The Magic Kingdom

1

Eddy Bale took his idea to the Empire Children’s Fund, to Children’s Relief, to the Youth Emergency Committee. He went to CARE and Oxfam and the Sunshine Foundation and, because he was famous by then, a famous griever, managed entrées to the boardrooms of Rothschild’s and British Petroleum, ICI and Anglo-Dutch, Marks & Spencer and Barclay’s, to Trusthouse Forte, to Guinness, to British Rail. He wrote to hospices; he wrote physicians on Harley Street and called at surgeries and hospitals. He spoke to high-ups in the National Health and dashed off letters to the national newspapers. He had an interview with Lord Lew Grade and worked up a proposal for Granada and the BBC. Because the idea was dramatic he approached the Directors of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had a sign made which could be put in taxis and minicabs.

What convinced him his idea made sense, he said, was the fact that none of these children was under the care of a pediatrician. Not one. (Charles Mudd-Gaddis, eight, was being seen by a gerontologist.) They’d been handed over to the specialists. Specialists diagnosed them and other specialists treated them, if you could call their courses of experimental drugs and dollops of nuclear medicine and being zapped by lasers treatment. They were tortured not into health, he said, but into, at best, brief periods of remission. They died in pain, language torn from their throats or, what little language they had left, turned into an almost gangster argot, uncivilized, barbaric as the skirls and screaks of bayed prey.

He spoke, he reminded them, from experience, and here his auditors looked away or cast down their eyes, for by this time there could hardly have been an adult in all the kingdom who hadn’t heard of the ordeal of Eddy Bale’s son: eleven operations in three years, the desperate flights to Johannesburg and Beijing; even, though the Bales weren’t Catholic, to Lourdes; and even, though they weren’t suckers by nature, to the gypsies — to anyone, finally, who promised to lift the curse. There had been a woman in Leek Street who read the toilet paper on which Liam wiped himself, and a witch in Land’s End who fed him the eyes of rabid dogs and the testicles of great sea birds wrapped in toad’s skin like a bleak hors d’oeuvre. Bale and Ginny together had all they could do just to hold him down long enough to get it past his jaws. When the stuff backed up he started to retch from his nose and the witch pinched his nostrils. “No,” she said when Ginny protested she was smothering him, “it’s supposed to mix with his puke. That’s what seasons it.”

“You know what practically his last words were?” Eddy Bale asked the great men with whom he’d had interviews. “‘May I die now? May I die now, please?’”

“Please, Mister Bale,” a Lord counseled softly, “you oughtn’t.…”

But Bale was crazy.

“Canisters!” he pleaded. “Just let me leave canisters with your publicans and newsagents. Let me put canisters in your tobacconists’ and greengrocers’.”

There were dozens of angles. Eddy wrote quiet businesslike letters to top rock stars suggesting they do a ballad about these children. He wrote Elton John and the musician replied, sending along with his letter a haunting and very beautiful song he’d written which he said Bale could have so long as the composer’s name was never linked with it. Bale showed the song to the managers of half a dozen of Great Britain’s most important artists with no success. All recognized the song’s genius but refused to allow the people they represented to have anything to do with it. Eddy even got apologetic phone calls from two of the Beatles and a long overseas call from Yoko Ono. Once, near a recording studio in Hammersmith, he actually heard someone whistling the mournful, catchy melody in the street, but when he stopped the man to ask what the piece was and where he’d heard it, the fellow, a particularly vicious punk rocker Bale recognized from his photographs, became embarrassed and rushed off as if actually frightened.

It was a question of taste. No one would say so; no one wanted to hurt a man who’d been through so much, who’d put the nation through so much. Two or three of the country’s biggest executives actually agreed that it was a wonderful idea for a promotion, worth probably hundreds of thousands to their firms, but when pressed declined to explain their reluctance to participate in his campaign. (Because even Ginny had abandoned him by now, having left just after burying Liam.)

Though no one had to tell him. Eddy Bale may have been mad but he was no fool. During the four years of his child’s illness he had submitted to — and survived — many exquisite attacks of pained, assaulted taste and wronged form. He’d lived with camera crews, gone on the wireless, wept for photographers from the mass circulation dailies till he could have wept, participated in a hundred stunts and publicity tricks, become the U.K.’s most visible, most recognizable beggar. He’d gone door-to-door, his hat quite literally in his hand, to raise the close to one hundred thousand pounds that kept Liam alive. He sold exclusives to the press, each more humiliating than the last, drawing them forth from a reserve, a storehouse, a treasury of indignities, intimate detail — giving Liam’s public honest measure, unstinting, honorable as a craftsman, an artisan of the unspeakable: BALES DISCLOSE DETAILS OF DYING LIAM’S GROWING SEX DRIVE!; HOW THEY BROKE THE NEWS: PARENTS TELL TWELVE- YEAR-OLD ALL HOPE DEAD! (It was all they would accept, finally, passing over his and his wife’s suffering and the considerable heroics of the child’s determined resistance, ignoring Liam’s struggle, whatever value he might still have as an inspiration to others, defying human interest itself at last — once it was established he couldn’t live — homing in on the macabre, the exotic, all the screwy, built-in ironies of premature death.) And he was humiliated. (And Liam, a terminal fame victim, as interested as the readership itself in the vicious aspects of his own story, taking a sort of cold comfort from its documentation, in a way grateful that others could be drawn in, driven to cliché, weeping as his father read these accounts to him of his own last months — for he was too weak to hold a newspaper now — sobbing condolence—“I’ve suffered so much, my death will be a blessing”—and offering his comments almost as if he’d survived himself.) And said to Ginny what Ginny could at any time have said to him (for they were in this together, collaborative as kidnappers, hijackers, ideological as terrorists), their hearts’ mutual weights and measures, lashed by the same hope, doomsday’d by identical misgivings: “We’re mugs, m’dear. Ants at the picnic. They hate us. They despise Liam. They wish we’d go ’way and eat our grief like men. ‘Your father lost a father,/ That father lost, lost his,’ et cetera et cetera.”

And if they were on Claudius’s side in this, why, so was he. So was Ginny. So, for his part, was Liam himself. Much as he was eager for others to know what he’d gone through, the child had despised his routines for television, for the press. “It’s mush, Daddy. It’s all cagmag and codswallop. And you know the part I hate most? The medical stuff. Pictures of my bone grafts, my deformed platelets, those awful blowups of my bombed-out retinas.”

So because he could get nowhere with the country’s great public firms and private men, nowhere with the public itself (despite Eddy’s protestations that the money in this instance was trivial compared to what it had given him last time, twenty thousand pounds as opposed to a hundred thousand), he determined to take his case over their heads. He decided to seek an audience with the Queen.

On the strength of a condolence letter—“My husband and I were distressed to read in the Times of your son Liam’s death. We have been following the course of your boy’s tragic ordeal and his valiant struggle. Our hearts are with you in this gloomy hour”—he wrote Her Royal Highness’s Appointments Secretary and was promised an audience just as soon as one could be worked into her busy schedule.

Which is why Eddy Bale finds himself on a fine spring day at Buckingham Palace.

He is dressed in a suit of black funeral clothes, the one he’d purchased for Liam’s burial service. He wears his mourner’s band, tight on his arm as a blood-pressure cuff. He is, he’s surprised to learn, not in one of the public rooms at all but in a sort of royal rec room in the Queen’s private apartments. To get here he has climbed the Grand Staircase and come down long elegant corridors behind a tall, slim young woman in custom jeans and a sort of country-and-Western shirt with the royal arms emblazoned on the back in an elaborate filigree. Her expensive Western boots seem to click on the carpet. “Bess normally sees subjects in the Appointments library, Mister Bale, but we’re fitting you in.”

The young woman, who has not bothered to introduce herself, leaves him in a very high and plush chair beside a card table on which a Scrabble game is still set up. Eddy means to ask about the protocols, but she is gone before he can even frame his question. Bale is able to read a few of the words the players have formed and abandoned—“peasant,” “serf,” “primogeniture”—but a child of perhaps seven or eight, either a page or one of the young royals, comes up beside him, and Eddy glances quickly away as if he has been caught poring over state secrets.

“What’s your name?”

“Eddy Bale.”

“You a commoner then?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eddy tells the boy.

“That’s all right,” the kid says. “Oh,” he says, “Bale. That was the name of that boy who died — Liam.”

“I’m his father.”

“Oh, I say,” the boy says, “he was quite a brave chap, wasn’t he? All those operations, all those heroic interventions and procedures. He won all us nobles, just walked off with our hearts. Many an aristocratic eye was moist when Liam succumbed. Did he really say, ‘I’m proud to have been English’?”

“We never falsified an interview,” Eddy says uneasily but can’t recall the quote. He’s a little startled by the child’s T-shirt: Buckingham Palace in embossed Gothic above what would have been the breast pocket. It’s less outlandish than the rampant lion filigreed in tiny pearls and gold leaf on the blouse of the young woman who conducted him here, but somehow he would have been less surprised if the child had appeared in a tiny bowler or carried a miniature furled umbrella, cute, like a kid in a sailor suit. Perhaps, among themselves, the royal family — he is in their private apartments, after all — enjoys a bit of high-camp informality now and again. Perhaps it’s their idea of patriotism.

Bale is uncertain about the child. He could be anything from a duke to a baron, could command the income on great estates in Surrey or collect the rents in downtown Leeds. He seems a kind enough young fellow, and Bale, who for all his interviews with the kingdom’s most powerful men, has never yet had audience with peerage, sketches his idea for the kid.

The child hears him out and concedes, “That’s a smashing plot!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Blast, I wish I’d the lolly, but I don’t come into my inheritance for just ages yet. Your troubles would be over if I did.”

“You’re very gracious, Your Grace.”

“Not a bit of it, Mister Bale. We all admired young Liam.”

“Thank you.”

“Twenty thousand,” he says, considering, stroking his chin, imagining ways it might yet be done.

“Yes?” Bale says.

“Well,” he says, “it’s just a thought, of course.”

“Yes?”

“We could put on a horse show.”

“A horse show.”

“Or sell lemonade.”

“Lemonade’s a thought,” Bale says.

“I know! We could hunt for buried treasure, raise the Spanish armada from Davy Jones’s locker. There must be just thousands of doubloons lying about.”

“Well…”

The Queen of England enters the family room carrying her purse. Bale rises and improvises a few courtesies. He completes his obeisances by pulling a chair out for his Queen on the other side of the Scrabble board. Queen Elizabeth II gestures for him to be seated, and Bale returns to his chair. The Queen is silent and Eddy clears his throat, is about to speak, when he sees that he does not have her complete attention. Covertly, she appears to be studying the rack of letters before her.

They play for money, Eddy thinks; they play for trips and dogs and horses. They play for cooks and butlers, for invitations and the use of castles. They play for gossip and regiments. He is a long way from his cause, and he thinks not of the children — in any case he hasn’t come to save the children; now his old notions are tempered, toned, almost temperate — but of himself.

He is calmer than he has been in months. Eddy Bale and the Queen of all the Englands are in a strange conspiracy of mood, she because she is Queen, unaccountable, irreproachable, the kingdom’s most private citizen as he is its most public beggar, and he because he has volunteered for scorn and is in the presence of one who has set all scorn aside, who has had it flushed from her system, an emotion not so much above her character — he doesn’t know her character — as beyond her biology, who could not have lived so long with such power and such privilege and not have dispensed with it, scornless from birth, from lifelong pet and pamper, public croon and cherish. Perhaps even surprise itself would be vestigial in her, useless to her as her appendix, and Eddy realizes he could not have offended her with his makeshift bowings and scrapings, his quick and nervous touch-flesh salutes. A woman who’s seen it all — though the empire is shrunken now — a queen shaped to tolerance and ceremony, who has sat in whatever place someone has told her to sit and observed all the strange dances of welcome, all the queer inverted struttings and high-souled arabesques and flashy, prescribed abasements and ceremonial mortifications, who has heard the odd music and seen the war paint — all the leaf mascaras, all the bark rouges and earth cosmetics, for whom the world and all behaviors are only a sort of anthropology and fierce loyalty, a kind of ethnic nationalism. She would never scorn him — for if he does not know her character she hasn’t a clue to his — and for a few seconds Bess and Eddy have this mutual moment. It’s as if — the child has left the room — they are married, in bed, side by side, reading…

Which puts Eddy into a sort of remission — gives himself back to himself, that is — and for the first time since Liam died and Ginny left him, for the first time since he’s had his idea about the children or delivered his new pitch to his famous but secular patrons, he is suddenly quiet, not at rest but unobsessed. The refusals he’s so patiently listened to — and understood, and even in his heart embraced — from men who’ve listened so patiently to him, have depleted him; just arranging all the appointments that have so conflicted other people’s schedules has: living by deadline, his opportunities foreshortened — despite their patience — spliced into ten- and twenty- and thirty-minute intervals, and even his own eye on the clock, not, as you might think, because he has just so many minutes to make his point before he is politely dismissed but because he has buses to catch, underground trains, other appointments to make.

And sometimes he wished they weren’t so matey, the chairmen and managers, wished they were as businesslike as himself, could forgo the cuppas and glasses of sherry, all the bright riffs of decorum, all the easy perks of the obligatory genteel. He apologized and declined whenever he was invited to lunch. A smoker, he refused even cigarettes when they were offered and, in his turn, and even when Liam was alive, withheld his own beggar’s knee-jerk God-bless-you’s, even when, as so often happened when Liam lived, he was successful. (Because Liam was appealing, even handsome, and lived — and died, by God — under the dreadful curse of his outside chances, his long-shot, high-roller, break-the-bank, one-in-a-million possibilities.) Because I am mad, he thought. Not so much grief-struck as driven. Ginny had seen it clearly and, though she’d been as tireless as himself while Liam was alive, wanted no part of this new business. Two hours after they returned from the cemetery, a taxi was waiting to take her away. (The taxi, like the food they’d lived on during their son’s illness — Eddy had taken leave of absence from his job in order to be with his boy — like their clothes and rent, like their phone bills, airfare, hotels, and utilities, like the cost of the boy’s burial itself, had been paid for from funds pledged to cure Liam, to keep him alive. Solicitors had put their two lives in trust, and just one of the peculiar results of their tragedy was that they’d come to live the managed financial lives of children of wealth, say, who’d not yet achieved their majority, or film stars on allowance, accepting doles and quarreling with accounts managers, dependent, special-pleading their special needs — though they were always merely Liam’s honest brokers: rails for the bed in his room, a remote control for his telly, down pillows, colored prescription lenses cut from blanks identical to the material that went into stained-glass cathedral windows — and both of them developing a sort of privileged rich kid’s cunning charm, turning them into nephews, nieces; a kind of undergraduate glamour, the exuberant flush of an overdraft youth upon them, the sense they could not help giving off — though it was never true — of people with gaming debts, their tailors and dressmakers unpaid, heavily into their publicans, their grooms and servants; a raffish couple, committed to weekending, to leisurely country pleasures, imbued with some nostalgic, almost larky spirit of the throwback, all the more — and all the more oddly—“modern,” for that the type had disappeared about the time they were born.)

It was, of course, an illusion. Inland Revenue was far too conscious of them. This was no fiddle. No fiddle was intended, no fiddle would have been allowed. Nevertheless, their lives in receivership, they seemed lifted from responsibility, what they did for their child, even those terrible “exclusives,” a kind of sinecure, like a plummy-placed commissionaire, or the man who changed the guard outside this palace. And Ginny had absconded with the last of the taxi fare, throwing neither reproach nor their common loss at him so much as the diminished fact of herself, taking her weakened leave, so that the cabman had to help her down not only with her two or three bags but even with her umbrella, and she seemed, well, found out, undone, all in, cashiered, disgraced, ruined, sent down, as if she’d actually been the type she had — they had — merely seemed. “Where will you go?” he’d asked, the words, despite his sour mood, unaccountably sweet because of their melodrama. Because it was a time in his life when he had absolutely legitimate recourse to the great phrases of melodrama, when entire conversations were built around them, exhorting contributors, reproving medical science, comforting Liam, tongue- lashing God. By turns angry, enraged, or gently depleted as an actor, and, late at night, with Ginny, when they returned from hospital or while Liam still slept in the next room, all the heavy, distilled oom-pa-pa of crisis and crunch on him. When he’d outlined his scheme. And Ginny had called him Boots the Chemist. “Boots?” “You fill needs like prescriptions, Eddy.”

The letter she’d left him unread. Not even opened. His wife. They’d lost a child together, a marriage, done chat shows, been to the necromancers. They’d always been intimate, but the very night they lost Liam, returning to their flat (reporters had been there, at the London Clinic, consigned to wait in the lobby until the Bales should appear, Ginny, who ought to have known better, surprised at their presence, even alarmed: “What are they doing here, Eddy?” “I sent for them.” “You?” “Please, darling, don’t go all upset on me. Stories properly have beginnings, middles, and ends.” “Eddy, you dumbshit, you damned son of a bitch.” “Thanks for coming, gentlemen,” Bale had said. “I’ve terrible news. Our Liam’s gone.” Though when they’d pressed him he hadn’t told them the little boy’s last words, had told them little enough, really, content to allow the child’s doctor to speak for him, for Ginny in shock, who could hardly have spoken for herself, the specialist reciting the facts of Liam’s case, letting the press in on its dark pathology, then Eddy stepping forward, nodding at the doctor as though the man were merely some compere at an awards dinner, as though the doctor’s dry recitation of their son’s passing had been only a sort of introduction, thanking him — you could almost see microphones — and, smiling thinly but almost hearty, relieving him, making his statement — you could almost see text — thanking all of them, the doctors and nurses, the splendid staff, the press who had so kindly come out on this wet night, who’d been so cooperative throughout, who’d taken the message of their son’s strange and terrible illness to the magnificent British people, whose response to the plight of one small, unfortunate, doomed little twelve-year-old boy, and whose consideration of that poor doomed boy’s poor doomed parents — pressing her close now, practically holding her there, applying the invisible forces and vectors of some secret body language, as you’d guide a horse with a barely discernible pressure of your knees, and actually saying the words “On behalf of my wife and myself, on behalf of our son, Liam…”—had been the manifestation of the generous spirit of a generous people), they had fallen into each other as into actual furniture, actual chairs, actual beds, not undressing each other, pulling off clothes, so much as tearing at belts, shoulder straps, zippers, ties, tugging on sleeves, elastic, undoing one another like gifts, packages, grasping as children and, naked now, as though they had uncovered puzzling, unassembled toys, or a clutter of treasure, say, reaching randomly for pieces, parts, touching features, lifting and turning over limbs, scenting fingers, handling rashers of flesh, inspecting, examining, now squinny-eyed, now all gawking open rubberneck and abandon, no surveillance or vigil, no cool peep or snoop, neither peek nor pry but committed, bristled stare, some in-for-a- penny-in-for-a-pound plunder of the other, Ginny forcing the cheeks of his ass, her face close as a detective’s and, shifted sudden as wrestlers, his eye at her cunt myopic as a man who’s lost his glasses. Not even fucking finally but transport, some courtship of the head, their very wills consummated, a will seduction that ends in the giant swings and fluctuate spasms and shudders of orgasm, coming, coming, come, autonomous but reciprocal, too, as the shuttle of a rocking chair or a kid’s seesaw, both feeling the private, internal seismics of self, percussive as a drum roll of glands — not even fucking — a convulsion of spirit, overwhelmed, rushed, jerked as boxers by jolts of lovepulse involuntary as seizure, some absurd, choreic twitch and flop- flounder fishthrill, the shaking of all the body’s lymphs, jellies, and puddings, and last declining flickers, tremors, and almost gentle aftershock and ripple of nerves, a sort of jitters, the groggy, pleasant, irregular cramp raptures, subsultive, succussive. “Wow!” says the bereaved man. “Oh, Jesus!” groans the woman whose child will be buried the day after tomorrow and who will leave her husband two hours afterward. Then both look up, stricken, and recover their clothes. (They have been through so much — the chat shows, the necromancers, the marriage, the kid. They have been through so much — the so handsomely rewarded begging; their life on the handouts of chairmen of boards, great merchants and managers, significant tradesmen; their odd raffishness, their queer, soiled fame.) And both realize, as they’d realized their detached, mutual frenzy of moments before, that the death of Liam is not without its compensations, that they are without his intrusive presence, that they have, in ways they could not have contemplated earlier that day, been freed. (They have been through so much. He speaks for both of them.) “Well,” Eddy says, “weren’t that a corking way to have a bit?” (He speaks for both of them and slips into their old slangy banter, the dated style he does not even remember they have not used with each other since Liam’s illness was diagnosed.) “Coo!” he says. “I daresay neiver of us has ever been brought off like that.” “Fair fizzing dinkum, it were,” his wife answers unexpectedly, but without energy. “I know I didn’t feel the draught,” Eddy tells her. “We was brung off just by looking, the both of us Harry starkers. We never even had it in.” “Jack it, Eddy, it was flaming doolally,” Ginny says. “You’ve got your rag out.” “Eddy, jack it,” she says listlessly. “You’re a long streak of misery.” “And you’re in high feather.” “Want to jig a jig then?” “You’ve got a hope!” “Come on, then.” “Eddy, you neddy.” “Pongy, were it?” “Were mine?” “Yours? No, la, yours was pukka. Yours was pure pukka quim, Ginny darlin’. Want to have it off?” “It’s not on,” she shouts. “Jolly good, luvverly,” her husband says. “Wasn’t we randy though?” she says more softly, and Eddy puts his arm about her shoulder. “If we’re going to do it,” he says, “I ought to Jimmy riddle first. It’s up in me marbles.” Ginny starts to cry. “We behave like this because he’s dead, Eddy.” “It’s not as if it was off the cuff, old girl,” Eddy says quietly. “Because he can’t hear us. If the phone rings it won’t be hospital.” And now she is speaking for both, resuming ordinary English, setting aside their old language as earlier they had dispensed with the actual need for actual fucking. “Why were they there? Why did you bring them in? The reporters? What business was it of theirs?” (They miss their stress, he sees, the full-fathoms pressure of their deep-sea lives. Stress was what organized it, kept it under control, kept it civilized. It’s at this point that Eddy knows Ginny will leave him. Like Eddy she can’t accept the gift of grief, all loss’s break-bank boons and benefits, the perks of tragedy. Oh, he thinks, what we could have done with each other! This evening’s outrage only a taste, the tip of their new iceberg privacy!) “Liam was never the press’s creature. He was never the hero of those accounts, that ordeal. We were,” he tells her. “Liam was just the little boy who died, only the victim.”

And now it is the Queen of England who does not have his attention. She taps a Scrabble tile lightly against the game board.

“Oh,” Bale startles. “Forgive me, Majesty.” And begins (not without wondering whether it isn’t being in a palace which has somehow caused his — their — lapse, the trance, the magic narcotics of his frozen animation: Has a century passed? Is Elizabeth still queen? Has the boy come into his inheritance by now? Enjoyed his tenure and relinquished it to a child itself no longer a child who for his part has handed over the depleted yet intact privilege of his title to the next in line in the orderly take-turn, marathon sequences of life and death? Is the kid ancestorized now, his portrait in uniform hung in a hall?) to tell his schemes.

“When I realized,” he says, interrupting himself, overriding his improbable, inopportune parentheticals, “we had pretty well come to the limits of my son’s medical options, I began to question whether he had been justly served. My wife, Ginny, and I had embarked on this search for a cure for what we’d been told at the outset was incurable. After the docs had conferred, after the second opinions, after the tests and operations and experiments, I began to see that Liam was really no better off than when his difficulties had been first confirmed in those initial interviews with the doctors in that first surgery of the National Health. Worse off, really. For by now the invasive procedures had been introduced. They beat my kid up, Your Royal Highness. With the best will in the world they worked him over. They took off his hair with their toxins and gave his liver third-degree burns. They softened his bones like modeling clay and grew little ulcers in his gut. They turned his blood into dishwater. They caused him such pain, Monarch. It’s not as if they didn’t warn us about the side effects. Every other word out of their faces was side effects: diarrhea, nausea, depression, and drowsiness”—and has some idea where his vagrant notion of a spell had come from just now—“weakness, fatigue. And everything with his parents’ permission. All, all of it approved at the outset, Sovereign, the sacrifice added to his sickness like a cover charge, risk built into his bill like the V.A.T. We were dippy for risk, spellbound — enchanted, I mean. Desperation whips up courage. It clothes consequence and dresses the bogeyman in high fashion. Oh, I think we were mad. Into science like astrology. Beside ourselves as gamblers doubling up on their bets. You’re ruler here, Ma’am. Tell me, is there a law of diminished returns? Should you hope with your head? Wouldn’t we have been better off if we’d boarded the ship for the sunny isles? Chosen the course of the stubborn old bastards, the ones who stuff pleasure into their winding sheets like a sort of Egyptians — port and cigars and a pinch for the nurses that doesn’t just elevate blood pressure but positively launches it? Hey, the only thing my kid never lost was his looks. Those he had on his deathbed. You saw his pictures, you followed his case. Did he go like a goner? Did he look like one? Teenage girls wanted his autograph. He was dreamy as a rock star, they said. Wouldn’t we have been better off to have given him a cram course in debauchery? Whatever it took? The rarest dishes and the richest sauces? Ardor, toys, and all the final cigarettes and secret wishes of his imagination?

“Well. You see what I mean. Where we went wrong. We never rewarded him for his death. He should have lived like a crown prince, Queen. We should have sent him off to hunt in a red coat. We should have brought him to opera and sat him in boxes. We should have hijacked the sweet shoppe and turned him loose at the fair. We ought have sent him on picnics with hampers of ice cream. We should have ground his teeth down on scones and flan and ruined his eyes on the telly. We should have sent him to sleep past his bedtime. We should have burned him out on his life, Dynast. We should have bored him to death.”

“Oh, I say,” the Queen says, clutching her purse. Bale knows that the woman — he recalls her odd patience with weather from photographs, news clips, her jungle and rain-forest tranquillity, her snowstorm serenity, her comfort in climate — has seen it all but wonders how much she’s heard. He senses her alarm, is alarmed himself. This is not the way he presents himself to patrons. With financiers he is reserved, refined as their boardrooms, sedate as a bank. Only to his suzerain has he said these things. Nor, till now, has he given much thought to his distinction, all that’s been granted him: his private audience with his Queen, his presence in the strange, off-limits room. He’s never seen it in photographs and cannot now remember how he reached it, has only a vague memory of having climbed a staircase, come down a corridor, rather, he imagines, like the corridors in First Class on good steamships, a queer notion of being pulled along. Yes, he thinks, in the wake of the beautiful young woman, sluiced as wood, debris, sucked and maelstrom’d, shipwrecked, beached. Even the sight of his Queen’s pocketbook strikes him as not only the most informal thing he has ever seen but the most intimate as well. I saw her cheat, he thinks, then wonders, My God, did that set me off? I am mad, I am. I’m lucky she don’t call the coppers. Which, he sees now, is not quite the case. Footmen have appeared. They stand along the walls in their livery, their rococo chests puffed as the breasts of birds. Bale is certain they have been signaled, high-signed. Or perhaps the room is wired.

Sending his own signals, Eddy moves his shoulder slightly forward, shifting the arm with the mourning band, favoring it like a man with a game leg. He actually touches the black cloth. It is some private rigmarole, reflexive but loaded with a meaning he hopes will carry across the abandoned game board. He is not calling attention to his loss — tears form in his eyes, choke his throat, but this is because, like Ginny, whose taxi had been paid for with the last bit of Liam’s cure money, his armband has been purchased with (what?) the last of the mourner money — but to his vulnerability, his madman’s amiable harmlessness. He holds the black armband as if it were a white flag. And Elizabeth II understands. She smiles. Even the footmen seem to have uncovered his intentions. Invisibly, they seem to relax, expel air from their chests, breathe normally as other men.

“Yes?” she says, encouraging him.

“Over two hundred children can be expected to die of rare terminal diseases in Great Britain this year.”

“Oh, my,” says the Queen.

“You should understand that nothing further can be done for them,” Bale says, and he is recovered now, as decorous as if he is addressing a tycoon, a newspaper magnate. “For many of them, additional treatment would make them even more uncomfortable than they already are and only hasten the day of reckoning. In several cases their therapies have already stopped or will shortly. This is at their parents’ request or, in certain instances, at the request of the patients themselves. Their physicians have placed them on a sort of minimum maintenance: restricted diets, courses of high-potency vitamin injections, carefully monitored sleep regimens, even, when the discomfort becomes too great, narcotics on demand.”

“Les pauvres!”

Bale pauses. A peculiar thing has happened. He discovers that, at the crunch, he is unable to bring his argument round, that the kingdom’s foremost beggar, a man who has passed the hat among the nation’s leading industrialists and press lords and brought his case to the public not only through those shameless exclusives he sold but who, in those early days of his son’s illness, even climbed soapboxes in Hyde Park Corner and accepted Liam’s weight from Ginny, handing the child up to him at the end of his spiel as if the boy were conclusive, telling evidence in a legal proceeding, and who on one occasion actually walked along beside the buskers working the crowds in London’s theater district, Liam’s sad legend printed carefully across a sandwich board — this man is suddenly and quite inexplicably mute in the presence of a woman who, to judge from her assenting clucks and royal coos, is already sympathetic, predisposed toward the children who are now his cause. Perhaps he feels himself an intruder, inhibited by the wealth she represents, the difference her sympathies could make. Perhaps he is having second thoughts — indecisive at the last moment as a child choosing which chocolate to take from a box. Perhaps that’s it, that he’s caught among need’s swerving priorities, its competing demands on good men. Or that what he feels are the once- burned-twice-cautious misgivings of the wish-privileged in tales, and what he’s searching for is precise language, seeking to clause request in legalese, to seal it in the metric measurements of ironclad engagement. (But Bale knows. He is frozen by the peculiar kicks of juxtaposition, the odd sense he has always had of misalliance, incongruence, all the thrilling, discrepant mysteries and asymmetries of disrupt geometry. Once, before Liam had become ill, he and Ginny had left the child with an aunt to go on holiday with friends to the French Riviera. In Nice, quite by accident, they had come upon one of the nude beaches. “When in France…” his friend’s wife had said and removed the halter of her bathing suit. He had known the woman for years and, though she had always been attractive, he could not recall ever having thought about her sexually. Afterward, back in London, he could not look at her without remembering how she had appeared to him on that beach in Nice. Nor was he particularly aroused at the time. What he subsequently could not forget was that he had seen his friend’s wife’s breasts. He had never touched her, yet he could not get the incident out of his mind, and a part of him believed, and believes still, that he had somehow cuckolded the husband. What he felt, God help him, was a sort of pride. Another time, before he ever met Ginny, he had lived for a while with a girl named Ruth. They’d led a placid, almost deferential life together, each conveying to the other a wish to please. They never argued; were, for the six or seven months they’d been together, completely at ease, agreeable as twins. Only once, when a package they’d been expecting arrived at the flat, did they come anywhere close to quarreling. Ruth had gone to the door to accept the delivery. “Look, Eddy,” she said coming into the lounge, “the bed lamp from Heal’s, I think.” Bale took the carefully wrapped package and began to tug at the cord which bound it. It was strong stuff and he was having difficulty. “I’d better get a knife,” he said and got up from the couch on which he’d been sitting and started toward the kitchen. “Oh, don’t bother, luv,” Ruth said, “I’ll manage.” He turned to look. The tough cord snapped in her hands like a biscuit. “How’d you do that?” Bale asked. “Look,” she said, “it’s the lamp, all right, but the nits have sent us the wrong color. This one is green.” “How’d you do that?” Bale repeated. “Do what?” “Break the cord like that.” “Well, I don’t know. I guess I just pulled extra hard.” He took up the cord from where it lay on the floor and wrapped it around his hands. He couldn’t break it. “You’re trying to jerk it,” Ruth said. “Just pull. Here, see?” The cord seemed to stretch like elastic. She broke it effortlessly. They’d never argued, never fought. Without thinking about what he was doing, Eddy reached out with his open palm and tried to slap her. Instinctively she caught his hand and forced it down. She’s stronger than me, Bale thought. It’s not even a goddamn contest. Afterward it was Ruth who was embarrassed. “I’ll make us some tea,” she said. When she returned with the tea he wouldn’t drink it, and though neither ever alluded to the incident, Eddy was never again comfortable with her. It was the disparity, the misalliance, his nervous apprehension of her great physical strength, which he found at once threatening and compelling and with which he had become strangely obsessed, that made him move out. He was ashamed of himself, repelled by his new attraction for her.

(Now the cat has his tongue because this queen has once again kindled the disparities, stunned and bewildered him by the Mutt and Jeff arrangements of the world, the absolute unapartheid provisions and tableaux he so yearns for and dreads, the surreal displacements of his heart.)

“What I want,” he begins carefully, “what is needed—”

“May I go with them, Ma’am?” It’s the little boy. He’s seated to Eddy’s side and slightly behind him, one leg comfortably crossed over the other, swinging freely, at once as poised and at ease as an assistant brought back in an illusion. “With Mister Bale and the sick children? The little dying boys and girls? May I, Ma’am? May I? To Disney World? On their dream holiday? Oh, I hope so. I hope I may! There’s nothing to do in the palace.”

“Disney World? Dream holiday? What’s Clarence saying, Mister Bale?” asks the Queen.

“Well, that’s my idea, Your Majesty. What I was leading up to. They’re terminal, you see. One little fellow is in the last stages of progeria. That’s a sort of premature old age. Charles Mudd- Gaddis. He’s only eight but he already wears bifocals and suffers terrible constipation. He’s feeble, of course, but he has all his faculties. He’s very alert. Really. He’s sharp as a tack. We should all be in such shape at his age.”

Queen Elizabeth stared at him.

“What I mean—” Bale breaks off helplessly to watch the Queen, who has opened her purse and begun to rummage through it as if looking for her compact, a handkerchief, her car keys.

“Continue, please, Mister Bale,” Her Majesty says.

“Well,” Eddy says, “there’s this eleven-year-old girl in Liverpool who’s already had a hysterectomy. They should have been tipped off by the hot flashes, but even so they wouldn’t have caught it in time.”

The Queen has found what she’s been looking for. “Yes?” she says when Bale pauses.

“I know the names of almost all the terminal children in England, Ma’am,” Eddy tells her, “and who would qualify for the dream holiday — who would benefit, I mean. Twenty thousand would do it.”

She takes a checkbook and gold pen from her purse. The checks are imprinted with her image and look rather like pound notes. Bale notices that they’ve already been signed; only the amount and name of the payee remain to be filled in.

“Of course there are lots of arrangements to be made,” Eddy says nervously. “I mean I’ve got to decide whether to remove my mourner’s band in the presence of the children. There’s plenty that remains to be worked out.”

She is writing his name on a check. “You will be wondering why I am never without my handbag. Very well, Mister Bale, I will tell you. You having shared so much with us,” she says slyly, barely glancing at him. “We clutch it this way because of the muggers,” she says, and tears the check out of the book and hands it to him. It is for fifty pounds. “Don’t cash it,” she says. “Show it round. The money ought to come pouring in. When you have what you think you need you may send the check back. You needn’t deliver it personally. Just put it in the post.”

“It isn’t for keeps, Your Majesty?”

“Nothing is for keeps, Mister Bale.”

“You want it back? Fifty quid? You want it back?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” asked the Queen of England.

2

He put his staff together like a collection, like partisans, like a crew in a caper. And liked, even as he recruited them, to think of them that way, something faintly illicit about what he could not really think of as trained specialists so much as a band or gang, some troupe of adventurers, a rash ring of the madcap, spunky-emboldened, stouthearted, suspect. Bale’s lot: his soldiers of fortune, his heart’s highwaymen. Though this was a ruse, a bit of deception he had got up for his own benefit, something Foreign Legion, if not about their bona fides then about their character, left over in his head from a time he had gone to films. Almost telling them when they agreed to join him in his venture — thinking of it as “venture,” too, “operation,” “undertaking,” the code words more satisfying to him than the “dream holiday” label the press had taken up — that they’d have to put by the hard stuff till they’d pulled this one off, that if he so much as smelled anything stronger than tea on their breath they’d be thrown out quicker than snap, and a severe warning that they’d have to lay off the birds — this last to a male nurse who’d tended Liam at the London Clinic and was almost certainly a poof. And nothing on the side, he would have warned: no private swindle, no skimming the cookie jar, no dipping into the private stock. One smutch on the escutcheon and out, he wanted to say. When they got back to England, he wanted to say, could barely keep himself from saying, they could do as they pleased. He was no parson himself; no one had elected him pope. They could go on a bender or fish pox in the stews, he didn’t care. They could bash up old ladies or belt cripples about. (This to Nedra Carp, a woman who, briefly, had been Prince Andrew’s nanny. He hadn’t thought of bringing a nanny, just the private pediatric nurse and erstwhile casualty-ward physician — a pediatrician — he’d met when Liam had been a patient at Queen Mary’s in Roehampton. He had the idea when he saw the woman on television. The children would like that, he thought, having the hero of the Falklands’ personal nanny.) Oh, yeah, he wanted to say, they could talk low bosh or play the berk. They could turn bloody kosher as far as he was concerned, but one smutch, one, and he’d have their guts for garters and their bones for toothpicks. They’d never work with terminal kiddies again, not while Eddy Bale drew breath! And hard cases, bullies and killers from the bottom bins, psychopaths, sociopaths, enemies of the people, enemies of God! Bale’s private fiction: Bale’s desperado wheelmen and demolitions experts, his lookouts and strong-arm guys pitched against the human! (Almost telling them this rubbish, his own low bosh almost out of his mouth, a strange wickedness on the tip of his tongue, all he could do just to mask it at the last moment in the sober turns of his conversations with them. Because I am mad. Am I mad?)

Actually the group was practically blue-ribbon, worthy as the blue-ribbon cash he had put together after the Queen had given him his seed money.

Colin Bible, the male nurse from the London Clinic, is a tallish, decorous, handsome man, his appearance in his impeccable hospital whites and almost slipperlike shoes oddly nautical, not so much jaunty as vaguely languorous, like the summery deck clothes of actors on private yachts in films. He has that same spoiled, fine blond hair and would look windblown, Eddy imagines, in sealed rooms. And a quality in his expression of some just-disturbed petulance, ruffled as his hair and as suddenly smoothed back, as if he is obliged to welcome surprise guests. Colin had been his son’s favorite, breezy with the boy, exaggeratedly swish, his broad effeminacy laid on as an accent in a joke and designed, Bale and his wife were certain, to give the boy the impression that it was to Liam alone he spoke this way. It was Bible who insisted, even in the last week of Liam’s life, that the boy required exercise and, when the doctors left — the technicians from Radiology to photograph his bones, from Hematology to draw his blood, from Nuclear Medicine to inject him with substances they would subsequently read tracings of on big, complicated machinery — he would pop into the kid’s room, look comically round to see if anyone was left (managing in quick strobic glances to give the impression that even Ginny and Bale were gone, who were always there, who in that last week did not even return to their flat except to change into fresh clothes, even then never going back together, the one fetching for the other and, in the last days, not going back at all, taking their meals not in the Clinic’s small coffee shop, or even from the vending machines, but ordering from the hospital kitchen, paying the same inflated prices—“They don’t make their money,” Ginny once joked, “on the operations and tests. They make it on the goddamn lunches and dinners”—choosing their next day’s meals from the same menu the Clinic’s dietician showed their dying child), and call out, first conspiratorially, then loudly, “Walkies, Liam. Walkies, walkies!”

(“Colin says I mustn’t invalid myself,” Liam tells them, back, breathless, in bed.

(“You’re overextended, darling,” Ginny says. “You must save your strength.”

(“What for?”

(“It’s just gone three,” his father says. “Where have you been these past twenty-five minutes?”

(“Colin took me to stand by the window. We looked out on Devonshire Place.”

(“Oh? What did you see?”

(“The traffic,” Liam says. “We counted two Humbers. There were Bentleys and Jags. Colin calls them doctor’s cars. Morris- Minors, of course, and Ford Cortinas and Anglias. We saw ever so many Vauxhalls and Daimlers. And Colin says he saw a Hillman-Minx with its top rolled back in the phaeton position. I missed that one.”

(He knew he was dying. He might have been talking about birds spotted in nature. He knew he was dying. He would have known this if he hadn’t the evidence of his decaying body. The doctors had spoken guardedly when he’d asked if he’d ever leave hospital again. He knew he was dying. There was the pathetic testimony of his parents’ vigil, their soured, close-quarters breath, Bale’s stubble and the careless erosion of his mum’s makeup. So he knew he was dying. Colin Bible had told him so. “It’s only traffic down there, kiddo,” the man had said. “They’re just cars, not kangaroos. If Lord and Lady Muck let me, I’d have you off to Kew Gardens or Regent’s Park zoo. We could pop by Madame Tussaud’s for a look-see. Most of that lot’s goners too, Liam.” Liam shuddered. “What, you’ve seen ’em then? Ozymandias, Ozymandias, hey, kid? They look a grave and gray bunch now, I grant, but I’ll say this much for ’em. They done their time, they done their time and they put on a show, the villains no less than the heroes and courtesans. Every mum’s son, every dad’s daughter. All the ancient and modern personages. Not one eager to die and, except for the crazies, p’raps, not one even willing. Not because they didn’t know what they was getting into but because only a crazy don’t appreciate what he’s getting out of. So that’s what you have in common with the moguls and presidents, Liam. Everybody wants to live. We all love the sunshine and we all love the rain. Only the nut case thinks life is hard. Hard? It’s softer than silk pajamas.”

(“My life is hard.”

(“Oh? Then you’re the one don’t mind dying.”

(“Yes. Yes I do.”

(“There you go then.”

(“I’m twelve years old,” Liam said.

(“Yes, and you weren’t always sick. You’ve kicked the football in your time, I’ll be bound. You’ve jumped into the header.” Liam smiled. “Sure. And I’ll bet you the baby you know how to swim, that you’ve been to the baths, maybe even to the sea itself. Maybe even to Brighton.”

(“And Blackpool.”

(“Brighton and Blackpool! And you tell me life is hard. Oh, yes. I believe you but thousands wouldn’t!”

(“One time, on the pitch, I was bowling and knocked the bails clear off the stumps three times running,” Liam remembers.

(“You were a bowler, were you?”

(“It wasn’t a regulation cricket ground. Something me and my mates set up on the common.”

(“You’ve done it all,” Colin Bible says.

(“I never did,” he tells him quietly, and looks at his nurse. The boy is tired, wishes the man would help him back to his room. On these occasions Colin rarely brings the child’s wheelchair. He carries him when he’s too weak to walk and sets him down on the hospital’s deep window ledges. “I never did those things.”

(“What things, Liam?”

(“That the ancient and modern personages did.”

(“That was my surprise,” Colin says.

(“I won’t live long enough to do just even ordinary things. I’ll never have my own bed-sitter.”

(“That’s not so much,” Colin Bible says. “What, a bed-sitter? There’s less there than meets the eye. They’re all moldy and dank, with patches of lino on the floor that never match. I think the Council has rules against it.”

(“I always wanted to live in one,” the boy says. “That was my idea. To rent a bed-sitter and put my shillings in the electric fire. What surprise?”

(“Well, you know, Liam, you really are a personage.”

(“What, I am?”

(“A modern personage but a personage all the same,” Colin tells him. “Maybe the most famous young personage in England.”

(“What, because I’m going to die, you mean?”

(“Your picture’s been in News of the Day. You’ve been on the telly. They’ve written about you in all the papers, even the Times. Just everyone knows you. You’ve been a poster boy. Famous people pray for you. Girls write for your autograph. They know you listen to Terry Wogan. They call him up and he dedicates songs to you. One Sunday in the flat my friend and I were listening to ‘Melodies for You’ and we heard your name. ‘I know him,’ I said. ‘You know Liam Bale?’ he asked. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘he’s my patient.’”

(“I never did anything brave. The pain doesn’t count. When it hurts I cry. I whine and I whimper. You’ve heard me, Colin.”

(“You’ve been to Madame Tussaud’s, Liam,” Colin Bible said. “It’s not all Monty and Lord Nelson and Christ on the Cross. You’ve seen the noted criminals, you’ve seen the film stars. Of course you’re a personage.”

(“Madame Tussaud’s?”

(“Well, that’s what we’ve been talking about, isn’t it? That’s my surprise. I can’t absolutely guarantee it, of course, but my friend is one of their top artists. He’s Artistic Director, actually, and makes most of the decisions about who’ll be showcased. When he heard I actually knew you he was very excited. He’d already made some marvelous sketches that he took from the papers. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if Liam even wants to be in your waxworks. Not everyone would, you know, Colin.‘—my friend’s name is Colin, too. — Well, he said he’d respect your wishes in the matter, of course. He doesn’t have to. He’s Artistic Director, and you’re a public personage. Even if you weren’t, once you’re dead you’d be in the public domain anyway — I think that’s the law — so he can pretty much do as he pleases, though he promised he’d respect your wishes. I said I’d check with you, Liam. Personally, I think it would be flippin’ lovely, but it’s your decision.”

(“Madame Tussaud’s!” Liam says. “Me in Madame Tussaud’s! That’s a stunner. I mean, no boy wants to die, but that’s a stunner. I can almost see the expression on my mates’ faces when they see me.”

(“Well, you know, Liam, I told Colin I thought that might be the way you’d react when I told you. He’s very good, Colin is. He doesn’t make the actual molds. Those are done in France, mostly, but he does the preliminary sketches and determines the poses.”

(Liam’s face goes suddenly pale. Colin Bible grabs him from the window seat and carries the boy to a bench, where he lays him down gently. He raises his pajama top, warms the metal disk with breath from his mouth, and puts it against the child’s skin. Liam starts to say something. “Shh, shh,” the nurse says. “All right then,” he says in a moment. “I want to take your pulse.” Which is rapid but not alarming. He places a thermometer under Liam’s tongue. Again the boy tries to speak. “Liam, please, you’ll snap it in two. Then we’ll both be at the Madame’s.”

(“Uh ojesh,” Liam says.

(“In a minute,” Colin says. The color has returned to Liam’s face. “Not even normal,” he scolds. “All right, Liam, what was that all about then?”

(“The poses,” Liam says, “the poses!”

(“All right, the poses. What about the poses?”

(“Not in a hospital bed! Sitting up in a chair, maybe, but not in a hospital bed! When you said that about the poses—”

(“Was that all that was? Sure,” Colin says, “I’ll tell Colin. He’ll have you in a chair. Reading, perhaps, or watching the telly. Looking out the window, seeing things far away or counting the Humbers. Don’t worry, Liam. It will be as grand as any effigy there. Colin’s a good friend. He’ll do all of us proud.”

(And these are almost his son’s last words, the ones Bale had held back from the journalists when they’d turned out on the wet and nasty evening of Liam’s last day, the words he’d hardly heard, could barely make out, when Liam pulled his father close, speaking from the fearful, terrible ecstasy of his dread: “Mamtooshawfsh.”

(“What, Liam? I’m sorry, son. I don’t understand.” Carefully, silently, signaling Ginny beside him, almost as if she is some Chief Inspector asked in a soft gesture to pick up an extension to hear a message from the kidnappers. “I’m sorry, Liam. Calmly. Calmly.”

(The boy shakes his head, breathes deeply, seeks for mastery of himself, finds it, starts again slowly, as slowly, as patiently as if his parents are the ones in peril. “They,” he says, “want,” he says, “to put,” he says, “my—” he says, and pauses, trying to recall the word, “—effigy, my effigy,” he says, “in Madame Tussaud’s,” he says.

(“Never!” his father reassures him.

(“Of course not, sweetheart,” his mother agrees.

(“No,” Liam pleads with them, bewildered, “you have to let them. Please,” he says. “I want…I want it there. Promise me!” he says, and dies.)

The ex-casualty ward physician is Mr. Moorhead. He is not, as Eddy Bale vaguely wishes, a ship’s doctor, someone ruined, a hardened stray from the China trade, the belowdecks, palmetto-fanned heats and ruthlessnesses of tubs and packets, the steamy African river routes, or the pack-ice Murmansk and Greenland ones — some drummed-out being, some tainted, weary wiz. (Why do I insist on this stuff? Bale wonders. Who will have young lives in his charge. Not even the just ordinary Boy Scouts and Girl Guides of summer’s hold-hand organized wayfare but the real thing, some from-the-start-doomed-and-threatened expedition itself. So why do I insist on this stuff? My wife walked out on me. I lost a son. Ain’t my life full enough already?) But far from being in disgrace, he is, despite Eddy Bale’s garish dreams for him, an eminent man. (In less than the four years since Bale first met him, Moorhead had left the National Health, set up in private practice, and was now Senior Registrar in Internal Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, an excellent, highly regarded doctor with a service at Sick Children’s which was one of the most distinguished in Britain.) Secretly he wishes to be awarded an O.B.E. Editorial leaders in Lancet have favorably mentioned his name, and even respected colleagues, to whom he’s never disclosed his ambitions, can’t understand why he’s overlooked while, year after year, rock stars, actors, TV journalists, designers, and others, less deserving and perhaps even less famous, are included. The omission has been noted and actually occasioned several letters to the Times, usually followed and sometimes accompanied by delicately worded, clearly embarrassed disclaimers from Moorhead himself. Who knows well enough, but will not of course state, the real reason he’s been passed over. Just as he knows why he’s chosen to go off with Bale and the children on their futile flying circus to Florida. Almost certainly, though he loves the sun, the heat, and regularly goes on holiday to Spain’s Balearic Islands or Africa’s west coast or even out on the banana boats, those fuming tubs and packets of Eddy Bale’s imagination, it’s a place he would never, as a tourist, enter on his own. It is the Jews. He is going to see the Jews. He has heard that there is an even higher concentration of them in Florida than there is in Israel. It is the Jews who have kept him off the Queen’s Honors List, who for three years now have permitted him to attend the Queen’s Garden Party but drawn the line when it came to sharing real privilege and power. All those Jews. It is for Moorhead alone the dream holiday.

They were in Eddy Bale’s council flat in Putney. “Doct—” Bale, offering refreshment, started to say, then, correcting himself, named instead the inverted, oddly up-ante’d title of certain physicians. “Mister Moorhead?”

Eddy, fussing tea, opening in front of his guest, who had followed him into his small kitchen, the all-in selection from Sainsbury’s dairy case, murmuring, apologizing for his surviving father’s and bachelor’s ready-to-wear arrangements, popping the tiny crustless sandwiches and little cakes into the gas range to take the chill off.

“It all looks quite delicious, Bale,” Mr. Moorhead said.

“I know it isn’t what you’re accustomed to.”

“It looks quite delicious.”

“Well,” Eddy said, “it’s hardly what they serve at the Queen’s Garden Party.”

“You know the Queen’s Garden Party?”

“I’ve been this fund raiser, this special pleader, for years now. I have the guest lists by heart. Well, I’d have to, wouldn’t I? For the leads. Like an assurance broker or a customer’s man in the City. I know my nobs. I know my hons.”

“My dear Bale,” the doctor said, “I don’t think you know me. It’s true I federate with the nobs and hons at Her Majesty’s company picnic. I’ve even an eye out for the chain and collar. Which makes me as much customer’s man as yourself, as anyone in bourse or bucket shop, but it all goes for the children in Great Ormond Street. If I climb it’s for them I climb, more Sherpa than Hillary. Which could explain my presence on this long march of yours. Now,” he said, “about these terminal kiddies, these goner spawn.” And indicated an immense pile of folders on the sofa in Eddy’s lounge.

And Mary Cottle, neither nanny nor nurse, a woman in her early thirties who’d lost neither husband nor child but fiancé, not to death, not even to a rival, and who would herself bear no children, who could conceive them readily enough and even carry them to term, but who wore a poisoned womb, a terrible necklace of tainted genes that could destroy any child, boy or girl, to whom she might give birth. Healthy herself, and quite beautiful, she suffered from the strangest disease of all. She was a carrier. Twice, once in her teens and again in her twenties, she had delivered ruined, stillborn babes. Two other times amniocentesis had revealed awful birth defect, chromosomes suffused with broad and latent deformity like too-bitter tea.

“There’s something wrong,” the doctor said. “Your children will be born blind. With cancer, measles, swollen glands. With canes in their little fists.”

“We shall have to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” the surgeon said who performed her second abortion.

“It’s all bathwater,” Mary said and broke off her engagement.

“It’s crazy,” her fiancé had said. “We don’t have to have kids.”

“No,” Mary Cottle said.

“We could adopt.”

“You don’t understand,” Mary Cottle said. “I could never sleep with you.”

“That’s ridiculous. What is it you’re supposed to have?”

“Everything. I’m this Borgia madonna. I poison babies.”

Since then she has not so much as kissed a man and kept herself equable by frequent and furious bouts of masturbation, each time wondering what unkempt, dreadful, sickened soups she stirred with her finger.

Although she was precisely the sort of self-exiled outcast Eddy wanted for his enterprise, Bale knew nothing of her history. She came to him with queer credentials: as a highly recommended gray lady, a candidate, in everybody’s books, of unchurched sanctity, always peaceful — her sponsors knew nothing of her habits either, her steady state, orgasmic calm — always serene.

“Mary’s a brick,” the parents of dying children told him. “She’s quite marvelous. I can’t imagine where she gets her strength.”

“We depend on Mary,” her supporters said when he checked with them. “I don’t think she has a nerve in her body.”

“All she’s supposed to have seen,” Eddy confided to two trusted nurses at the London Clinic, “perhaps she’s callous.”

“Go on, she never is. It’s more like — well, something spiritual. Isn’t that what you’d call that far-off look in her eyes, Bert?”

“Spiritual, yes,” Bert said. “I’d say so. That calm, spiritual quality.”

“Always smiling. You know what she reminds me of? The Mona Lisa.”

“She’s an angel, is Mary.”

“Angels don’t smoke,” Bale, who’d never seen her enter a room without a cigarette in her lips, said.

She was smoking one then, in Putney, on the day they chose their finalists.

“Sorry I’m late,” Mary Cottle said, sitting down, and Eddy was struck by the lack of sorrow in her voice or on her beautiful, blissful face, which seemed never to have entertained the slightest anxiety. “What have I missed?”

“Mister Moorhead’s been disposing of our case load,” Colin Bible said, and pointed to about two dozen file folders at the physician’s feet.

Nedra Carp had to laugh over that one, she said, and did, loudly, and Bale was reminded again of something he’d noticed all his life: that people, even quite humdrum people, often behave eccentrically in groups. He’d seen this in school, had observed it when he’d done his National Service, in the office when he’d held down a regular job. It was as if the laws of civility, which not only governed but actually controlled people in one- on-one situations, were repealed once individuals joined with others, as if sanity were only a sort of practiced shyness and that what they were, what they were really, their true colors, wild as the plumage of exotic birds, was permitted to glow only in association, all their nut-case gushers and bonanzas, all their moonstruck, batty doings flourishing in packs, fielded herds of the erratic.

Because on television she had seemed such a nice woman. On the phone she had. And although it was true what Colin Bible had suggested, that Moorhead had been behaving with peremptory flair, rummaging among the names Eddy had proposed for the dream holiday with something more like impatience than judgment, like a card player discarding anything not of immediate value to his hand, say, Bale supposed it was only what Moorhead, as the only physician there, supposed was expected of him. Perhaps he did think that, for when Colin Bible said what Nedra Carp had laughed about so loudly, Moorhead looked up sharply. “It isn’t a contest, you know,” he said. “None of these children has actually made application to come with us. This is only a sort of triage. Doctors do it in casualty wards all the time. On battlefields they do. What we’re looking for here are those children who would most profit from our attentions.”

“The deserving dead,” Mary Cottle said. Nedra Carp shrieked.

“There are ethical considerations,” Moorhead said.

“My friend Colin warned me this would happen,” Colin Bible whispered to Mary Cottle. “‘Just take what comes,’ he said. ‘Regard the group, whatever its final makeup, as a sort of found sculpture.’”

“What ethical considerations?” Eddy Bale said.

“Well, if we chose a child whose parents can afford to make the trip on their own,” Moorhead said.

“Say, that’s right,” Eddy said.

“And the children ought to be compatible.”

“And what if they haven’t taken in yet that they’re going to die?” Mary Cottle asked equably. “Seeing some of their companions could come as a frightful shock.”

“The trip will be exhausting. It could shorten their lives.”

“That’s right,” Moorhead said.

“Then there’s the whole question of taste,” Colin Bible said.

“Taste?” said Eddy Bale.

“I’m sorry,” Colin Bible said. “My roomie warned me to keep my nose out of this.”

“Where’s the Ladies’?” Mary Cottle wanted to know.

“Taste?”

“Well, there’ll be all that media coverage, won’t there?” Colin Bible said. “You know how the press exploits these kids, Mister Bale. Who better?”

“They trained their long lenses on us whenever we went on an outing,” Nedra Carp said. “They could shoot right into Prince Andrew’s picnic hamper.”

“And medicine is more of an art than an exact science anyway.”

“So?” Eddy Bale said.

“A doctor gives one child six months and another two years.”

“So?”

“There’s no guarantee the one with six months couldn’t go two years.”

“Or the one with two years die in a week.”

“We have to be sure, you see,” Nedra Carp said.

“That they’re dying. That it’s actually imminent.”

“It’s a nice question,” Moorhead said.

“Like when brain death occurs.”

“Lung death.”

“Finger death,” muttered Mary Cottle in the loo.

“There are many nice questions.”

“There are many ethical considerations.”

“Suppose one kid is religious?”

“That he believes in God?”

“Has hope of Heaven?”

“Is convinced of it.”

“While the other kid isn’t even a believer?”

“Thinks when you’re dead you’re dead.”

“Or’s Jewish.”

“It wouldn’t be fair.”

“To the skeptic, atheist, agnostic kid.”

“To the kosher boy.”

“To the skeptic, atheist, agnost—?”

“Well, the religious kid would have it both ways, wouldn’t he?”

“Disney World, and Heaven too.”

“Or look at it the other way around.”

“That’s right.”

“Should the believer be penalized for his beliefs?”

“There are all these nice questions. I shouldn’t have thought we’d even scratched the surface.”

“Ought they to spend their final weeks away from their family, friends, and pets?”

“If I wear my armband all the time,” Bale reflected, “that could put them off.”

“Perhaps something less ostentatious. Perhaps a button in your lapel.”

“Well, you know, I never thought about the nice questions,” Eddy Bale said. “All I thought about was the fellowship of the thing.”

“See Naples and die.”

“See Naples and die?”

“He means how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm.”

“He means England and home might be a letdown.”

“That they could go into a reactive depression.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Bale asked. “You parse good deeds. Lawyers, ambulance chasers. I don’t know damn-all about the ethics and nice questions. Only ordinary human action. Nobody tells me ‘Have a good day’ anymore,” he said.

They stared at him.

“The chief’s right,” Colin Bible said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Mary Cottle, rubbing her hands as if she’d just dried them but hadn’t managed to get all the wetness off, came back into the room and smiled at them beatifically.

“Well,” Moorhead said, and picked up the remaining folders.

“Spit-spot!” said the nanny, Nedra Carp.

Which was when he got the giddies. Could barely refrain from spouting his gibberish about the desperado backgrounds he was constantly sketching in for them, their base curricula vitae pasts. “Chief” had worked on him, on all of them, like an enchantment. Eddy couldn’t help it, was as giddy with their gibberish and low bosh as with his own. Chief he’d never been, yet as soon as Bible spoke Bale perceived the change in the room, the simple fact of the matter. He was their chief, the responsible one in the bunch. The organizer. The enforcer. In their group madness they had, as madmen have always done — even those with delusions of grandeur — looked for someone at whose feet they could dump their delusions, fetching them to him with the pride of cats with dead mice, birds, cleverly preparing their loophole lunacy. While, just as cleverly (if with less good judgment), he saw what they were doing and accepted their nutty proposition, their singular single condition — that he be the one in charge.

So, like the good administrator he had just become, he delegated, who had himself been delegated, delegation smeared as perspective in a funhouse mirror — we’re all mad now, he thought — and asked the doctor for a run-down. He wanted Moorhead’s medical input, he said — he called him Moorhead; he said “input”—into a candidate’s qualifications. He would entertain suggestions, he said, as to who might best benefit from such a trip. And was actually startled to see the doctor take up folders he had already discarded, names and case histories strewn at his feet like debris, like castoffs in card games, and listened attentively as the physician offered his careful Senior Registrar’s considered advice, though not so much attentive — England’s most famous beggar munificent for once — as patient, to the physician’s latinate terms, expecting and getting his almost simultaneous layman’s translation, a kind of due, a sort of deference, as if he were Head of Delegation at the U.N., say, feeling good about things — he crossed his legs — and finally neither so much attentive or patient as complacent — he felt the hair silver about his temples — interrupting only to ask his perfect administrator’s breathtaking questions.

“Thank you, Mister Moorhead,” he said politely when the doctor had finished. And turned smartly to Colin Bible. “And you, are you in concurrence, Sister?” he wickedly asked the poof nurse who would have had dead Liam stuffed and put on exhibit in a case.

“Oh, aye,” Colin said. “There’s nought we can do for the medulloblastomas. They quite put one off with their dizzy spells and fits of vomiting, their falling down and constant headache.”

“Nanny?”

“They would me,” Nedra Carp said.

“What about the Stepney lad with corrected transposition of the great vessels?”

“He’s kind of cute,” Mary Cottle said dreamily, looking at a photograph.

“Well,” Colin Bible said, “as Doctor explained, their autopsies are interesting. Hearts like Spaghetti Junction. I say give him a pass.”

Bale went round the room and gave each of them the opportunity to disqualify one or two victims out of hand. Mary Cottle declined her turn sweetly and Eddy, his administrative eye on the logistics of the thing, reserved for himself the right to use her veto powers. In this way, in addition to Mr. Moorhead’s exclusions and Colin Bible’s of the boy from Stepney, they rid themselves of Dawson’s, Tay-Sachs, Krabbe’s I, Wilm’s, and Cushing’s disease, and were left with one case each of Gaucher’s disease, tetralogy of Fallot, osteosarcoma, cystic fibrosis, dysgerminoma, Chédiak-Higashi syndrome, progeria, and lymphoblastic leukemia.

“Well,” he said, standing up, “it seems all that remains to be done is to notify the parents and work out with the lawyers the wording of the disclaimer. Congratulations to you all and thank you. I’d say we’ve done rather a good day’s work.”

He believed it.

Then why, he asked himself when they left, do I feel like such a prick?

It was a nice question.

3

The kid with Chédiak-Higashi disease was dead. A newspaper reported the story of Eddy’s group three days before its official release date. The child, recognizing Bale’s name on the envelope that had been addressed to his parents, was so excited by the prospect of going on the dream holiday that he tore open the letter without thinking. The discrete paper cut he did not even feel at the time — he was that excited — but the big sandy granules that invaded his white blood cells, and made them ineffectual in fighting infection, did him in.

Janet Order also saw the letter before her parents did, and though she had a pretty good idea about its contents — like many of the diseased children, like Liam himself, she was exceptionally bright; she would, if she lived, be a teenager on her next birthday; her body had begun to fill out months before and already she’d had to abandon her training bra for the real thing; this didn’t particularly embarrass her and, indeed, she quite accepted the idea of becoming a young lady, taking an interest in her puberty, rather proud of it actually, attending her monthlies with a modest though becoming interest, enjoying, if not the discomfort of her periods, at least the opportunity to minister to them, to care for herself, dressing in the queer new tampons and flushing herself with scentless, lightly medicated douches, evaluating not only the different painkillers on the market but their most effective dosages as well, taking an almost ecological interest in the crop of sparse, light brown hair which dusted her mons veneris, and generally presiding over and servicing the new blockbuster secretions of her glands with a solicitude she had a few years earlier shown for her dolls — she did not open it, preferring to wait for her parents, meanwhile practicing the new biofeedback techniques, stretching, and deep-breathing exercises her physical therapist had shown her. In a few minutes her pulse had returned to normal and her pressure, which she had been taught to take by herself, was not, for her, especially elevated.

Janet had a congenital heart disease, tetralogy of Fallot. In all other respects a bright and even beautiful child, she had been born with a hole in her heart and a transposed aorta, a heart like one of those spectacularly deformed vegetables one sometimes sees on Fair days: a potato in the shape of a white bread, say, or a cluster of Siamese-joined grapes. She was tall for her age, delicate but sturdily built, and had long, flaxen hair to her waist. In a black-and-white photograph one would have seen an unsmiling, even pouty, but remarkably attractive child. The pout was put on, a performance, not so much a sign of mood as, or so Janet thought, of character. She was, considering, a cheerful enough girl and sulked at the world only in those pictures, doing it, she liked to think, as a kind of truth in advertising, sending her sneers and sniffinesses, her frowns and scowls, to the people who would see these pictures, so as not to misrepresent herself; to discount her beauty or, rather, to signal its opposite, invisible in the black-and-white photographs. Because of her abnormality, the deficient oxygenation in her holed heart, the surgically attached aorta added on by the doctors like some displaced bit of afterthought architecture, she had been cyanotic from birth, her skin everywhere an even, dusky bluish color, dark as seawater.

Additional operations had, as her parents had been warned, as she had, only been remedial, not treatment so much as a flurry of activity, battles fought over the inopportune ground of her tampered chest.

Children teased her.

“Ooh,” they might say, “dere goes a piece of der bloody sky.”

“Yar. I’ve seen fledgling birds wot fly crost ’er face fer practice.”

“Yar, well, dat’s because dey fink she’s one of deir own. Some great gawky bluebirdy her own self.”

“Nah,” they might say, “wot dey fink is dat she’s a blueberry patch. Dey’re looking to snack off her.”

Janet Order viewed these occasions as opportunities to correct the kids, to make, as she saw it, the world a better place in which to live. “It’s only a birth defect. You oughtn’t to laugh at birth defects, children,” she would say. “My skin is blue because when I was born my blood flowed through the hole in my heart to my body without first passing into my lungs. It’s the lungs that tint the blood red by adding oxygen, boys and girls.”

“Bleedin’ ’eart ’ole!” they taunted. “’Ere coom Janet Order wif er bleedin’ ’eart ’ole!”

What most concerned her, though, was their fear. For each child who mocked her, there were a dozen who couldn’t even look at her.

“No, no,” she’d say, “don’t be afraid, touch it. Go ahead, touch my skin. Oh, I know it looks icy but it isn’t. It’s as warm as your own. Go on, touch it. I don’t mind.”

And sometimes, occasionally, once in a while, a brave soul would. He would touch it gingerly, laying the back of his hand against her blue cheek while Janet took his own pink hand in her two blue ones and guided it along the length of her blue arm, her blue neck and blue shoulders, soothing him, comforting. “There,” she’d say, “you see? It’s not cold. It’s blue like this because the lungs build up pressure and the patches burst where the surgeons keep sealing it and grafting blood vessels onto it like you’d patch an old tire. It could have been corrected, but they say I have this ventricular septal defect. You mustn’t be afraid.” But the child would think of Janet Order’s blue defect and shudder involuntarily in her temperate blue grasp.

She had only grown kind. When she was smaller, and had played the secret games of childhood, the other children had been terrified of the blue surgical scars crisscrossing her chest like surfaced veins, of her blue behind and little blue mons. Wickedly, she’d teased them, cruel and comfortable in her blue power over them.

On the day of the letter, tears were rolling down her cheeks when her parents returned. “This letter came. I didn’t open it but I think it’s about my dream holiday.” She handed the envelope to her father.

“It is,” he said. “Oh, it’s grand news, Janet. In two weeks you’ll be leaving for Florida. Can we get her ready in time?” he asked his wife. “She’ll need some summery dresses, I should think. And a new bathing suit. What do you think, Doris? Can we get her ready? Oh, ducks, don’t cry. Don’t cry, ducks.”

“Our Janet’s a big girl now,” her mother explained. “Sometimes when they’re extra especially happy the only way a big girl can show it is by crying.” Then she turned to her daughter. “But please, Janet,” her mother said, “you know it’s not good for you to become emotional. Your lovely brown eyes have gone all blue.”

“I’m not worthy, Mummy,” her daughter whispered.

“Don’t be silly, Janet. All those operations? You’ve been a dreadfully burdened little girl.”

And then Janet Order confessed that her blueness had never been a burden and told her parents what she’d said to those little boys, whispered to them in those dank basements and dim potting sheds and in the obscure corners of the deserted common, frightening them, boasting of her blue bowels and blue pee, commanding their loyalty by the blue power of her blue tears.

Noah Cloth, confined to hospitals at a time in his life when other boys his age were in school, could not read well or do his maths. His history was weak, his geography, most of his subjects. Only in art had he done well, and now he’d lost his ability to draw. Nine times he’d been operated on for bone tumors: in his right wrist, along his left and right femurs, on both elbows, once at the base of his skull, and once for little garnetlike tumors around a necklace of collarbone. Twice they had cut into his left hand by the bones beneath the skin of his ring finger. The first operation had been successful, yielding tiny growths of a benign jewelry, but when the surgeons went back in a second time, they discovered the boy had severe osteosarcoma and had to amputate the finger. They told Noah’s parents they must expect more malignancies, and a nice lady from a hospice came to explain what was what to the kid.

Noah argued with the woman, asserting that there were just hundreds of bones in the human body that were dispensable, the bone in his ring finger, for example. He told her he could live a normal life, not indefinitely, of course, no one lived forever, and probably not without some inconvenience, every once in a while sacrificing a really important poisoned bone or so, but what he really feared, he said, was that one of these days the poison would find its way into his leg and they’d have to amputate it and replace it with an artificial one — he saw what went on; he’d spent lots of time on the rehabilitation wards — and he’d have to walk with a cane. He laughed and said he guessed worse things had happened at sea, but what if it was the right leg they had to cut off?

“The right leg?” asked the lady from the hospice.

“Well, sure,” he said, “then I’d really be knackered, wouldn’t I? Well, I mean I spent all that time on the wards, didn’t I? So I know about these things.” She wasn’t following him. “It’s the opposite limb,” Noah explained. “The cane goes in the hand opposite the wounded limb.”

“I don’t…”

“Oh, lady,” Noah Cloth said, and held out the hand with the missing finger. “It’s all right once you get accustomed, but how’s a bloke supposed to rehabilitate himself into a wood leg if he can’t even hold his cane proper? I mean, it’s what happened with my drawing pens, isn’t it?”

And only a few weeks before, he’d begun to detect a sharp pain along the length of his right shin. Uh-oh, he thought, but said nothing to his parents or the doctors, and nothing either to the busybody from the hospice, because he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction and because, too, she only depressed him with her arguments.

“Don’t you see, Noah,” she told the eleven-year-old boy when she called round at his house to ask him to die, “you’re denying the facts. Don’t you see how typical your behavior is? Kübler- Ross tells us that denial, rage, bargaining, and acceptance is the classic pattern of people in your circumstance. You can’t get past even the first stage. How do you expect to come to terms with your situation?”

“Well, if I don’t,” Noah Cloth said, “I won’t die then, will I?”

“That’s bargaining,” the woman said, pouncing cheerfully.

“No,” Noah Cloth said evenly, “it’s rage.”

The hospice woman left him a pamphlet.

Which, since he couldn’t read, he threw to the corner of his bed, where his father found it when he came into Noah’s room later that evening. The father picked the pamphlet up to examine. “You know what this is about?” he asked.

“No,” Noah Cloth said.

“Do you want me to read it to you?”

“Is it a story?”

“No,” his father said.

“Because there’s better stories on the telly,” Noah said.

“This isn’t a story,” his father said and cleared his throat while Noah quietly began to grieve and his mother came into the bedroom to listen as the father read to the son about letting go of life, tough talk about the child’s fears, how it was important not to be ashamed to die. When his father finished he closed the book and looked at the boy.

“It was a story after all,” Noah Cloth said, and drew a deep breath and felt a stitch. No bones there, he thought absently, ignorant still of what his disease might yet do to him — all its oyster irritabilities and abrasions, the little shards of malignant pearl piercing his lungs like studs, glowing like nacre, shining his breath like dew.

“Some dream holiday,” Benny Maxine, the Gaucher’s disease, complained to Rena Morgan, the cystic fibrosis.

“What’s wrong with Disney World?”

“Well, nuffink if what you’re into is rides and a bunch of dwarfs and down-and-out actors what can’t get proper work all dressed up like animals wif their paws stuck out for a bit of graft every time you might want to take your picture wif dem. I’m at liberty to tell you dat’s not my idea. Benjamin Maxine, luv. Benny to me mates. I don’t fink I’ve ’ad the pleasure.”

“Rena Morgan, Benjamin.”

“Benny to me mates.”

“Benny.”

They shook hands solemnly.

“No, that’s not my idea at all,” Benny Maxine said. “Not of no dream holiday it ain’t.”

“Have you been there?”

“What, the Wor-ruld? No fear!”

“Well, maybe you’ll be surprised. Perhaps you’ll like it after all.”

“Nah,” Benny said. “It’s some tarted-up Brighton, is all. Adventureland, Tomorrowland. The bloody Never-lands! Greasy great kid stuff is what I say!”

“The Netherlands?”

“What?” Benny Maxine said. “Oh. No, sweetheart. Never- Land. You know, where Peter Pansy flies his pals in the pantomime. Not the country, not the place wif the wood gym shoes and all the boot forests. You don’t talk the bull’s wool, do you, luv? Not to worry. We’re all Englitch ’ere. Just little dying Englitch boys and girls. Which is why I fink we should ’ave been personally consulted, drawn into the discussions, like, before they shipped us all off to Florida and the Magic Kingdom to put us on the rides and expose us to the dangerous tropic sun.

(“Don’t look now, luv,” Benny whispered, and indicated with a gesture of his chin where Janet Order was sitting, “but that one could do wif a bit o’ old Sol!) I mean, how do they know where a poor little mortal loser like yours truly would like to take his dream holiday? No one sat on the side of my bed and listened to me talk in me sleep.”

“Where would you?”

“What, take my dream holiday?”

“That’s right.”

“What, if I had the whole wide world to choose from?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s no contest then, is there? I mean, look what we got ’ere. Africa, South America, Australia. Asia. You can’t forget Asia. There’s Mother Russia and China, too, in Asia.”

“Is that where you’d go, Asia?”

“Monte Carlo,” Benny Maxine said.

“Why that’s only in the south of France.”

“Monaco. It’s in Monaco.”

The little girl giggled. “And isn’t as big as Regent’s Park, I shouldn’t think.”

“A choice seafront property,” Benny Maxine said.

“What a queer place to choose,” Rena said. “Whatever would you do there? Get your postcards franked?”

“Yeah, that’s right. And send them off to you and Little Girl Blue over there in Mickey Mouseland. ‘Yours truly,’ I’d sign them. ‘The Kid Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo!’”

“You wi-ish!”

“Hey, you’re pretty lively for a snotnose, ain’t you?”

For her giggle had shaken loose some of the immense reserves of Rena Morgan’s clear, cystic fibrotic phlegm. Benny watched for a moment. “You got a bad cold there, luv,” he said, offering his big clean handkerchief. Which, shaking her head, she declined, opening instead a rather large and attractive flowered canvas drawstring bag which, or so it seemed to Benny, appeared to contain nothing but handkerchiefs, men’s handkerchiefs, bigger than his own, some of them already crumpled. She poked her hand into the depths of the bag, plunged her wrists past the wet linen, and withdrew an unused handkerchief. Then, taking hold of it by a corner, she flipped it once and the whole thing came unfolded, unfurling like a flag, rolled carpet, an umbrella. She didn’t press the handkerchief to her face, she didn’t even actually blow, but allowed it to pass under her nose in a continuous, unbroken movement, like someone sliding corn on the cob past her teeth, Benny thought, or like paper moving beneath the keys of a typewriter.

“Sorry,” Rena Morgan said, crumpling the now-drenched handkerchief and dropping it into her bag. She seemed quite recovered.

“That’s a great trick,” Benny said. “How you unfolded that hanky.”

“I secrete too much mucus. It’s disgusting,” she said. “I’ve cystic fibrosis.”

“Well, we all got our cross, don’t we, or we wouldn’t be sitting here in de West bloody London Air Terminal waiting to be taken off to bleedin’ Heathrow in the bloody limos like it was already our bleedin’ funerals, would we?”

“You shouldn’t curse.”

“I’m fifteen years old.”

“I don’t think age has anything to do with it.”

“Yeah, and I don’t think age has anything to do with where a person would want to spend his dream holiday.”

“Think?”

“Pardon?”

“You didn’t say ‘fink.’ You can pronounce your th’s.”

“A diller, a dollar, a ten o’clock scholar.”

“What’s your cross?”

“Oh, my cross. My cross is the Magen David.”

“I never know what you’re talking about, Benny.”

“I’m a yid. I’ve got this yid disease. Gaucher’s, it’s called. I’ve got this big yid liver, this hulking hebe spleen. I’ve this misshapen face and this big bloated belly. It’s the chosen disease of the chosen people.”

“What does it do?”

“What does it do? It makes me beautiful and qualifies me to meet Donald Duck in person.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s very weird. Sugar accumulates in my cells.” He lowered his voice. “See my fingers?”

“You bite your nails.”

“For a treat. I chew my thumbs. I lick my palms. I’m candy. I squeeze sweetness out of the juice of my tongue; my saliva’s better than soda pop. Look.” He unbuttoned his shirt sleeve. Indistinct crescents of teeth mark made a random, mysterious graffiti all along his arm. “I’m caramel, I’m cake, I’m syrup, I’m mead. I’m treacle and jam, I’m bonbons and honey. It’s incredible. I’m bloody fattening. But nah, it don’t hurt. Only when my bones break. I’ve got these peanut-brittle bones. Like tooth decay, only in the marrow.”

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Rena said.

“Yeah, well, we’re all ’orrible ’ere. That blue kid? The one that looks like someone’s school colors? And what’s’isname, Cloth, the one with the cancer, that they keep sawing at and carving on so that even if he lives he’ll end up looking like a joint for somebody’s Sunday dinner?”

“You’re terrible,” Rena said.

“They put me off my feed, our crowd does,” Benny Maxine said. “I don’t think I could take one contented munch off meself round this lot.”

“Oh, Benny.”

“You know what a tontine is?”

“A tontine?”

“It’s this agreement, like. Usually geezers make it? Flyers from the war, daft old boys, a particular chapter, say, of the Baker Street Irregulars — people tied up in some dotty mutual enterprise. And each puts something into the kitty, survivor take all. That’s what our bunch ought to do. Get up a tontine. We could have Mister Moorhead handicap us. Like underwriters do for the life assurance societies. We prorate what each puts in and — hey,” Benny Maxine said, “hey, don’t. Hey.”

The girl was crying, her tears melding with the clear gelatins of her runny nose.

“What’s happened?” her mother demanded, running from where she and the other parents had been talking with the staff. “Stop that, Rena! Stop! You know what crying does to you. Oh, Rena,” she said, and held the child in her arms, dabbing at her daughter’s nose with handkerchiefs from the drawstring bag, stabbing her mucus, blotting it up, stanching it as if it were some queer, devastating blood.

Bale feared they might never take off. Last-minute hitches. At this point almost a sign. Something might have been waving red flags at him, warning him off. Stand clear or be destroyed with them, his kids, his doomed collective charges. (Charges indeed. Bale’s bombs. Rigged. Set. Eddy’s timed tots. He felt like a sapper.) Ginny was there, Eddy waving and calling “Over here, over here,” like a reconciliation in pictures, the kids looking as if a ringer had been snuck in on them, the wise-guy kid, Benny Maxine, rolling his eyes and nodding his Uh-oh’s and What now’s? as if he knew something. How do you like that kid? Bale wondered. Playing to the crowd, putting on his phony Cockney accent when the closest he’d been to Bow Bells was Michael Caine films; Eddy Bale spotting Ginny meanwhile and doing his own home movies in his head, crying and laughing like a loon in Heathrow’s crowded departure lounge and singing “Over here, over here!” as if it were a railroad platform at Waterloo they stood on, both of them caught up in the indifferent traffic, swimming against the stream like salmon and Eddy already figuring out what to say. Ginny not even an apparition, not even someone who just looked like her, who wore her hair the same way or had similar tics. Ginny Ginny, and, worse luck, embarrassed. “Gee, Eddy, I didn’t remember today was the big day.” “What are you doing here then?” “Meeting a friend.” “Oh,” Eddy said. “Are those the children?” “What? Them? The saucy blue baggage who looks like she’s been dipped in grape juice? The boy with no place to put his ring? That little tyke with the wig who looks like she’s eight months pregnant? Or maybe you mean that idiot-looking nipper sucking chemotherapy from a bottle.” “Oh, Eddy.” “What friend?” “My lover friend, Eddy.” “Your lover friend. Ri-ight.” “I don’t want to hold you up,” she said. “Anyone I know?” “Oh, Eddy.” “Is he?” “Yes.” “You know something, Ginny? That’s too bad. I mean it really is. That makes me sorry for you in a way. Because I can’t, I mean try as I may, I brutal truthfully can’t think of anyone we both know who can hold a candle to me in the way of friendship or anything like loyalty.” The uproar in the lounge a welcome distraction by this time, a sound like the sudden appearance of celebrity, Eddy Bale looking over his shoulder.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “It’s the wiseacre.”

Benny Maxine was talking to the media.

“After all this excitement, what’s the first thing you mean to do when you get on that plane, Benny?”

“Hijack it to Monte Carlo. I’ve had an ’art-to-’art wif me mates an’ we’ve decided dat Florider is a nice ernuff place ter be if you’re a horange or a halligator, but Monte Carlo’s where de action is for poor blokes wot are last-flinging it an’ habout ter make deir mums an’ das orfinks, as ’twere. Der red an’ der black, Chemmy-de-fer an’ de nude beaches, dat’s de place fer us!” Benny Maxine said into their television cameras.

“You really mean to hijack that seven forty-seven, Benny?”

“You de bloke from de Times?”

“Evening Standard.”

“I want ter see de Times chap. De Queen takes de Times.”

“I’m from the Times.”

“Tell der Queen we’re Englitchmen, loyal subjects one an’ all. Tell ’er we go where we’re sent. Tell ’em in Piccadilly, tell ’em in Leicester Square. Tell ’em on de playink fields de lent’ an’ bret’ uh dis great kingdom. We’re nought but poor terminal yunsters wot may be dying an’ all, but true blue Englitch for all dat. Hip hip, haw haw!”

They stared at him.

“Too much?” Benny asked in his own voice.

Benny abandoned, the press off to take down the views of the more solemnly sick, getting Janet Order’s blue opinions, Noah Cloth’s amputate pearls, Rena Morgan’s sob story, the wit and wisdom of Lydia Conscience and Charles Mudd-Gaddis and Tony Word.

“I make the best copy,” Benny Maxine sulked to Bale. “I’m the character here.”

“It isn’t a contest, Benny,” Eddy consoled. “Don’t push so hard.”

“Jimmy Cagney,” Benny Maxine said. “I want to go out like those guys they used to send down that last mile to the chair. Chewing gum, cracking jokes. ‘I know what you’re up to, Fadda. You’re a good Joe, but you’re wasting your time. I guess I’m just this bad hardboiled egg, Fadda.’”

“Come on, Benny.”

“I’m fifteen years old, Mr. Bale. Those other kids. Some of them are sicker than I am, but I don’t think it’s hit them yet. What’s what. How they’ve been kissed off by God and medical science both. The nits are actually excited.”

“Listen, Benny, don’t get the idea you’re here to set anyone straight. There’s no timetable. It ain’t British Rail. Leave them alone with your inside information.”

And filling in the nanny, Nedra Carp, about Benny: “Use the spurs on that one, Miss Carp. He wants to tell ghost stories.”

“Call me Nanny,” Nedra Carp said. “Prince Philip called me Nanny. Her Highness did.”

And Mr. Moorhead, who advised him that Ben was very likely in a manic phase just now and that they could expect a reactive depression to follow. Telling Eddy that while there wasn’t much he could do medically for the child at this point, if his symptoms became more focused they could take certain steps. “Jesus,” Bale said. “He’s manic depressive too?”

“We can handle it. If he gets really low,” said the physician, “I’ve some reds I can give him.”

“Reds,” Eddy said.

“Sure,” the good doctor said, “and if he climbs too high we can put him on blues.”

“Reds and blues,” Eddy Bale said, staring at the medical man.

“Uppers and downers, Eddy,” the doctor explained scientifically. “This could all have been avoided if we’d had extensive psychological profiles on these kids. Though it just might help if we kept him off sweets.”

Eddy Bale thought of Benny Maxine’s hi-cal fingernails.

Because the last-minute hitches were something more than the odd mislaid passport or their friends crowding round to see them off, their relatives’ helpful hints, special-pleading the kids’ tics and habits that they chose only at this last minute to disclose to Eddy, Eddy’s staff, Eddy taking notes and going into a furious, extemporized version of a shorthand he would not later be entirely able to decipher, offering the benefit of their close, habituate knowledge, their eight- to fifteen-year-old front-line observation of their offspring, filling them in — even the hostesses, even the stewards, the pilot, the crew of the 747 who had come out to look at their special passengers — on everything they could think of, as if the children were temperamental doors that only they knew how to open, cars difficult to start unless you knew just how to turn the ignition — Eddy furiously writing, writing — or houses leased for a season to strangers, pressing on them, too, medications that would have to be chilled, chipped toys, broken dolls, scraps of blanket, swatches of garment: all the emergency rations of a crisis comfort. (Exactly as if they were mechanical, their disorders trying as someone else’s machinery.) Or even the crush of the press. Not hitches, not even helpful hints, so much as a series of charms and spells. And Eddy trying to keep up, to get it all down. The real hitches his queer staff. Only Colin Bible quietly coping. Only Mary Cottle serene. The kids themselves in palace revolt, bloodless coup. Not noisy — they wouldn’t be noisy children, giving loudness only to their pain, the klaxon fortissimos of alarm — but moving along vaguely forbidden routes, doing the water fountains excessively, the lever- operated ashtrays, the now dismantled television equipment, the mikes and lights, watching the planes land, pointing, their eyes peeled for catastrophe. The real hitch his staff, his caper- dreamed crew. (Bale taking notes furiously, abbreviating, jotting, underscoring, placing exclamation points like unsheathed daggers beside main points he would later puzzle over, wondering what they could possibly mean.)

Out of the side of Bale’s mouth: “Get on them, please, Nanny.”

“At once, sir,” Nedra agreed, and Bale, even out of just the corner of his eye and even with only half an ear cocked and only a fraction of his already divided attentions, could tell at once the enormity of his mistake. She was solicitous and intimidated, her months with Prince Andrew no plus at all, a season of watered, undermined authority. (He should have demanded references from Her Majesty.) Eddy saw her for what she was, more nursemaid than nanny, a tucker-inner, a pusher of perambulators and strollers, protective enough but incapable of anything but loyalty, by nature a fan, for Labor, he guessed, when Labor was in, a Tory under the Tories, on all Authority’s impressive tit, effaced, invisible as a poor relation or maiden aunty. Wouldn’t the children be happier in the airport’s lovely, comfortable seats? she wondered. Would they like to look at some of our nation’s lovely newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind? Perhaps a few of the bigger children could read some of the smaller children the news?

“Was that a crack?” Charles Mudd-Gaddis snarled.

“Of course not, Charles,” Nedra Carp said. “I’m sorry if you took it that way.”

“I may only be eight years old and three feet tall,” he sneered, “and weigh only thirty-nine pounds, but I’m not ‘some of the smaller children.’”

“Of course not.”

“I’ve got progeria,” he said bitterly.

“Yes.”

“It’s a condition,” he grumbled.

“I know.”

“It ages me prematurely,” he complained.

“Tch-tch.”

“It shrivels me up like a little old man,” he groused sullenly.

“Of course it does,” she said, and looked around desperately, studying Heathrow’s lovely lever-operated ashtrays should she be taken ill.

“It wrinkles my skin and hardens my arteries and causes my hair to fall out,” he whined.

“That’s only natural,” she said vaguely.

“No one knows the cause,” he said acrimoniously. He pointed to the doctor. “That one, for example. He doesn’t know the cause. He doesn’t know the cure either,” he grumped.

“I’m sure they’re working on it,” Nedra Carp offered brightly.

“Too rare,” Mudd-Gaddis shot back crossly.

Her attention had wandered. She was looking at the airport’s comfortable seats and wishing she were seated in one now, curled up with one of the nation’s newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind. “Sorry?” she said, turning back to him.

“I said too rare. What’s wrong with your ears, woman?” he asked irritably. “One in eight million births. No one’s going to commit the research money to wipe out progeria when only one in eight million gets it,” he growled.

Nedra Carp nodded.

“It constipates me and makes me cranky,” he told her crankily.

“That’s awful.”

“I have to take prune juice,” he said resentfully.

“I’ll see there’s some always on hand.”

“But I’ve got all my faculties,” he protested indignantly.

“Certainly,” Nedra Carp said.

“Which I daresay is more than many can say,” he added accusingly. “I can recall things that happened to me when I was two years old as if it were yesterday. I’m very alert for my age.”

“What about yesterday?”

“I don’t remember yesterday.”

“I see.”

He studied her carefully.

“Yes?” Nedra coaxed.

“Are you my uncle Phil?” he asked.

“I’m Nanny,” Nanny said.

“That’s right,” Mudd-Gaddis said, and shuffled off, Nedra Carp looking after the little withered fellow in a sort of awe. Death was the authority here. Death was boss.

Bale, who’d overheard Benny Maxine offer to make book with the children about who’d get back alive, wanted a piece of the action. The kid quoted long odds for naming the deceased in a sort of daily double, suggested complicated bets — trifectas, quinellas. When they looked at him peculiarly he objected that there was nothing illegal about it, it was just like the pools. Eddy thought of going up to the boy. He’d have put Nedra Carp’s name down beside his own.

Meanwhile, Ginny had come back into the lounge with a man who looked familiar, who rather resembled, except for his clothes, Tony, their old newsagent and tobacconist. A sport in a sort of savvy, modified trench coat television journalists sometimes wore in the field, he seemed absolutely at home in a world class airport like Heathrow and looked, in his cunning, elegant zippers, loops and epaulets, one hand rakishly tipped into what might have been a map pocket, every inch the double agent. He could almost have been holding a gun, was awash in gaiety and a kind of hysterical flush — joy? — and seemed as if he might be taken off any second now by a sort of apoplectic rapture.

“You remember Tony,” Ginny said.

“How are you, Eddy?” Tony said, and withdrew the gun- toting hand from the depths of his trench coat. Bale wondered why all the men who broke up homes in Britain were named Tony. “Fine bunch of bairn,” the anchorman added affably, indicating the terminally ill children. “You know, they don’t seem all that sick?” he said.

“They don’t?” Bale said.

“Well,” Tony said, qualifying, “maybe the little preggers kid doesn’t look quite strong enough to carry to term.”

“The preggers kid.”

Ginny’s friend indicated wasted little Lydia Conscience, eleven, whose ovarian tumor had indeed punched up her belly to something like the appearance of a seventh- or eighth-month pregnancy.

“She has dysgerminoma,” Eddy Bale said with great feigned dignity. “That’s a tumor she’s carrying to term.”

“Hmm,” the foreign correspondent said thoughtfully. “You know what gets me about all this?”

“What’s that?”

He lowered his voice. “When they’re that sick they go all emaciated, and it makes their eyes something enormous,” he said. “That’s because eyes don’t grow. It’s a fact. Eyes is full size at birth. Then, when the face comes down, it’s pathetic. ‘Windows of the soul,’ eyes are. Big eyes touch a chord in Christians. Oxfam understands this. That’s why you see all them great full- moon eyes in the adverts, Eddy.” Bale widened his own eyes and looked at his wife. She hung on the fellow’s arm, attached there like one more of the trench coat’s accessories. Tony, intercepting Bale’s glance, shrugged shyly. “It’s odd and all, me calling you Eddy like this.”

Eddy studied him. “Tell me something, would you?” he said at last.

“What’s that?”

“Are you really our old tobacconist?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“Not without the cardigan, not without the loose buttons hanging by a thread. You pronging my wife, then, Tony?”

“That isn’t a question a gentleman asks another gentleman,” their newsagent said stiffly.

“Come on, old man. Are you?”

“I shouldn’t have thought that was any of your bloody business,” said their ice lolly monger.

“Too personal?”

“Yes,” he said, poking about in his trench coat for a grenade, “I’d say too personal.”

“You’d say too personal.”

“I’d say so. Yes.”

“I don’t suppose it was too personal when you were selling us cigarettes!” Bale exploded. “I gather it wasn’t too personal when we bought your damned newspapers!” he shouted senselessly. He saw Mary Cottle reappear from the Ladies’. She seemed to watch them from behind a thick, almost weighty tranquillity. He turned to his wife. “This is a joke, right? Showing up in the departure lounge like this?”

“A joke?”

“He’s our tobacconist, for Christ’s sake! He keeps house behind a yellow curtain. A bell rings when the door opens and he pops out to sell ten pence worth of sweets. How’d you get him to close the shop?”

“You know something, Eddy? You’re a snob.”

“Tony, I really didn’t recognize you in that getup. Amateur theatricals, am I right? You’re good. You’re damned good. Isn’t he good, Ginny? Hey, thanks for coming by to see us off. Both of you. Really, thanks. It’s a grim occasion. And the fact is I was nervous. You took a lot of pressure off.”

“Getup? Getup?”

“Listen,” Bale said, “I appreciate it.”

“Sure I prong her,” Tony said. “Certainly I do. We prong each other. Turn and turn about. Behind the yellow curtain.”

Ginny was tugging at the sleeve of Tony’s coat. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll miss our plane.”

Benny Maxine was taking it all in. Mary Cottle was. Colin Bible looked up for a moment from the bottle of chemically laced orange juice he was nursing past Tony Word’s lips, and the nipple slid out of the little boy’s mouth. Some juice squirted into the corner of the child’s eye and he startled. “Watch what you’re doing,” the little boy said. “That stuff smarts.”

“Don’t grumble,” Colin said. “That shows it’s working.”

“Isn’t he too big to take medicine from a bottle?” Noah Cloth asked.

“It’s nasty,” Colin explained. “A spoonful of titty makes the medicine go down. Don’t ask me why.”

Noah Cloth ran off laughing to tell the others what Bible had said.

Mr. Moorhead was making a sort of Grand Rounds in the departure lounge, almost abstractedly checking pulses, touching foreheads with the back of his hand, peering down throats and looking into eyes and ears, making jokes, soothing parents and children both with his big, complicated presence.

An airlines agent cleared his throat into a live microphone. “Well,” Ginny said, holding her hand out for her husband to shake, “happy landings.”

“Turn and turn about,” Eddy Bale said, taking it.

“Good trip, Colin,” she said, acknowledging her dead son’s nurse. Bible nodded, and Ginny went off with her lover.

Parents were hugging their own, each other’s kids. Colin Bible’s roommate, who’d shown up just as the children and their caretakers were about to board, reached out and patted his friend’s cheek and handed him what looked to be a brand-new Polaroid camera. Mary Cottle smiled dreamily as Lydia Conscience began to recite. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she recited, “and pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“It’s just like they say,” Benny Maxine said. “There ain’t no atheists in foxholes.” And Eddy Bale, boarding the airplane, wondered what he thought he was doing and, oddly, and not for the first time either, just what the hell went on behind that yellow curtain.

4

Mr. Moorhead needn’t have worried. He’d been unable to sleep during the long flight across the Atlantic. Though he hadn’t paid for a headset, he sat in the dark and watched a film he’d already seen, trying, with the aid of his memory and intense concentration, to read the actors’ lips, even to bring back the theme music, grand and vaguely classical, to see if he could match his memory of the story to the mood of the weak and watery silent scene projected before him on a screen the size of a desk top. For some reason the exercise reminded him of his days as a medical student, when he’d spent entire nights getting up an exam. A close-up of the heroine brought back the obscure pathology of a wasting disease, a master shot of a city street the sharp, deserted, shut-down memory of epidemic, an overview of a crowd scene the metallic taste and texture of plague. He rarely took his eyes from the screen — once to adjust the volume on Tony Word’s headset and again to find an additional blanket for Lydia Conscience — and when the film was over Mr. Moorhead had both a complicated sense of the film’s mildly melodramatic plot and the sour etiologies of a hundred diseases in his head.

What had upset him, however obscurely, what had forced him to his strange effort to bring back an entire motion picture he hadn’t enjoyed when he’d seen it the first time, was the fear that he might have to room with Colin Bible.

I’m not a bad man, Mr. Moorhead thought. I do no evil. And, wondering whether he was a good doctor, he began soundlessly to cry.

In the seat next to him Benny Maxine stirred, whimpered in his sleep. The doctor carefully removed the shoes from the boy’s swollen feet and loosened the small airline blanket from where it had become tangled, caught beneath his hips. He adjusted the pillow to a more comfortable angle and frowned in the dim light at the Jew’s oddly slacked jaw, the puffy, almost flexible bone structure that gave Benny’s head a queer mashed quality. If he could he would have remolded the kid’s face, tamping, patting, massaging the bad bones back into phase, packing the distended skin about them as he would have trimmed wet sand about the pylons and fretwork of a beach castle.

Mr. Moorhead had a vagrant impulse toward the chiropractic, an urge like some Pygmalion of the medical, a desire to extract health, to grow it like a culture in a petri dish, to adjust, as he’d adjusted Benny’s blanket and pillow, drawing off all the gnarled strings and matted clumps of illness and disease. At university he had led his classes in anatomy, a wizard of parts, an almost sculptor’s instinct for muscle and bone, an almost geologist’s or diviner’s one for the shales and fluids of form. He could tell at a glance the distortions on an anatomical chart and all the split ends of an internal organ badly drawn. He had an artist’s eye for the human body and, in museums, would actually diagnose statues, excitedly explaining to astonished friends, even to strangers, which statues and pictures were modeled from life, which were only the sculptor’s or painter’s Platonic ideal. Michelangelo he thought a fraud. “If there’d been an actual model for David,” he’d once told his professor, “he’d probably still be alive.” And had a theory that her incipient goiter would, were she real, almost certainly have killed off the Mona Lisa before her thirtieth year.

And that was the rub. A pal to whom he’d explained his David idea was a student at the Royal Academy of Art. “But look here, Moorhead,” his friend told him, “there really was. A model. Some kosher boy Michelangelo was sweet on. Genuine McCoy right down to his high holy circumcised pecker. There are life casts in the R.A. basement.”

“Life casts.”

His friend winked. “High times in sunny Italy. Signor Buonarroti liked them dripping in plaster, ooh la la.”

Because he was smitten by an ideal of health and life, some full-moon notion of the hale and hearty. Of soundness, bloom, the body filled to its sunny, f-stop conditions of solstitial, absolute ripeness like a ship floating in water precisely between its measured load lines. Flowers in their brief perfection broke his heart. Healthy beasts did. All perfect specimens, male and female. All heedless vitality, all organisms generally unconscious of pain, unmindful of death. It was why he had become a doctor in the first place and chosen pediatrics as his specialty. It was what both appalled and fascinated him about Jews.

He was already a resident when he saw the photographs. Of the survivors. From the camps. Not men but devastated, stick- figured blueprints for men. The declined, obscene inversions of all those anatomical paradigms of the human he’d studied at university. And that overturned for him forever the near-flawless portraits of the sound and scatheless, the immaculately unblemished, all those slick, transparent graphics and overlays that had, almost without his thinking about it, instilled in him an idea of centrifugal man, the notion of health as a radiation outward from some fixed center, of the organs and glands, the gristles and guts, impacting their neighbors, transmitting actual electric life from some unseen, unseeable omphalos — pith? gist? soul? — as if body, body itself, were only a kind of archaeology, some careful pile of palimpsest arrangement, sequential as arithmetic. The photographs had been a revelation to him, astonishing not for what they revealed to him about what men were capable of doing to each other but for what they taught him about his trade. He had to revise all his old theories. Disease, not health, was at the core of things; his idea of pith and gist and soul obsolete for him now, revised downward to flaw, nubbin, rift; incipient sickness the seed which sent forth its contaged shoots raging through the poisoned circuits of being. He stuck a jeweler’s loupe in his eye and examined, pored over, scrutinized, their busted constitutions. From loose and sunken skeletons, from hollows and craters beneath baggy skin ill-fitting as badly hung wallpaper, he dared spectacular diagnoses, astonishing prognoses. He must have seemed like some scholarly counterfeiter, double-, even triple-checking his plates, searching them for error and balls-up. Learning more from those terrible photographs than ever he had from the perfect meat in those idealized medical texts. He must have seemed crazy to his Jewish registrar, who caught him out, the loupe in his eye like a pawnbroker’s and the pictures spread out before him like pornography.

But Colin Bible was a different story.

Colin Bible was a perfect specimen and Mr. Moorhead was flustered by him. He hadn’t bargained for any Colin Bible. Most likely the male nurse was a fag and, already in love with the man’s visible health, Moorhead bit his nails and worried that he’d have to share a room with him. He wished now he’d argued more persuasively with his wife, a comfortable, not unattractive woman, made safe to Moorhead’s consciousness by the varicose veins in her calves, that she accompany him. Moorhead, who wished to be a good man, missed her. He was crying again, not soundlessly this time but openly sobbing.

Benny Maxine stirred and murmured in his sleep, and Moorhead leaned over to listen.

“If you can’t afford to lose, don’t gamble,” Benny mumbled.

Lydia Conscience giggled. Of all the children on the plane — indeed, of all the sleeping children in the world at that moment, those in their beds for the night as well as those merely napping — she was the only one who happened to be dreaming of the Magic Kingdom. She knew this because there was no busy signal, no distracting burr to flatten and compromise the call. And, though she was a generous child, it was pleasant to have the dream to herself, not, as in hospital, to have always to share — the attentions of the nurses, treats, visitors, the ward’s big telly — with the other patients.

The big park was not empty of visitors — that would have frightened her — but there were no long lines for the rides and shows and restaurants, no one in the clean rest rooms. There were a nurse and a doctor on duty in the cool, comfortable emergency tent but no one was there to cry out for first aid, not even a lost child to rumple a cot or mess the place up with candy wrappers, soft-drink bottles, an ice-cream cone, smashed and melting on the pavement. Except for the cheerful, efficient crew, Lydia had Captain Nemo’s plush, handsomely appointed submarine practically to herself, a fine view through the big portholes of the fleet’s other craft disporting like dolphins in the dark clear water — water, Lydia imagined, crisp and quenching in the throat as the ice in the packs that brought down her fevers and cooled her sleep.

Throughout the Magic Kingdom there was the same comfortable traffic, the thin, perfect crowds there only for scale, to set off the fantastic buildings and marvelous attractions, appearing, or so it seemed to Lydia, as they must have appeared in the original architectural sketches, well-groomed adults and their kempt, healthy children taking their ease on the wide benches and strolling at leisure through the park’s beautiful pavilions, the cunning vistas and landscapes, the visitors — Lydia was the exception — like line drawings, attractive figures in a brochure, well-behaved as guests at a garden party. Lydia was delighted by her unobstructed views, by her keen sense of privilege and status. On the river trip, for example, in the tiny steamer that vaguely replicated the African Queen with its chuffing, sputtering engine and its soiled and rumpled honorable mate, Lydia was comfortable enough during even the small boat’s most treacherous passages down the winding jungle river to load her camera, get exactly the right light reading, focus carefully, and shoot only after she was satisfied with her composition. When a fierce-looking hippopotamus submerged itself in the muddy waters alongside the ship, Lydia had sufficient presence of mind to ask the mate to turn off the engines so that she might get an even better picture when he reemerged into the air.

“She,” the mate said.

“Sir?” Lydia Conscience said quizzically.

“That hippo’s a female, miss,” the man informed her. “She does that for her babies. It ain’t playfulness, mademoiselle. The fact is, hips hate water about as much as cats do. It’s a hygiene thing. She’s setting an example for her cubs. They must be fairly close by or she wouldn’t have bothered. She’ll come up two more times, then make that noise they’re so famous for, that special- call noise that the cubs, no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing, have to come running when they hear it. That’s the picture you want, ma’am. I’ll steer the boat over to where the water’s a bit clearer. You can get a shot of the cubs sucking her teats.”

“Really, Mister Bale!” Lydia said.

“It’s how they breathe, Fräulein,” the grizzled mate explained. “They get their air out of the cow’s milk. Something terrible is a hippopotamus’s breath, but them little ones’ lungs is so tiny they’d drown otherwise.”

“Nature is amazing,” Lydia Conscience said.

“It’s alarming, comrade. Me, I never went to no school,” the man told her. “I learned all my lore here on the river.” With a broad sweep of his arm he indicated the rubber duckies floating on the surface of the water, the mechanically driven, wind- up sharks, the needlework palm fronds along the banks.

Before the ride was finished and the conductor collected her ticket, Lydia had several other opportunities for fine photographs. She got a rare close-up of Tarzan pruning his treehouse and an absolute stunner of a cannibal picnic. Once again the mate silenced the engine and, putting his fingers to his lips, indicated that Lydia be quiet. Together they listened to the cheery campfire songs the cannibals were singing.

“I like this,” Lydia said when they were again under way. “Not being from a Third World country myself, it gives a London girl a grand opportunity to find out what really goes on.”

The hoary mate with the sad, steely eyes nodded judiciously.

“Wait till you meet Mickey,” he said.

“Mickey?”

“Mouse.”

“Oh, will I actually get to meet Mickey Mouse?”

“A private audience, memsahib.”

“A private audience!”

The mate lowered his voice. “Because you’re the only one who really wanted to come on the dream holiday.” It was true. Lydia Conscience had wanted to visit the Magic Kingdom for donkey’s years. For fear of hurting his feelings, she couldn’t tell the mate that Donald Duck and Goofy and Dumbo or even the 101 Dalmatians were her real favorites, but the shrewd old tramp, suspecting something of the sort, turned aside whatever objection she might have made. “He’s very kind, really. Not at all as standoffish as his critics make out. And he has wonderful powers. If he takes a liking to a kid there ain’t anything he wouldn’t—” But before he could finish, busy signals had begun to interfere with the dream. They were coming in from Holland, they were coming in from Spain. They were coming in from a hundred countries where little children were being set down for their naps.

Lydia was a generous child and ordinarily wouldn’t have minded. Disney World was a big enough place. It had been pleasant not to have to stand in line or deal with the crowds and, from a strictly practical standpoint, safer not to run the risk of bumping into people with her bloated, swollen belly, painful on sudden contact as a sore toe jammed in a door. And shameful, too. She was perfectly aware of how she must appear to strangers (P-R-E-G-G-E-R-S). And had long ago taken to wearing a cheap engagement and wedding ring so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea (or so they would, she giggled). But it was too spooky-making just now to have to run into that little blue girl. What was her name? Oh, yes — Janet. Janet Order. Who was just now being handed aboard. So Lydia Conscience ran and hid, her big tumor painfully sloshing in the amnion that had grown up around it.

In the smoking section toward the back of the plane, Janet Order had finally slipped into sleep. Janet was a child who welcomed sleep. It was the dreams. Janet Order looked forward to her dreams. In these dreams she’d found an infinite number of ways in which she was able to take on a sort of protective coloration. Sometimes she was an ancient Briton, one of that old Celtic tribe who painted themselves blue, or she dreamed of Mardi Gras, fabulous celebrations, the holiday makers behind incredible disguises, her own blue skin almost ordinary among the brilliant hues and shades of the gaudy, garish celebrators. Or was a huntress, a warrior, the bright blue cosmetics of her pigmentation there for war paint and terror, the honorable, acceptable hues of murder. Or at court at masquerades, or gloved at beaux arts balls behind soft veils or holding a lorgnette against her eyes like a stiff, slim flag. And sometimes the actual blue flag at the ceremonies and state occasions of imaginary nations. Or even — this was tricky, thrilling — as she marched past a reviewing stand, waving a large, heavy Union Jack in front of her in such a way that the flag’s staves and superimposed crosses hid her face while her body was protected behind the livid, rippling triangles of the blue field. She felt at these times quite like a fan dancer, quite like a tease. There were thousands of ways to protect herself. She dreamed of blue populations in blue towns and blue cities. She dreamed of herself cold and at peace in water, her lips and face blue in the temperature. Or exposed on a beach, blue and drowned.

At the precise moment that Lydia Conscience was hiding from the blue girl, Janet Order entered the dream. Lydia was nowhere about, nor did Janet know that Lydia — she was that neat — had ever occupied it. But noticed the water first off and dove into the stinging river downstream of the African Queen, the rumpled mate blowing warning whistles at her, cupping his hands and shouting directions she couldn’t hear but perfectly understood when he threw a line to her. Which she wouldn’t take. Preferring instead to wait until the water became chilly enough to justify her appearance. Only when she saw the hippo did she realize that it was a jungle river.

“Grab it,” the mate shouted when the tiny steamer came abreast of the girl. “Grab the life preserver, kid.” Blushing — the rosiness of her modesty added to her natural color and turned her a deep shade of purple — Janet Order dove under the dark, muddy water and swam away from the boat. There, along the warm bottom of the jungle river, in the soft medium of a swirling, rising mud, in broken earth’s cloudy dissolution, through all erosion’s rich rots and deltic rusts, Janet Order, her eyes adjusting to the decomposing silts and sediments and lees, all the fermenting dregs of all drenched dirt’s loamy planetary brew, swam. The badly hearted child — she’d seen her x-rays, her blunt, boot-shaped heart, the mismanaged arteries and ventriculars like faulty wiring or badly tied shoelace — relieved of gravity, flew through the water, her breathing easy as a fish’s, as the heavy hippo’s or the two dreamy cubs, oblivious, abstracted, stuck at their mother’s teats as at soda straws. She swam past the stalled propellers of the little steamer and came into an area not so much clearer as less perturbed than the one she had just come through. Here the mud and motes of the river bottom no longer swirled but lay fixed in the strata of water — she perceived that water was subtly stratified as rock or sky — as in aspic. Indeed, when she stuck out her finger to lick a particularly delicious-looking piece of mud-studded water, she seemed somehow to compromise the delicately balanced layers of the river. The water trembled, entire panes and levels of it smashing around her like so much glass. “Oh, my,” Janet said, seeing too late the DO NOT MOIL signs posted all about the warm jungle river. Everywhere fabulous creatures, their sleep disturbed if not by the intruder herself than by her thoughtless liberties, came out to see what had happened to upset the balance of nature. And although nothing was said, she sensed herself scolded by the coral, scorned and disparaged by the haughty sea horse, upright and stately as an initial on a towel. Microorganisms abused her: plankton and a tiny grain of sand which one day would irritate itself into a pearl and was just now slipping into the shell of an oyster. She was snubbed by great whales and silently upbraided by sharks. Reproach glittered like tears in the eyes of sirens and mermaids. Drowned sailors speechlessly gave her the rough side of their tongues.

“Excuse me, I’m sure!” said Janet Order indignantly, the syllables carried out of her mouth in bubbles that accommodated them like language in cartoons. Released, they dispersed, bumped by the current, buffeted, snagged, a random, wayward detritus, a debris babble. I’m, she read, cuse sure! me Ex.

Oh, dear, she thought, bothered that she’d been unable to make herself clear and seeing herself as they must see her, feeling a trespasser now, a poacher in this peaceable kingdom. But I didn’t mean, she dreamed, holding her tongue, biting it so that the words could not escape only to reassemble into that frightful syntax.

Which was when the sea serpent swam up close to inspect her. Which was when the seals grazed her sides, the sea robins and orcs. Which was when the manatee brushed against her gently. Which was when Triton did, and the naiads and nereids. Which was when Leviathan smiled and Janet Order realized that of all these fabulous creatures it was she, the little blue girl, who was the most fabulous of all.

In the seat next to Janet’s, Mary Cottle slipped a Gaulois from its pack and lit it, discharging the sweet, vaguely fecal smoke into the air about her. Mary Cottle enjoyed harsh cigarettes and often even treated herself to cheapish cigars in her Islington flat, rather enjoying the crossfire of fusty smells. She thought they made the place seem more lived-in somehow. She would smoke a pipe, too, at least until it was broken in, and, on holiday on the Continent, in Italy and Yugoslavia, in Spain and behind the Iron Curtain, was careful to observe what the peasants smoked, the old-timers she meant, their severe tobaccos — not the imports, not the better-grade domestic brands of the trendy teenagers and working-class young people in the cafés — and chose these, preferring to purchase them loose at the kiosk, even forty or fifty at a time, pleased by the street merchant’s grimy hands, stained by newsprint, by the cheap colored inks of the magazines they handled, the diesel and industrial fumes to which they were exposed, selecting the rough burleys and dark, synthetic latakias and spiked, ersatz Virginias, dense, bitter, aromatic as mold. She might have smoked this sort of tobacco even more often — even the cigars, even the oppressive pipes — but discovered early on that that sort of thing made her oddly attractive to men, exciting them in some strange way, almost as if she gave off a musk, some suggestive, cabaretish spoor of Weimar, prewar Berlin. And women, too. Thinking her butch, mistaking her serene expression for smug, dikey complacency.

Beside her the child stirred uneasily in her sleep and began to cough, gasp. Mary Cottle patted her gently awake while in her dream Janet Order, choking, reasoned that she’d been underwater too long and struggled to the surface, bruising past the astonished sea gods and monsters, past Triton and Poseidon and lovely, curious Amphitrite. It was fortunate, she thought, that it was only a dream. In real life she’d learned to float but never to swim, though on doctor’s orders she was brought frequently to the public swimming baths for therapy, there to float in the water, lifted from gravity and all the ordinary exertions of life, while her mother or one of her brothers looked on from the side.

Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

It was the smoke from Mary Cottle’s cigarette which in Janet Order’s dream had triggered the transposed bubble-speech and set off the choking of her jigsaw heart and wakened her. Only after Janet was thoroughly roused from sleep did Lydia Conscience come out of hiding and return to the picturesque deck of the African Queen.

“Did you see her?” Lydia asked the mate.

“Who would that be, mama-san?” the crusty old sailor asked.

“The little girl.”

“Blue kid?”

“That’s right.”

“Hell of a swimmer,” the man said.

“Is she?”

“Oh, yeah,” the mate said, “hell of a swimmer! I tried to throw her a line but she wouldn’t take it.”

You’d have had to look quickly to see Mary Cottle crush her cigarette out in the tiny ashtray built into the armrest of her seat on the 747 and fan away the smoke. And almost have had stroboscopic vision to have caught at all the momentary flicker of concern that passed across her face.

“Are you all right? Shall I fetch you some water?” she asked Janet when the little girl’s coughing had begun to subside.

“Yes, please,” Janet said. “That would be lovely.”

The drinking water that came out of the taps was too tepid and the cups themselves too small, so Mary went forward to ask the stewardess for a glass and some ice. As she passed Rena Morgan she looked down at the sleeping child and felt a kind of gratitude to her for declaring straight off that if Mary was a smoker she thought she’d better change seats rather than run the risk of having her chest and sinuses fill with mucus. It would be better all round if she didn’t have to sit in the smoking section, she’d added apologetically. And because Mary was upset—everything has a reasonable explanation — that Janet had so nearly choked in her sleep she decided to slip into the lav for a moment to relieve some of the tension.

Colin Bible watched Mary Cottle pass. I don’t know what she thinks she’s up to, he thought, but she’s definitely not gay. Who had an eye, almost an instinct, for such things, blessed with a sort of perfect pitch for sexual preference, not one ever to be fooled by appearances, the drag shams of gender — bearing and behavior, effeminacy and manliness, only a sort of jewelry, Colin thought, only posture’s and gesture’s dress code. And who on more than one occasion had been spared embarrassment, rebuff, even beatings or arrests because of his gift. A sexual geologist, a sexual prospector who worked only the real veins and never wasted effort where it wouldn’t pan out.

Thank God for Colin, Colin thought, pleased to be settled and to have settled, grateful for all the sedentary inducements and consolations of love, to be out of that rat race of the heart, grateful not to have to scrounge for companionship, done with flirting, dating, the extended, lifelong adolescence that was the mark and curse too of the single condition. He thought of his flatmate with a certain gratitude and feeling over and above their feelings for each other, and was aware, too, of a kind of unaccountable peace until he became conscious of the great speed at which they were traveling, their black, tremendous altitude, the dark, dangerous ocean beneath them. Always before, unless they were on holiday together, it had been his lover who had borne the risks of travel, who had been the flier, off to Paris for a conference with his artisans, to eastern Europe, to Africa — he’d spent two weeks in Uganda with Idi Amin to get that tough customer to agree to pose for his portrait in wax — to Utah to obtain for Madame Tussaud’s the artistic rights to Gary Gilmore’s execution by firing squad: all over the world arranging the compliance of principals, the cooperation of families. “Headhunting,” Colin called these expeditions. Bible had remained behind. Like a fireman’s wife, a cop’s, like a war bride.

And though he was not really worried, it was nice once and again to be oneself at risk, there being a certain comfort in being the benefactor rather than the beneficiary. He had received with rather more humiliation than dread those policies, mailed from Heathrow and usually delivered the same day, that named him legatee in the event of Colin’s death by misadventure. The pound that would get him a hundred thousand should his friend’s plane crash and Colin die had seemed to make of their relationship a joke dependancy, and Colin’s larky notes accompanying the instrument and usually scribbled across its faint third copy—‘Bye, darling, buy yourself a new dress! — did not much mitigate Bible’s feeling of having suffered an indignity, a flip deprecation. (Who knew well enough the terms of Colin’s real will, the thicker-than- water arrangements of sedate and serious death. Who, indeed, had been a witness to the document. Everything to the sister in Birmingham, to her two boys should she precede them, to a network of uncles, aunts, and cousins, complicated as an aristocracy, should the nephews die, Colin himself bringing up the rear of a very long file.) He no longer bothered to open these envelopes, allowing them to stand at the bottom of the pile of correspondence which would accumulate during his friend’s absences.

“Really, Colin,” his friend scolded him on finding the unopened envelope, “you oughtn’t be so cavalier. This is an important paper. Insurance on my life should my plane have gone down. You’d have stood to gain a hundred thousand.”

“Ta,” Colin Bible told him, “but if you really want to buy me a present, why don’t you just get me a ticket on the pools?”

After that, the policies Colin sent from Heathrow became more and more elaborate. Not only did the premiums and benefits go up but the contingencies they covered became increasingly diverse. Not only would Colin collect if Colin were killed in an automobile accident, if he were taken from him in a train or bus crash, but if he died in a hotel fire, if his plane was hijacked, if he was kidnapped or poisoned or sustained injuries inflicted by terrorists. There was a triple indemnity clause if he died in a foreign hospital that was no longer accredited.

“Really, Colin,” Colin said, “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. Do you know what a good all-in policy sets one back? Fifteen pounds! With the riders I take out it comes almost to twenty.

“And don’t look so indifferent, dearie! Do you have any idea how they drive in some of those countries? Have you even the foggiest how volatile the wogs are? Just the sight of a white skin inflames them!”

“Me too,” Colin said.

“It’s no joke. I could go like that.”

“Don’t you dare go like that.”

“Be a little more businesslike in future, please, Colin. There are real risks.”

“Don’t tell me about risks,” Colin answered, angry now. “I’m a nurse. I work in hospital. Don’t go all bogeyman on me and threaten me with your spoiled food and terrorists. You know why I don’t open those envelopes? Your snide remarks. ‘Get your hair done!’ ‘Towards a decent suit for the funeral!’ Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?”

“My adorable floozy.”

“Now there’s a policy I’d treasure! Floozy insurance. Herpes riders.”

“I don’t cheat on you, Colin.”

And he probably didn’t, Colin thought. Like himself, Colin was a decorous man. Even before they’d found each other, neither had been a chaser. (That probably explained his lover’s will — Colin’s inability to put down in writing or acknowledge in law what had been an open secret for all the time they’d been together, that their arrangement was serious, a commitment, a pledge, a relationship, a devotion lacking in nothing save what would stand up in court. It explained the Birmingham sister, the nephews, the uncles and aunts and distant cousins, all Colin’s trophies of vague, treasured legitimacy. Perhaps it even explained the ever more complicated travel insurance Colin took out each time he went away on business. Possibly he even intended, wanted, or was simply just willing to die out of town, as if the disasters he insured against, the bizarre deaths he underwrote in Heathrow, were only the ordinary extension of the sort of agreement undertaken by flatmates, like a side bet, say.) So Colin was no chaser. Indeed, it had only been Colin Bible’s extraordinary sensitivity to the sexuality of other persons which had brought them together in the first place.

They’d met in hospital. Colin had come in for minor surgery but had been having a bad time of it: painful though not dangerous — thank God — complications. Colin Bible had been taken off the pediatric ward and transferred to orthopedics during a temporary shortage of nurses there. He recognized at once that the man was homosexual, and Colin, seeing how uncomfortable his new patient had become from being forced to lie in one position, asked if he would like a back rub.

He ejaculated while Colin was still applying the lotion. The nurse hastened to reassure him.

“Don’t worry about it,” Colin told the man. “It happens all the time.”

“Extraordinary,” his future lover explained hastily. “I haven’t a clue why I should have behaved that way. That sort of thing has never happened to me. You must know special contact points — being a nurse and all. You must accidentally have rubbed against one of them.”

“It’s the skin,” Colin lied. “The skin’s especially responsive after trauma.”

“You must have a very bad impression of me.”

“No,” he said, and did something he hadn’t imagined himself capable of. He violated his professional ethics. He leaned forward and kissed his patient. He stroked his hair. The man didn’t move.

“I’m artistic,” the man explained irrelevantly. “I work for Madame Tussaud’s. I’m one of the new breed. Well, I suppose that sounds rather grand. All I mean is I’ve these bold ideas. Innovative,” he added nervously.

“Madame Tussaud’s was one of my favorite places when I was a kid,” Colin said. “I haven’t been there in donkey’s years.” He was still stroking his patient’s hair.

“You wouldn’t recognize the place. And once the new wing is in…do you recall the Chamber of Horrors?”

“Do I?” Colin Bible said. “I should say!”

“Jack the Ripper,” his new friend said scornfully. “Burke and Hare!”

Colin Bible shuddered.

“No,” the man said, “that’s just the point. They were merely aberrant.” He flushed reflexively. “I mean they had no social significance. What’s the point? They put fellows like that on display to titillate. What I’m after is something else entirely. I mean, would you like to know my dream, my vision for the place? God, I mean, just listen to the way I’m talking!”

“Of course I would,” Colin Bible said.

“Really? I mean you’re not just humoring an old poof, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Well,” he said, “those fellows, that lot, they were just our own parochial, historical sociopaths. Freak show, is all. Hydras and kraken. Rocs and manticores. Stuff that goes bump in the night. I mean, even Hitler — and there was a do just to get him in at all. I mean, can you imagine? The old-timers on the Board of Directors were dead against it. Even after they came round, they propped him up in full-dress regalia like an entirely proper führer. Why, he looks like a Caesar. Hitler!”

Colin Bible nodded.

“Well, what is the point? My notion is to show what he did. I want the Holocaust represented. I think that deserves a room all to itself. A large room. We could show the ovens, we could show the showers and the Jews, naked, their blue numbers burned into their wrists, not knowing what’s going to happen to them. We could show the wasted survivors pressed against the barbed wire in their penal stripes. Their mountains of gold teeth, their piles of shoes.

“Hiroshima. Just one wall of a building still standing, a shadow of vaporized flesh imprinted on it like a double exposure.

“We should show cancer,” the man said, tears in his eyes and the bent index finger of the hand that, seconds before, Colin had been holding pressed between his teeth. “And I’m not an old poof,” he said.

“I know that,” Colin Bible said.

“I’m not.”

“I know,” Colin said.

“Actually, sexually I’ve never been very active.”

“I know it.”

“I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either,” Colin Bible said.

“Oh, dear,” his patient said.

What he told him was true, but when Colin was discharged from hospital Colin Bible moved in with him and they became lovers. They had been together almost four years.

Nevertheless, it was good to feel the odd sense of self-reliance imposed on him by the remote dangers of the speeding aircraft.

At Heathrow he’d been too busy with the children to give much thought to Colin — they did not accompany each other much to airports, and he’d been taken by surprise when his friend had shown up in the departure lounge at the last minute — and had come upon the flight insurance desk quite by accident. I really ought to take some out, he thought impatiently. Colin sets store in such things. He thinks he’s sending you a dozen long-stemmed roses. The girl began to explain the various plans. “No, no,” Colin Bible interrupted. “Just your basic ‘My God, We’re Going Into the Drink,’ ‘Three Hundred Feared Dead in Air Disaster!’ coverage,” he said. Take care of yourself, he scribbled hastily across the top of Colin’s copy.

He could not account for it, but he was smiling.

The children slept, fitfully dreaming.

Little Tony Word, dying of leukocytes, of clear, white, colorless cells watering his blood and turning it pale, of petechia and purpura, the petty hemorrhages across his face like so many false freckles, of fatigue and fever and bone pain, of malignant cells buttering his marrow with contamination, of major and minor infections exploding inside his body like ordnance, of the inability of his blood to clot, of his outsized, improperly functioning organs, all the cheap cuts — his liver, his kidneys — of his compromised meat — of leukemia — of the broad palette of chemicals with which his oncologists painted his blood, going over it, careful as art restorers, chipping away at the white smear that poisoned it, bringing back the brisk, original color from their tubes of vincristine and prednisone and asparaginase and dexamethasone and mercaptopurine and allopurinol and methotrexate and cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin and other assorted hues — dying, too, of time itself, of the five- and six- and seven-year survival rate (Tony is now two years beyond his last remission but freckles have begun to reappear along his jawline and his renal functions are in an early stage of failure) — little Tony Word dreams of his low-salt meals, of the liquids and fruit juices he is forced to swallow, almost, or so it seems to him, by the pailful, of all the rind fruits he must eat, and which, because of the invisible germs and hidden dirts which might be on his mother’s hands, he must peel himself — the sealed orange, the difficult apple, the impossible pear, the ordeal of a grape, which he handles with specially sterilized toothpicks, as he does everything, to avoid the accident of cuts which will not stanch — encouraged, too, to prepare his own well-balanced, nutritious meals (though he’s not allowed to go near a stove), his boiled and scrubbed green leafy vegetables, washing lettuce, kale and cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, cabbage; washing everything, eggplant and potatoes, shallots and mushrooms, then consuming the congealed pot liquor which he has to scrape from the side of the pot with a spoon and spread on toasted sandwiches (from which he first must tear away the crusts) just to be able to get it down, or drinking the broth, thick as barium, to get at the vitamins and minerals, and eating the flaccid vegetable flesh; preparing the meats, too, scrubbing (this much, at least, his own idea, the scared kid’s) his veal and ham, his steaks and chops, his joints and shanks, so that everything he eats, or so he thinks, tastes of a light seasoning of dishwashing detergent, learning to cook even at four and already at ten an accomplished chef, teased for this, for this only, not for his weak and sickly ways, his inability at games (which he would not have been permitted to play anyway), or even his high anxiety as a spectator sitting well back in the stands in the gymnasium lest he be hit by a stray ball, or far away from the sidelines when what they would surely snicker at him for should he call them his mates went outdoors to play, but because they know he cooks, have heard him brag of it who has nothing else to boast of (save his pain, save his endurance, save the one or two or, at the outside, three years he has left to live perhaps, and which he has never mentioned), seen him in the lunchroom chewing his queer veggie remnant sandwiches with their vitamin slime and viscous mineral fillings, have seen him fastidiously peel his fruits and drink his juices, his quart of bottled water from which someone else has first to remove the cap and then pour into a paper cup lest Tony cut his finger on the saw-toothed cap or the bottle opener or the drinking glass he was not even permitted to use accidentally break. So the small dying boy tosses and turns, dreaming his breakfasts of champions, his athlete’s meals, his health faddist’s strict dietary laws, sated in sleep, stuffed, full as a glutton, who has never been hungry, dreaming of food who is not hungry now.

Charles Mudd-Gaddis, that little old man, dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he’s three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now — twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he’s five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he’s seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it’s now, and can’t recall how old he really is.

Rena Morgan can’t tell if she’s awake or sleeping. She’d sensed Miss Cottle pass down the aisle, the trace of tobacco scent clinging to her clothes and skin like an odor backed up in a cellar. In what is more likely sleep than not, she brings a hanky, which she is never without, up to her nostrils, and mildly blows, delicately, ladylike, folding the discharge into a dry patch of handkerchief as expertly as a magician hiding a coin. She has taught herself to make these passes at her face before actual mirrors, using as her model images she’s picked up of tragic ladies dabbing at tears in the corners of their eyes, her fingertip eased along a groove of linen so that, when it works, as it almost always does now that she so perfectly executes the gesture, it isn’t as if she were wiping tears away at all so much as brushing cosmetics into her flesh or whisking flecks of mascara and excess powder out of her vision — even in sleep there is exactly that look of concentrated dispassion on her face — doing all the last-minute repairs and touch-ups of grace. Yet it is really as tears that she thinks of her mucus, some vast reservoir of the sorrowful, her sad pain treasury. She fills her hankies and disposes of them in her sleep, folding them neatly into pockets, putting them under pillows, a kind of controlled, sedentary somnambulism, her tricky cardsharp slumber. She doesn’t know why she does this (or even how), though she supposes it a form of pride, some maidenly self-governance, romantic even, the hope-chest antics of the heart. But has no time for dreams and, vigilant, ever on her toes, can never quite tell whether she dozes or is wide awake.

In Monte Carlo, Benny Maxine held a bad hand and waited for the croupier to scoop in his losses.

The amputee, Noah Cloth, held up his bad hand and counted his losses.

This was the best time, thought Nedra Carp. The children all tucked and making their bye-byes. She even enjoyed their little snores. Hardly snores, really. Barely rustles. Just only some tinny nasality of warmed air. In with the good, out with the bad. Though she couldn’t hear even this. Not over the husky drone of the motors. (Engines, would they be?) Or, for that matter, even see her charges. Only, on her right, Charles Mudd-Gaddis and, on her left, Rena, who, in her sleep, raises hankies to her eyes as though she dreams something sad, watching whatever it is like some warmhearted little dear at a play or cinema. She likes such tenderness, enjoys being with children who can’t hold back their tears when Bambi’s mother dies or, at the pantomime, when Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and stepsisters plot against her. She doesn’t care what they say, sentiment is the only true breeding. Prince Andrew had shocked her when he’d been small and had watched with cool indifference and unalterably dry eyes the terrible sufferings of Hansel and Gretel when they finally realized that their father, that hen-pecked woodcutter, meant actually to abandon them in the forest just because his shrew of a wife told him there wasn’t enough food to go round. It’s a jolly good thing for the U.K., Nedra Carp thinks, that Andrew is so far removed from the succession. Monarchs ought to be properly compassionate, she feels, to understand that not all their subjects are as well-off as themselves. Ho. Not half, they aren’t. (And wasn’t that woodchopper’s wife another stepmother? Though Nedra doesn’t let the husband off so easily. The reconciliation at the end is all very well, but if she were those two she wouldn’t have been so quick to jump back into his arms. Suppose times turned bad again. Suppose…Well. Once burned, twice sorry.)

Or even, when it comes down to it, tucked. Not properly anyway. Only a dusty old airline blanket thrown over them, smoothed about their shoulders and flowing loose about their torsos. Hardly like being in their own beds, though one does one’s best. And recalls the healthy children she has tended. Nedra, reading them stories, stroking their heads, has almost absorbed their soporific comfort, that agreeable ease and comfy coze, their bodies’ balmy thermometry and featherbed climate just so, like a snug tropic. Oh, yes, she knows well enough how they feel, their maiden, their bachelor laze and grand smug innocence and sometimes wonders if she takes this from them to bed with her, if the memory of that heavy rest that lies about her like perfume is not hers but the airy burr they exhalate? Is all this, to her, to Nedra Carp, what their stuffed animals and bits of blanket and fingered cloth and crushed bunches of palmed wool are to them? She rejects the supposition. She stands in loco parentis, after all. Yes, she thinks grimly, like all those wicked stepmothers. Yet she is not wicked, if anything too tender, discipline not her strong suit, her lack of firmness a weakness. Ha ha, she laughs in her reverie, that’s a good one; lack of firmness a weakness is a good one. Yet she knows the literature well enough, the stories of stern nannies, repressed, dried-up old crazies jealous of their privileged charges. Letting them howl their hunger, then tweaking them in the nursery, laying on sharp twists and pinches when no one important’s about, gossiping in the parks among the sisterhood. Oh, well, they probably meant governesses. To the uninitiated, governesses gave nannies a bad name.

It’s ironic, Nedra Carp thinks, but here I am, off to America, to Disney World, Florida, and feels a queer thrill. It was Mr. Disney and the Yanks that made Mary Poppins famous, a household name throughout the world, in all the climes and cultures, a comfort, a tonic. It’s silly, she thinks, I’m no R.C., but Mary Poppins is practically my patron saint.

She was. Nedra Carp imagines Mary Poppins watching over her, not convinced of so much as comforted by the idea of her presence. She has seen the film seventeen times, and though she knows she is nothing like that mysterious woman, has neither her powers nor her flair, yet it is to Mary she turns when she’s in trouble, to Mary to whom she flies now high above the watery rooftops and smoking chimney wisps of the clouded world. And thinks of Mary, that stout, good-natured voyager, of Mary of England and all the globey sky. And knows that it’s because of Mary Poppins that she makes this trip, racing toward Disney World as to a sort of Lourdes, bringing, who has no talent even for changing a diaper and is probably embarrassed by it, no skill with even feverish children let alone dying ones, who cannot make even healthy children laugh or, for that matter, keep them entertained or, if you must know, make them behave, who has none of Mary Poppins’s aptitudes but only her own dull gift of love, flying to Florida, to her patron there — maybe there — to pray before some very likely tarted-up, possibly animated saint. Off to Orlando, who is in the wrong profession and whose love of little children is unrequited, a repressed, dried-up old crazy herself, one muy loco parentis who can’t bear to think of those characters she carries in her handbag like a packet of tame old love letters.

Nedra Carp, Nedra Carp thinks. With my name like a fish. And though most of her employers these self-conscious, egalitarian days call her Mrs. Carp — the Queen herself did; lisping Andrew, keeping his distance, did — she has never married. And knows those aren’t love letters she carries in her purse but only her tepid warrants and credentials — she’s peeked; she’s read them — like the lukewarm references of someone honest and even diligent but uninspired. And knows, too, that if she had married it would probably have been to some widower with kids, in loco parentis again, in loco parentis always who would never have a place of her own. And also knows, as she knows she’s never gossiped about her charges or practiced any of the petty cruelties of her trade, that she would starve rather than deny her stepchildren even one morsel or talk behind their backs to the woodchopper, that unlike Cinderella’s stepmother she could play no favorites, not she, she thinks proudly, not Nedra Carp, who has, for good or ill, like a built-in murmur, her adoptive heart.

Because probably no one but Nedra and those involved know that as a child she had had nannies herself and, as an older child, a governess, or that she was herself a stepchild, her mother having died when Nedra was four, her father remarried to a woman with two children of her own. Hers had been kind enough, nannies, governess, stepmother, stepsister, stepbrother, father, and, later, her half brother and half sister. But then, when she was nine, it was her father who died and her stepmother, not yet thirty-four, who remarried, a widower with two daughters. And Nedra carries with her still a sad sense of fragmentation and dissolved loyalties, a vague notion of having grown up with distant and distancing cousins, who had two stepsisters now, a new baby brother, a new baby sister, and a confused notion of having been raised by aunts and uncles or even just in-laws, all tenuously related and removed, too, by marriage. Only she and the half brother and half sister were Carps, and as much out of confusion as blood and love she sought to make an alliance with them, which they did, but when the last of the stepmother’s children was born, he’d come to her, the half brother. “I find I may no longer in good conscience honor our special relationship,” he said.

“Oh?” said Nedra.

“It would be unfair to my half brother, my new half sister.”

“I see,” Nedra said.

“This complicates things awfully,” the only male Carp apologized.

“It does, rather,” Nedra admitted.

“Though I shall always half love you,” he said, and seemed to fade before her very eyes.

But then it was the stepmother who died and the double widower who remarried, the house filled now with steps and halves and quarters, an ever more fractioned tangle of thinned kinship, practically a decimalized one.

So it was to the nannies she’d turned. Perhaps because they understood even less than she who was who, the strange range of relation in the house. It would have taken a Debrett to work it all out. I was no poor relation, you understand, thinks Nedra Carp, but the only living child in that household of the true founders of the family. The very house in which we lived had belonged to my mother. So it was to the nannies I turned, as bonded and blooded to any of them as to any of the steps and halfs and lesser fractions of alliance there, those amiable nonconsanguineous sleep-in ladies: to them, to the nannies I turned, pitching in, pulling my oar, helping out with the smaller children, a Cinderella of the voluntary, who must have thought of me, if they regarded me at all, as some nanny apprentice or nanny greenhorn, whom though they — the nannies — did not scold, were yet without love, their trained, neutral hearts less in it — yes, and less called for, too — than their time.

Except, Nedra Carp thinks, that should never have been permitted. That was unforgivable. Someone should have corrected that when it first came up. My new stepmother, my diluted half brother, the double widower, the real nanny herself, somebody. My mother had owned that house. Those children had no right to call me Nanny.

Eddy Bale talks to his dead son, Liam, in his sleep addresses the boy in a hospital room he does not remember, cheered by that very fact, taking heart from the realization that it isn’t just that he can’t remember the room but, looking past Liam and out the boy’s window, doesn’t recall the view. It isn’t London, it isn’t even England. There’s a park out there but the vegetation is unfamiliar, the cars going back and forth in the heavy traffic. They are not even of a design he recognizes, and trail from their tailpipes a faint, curious steam he does not recognize as ordinary exhaust. He wishes a nurse or doctor would drop by so he could see what race they are. He is too high above street level to make out the ethnic characteristics of the passersby, and he’s unable to make out anything at all of the drivers in their oddball machines. Indeed, there’s a curiously opaque quality to the window glass of the strange automobiles. What he really hopes, of course, is to have confirmed that he is somewhere he has never been, in a land of new breakthrough technologies, some boldly experimental hi-tech country where they have their priorities right. He would like to see, for example, one of those pie-shaped charts that tell where the tax dollars go: 25 percent for social services, 25 percent for R&D, 25 percent for entitlement programs, and 25 percent for a military so strong no country would dare challenge such a civilized power.

He can’t ask Ginny. Ginny isn’t around. But perhaps that’s good news, too. Maybe the treatment here is so advanced that visitors are either nonexistent or only come out of some true sociability, as one might call on a pal in town overnight in his hotel room.

So he can’t ask Ginny and won’t ask the boy. For fear he might be interfering with some delicate therapeutic balance. And is heartened, too, by other things, small stuff, little touches not ordinarily associated with science but, or so runs his hunch, telling enough in a hospital room. There’s the gas range, for example, and a larder stocked with bakery goods, with rich pâtés and cheeses. There is a small refrigerator with fine wines and various drugs lining its shelves. Beside it, on a laboratory table adjusted to what must be his son’s height, is an assortment of pharmaceutical equipment: Bunsen burners, a good microscope, and, nearby, several covered petri dishes glowing with cultures as with bits of bread. There is a burette, sundry flasks, an old-fashioned mortar and pestle where his son probably ground his cunning nostrums and medications and coffee beans into a fine powder. Other instruments whose names he doesn’t know. Also, there’s a box of candy, a nice bowl of fruit.

“What I thought I’d explain to you, Liam,” he says guardedly to the boy in the bed, “is this ‘Dream Holiday’ business. I’m trying to make it up to them, you see. For being so sick, I mean. For having these catastrophic diseases. For having to die before their time, you understand. Well if you don’t understand, who would?” he adds, chuckling. “I mean, you’ve been there, son. You know how it is. Who better? I mean, you’re that Indian whom no one may criticize until they walk a mile in your moccasins, my child.

“So it’s like a reward is the way I look at it. Entre nous, kiddo,” he whispers, “bonus pay for hazardous duty.” He winks at the boy. “Just this little inducement, just this small ‘consideration,’ if you know what I mean,” and rubs his thumb and forefinger together, and makes a sign as if he were greasing a palm. “Just this bit on the side, boy. Hey, son? Hey, Liam?” And shakes his head and slowly raises a finger to his lips. It’s that delicate therapeutic balance again. That he doesn’t want upset. So he paces the room. Diligently avoiding eye contact. Wondering to himself, How’m I doin’? How’m I doin’?

“It isn’t as if this trip were your memorial or anything. Of course not. What, are you kidding? A clambake in Florida? A binge on the roundabout? A spree at the fun fair? Your memorial? You think your mum and I would turn something like that into a great bloody red-letter day or go skylarking about like nits in the pump room? It’s shocked I am you should think so, well and truly shocked. Come on, Liam, you know better!” But still won’t look at the lad.

“Or should. Should know better. Because we’ve a proper memorial stone already picked out. Your favorite kind, kid. Pure solid marble. None of this newfangled ‘composition’ crap. Nothing ersatz, nothing trashy. With your name, address, dates, phone number, and grades cut in to last a thousand years. Could a father say fairer?

“Because we’re proud of you, son. You bust our buttons. Really, child, Daddy’s pleased you’re getting on so well. All this equipment. Whew! I wouldn’t begin to know what to do with it, I’m sure. You mix this black sauce with the snotty green lumps all by yourself? P.U.…Smells nasty enough. What it must taste like, eh? It’s the furry part I couldn’t get down.” And suddenly turns to look at his son directly. Though Liam’s eyes are shut, his lids seem to follow Eddy wherever he goes in the room, like a trick of perspective in a portrait. “But then again you’ve taken plenty of punishment in your time. The x-rays and lasers, the invasive procedures, the pain and the nausea. Suffering was always your very particular speciality. I’d give you a first. I really would. I’m not just saying this because you’re my son. Somebody ought to do something about all that vomit, though.

“Well, I’m sure it was very clever of the doctors to let you work out your cure for yourself. They seemed to be stymied there when they had a go at it, God knows. So what did it turn out to be? The breakthrough? What’d it turn out to be in the end? When all is said and done, I mean?”

This time he rushes his finger to his lips, admonishing Liam’s silence. The gesture is like an awry slap.

“No,” Eddy says. “Hush, Liam. Hush, son. Because if you really are dead — not that I think you are, you understand, not for a minute — but just in the event, on the outside chance, I don’t want to hear about it. I won’t hear about it. Nor will I listen to a word about bold cures and new breakthroughs. Not if you’re dead, I won’t.

“How’m I doin’?”