The Gone-Away World

Chapter Three

THE MAN whose head occupies my attention is called Phillip Idlewild, although I know him (as of an hour ago) as Lay Chancellor Idlewild, PhD, professor of Greek and nominal top dog at Jarndice University. It is a blusterous October evening; the sky is a deep blue-grey made popular by an artist named Payne. We do have those days, and this is one of them, but for the most part the place where I grew up—bounded by Cricklewood Fens on one side and Jarndice on the other—basks in a gentle climate which favours delicate flowers and happy short-haired dogs. Tonight, though, the wind is whipping in across the ocean and bringing a tang of salt, spume and tar, and there’s a bass note of corruption: a huge dead sea creature floating on the forty-foot swell, picked apart by gulls. It is the perfect night to be a young man; it is a night to tear off your shirt and howl at the sky and run, to feel the moisture on your skin and not care about the cold. It is a night when wine and whisky will flow and a roaring fire and a wild dance will find you in the arms of that girl or this one or making friendships which will last for ever.

Unfortunately, I am at a function. I arrived at my set (not digs, please, or rooms, or even accommodation) and opened my suitcase and set up my music, which is pretty much all the unpacking I needed to do, and went directly from there to Matriculation Dinner, which is the first in what is an almost inexhaustible list of traditional Jarndice occasions which are best discreetly ignored. Almost no one ever knows that about the Mat Dinner and so they end up, like me, staring at the bald patch on the top of Phillip Idlewild’s head and wondering whether the pale, scabrous material which is fluttering from it as he rubs his hand through the two or three remaining hairs is in fact a contagious disease, a harmless consequence of advanced age or the residue of something he accidentally dipped himself in at lunch.

Professor Idlewild cannot speak unless he is horizontal, or at least unless his head is horizontal. When he wishes to emphasise a point, he twists his face up towards you like a passionate piebald owl and nods, and the tendons in his neck stand out amid the wrinkles, but for the most part he addresses his eloquence to the patina of the dining table. A vertical cross-section of Lay Chancellor Idlewild, taking its plane from the line of bilateral symmetry between the eyes of the normative human figure, would likely reveal a distorted set of interior organs and bones in the shape of a question mark, which seems mysteriously inappropriate in a man whose entire conversational armament consists of exclamations. As the butler (who is a postgraduate student in Industrial Conflict Resolution Theory) brings the fish course, Idlewild looses another flurry of dermis or necrotic fungal spores into the butter dish and, by means of a series of puppet-like twitches, turns to me.

“Mr. Lubitsch! Welcome to Jarndice. I’m told we should expect great things.” He smiles. “Do try to make a gesture in the direction of LMAE, won’t you, it makes them happy!”

I realise that I will have to tell him I am not Gonzo. I do so. To my surprise, he hoists a horizontal smile at me.

“My dear fellow,” he says, “I’m most terribly sorry.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Oh, you’re the other one!”

Yes. I am. Of all the students here, only I am the other one. Idlewild grins and turns back to his prior interlocutor. I look for Gonzo in order to hate him, and find him for a moment silent and bereft, two chairs away and across. On his right is a glowingly beautiful girl who appears to be genuinely interested in the conversation she is having with her opposite neighbour and his companion about crystal structures, and on his left is a hard-eyed dame of the Evangelist’s type who announced herself to him audibly as they sat down as “Doctor Isabel Lamb, and I loathe attractive young men.” Whether this is in fact true (I suspect it is not, and that Gonzo was supposed to take it as a challenge) it wrong-footed him and he simply edited her out of his world. Dr. Lamb is now holding forth to the man beside her on the subject of catastrophic failure in suspension bridges, and Gonzo is almost switched off. Without an audience to verify his magnificence, Gonzo has to look deep inside to find himself. He is looking now, but amid the clutter and the obvious sociableness of everyone around him he’s having a hard time. I can do nothing for him from here, not directly, but if I can find the right moment to butt into the conversation on my left and drag it into more promising fields, Gonzo will be able to unleash his charm on the situation and will stop looking so horribly empty and insufficient. Ma Lubitsch did not say to me, as we left Cricklewood Cove, that I was to take care of Gonzo. Old Man Lubitsch did not, as he dropped us at the train station, lay upon me a burden of fraternal care and support. They did not do these things because there was absolutely no need. I understand my obligations. After a moment, I beg my neighbour for the salt, and in passing ask why powdered salt is so different from crystal salt and why no one cooks with it, and the conversation roars off at a tangent and Professor Idlewild wants my attention again and Gonzo is debating spices with the numinous girl. Idlewild’s conversation takes the form of a lecture, and I consider this new world and take care to avoid eating any small pieces of him which make their way onto my plate.

Jarndice University is not large, but nor is it new. Its proper name is the Jarndice-Hoffman Metanational Wissenschaft-u. Kulturschule, from which it is possible to deduce that although Mr. Jarndice was what is usually for the sake of brevity known as English (i.e., possessed of a genetic heritage including the DNA of warring Angles, Normans, Saxons, Jutes, Picts, Celts, Kerns, shipwrecked Catholic Spaniards, fleeing Sephardi Spaniards and curious Moorish Spaniards, and also mercantilist Burgundians, Viking Scandawegians, rampaging Goths, sullen Vlams and the occasional dislocated Magyar) his fellow rationalist and educator was a pure German (specifically a Teuton-Tartar-Turkic-Russ-Ashkenazi-Franco-Prussian). These two individuals determined not only to found an institution of higher learning and scholarly debate free of the wranglings of academic strife, but also in doing so to create a place apart from the petulant squabblings of national entities. They therefore required in the Ordinanses of ye Univarsitie (which also decree that all students shall live within a myle radiusse of Jarndice Library, a regulation which became impractical in 1972 when the faculties, sports fields and lecture halls came to occupy most of that space, but which could not be repealed and was instead reinterpreted as referring to a league, which in turn is three English nautical miles, which is 5.55954 km, rather than 5.556 km, which would be three international nautical miles, a distinction chosen to honour Palgrave Jarndice’s nationality in spite of his dislike for all forms of patriotism, but which also serves the useful purpose of obfuscating the precise terminator line of that great circle and allowing everyone to live where they damn well please) that anyone who comes to Jarndice in whatever capacity make oath to the effect that they will looke upon ye world with an eye to ye proper managemente thereofe, ye goode conducte of ye businesse of livynge and ye keeping of ye pease, and that all magisters will give heede to ye thoughts one of another, and not take untoe themselves an excessive pryde. As a consequence, Jarndice University is a hotbed of cordial scholarly loathing, departmental vituperation and ecstatic political extremism. It is also infamous as the “U of Ye,” short for “University of Ye Ordinanses,” in reference to the eponymous document, and pronounced by detractors and Matriculats (first year students) as “yee,” whereas the letter y in this context is in fact the Anglo-Saxon symbol for th, a point the lay chancellor does not tire of explaining in exhausting detail to whoever sits upon his left at Matriculation Dinner.

And here I sit, longing to be up and roaringly drunk, instead clad in a rented blue velvet gown with silver trim which scratches at the back of the neck and smells strongly of elderly cat. Dressed thus like a bargain basement Polonius, but with the manners I learned at Ma Lubitsch’s table too firmly ingrained to do anything so uncouth as interrupt the flow of nested histories regarding the Great Vowel Shift and the decline of classical scholarship since Hadrian, I endure the stewed beef and smile at the fine-featured woman opposite me and wait for Professor Idlewild to run out of breath. This he does, as dessert arrives, not slowly, but all at once. He stops, and shivers. He compresses himself against the dining table as if looking for a particular fragment of his head which he has decided he will want later. His nose grazes the polish, and two ragged cones of mist appear beneath it—uneven, because his head is turned somewhat towards me. His hands grip the edges of the table. I look across at the fine-featured woman on Idlewild’s other side, but her face shows only chiselled bewilderment and the beginnings of the same concern which must be showing in my own. It strikes me as entirely conceivable that Professor Idlewild is having some form of heart attack, or is about to have one, and I realise that I know nothing at all about what to do if this should prove to be the case, nor even how to determine if it is. Part of me also is unthrilled at the notion that he has elected to expire right here in front of me, of all people, at this time, which will inevitably scar me in ways I cannot envisage.

Professor Idlewild throws himself back from the table in a cloud of dandruff, and sits bolt upright, staring and shock-headed. He gurgles a bit, then curls himself around his chest, hands and arms contorting, and gives vent to a kind of bark or yawp. He is either dying or being possessed by the divine animus; the former would be tragic, but also frankly a bit weird, and the latter leads one to contemplate the nature of a deity who might select as his messenger, even his vehicle in this world, an academic bore with a minor but revolting skin complaint and mushroom breath. I glance around a bit frantically for someone who has a clue about what to do next, but no one is paying any attention at all. This complete absence of anyone paying attention—anyone from Jarndice, that is, as the new arrivals are all sharing a moment of unease up and down the table—is a big hint. I find the butler at my elbow wearing an expression of absolute blandness. Since his master is, at this moment, grabbing both his ears and pulling hard, so as to produce an effect not unlike the wings of a fruit bat held up to a bright light, and since this appears to discomfit him not at all, I deduce that Lay Chancellor Professor Idlewild of Jarndice is subject to some form of seizure disorder and it is polite to ignore it. It is in fact polite to the extent that no one would ever consider mentioning it in advance, or commenting on it to anyone who might leap up and do something about it. I am deeply thankful that I am sitting here and not Gonzo, who, having just cottoned to the situation, is preparing a savage lunge down the table to perform a tracheotomy, but has the native intelligence to note that I, who am closest to the emergency, have taken a serious decision to do nothing and that there must be a reason for this. I am therefore spared the spectacle of my best friend sprinting pell-mell along an oak banqueter, spraying nineteenth-century china in all directions, and plunging a silver port funnel from the Arts and Crafts period (probably late 1890s, well made, although not a very attractive example owing to a series of nicks and dents resulting from careless use) into the throat of Professor Idlewild in order to facilitate his continued access to oxygen.

In all of this confusion—like Harry Callaghan—I forget myself sufficiently that I accidentally chat up and make friends with the fine-featured woman sitting opposite me, and it emerges that her name is Beth, and that she is from Herringbone and that she has just left her boyfriend because he was seeing a dancer named Boots on the side. By the time Professor Idlewild has sufficiently recovered himself to break into the conversation, I have even managed to make some forays into the knotty problem of what we will talk about when we go for a drink later in the week. The answer, of course, is politics.

POLITICS IS very much in fashion at Jarndice, because—aside from being a topic specifically frowned upon in Ye Ordinanses—it is also one which provokes lively debate, passionate shouting matches and wildly inconsistent positions, and is therefore ideal for student posturing and social one-upmanship. The flashpoint of the day is the Addeh Katir Problem.

Addeh Katir is a small nation rubbing shoulders with a variety of big ones. It is temperate and tropical both, richly colourful, lush and splendid. A great chain of lakes runs along its spine (the largest of these being Lake Addeh, quietly famous because its water was for many years reckoned to be the last word in tea-making) and this fertile interior is wrapped in sheltering peaks, the eponymous Katirs, which jut eastwards from the Himalayas and have embraced Lake Addeh and its smaller companions as if determined to keep them.

Politically, the best description of Addeh Katir might be that it is broken. There are many failed states, but this one has rather been vandalised. The place has no inherent ethnic tensions owing to the somewhat unique circumstances of its creation: the people of today’s Addeh Katir are descended from assorted thoughtful souls who grew bored with the endless pendulum of massacres and treaties in their own countries, and also with a curious ban on fermented beverages being then imposed by party-poopers of the Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu faiths, and also by various other sects and cults with a me-too approach to religious prohibition. They therefore hoofed it from what are now China, Tibet, Pakistan and India, and headed to the Katir mountains to hide out and (to be honest) get drunk. Arriving on the shores of Lake Addeh, they found that the entire indigenous population had been wiped out by a variation of rubella to which they were by and large immune.

Thus presented with a nation ready-made, they proceeded to divide the overlarge parcel of land as equitably as they knew how, and set about living as quietly as they could. They selected as their leader a minor noble expelled from his home for unrecorded but minor sins and basically told him not to bug them too much, and he didn’t, and nor did his son, or his son, and so on, a tradition of benign indifference which has endured into the present. Their languages blended together, and so did their genes, and after a few generations they forgot they’d ever been from anywhere else. The British conquered Addeh Katir as a matter of course, looked at the infrastructure and established that the Katiris were quite content to fly any damn silly flag as long as they were allowed to get on with it. Bored ladies and jaded gentlemen of the Raj spent a certain amount of time chasing nubile Katiris up and down wooden staircases and along polished verandas, and that—along with the adoption of English as Addeh Katir’s second tongue—was by and large the full extent of the Imperialist Yoke. The colonial project is considerably less enjoyable when you can’t think of any improvements and the place runs itself so well that you feel rude making suggestions. When the British departed the subcontinent in 1947, there was a brief period of unrest brought about by a cartel of opium traders seeking to move their product along the waterways of Addeh Katir. The reaction of the lake-dwellers was sufficiently emphatic that the project was abandoned.

In 1966, however, the All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group—under the great Developmental Initiative which was begun in that year with a view to raising the entire world beyond the reach of poverty through triumphant large-scale capitalism—made a loan to Addeh Katir. It was a most curious loan in that it was not requested and the nation never drew on it. It sat in an account and accumulated a certain amount of interest. Strangely, however, the incurred debt accumulated interest more rapidly. Thus, in 1986, when the loan was due to be repaid, the bank was in fact owed several tens of millions of dollars in addition to the original enormous amount. Addeh Katir was called to account. The maharaja pointed out that he hadn’t asked for a loan, didn’t need it, had entered into no contract with anyone and had never benefited from the money. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group responded that while this argument was not without intuitive appeal, the situation was now ipso facto a counterintuitive matter, in that it dealt with the intricacies of the economic system, which often defied common sense, and that the nation of Addeh Katir had benefited from a perception by investing businesses that the loan was there to be drawn on at need. The maharaja responded that no businesses had invested in Addeh Katir. No businesses, in fact, had been invited to do so. Addeh Katir was just fine, thank you. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group got snarky and told the maharaja to pay up. The maharaja, very politely, told the All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group to stick this suggestion in its ear. The All Asian Investment & Progressive Banking Group alerted the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to the now-obvious truth: the maharaja was a cryptocommunist.

The maharaja was overthrown during an extremely expensive and well-organised insurgency of questionable representativeness and replaced by one Erwin Mohander Kumar, an Anglo-Indian immigrant, former drug-smuggler and noted syphilitic, who under the banner of the Katiri Provisional Authority was detailed to bring Addeh Katir into the economic fold. He immediately signed a document committing the nation to paying its debt, and followed this up by according himself certain seigneurial prerogatives regarding the women of the locality. Addeh Katir collapsed into civil war, but at least there was no danger of it falling into the hands of the communists.

The Addeh Katir Problem of the new semester is a consequence of this sad chapter. Erwin Kumar’s depredations have created a resistance movement. The lakes of Addeh are now home to a kind of buccaneer named Zaher Bey, reportedly a giant warrior, a militarised Gandhi, who has been acclaimed ruler of the islands and of a nation of piratical revolutionaries. This Colossus, clad only in traditional sailor’s trousers and brandishing a great cutlass in either massive fist, absolutely rejects the Katiri debt, and has inspired in the womanhood of Addeh Katir and the surrounding nations a twittering of fraught sexual fascination. A Bollywood film has been released which features a marriageable girl falling into the Bey’s awful clutches, and (through the media of dance numbers, upbeat love songs and demure glances) taming him so as to make of the monster an ideal husband. It is a weird combination of Beauty and the Beast and My Fair Lady. The racy subtext is that the Bey is something of a wild man in the sack, and one of the numbers was adjudged too fruity for domestic circulation, assuring instant distribution in electronic samizdat form through the sprawling internet/sneakernet of southern Asia. The Zaher Bey of this snappy piece of political commentary makes no mention of elections or responsible democratic government, but is not in any sense a diseased maniac with (as now turns out to be the case with Erwin Kumar) a foot fetish. The question under discussion in the halls of Jarndice—where, quite clearly, secret opinion-seekers wait around every corner to rush convincing students to the halls of international policymaking—is whether the mysterious Zaher Bey should be supported as a friend of all mankind or reviled as a terrorist.

Alas, it emerges that Beth believes the latter, and I the former. Our date is a bust, and she leaves me at our table to talk to a portly third-year named Dhugal, with an h.

FURIOUS AND HAIRY in cheap cowboy boots and a chequered red-and-black workshirt, I am the very model of modern disaffected youth. I am the spectrum of discontent, and each colour takes me far less than a whole winter. I wear a baseball cap and low-slung jeans and shout abuse at the smart set. I wear skintight black PVC and white foundation and I glower and mourn the death of Byron in the back of the bar. From there I discover punk, and briefly have no hair at all, then am mistaken for a fascist by a group of businessmen who proceed to celebrate my bravery and drink my health, and driven by this horror I grow it out again. I go yuppie, briefly, when I get so angry at the world in general that I reject my own generation and its pathetic caring for this vile planet, and then I rediscover radicalism by sexual transmission. My co-revolutionist’s name is Aline.

Aline of the tangled dark hair and the improbable lips; Aline of the Roman nose and the pasta chef’s fingers; Aline of the astoundingly loud orgasms. She corners me after a study group and demands that I account for my ill-considered and old-fashioned views. She pins me to the wall and sets an arm on either side of me to prevent my escape, then lambasts me with referenced and footnoted counterpoints, and when I splutter my best high male affront, she leans closer and parts her lips, and silences me with a lush and frankly erotic kiss. Her mouth tastes of coffee and cigarettes and chewing gum, and she has thought this out (the politics and the kiss) far better than I. I am, however, just smart enough to respond by wrapping my arms around her and making the whole thing my decision, in so far as that is still possible, which is a delusion she allows me to keep. When we come up for air, it is time for dinner, and she knows just the place: an unlikely club tucked between a bank and a post office, a narrow corridor of tables opening onto a smoke-filled lounge at the back. It is called Caucus (definite and indefinite articles denote a bourgeois need to distinguish a favoured locality from one which is accessible to the lumpenproletariat, and hence Caucus—known like a dear friend as Cork—eschews them, and indeed the inadvertent use of articles on sequential occasions can be grounds for suspension or some form of fortfeit) and it is an old and respected bastion of radical opinion. I eat at Cork for months, and Aline feeds me sexual ecstasy and political agony, and I become, if not a man, at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, and there is a bounce in my step, and a swagger, and I grow familiar with the faces around me and gradually even understand something of what they talk about.

The denizens of Cork go by names like Iggy, Quippe and Brahae—this by choice rather than because their mothers called them such things—and they lean heavily towards black jeans and leather waistcoats. They will argue about almost anything, at any time, but mostly they argue about the Global Open Market Agreement (which is not exciting) and the Eurasian Economic Partnership (which is even less so) because these unexciting things govern who is rich and who is poor and who starves and who survives, all of which are rather more interesting.

“GOMA will fall,” Aline asserts one afternoon, “because it depends on constant correction by the government—that’s not an invisible hand, it’s a glass fist, and sooner or later it will shatter and the whole illusion will come—” And surely she intends to say “apart,” but she does not because Quippe, who is meaty and a cheat at cards, flings up his chubby hands and cries out that she is insane, that GOMA is perfectly balanced on the moralistic spike up its own arse, and nothing short of revolutionary surgery will get it off.

“Poppycock,” says Sebastian, and there is silence. Sebastian does not speak on small matters. Like Aline, he is somewhat Italian, and like her also he has served time in the student brigades. He has been struck repeatedly by oppressing policemen and once set fire to a barricade in Amsterdam. Sebastian can quote a string of revolutionaries from Socrates to Lenin to Michael Moore and knows the numbers on any claim you care to make. He knows how much the sea level has risen and which nations are most at risk. He knows the precise atmospheric projections for the next ten years, the next twenty, the end of the century. He knows the GDP of Uganda and the percentage of the total global economy which is derived from drugs and prostitution. He knows all this, or can make it up so smoothly and uncheckably that the difference is moot.

“Revolution,” Sebastian says, as if we should all have known this already, “is reaction. It’s the body politic in spasm. When was the last time you saw someone in the throes of an epileptic fit?”

No one mentions Lay Chancellor Idlewild, but his dandruffed head hangs like a collective hallucination before us.

“So,” says Sebastian, “would you choose that moment to ask the patient about taxation? Or, would they mind holding your newborn child? No? So why on Earth would you imagine that a revolution would be the ideal moment to propound a better way of living?” He rolls his eyes, which by coincidence draws everyone’s gaze to the narrow and very fetching scar which marks his otherwise flawless brow—courtesy of a Dutch riot policeman whom Sebastian later befriended.

“The problem isn’t who is in charge. It’s what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good—makes them human—is ruled out. The system doesn’t care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises. The only revolution which matters,” Sebastian concludes, “is the one where we stand up and do it for ourselves.”

When he doesn’t get much in the way of response, Sebastian shrugs and returns to his magazine and his vodka tonic. Aline picks up the conversational ball and runs for the scoring line. Quippe and the others are still goggling a bit at the idea that revolution might be a bad thing, and she touches down with “. . . and that’s why the means of production [citations, quote] is teleologically orientated towards penetrative modes [citations, data], which entails ambient and inherent injustice on a monstrous scale!” And everyone nods. Aline glances at me and licks her lips, because political discussion leads inevitably in one direction for her, and we leave and go to my apartment. Society may—or may not—be teleologically oriented towards penetrative modes, but there’s no question about Aline.

Sex and politics and a free passport to cool are all a growing boy could wish, and the high is compounded when we demonstrate and shout and flee the myrmidons of the law and steal a policeman’s helmet and mount it over the bar at Cork. When the drunken conga line of victory is over and we adjourn to Aline’s flat, it transpires that the helmet is not all she has stolen. I emerge from the shower to find her nude and wearing nothing but a pair of service-issue handcuffs and kneeling, breathless, on her own bed. Fortunately, she has also stolen the key.

THE PHONE CALL comes the following morning. It is Elisabeth Soames, but she is crying and speaking almost entirely in a foreign language. I try to slow her down. I ask her, very gently and simply, to be calm, and to speak English—or at least I attempt to do this, but some transference has occurred and I cannot actually say anything, because my throat has closed and my mouth is full of salt and water. When I’ve dealt with that, my nose starts running and I find tears on my face. Elisabeth rants at me, or rather she screams and rages in general and I am the person who is witness to it. The whole time, she keeps lapsing into her alien tongue: strange, hard syllables which have no place in my head, which make no sense. And still, perhaps because she is so upset, I cannot stop crying and my throat is raw. At some point in all this, I look for Aline, but she has left for an early lecture. I am not sure whether this is desertion or mercy. I am not sure whether she was here when the phone rang.

Elisabeth is silent for a while, or at least she doesn’t talk. She rasps down the phone, and when I listen I realise that I am hearing my own breathing as well, phlegmy and uneven. We have been doing this for over an hour. And finally I can hear what she has been saying. I can remember the conversation, the endless, circular awfulness of the last sixty minutes, and I know she has not been speaking a foreign language at all. It’s not the words which are the problem, it’s the thing itself. She has been telling me that Wu Shenyang is dead. And with that understanding I lose track of however long it takes until I am standing outside what used to be his house, and she is sitting alone on the kerb, with her feet in the gutter, and that is how I spend my day.

Ma Lubitsch taught me there was only ever one truth. That was how you knew it; it was unique. There were no multiple versions of events, there was no “from a certain point of view.” Ma Lubitsch is above all a mother, and motherhood is not a binary state. But here, by the roadside, in front of the smouldering char which was the House of the Voiceless Dragon, there are two truths. Both of them acknowledge certain facts. This house is number five in the street. It was inhabited by an old man of Chinese origin, and contained a collection of antique weapons, a lot of geriatric furniture and an antique gramo-phone. Sometime between six and midnight, when they returned, a fire started on the garden side of the house, which swiftly consumed the place.

So much is, as it were, the skeleton. The fire, however, has consumed the flesh, and so the skull of truth has two faces. The first is simple and bleakly comfortable. Yumei and Ophelia were staying with Master Wu while their home was being redecorated, but were out that evening at a puppet show. Alone, and perhaps lonely, Wu Shenyang went to bed late, having consumed a certain amount of brandy. He neglected to place the guard in front of the fire, and thus a stray spark emitted from green logs crackled across the room and ignited the mismatched curtains. The house was filled with paper and wood, and the blaze was rapid and very hot. This would be a hard truth. That kind of grief is of a commonplace sort, and it is cool enough to hold.

The second face is fanciful. There is no evidence for it. It is a hero’s death. It goes like this:

The big clock is tock ticking and the fire is low. Master Wu is eating spiced apple cake—Elisabeth has sent him one in a Tupperware pot. Master Wu is fascinated by Tupperware. The variety of it, the fabulous utility of reusable, sealable plastic containers pleases him. This box is the new kind with the little wings which clip down over the side to make the boxes airtight. He is holding the box loosely in one hand and flipping the side up, clack, and down again, plick plack; there are two fastenings on each side—they open as one, but you have to close them individually. Clack . . . plick plack. The plastic is cool, but still ductile or elastic (this part of my mind doesn’t have full access to my education, isn’t sure which word is appropriate). It is bendy, anyway, bendy enough that old fingers can open it without catching fingernails or abrading skin. Clack . . . plick plack. The apple cake is very good. It is fresh and sweet, with moist bits of apple and the applegoo which happens when you make a cake like this and get it just right. There are none of those awful retch-inducing bits of core which some cooks insist are an important part of the apple, presumably out of a false sense of parsimony, because those bits ruin perfectly good mouthfuls and therefore consume scarce apple cake resources. Elisabeth is an apple cake perfectionist. Clack . . . plick plack. Master Wu’s fingers trace the smooth curve of the Tupperware box. It is a largish one. This particular model, he knows, comes with two segmented trays, so that you can store different but related foodstuffs in it. You could keep, for example, two portions of chicken, two of rice, and two of vegetables in oyster sauce. He does not actually like oyster sauce. It always tastes of oysters. Clack . . . plick plack. The box lid is a smooth quadrilateral with stubby wings. It is reinforced across the top with flanges or stanchions, injection-moulded as part of the lid form. It is not heavy, but it is strong. The base is more flexible, possibly so that it can absorb little shocks and knocks, possibly to allow for food and liquids which contract on cooling. The plastic is also resilient to being cut, almost sucks together around the small nicks and scars where someone has cut a cake inside it—something Master Wu would never do. Clack . . . plick plack . . . tink.

Master Wu does not change his position. He does not tense. He is exactly as he was a moment ago. And yet everything is different. The noise tink is a specific thing. It has implications and layers of significance, like a sort of deranged domino game spread out across several floors of a mansion house. It is the sound made by the leftmost bell on the middle line. It means that a small amount of pressure has been applied to the middle window. The fact that only one bell sounded means that it was a very, very slight pressure, and it has now been withdrawn. It is as if a butterfly took off from the window. At this time of night, of course, it would be a moth. Clack . . . plick plack. So. The moth has departed. However . . . tink. It has a somewhat heavier-handed friend, perhaps a boy-moth chasing a girl-moth. If so, he is doing so just by the window on the right. And . . . tinktink . . . the girl-moth is a game lass, and she is running him all around the houses and all the way over to . . . tink . . . the window on the left.

Master Wu is sitting in the rocker. He is an old man. He has eaten a lot of cake and drunk some tea, and he’s been playing with a Tupperware box for half an hour. If the cause of the bell ringing were not a pair of randy moths—if, for example, someone were thinking of entering his house with a view to assassinating him—they could not fail to see that he is over the hill. A harmless old geezer who is now falling asleep, lulled by the rhythm of his own fidgeting and the gentle movement of the chair. Perhaps he has chosen this fraught moment to enter a second childhood. His eyelids droop, but do not quite close. He is so old that the difference is hard to detect.

The man who comes through the leftmost window is big, which makes his silence all the more scary. He is in amazing shape; in order to step through as fast and quietly as he does, he has essentially to do the splits while standing on one leg, hold it, extend himself into the room and never lose his balance or his control as he moves onto the other foot. All this he does in a fraction of an eyeblink. The bells on the window make one more tink noise before he stills them.

Master Wu does not wake. He mumbles something, paws at his Tupperware. The intruder freezes. Two more men enter the room through the same window. More wait in the garden. There is an army out there. The ninjas—the foot soldiers of the Clockwork Hand Society—have finally come for Wu Shenyang. And as they look down at the old fart dozing in his chair, and as they realise that they have come all this way in such numbers and with such caution to deal with one octagenarian has-been, the leader gives a soft, unpleasant chuckle.

The lid of the Tupperware box hits him squarely over the eye. It’s not a dangerous cut, but it makes his forehead bleed and he can’t see clearly. He loses depth perception almost immediately, and so he cannot defend himself as the rocking chair flings Master Wu forward and almost into his arms. He thrusts and twists with his longknife, and it finds a target, but that target is the base of the Tupperware box. Master Wu twists it sharply. The plastic clutches around the knife blade, and the other man cannot easily withdraw it or hold onto it and consequently is in danger of being disarmed. His decision to cling to his weapon is instinctive, given that he has already been partially blinded and is not yet caught up with events as they are unfolding. Master Wu does not attempt to take the knife away. He accepts the direction his enemy has chosen, and flows with it, continues it and suddenly owns it. The other man finds his hips out of synch with his feet, his hands too far away from the centre line of his body for his arms to bring their strength to bear. The cycle ends with Master Wu in possession of the longknife, and the big man on tiptoe with the razor’s edge under his chin. That’s what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

Master Wu chooses not to kill the man at this time. That is, in a sense, the definition of being a good guy. He knocks him out and hopes, very briefly, that his enemy will reconsider the path his life has taken. Then he steps smoothly between two more opponents and redirects their attacks towards each other. Regrettably, they are trying very hard to kill him and one of them therefore sustains a nasty wound high in the chest. This distracts his partner, and Master Wu takes advantage of this, propelling him backwards into two of his friends who are preparing an attack of their own.

The fight scene goes on, and it is fluid and magnificent, but at some point Master Wu realises something. He is getting tired, and they are not. He is unscathed, but by the same token he cannot sustain injuries, or he will lose. He has to be perfect; they only have to be persistent. He realises that even if he can beat all these men—even if he were to kill them, one by one—more will come, at a time and place not of his choosing. If he continues this battle much longer, the likelihood is that Yumei and Ophelia will come home, and even if they are not killed, they will be exposed. At the moment Master Wu could well be a bachelor. The ninjas have no knowledge of his family arrangements, because they haven’t had the opportunity to look around inside the house, and that’s where all the family photos are. They’ve seen only this room, and they’ve been kinda busy. Similarly, they do not have any idea who his students are. All that information is in the desk. Thus, he is the weak link in his enemies’ chain. Without him, they simply cannot find the Voiceless Dragon. It will be not only silent, but invisible. That’s the kind of situation which makes a ninja’s shoulder blades itch. It will be interesting to see how they like having the shoe on the other foot. And it is at this point that he makes a decision.

There are three men coming for him now. They approach slightly out of time with one another, which makes dealing with them exponentially more difficult, and by-the-by implies that they’re very good. It’s hard to avoid accepting the rhythm of those around you. Master Wu steps to meet one of his attackers, then slides through the space another is preparing to occupy, and slams the second man into the first. Both of them tumble into the fireplace and ignite. The third man hesitates, then breaks off to haul them out. Master Wu takes the opportunity to open the liquor cabinet and select two bottles. He smashes them over his head, creating two extremely unpleasant weapons and also drenching himself in alcohol. He steps to one side, allowing a fresh enemy to destroy the cabinet, breaking more bottles, and then he moves around the room, leaving a trail. He ducks and bobs, slices and scores, his arms whirling and twisting around his body. As he passes the fireplace, he shuffles, splashes booze into the flames. An instant later, fire laps at his feet, following him as he continues around the room. The curtains catch, and the painted walls start to smoke. The ninjas pursue him; blades slash past his back and over his head, heavy hands clutch at him and stamping feet thunder against the ground where he is no longer standing. They cannot touch him. Wu Shenyang is made of water.

And then, amid the chaos, there is a single perfect moment of stillness, as all the actions and reactions are held in balance. Master Wu smiles, reaches out to the flames and catches fire. He is still smiling as he turns to the remaining ninjas, a glass razor in each hand, burning arms spread wide. Every single one of them will remember this feeling for the rest of their lives, in quiet moments and in the cold, truthful hours of the night, and every time they see Tupperware. They will remember the terrible old man with placid eyes who stepped nimbly towards them while his skin blistered and his hair fizzled away; who advanced as they fell back. They will remember that he forced them out of his home into the night, and that he followed them, and kept them at bay until the house and all its contents were beyond salvation, and then kneeled down neatly to expire, at peace, while they cowered in the dark. They will remember it as the moment they discovered fear.

MASTER WU’s funeral is surprisingly large. It seems he knew nearly everyone in Cricklewood Cove. Every tradesman, every family, every teacher from the Soames School, everyone from every beach house and second home, all of them arrive to see him off. People bring cakes and tea, and we all stand and raise them in salute—I had no idea he knew so many people. I mention it to Elisabeth.

“I asked them to come,” she says. “It’s traditional to have a lot of guests. And I couldn’t—” Her mouth gets very tight, and her hands clench in her pockets. I know what she is not able to say; I too am disappointed. The people we could not find—despite great efforts—are Master Wu’s other students. In every city, on every continent, the Voiceless Dragon has vanished—boiled away like steam. Or, perhaps, ashamed to have left him alone, they’re just dodging our calls.

In the midst of the crowd, Yumei and Ophelia are almost invisible, two more guests at a big, bewildered show funeral for an old man. The urn is very small, so it’s not clear who carries it as we walk solemnly out of town to the sea. We scatter Master Wu into the wind from a high place, and he drifts like a cloud until the breeze whisks him off on new adventures. Elisabeth embraces me, then turns away, and we grieve separately.

Gonzo and Aline, always uneasy in each other’s company, take turns with me when I return to Jarndice. They get me drunk and make me forget or at least live through it all, until two weeks later I wake and discover that although the sky is grey and the world is dark, it is a dark which rouses my heart rather than subdues it. It is evening, and I am not hungover. I can function again, and indeed I am supercharged. The presence of death has woken me in some profound way, and I take great bites out of life. Aline and I screw like mink, and I leap from the bed as if sleep is for other people, and devour books and concerts and beverages and vast amounts of food. I put on several pounds of bulk. I wear my shirt open halfway down my chest without irony, and no one sees fit to mock. I am Tarzan, I am Long John Silver, I am all goddam that. Behold! Gonzo finds me alarming.

I reel from lecture to Cork to party to demonstration and the faces blur until the police are more familiar than the demonstrators, because although our comrades in linked arms and flowers are drawn from the same pool, we are always at the front, and spend more time looking through riot shields than back at our fellows. At one rally I am gashed by a falling stone, flung most probably from the back, but I am hailed as a hero and make the cover of the local news, and a genial letter arrives from the police superintendent saying he hopes I have sustained no lasting injury. To Aline’s momentary disgust I reply chirpily that I am well and hope that he is too. She forgives me only when I point out that he has admitted tacit responsibility for something he almost certainly did not do, and when the scores are tallied this will count against him. I place telephone calls to Sweden and ask them to send a speaker to Cork, and when they agree (a tedious little man shows up from the embassy and tells us about mineral rights in the North Sea until we get him drunk and send him home with an ostrich feather in the back of his trousers) I call Moscow, Sydney, Rome (and the Vatican), Poland and even Addeh Katir in the hope of further coups.

Calling Addeh Katir is exciting and difficult because the dialling code is not listed and eventually I have to ask the caretaker at Cork, who once dated a woman from the Red Cross and knows a guy at the UN who has a number for the office the Katiri Provisional Authority maintains in New York, but when I ring, the receptionist tells me she hasn’t been paid since November and she’s damned if she’s taking my message. I tell her she’s doing a great deal for international relations, but she has already gone. I hang up and try something more daring.

I call a man who knows a man who once dated this girl whose address book contains reference to a person (gender unknown) who apparently has contact with a certain scholar. The scholar is close to the great Colossus, the destroyer of sound economic practice and layer-waste of treaty obligations; the ravisher of coyly willing maidens (and matrons); the master swordsman and gargantuan, fearless, indestructible freak of nature; the titanic warrior Fred Astaire of Addeh Katir himself, Zaher Bey.

This chain of loose acquaintance yields a cell-phone number with a Swiss area code, which is answered by a querulous individual of indeterminate sex.

“Konditorei Lauener, hello?”

“Hello? I’m looking for Zaher Bey.”

“We have none. Only the hotel is now permitted to make it.”

This response confuses me. I was not prepared for an exchange of sign and countersign. I grope for something suitably espiocratic, but the other person interrupts before I can assemble the requisite parts.

“There was a legal case, you see. The people at the hotel required an adjudication. It is their mark, you see. Anyone can make a chocolate cake in the Sacher style, ne? But only they can make Sachertorte. It’s the law. But in any case,” the personage adds, with some satisfaction, “we have none.”

It appears that my interlocutor has misconstrued “Zaher Bey” as “Sacher Cake.” I explain that I am in fact looking for the leader of a political movement arising in response to foreign economic imperialism and a puppet regime predicated on the lust of Erwin Kumar. There is something of a pause.

“You know that it’s a cake shop?” the personage says at last, probably uncertain about whether to continue the discussion.

“This is the number I was given,” I explain. My voice has slipped from professional and commanding to apologetic.

“You should give it back!” This with some amusement. “You have a bad number. This number, it’s a cake shop. In Basel. That’s in the north, huh? We have lots of cake. But no revolutionaries. Revolution, the shouting and breaking things. It’s un-Swiss.”

This information delivered, the personage politely disengages, and I sit by the phone trying to figure out what to do next.

Two days later, a dapper gentleman in his forties sits down at my table in Cork. How he has secured entrance I do not know, but he is carrying a glass of single malt from the bar and gives every evidence of being comfortable with his surroundings. Mr. ibn Solomon (such being the name he gives me) has an almost unnoticeable pot belly and a fine blue suit. His skin is clear and fairly dark. He looks as you might imagine a Phoenician merchant or a Moorish market trader. He is clean-shaven and twinkly, and has well-kept hands. His voice is soft, and it is something of a surprise when he reveals that his full accorded title is Freeman ibn Solomon, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Bey’s forces in Free Addeh Katir. Will he speak to the assembled thinkers and drinkers of the club? You betcha. It is his pleasure and his vocation. But Freeman ibn Solomon is a strict believer in single-level discussion and negotiation. No dais and no lectern; he will sit in this fine lounge and he will share in our conversation like one of us. And to demonstrate his willingness to be like us, he knocks back his Bruichladdich and obligingly fetches himself another.

“WE HAVE a gun mountain,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “You people are cursed with milk lakes and grain plains and all the rest. We have a gun mountain. We don’t really mind having all your spare guns,” adds Freeman ibn Solomon. “We just wish you’d put them right on the pile. They come into our country in little dribs and drabs. They go to Erwin Kumar and he loses them or he sells them and they show up all over the place. Only a week ago I found a whole crate of them in my kitchen, under the broccoli. And of course,” he adds, without a trace of anger or irony, “very occasionally someone gets shot with them, which is so upsetting.”

Iggy comes to the defence of the international system. It’s very strange. Most of the time Iggy and the others bemoan the iniquity of the capitalist hegemony (that is, everything in the world). Now here is Freeman ibn Solomon, saying things they often say, but they are trying to persuade him it’s not all that bad. This is probably because, when Freeman ibn Solomon says it, and puts it in context, you can’t help but feel it could be your fault.

“You’re not exactly representative, though, are you?”

“Good God, no,” Freeman says, “we don’t represent at all.”

Iggy leans back, having established the fly in this dangerously perfect ointment.

“No,” Freeman ibn Solomon continues, “we are a participant democracy. Everyone takes part of every decision, if there’s time. Otherwise, of course, the Bey is afforded an executive right of action, so that we can’t be caught sleeping. But we have no laws.”

Iggy stares at him. Sebastian, behind a vodka tonic, opens his eyes and looks on with interest. Aline sputters.

“No laws?” she demands.

“No,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway. We don’t have that. Every one of us is expected to act within the constraints of right thinking, and to be prepared to stand by the consequences of those actions. That is,” he adds, “not as comfortable a position as you might think.” And he takes another sip of his whisky.

“Doesn’t that lead to corruption?” Aline wants to know.

“Oh yes,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “I mean, in a sense it’s hard to tell. We’re a pirate nation, so we have less formal administration. But yes, everyone feathers his own nest to some degree. On the other hand, anyone can be held accountable. There’s always a person you can argue with.” He shrugs. “With governments,” he says, “you choose your poison. This is ours.”

He looks so crestfallen that the discussion turns to other things, and then Quippe strikes up at the piano, and we are privileged to watch the Ambassador Plenipotentiary dance the cancan with Aline and a girl named Yolande who shaves one half of her head.

Once it gets out that we had a man from Addeh Katir on the campus, every other far-flung cause and dissident voice in the spectrum suddenly recognises our seriousness, and our importance as a free-thinking zone. I bring new causes to Cork, and new speakers, and some are friendly and some aren’t, but I’m totally the man, and each speaker seems to make Aline randier and we all but wear out the oppressive manacles of the state oppressor and it’s getting to the point where we’ll have to pinch some new ones. Addeh Katir fades from the public view because the negotiations there are somewhat bogged down. The United Nations Security Council refuses to accept the request of Zaher Bey to send a peacekeeping force. Cork goes practically schismatic over whether this is a step in the right direction (away from quasi-totalitarian cultural hegemonising) or the wrong one (towards an isolationist economic imperium), but finally settles on having a foam party. Life goes on.

In Erwinville the great president continues his thirty-year rampage through the Kama Sutra.

Around Lake Addeh, Zaher Bey’s faction maintains a semblance of order and infrastructure through a black market more efficient and humane than the legal economy.

Aline shaves her pubic region in protest against the fur trade. Despite this distraction, I manage to stagger through my exams.

Gonzo receives a care package from Ma Lubitsch which contains so much food and drink of such staggering richness that he can barely store it all in his accommodation. I am particularly fond of the oatmeal meringue with raspberries.

The idyll lasts until one morning, when I am sitting at the coffee table working on my biology coursework and not really listening to Sebastian telling Quippe that “the freedom of movement and the speed of communication intrinsic to the Late-Modern period entails but does not legitimate the demise of the Age of Presence,” when guys in balaclavas explode—literally, explode, because their arrival is preceded by a blast of light and sound which makes my nose itch and my ears bleed—through the butler’s pantry and the honour bar, and throw us all violently down to the floor and grind our faces into the threadbare carpet, so that I inhale an almost uncountable number of dust mites and the faintest odour of sexual congress. One of the balaclava guys yells somewhat redundantly that this is a raid.

I lift my head up. Aline is just across from me, dark hair charmingly and sexily askew, face utterly shell-shocked and afraid, and this in turn makes me afraid, because she’s been through more revolution than I have and she never mentioned anything like this. I gasp her name and she doesn’t look at me, and one of the shouting men comes and shouts into my face and I get lifted up and carted off alone because I am clearly more of a subversive than the others, or possibly because I have—equally clearly—been doinking the cute subversive in the skintight jeans and this is a very good reason for me to suffer.

The interior of a security services truck is a very bad place. It smells of fear and unwashed or unperfumed individuals and there aren’t any cushions. My cuffs are linked to a big hoop in the floor and I envisage a sort of built-in padlock mechanism and wonder what would happen if the truck were to fall into one of the many rivers around Jarndice and conclude that there must be some kind of auto-release and then conclude that there probably isn’t. I place my trust, and my hope, in the shaven head which is visible through the grillework, and try very hard to be a good convict and not a danger to society and also not to throw up, because being in the back of a windowless truck with your head between your knees in the Jarndice heat is conducive to nausea.

From the chatter on the radio and the exchange of monosyllables between the driver and his fellows, I glean the information that the guys in balaclavas are not technically soldiers. They are a nominally non-military task force for civilian defence and counter-terror. They are in fact an internal hire; the armed forces have loaned them to the security arm of the government, so for the duration of their present employment they are functioning as civilians. This means that they are trained as soldiers, beweaponed as soldiers, can fight and if need be kill like soldiers, but can be deployed at home and abroad without reference to annoying statutes like Posse Comitatus or the UIK’s Bill of Rights. Curiously, not being soldiers frees them to be more unpleasant to people who are also not soldiers.

They march up and down the lines of hangdog detainees and scream that we are quislings, which seems like a particularly arcane thing to be upset about. Every now and again, they slap someone across the back of the head, or a detainee rashly objects and is silenced with a kick or a closed fist. Then they shout some more. We are backstabbers, treasonists, collaborators, fifth columnists, turncoats and copperheads. After we have been processed—this basically means taking our names, addresses and any confirmatory ID, and then sequestering our belts and shoelaces—a junior officer drops in to our cells to add that we may well be Arnolds and Haw Haws. I wonder, briefly, whether they’re working from a thesaurus.

The holding cells are not high-tech. In some part of my head I was expecting gleaming corridors and bio-monitors and polygraphs. I was not expecting ad hoc detention facilities made by running chicken wire in a grid through the middle of a warehouse. I was not expecting single-bulb lighting and iron buckets to pee in. This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

I am sharing my cell with Iggy and Sebastian and two or three persons I do not know who are obviously not students, because they are older and crustier and work for a living. They are unionists in the real sense, men who organise their work colleagues to stand up together to demand proper—but not outrageous—remuneration and safety codes. They are scared, which is scary, because they know more about this kind of thing than we do.

“Fucking Nazis,” Sebastian says. Iggy isn’t at all sure that’s what they are—the frequent invocation of Holocaust imagery is counter-constructive because—

“If it puts you in a chicken-wire box,” Sebastian says firmly, “and treats you like a sub-human, and it wears a sexy uniform and claims all this is for the greater good, it’s a Nazi.”

At which point they storm into the cell and pull him out and hood him, and Sebastian looks steadfast except that as he reaches the door I hear him start to cry. It’s probably not the case that they “storm,” not really. We can see them coming. They walk with purpose, and there are several of them looking muscular in their spiffy uniforms, but while they fling open the door, it is nothing when compared with their earlier entrance through the butler’s pantry at Cork. They do not shout. There’s no flash grenade, no barging and shoving. Still and all, they do what they do with the ease of long practice and a powerful kinetic energy, an odour of power which hurls us back from Sebastian and allows them to scoop him up as if weightless and carry him away. They do not bring him back. We keep expecting them to, but they don’t. They do not bring anyone back, and gradually our warehouse gets quieter and emptier and more afraid.

I find myself talking. Almost everyone else is quiet, and most of them are sitting or leaning, but I cannot stop pacing and my mouth seems to be running by itself. I want to know if this can possibly be lawful, and if it isn’t, whether that’s better or worse for us. I ask if anyone has any experience with arrest, or any legal training, and Barry (the second unionist) points out that anyone who does might not wish to say so in a detention area which might well be monitored. That stops me asking questions for a while, but inspires me to search for listening devices until Iggy points out that they wouldn’t have to be visible. I keep searching, in case they’re there and I’m supposed to be able to find them, and Iggy starts to tell me to be quiet and sit the fuck down when the men come again. Barry walks towards them, offering his hands, but they ward him off. They step around him and past me, and they draw Iggy firmly out and cover him up, and when he stumbles they drag him along until his feet catch up.

“Not good,” Barry says.

“Why not?”

“Well, if they want us in order, it follows they know who we are, doesn’t it?”

And if they know who we are, or think they know, then this is at least not a simple mistake. They believe they have something. Barry shrugs and sits down. Clearly, he says, the ones they take away are simply placed in a separate area of confinement, so that they will not be able to prepare us for what’s to come. It’ll be fine. May take a bit longer to untangle, but it’ll turn out right.

I preferred it when he wasn’t worried enough to reassure me, and I wish he weren’t shaking so much. I worry that I’m going to die here, disappear for ever. I tell myself this is part of the interrogation. It doesn’t help.

The men come back, and the officer’s boots are leaving little dark red prints. I hope to God he has walked through a freshly painted road sign, but know that he has not. They take Barry and he gives me a nod and says “Bear up” and this annoys them so they gag him before they hood him. Twenty minutes of eternity later there is canvas sliding roughly over my skin and it smells strongly of someone else’s cheap cologne.

Walking hooded is a curious thing. I cannot see, cannot hear properly. The not-soldiers must hold my arms to guide me. I am dependent on them, but they in turn have to take care of me to this small degree. They are in loco parentis, and I am their ward for the journey from where I was to where I am going. The one on my left leans close. Couple of steps, one, two, all right, stop . . . there’s a good lad. He seems genuinely pleased. Turn around . . . now. Sit. There we go . . .

They put me in a chair. It is uncomfortable, and it is damp. Someone has sweated a great deal in this chair, and possibly more—there is a lingering smell of bleach. They leave the hood on. The guy on the left—he’s moved, actually, but it’s the same voice—murmurs again: Now then. You be well-behaved, all right? Much better off that way. In the background, someone laughs at him and calls him Mr. Nice. Yes, he says, yes, I fucking am. From which I deduce that there is also a Mr. Nasty. Mr. Nice draws back from my shoulder. The air is just a little cooler without him. I wait.

Then I hear a loud scraping noise. The floor beneath my feet is your standard warehouse concrete, rough and porous, and so I realise that someone has drawn up a chair opposite my own. It is a moderately heavy chair, an office chair without wheels rather than one of those plastic disposable chairs they put in conference centres. The hood is whipped off with disdain for my nose and chin, which suffer minor friction burns, and I am eye to eye with a relaxed, bucolic geezer in a grubby general’s jacket who seems to be in charge.

His face is not a surprising face, in the sense that it is big and red and somewhat covered with pale spiky stubble. His eyes are narrow and seem small because they are turned down at the outer corners, as if someone has stitched his eyebrow to his cheek. Part of me recognises this feature as an epicanthic fold, and helpfully supplies the information that it is common in persons of Asian descent, but rare in Europeans (what most Americans call Caucasians despite the fact that the peoples of the Caucasus mountains are a diverse bunch, and certainly not Anglo-Saxon) and sometimes associated with Down’s syndrome. Since the man in front of me is clearly and inescapably not Asian, and since it is profoundly unlikely that a person with Down’s syndrome could rise to this rank in the services, it seems the general is a minor biological curiosity—but that also is not the cause of the shock I experience on seeing him. I am surprised, even stunned, by the visage of this individual because his name is George Lourdes Copsen, and he is the father of Gonzo’s donkey-loving princess bride, Lydia, and I know him and I know that he knows me. I last saw him across the table of a “guess the number of sweeties” stand at the Soames School fete. George Copsen did not guess well. He did not guess at all. Using a pocket calculator, he collated the guesses of the three hundred or so other entrants and produced an answer that was accurate to within the margin of error (i.e., when we came to count them we were unable to prevent one of the first-years from eating between five and ten sweeties). He eyes me with the air of a man who has already been briefed, has seen the file, knows the score, isn’t tied to a soggy cushion and who holds a small remote control with a significant red button on it, all of which he is.

“How are ya?” says George Copsen conversationally, and I essay an insouciant nod to demonstrate how much I am in control of the situation despite the fact that I have just been abducted from a dining club by a paramilitary force and strapped to a chair. Unfortunately they have secured my head in some fashion and so I pull some muscles in my neck and look like an idiot. George Copsen grins in a friendly way and suggests I use words, so I tell him I’m fine. Good. A bit nervous, actually, and George Copsen says that I probably should be, but he’s going to sort all that out now.

“All you need to do,” George Copsen says, “is tell us who recruited you, and what the cell talked about, and what actions they engaged in, and who the others were.” And he grins again.

Which is a problem for me because I was never actually recruited. I was signed up sight unseen and I was boned by a wild Italianate activist and I fell in love with her for what I now perceive to be less-than-highbrow reasons, but I was not in fact ever a member of anything more radical than a fraternity of windy drinkers and the rather large club of young men who have acquired radical opinions as a way of getting laid. George Copsen produces a file from somewhere out of my field of vision and leans close. He opens the file like a family Bible and proceeds. His voice is filled with reproach, as if I am a new puppy which has peed on his carpet.

“It seems many of you boys and girls of good family were very much influenced by one particular character. Let’s call that person Mr. A, shall we? Hell of a man.”

Sebastian. Christ. You are so fucked. And they want me to add to it. And what would Gonzo do? Gonzo would never be here. Gonzo is a track and field star, a footballer, a hero to the masses and a lover of profoundly conventional college girls. Gonzo is a free market, entrepreneurial, registered good guy. But Gonzo would never turn on a friend. Not now, not ever, not for any price and not under someone’s guns.

“ ‘Mr. A was central to all actions carried out by the cadre at Cork.’ ” Since when did we have a cadre? I’m not even sure what one is. “ ‘He was a leader to us and a confessor to any who wavered. Without Mr. A, the thing could not have existed.’ That’s the one called Iggy. What’s his real name?”

It’s a harmless question. Iggy’s clothes still have name tags from his schooldays. “Andrew,” I tell George Copsen.

“Here’s your man Quippe: ‘A taught us various techniques of subversion ranging from bribery and blackmail to sexual procurement and demolitions.’ ”

Quippe has clearly gone to town on fantasy. Mind you, perhaps he was encouraged.

“And then there’s this little lady: ‘I was recruited by one of my fellow students. I cannot overstate the power of his convictions or his resolve. In my case the avenue of approach was sexual; he seduced me and effectively addicted me to his physical presence. He inscribed himself upon my opinions at the same time, and introduced me to the club known as Caucus, which as I have already stated is a front organisation for the indoctrination and training of terroristic elements. I feel now that I lived between sexual obsession and physical fear of this man at all times. Thank you for’ ”—and here George Copsen’s voice is suffused with some emotion which I take to be pity but which might in another setting be hilarity—“ ‘for rescuing me.’ Sounds like quite a trip.”

Aline, I think, has omitted to tell me that she was once a paramour of Sebastian, or that he exerted such a strong and lasting terror. Except that I have begun to realise that George Copsen is not talking about Sebastian, and this is confirmed when Sebastian’s terse, punctuated statement also blames Mr. A for all the world’s ills, and it is becoming very apparent that George Copsen is not looking for me to confirm this story, to add to the flames which will burn Mr. A on the pyre. Aline and Iggy and Quippe are describing someone I do not know, someone I have never met until this curious proxy introduction. I am very much afraid, however, that they have dressed me in this bloke’s coat and hung me out on the line. George Copsen shows me Aline’s signature, flowing and elegant and somehow still wearing handcuffs in bed. And he nods and tells me yes, they all say I am Mr. A.

Even now, Gonzo would not give them up. He would not detail their transgressions, would not recall time and place or accuse them in turn. Gonzo would stand firm and demand a lawyer and his rights and he would cast his despite in George Copsen’s face. I do my best, which is miserable, and I say that I don’t know why they would have said any such thing, although I am bleeding within and only barely refrain from crying.

At this, the general’s face goes a little grave and he suggests that I consider my position, so I tell him the whole story from start to finish and he listens attentively and then explains that he was not speaking figuratively. His recommendation was to be taken as a literal instruction. He produces a ladies’ powder compact from his eminently male pocket and folds out the mirror, displaying to me between the spots of expensive cosmetic the full profundity of the deep shit into which I have gotten myself.

The sense of smell is deeply associated with memory. Old men, blind and senile in deckchairs on the lawn at Happy Acres, recall lucidly the things which happened to them around cut grass and in the flower beds of youth. This moment imprints on me in reverse, as it were: from the moment of revelation in that little room in Jarndice until this day I cannot smell that particular face powder without choking with fear. It is worn by dowager ladies with stiff manners and powerful personalities, which probably does not help, but I do not see them. Instead, I recall the slow process of putting together a picture from the two-and-three-quarter-inch mirror held in Copsen’s hand. George Copsen’s hands do not shake particularly, but he isn’t a statue either, and so the mirror wobbles. This is not in fact a problem but an advantage; the mirror is too small to show me at one moment the nature of this chamber. My dawning horror relies on a phenomenon called image retention, which is also the basis for cinematic film: the human visual apparatus holds on to scenes for a moment after they are gone. A full representation can be assembled from disparate elements. A sequence of twenty-four slightly different frames becomes a moving image. And thus also I construct my predicament from a scattered series of circular reflections, and I have to concentrate to do it. Perhaps George Copsen knows this, and intends to focus my mind.

The reason this room smells of bleach; the reason the seat is damp and a little slippery; the reason my head is restrained and my hands will not move, is that I am in an execution chamber. I am sitting in an electric chair. A thick trunk of cable runs out like a rat’s tail from the wall and connects to the base near my feet. If necessary, enough electricity can be run through this apparatus to set my brain on fire.

Lydia’s father is considering whether or not to execute me on the spot, has his finger on the button, and in fact might push it by accident if I were to give him cause to clench his fists or even should he sneeze. This is highly illegal, and no doubt if anyone ever finds out, the general will be in big trouble, but this will (and it is plain that George Copsen follows every point and counterpoint of this debate) matter very little to the smoking, baked long-pig remains of a falsely accused undergraduate without the sense to appreciate when his arse is in a sling and when it is not appropriate to stand on constitutional ceremony.

Gonzo would call his bluff. Gonzo would be sure it was a bluff. My instinct is to explain the question of Mr. A in the terms I have recently been studying. This would mean telling General Copsen about Frege’s notion of sense and reference, which is essentially that language and reality do not always match, and that it is possible to use words—such as “unicorn”—to denote an object which does not necessarily possess the qualities inherent in that description. The word “unicorn,” for example, proposes a magical beast with a long horn sprouting from the forehead and a fondness for chaste women. This is the sense. The sense need not be an accurate description of what is actually there. That thing—the reference—may be something quite different; say, a grubby horse standing in front of a fence post.

Mythological beasts aside, the important and relevant point is that sense and reference can be quite independent of one another, can be wildly at variance, with the result that things you thought you knew from front to back and top to toe turn out to be different from how you understood them. At some point, for example, someone woke up, looked at the Morning Star, thought about the Evening Star and then looked through their telescope and saw what was actually there and realised that Phosphorus and Hesperus are both the planet Venus. Two incorrect senses with the same actual reference! What a day that must have been! A real eye-opener, oh, yes. How they must have laughed . . . aha! A-hahahaha! Something which everyone would have sworn an oath on, signed their name to, turned out to be completely untrue. Much as the mythical Mr. A, who does not exist, is a pure sense, a hallucination shared by the government and General George and latterly by Aline and Iggy and Quippe and all the rest, but whose reference, ludicrously, appears to be myself. We shall all laugh about it later. Ah-hahahah! Oh, what larks!

Something tells me that this line of exculpation will sit poorly with George Copsen. He may not have the patience for Frege (pronounced Fray-guh) and if he does not he may grow weary and press certain buttons just to see what happens. I do not want to know what happens, so I do not talk about Frege.

I do instead the first smart thing I have done in several months: I ask the general, very politely, to explain to me what it is he would like me to do, what he would do in my position and what, if I might press him for one further piece of information, would be the course of action I would wish to have taken were I looking back on this moment from the safety of advanced and healthy old age? And the general says that seeing as I am an old family friend, and I was never really part of this outfit, and seeing as how I have agreed to write down the names of everyone I can remember in the building and everything any of them ever said or did or even might have done, perhaps we might come to some arrangement—but if, if I get out of this alive, I should please study hard, play nicely, vote thoughtfully and with an eye to the patriotic good, and get my arsehole friend to apologise to his lovely daughter for that business about the donkeys.

I HAVE never written a confession before. Very few people, probably, ever have, until the time comes to do one for real. I have not been taught any kind of structure or template for admitting to treason (or admitting to having been near treason), but judging by the exemplars in front of me, confessional documents are somewhat inverted, having the good stuff up at the front in the initial declaration and the nitty gritty later down the line. Still sitting in the awful chair (they bring me a writing tray and a soft-point pen) I come up with the best I can do by way of a creditable first draft, always remembering that this is a work of fiction, a tissue of lies. Normally I would sit with a piece of paper and brainstorm first, but I sense that any departure from the appearance of remembering will go down poorly with George Copsen, and so I just scrawl it down. The only question, as I embark on the preamble (“to my enduring sorrow and shame I have been lured by persons more sophisticated than myself into the appearance of grave crimes”), is whom I shall indict. The spectre of Quippe hanging by the yardarm is a pleasing one, and the notion of Iggy sweating it out like this, confronted with his own undeniable wrongs, is another possibility. But they are buffoons, and I am looking for a scapegoat, not playing Smite the Iniquitous in the Evangelist’s play group. And so it is Sebastian that I traduce, and I do it with seamless thoroughness, blending his life with my lies just as he has done with mine.

The magnitude of this deception is part of the power; I draw Sebastian carefully as an extremist, a fiendishly concealed spider in the midst of a balanced web of political sophistry. I imply that he is a hard-action man, but I do not say so. I quote him selectively to suggest that he is dedicated to change at any cost, revolution for the sake of revolution, not the measured, human variety he proposed over his vodka tonic, but the other kind, the tumultuous spasmodic variety which kills. I explain that he is not averse to drawing down the temple on top of himself, to fertilising the soil with his own blood and that of others, to bring about the new order. I do not attempt to define his ideology. I merely say that he is dedicated to it above loyalty to state, to human life, to his own survival. I leave the reader to fill in the blanks from the public record. This is an absolute calumny. It is a savage misrepresentation. Sebastian’s credo—which he does indeed value above almost anything else—is that no single idea, no map of progress, no theory should ever advance in the world at the cost of a single human life. Sebastian loathes the statistics with which he is so able. He is interested exclusively in histories, because where numbers of the dead are only numbers, stories of them evoke tragedy.

According to Sebastian, ideas have run away with the world. He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes—any instance of something which is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic, like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place.

I imply that he would therefore like to blow them up. But I do not say so. And nor, to my own surprise, do I do the same for Aline. I do not say that she is a siren and a Charybdis. I paint her as an innocent: a virginal, unsophisticated creature drawn to sex and somehow always making it her first time. And it occurrs to me as I do this that perhaps it’s true.

George Copsen reads this mendacious opus, and either believes it or believes something or somehow is served by it, because they let me go and do not kill me or even ever officially arrest me, although a burly non-sergeant leans towards me as I walk free from the internment building and murmurs ferociously the single word “donkeys.”

Fortuitously, this part of the debt is easily discharged—Gonzo has recently re-encountered Lydia Copsen, and she appears to have blossomed into a very attractive, worshipful freshman of abundant cleavage and mightily pneumatic disposition, and the inevitable consequence of his taking her out to apologise is that the plaster falls off my wall and my paintings shudder and I miss Aline more than ever, as Gonzo and Lydia enjoy some after-dinner coffee in the adjoining room. This is almost certainly not what the general intended, but I have no intention of letting on and nor, apparently, does the much-pleased Lydia. Gonzo has that effect on some women. George Lourdes Copsen is satisfied as well (though not, I devoutly hope, in the same fashion), and I continue my studies at Jarndice with a deeper understanding of the nature of power and a degree of caution regarding my associations. The next time I see Aline’s face is years later at a stag party. She is starring in a sophisticated picture called Butt Before You Go, a rendering into the erotic milieu of Gone With the Wind, in which the male protagonist (the renowned penile thespian Coitus Clay) subtly and tastefully coaxes a string of comely wenches to levels of bliss untold by means of non-standard penetrations. Despite being unashamedly pornographic, Butt Before You Go has a curious naivety about it, a kind of safety, perhaps in part because Coitus Clay seems genuinely affectionate towards his principal partner. Identification is difficult, because he is pictured mostly from below, but after a moment I am able to abstract the chiselled features of Sebastian from the lusty visage gurning before me.

More immediately, the product of my near-death experience in an electric chair is a large amount of hard work culminating in a considerable surprise when I receive my grades: I have scored in the top category. Gonzo, meanwhile, has achieved a middling result, which bothers him not at all. But here is another first time: in something which the world feels is important I am ahead of my best friend.