress him, Skull,’ he said, ‘then bring him out.’

The Skull hauled Nathan to his feet, then he pulled up Nathan’s pants. ‘You don’t smell too good.’

He brought Nathan to within two inches of his face. Nathan could see himself twice in the mirrors of the Skull’s eyes, he could smell the Skull’s bitter breath. He saw one corner of the Skull’s mouth lift, as if the Skull had been hooked, as if someone was pulling on a line. Then he was pushed through the cabin door and up the stairs and out on deck.

They were already in the harbour, no more than a couple of hundred yards offshore. He tried to get his bearings. A passing sign said VENUS ENGINEERING. It must be Venus Bay then. One of the remote backwaters. Angelo steered into the flat black water of a boatyard and threw the engines into reverse to bring the port side flush with the quay. The Skull jumped ashore. Once he’d secured the ropes, Creed and Nathan followed.

They walked down the quay and out into a parking-lot. Creed’s black car waited by a high, wire-mesh fence. The Skull tossed a set of keys to Angelo, who bounced them on his palm. Angelo walked to the car on feet that seemed alert. Angelo would be the one to follow through a minefield; he’d always find the magic route. Nathan watched him unlock the car and climb inside. The engine crackled and spat, the headlamps lifted like eyes and lit the gravel. Nathan thought of Jed’s bad skin.

Creed put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to find your own way back.’

‘So you’re not going to kill me?’

Creed smiled. ‘You’ll keep your mouth shut. You’ve seen what happens to people who don’t.’

The car drew alongside. The tail-lights turned their faces red. For the first time Nathan noticed the numberplate:

3UR 1AL

Creed saw where he was looking. ‘You like it?’

Nathan didn’t answer.

‘Numberplates,’ Creed said. ‘It’s a little hobby of mine. Maybe you should come and see my collection some time.’

Nathan took a step backwards.

Creed laughed, slid into the car. The door clicked shut. The car trickled over the gravel to the gate.

‘What about my hands?’ Nathan shouted.

The car turned left on to the road and vanished behind a warehouse wall. The sound of the engine faded.

He walked to the gate. On the other side of the road there was a small park with trees and benches. That would do. All he could think of now was sleep. He crossed the road and lay down on the first bench he came to. The world went black, the stars shrank and vanished, his heart blew through his body like a bomb, again, again, again. He heard the shrapnel land on the ground around him, it came showering down like rain. He was so cold inside, and burning too. But he was feeling less and less. His eyelids closing, it was like dust settling, soon there was nothing.

He woke, and it was light. He sat up. He wanted to rub his eyes, but he didn’t have any hands. He looked up and saw a policeman standing in front of him. A big solid policeman.

‘What’s the time?’ he asked the policeman.

The policeman was wearing a big solid watch to go with the rest of him. ‘It’s seven-thirty.’ He seemed slightly annoyed Nathan had asked the first question. Policemen are supposed to do that. He had to be satisfied with the second question. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I was just waiting till daylight,’ Nathan said. ‘Then I was going to hitch a lift home.’ Though how would he hitch, he wondered, with no thumbs?

‘Couldn’t you get home last night or what?’

‘No money.’ Nathan wanted to spread his hands in the air. Couldn’t, of course. All he could manage was a kind of shrug, a kind of grin.

The policeman slowly leaned sideways, like a falling tree. ‘Something wrong with your hands?’

‘You guessed it.’ Nathan couldn’t help sounding smart. It was just to keep his head above water. If he didn’t say stuff, if he stopped and looked at his boots, he’d sink for sure. ‘I’m all tied up.’ He turned round, showed the policeman his hands.

‘How do you explain that?’ the policeman asked.

‘It was a joke,’ Nathan said. ‘Some friends of mine.’

‘Nice friends,’ the policeman said and, walking round behind Nathan, he began to untie the belt.

Dead Ends

He woke up and he was drowning. It was as if he’d been born blind into a world where the only element was water. He struck out with his hands and kicked with his feet, but the water wrapped all his movements up, stole all their strength. He struck out, kicked again. Rose to the surface. Drank the black air down. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist. Now he could see. Black trees crowding over him. The night sky, one shade lighter, just behind. He turned in the water. A glimmer of white. Windows hooded like the eyes of owls. The house. He swam to the side of the pool and hauled himself out. He crouched, his head between his knees, retching.

When the water had finished spilling from his nose and mouth, he huddled at the end of the pool, his toes hooked over the edge. A warm wind blew across his shoulders, drying him. He could only think of one explanation. He must’ve been walking in his sleep. He must’ve walked right into the deep end.

Ever since that night on the boat he’d been buying the Moon Beach papers every day, scouring their pages for some mention of the name Jed Morgan. He wasn’t expecting front-page news. He knew Creed well enough to realise there’d be no mistakes, no clues. That was why Jed had been dumped in Angel Meadows and not some stagnant harbour bay. When those deep waters took you they took you for ever. But there had to be a paragraph somewhere, even if it was only six lines tucked away at the bottom of a page: MAN, 27, MISSING. Something like that. Surely someone would report him missing. He felt he needed evidence of what had happened. Some kind of proof. But almost a month had passed, and there’d been nothing.

And now he was walking in his sleep again, for the first time in almost fifteen years. He remembered the rumours it had spread about him, the tall tales it had told. And yet he’d never said anything about it. That was the way he’d been brought up. You kept all your worries locked inside, in some attic in your head, like mad relations. Sometimes you met people who could hear the screams. You tried to cover up. Scream? you said. I didn’t hear a scream. Must’ve been the wind. Sometimes he thought that all his pain had come from biting his tongue, all his pain had come from silence. And silence, once established, bred a new pain of its own.

He remembered how Georgia had appeared behind the reinforced glass of the police-station window. Her face still smeared with sleep, it had been so early. Her eyes moving from his torn and filthy clothes to his scorched wrists.

‘Nathan,’ she said, ‘what happened?’

It was in his head to say, ‘I’m all right, don’t worry, I’m all right, really,’ but that was what he’d been taught, white lies and twisted courage. There were no apologies to give her, no reassurances. Not this time.

Her eyes silvered over with tears. ‘But,’ and she didn’t know quite how to put it, ‘but it’s me who’s supposed to do things like this.’

‘Just take me home,’ he said.

She was right. In the past it had always been her who needed saving. Now, suddenly, it was him. He could hear the shock in her voice, it sounded almost petulant, like indignation. He could hear the fear.

But she took him home. Ran a hot oil-bath for him. He sank into that water with such gratitude. He felt his body slow, his thoughts cut out. He lay back, let the seconds ripple, drift. Through the perfumed steam and the half-open door he saw clean sheets billowing across a room.

Later, as she tucked him into bed, she said, ‘We’ve got to look after each other. Like that dream you had. Like the jets.’ He smiled. She had the measure of the simple things. She knew what they were.

Time passed, and that simplicity attached to everything. They sat down at the kitchen table and made decisions. First they arranged for the bank to execute Dad’s will on their behalf; it would put Nathan out of Harriet’s reach. Next they accepted an offer on the house. It meant they had just one month to clear the place, but to Nathan that kind of urgency seemed welcome now, intended, even crucial. Apart from anything else, it took his mind off the continuing silence of the newspapers. Working together, they began to sift the past, and they sifted it with an exuberance that bordered, at times, on delirium. One afternoon they built a fire out of all the worst things they could find: carpets, mattresses, hose-pipes, tyres. Black smoke gushed into the air, it looked as if a plane had crashed in their back garden, and some neighbour called the fire department. But they just laughed when the red trucks lined up in the road, it had the look of a joke, they were children answering to nobody. The days ran like clean cold water from a tap. Not even Harriet had any power any more.

Though she made one last attempt to wield it.

It was late one afternoon. The distant beat of helicopters circling above the harbour bridge. A fringe of shadows on the lawn. He was down in the empty pool, scrubbing the tiled sides, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned round. Harriet was standing in the shallow end. She was smiling with her crimson lips. She thought she’d made an entrance.

‘Well?’ she said, and the empty pool took the word and played ball with it. ‘Have you been thinking about what I said?’

He smiled. ‘Yes, I have.’

‘What did you decide?’

‘If you have any questions about the will,’ he said, ‘you’d better contact the bank. They’re dealing with it now.’

He watched her lips tighten on her teeth. He had to be careful or she would turn him into someone like her. That was the one power she still had left. And so he bore her no ill will, he showed no malice. He simply told the truth. And smiled.

‘I thought they might do a better job,’ he said. ‘I thought they might be more,’ and his smile widened, ‘trustworthy.’

She walked back up the steps, her head set so stiff on her shoulders that it might’ve been glued. It’s hard to make a dramatic exit when there isn’t any door to slam. She had to be content with the screeching of her tyres on the drive. That was the last they’d heard of her.

Within hours of Harriet’s departure, Yvonne called. She asked if she could come and say goodbye to the house. And take some of Dad’s paintings to remember him by.

‘As if you need to ask,’ he said.

She drove down the next day in her station-wagon. When she opened the car door, clouds of smoke poured out as if she’d been lighting fires of her own. She stood on the driveway with her legs astride and a cheroot stuck in the side of her mouth, her copper hair tied back with a piece of paint-stained silk. They ran to her and wrapped their arms round her. She smelt of the inside of cupboards, long journeys, kindness.

Nathan spoke for both of them. ‘We’ve missed you.’

Later that day, walking in the garden, she said, ‘It’s funny, you’ve risked your life so many times saving all these people you don’t know, and all along the only person you ever really wanted to save,’ and she looked at him, ‘but you know that, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘I know.’

In that moment he also knew that he’d been asking the impossible of himself. He couldn’t have saved Dad. He couldn’t even save Jed. You lose people sometimes. It was one of the laws of the surf. The captain had told him that. Sometimes the ocean’s just too strong, the captain had said. Spring tides, a rip, whatever. There’s someone in trouble, you go after them, they’re there, they’re still there, and he snapped his fingers, then suddenly they’re gone. Don’t pretend it never happened. They were there, you did your best. You live with that. You carry on.

Nathan looked at Yvonne. Her bent teeth stained by cigars, her hair as crunchy as a horse’s mane.

‘You loved him, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘Harriet was right about that.’

She looked away into the lowest part of the sky. It was a look that was both longing and resigned. It was as if she could see all the things that had never happened to her.

‘Love?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. There was just a feeling I got sometimes, when I looked at his hands.’

He took her arm and they crossed the bright grass without another word. They walked up the stone steps and back into the house. It’s one of the hardest things, he thought, when life is miserly to those you care for.

On her last night they barbecued some chicken by the pool. It was so still; they lit candles and ate their dinner under the stars. Yvonne had brought some wine down from the Cape. It was that pale white wine that looks almost green in the glass. They drank to the future of the house without them. They drank to Dad and to themselves. They drank to so many things that Yvonne had to open a third bottle.

‘So tell me,’ she said finally, ‘what are your plans?’

Nathan and Georgia looked at each other. They’d hardly discussed it. It had been enough to move from one day to the next, to feel the days forge links and pick up speed.

‘Summer’s on the way,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should come and stay at my house for a while.’

He didn’t have to look at Georgia this time to know the answer. They watched Yvonne drive away the next day, the back of her station-wagon stacked with paintings, Dad’s red chair strapped to the roof, and knew that they would see her soon.

He leaned back, stretched. It was almost morning. The wind blew some pale blossoms against his thigh. He’d been through hard water all his life, but there was no water harder than the water of the last few weeks. He’d come through, though, he’d been strong enough, and he could build on that. He could learn from Dad too. Not the carefulness, the wariness; not the silence. But the sheer determination, that iron grip on life. Death had brushed past, snatched half each lung and a handful of ribs. But Dad had clung on. What had that nurse at the hospital said? ‘Your father’s been living on borrowed time.’ Crap. Dad didn’t borrow it. He took it. He laid his hands on it and said this is mine. That’s what you do with time. The thought of Dad as some kind of thief brought him to his feet with a smile. He walked towards the house, the lawn warm under his heels, still warm from the day.

The next morning he left the house at around eleven. He was halfway down the hill when he met Mrs Fernandez, the lady who used to clean for Dad sometimes. She put a hand on his wrist. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your father,’ she said. He thanked her. There was sweat on her top lip, he noticed. It was a hot day, but not the thick, wet heat of summer. Not yet. He said goodbye to her and walked on down the street towards the newsagent’s. A breeze picked up. The dry branches of the palm trees clicked and scraped. It was a Tuesday.

He only bought one newspaper that morning. As he left the store he tore the front page out of the paper and dropped the rest in a trash bin. He walked back to the house without lifting his eyes from the front page once. And by the time he did he was home again, sitting at the kitchen table, and he put the page down and moved his head slowly from side to side, all the blood drawn out of his face. Then he picked the page up again and read it through once more:

DEATH KING BRUTALLY MURDERED

Escaped mental patient found in victim’s apartment

Mr Neville Creed, chairman of the prestigious Paradise Corporation, was found dead in his apartment in the Palace Hotel last night.

In what is already being called the ‘John the Baptist’ murder, Mr Creed, 43, was stabbed fourteen times and then decapitated.

Police have arrested Mr Vasco Gorelli, who was found in Mr Creed’s apartment. Mr Gorelli escaped from the Westwood Hill Clinic last Friday where he was held in a ward for the dangerously insane. He was still unavailable for comment yesterday.

Mental

The ferocity and bizarre nature of the killing have drawn comment, even from police working on the case.

‘It’s a horrific crime,’ said Det. Sergeant John Lopez of Moon Beach Homicide. ‘I understand the suspect has a history of mental illness and maybe that explains it.’

The body was found by Mr Al Cone, a night porter at the Palace Hotel, when he received complaints of a disturbance on the fourteenth floor and went up to investigate.

A visibly shaken Mr Cone told reporters how he had found Mr Gorelli sitting in an armchair covered in blood while the headless body of Mr Creed lay beside him on the floor. Gorelli had smashed the television screen and put his victim’s head inside.

Mr Cone went on, ‘He was watching it, like it still worked. You know what he said to me when I came in? “Ssshh,” he said, “it’s the news.’”

Charmed

Neville Creed was one of the city’s most distinguished funeral directors, with a record few could match. Marble Grove, his uncle’s funeral business, was on the brink of receivership when Creed took it over, at the age of 22.

Seven years later he merged with the Paradise Corporation, who bought Creed’s company for an estimated $30m. Creed was made a member of the board.

‘It was a meteoric rise,’ said an old partner of Creed’s. ‘Some people truly seem to lead charmed lives.’

Private

Like many rich people, Creed was intensely private. He didn’t mix in Moon Beach society and he had few friends. He lived a life shrouded in mystery in his penthouse apartment on the top floor of the exclusive Palace Hotel.

The circumstances of his death are no less mysterious. Police are still trying to establish a motive for this seemingly senseless killing, but, so far, they have come up against nothing but dead ends.

Nathan folded up the front page and looked round for the waste bin. His eyes moved through the empty room, found nothing. They must’ve already thrown it away. He looked out of the window. A thin column of black smoke rose above the hedge. Georgia must have built another fire early that morning. One last fire. The neighbours would be complaining again.

He left the house and walked to the end of the garden. He stood looking down into the fire. He could identify various objects. An empty box of cheroots, the video of Harriet. Several dozen bottles of stale pills. Smiling, he dropped the newspaper article into the core of the blaze. He stood over it, watched it begin to turn yellow, then brown, watched it begin to burn. Then stepped back, startled, as it rose out of the flames, rose past his face, and flapped away through the clear blue air, its wings black at the edges, its body still on fire.