Walking on Glass

HALF-MOON CRESCENT

On the corner of Maygood Street and Penton Street there was an employment office, where people went to sign on for dole money. A sign said: Door C surnames A-K, Door D surnames L-Z. Graham walked by, looking down to Half Moon Crescent itself; the curve of tall houses where Sara ffitch was living. His stomach seemed to lurch, tensing with nervous anticipation. He felt shivery, keyed up; the vaguely sultry, dulling air seemed suddenly sharpened. Colours stood out, smells (cooking, asphalt, exhaust fumes) became more vivid. The buildings - ordinary Victorian three-storey terraces, now mostly converted into flats-were strange and alien.

His heart beat faster when he saw a bike parked outside one of the houses in Half Moon Crescent, but it was outside the door next to Sara's, and it was a red Honda, not a black BMW. He took deep breaths to try and slow his heart down. He looked up at the window Sara leaned out of sometimes, but she wasn't there.

She will be there, though, he told himself. She won't be out. She will be in. And she won't have changed her mind.

He went to the entryphone. He pressed the button for her flat firmly. He waited, staring intently at the grille from which her voice would come. Very soon.

He waited.

He put his finger on the button, about to press it again, then hesitated, uncertain whether to wait a little longer or not. She might still be waking up, or having a shower; anything. There could be lots of reasons for her not answering yet. He licked his lips, kept staring at the grille. He leaned forward on the button once more, closing his eyes as he did so. He let the button go.

There was still plenty of time. Even if she wasn't in, he could wait; she would probably just be out getting something for the salad she'd said she would make for them.

He wondered whether he ought to press the button again. His stomach was feeling heavy, sick. He could just imagine someone from the houses on the corner of Maygood Street watching him now, looking at his back as he stood at the entryphone grille, waiting and waiting. The grille made a clicking noise. "Hello?" said a breathless voice. It was her!

"It -" he said, and choked on the words, throat dry. He cleared his throat quickly, "It's me. Graham." She was there, she was there!

"Graham, I'm sorry," she said. His heart seemed to sink, he closed his eyes. She was going to say she had changed her mind. "I was in the bath." The buzzer on the entryphone sounded.

He stared at the door for a moment, then at the entryphone, then at the still buzzing door. He pushed it quickly, just before the buzzer stopped sounding. The door swung open, and he went in.

There were carpeted steps down to a basement flat, a door straight ahead to the ground-floor flat. He went up the stairs; cheap but cheerful carpet, white paint on the banisters, fading pastel wallpaper. He could hear an old Beatles record being played downstairs. He got to the first-floor landing. There were more steps up to another flat, but the door on the first floor, into her flat, was open. He knocked and went in, looking around with obvious trepidation, just on the off chance it wasn't the right flat, or she hadn't meant to leave the door open. He heard water from a room to his right. Light showed under the door. "Graham?" she said.

"Hello," he called out. He put the portfolio down against the wall and closed the door on to the landing.

"Go on in, to your left." Her voice was soaked up by the sound of the running water. He took the portfolio up again, went round to his left, into a small, cluttered room with a couch, chairs, television, hi-fi, bookcases and a small coffee table; at the far end, raised up a few inches, separated from the main part of the room by small wood railings which each extended a third of the way across the area, was a kitchen section; cooker and fridge and sink, a larger table, and behind it, main curtains drawn, white lace ones floating out slightly on a faint breeze, was the window.

He put his portfolio down by the side of the couch. A small table at one end of the couch held the telephone; he recalled the time it had rung and rung, and she was under the1 bedclothes, hiding from the thunder. He crossed the room to the raised kitchen section, stepping up on to its worn linoleum surface and going to the sink. He rinsed his hands under the cold tap, splashed some water on his forehead. He dried his face and hands on a dishcloth; there was no hand towel. He was shaking.

He went back down onto the carpeted area and stood, heart beating quickly, in front of the bookcase beside the television. He saw a book there which he hadn't read but had seen televised. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was the second part of the story begun in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Slater had told him that when the BBC made the series they just lumped the two books together. Graham took the slim volume out, flipped through it, looking for one bit in particular. He found it, in about the middle of the book. The scene involved a character called Hotblack Desiato, who was spending a year dead for tax reasons. Desiato was a firm of Islington estate agents, Graham had seen their signs; Douglas Adams must have lived in the area.

He put the book back. Although it was funny, it was rather light reading; he wanted Sara to find him reading something more impressive.

There were a lot of books on best things and worst things; books full of quotes, criticisms, collections of hyberboles and euphemisms, lists of lists, books full, simply, of facts; books on what had happened on each day throughout the year, books about last words, famous mistakes, most useless objects. Graham knew what Slater thought about such works. He took a very dim view indeed; they were yet more signs that the End was In Sight. "Can't you see?" he'd said, one day in March, sitting in the small, steamy cafe in Red Lion Street. "It's a society getting its affairs in order, preparing for the end, drawing a bottom line under what it's done. That stuff and all the bomb literature... we're becoming a death-based society, in love with the past, seeing only annihilation ahead: annihilation we're fascinated by but powerless to do anything about. Vote Thatcher! Vote Reagan! Let's all die! Yip-fucking-pee!"

Graham took out a book on Marxist economics, opened it about a third of the way through, started reading. His eyes took in the words, but it was dry, hard, complicated stuff, and the meanings flowed over the surface of his mind and off again like water from a sun-creamed shoulder.

"Graham," Sara said from the doorway. He turned round, heart thumping, to see her just leaning in from the hall, a white towel round her head like a turban, a thin blue dressing gown round her body. Her face looked white and painfully thin without its usual aura of black hair. "I won't be long. Have a seat." She went into the room across the hall, which he assumed must be the bedroom. He put the economics book back.

He sat down, looking around the room. After a while he rose to look at the record collection. It all seemed very dated; a lot of old Stones records, but much Led Zeppellin and Deep Purple: middle period Floyd and early Bob Seeger. Meatloaf was about the latest stuff. Funny. The collection must have belonged to the girl who actually owned the place, the one who was in America.

He inspected the bookshelf again.

At that moment, on St John Street, near the buildings of the City University and about a quarter of a mile south of the junction of Pentonville Road and Upper Street, a figure in black leathers, wearing a black full-face crash helmet with a smoked-glass visor, was crouched by the side of a BMW RS100 motorbike which was propped against the side of the kerb. The man in the black leathers sat back, looked up the road, north, in the direction he had been heading when the bike had suddenly started misfiring a quarter of an hour ago, while he was making his way, as arranged, to Half Moon Crescent. He cursed, leant forward again, quickly turning a small screwdriver as he fiddled with the settings on the carbs. STK 228T was the registration number of the bike.

Graham took out a book on ethics. It looked like the sort of book to be found reading, too. Slater, naturally, had his own views on ethics as on everything else. His philosophy of life, he said, was founded on Ethical Hedonism. This was the moral system virtually every decent, unblinkered, reasonably informed human able to scrape together a quorum of neurons lived by, but they didn't realise it. Ethical Hedonism recognised that one had to enjoy oneself where one got the chance these days, but that rather than immerse oneself totally in such diversions, one ought always to behave in a reasonable and reasonably responsible manner, never losing sight of the more general moral issues and their manifestations in society. "Have fun, be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking, is what it boils down to," Slater had said. Graham had nodded, and observed that it sounded like it was easier done than said.

He got bored with the book on ethics, which was even more obscure and difficult than the economics book, and replaced it in the bookcase. He went back to the couch and sat down, looking at his watch. It was four twenty-five. He took his portfolio up, set it on his knees. He thought about opening it up so that he would be looking at the drawings when Sara came in; perhaps even doing some last-minute alterations to them; he had a pen and pencil in the portfolio, too, in the bottom. He decided not to. He didn't have Slater's natural acting ability, that way of just adopting a persona. "You should have been an actor," he'd told Slater, late last year, sitting in Leslie's sandwich bar over a couple of cups of tea and two sweet, sticky pastries.

"I tried that," Slater had replied huffily. "They threw me out of drama school."

"What for?"

"Over-acting!" Slater had said, dramatically.

Graham put the portfolio down again. He stood up, looking at his watch again, and walked back to the kitchen part of the room, to the window. A slight breeze blew the thin white curtains softly towards him. The view outside, round the corner of Maygood Street, was still. A couple of parked cars, closed doors, the usual grainy sunlight of the summer city.

A fly buzzed in through the window, and Graham watched it for a while as it flew around the kitchen area, hovering over the cooker, flying down underneath it, wavering in the air around the door of the fridge, floating over the black surface of the round table near the window, criss-crossing the air in front of the food cupboard. It settled on one of the thin plastic chairs pulled in around the table.

Graham watched as it stretched its two front legs over its head, cleaning itself. He picked a magazine up off the table and slowly rolled it up until it was tight, then he stepped slowly forward, towards the chair where the fly was. The fly stopped cleaning itself; its front legs went back down to the surface of the seat-back. Graham stopped. The fly stayed still. Graham moved into firing range.

He drew the clenched magazine upwards, tensing himself. The fly didn't move.

"Graham," Sara said from the doorway, "what are you doing?"

"Oh," he said, putting the magazine down on the table. "Hello." He stood there, embarrassed. The fly flew off.

Sara wore baggy olive-green dungarees, a black T-shirt underneath. On her feet were a pair of pink trainers. Her hair was still swept back from her face, held at the rear of her skull by a pink ribbon. He hadn't seen her with her hair like that before; it made her look smaller, thinner than ever. Her white skin glowed in the light coming from the window. Her dark eyes, the heavy lids like hoods, regarded him from the far end of the room. She was putting her watch on; a black band round the thin cord of wrist.

"Are you early, or is my watch wrong?" she said, looking at it.

"I don't think I'm early," Graham said, glancing at his own watch. Sara shrugged and came forward. He watched her face; he knew he could never draw it properly, never do it justice. It was flawless, precise, perfect, like something carved out of the finest marble and possessing an ultimate elegance and simplicity of line, but yet containing a promise of such softness, a tactile transparency... I'm staring again, he told himself. She stepped up on to the raised kitchen area, still fiddling with the strap on her watch, and went to the window, looking out of it for a moment. Then she turned to him.

She looked into his eyes, and he felt he was being assessed in some way; she took a deep breath, nodded at the table between them. "Shall we sit?" she said. It sounded like an odd thing to say. Sara drew out one of the small plastic chairs, her back to the window, and sat down. She watched as Graham sat down too. She had her hands on the table; he put his there, spread out like fans, thumbs just touching, as hers were.

"When do the rest of the people for the seance turn up?" he asked, then wished he hadn't. Sara smiled at him in a strange, distant sort of way. Graham wondered if perhaps she was on something; she had something of the disengaged look people often have when they've been smoking dope.

"I didn't have time to get the salad together," Sara said. "Do you mind if we have a talk first?"

"No; on you go," Graham said. There was something wrong; he felt bad. Sara wasn't the way she usually was. She kept looking at him with that odd, vacant, assessing gaze which made him uncomfortable, made him want to curl up and protect, not be himself and open out.

"I've wondered, Graham," she said slowly, not looking at him but looking at her own hands where they lay on the black surface of the table, "about how you... see the sort of relationship we've had." She looked up at him briefly. He swallowed. What did she mean? What was she talking about? Why?

"Well, I..." he thought as hard as he could about it, but he had had no time to prepare, to think about the subject. With some warning he could have talked about it perfectly easily and naturally, but just to be asked outright like this... it made things very difficult. "I've enjoyed it, to some extent," he said. He watched her face, ready to alter the way he was expressing himself, even alter what he was saying, according to the reception of his words on the white surface of her face. Sara gave him no clues, however. She was still gazing at her pale, thin hands, the lidded eyes almost hidden from Graham's view. A small white section of the scar tissue round her neck showed from the square neck of the T-shirt, by the pale column of her neck.

"I mean, it's been great," he said awkwardly, after a pause. "I realise you've had... well, that you've been involved with... somebody else, but I..." He dried. He couldn't think what to say. Why was she doing this to him? Why did they have to talk about this sort of thing? What was the point? He felt cheated, abused; sensible people didn't talk about this sort of thing any more, did they? There had been so much rubbish talked and written and filmed over the years; all that romantic crap, then the idealistic, unrealistic naivety of the sixties and the wide-eyed evangelism of the new morality of the seventies... all that had gone; people were less inclined to talk, more liable just to get on with it. He'd talked to Slater about this and they'd agreed. It wasn't so much a backlash, more a slack pausing for breath, so Graham believed. Slater thought it meant The End, but then to Slater little didn't.

"Do you think you love me, Graham?" Sara asked, still not looking at him. He frowned. At least the question was more direct.

"Yes, I do," he said quietly. It felt wrong. This wasn't the way he had envisaged telling her. This afternoon setting, the lightness of the room, the distance of black-painted table between them; nothing suited what he had to say, what he wanted to tell her he felt.

"I thought you might say that," she said, still staring at her long white fingers on the table top. Her voice chilled him.

"Why are you asking all this?" he said. He tried to sound a little more jocular than he felt.

"I wanted to know..." Sara began,'... how you feel."

"Feel free," Graham said, laughing. Sara looked at him, calm and white, and he stopped the laughter in his throat, killed the smile on his face. He cleared his throat. What was going on here? Sara sat for a moment, silent, while her fingers lay on the table, inspected and observed

Perhaps he should show her the drawings he'd done of her, he thought. Perhaps she was upset about something, or just depressed in some general way. Maybe he ought to try and take her mind off whatever it was. Sara said, "You see, Graham, I've deceived you. We have. Stock and I."

Graham felt his stomach go cold inside him. At the mention of Stock's name something happened deep inside him, a gut reaction of ancient, evolved fear and distress.

"What do you mean?" he said.

Sara shrugged jerkily, the tendons on her neck standing out like taut ropes. "You know what deception is, don't you, Graham?" Her voice sounded odd; not like hers at all. He formed the impression that she had thought this out, that like him she had thought in advance about the things she would say (but she, choosing the ground in advance, had the advantage), so that her spoken words were more like lines, something to be acted out on the tense stage of her body.

"Yes, I think so," he said, because she was silent, and it seemed they would go no further until her question was answered.

"Good," she said, and sighed. "I'm sorry you've been deceived, but there were reasons. Do you want me to explain them to you?" She looked up again, once more just for a second or so.

"I don't understand," Graham said, shaking his head, trying, by the expression on his face, the tone of his voice, to make it clear that he wasn't taking all this as seriously as Sara was. "How do you mean 'deceived'? How have you been deceiving me? I've always known about Stock, I've known about your relationship, but I haven't... well, I might not have been ecstatically happy about it, but I didn't -"

"Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a callbox, I think you said?" Sara interrupted.

Graham smiled. "Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman turned up full blast to drown out the thunder."

Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. "No. No, I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock. When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the bell." She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying (while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her face. "As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power."

He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:

"That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street, the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?" The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry hint of a smile. "He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You know?"

He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane. It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist caricatures of female deception. Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?

She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point, decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why, though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend, the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)

"You do remember," she said, voice purring, "don't you?"

"I... remember," he said, feeling broken, unable to look at her, and stared at the table's surface and one or two small crumbs lying on it. "But why?" he said, looking up at her. He could not keep his eyes on hers for very long. He looked down again.

"... even that first time," Sara said, ignoring his question, "when we met at the party. In the loo. Would you believe that Stock was in there? We had arranged it all in advance. He climbed up the drainpipe. I left that room we were in and went down there to meet him. That's what I was doing in the bathroom; fucking on the floor with Bob Stock." She pronounced the words carefully.

"Really?" he said. He had forgotten it all, forgotten all he had ever felt for her. He would feel it again, he knew, and it would hurt, but for now he was putting it out of his mind. It didn't matter any more. She had changed all the rules, put the whole relationship that had existed between them into quite a different category. He stored the old self, the hurt young man for the moment, concentrated as best he could, while still reeling inside from the sheer force and extent of the change, on what was being said now, on this new set of rules, this role he was being forced into, for reasons he didn't yet understand. "But why?" he said, trying not to sound hurt, trying to play it the way she was.

"Decoy," she said, shrugging. She gazed at her fingers again, spreading them out on the black paint surface. "That divorce of mine... my husband was having me followed. Stock couldn't afford to be involved, but we didn't want... couldn't stop seeing each other. So we decided to use somebody else to seem to have an affair with me. You were seen to go upstairs with me at that party; we figured that whoever my husband had tailing me would be at the party, gate-crashing; following me. We thought that he would assume we'd been screwing. I really had, of course, but that was just a little extra. We've been stringing you along ever since. Sorry, Graham. Anyway, our man doesn't seem to be following you. Perhaps he's been called off the case or something. Maybe my other half just didn't want to spend any more money on me; don't ask me."

"So," Graham said, feeling faint, sitting back in the chair as though nothing was wrong, trying to stop his lips quivering, one hand on the top of the seat-back (where, he remembered for no good reason, the fly had been), his other hand still on the table, like some strange animal in a black and circular arena, on the far side of it from her pale fingers. His hand, trembling very slightly, scratched at a fleck of white paint on the black surface as he said, "I'm not... of any use any more, is that it?"

"Sounds rather mean, doesn't it?" Sara said. She was still trying to sound calm, but her words sounded clipped. Graham laughed, shaking his head.

"Oh no; no, not a bit!" He felt tears starting to come to his eyes, and stopped them, determined not to show her what he was feeling. He shook his head, went on laughing, still watching his finger scratching at the white-paint fleck. "Not at all, no." He shrugged.

He was aware of a sort of tingling itch all over his body, as though the heightened awareness of his earlier anticipation was with him, in a single sense only, once again, and every nerve in his skin was receiving a maximum intensity, pouring into his brain a mass of static, average signals, a bodily white noise giving an impression of unattenuated, unsifted, exaggerated usualness; a paradigm of the pain of clearly felt normality.

"So it was all just an act, was it?" he said, after a while, when she had said nothing more. He still couldn't show what he felt. He kept thinking, wildly, that it might all be a cruel sort of joke, or even a test, a final examination before he was allowed closer knowledge of this woman. He couldn't, mustn't over-react.

"Sort of," Sara conceded, voice deliberately lazy (he had the impression of her turning very slightly to the window, as though listening for something), "but I haven't hated it. I quite like you. Graham, really I do. But having set out to use you, there wasn't a lot else I or... Stock could do but go on with it. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you any of this now. Maybe I should just have told you not to come here, and then not have seen you again. But I wanted to tell you the truth." She swallowed a couple of times, gazed at her hands on the table, clasped them.

Still there was that false coldness in her voice, he thought, as he scratched at the white fleck of paint; still she was not really telling the whole truth at all. She wanted to see what his reaction would be, how the words would affect him. He sat there and wondered what he could do. What was there to do? Break down and cry? Become violent? Just get up and leave?

He glanced quickly at her, then away. She sat looking at him, still but somehow tensed. Looking again, he saw what might have been a tic, near the edge of her jaw, under her right ear. A pulse on her neck, over the white scar on her upper chest, beat rapidly. He looked away, eyes blinking.

He could not, he would not break down. She would not see him cry. A furious, vicious, angry part of him, some deep, buried kernel of animal hatred, wanted to attack her; slap and punch that cold white face; rape her, leave her wrecked and battered; reciprocate and outbid her in this awful, hurtful game she had suddenly chosen to play. The only part he trusted (but the part that had got him here, now in this situation, even if through no fault he could see) was equally revolted by the idea of either type of assault; to embrace either of the sexually conventional reactions, adopt either of those segregated responses was... insufficient. Pointless. Nor was there a way to stay in the game with (he searched for a word, inside himself)... honour (that was the only word he could think of, though it was too old and tainted, too historically misused to be quite what he wanted or meant. But in more sense than one, it was all he had).

"So this is the truth, is it?" he said, still with a sort of half-laugh in his voice as his finger picked at the table.

"Don't you believe me?" she said, clearing her throat awkwardly on the first word.

"I believe you. I suppose. Why shouldn't I? Why should you tell me any of this if it wasn't true?"

She didn't answer. He smiled emptily as he watched the finger, still trying to lift the stuck-down wisp of dried white paint from the black surface of the table.

Back at the bike, the black figure twisted the throttle, trying to gun the motor, but it stuttered, rasped then coughed, almost died. It ran more smoothly, but still not perfectly for a few seconds, then hesitated once more, missing beats. The man kicked the bike, then straddled it, revving the motor. He looked behind him for an opening in the traffic. He let the clutch in on first gear and the bike jerked forward, then the engine failed, dying again. The bike trickled forward as horns sounded from the cars and trucks behind; the bike revved, moved forward, but each time the engine tried to take the load it stuttered and the bike slowed.

"Fuck it!" the man shouted into his helmet. "Oh, God." He used his feet to trundle the bike back in to the kerb again. He got off quickly. Should he walk, or run, up to Half Moon Crescent?

"Well then, be there," she had said. He'd laughed. They had been planning just how they would remove Graham from their private equation. "I'll be there," he'd assured her, "no problem." She'd said, kissing him: "If you are not on time I might resort to Plan B." He had asked her what that was. "I give him what he wants," she'd said, "then tell him to disappear..." Whereon he had laughed - he now thought - a little too heartily.

He got down quickly to his knees, took off his gloves and threw them to the pavement, opened one of the panniers at the back of the bike and snatched the toolkit out. "Come on. Stock," he said to himself, "you can do it, son...' He took the small screwdriver out. Damn bike. Of all the times to let him down!

He had been concerned, mostly for her sake, that she wasn't too hard on Graham before he got there; she was only supposed to tell him she had decided to stay with Stock, not hurt the kid too much - dangerously much - with the truth about the way they'd used him. "Let him down gently, won't you?" he'd said. She'd looked at him calmly for some time, then said evenly, "I'll let him down."

He looked over the top of the bike at a young man with fair hair walking up the far pavement. For one heart-thumping second he thought it was Graham Park, then saw it wasn't. As his gaze dropped to the bike again, he caught sight of something odd on the top of the black-polished petrol tank. He looked back again, more closely. There were fresh scratches on the paint round the chrome petrol filler cap, and clusters of small white grains. When he tried the cap it lifted easily, and would not lock. The small white grains felt sticky. "Oh shit," he breathed.

"Poor Graham," Sara ffitch said, smiling jerkily at him, letting her head tip slightly to one side, as though she was trying to get him to look at her.

"Why me?" Graham said (and wanted to laugh in spite of it all, at the sheer absurdity of what he was saying, the falsity of the entire situation, the way that, because it was like a game and the sort of scene they had doubtless both seen portrayed in this popular culture a thousand times, there were only certain things he could say, certain viable responses he could make).

"Why not?" Sara said. "I heard about you through... Slater. You sounded like the sort of guy I might be able to charm, you know?"

He nodded. "I know," he said. A small piece of white paint came away from the surface of the black table, lodging under his fingernail.

"I didn't think you would actually fall in love with me, but it did make things easier in a way, I suppose. I'm sorry for you, though. I mean, I don't think we can go on after this, do you?"

"No. No, I think you're right. Of course." He nodded again, still not looking at her.

"You don't seem... very concerned."

"No," he shrugged, then shook his head. The last piece of paint stuck on the table's surface would not come off. He took his hand away, glanced at her, then sat forward in the seat, folding his arms, crossing his feet at the ankles, as though suddenly cold. "You just acted it all, then?" he asked.

"Not really, Graham," she said. He thought he could just make out, from the tops of his eyes, as he stared at the table, her shaking her head. "I didn't act very much at all. I told a few lies, but I didn't promise very much, I didn't have to pretend very much. I did like you. I certainly didn't love you, but you're quite nice, quite... sweet."

He laughed, briefly, quietly, at that last word, such faint praise indeed. And that "certainly'; did she have to put that in, as though trying through every single word and nuance to find a way to hurt him? How much damage would she be content with? What sort of reaction was she trying to get from him?

"And I loved you, I thought you were so..." he could not finish. If he went on, he knew, he would break down and cry. He shook his head and angled his gaze so that she would not see his eyes glisten.

"Yes, I know," Sara said, sighing artificially, "it was pretty dirty, I know. Terribly unfair. But then who gets what they deserve, hmm?"

"You bitch," he said to her, looking up and into her eyes through a film of tears, "you fucking cow."

Something changed in her face, as though the game had become more interesting at last; her eyebrows might have risen fraction- ally or her tiny smile, that twisted look at the side of her mouth, have reappeared, but whatever it was it struck him with almost physical force. He was not proud of the words, he knew what they sounded like, what the whole setting and implication of them was, but he could not help them; they were all he had to throw at her.

"Well," she said slowly, "this is a bit more like it..."

He stood up, his breath forced in and out of him in spasms, his eyes drying again but smarting, staring at her. She sat there and looked up at him, quizzically, some sudden quickness of interest, even fear illuminating the until then cool, quiet features. "What the hell did I ever do to you?" he said, staring at her. "What gave you the right to do this to me?" His heart pounded, he felt sick, he stood there quivering with rage, but still, still, remaining unaffected, a small part of him saw this unusual, unaccustomed anger within him, heard the words he spoke, with an amusement, a sort of critical appreciation, not unlike what he saw in her eyes and read on her face.

She shrugged, swallowed, still looking up at him. "You did nothing to me," she said slowly, "or to... Stock. We had no right, of course. But what difference does that make? Does it really make you feel worse?" She looked at him as though she really was asking a serious question, something she could not find the answer to in herself, something she had to look to him or somebody like him to answer.

"What do you care?" he said, shaking his head, leaning towards her across the table. His eyes were bright, he could look at her now. She gazed back, something like fear quickening her, widening the hooded eyes. He saw the small pulse by the side of her neck again, he became aware of the shallow rising and falling of her T-shirt inside the olive dungarees. He could smell the oil she had put on herself after her bath, the clean fresh smell of her. She shrugged again, shoulders jerking.

"Just interested," she said. "You don't have to tell me. I just wondered how it felt."

"What the hell are you doing?" He couldn't stop the words coming out in a gasp, couldn't stop the anger, the pain from being there. "What are you trying to... Why did you have to do it this way?"

"Oh, Graham," she sighed, breath ragged, shaking her head. "I didn't set out to hurt you, but when I thought about what I had to tell you, how I had to tell you, I... saw it had to be done in a certain way. Can't you see?" She looked at him, intent, almost desperate; "You were just too perfect. It had to go along certain lines once we'd set out. I can't really explain it to you. You... you asked for it." She held up one hand, as though to catch something he had thrown at her, as he opened his mouth to speak. "Yes, yes," she said, "I know, it does sound terrible, it's what... it's what rapists say, isn't it? But that's the way it was with you, Graham. That was all that gave me the right to do any of this to you, that's all you did; just be the way you were. All you were guilty of was being innocent."

He stared at her, his mouth open. He walked round the side of the table. She stayed sitting as he approached her; the beat of her pulse quickened, her hands clasped quickly together on the black circle of the table. She stared away, at where he had been sitting. He went round the back of the seat she sat in, to the window, and stared out of it.

"So I just go now," he said quietly.

"I want you to go, yes." Her voice was thin and sharp.

"Do you, now?" he said, his voice still low.

I could, he thought, throw myself out of the window, but it isn't very far to the street, and why should I give her another little display of grief and petulance anyway? Or I could draw these curtains and turn on her, hand over mouth, throw her across the table, tear the clothes off her, pin her there... and act out another part, that's all. I could plead temporary jealous madness; depending on the judge, I could have a very good chance of getting away with it. I could say no violence was used (just that blunt instrument between the legs, just that even blunter instrument between the ears, just the age-old violence, the ancient cruelty, the ultimate obscenity of pleasure, joy twisted into pain and hatred. Yes, yes, that was it; what perfect torture; an archetype for all the cunningly designed machines us boys have played with. Shatter and destroy inside, leave no outward trace or bruise).

She led me on. Your Honour.

Yes, she led me on, and fuck you. Your Honour. I'll not do that, to her or myself. Always did think Pilate had the right idea; wash hands, let the mob have its grubby desire. Slater, my brains are in the right place after all. He turned round, half-expecting her to be holding a breadknife.

But she was still sitting there, in the seat, her back to him, hair gathered and bunched.

"I'd better go, then," he said, and was hopelessly, emptily elated that his voice did not shake very much. He walked slowly past her, down to the carpeted section of the room, and took up his portfolio of drawings. He thought of leaving them for a moment, but he needed the plastic portfolio; it would be a pointless gesture to leave it, or even remove the drawings.

He walked out into the hall; from the corner of his eye, he saw she was not moving. She sat in the chair, unmoving, watching him. He let himself out by the thin, light, inner door, went down the stairs and out the front door. He walked across to the corner of Maygood Street, and straight up it. He almost expected to hear her call him, from the window, and had already decided not to turn if she did, but no sound came, and he just kept on walking.

When she heard the door close beneath, and the lock catch, and then the sound of his footsteps on the pavement outside, Sara slumped suddenly, puppet-slack, her head dropping as though in a faint to lie on the sweat-slicked surfaces of her forearms, near her still clasped hands. Her eyes stared over the smooth dark surface of the table. Her breathing slackened, and her pulse slowed.

He gunned the bike again, sending it out into the traffic, drawing a chorus of horns from behind as the bike's engine hesitated once more. He gritted his teeth, swore, felt sweat dribble inside the black helmet, and twisted the throttle again. The bike's stuttering engine caught and he surged forward, beside a flat-decked beer lorry with a few barrels at the rear of its long load platform. He gunned the engine, swept round the Watneys" truck, the aluminium barrels at its rear glinting in the sunlight. Then when he was level with the cab the engine failed again; he just got round in front of the lorry, then had to slow down. The truck's engine sounded, loud, right behind him. The dying engine would not restart; he would have to steer back in for the side of the road. He waited for a break in the traffic on his left which would let him get to the kerb, ignoring the pulsing horn of the Watneys" truck, which he was now holding up. The engine spluttered, then suddenly caught and ran smoothly again. He hissed through his teeth, revved it. The bike shot forward. Some shouts came from behind, from the cab of the lorry at his back. They came to the lights at the junction of Pentonville Road and Upper Street; he would have to go over the junction and then cut down Liverpool Road, to get to Half Moon Crescent.

He waited at the lights. The beer lorry drew up alongside, the driver shouting at him, loudly asking him what he was up to. He said nothing. The lights changed, the truck moved off, the bike's engine died completely. He restarted it, roared off after the truck, caught it and started to pull in front. The lorry driver was keeping his foot on the floor, the truck's engine screaming. The bike stuttered once again. The engine caught, failed, caught again; together the bike and lorry roared up the wide stretch of Upper Street, the beer lorry stopping the bike from pulling in towards Liverpool Road.

He saw a hole in the tarmac in front of him (and was vaguely aware of people on the pavement, waiting for buses, as their faces flashed by on the far side of the truck's flat deck). The long hole in the road surface ahead of him wasn't too large; he could avoid it and the long dark plume of disintegrating tarmac strewn out on its far side; he swerved the bike neatly.

At first it looked as though the lorry with the beer barrels would miss the hole, too, but it swerved suddenly towards the hole and bike - as though avoiding somebody stepping out into the road from the bus-stop - and its wheels went thumping, crashing into the ragged trench in the roadway with a huge hollow-sounding noise, and from the truck's lightly laden, suddenly bouncing rear, something flew into the air...

Graham walked up the street, through the hard sunlight of the late afternoon, over Penton Street and into an area where most of the buildings had been demolished. Around him were some echoes of buildings; rows and corridors of corrugated iron, new and zinc-bright in the sunlight, standing on end around empty, dusty sites where weeds grew; in the distance were old buildings, tall crumbling places, leaning and twisted, worn old slates with many missing, roofs bowed under the ancient weight, old windows, glaucomaed with age, eaten timbers making up ramshackle additions to the top storeys. New kerbs, un-made-up pavements, dust and sand. He caught glimpses of the empty sites through spaces in the corrugated iron. Most were flat, filled with swirled patterns of rubbish and growing weeds. Some were being worked on; he saw the naked bricks and ragged lengths of concrete-bottomed trenches which would become foundations; lengths of string marked lines and levels for bricks.

He walked through this summit of iron and dust, seeing it but numb to it, through the slightly humid air and the sounds of the traffic and sirens, through the smells of cement dust and rotting rubbish, down to Liverpool Road and over towards Upper Street.

He could only think of what had just happened to him as something he had watched, not actually taken part in. He could not appreciate it directly, he could not cope with it in any personal way, on a level which related to what he regarded as his real self. It was something too important to be assimilated quickly; it was as though some vast besieging army had finally smashed the main gate into a great city, and swept in to overwhelm its ruined defences but could do so only through that one point, so that, while the forces spread throughout the streets and houses and the city's fall was assured, already underway, for a long time in many places within it there was nothing immediately wrong or affected, and life could go on almost as normal.

When he got down to Upper Street there was a traffic jam, and the flashing blue light of an ambulance waiting somewhere at the bus-stops; people were looking in that direction, trying to see over the tops of the other people's heads, edging closer, trying to find out what happened. He could not go near, did not want to see other people.

He crossed the lanes of stationary traffic, waited for a break in the still moving south-bound streams, crossed to the far side, walked past another huge building site where tall cranes stuck into the sky and dust moved in the wind, then went down through smaller streets, ignoring people, clutching the black portfolio to : him, heading towards some trees he could see.

Richard Slater lay in bed with his elder sister, the woman Graham knew as Mrs Sara ffitch, but whose real name was Mrs Sarah Simpson-Wallace (nee Slater).

The shared, mingled sweat dried on their naked bodies. Sarah took another Kleenex from the box under the bed, dabbed at herself, then put the soggy tissues in the small split-cane bin at the foot of the bed. She got up, stretching her arms and shaking her black, tangled hair.

Slater watched her. He had bruised her again. Dark blue marks were forming on the tops of her arms, and under her buttocks, at the top and rear of her thighs. He had bitten her, too, on the white scar (where she didn't feel it so much). She had whimpered at the time; cried out, but - perhaps because she was relieved she had received no physical retaliation from Graham - she did not seem to be in a mood to complain today. Still, Slater felt guilty anyway. He was too rough, and despised himself - and maybe even her - for it. He had never been like that with anybody else, never even felt like being that way. With her, he couldn't help it. He wanted to be like that, he wanted to grip her, squeeze her, to impale and imprison her, to shake and pummel her; mark her. It was that or it was nothing; cold, without feeling, almost masturbatory.

Why? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Why do I do that to her? Why do I need to? He knew he wasn't like that really. It went against everything he believed in. So why?

Sarah took a plain, blue silk dressing gown from the bottom of the bed and tied it around her. She still wore the pink training shoes she had put on after her bath.

Slater sighed. He said, "None of which alters the fact that you shouldn't have done it, not without me here."

Sarah shrugged, without turning round. "I'm going to have some orange juice," she said. "Want some?"

"Sarah."

"What?" She turned to look at him. Slater looked at her accusingly. She grinned back at him. "I handled it," she said. "Nothing went wrong, did it?"

"He's bigger than you are. He might have got violent. He is a man, after all, dear. We chaps are all the same, didn't you know?" He could not resist smiling as he said it.

"Luckily, you aren't all the same at all," Sarah said, and went through the doorway, across the hall to the sitting-room and kitchen. "Not at all," she said from the other room as she walked. "Not even slightly."

Slater lay on the bed, shivering once as his flesh dried. He got up and took a piece of paper from the small dressing table by the side of the bed. It was an old Labour election leaflet, blank on one side. He took a pen from the inside pocket of his biker leathers - strewn on the floor with her dungarees and T-shirt - then sat up in bed and started to write, quickly and in a small, scratchy, precise hand.

He wrote:

Dear Graham,

I know what Sarah has told you. It was not the whole truth. I'm afraid. The fact is that I am Stock (and so, once, was Sarah, as I'll explain). There is no Bob Stock, there's only me.

Sarah is my sister and we've had (horror of horrors!) an incestuous relationship for the past six years or so (blame single-sex public schools, I say). Sarah is married and her husband was having her followed. I couldn't risk being seen with her, so I invented Stock; I keep the bike in a car park at the back of the Air Gallery; I know somebody who works there and they keep the leathers and crash helmet. I dress there and visit Sarah using the bike, looking terribly butch and incognito.

So far so good, you might think, but we needed more; it wasn't all that important that Sarah was known to be committing adultery, but it was important, at least until very recently, that it wasn't known who with. Quite apart from the fact that what we're doing is reasonably illegal, it would have done terrible things to our parents. Dear dad, you see, was Conservative MP for Salop West. Even you might have heard of him; very strong line on family life, morality and that son of thing; supported the Festival of Light, the National Viewers and Listeners Association (Mary White-house's mob), and SPUNK, or whatever they call it; the Society for the Prevention of Unborn Conservatives (sick!). Pro-hanging, of course.

The old bugger having made his reputation peddling this sort of reactionary moralist nonsense, the revelation that his two children were humping each other would have finished him; that applied at the start of all this, but became even more important when Mag the Hag announced the election. Anyway, going back to where you came in, I think you'll appreciate that the situation was such that we needed another safeguard to stop me being identified. We needed somebody else, to draw the heat, to distract the chap we knew was trailing Sarah. We chose you. All right; I chose you.

Why couldn't we just have stopped seeing each other? I hear you ask. Tried that. Just not poss. Sarah got married trying to get out of this whole thing, and I moved down here, but neither of us could stop thinking about the other; just couldn't forget. I suppose we must be doomed for each other.

I think you fell for Sarah a bit (though being you you made it impossible to tell; you could have been cranium-over-Achilles for the girl and still have given nothing away; acting Joe Cool as usual) and if my fucking bike hadn't conked out on me (I think some bastard put sugar in the petrol tank) we were going to let you down easier; I was to appear in the street outside while Sarah was explaining to you in the flat that she liked you too much to start anything because she was basically a bad "un and she and Stock deserved each other... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time; you hustled out the back door as Sarah panicked; unrequited but smug, knowing You Were Too Good For Her, and her, worthless bitch, back with the bad guy. Oh well.

Anyway, the election's over, as you might have noticed, and our father was one of the only two Tories to lose their seats in a Conservative landslide (to a Liberal; ha ha), and he's retiring from politics. Sarah isn't being followed any more, as far as I can tell, so the need for most, if not all, of the subterfuge is gone... sorry.

Why protect the old fascist in the first place?

What can I say? That blood is thicker than water maybe, but also that if anything had come out about Sarah and me it might not only have ruined our father but it would certainly have killed our mum, who really isn't a bad sort. (Fuck it; we both still love her. There.)

Family loyalty, in other words. I don't know.

Well, you must admit we were thorough; we even arranged for you to see "Stock" when I was there (you remember; in the pub?); that was Sarah, padded out with jeans and jumpers and walking on tip-toe with several dozen of my socks stuffed into the bottoms of my boots.

I don't know how to -

Sarah came back then, with two glasses of orange juice and a large plate with small pieces of bread topped with pate, various cheeses and honey. "Here," she said, putting the plate and one glass down by the side of the bed, on the small dressing table. "What are you writing?"

"A letter to Graham, telling him the whole truth. All of it. Nothing but," Slater said. Sarah looked at him without saying anything, took a drink from the slim glass she held.

Slater looked at the letter, reading his own scrawled lines with a frown on his face. "You know," he said to his sister, "I really wish I could send this to him."

"If you've told the whole truth, you certainly can not."

"Hmm. I know. But I need to write it anyway. For me." He looked at her. "I guess I'm still tense."

She moved closer to the bed, looked down at him, "You still worried about that crash?" she said.

Slater put the pen and the paper down on the dressing table. He rolled his eyes, then put his hands over his face. "Yes, yes!" he said, and pushed his fingers through his dark hair, staring at the ceiling while she watched him calmly. "Oh God, oh Doom! I just hope they didn't get the number!"

"What, of the bike?" she said, drinking her orange juice.

"Yes, of course!" He shook his head at the ceiling, then levered himself back up on one elbow, and read over the letter Graham would never read. What to say next? How to finish it off? Sarah watched for a while, then turned away and combed her hair. She heard a rustle of paper, the clatter of the pen on the dressing table, after a while. She turned to look at him.

"Better?" she asked, putting the comb down. Slater lay on the bed, the paper crumpled in one outstretched hand. He shook his head, still staring at the ceiling, then let the crumpled ball of paper roll out of his hand. At the same time he croaked, "Rosebud!" The paper ball rolled along the floor. She smiled, kicked the paper with one pink-shoed foot towards the bin.

She turned and studied herself in the mirror, calmly stroking her bruises.

"Have you ever," Slater said, "entertained the idea that we might be evil? I mean that despite the fact you're beautiful and I'm right... that nevertheless, for some horrible, maybe genetic reason, maybe class, even, we -"

"I have never even considered any other explanation," Sarah said, smiling, still looking at herself. Slater laughed.

He did love her. It was all that a brother-sister relationship was supposed to be, all that people meant when they talked of loving someone like a brother or a sister... it was just that, but not only that. He wanted her. At least sometimes, at least when he did not hate himself for wanting her in the way he did.

Perhaps it was possible, though. Perhaps he could just love her solely and conventionally as a sister. She was worth all that alone, after all. She could not mean less to him. Sex was only that, surely, and indeed with her only more intense...more dangerous in its feel than with others; not better. Worse, in fact, in its penumbra of guilt and self-disgust. He should, he really ought to make an effort; let what had happened to Graham, what they had done to him be a tragic landmark, a reason almost... at least not let it go to waste...

Sarah went to the old mono record player which stood on a small table on the far side of the bedroom. She took her current favourite Bowie album, his latest, and put it on at the start of her favourite track, the song which was a single and still in the charts; Let's Dance, the title track. The stylus scraped into the groove, neatly between tracks. The old speaker crackled slightly and hissed; she turned the volume up, put the arm mechanism on to repeat.

Slater lay on the bed, turned sideways, watching her. He forgot about the accident he had helped cause, about Graham and the hurt he had contributed towards, as he watched his sister sway and move in front of the record player. The music punched out, filling the small room; she nodded her head, her body moved inside the thin blue silk, in time to the first few lyrical bars of the song. He felt his desire grow for her again.

She knew the song well. Just before Bowie's voice started, just before the words "Let's dance," she turned, smiling to her brother, put her slender fingers to her shoulders, opening the blue silk gown and letting it fall from her, collecting in soft folds about the pink trainers as she nodded twice in time to the music and over the first phrase mouthed the words "Let's fuck..."

And for a moment, behind his eyes, where he felt he really lived, he felt complete despair, and the absolute necessity of keeping what he felt away from her, of stopping it from showing on his face.

He seemed to halt then, in some frozen moment, an expression of feigned delight and surprise impacted on his face, as behind it, inside him, a pain he could not name, like his wanting, with his wanting, arose and overwhelmed him.

From the notebook of Detective Sergeant Nichols; interview with Thomas Edward PRITCHARD. Islington Police Station, 28/6/83.

Q: What about the bike then did you get its no?

A: O yes I got that bastards no. alright. It was STK 228 something. Either I or T. T, I think.

DR SHAWCROSS

Mr Williams - Mike, as he liked to be called - was Steven's friend in the hospital. He called Doctor Shawcross "Doctor Shock" because he said if you were bad and didn't do what they told you to do, they gave you electric shocks. Mr Williams was funny. He made Steven laugh lots and lots. He could be cruel sometimes, too, like when he had dropped the spiders into the lap of Harry-the-guy who-hated-spiders the other day (Mr Williams had used a long word instead of "the-guy-who-hated-spiders', but Steven couldn't remember what it was). That had been cruel, especially as they had been at dinner at the time, but it had been funny too.

Steven had been blamed for that, and they had punished him for it, but he couldn't recall what the punishment had been.

The crows called his name.

Dr Shawcross sat in his office, staring out of the window at the unleaved trees of the Kent countryside, watching a few crows flap lazily from tall branches, out over the bare brown fields. In front of him, spread out on his desk, was the file on Steven Grout. Dr Shawcross had to write a report on Steven, for the insurers of one of the vehicles involved in the accident which had resulted in Grout ending up here, in the Dargate Sheltered Unit.

It was February 16th, 1984 (Dr Shawcross had already noted the date on the sheet of paper he was going to draft the report on). It was cold. The car had been very slow to start that morning. Dr

Shawcross hummed tunelessly to himself and reached down to the floor where his briefcase was. He glanced over the previous reports on Grout as his right hand fumbled in the case for his pipe and tobacco. He found them, put the pipe on his desk and started to stuff the tobacco into the bowl.

His mind wandered when he saw the date of Grout's accident; June 28th last year. He sighed. Summer seemed such a long way away, but at the same time there was that paper he had to write for the conference in Scarborough in June; that would come around soon enough; he'd be pushed for time on that, he'd bet.

Steven Grout (no middle name) had been involved in a road traffic accident on June 28th, 1983. A beer barrel struck him on the head after bouncing off the back of a lorry. Grout had fallen into the stream of traffic and been run over by a car. His scalp was lacerated, skull fractured, both clavicles and the left scapula sustained fractures, and he had multiple rib fractures as well.

Dr Shawcross experienced an odd sensation of deja vu, then suddenly recalled that he'd read something about the trial of the case which resulted from this accident in the paper just the other day (was it yesterday?). Hadn't somebody famous been involved, or somebody connected with somebody famous? Some public figure, anyway, and some sort of scandal. He couldn't remember. Maybe the paper was still in the house. He'd check when he got back in the evening, if he remembered, and Liz hadn't thrown the paper out.

Dr Shawcross read through the previous reports, packing the tobacco into the bowl, putting the pipe in his mouth, then patting his pockets one by one as he searched for his matches. His eyes flitted over the typed sheets as he refreshed his memory, only certain important words and phrases really registering: cyanosed flail chest... intubation... raised intracranial blood-pressure and Dexamethasone and Mannitol... pulse slowing... blood pressure increase... very slow response to deep painful stimulus... eyes deviated dysconjugately... possible frontal lobe contusion... neck angle a tracheostomy was performed...

Dr Shawcross tutted to himself, pulled open a drawer, rummaged briefly, found a box of matches. He lit his pipe.

The latest of the reports concerned Grout when he was physically more or less recovered, and in the rehabilitation ward of a hospital in North London. Grout had been totally disorientated in time and space, the report said. He had been capable of holding a conversation but unable to remember any fact for longer than a few minutes; no recollection from day to day of the nursing staff who tended him.

Dr Shawcross puffed away on his pipe, once waving a lock of blue smoke away from his eyes as he read (he was supposed to have given up for the new year. Well, at least he didn't smoke in the house nowadays. Well, hardly ever).

The patient improved only slowly; conscious and alert but still disorientated; marked impairment of reading ability and memory; vague recollections of the distant past (now knew he had been brought up in a children's home), but thought the date was June 28th, 1976.

One phrase kept cropping up time after time in the report, as various follow-up and check-up examinations were recorded, and Grout's post-traumatic amnesia lengthened: little insight into his disability... no insight into his disability... lack of insight into his condition... still no insight into his disability...

Grout was usually quite euphoric, always smiling and nodding and giving the thumbs-up sign; he cooperated fully with physical examinations and seemed anxious to help and cooperate in the memory tests and other examinations of his mental faculties he was asked to undergo. But while he felt quite sure he was capable of living by himself, and of undertaking any job or career, his poor short-term memory and total lack of drive and initiative made him totally unfit for anything but the sheltered environment he now lived in. To that extent, he was permanently disabled, with little, if any, chance of any further improvement in his condition.

Dr Shawcross nodded to himself. That was it, all right. He'd examined Steven that morning, and the man, while quite happy and content, had no prospect of leaving the Unit in the foreseeable future. He was still euphoric, though when pressed did admit that his memory wasn't all it had been. Dr Shawcross had asked him if he recalled ever having been on any day trips with the other patients in the Unit. Steven had looked exaggeratedly thoughtful and said that he thought he had been to Bournemouth, hadn't he? Dr Shawcross knew from the file that Steven had been on one day trip, but that was only as far as Canterbury.

He told Steven a little story which he asked him to try and remember: a man in a green coat, with bright red hair, went for a walk with his dog, a terrier, in Nottingham. Then he talked to Steven about how he had settled into the Unit since his arrival in January.

After about five minutes he had asked Steven if he could remember the little story he'd told him. Steven had frowned, looked very thoughtful for a while. Was there something about a bald man? he had asked. Dr Shawcross had asked him if he could recall any colours involved in the story. Steven had creased his brows again. Was the man wearing a brown jacket? he had said. Dr Shawcross had said that sounded like a guess, and Steven had smiled sheepishly and admitted it was.

Dr Shawcross's mouth made small papping noises as he drew on the pipe. He sat back a little in his seat, looking out of the window again. The sky was full of low grey clouds.

He wondered if it would snow, or rain.

Steven was in his favourite place.

It was a sort of little tunnel under the raised bank of the railway line which passed along one side of the hospital grounds. Strictly speaking it was out of bounds, but only just. The tunnel was only about fifty or sixty feet long, but it was nice and dark and secluded because both ends were overgrown with bushes and small trees. In the direction that Grout sat facing, over the naked earth fields and the distant lines of trees, over low rolling hills, towards the unseen sea, the end of the tunnel was barred by a lop-sided wooden gate, twined round with brambles and long grass.

Steven sat on an iron seat; a saddle-shaped iron seat which itself sat on a rusty old grass-roller with a broken towing bar. The broken grass-roller was one of many interesting things in the dark, damp, soft-earthed tunnel. There was an old, pale pink plastic bucket with a split bottom, four woodwormed fenceposts with three staple nails in each, an old car battery with the top bit missing, a torn plastic Woolworth carrier bag, two crushed, empty Skol lager cans, an uncrushed Pepsi can, various sweet wrappers, an old damp matchbox with three dead matches inside, a yellowing sheet of paper from the Daily Express dated Tuesday, March 18th, 1980, and several dozen cigarette ends in various stages of decomposition.

The grass roller was the best thing, though, because you could sit on it, nice and dry and quite comfortable, and you could look out over the mass of undergrowth at the end of the tunnel, and see the sky and the trees and the fields. Crows flew around the trees, over the naked-earth fields. The crows called out, calling his name.

Steven was happy. It was cold (he wore two T-shirts and two pullovers and a parka), and he could feel the cold of the iron seat under his bum seeping through to his skin; his breath glowed in the dark tunnel and he had to keep his hands in his pockets because he'd lost his gloves again, but he was happy. It was nice to get away now and again, even though he quite liked the hospital. Mr Williams made him laugh, the tricks he played and the funny things he said.

They went on day trips, sometimes, though Steven couldn't quite remember where. He read a lot. Important books, though their names escaped him just for the moment.

He used to be happy, then unhappy (he seemed to recall) and looking for things, but now he was happy again. He had mentioned all this to Mr Williams, about how he'd been unhappy and looking for things, and Mr Williams have given him an old big rusty key and a plastic sign which said "Way Out'. Steven kept them in his locker and took them out and looked at them sometimes.

He had other things in his locker; things from before, when he had been unhappy. They had given him these things... he couldn't remember when, not at the moment... but it would come to him... anyway, they had given him a radio and an atlas, some books and a metal sort of sculpture thing of a lion or a tiger or something. He kept them because you weren't supposed to throw away things people had given you, but he didn't really want them.

Then there were some bits and pieces from games which Mr Williams had given to him. There was a chess piece which looked like a little castle, and another which looked like a little horse, also some bits of plastic with letters on them and little numbers, and other bits of plastic which had spots on one side.

In the old country house around which the hospital had grown and spread since its foundation after the First World War there was the Sheltered Unit's library. An old man and an old woman sat in there, playing games over an old coffee table. Mr Williams took pieces from their games when they weren't looking, just for a laugh. He would give them the bits back later on, of course, so it wasn't really stealing, but oh, it was funny, watching them get all upset!

Steven thought Mr Williams was naughty, but he did make him laugh, and Steven liked to feel trusted, and liked being in on Mr Williams's jokes and secrets. It was good.

The crows called his name again, wheeling above the turned-over fields, scraps of black against the greyly shining clouds. Steven smiled and looked round the littered surface of the tunnel floor. He leaned down and picked up the matchbox with the three dead matches inside it and turned it over in his hands. He heard a train hooter in the distance.

Soon a train would go noisily overhead, on the rails on the top of the banking the tunnel ran through. Steven liked the busy, steely noise the trains made over his head. It wasn't frightening at all. He squinted at the words on the faded cover of the little match-box:

McGuffin's

iZEN BRAND!

matches

average contents: v2

Steven didn't understand. He turned the matchbox over and read a riddle printed on the back. He didn't understand that, either. He read the words out slowly to himself. "Q: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? A: The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves."

Steven shook his head and put the matchbox back down on the ground. He shivered. It would be time for tea soon.

Dr Shawcross scratched behind his left ear with one finger, brow furrowed like the ploughed Kentish fields. He couldn't think of any other way to put it, so he wrote, finishing the sentence and also the report, apart from the summing-up:... euphoric, but still totally lacking insight into his disability.

Steven stared at the bright inverted U of light, as the train clattered and whined overhead and the little iron seat on top of the grass-roller vibrated slightly. The crows called his name, their hoarse voices not quite drowned by the passing train: "Ger-out! Ger-out! Ger-out!"

He was happy.

TUNNEL

Quiss stood on the parapet of the balcony, staring down at the white plain beneath. His mouth was dry, his heart beat quickly; he was trembling, and a nervous tic jigged at one corner of his mouth as he stood, swaying slightly, getting ready to jump.

He was going to kill himself, because now he knew the secret of the castle. He knew what it was founded on, what underlay it; he even knew where it was and when. The red crow had shown him.

They had played a game called Tunnel, which was based on a game called Bridge. They played two hands each, using blank cards, trying to make things called tricks. The idea was that Tunnel was like Bridge played underneath the table, or in the dark. As in Spotless Dominoes, they had to go through the motions of playing the game, hoping that eventually they would play one game in such a way that the blank cards - which the little games table had ascribed values to, new ones for each game - would end up displayed on the table in a logical sequence, the "tricks" correctly composed of similar-suit cards.

The game was over; after a thousand days they had done it, but they were still undecided what to give as an answer to the riddle. They couldn't think of anything they both agreed was a reasonable response. Quiss didn't care any more. It wouldn't make any difference, anyway. There was only death here, death or what the red crow had shown him. He looked down at the snow. It lay over the jumbled crags of slate far below, at the base of the castle. It was about a hundred metre drop. There would be a lot of wind noise, he would feel cold for a while, weightless for an instant, then... nothing. He should do it now, but he had to prepare himself. Still, Ajayi might not be away for very long (she had gone looking for books as usual), and he didn't want her seeing him there. He leaned forward, over the drop, biting his lip.

No machine-gun this time, he thought.

He had been down in the guts of the place.

More locked doors. The same ancient corridors, dimly lit. His scullions would not help him find keys for the doors; they said they had no influence with the keykeepers, they didn't know any of them and if they started to make any inquiries they would be under suspicion immediately; they thought the seneschal already knew of their allegiance to Quiss, and merely tolerated it.

Quiss tried to engage the attendants he met down here, deep under the castle, in conversation, on the odd occasions when he encountered them; but they were taciturn, unhelpful. He thought about knocking one over the head sometime, seeing if it had a key which he could steal and use, but as soon as he had even hinted he might try this his own scullions had started weeping and begging him not to. He and they would be terribly punished if he tried to open the castle's doors like that. The black minions, they said, in quivering voices; the black minions... Quiss assumed they were talking about the attendants he had seen only once, with the seneschal that one time he had found an open door and the seneschal and the black-robed minions arrived in the creaking elevator. He reluctantly shelved the idea of taking a key by force.

He walked along the corridor. He was in the general area of the door he had found open, many many days ago. He thought he could just make out a sort of half-felt, half-heard thumping noise, and suspected he was somewhere near the number-crunching room; dee pee as the snooty attendant had called it.

The corridor opened out to about twice the cross-section which he regarded as the castle's standard. A slate bench on one wall faced a row of twelve large, stout, metal-strapped doors.

He was weary, so he sat down on the bench, looking through the gloom at the tall, dark doors.

"Tired, old man?" a voice said, from above him. He turned and saw the red crow, perched on a peg stuck into the wall high above the slate bench, near the vaulted ceiling.

"What are you doing way down here?" he asked the creature, surprised to find it so deep in the castle's structure.

"Following you," the crow said.

"To what do I owe such an honour?"

"Your stupidity," the red crow said, stretching its wings as though stiff. One of its small eyes glinted in the dim light from the glowing, transparent tubes at the apex of the ceiling.

"Really," he said. If the red crow was just insulting him, let it. If it wanted to talk it would have to start things off. He suspected it did want to talk. It was here for a good reason.

"Yes, really," the red crow said testily. It flapped off the perch on the wall and landed in the middle of the floor, facing him. It folded its wings. A little dust swirled around it. "You won't listen to reason, so I'm going to have to rub your nose in things."

"Are you indeed?" Quiss said coldly. He didn't like its tone. "What 'things'?"

"Call it truth," the red crow said, spitting the word out like a lump of gristle.

"What would you know about that?" Quiss scoffed.

"Oh, quite a lot, as you'll discover, man." The red crow's voice was calm, measured and mocking. "If you want to, that is."

That depends," Quiss said, frowning at the bird. "What exactly are we talking about?"

The red crow jerked its head, indicating the wall and the doors behind it. "I can get you in there. I can show you what you have been looking for all this time."

"Can you really?" Quiss said, stalling. He wondered if the crow was telling the truth. If it was, why was it telling him?

The bird, its bright plumage dulled to burgundy by the gloom, nodded. "I can. Do you want to see behind the doors?"

"Yes," Quiss said. There was little point in denying it. "What's the catch?"

"Ah," the red crow said, and Quiss thought that if the bird could have smiled, it would. "I must have your word."

"On what?"

"That I show you what I show you of your own free will, that you go willingly on the understanding that without any outside influence from me or anything else you may not desire to come back, or may desire to kill yourself. You may not, of course, but if you stay, or if you kill yourself, you must give me your word you will say that I warned you of this first."

Quiss narrowed his eyes, leaned forward on the slate seat, putting one elbow on his knees, one hand to his lips. His chin was rough with stubble. "You are saying that what you will show me may make me wish to stay behind those doors, or may make me desire death."

"In a word: more-or-less," the red crow cackled. "But you won't use any dirty tricks to influence me."

"No need."

"Then I give my word."

"Good," the red crow said with some satisfaction. It flapped once and rose into the air, and Quiss had the impression that it was done too easily, that the wings had not powered the bird at all, that it flapped them merely for show. The bird turned and flew off down the corridor, in the direction Quiss had been heading. It disappeared round a corner in the dim distance.

Quiss got to his feet, wondering if he was supposed to follow the creature. He scratched his chin, looking at the dozen doors. His heart started to beat a little faster; what was behind the doors? The red crow wanted him and Ajayi dead; it wanted them to admit defeat and give up their struggle with the riddle. That was simply part of its job, though it claimed it really did want rid of them anyway, because they were boring. It knew that Quiss knew this, so it must be very confident that whatever was behind the doors would have a considerable effect on Quiss; enough to break him, perhaps. Quiss was nervous, keyed up, but determined. He could take whatever the red crow was going to throw at him, whatever it had to show him. Anything which might help him find the way out of this thing, even just give a new angle on his and Ajayi's plight, would be useful. Besides, he suspected the red crow did not know that he had been behind one of those doors once, even if only briefly. If the revelation beyond that heavy wood and metal strapping had something to with the ceiling-holes and the place called "Dirt', then Quiss vas already prepared.

The door nearest Quiss clicked. He heard a tapping noise, and went forward. There was a metal-lined slit in the door which he took to be a handle. He pulled on it; the door opened slowly, smoothly, and revealed the red crow hovering in a long corridor lit by small glowing globes fixed to the wall.

"Welcome," the crow said. It turned, flew slowly down the long corridor. "Close the door; follow me," it said. Quiss did as he was told.

The bird flew, and he walked, for about ten minutes. The tunnel led down and to the left, curving gradually. It was quite warm. The red crow flew, silently, about five metres in front of him. Finally they came to another door, similar to the one through which they had entered the tunnel. The red crow stopped at it.

"Excuse me," it said, and disappeared through the door. Quiss was startled. He touched the door, to make sure it was not a projection; it was solid, warm. It clicked. The red crow reappeared over Quiss's head. "Well, open it," it said. Quiss pulled the door towards him.

He walked, with the red crow behind him and over him, into a strange place.

His head swam; he felt himself stagger momentarily. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. He felt at once that he had walked into a place, but also out into the open air.

It was as though he stood on a flat desert floor, or the dulled bed of a salt lake. But the sky was within touching distance, as if some flat layer of clouds had lowered to within a couple of metres of that salt or sandy surface.

Behind him (as he turned, dizzy, looking for a point of reference in the confusing, pillared infinity before him) was the door they had just come through. It was set in a black wall which at first sight seemed straight, but which he soon realised was curved; pan of a gigantic circle. The red crow flapped lazily just overhead, watching with amused malevolence as Quiss turned again to the space in front of them.

The floor was smooth slate, the ceiling composed of the glass and ironwork and water common to the castle's upper storeys. Slate and iron columns supported the roof, which was at the same height it had been in the room Quiss had found his way into such a long time ago, when he discovered the hole in the glass with the creature over and around it. All that was missing, in three out of the four directions, was a wall.

It was not bright, with only a few of the luminous fish waving lazily over his head and nearby, but it was light enough to see that the space he was now in seemed endless. Quiss peered into the distance, but all he could see were pillars and columns, growing smaller and smaller in the squeezed, twisted depths before him. Pillars and columns and... people. Human figures stood on small stools, or sat in high chairs, arms in iron hoops, shoulders hard up against the undersurface of the endless glass ceiling. Some of the things he had thought were pillars or columns at first, stunned sight were not; they were people with their heads stuck in the ceiling, dark shadowy forms above them in the glass, surrounding holes in the ceiling like the one he had stuck his own head into, briefly, in that small room long ago.

He shook his head again, peered again into the distance. The narrow space between floor and ceiling vanished, all around, into a thin line, hazed by distance. The line looked very slightly curved, like a horizon of empty water seen from a ship on a planetary ocean. He felt dizzy again. His eyes could not accept it; his brain took in the short space between floor and ceiling and so expected walls, expected a room-space. But if he was in a room (and if this was not some sort of projection, or even some unsubtle trick with mirrors) then its walls appeared to be somewhere over the horizon. He turned again, carefully, trying to recall his early training for the Wars, which had included balance and disorientation exercises that had left him feeling a bit like he did now, and looked again at the black wall just behind him, with the metal-strapped door in it. He looked along the very slightly curved wall, trying to estimate the diameter of the circle it implied. It must be several kilometres; sufficient to encompass the castle, mines and quarries. This wall was the castle's root, its foundation. This endless space some sort of vast basement.

"What is this place?" he said, and felt as though he was whispering; his brain expected echoes, but none came. It was like speaking in the open air. He looked round at the people stood on stools and slumped in tall chairs as the red crow said, "Let's take a walk. Follow me and I'll tell you." It flapped slowly past him, and he walked slowly after it. He passed near one of the standing figures: a man, dressed in furs similar to his own, but older-looking. The man looked skinny. A pipe led from the furs round the man's crotch to a stone jug on the floor. They passed him by. Some movement, far in the hazy distance, attracted Quiss's eyes. It looked like a small train; a narrow-gauge railway with a small locomotive on it, hauling hopper-like carriages. It was difficult to estimate the distance, but he guessed it was at least four hundred metres away, moving out from the castle, away into the thin space of standing people and supporting columns. He remembered the train he had seen, long ago, in the kitchens.

He looked round, trying to estimate the density of people in the place. There seemed to be about one person per ten metres square. Fascinated, he stared at them, seeing hundreds, thousands of them. If the density was the same throughout the space he could make out in the dim haze of distance before floor and ceiling seemed to meet, then there must be ...

"It has no name," the red crow said, flapping in front of him, facing away from him, its voice far away. Technically I believe this is part of the castle. It may even be thought of as the basement." Its voice became a chuckle for a moment. "I have no idea how large this place is. I have flown for ten thousand wingbeats in many directions and not even seen a wall. It is all very, very uniform. Apart from a greater concentration of railway lines in the floor, what you see here is what you would see anywhere, in any part of it. There must be many tens of millions of people here, with their heads stuck inside the ceiling, in these reverse goldfish-bowls."

Quiss didn't know what a goldfish-bowl was, but he thought it best to feign ignorance of what these people were doing with their heads stuck in the ceiling. He asked the crow about this.

"There is a type of animal which sits over the hollow glass semi-sphere the people have their heads inside," the red crow said. "The animal translates thoughts through time. Each of these people is inside the head of a human being from the past."

"I see," Quiss said, hoping he sounded more blase than the red crow expected. "The past, you say?" He scratched his chin. He still could not believe what his eyes told him; he was walking forward, not bumping into anything, but some part of him still expected to hit a projection screen or wall.

The red crow turned easily in the air in front of him, so that it was now flying backwards, something it appeared to do with the same facility with which it flew forwards, or smoked a cigar. "You haven't guessed, have you?" it said to him. There was a smirk in its voice, if not on its expressionless face. Iron reinforcing bands in the ceiling cast bands of shadow over the slowly flapping red wings.

"Guessed what?"

"Where this is. Where you are. The name of this place."

"Where? Tell me, then," Quiss said, and stopped walking. The small train had disappeared in the distance. He thought he could just hear it, though; rails singing. A whisper of that noise seemed to fill this place, like low voices.

"Hmm," the crow said, "well, you may not have heard of it; even at the times of the Therapeutic Wars the memory was being lost well, anyway. This is, as you might have guessed, a planet. Its name is Earth."

Quiss nodded. Yes, that made more sense that what the small attendant had told him in the room he had found his way into. "Dirt', indeed!

"That is the name of this place; that is where the castle is; on Earth, towards the end of the planet's life. In a few hundred million more years the sun will become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets of its system. In the meantime, with no moon anymore, and having stopped wobbling and spinning, with only the castle, as far as I know, on the surface and all trace of previous civilisations and the species of humankind just weathered away or ground beneath continental plates a billion years ago, this is your inheritance."

"Mine?" Quiss said. He looked about. Some distance behind him, the gentle curvature of the castle's base-wall was more evident than it had been closer to.

"This," the red crow said "is one of two fates that wait you. If you want, you can join these people; become one of them, dreaming of a past time, within the body of whoever they choose, billions upon billions of years ago."

"Why should I want, or not want that?"

"You might want it because you do not wish to die now. You may not want it because you have what they sometimes call a civilised consciousness. You see, each of these people has tried and failed to do what you and your lady-friend are trying - and will fail - to do; escape. Every one of them, all these millions of individuals, is a failure. Each one has given up trying to answer the riddle they were set, and while others have chosen oblivion, these have chosen to live out what time they have left as parasites, in the minds of others in forgotten times. They experience what others have experienced, they even have the illusion of altering the past, so that they seem to exercise free will, and apparently influence what their hosts do. It is to delay death, to turn to something like a drug, to turn away from reality, to refuse to face one's own defeat. I have heard it said that this is better than nothing, but..." the creature's voice trailed off. Its beady eyes stayed fixed on Quiss.

"I see," he said. "Well, I must say I don't find it all that depressing."

"Perhaps you will, though, later."

"Perhaps," Quiss said, and did his best to assume a nonchalant air. "Do I take it that these people have to be fed, and that the castle kitchens are as large and as busy as they are because they must cater for them?"

"Oh well done," the red crow said, only a little sarcastically. "Yes, they run little trains from the kitchens, full of soups and gruels, to the furthest points of the place, wherever those may be; some trains get lost for years, others never return. Luckily these failed unfortunates need little in the way of nourishment, so the easily kitchens can just about cope, though even so they couldn't do it if they didn't mess around with subjective time... For all I know this universal basement extends right round the planet, and the castle supplies all those people; or perhaps there are other castles; one does hear rumours. Well, the castle feeds all the people you see, at any rate. They're eased out of the head-hole and given a bowl to sup from; they sit there with empty eyes, as though asleep, drink or sup, then like zombies go back to their own little world again. Their wastes are taken away in the same trains." The red crow cocked its head, and its voice sounded almost puzzled: "But don't you find this all rather... sapping? This is what awaits you, man. This is where almost all of them end up, and a lot of them were a lot brighter than you. Ask the seneschal, if you like. He will confirm what I say. Very few escape. Virtually none."

"All the same, though, like you say," Quiss said, "it's better than nothing."

"To be a parasite? To end up with your head stuck inside some cheap biological time machine? I don't believe it. I thought more, even of you. I haven't lied to you, you know. The truth is quite awful enough. It's not as though these zombies really do influence the people whose brains they inhabit. The seneschal might like to pretend that they do, that free will increases with time and these people account for the sudden impulses in the primitives they haunt, but that's all nonsense. The creatures around the holes may make them think that, but experiments I have carried out myself indicate quite definitely that only the illusion of this effect exists and anyway, which is the more likely explanation?

"I tell you: these people are as good as dead. Theirs is a dreaming death."

"Still better than nothing," Quiss insisted. "Definitely."

The red crow was silent for some time, flapping lazily in front of him, hovering there, black eyes staring, expressionless. Eventually it said, "Then, warrior, you have no soul."

It flew in a semi-circle around him, heading back for the black wall which was the castle's base. 'We'd better get back," it said. "Ask the seneschal about this place, if you like. He will be angry, but he will not punish you and he cannot punish me. Ask him," the red crow said as it beat back to the curved wall of the roots of the Castle Doors, the Castle of Bequest, "anything at all. He will confirm that I almost none escape, that most end up here, or- the brave ones, the really civilised ones - kill themselves."

They arrived back at the door; it was still ajar. The red crow flapped at its side as Quiss, following it back, walked past the pillars and columns and dreaming people. At the same man, in furs, on a stool, he had looked at earlier, he stopped and turned to the red crow saying, "Let me ask you something."

"Yes, of course you can have a preview," the red crow said, and started to fly towards him. "There's an empty -"

"Oh no," Quiss said, shaking his head, looking at the bird as it stopped near him. Quiss nodded at the skinny man in the furs with his head stuck in the glass ceiling. "I was just wondering if you knew anything about him, say. What's his name? How long's he been here?"

"What?" the red crow said, sounding a little confused, even upset (Quiss concealed the thrill of triumph which shivered through him). "Him?" The red crow fluttered a little closer. "Oh, he's been here for ages," it said, its voice recovering its usual composure. "Name's... Godot? Goriot? Gerrut; something like that. The records aren't perfect, you know. An odd case... listen, are you sure you don't want to see what it's like? I can show you where -"

"No," Quiss said firmly, and walked smartly to the door leading back to the castle. "I'm not interested. Let's go back now."

And he had gone to the seneschal, who in the kitchens" clamour had confirmed most of what the red crow had said.

"So?" the seneschal had said, obviously annoyed. "You have seen your most likely fate; what of it? What am I supposed to do about it? Just think yourself lucky you didn't take the red crow up on its offer; once you're in one of those things properly you don't come out of your own free will; too beguiling. If somebody doesn't come to get you out you stay there, tapping every form of human excitement. By the time your belly rumbles you're hooked. You come out for food and it's just a grey dream compared to what you have just left.

"That's what the bird was up to. It would have shown you the free ceiling-port down there, then just have left you. And don't trust it on free will, either. The ceiling-ports allow full control of the primitives" minds. Everything can be altered. Every mind contains its own universe. We can be sure of nothing. That is all I have to say. If you want to enter officially that place which you have already seen informally, file a notice of surrender with me through the proper channels. Now go away, please." The seneschal had scowled, and gone back up the rickety wooden steps to his office, away from the continuing chaos of the kitchens.

Quiss had gone back to the games room, his old legs quite exhausted by the time he got back.

He said nothing to Ajayi.

He stood on the parapet of the balcony.

Yes, the red crow had been right. It did not know it, it could never have been sure, it had probably only dwelled on the awfulness of the dreamers" fate to bluff him into trying the experience out, so that it could leave him there, but it had been right, nevertheless, about the eventual effect of its revelation.

The thought of that low, limitless space beneath the castle had filled Quiss's thoughts - and, more importantly, his dreams - for almost a hundred days and nights since. A deep, dark depression had settled on him, weighing him down like some heavy suit of armour. He felt like some warrior, chain-mailed, stumbling into quicksand...

He could not keep his mind from dwelling on what he had seen, on the sheer extent of the place beneath them, that impression of claustrophobic infinity. So many people, so many failed hopes, lost games, surrendered dreams; and the castle, a single island of warped chance in a frozen ocean of missed opportunities.

That bright, beguiling image he had held on to all these days, of those brown arms, that blue sky, the single shining line of contrail; it returned only to hurt him now, taunt him in his dreams. In that deep, dark, echoless and echo-filled space far beneath him, his mind was already lost; sideless, wall-less the place, bottomless his despair.

His hope, his determination - once so fierce, so furious and powerful and energetic - had ground to a halt, rusted up; seized.

The castle's doing. That was its effect, on those within it as well as on itself. To grind down, to slowly, slowly abrade and at the same time fuse, wearing away and seizing up at once, like sand-laden water in some huge engine. He felt like that now. He felt like some grain of sand inside the place, no more important.

He stared down at the crags and snow far below him, rocked once back and forward on his feet, felt himself tremble. His jaw wanted to shake, but he clenched his teeth. The wind gusted, swaying him. Cold as a glacier, he thought, smiling grimly. A slow-flowing glacier. A fit image to take to his death, he thought, and remembered the room of flowed glass, the final straw which had eventually followed the red crow's revelation. That had been the real trigger, that was why he really stood here.

It was a room he had discovered, just that day, on one of his now infrequent walks. He had wandered, lost as usual, then he had come to a room inside the thick walls where the wind blew in and snow heaped on the glass floor under the windows.

In the window spaces there were the remains of metal frames; he noticed this as he went to the aperture to look out and so get his bearings from the landscape beyond (he should see the slate mines if his sense of direction was right, but it had been failing him with increasing frequency lately).

Something like clear tar had flowed from the almost empty frames, where only a thin edge of glass lay in the bottom of each hexagon of the metal frames. The glass under his feet was dark. He looked out of the windows, eyes narrowed against the cold, funnelled wind moaning quietly through the deep slit. The floor sloped slightly, up to the windows. Clear stuff, like ice, stuck to the walls under the windows. He stooped, grunting with effort, to examine it, finally got down stiffly to his knees, scraping at the floor (there was a slate floor just underneath the thin covering of glass). He tapped at the clear stuff still in the window frames above, then ran one finger down from the glass still in the frames, over the sill, down over the clear flow on the walls until finally his finger slid all the way down without a flaw, crack or join registering under his fingertip, to the floor.

The glass in the bottom of the frames, on the narrow sill, on the walls under the windows and on the floor of the room was joined. It was all one. He stayed kneeling and let his hands rest in his sloped lap. He stared ahead.

He recalled, from when he could not remember, that glass - ordinary glass, made from sand - was theoretically a liquid, that in old buildings" very sensitive measuring equipment could detect a significant thinning at the top of the pane, and a corresponding thickening at the bottom of the sheet as the glass gradually gave in to the incessant pull of gravity. In the Castle of Bequest, in places at least, the process had simply had time to go further. The glass had flowed - was still flowing - from the frame, over the sill, down the wall, to the floor.

He knelt, realised this, and after a little while, to his own astonishment, he started to cry.

The mines, anyway, had not been visible from the windows; he had wandered again, mind blank, until he found himself back where he had started, in the empty games room.

He had made for the balcony almost automatically, then stopped to think; vaguely, almost innocently surprised at the ease with which he was suddenly able to accept his own death, even desire it.

And, thinking, there was nothing.

So he had climbed up onto the cold stone parapet.

Now he knew what the red crow had meant by soul, and that a-religious quality of irreducible character, that selfness, would now articulate its most profound self-statement, in its own destruction.

Quiss closed his eyes, leaned forward into space.

Arms closed around his waist; he was pulled back. He opened his eyes to see the sky tipping, the wall of the castle above the balcony slanting over him as he fell. Ajayi gasped as they thumped together onto the slate of the balcony floor. Quiss rolled over, into the warmth of the games room, banging his head on the glass floor.

He looked up, dazed, to see Ajayi lying on the floor of the balcony itself, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and staring at him. She was picking herself up. "Quiss -"

He scrambled to his feet, drew back his hand and hit her hard across the face, knocking her to the ground again. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. "Why can't you leave me alone?" he screamed. He bent down and picked her up. Her mouth was bleeding, her face was white. She cried out, and put her hands up in front of her face to protect herself; he threw her into the games room and she staggered across the floor, tripped on some fallen books and went sprawling. He went after her. "You just can't leave me alone, can you?" he sobbed. His eyes were filling with tears, his hands and arms shook. He bent and picked the woman off the floor again; she brought her hands up, her eyes tightly screwed up, face grimacing; he slapped her and she cried out again, falling to the floor as he let her go. He drew back his foot to kick her, as she lay, curled up on :he glass floor, hands over her head, crying.

He saw the games table, not far away, with the pack of cards lying on it. He didn't kick the woman, but stamped over to the small table, got hold of it by two of its legs, took it over to the woman, then as she looked up, eyes wide with fear, he raised the table over his head (she cringed, cowered, hands over her head again; the cards fluttered down), he swung the table down, into the glass floor near her head, shattering the table and smashing a network of cracks a jagged metre in diameter on the floor's transparent surface.

The table disintegrated; the small red jewel at its centre broke into a thousand pieces, a tracery of shining filaments burst from the table's intricate surface, sparking and spitting for a second, then smoking and going dull, and the solid legs of the table sprang open, cracking and revealing tightly compressed pages with print on them. Quiss kicked the debris, then turned away, covering his eyes with his hands and sobbing.

He stumbled off, into the back of the room, away from the balcony.

Ajayi looked up, over the remains of the shattered table, and saw Quiss bump into the wall by the winding-stair. He staggered down the first few steps and disappeared. She breathed again, dabbed at her split lip with the hem of her furs.

She sat up properly on the glass surface, moving away from where a thin pool of warm salty water was spreading from the cracks where the table had hit. She was trembling.

She looked at what was left of the table.

Well, they had played their last game; they had been left in no doubt about that. No table, no valid games. So they had just their one, unused answer left.

She tried to think calmly, wondering what had made Quiss want to kill himself. She didn't know. He had been increasingly morose recently, but would not talk about the reasons, if there were any. She had hoped he would come out of it; he had been depressed before, as had she, but for the last hundred days there had been a special sort of despair about him, and he had just kept on going downhill, unwilling to talk about it or be cheered up. Perhaps she shouldn't have left him alone just now, but what could she do? If he was determined to kill himself there was nothing she could really do about it. It was his life, it was his right. Maybe she was just being selfish.

She stood up shakily. She was a little dazed, and she hurt in a variety of places. Well, nothing was broken; that was something to be thankful for.

She noticed that the legs of the small table had been made out of books. A couple of them had torn covers and pages; bits of them were still stuck to the veneer of wood which had covered them when they were still part of the table. There had been one or two books making up each of the three legs. The books were written in English.

"Titus Groan," she read, talking softly to herself. "The Castle, Labyrinths, The Trial..." And another book, which had the title page missing. She glanced over the torn remains of the first page instead, and frowned.

She looked at the other books she held. This was interesting. She had been looking for a couple of them, having read about them in some of the literary guides and commentaries which she was using to select which books she ought to read. They hadn't been in the places in the castle where she had expected to find them. Perhaps it was significant that they had turned up instead inside the games table. She looked again at the book with no title page.

She decided she would read this nameless book first. Anyway, it might help calm her down, take her mind off things...

Yes, she thought, as she walked over to her stool, she would read this one first, then the others. She would just have to hope Quiss would be all right. They still had that last answer to come up with.

She sat down.

She started reading.

After all, what else was there to do?

The story began:

He walked through the white corridors.