Yellow Dog

1. Renaissance Man

But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find …

Xan Meo went to Hollywood. And, minutes later, with urgent speed, and accompanied by choric howls of electrified distress, Xan Meo went to hospital. Male violence did it.

‘I’m off out, me,’ he told his American wife Russia.

‘Ooh,’ she said, pronouncing it like the French for where.

‘Won’t be long. I’ll bath them. And I’ll read to them too. Then I’ll make dinner. Then I’ll load the dishwasher. Then I’ll give you a long backrub. Okay?’

‘Can I come?’ said Russia.

‘I sort of wanted to be alone.’

‘You mean you sort of wanted to be alone with your girlfriend.’

Xan knew that this was not a serious accusation. But he adopted an ill-used expression (a thickening of the forehead), and said, not for the first time, and truthfully so far as he knew, ‘I’ve got no secrets from you, kid.’

‘… Mm,’ she said, and offered him her cheek.

‘Don’t you know the date?’

‘Oh. Of course.’

The couple stood embracing in a high-ceilinged hallway. Now the husband with a movement of the arm caused his keys to sound in their pocket. His half-conscious intention was to signal an impatience to be out. Xan would not publicly agree, but women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting. Men shouldn’t mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power … Now Xan sighed softly as the stairs above him softly creaked. A complex figure was descending, normal up to the waist, but two-headed and four-armed: Meo’s baby daughter, Sophie, cleaving to the side of her Brazilian nanny, Imaculada. Behind them, at a distance both dreamy and self-sufficient, loomed the four-year-old: Billie.

Russia took the baby and said, ‘Would you like a lovely yoghurt for your tea?’

‘No!’ said the baby.

‘Would you like a bath with all your floaty toys?’

‘No!’ said the baby, and yawned: the first lower teeth like twin grains of rice.

‘Billie. Do the monkeys for Daddy.’

‘There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They took him to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the BED.’

Xan Meo gave his elder daughter due praise.

‘Daddy’ll read to you when he comes back,’ said Russia.

‘I was reading to her earlier,’ he said. He had the front door open now. ‘She made me read the same book five times.’

‘Which book?’

‘Which book? Christ. The one about those stupid chickens who think the sky is falling. Cocky Locky. Goosey Lucy. And they all copped it from the fox, didn’t they, Billie.’

‘Like the frogs,’ said the girl, alluding to some other tale. ‘The whole family died. The mummy. The daddy. The nanny. And all the trildren.’

‘I’m off out.’ He kissed Sophie’s head (a faint circus smell); she responded by skidding a wet thumb across her cheek and into her mouth. And then he crouched to kiss Billie.

‘It’s Daddy’s anniversary,’ Russia explained. ‘Where are you going,’ she asked him finally, ‘for your lost weekend?’

‘That bar-type place on the canal. What’s its name. Hollywood.’

‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ Billie called.

Leaving the house, he turned briefly to assess it — a customary means of assessing himself, assessing where he was positioned, where he was placed. It wasn’t his style (we shall come to his style), but he might have put it this way:

If fine materials are what you like, then have a feel of that fleece there, on the extravagantly deep armchair (take as long as you like: don’t stint yourself). In fact, if you have an interest in real estate or fine living generally, you could do worse than take a tour of the whole house. If, alternatively, German technology is your thing, then get you to my garage, just around the side there. And so on. But it wasn’t the money. If you harbour an admiration for extreme womanly beauty, then feast your eyes on my wife — the mouth, the eyes, the aerodynamic cheekbones (and the light of high intelligence: he was very proud of her intelligence). Or, if your soul melts to the vivid ardour of unusually cute, healthy and well-behaved children, you would envy us our … And so on. And he might have continued: But then I am the dream husband: a fifty-fifty parent, a tender and punctual lover, a fine provider, an amusing companion, a versatile and unsqueamish handyman, a subtle and accurate cook, and a gifted masseur who, moreover (and despite opportunities best described as ‘ample’), never fools around … The truth was that he knew what it was like, being a bad husband, a nightmare husband; he had tried it the first time; and it was murder.

Xan Meo walked down St George’s Avenue and came to the main road (this was London, near the Zoo). In so doing he passed the garden flat, opposite, which he now seldom used. Were there any secrets there? he wondered. An old letter, maybe; an old photograph; vestiges of vanished women … Xan paused. If he turned right he would be heading for pram-torn Primrose Hill — itself pramlike, stately, Vicwardian, arching itself upwards in a posture of mild indignation. That route would have got him to Hollywood the long way round. If he turned left he would get there sooner and could stay there later. So he had a choice between the garden and the city. He chose the city. He turned left, and headed for Camden Town.

It was late afternoon, and late October. On this day, four years earlier, his decree nisi had been made absolute, and he had also given up smoking and drinking (and dope and coke. American pimps, he had recently learnt, called coke girl; and heroin boy). It had become Meo’s habit to celebrate this date with two cocktails and four cigarettes and half an hour of writhing reminiscence. He was happy now — a delicate state: you could feel the tingle of its stress-equations. And he was steadily recuperating from his first marriage. But he knew he would never be over his divorce.

The rink of Britannia Junction: Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the dozen black frames of the traffic lights, the slum of cars. Certain sights had to be got out of the way: that heap — no, that stack — of dogshit; that avalanche of vomit; that drunk on the pavement with a face like a baboon’s rear; that old chancer who had clearly been incredibly beaten up in the last five or six hours — and, just as incredibly, the eyes that lurked among those knucklestamps and bootprints harboured no grievance, sought no redress …

Xan Meo looked at the women, or more particularly the girls, the young girls. Typically she wore nine-inch bricks and wigwam flares; her midriff revealed a band of offwhite underpants and a navel traumatised by bijouterie; she had her car-keys in one cheek and her door-keys in the other, a plough in her nose and an anchor in her chin; and her earwax was all over her hair, as if via some inner conduit. But aside from that — what? The secret purpose of fashion, on the street, the harlequinade, fashion in its anarcho-bohemian form, is to thwart the lust of your elders. Well, it’s worked, thought Meo. I don’t dig you. He thought too of the menpleasers of twenty-five years ago, their stockings, garterbelts, cleavages, perfumes. Girls were now breaking with all that. (And maybe it went further, and they were signalling the retirement of physical beauty in the interests of the egalitarian.) Meo would not say that he disapproved of what he saw, though he found it alien. And when he saw two teenagers vigorously kissing — an unimaginable mesh of lip-rings and tongue-studs — he felt himself assent to it. See the young kissing and run it by your heart; if your heart rejects it, retreats from it, then that’s age, that’s time — fucking with you.

As he joined the long queue at the service store, for cigarettes, Meo recalled his penultimate infidelity (the ultimate infidelity, of course, had been with Russia). In a hotel room in Manchester he methodically undressed a twenty-year-old continuity girl. ‘Let me help you out of those nasty hot clothes,’ he said. Which was a line of his. But the line felt accurate: the damp-dog sloppy joe, the woollen tights, the rubber boots. He was seated on the armchair when she finally straightened up in front of him. There was her body, with its familar circles and half-circles, its divine symmetries, but it included something he had never seen before. He was face to face with a pubic buzzcut. Also: ‘What’s that doing there?’ he asked. And she answered: ‘It helps me have an orgasm’ … Well, it didn’t help him have an orgasm. Something else was hard where everything was meant to be soft: he seemed to be pestling himself — against a steel ingot. Plus a nice telltale welt (with her name and phone number on it) to take home to a wife who was, in any case, and with good reason, psychopathically jealous (as was he). The continuity girl, then, had not been a continuity girl. Discontinuity, radical discontinuity, was what she had signalled. How clear did it need to be? No more monkeys jumping on the bed. He had been sleeping with Russia for four and a half years. Passion survived, but he knew it would dwindle; and he was prepared for that. Xan Meo was on his way to realising that, after a while, marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

Dusk was now falling; but the firmament was majestically bright; and the contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe … On the street Meo stopped looking at the girls, and the girls, naturally, went on not looking at him. He had reached the age (he was forty-seven) where young women looked through you, beyond you, they looked through your ghost: a trite misfortune, perhaps, but definitely a point in your leavetaking, your journey to ghostdom. You whisper goodbye, goodbye—God be with you (because I won’t be. I can’t protect you). And yet this was not quite fully Meo’s case, for he was a conspicuous man, and knew it, and liked it, on the whole. He owned a lot of physical space, tall, broad, full; his dark brown hair was no longer thick and wavy but it still covered a fair part of his head (the unguent that lent it extra mass and fixity was called Urban Therapeutic); and his eyes had rather more twinkle in them than you necessarily want to see. His face held a glow to it — a talented glow, certainly, but what kind of talent? At its weakest, its most ingratiating, Meo’s face was that of a man who might step up to a microphone and give you a competently leering rendition of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. His air seemed likely: plausible for the purpose at hand.

And, more than this, he was famous, and therefore in himself there was something specious and inflationary, something bigged-up. He was, however, quietly famous, as so many are now: many are famous (and even Meo could remember a time when hardly anybody was famous). Fame had so democratised itself that obscurity was felt as a deprivation or even a punishment. And people who weren’t famous behaved famous. Indeed, in certain mental atmospheres it was possible to believe that the island he lived on contained sixty million superstars … Meo was, in fact, an actor, an actor who had gained sudden repute by warily diversifying into another field. And the world has a name for these people who can do more than one thing at the same time, these heroic multitaskers: it calls them Renaissance Men. The quiet glow of quiet fame, then, further illumined Xan Meo. Every five minutes someone would smile his way — because they thought they knew him. He returned such smiles.

The stroll to Hollywood continued — and we will stay with Meo’s stroll, because it will be his last for some time. He stuck his head round the door of the High Street bookshop and complacently ascertained that his paperback (a debut collection of short stories entitled Lucozade) was still on the table marked Our Staff Recommends. Then, turning right up Delancey Street, he passed the café where Renaissance Man played rhythm guitar every second Wednesday with four old hippies who called themselves the Original Hard Edge. He cut left down Mornington Terrace — rather poorer, very much quieter: he could hear his own footfalls despite the thrashing trees he walked beneath and the submerged clangour of the rolling-stock deep down over the wall to his right. The weather was of the type that was still politely described as blustery. A ragged and bestial turbulence, in fact, a rodeo of wind — the earth trying to throw its riders. And in the street: garden furniture, twirling dustbins, bicycles and (increasingly) car doors thrown open into the path of the boost. Xan was too old for fashion, for cuts and styles; but his trousers, now, were alternately flared and drainpiped by the wind.

Up ahead he picked out a figure that reminded him, or reminded his body, of his first wife — his first wife as she was ten years ago. Pearl would not have had a cigarette in her mouth and a tabloid in her armpit, and nor would her clothes have been quite so brief, so taut, so woman-crammed; but the aggressive or at least sharply defiant stance, the arms disaffectedly folded, the lift of the chin that said that all excuses had now been considered and dismissed … She stood, waiting, in the shadow of a dun-coloured mediumrise. Behind her a male infant lingered, wiggling a stick among the exposed innards of a black plastic bag. As Meo turned to cross over the railtracks he heard her say,

‘Harrison! Move your fucking arse!’

Yes, most regrettable, no doubt; but with his back safely turned Meo did not deny himself a wince of laughter. He was a good modern person; was a liberal, a feminist (indeed a gynocrat: ‘Give the girls a go,’ he’d say. ‘I know it’s asking the earth. Still, we’re no good. Give the girls a go’). But he still found things funny. The woman, after all, had made her meaning plain; and it couldn’t be said that she had minced her words. No: Pearl would have put it differently … He could see the building now, with its variegated Christmas lights, its squirming barber’s pole. Sometimes a descending aeroplane can sound a warning note: one did so, up above — an organ-chord, signalling its own doom.

He stopped and thought: that feeling again. And he sniffed the essential wrongness of the air, with its fucked-up undertaste, as if all the sequiturs had been vacuumed out of it. A yellowworld of faith and fear, and paltry ingenuity. And all of us just flying blind. Then he stepped forward.

Xan Meo went to Hollywood.

‘Good evening.’

‘All right?’ said the barman, as if querying the mental health of someone who still said that: good evening.

‘Yeah mate,’ said Meo comfortably. ‘And yourself?’ This was the thing about him: he was big, he was calm, he was comfortable. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘Football. England. They’ll come steaming in here around eight.’

Meo, who would not be around for that, said, ‘You want to get those uh, plasma screens in. They can watch it in here.’

‘We don’t want em to watch it here. They can watch it in the Worm and Apple. Or the Turk’s Head. And trash that when they lose.’

The cocktail menu had been chalked up on a blackboard above a display of bottles and siphons arranged and set-dressed to resemble downtown Los Angeles. Out-of-scale mannequins of selected moviestars lurched through its streets.

‘I’ll have a …’ There was a drink called a Blowjob. There was a drink called a Boobjob. He thought: it’s like those companies called FCUK and TUNC. Meo shrugged. It was not his intention, now, to ponder the obscenification of everyday life. He said, ‘I’ll have a Shithead. No, a Dickhead. No. Two Dickheads.’

Holding a glass in either hand Xan went out into the paved garden overlooking the canal where, in recent months, on a west-facing bench, usually with Russia at his side, he had consumed many a pensive Club Soda, many a philosophical Virgin Mary. And how much more solemn — how much more august and royal — his thoughts would be, pondering Pearl, alone with his cigarettes and his Dickheads … Meo’s first glance at the motionless green channel rather too studiously confronted him with a dead duck, head down with its feet sticking up like the arms of a pair of spectacles. Dead in the water, abjectly dead: he imagined he could smell it, over and above the elderly medicine of the canal. Like Lucky Ducky or Drakey Lakey, after Foxy Loxy was done.

Xan seemed to be alone in his garden. But then a dapper young man emerged from a Hollywood side-exit, with a mobile phone held to his ear; he seemed briskly bound for the street until he stopped dead and then seemed to grope his way sidewise and steady himself against the canal fencing a few feet away. He acknowledged Xan’s nod with a flicker of his brow and then said clearly, ‘So everything we said, all the vows we exchanged, now mean nothing. Because of Garth. And we both know that’s just an infatuation … You say you love me but I think we have different conceptions of what love really means. To me, love is something sacred, almost ineffable. And now you’re saying that all that, all that …’ He moved off, and his voice was soon lost in the hum of the city. Yes, and that was part of it, the obscenification: loss of pudeur.

Like the dead duck, the worldline of Xan’s first marriage, that attempted universe — dead also. His divorce had been so vicious that even the lawyers had panicked. It was as if the two of them had been trussed together with barbed wire, naked and face-to-face, and then thrown overboard. Your flailings down there, your kicking and clawing: there could be no morality. When Pearl had him arrested for the third time, and he stood at the door of his service flat listening to the charges, Xan knew that he had reached the end of a journey. He had reached the polar opposite of love — a condition far more intense than mere hatred. You want the loved one dead; you want her plane to come down, and never mind about the others on board — those four hundred saps and losers …

But they’d survived; they lived, didn’t they? Xan reckoned that he and Pearl came out pretty well even. And, fantastically, they came out richer than they went in. It was the boys, the two sons, who lost, and it was to them that Xan Meo now raised his glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ As if in recompense for the waterbird upended in the green canal, a sparrow, a feathered creature of the middle air, hopped on to the bench beside him and, with eerie docility, began to ventilate itself, allowing its wings to thrum and purr, six inches away.

The wind had departed — fled elsewhere. In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself. It resembled a titanic firefighting operation, with ethereal engines, cranes, ladders, the spray and foam of hose and standpipe, and the genies of the firemen about their massive work of hell-containment, hell-control.

‘Is that your “bird”?’ said a voice.

Meo acknowledged the passing of his solitude. He looked to his right: the sparrow was still agitating on the arm of the bench, testingly close to his second Dickhead. He looked up: his smiling questioner, a square-looking, almost cubic individual, stood about ten feet away in the weak dusk.

‘Yeah, well it’s all I can pull these days,’ he answered.

The man took a step forward, his thumbs erect on either side of his navel. Recognised, thought Meo. Made.

‘Are you the?’

Expecting that he would soon have a hand to shake, Xan got to his feet. The sparrow did not yet absent itself.

‘Yes. I’m the.’

‘Well I’m Mal.’

‘… Hello there,’ said Xan.

‘Why’d you do it, son?’

At this point it became clear that Mal, despite his air of humorous regret, was a violent man.

Far more surprisingly, it became clear that Xan was a violent man too. That is to say, he suffered from no great deficit of familiarity as the changed forcefield took hold. Violence, triumphally outlandish and unreal, is an ancient category-error — except to the violent. The error having been made, both men would know that from here on in it was endocrinological: a question of gland-management.

‘Why’d I do what?’ said Meo, and took a step forward. He hoped still to avert it; but he would not be going second.

‘Ooh.’

He pronounced it où, as Russia Meo had, so long ago. He went on, ‘I heard you was a bit tasty.’

‘Then you know what to expect,’ he said as levelly as he could (there was an acidic presence in his mouth). ‘If you have it with me.’

‘You went and named him! And I mean that, to me, that is totally, to me—’

‘Named who?’

Mal breathed in and bulged his eyes and loudly whispered, ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. J-o-s-e-p-h A-n-d-r-e-w-s.’

‘Joseph Andrews?’

‘Don’t say it. You don’t say it. You named him. You put him there — you placed him. In black and white.’

For the first time Meo thought that something else was wrong. The calculations going on inside him might be given as follows: my five inches equals his two stone, and zero real difference in the other thing (time lived). So: it would be close. And the guy seemed too blithe and hammy for close. He couldn’t be that good: look at his suit, his shoes, his hair.

‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’

But there is another actor on our stage. But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital. A man (for it is he, it is he, it is always he), a sinner, shitter, eater, breather, coming up fast on him from behind. Mal is violent, and Xan is violent, but in this third player’s scowl and its nimbus you see an absence of everything that human beings have ever agreed about: all treaties, concordats, all understandings. He is palely and coarsely bald. His eyebrows and eyelashes seem to have been lasered or even blowtorched off his face. And the steam pouring from his mouth as if from a spraycan, on this not intemperate evening, reached out to arm’s length.

Xan heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe, of the hefted cosh. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn, and he didn’t turn — he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many noble and delicate powers are so trustingly encased.

He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat: his womanblood, his childblood, taken by his enemy. The physics of it sent his Dickhead twisting up and away. He heard the wet crack, the wet crack of his knees followed by the wet crack of the sliced glass. The world stopped turning, and started turning again — but the other way. Only now after a heartbeat did the sparrow rear up with the whirling of its wings: the little paparazzo of the sparrow.

The sky is falling!

Then the words ‘Get down’ and a second, fervent blow.

The sky is falling, and I’m off to tell the …

Seemingly rigid now, like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.

2. Hal Nine

The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money. He was in a drawing-room in the Place des Vosges, absorbing some very bad news. The equerry on the armchair opposite was called Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. Between them, lying on the low glass table, was a photograph, face-down, and a pair of tweezers. And the room was like a photograph: for several minutes now neither man had moved or spoken.

A vibration was needed to animate the scene, and it came: the ping of a tuning-fork, as one of the thousand facets in the icy chandelier minutely rearranged itself within that ton of glass.

Henry IX said, ‘What a dreadful world we’re living in, Bugger. I mean, it’s such a ghastly, dreadful … world.’

‘It is indeed, sir. May I suggest a brandy, sir.’

The King nodded. Urquhart-Gordon wielded the handbell. More vibrations: scandalously shrill. The servant, Love, appeared in the distant doorway. Urquhart-Gordon had nothing against Love, but he found it awkward using his name. Who would want a servant called Love?

‘Two large Remy reserve, if you would, Love,’ he called.

The Defender of the Faith — he actually headed the Church of England (Episcopalian) and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) — went on: ‘You know, Bugger, this shakes my personal belief. Doesn’t it shake yours?’

‘My personal belief was ever but a slender reed, sir.’

An unlikely expression, perhaps, coming from a man shaped like a cummerbund. Bald, dark, rosy, with Jewish brains (some said) from the mother’s side.

‘Shakes it to the core. These people really are the limit. No. Worse. I suppose it’s all part of some ghastly “ring”?’

‘That is possible, sir.’

‘Why did … How could it be so arranged that such creatures play a part in God’s plen?’

Love reentered and, as he approached, perhaps a dozen clocks, one after the other, began to chime the hour. An instinctively practical man, Urquhart-Gordon reflected that more work would have to be done on the modernisation of the King’s short ‘a’. In times of crisis, especially, it sounded almost prewar. Brendan’s rosy cheeks were for a moment all the rosier as he recalled Henry’s visit, as Prince of Wales, to the trade-union rest-house in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, and the Prince at the piano singing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’: ‘My old men’s a dustman, He wears a dustman’s het, He wears cor-blimey trousers, And he lives in a council flet!’ The Fourth Estate had not been slow to point out that the truth was otherwise: Henry’s old man was Richard IV, and he lived in Buckingham Palace.

Feebly averting his face from the humours of the brandy balloons, Love continued towards them, and still had a fair way to go. It was five past six by the time he left the room.

‘Forgive me, Bugger. My mind’s a blenk. Delivered …?’

‘The photograph was hand-delivered to my rooms in St James’s. In a plain white envelope.’ This envelope Urquhart-Gordon now produced from his case. He handed the transparent zipper-wallet to Henry IX, who gave it a more than averagely puzzled squint. MR BRENDAN URQUHART-GORDON ESQUIRE, and, in the top right-hand corner, Private and Confidential. ‘No accompanying note. Calligraphy and the redundant “Esquire” suggest an uncouth or foreign hand, or an attempt to have us believe as much. Protection will conceivably tell us more.’

Urquhart-Gordon studied the King’s frown. Henry IX normally wore his thick fair hair swiped sideways across his brow. But now in the royal disarray his quiff had collapsed into a baffled fringe, making his eyes look even more beleaguered and inflamed. Henry IX frowned on at him, and in response to this Urquhart-Gordon shrugged and said,

‘We await further communication.’

‘Blickmail?’

‘Well. I would say extortion. It seems reasonably clear that this is not the work of the media, in the usual sense. If it were, then we would be looking at that photograph in some German magazine.’

‘Bugger!’

‘I’m sorry, sir. Or on the Internet.’

With a bedraggled gesture Henry IX reached for the thing on the table. His hand wavered.

‘Use the tweezers, sir, if you would. Turn it with the tweezers, sir.’

The King did so.

He had not seen his daughter naked for perhaps three or four years, and, over and above everything else, he was harrowed, he was bitterly moved, by how much woman was already in her, in his girlchild who still played with her dolls. This, together with the dreaminess, the harmlessness, of the face, caused her father to cover his eyes with his sleeve.

‘Oh Bugger.’

‘Oh Hotty.’

Urquhart-Gordon looked on. A fifteen-year-old girl in what was evidently a white bathtub, with her arms up on the side, her legs folded at an angle in six inches of water: Princess Victoria, in her costume of nudity, her catsuit of nudity, adumbrating womanhood. The conspicuous tan-lines — she seemed, furthermore, to be wearing a spectral bikini — suggested summer. Urquhart-Gordon had checked the scrolled itineraries: all the Princess ever did, apparently, was go on holiday. But she had been back at boarding-school for six weeks and it was now almost November. Why, he wondered, had they waited? There was something about the Princess’s expression that worried him, that additionally disquieted him: the elevation of the pupils … Brendan Urquhart-Gordon’s nickname, by the way, derived from his initials, Henry IX’s from his performance as Hotspur in a school production of Henry IV, Part One.

‘Do you think,’ the King said miserably, ‘that the Princess and a uh, girlfriend might have been messing about with a camera, and uh …’

‘No, sir. And I’m afraid it is highly unlikely that this is the extent of it.’

The King blinked at him. The King always made you spell it out.

‘There must be more photographs of the Princess. In other … poses.’

‘Bugger!’

‘Forgive me, sir. That was unfortunate. The point is: look at the Princess’s face, sir. That is the face of someone who thinks she’s alone. We must take comfort from the fact that the Princess was and is quite unaware of this really unprecedented intrusion. Quite innocent of it.’

‘Yes. Innocent of it. Innocent of it.’

‘Sir, do I have your permission to activate John Oughtred?’

‘You do. Not another soul, of course.’

Henry IX got to his feet, and so, therefore, did Urquhart-Gordon. They fell into step together, the one so sleek, the other so lean. When the great embrasure of the central window had at last been reached, the two men looked out through the lace, through its weft and warp. Floodlights, cranes, gantries, retractable ladders: the firefighters of the Fourth Estate. It was the eve of the second anniversary of the Queen’s accident. The King was expected to make a statement in the morning before flying back to England and then on to his wife’s bedside. For the Queen was not in the garden, eating bread and honey. She was attached to certain machines, in the Royal Inverness.

‘Well, sir. The family motto.’

The family motto, impressed upon Henry IX by his father, Richard IV, and his grandfather, John II, was unofficial. In Latin it might perhaps have been Prosequare. In English it ran as follows: Get On With It.

‘What have I got tomorrow? The AIDS people or the cancer people?’

‘Neither, sir. The lepers.’

‘The lepers? … Oh yes of course.’

‘It could be postponed, sir. I don’t see how it was arranged in the first place, given the significance of the date.’ And he invitingly added, ‘With your permission, sir, I will be availing myself of the King’s Flight in — two hours.’

‘No, I’d better go ahead and do the lepers, now I’m here. Get on with it.’

Urquhart-Gordon knew the real purpose of Henry IX’s visit to Paris. He was obliged to conceal his astonishment that, despite the nature of the current crise, the King evidently meant to go ahead with it (and despite the atrocious timing, the atrocious risk). Now his eyebrows arched as he made a series of fascinated deductions.

‘And after the lepers — then what?’

‘You should be in the air by noon, sir. There’s the ceremony at Mansion House at two: your award from the Headway people.’

Again Henry IX blinked at him.

‘The National Head Injuries Association, sir. Then you go north,’ he said, and superfluously added, ‘to see the Queen.’

‘Yes, poor thing.’

‘Sir. I have Oughtred on hold and will liaise with him tonight at St James’s. We must avoid passivity in this matter.’ He shook his head and added, ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to begin.’

‘Oh Bugger.’

Urquhart-Gordon had an impulse to reach out and smooth Henry IX’s hair from his brow. But this would surprise the King’s horror of being touched: touched by a man.

‘I feel very sorry for you, Hotty. Truly I do.’

Soon after that the King went off to bathe, and Brendan sat on in the drawing-room. He removed his hornrims; and there were the tumid, vigilant brown eyes. Brendan had a secret: he was a republican. What he did here, what he had been doing for a quarter of a century, it was for love, all for love. Love for the King, and, later, love for the Princess.

When Victoria was four … The Englands were holidaying in Italy (some castello or palazzo), and she was brought in to say goodnight to the company — in robe, pyjamas and tasselled slippers, with her hair slicked back from the bath. She went to the cardtable and, on her easy tiptoe, kissed her parents, then exchanged particular farewells with two other members of the entourage, Chippy and Boy. Sitting somewhat apart, Brendan looked up from his book in rosy expectancy — as she wordlessly included him in the final transit of her eyes. Then she took her nanny’s hand, and turned with her head bowed. And Brendan, startling himself, nearly cried out, in grief, in utter defeat — how can I feel so much when you feel so little? All the blood within him … Brendan knew himself to be perhaps unusually fond of the Princess. Was it an aesthetic passion merely? When he looked at her face he always felt he was wearing his most powerful reading-glasses — the way her flesh pushed out at him like the contours of a coin. But this would not explain his condition in the Italian ballroom as Victoria went to bed without wishing him goodnight: for instance, the sullenly mastered temptation to weep. ‘Goodnight, Brendan,’ she had said, the following evening; and he had felt gorgeously restored. It was love, but what kind of love? These days she was fifteen, and he was forty-five. He kept expecting it to go away. But it didn’t go away.

Now Brendan looked again at the photograph of the Princess. He did so briefly and warily. He was wary for her, and wary for himself — for the information about himself it might give him. Of course the point was to serve her, to serve her always … Brendan marshalled his briefcase, preparing himself for the drive to Orly, the King’s Flight to the City of London Airport, and the working supper with John Oughtred.

Eight o’clock was on its way to the Place des Vosges. Downstairs, in the alpine vault of the kitchen, the security detail frowned over its instant coffees — and its playing-cards, with their unfamiliar symbols, swords and coins from another universe. Upstairs, Love, with a white napkin draped over his forearm, was setting the table in a distant corner of the drawing-room. He was setting it for two. Fragrant from his toilet, the King felt his way from one piece of furniture to another. In this room everything you touched was either very hard or very soft, invaluably hard, invaluably soft.

The house belonged, of course, to Henry IX’s especial friend, the Marquis de Mirabeau. Less well known was the fact that the Marquis maintained a further apartment in the Place des Vosges …

Now the clocks chimed, first in relay, then in unison.

‘If you would, Love,’ said the King.

Against the wall on the landing’s carpeted plateau stood a chiffonier the size of a medieval fireplace. This now began to turn, to slide outwards on its humming axis. And in came He Zizhen, greatgranddaughter of concubines.

Love bade her welcome.

When the clocks chimed again He began to undress. This would take her some time. The King, already naked, lay helplessly on the chaise-longue, like a child about to be changed. As she removed her clothes He caressed him with them, and then with what the clothes contained. He touched him. He touched He. He was hard. He was soft. He touched him and he touched He.

There came a ping, a vibration, from the chandelier.

3. Clint Smoker

‘The Duke of Clarence played Prince ChowMein last night, writes clint smoker,’ wrote Clint Smoker. ‘Yes, Prince Alf wokked out with his on-again off-again paramour, Lyn Noel, for a slap-up Chinese. But sweet turned to sour when photographers had the sauce to storm their private room. Wan tun a bit of privacy, the couple fled with the lads in hot pursuit — we’ll cashew! What happened, back at Ken Pal? Did Alf lai chee? Did he oyster into his arms and give her a crispy duck? Or did he decide, yet again, to dumpLyn (after he’d had seconds)? Sea weedn’t like that — so how about a kick in the arse, love, to szechuan your way?’

‘What’s this?’ asked Margery, who was passing.

‘Photocaption,’ said Clint pitilessly, leaning sideways so she could see.

Clint Smoker’s screen showed a tousled and grimacing Prince Alfred and a tearful and terrified Lyn Noel fighting their way through a ruck of photojournalists and policemen in steaming Soho traffic.

‘That rain’s not doing her hair much good,’ said Margery, who now took her place in the next workstation along. A ruddy sixty-year-old, Margery was pretending to be a glamour model called Donna Strange. She was also pretending to have no clothes on.

‘Yeah well it’s the drowned-cat look,’ said Clint.

An identikit modern uggy, Clint himself subscribed to the look-like-shit look (as he had seen it called), with closely shaved head (this divulging many a Smoker welt and blemish), a double nostril-ring in the shape of a pair of handcuffs (the link-chain hung over his long upper lip and was explorable by the petri-dish of the Smoker tongue), and a startlingly realistic, almost trompe-l’oeil tattoo of a frayed noose round the Smoker neck (partly obscured, it is true, by a further rope of Smoker blubber). And yet this man, with a laptop in front of him, was a very fine journalist indeed. Clint’s shoes also repaid inspection: two catamarans lashed in place by a network of cords and cleats.

‘Dear Donna: I am a nineteen-year-old heiress with a slender waist, a shapely derrière, and bouncers as big as your bonce,’ wrote Clint Smoker.

‘Actually not a lot,’ Margery was telling one of her phones. ‘Heels, ankle bracelet, and that’s it, apart from me thong.’

‘Me passion’, wrote Clint, and then went back to change that e to a y, ‘is to dress up in the shortest mini I can find and then go round all the shoeshops with no knickers on. I wait till the lad is on his little seat in front of me. You should see the way they—’

He then said in his uncontrollably loud voice, ‘Here, Marge, they do—’

‘Donna,’ said Marge, pressing the mouthpiece to her breast.

‘They do have blokes serving in birds’ shoeshops, don’t they?’

She shrugged a nod and said, ‘Do you darling? Well we all feel a bit fruity in the afternoons. It’s the biorhythm.’

‘… drool’, wrote Clint, ‘when I yank my—’

Supermaniam Singh poked his head round the door and said in estuary English, ‘Oi. He’s here.’

By the time Clint clumped into the conference room the Publisher, Desmond Heaf, was leaning over the cover of yesterday’s Morning Lark and sorrowfully saying,

‘I mean, look at her. Clint: nice to see you, son. I mean, look at her. That’s deformity, that is. Or obsessive surgery: Munchausen’s. They’re very unhappy people and they look it. See her eyes. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times. Keep the bosoms within reasonable bounds: forty-four triple-F would do as a benchmark. I say it and I say it. They go down for a while but then they always creep back up again. And then we get this.’

‘More centrally, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘it makes the paper too embarrassing to buy. I bet we’re losing wankers.’

Even before the first issue had hit the streets, it was universal practice, at the Morning Lark, to refer to readers as wankers. This applied not only to specific features (Wankers’ Letters, Our Wankers Ask the Questions, and so on), but also in phrases common to any newspapering concern, such as ‘the wanker comes first’ and ‘the wanker’s what it’s all about’ and ‘is this of genuine interest to our wankers?’ The staff had long stopped smiling when anybody said it.

‘Well said, Clint,’ said Heaf.

‘We wouldn’t be losing wankers,’ said Supermaniam. ‘You might find a blip on the rate of increase but we’re not actually losing wankers.’

‘Red herring,’ boomed Clint. ‘We’re losing potential wankers.’

‘I’ll have Mackelyne track the figures,’ said Heaf. ‘Who keeps putting these bleeding great … dugongs in the paper anyway?’

No one spoke. For the Lark was run along cooperative lines. The selection of the scores of near-naked women who appeared daily in its pages was a matter of cheerfully generalised improvisation. Naturally the editorial staff was all-male. The only women to be found in the Lark‘s offices were its tutelary glamour girls and the retirees who impersonated them on the hotlines.

‘I don’t know, Boss,’ said Jeff Strite — Clint Smoker’s only serious rival as the paper’s star reporter. ‘You get in a sort of daze after a bit. You go, you know, “Sling her in” without really thinking about it.’

Clint said judiciously (and loudly), ‘Some blokes do think you can’t have too much of a good thing, so there’s an argument for the occasional bigger bird. We’ve got to attract the more specialised wanker without grossing out the rank and file. It’s this simple: keep the dugongs off the front page.’

‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Anyway, who are we to complain?’ said Heaf. Normally the Publisher had the air of a small-town headmaster — and one harassed by logistical cares to the point of personal neglect (so frayed, so meagre). But now he freshened, and said in a gurgling voice, ‘Gregory, be a good lad and make a start on the beverages, would you?’

Mackelyne had entered and taken his seat. They listened as he talked about the latest sales figures, the multimillion hits on the hardcore websites, the fact that the new sexlines had caused the collapse of the local telephone network, and the inevitability of the 192-page daily format. Then came the money numbers … At the Lark, all profits were shared, with certain steep differentials. But even young Gregory, who was little more than an office boy, had plans to buy a racehorse.

‘Now,’ said Heaf, a while later. ‘What have we got for tomorrow? Clint.’

There always came this moment (and by now the empty bottles of champagne were ranked on the Publisher’s desk, and the dusty air looked gaseous in the low sun, as if everyone had joined in one cooperative sneeze), this moment when the men of the Morning Lark tried to feel like journalists. There was of course hardly any news in the Lark, and no global cataclysm had yet had the power to push the pinup off the front page. Even the vast sports section did little more than print the main results; the rest consisted of girls climbing in and out of the kit of famous football clubs, girls chronicling their one-night stands with famous footballers, early and reckless photographs of models who were married to or living with famous footballers, and so on, plus a few odds and ends about adulterous golfers, satyromaniac jockeys, and rapist boxers. But current events of a certain kind were covered, usually on the lower half of pages two and four.

It was Jeff Strite who spoke. ‘The Case of the Walthamstow Wanker,’ he intoned. ‘And I don’t mean the Walthamstow Reader. It’s an interesting story. And it ties in with our Death to Paedophiles campaign. There’s this public swimming-pool, right? With a gallery? He’s up there alone watching a school party of nine-year-olds. Then this old dear, you know, Mrs Mop appears. The geezer does a runner, falls down the stairs and smashes his head in. For why? His trousers are down around his ankles.’

‘Because he was having a …?’

‘Exactly. Good headline too: Pervs Him Right.’

‘Excellent. And I see we’ve decided to go ahead,’ said Desmond Heaf, ‘with Wankers’ Wives.’

Back at his laptop Clint resumed work on the heiress with a passion for visiting shoeshops in short skirts. This contribution posed as a letter to the paper’s agony aunt, or ‘Ecstasy Aunt’, whose daily double-page spread was pretty well entirely composed by staff writers. Long narratives of an exclusively and graphically sexual nature were followed by three or four words of encouragement or ridicule, supposedly from the pen of Donna Strange. Readers did write in; and once in a blue moon their letters received the hospitality of the Lark‘s correspondence columns. These letters dramatised the eternal predicament of erotic prose. It wasn’t that they were insufficiently salacious; rather, they were insufficiently universal — were, in fact, impenetrably solitary. And they were never from women … Then, with a heavy heart, Smoker flagged the new photo-section alluded to by Desmond Heaf. It was to be called Readers’ Richards, ‘Richard’ being rhyming-slang (via Richard the Third) for bird, just as ‘Bristols’ (via Bristol City) was rhyming-slang for—

‘Why’d you want those bloody handcuffs in your conk?’ asked Margery, who was packing up. She was sixty; he was thirty: these facts had suddenly to be acknowledged.

‘Reminds me I’ve got a nose.’

‘Congratulations. Why’d you want reminding you’ve got a nose?’ Especially that nose, she felt moved to add (Clint’s nose was a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage). ‘And what’s that rope in aid of?’

‘I’ll swing for you, Marge,’ said Clint in a softer voice than usual. ‘It’s my identity. Now shut it.’

He was still muttering viciously to himself when five minutes later his mobile sounded: the knock of a truncheon on a cell door.

‘Clint? And.’

And was Andrew New, one of the sempiternal figures in the Smoker universe, someone with whom he had formed the stoutest of bonds. And was Clint’s pusher. And this call was out of the ordinary. And hardly ever rang Clint. Clint rang And.

‘And, boy. Jesus, what’s that racket? She having another go then?’

‘Gaw, hark at this. “Harrison! Will you get your fucking arse into that bath!” Terrible it’s been. “And! And! Come and it im!” You fucking it im! I hit im the last time. Sorry, mate. It’s calming down a bit now. It’s not as bad as what it sounds … Uh, Clint mate. I think I’ve got a news story.’

‘Well you’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘Yeah, but you must have contacts.’

‘I’m tolerably well connected,’ said Clint untruthfully (and loudly. People placed near him in restaurants used to ask for relocation. That was when he still went to restaurants with other people). ‘Come on then. What is it?’

‘You know that bloke got done last night. Xan Meo. The actor that plays the banjo or whatever the fuck it is. What do they call him.’

‘Renaissance Man.’

‘I was there, mate. Fact. I saw them do im! By the canal. I was down on the path where I keep me stash. He’s just sitting out there having a drink and there’s this two blokes on him. They didn’t half fucking give him one. No. They give him two. I thought: that’s him fucking telt. Then they give him another.’

Clint, at stool, had read about the attack in the Evening Standard. His interest was only mildly piqued.

And went on: ‘Seemed it was like, you know, payback time. Seemed like he’d grassed someone up and it was payback time. They’ve give the name. Said he grassed up Joseph Andrews …’

‘Well it’s no use to me, mate. Unless there was any topless skirt involved. Are you going to the Old Bill with it?’

‘That’s no fucking use to me, is it? There ain’t any reward or anything. No. I was going to flog it round the newspapers.’

‘Uh, don’t do that, mate.’ Clint considered. ‘It’s not that big of a story. And you might get yourself … Let me put out a groper and I’ll give you a call. What was the bloke’s name again — the one that got grassed up?’

‘“Harrison! And! And!” ‘And And said, ‘Gaw, Jesus. Here we go. Joseph Andrews.’

Clint Smoker worked in a sick building. It should have had a thermometer poking out of its first-floor window like a barber’s pole — not writhing, but trembling. In the 1970s it had ambitiously served as a finishing-school for young women hoping for preferment in the public-relations industry. So many of the students suffered from eating disorders that the entire plumbing system surrendered to the ravages of gastric acid. This in turn caused a ‘billowing fracture’ which warped its ventilation systems. The air was turbid with emanations, spores, allergies. Everyone at the Lark was always sneezing, sniffing, coughing, yawning, retching. They knew they felt sick, but didn’t know they felt sick because they worked in a sick building: they thought they felt sick because of what they did in it all day long … Today the sick building gave off an olive glow; a thin rain had fallen, and its face seemed to be dotted with sweat.

He shouldered his way out of there with a cigarette in his mouth. Big man: see the way the automatic doors jerked away from him in fright. Massive, pale, the flesh with the rubbery look of cold pasta; but Clint wielded the unreasonable strength of heavy bones. He kept winning these ragged brawls he kept having, on roadsides, in laybys and forecourts, with their flailings and stumblings, their miskicks and airshots. Clint’s brawls were about the Highway Code: heretical as opposed to canonical interpretations. And Clint was the Manichee.

‘Can you spare some change, sir?’ asked the man with the HOMELESS sign. He asked it ironically: he knew Clint, and he knew Clint never gave.

‘Yes thanks. You’ve done well for yourself. Stay at it: keep that pavement warm.’

If you saw Clint’s jeep in your rearview mirror you’d think that an Airbus was landing in your wake. He needed a big car because he spent at least four hours a day in it, furiously commuting from Foulness, near Southend, where he had a semi.

Now, Smoker lived alone. He had never found it easy to begin, let alone maintain, a fulfilling relationship with a woman. His penultimate girlfriend had ended the connection because, apart from Clint’s other deficiencies, he was, she explained, ‘crap in bed’. Her successor, when she ended the connection, put it rather differently but in the same number of words (and letters): he was, she said, ‘a crap fuck’. That was a year ago. Clint Smoker: crap fuck. It did not enhance his sexual self-esteem. He thereafter relied on escort girls, entertained in various London hotels; and even these encounters were far from frictionless. The truth was that when it came to love, to the old old story (and face it, mate, he’d tell himself: see it foursquare), Clint Smoker had a little problem.

The Foulness semi. It was a ridiculous situation. He had the cash to relocate further in. But the yearlong deprivation of a feminine presence had reduced his place to a condition of untouchable sordor. It was a wonder he kept his person clean. (The bathroom was, in fact, the only non-unbelievable part of the house.) He couldn’t muck it out. He couldn’t sell it. He’d have to board it up and abandon it. The sordor exerted an influence, a paralysis, a nostalgie … And the house was also saturated with pornography in all its forms.

Clint hoisted himself up into the driving-seat of his black Avenger. He now weighed four tons and had a top speed of 160 miles per hour.

A short while ago Clint had received a communication from a young woman. It was not addressed to him but to the Lark‘s Ecstasy Aunt. It began: ‘dear donna: honestly, what’s all the fuss about orgasms about? I’ve never had one and i don’t want one.’ Clint responded personally, to ‘k’ of Kentish Town, saying that he found her views ‘most refreshing’. She’d e’d him back: dialogue. Ah, e-love, e-eros, e-amour; e-bimbo and e-toyboy; ah, e-wooing on the Web … What usually emerged (Clint found) was all vanity and shadow, inexistent, incorporeal: unreal mockery. But something told him that ‘k’ was a woman of substance.

Smoker’s cleated clog plunged down on the accelerator. Only weeks out of the showroom, the Avenger already resembled the bedroom of the Foulness semi. It smelt of new car and old man. Clint was now shouting at the truck he wanted to overtake. He quite sincerely hoped that the crocodile of schoolchildren crossing that zebra up ahead wouldn’t be there when he shot by.

Soon afterwards Homeless John went home, with his HOMELESS sign. His HOMELESS sign leant against the wardrobe while he slept. It leant against the table while Homeless John’s mother made his breakfast.

‘You love that sign, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Looks nice. Most of the blokes write it down with a Biro on a scrap of cardboard. That’s depressing, that is. They don’t even take it home with them. Chuck it away and do a new one in the morning. Couldn’t do that. My sign’s like a breath of fresh air.’

It was true. Homeless John’s HOMELESS sign was a gentrified HOMELESS sign. On the blond wood he had painted a yellow sun, a white moon and silvery stars; then, below, the word homeless, in capitals with double quotes: “HOMELESS”.

‘I wish you wouldn’t, you know,’ she said.

‘It’s just a summer job, Ma.’

‘That sign.’

‘What about my sign?’

‘Everyone sees you come whistling down the street with your HOMELESS sign and your door-key. You sit here having your tea with your HOMELESS sign. It makes me feel this isn’t a home.’

‘I’ll put you in a home in a minute. Don’t be silly, Ma. Course this is home. The sign’s just the tool of my trade. And it’s why I’m a superstar out there: top boy. Made a fortune last week.’

‘And I’ve heard them call you “Homeless” in the pub.’

He had an idea. His estimation of his sign, already very high, climbed a further notch. ‘Look at the quote marks, Ma. It’s saying I’m not “really” homeless.’

Homeless John’s mother was adopting an expression of sorrowful entreaty. She tipped her head and told him: ‘You won’t stay out in the wet, will you, love.’

‘Not me, Ma. I’ll come home.’

Which he would do. With his sign held up high against the rain.

* * *

February 14 (9.05 a.m., Universal Time): 101 Heavy

At Heathrow Airport they loaded the corpse into the hold of Flight CigAir 101—bound for Houston, Texas, USA. The corpse’s name was Royce Traynor. On February 11 the old oiler had been walking down a street in Kensington when a roofslate the size of a broadsheet newspaper came scything down at him. He died in the ambulance, cradled in the arms of his wife of forty-three years, Reynolds. Reynolds now sat in a more attractive part of the aeroplane, in seat 2B. She was tearfully drinking her second Buck’s Fizz and looking forward to the moment when the Captain would switch off the no-smoking sign.

Of the 399 passengers and crew on this ten-hour flight, Royce Traynor was the only one who would feel no erosion of his well-being.

1. The transfer to Trauma

Tender-yeared Billie Meo walked through Casualty with such fascination that the scored lino strained to feel the weight of her tread. Her slippers were landing heel-down, but there was a tiptoe in her somewhere — in the calves, perhaps. Russia Meo, when she took her daughter’s hand, could feel the fractional levitation of inquisitive anxiety as, all around them, figures like distorted statues were being lowered, winched up, bent over, turned. And the noises, and the smell.

It was nine o’clock before Russia called the police and started ringing round the hospitals. It was nearly ten when she learnt that her husband had been admitted to St Mary’s with a closed-head injury that was thought to be minor — as opposed to major. By that time Billie was altogether caught up in her mother’s agitation, and Russia felt she didn’t have a choice but to let her ‘come with’. (The baby, Sophie, had been down for hours — pompously at peace, with her nose upturned.) Russia had trusted herself to take the car, though she already felt like a driver on a stretch of black ice: no grip on the road, and many futures vying to become her next reality. But that would be to get ahead of yourself, because the evening had become a tunnel, and there was only one possible future now — the one at the hospital. She was aware that her body was being internally tranquillised, that time had slowed on her behalf. Like Billie, she was in a state of hallucinogenic curiosity. She parked the car across the street beneath the other building, where she had given birth to both her girls. Then the Reception area, where families and parts of families sat in taciturn vigil, some groups erectly tensed, others in sprawling abandon, as if for a twelve-hour flight delay.

In hospital, she thought: no the or a. In court, in jail, in church. What did these institutions have in common? Something to do with the settling of fates … Billie had been in hospital only twice before: on the occasion of her birth, and, more recently, when it was discovered that she had consumed half a bottle of liquid paracatemol. That had also taken place at night. Billie was in fact concluding that hospital was what automatically happened if you succeeded in staying up very late.

They were now directed to Trauma.

‘A head injury’, said the Intensivist, ‘entrains a sequence of events. We talk of the Three Injuries. The First Injury occurs in the first few seconds, the Second Injury in the first hour, the Third Injury in the first days or weeks or months. Your husband — Alex — has sustained the First Injury. It is my immediate task to prevent the Second and the Third. He lost consciousness, it seems, for about two or three minutes.’

‘I thought anything over a minute …’

‘Three minutes is not the end of the world. Although he couldn’t remember his surname or his telephone number, he was lucid in the ambulance. His blood pressure was normal. The brain was not deprived of oxygen: the Second Injury. His respiration was found to be strong and regular. When there is irregular or depressed respiration in the presence of an adequate airway, the prognosis is invariably grave.’

Some doctors are diffident about the power they wield. Other doctors glitter with it. Dr Gandhi (satanically handsome, it seemed to Russia, but starting to bend in on himself as he reached the middle years) happened to be a doctor of the second kind. He was gratified, he was warmed, by how intently people listened to what he said, with their imploring eyes. They were right to do so, and it was natural to fear him, to love him: he was their interpreter of mortality. What he dispensed — what he withheld … Billie was in the adjacent playroom. Russia could hear her. The child, too, seemed to be taking deep breaths and then holding them; she gasped and sighed as she married and severed the plastic Sticklebricks.

‘Alex was reasonably lucid in the ambulance. By the time I examined him he was talking gibberish. I was not discouraged. He enjoyed obedient mobility and his eyes responded normally to light. Over the space of an hour his score on the Glasgow Scale rose from nine to fourteen, one short of the maximum. The X-ray revealed no fracture. Better still, the CT-scan revealed bruising but only minimal swelling. Which would have been the Third Injury. I administered a diuretic as a precaution. This dehydrates and thus shrinks the brain,’ said Dr Gandhi, reaching out his hand and clenching it. ‘He is in Intensive Care. And asleep, and breathing normally, and fully monitored.’

‘And that will be that?’

‘… Madam, your husband’s brain has been accelerated. The soft tissue has been impacted against its container: the skull. On the front underside of the brain there are bony ridges. What are they for! Nobody knows! To punish the head-injured, it would seem. As the brain accelerates it rips and tears on this — this grater. Nerve cells may be damaged, or at least temporarily stunned. The brain, we believe, attempts to restore the deficit, using surplus cells in a process of spontaneous reorganisation. This may take time. And there are a myriad possible side-effects. Headache, fatigue, poor concentration, poor balance, amnesia, emotional lability. Lability? Liable to change. Mrs Meo, which of these four words best describes your husband’s temperament: serene, easy, irritable, difficult.’

‘Oh, easy.’

‘Expect a tendency, in the coming weeks, towards the difficult. Would you and uh, Billie like to look in on your husband? He has been given a muscle-relaxant. I suggest you do not wake him. An hour ago my colleague tried to shine a light in his eyes. Alex was not best pleased!’

Intensive Care felt like a submarine or an elderly spaceship: dark compartments where important devices whirred and ticked — electrocardiograms, panting ventilators; the churning of life and death in shapes and shadows. Smiling, the charge nurse drew back the curtain. In they crept.

When she saw him Billie gave her characteristic groan of love — but there seemed to be grief in it now. Feeling a pain in her throat, Russia stooped hurriedly and lifted the child into her arms.

They had him at a steeper angle than she expected. The hefty white collar he wore and the way the sheets were puffed up round his neck made it impossible to avoid the thought that he was slowly emerging from the depths of a toilet bowl; and there were wires taped to his scalp.

‘Why he not awake?’

‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered sibilantly. ‘He got an ouch and he’s asleep.’

Suddenly his eyes opened and he was staring straight at her. She felt herself rock back: what was it? Accusation? Then focus was lost, and the lids sank slowly, obedient to a chemical torpor.

‘Blow a kiss,’ said Russia, ‘to make it better.’

As she was walking back through Reception, with that light tread, that flat-heeled tiptoe, Billie looked up at her mother and said, with unreadable contentment,

‘Daddy’s different now.’

‘Count down from one hundred in units of seven.’

‘One hundred … Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Et cetera.’

‘Good. What do a bird and an aeroplane have in common?’

‘Wings. But birds don’t crash.’

‘Can you name the Prime Minister?’

Xan named him.

‘Can you name the Royal Princess?’

Xan named her.

‘I’m going to ask you to memorise three words for me. Will you do that? They are: dog, pink, reality … All right. What were they?’

‘Pink. Cat. Reality.’

His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from — snap out of. Now it was a dream within a dream. And both dreams were bad dreams.

That morning, with Russia present, Xan had been moved from the Intensive Care Unit to the Head Injury Ward. He had won (it seemed to him) insultingly excessive praise for slowly walking in a roughly straight line, for negotiating a flight of stairs depending only on the handrail, for ponderously combing his hair and cleaning his teeth, and for successfully getting into bed. The consumption of a fish finger, with full deployment of knife and fork, brought him further accolades. It was a dream and he couldn’t wake up. But he could go to sleep, and he did so, dreamlessly.

In the afternoon everything became a little clearer. There were fourteen patients in the ward, and they had all of them been split in time. Their minds had gone backwards, while their bodies had floundered on into age. The dullest chores of body-maintenance, those that normally made you numb with inanition, were hereabouts hailed as skills. For example: voidance. An unassisted visit to the toilet could win a round of applause from the staff and from all the patients who knew how to clap. (And even Sophie, at ten months, knew how to clap: a tinny, ticky sound, to be sure, but she seldom actually missed.) Then, too, there were accomplishments that were even more basic than going to the toilet — like not going to the toilet when you weren’t in the toilet. Aslant the next bed but one there lay a seventy-year-old who was being taught how to swallow. And there were others, at different points along different roads, trudging off in tracksuits to the woodshop or the physiotherapy pool. And there were two or three like himself, the uncrowned kings of Head Injury — virtuosos of toothbrush and hairbrush, crack urinators, adepts of the shoelace and the beltbuckle, silky eaters: Renaissance Men.

‘Do you know what the en ee oh is?’

‘Meo. Neo. No.’

‘Near Earth Object. Have you seen a newspaper? It rather drove you off the front page, I’m afraid. It’s coming on Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry. It’ll be close, but it’ll miss.’

Valentine’s Day, he thought. Not a good day for this particular woman. The full orange lips against the downy pallor, the massed orange hair. And yet there was something …

‘Could you write out a sentence for me? Any sentence.’

Xan was handed a pencil and pad. His interlocutor was a forty-year-old clinical psychologist called Tilda Quant. She was having a reasonably good time, partly because it made a change from cajoling an elderly into spelling the word the, but also because this patient was indeed in the newspapers, was in show business, was a mediated individual. Tilda wasn’t succumbing to the old-style reverence for fame. This was something more subliminal and interactive. Partaking of his publicity, his exposure to general observation, her own publicity was minutely enhanced. For his part, Xan thought it tremendously significant, for reasons as yet unclear to him, that Tilda Quant was a woman. She said,

‘“The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” Hm.’

‘It’s an exercise,’ he said. ‘Supposed to contain every letter in the alphabet.’

‘Yes, you’re a qwerty too. Qwerty? You know: qwerty uiop.’

‘Oh yeah. I think I got it wrong though. The sentence. Don’t see a vee in it. I could never remember that one. Even before.’

‘… You say you don’t remember it, the uh, violence.’

‘I do. I do. It wasn’t just the rough stuff in the last few months. The whole process was unbelievably violent. I’ll tell you how I felt. I thought: If I could find some very old people to sit near to, then maybe for ten seconds nothing that bad would happen. Then I wouldn’t feel so incredibly frail.’

She was looking at him with a new fascination. She said,

‘What are you talking about?’

‘My divorce.’

‘Hah,’ she said, taking notes. ‘I’d call that your first dabble in cognitive dysfunction. An inappropriate response to a question that was clearly related to the assault.’

‘The assault? No, I don’t remember the assault.’

‘Do you remember the three words I asked you to memorise?’

‘… Cat. A colour: yellow or blue. Oh, and reality.’

Outside the sun was an hour above the horizon, still showing one thing to another: showing the other thing to this thing, and this thing to the other thing. He watched shadows move. They moved, it seemed to him, at the same speed as the minute-hand of the clock on the wall of the sister’s office, behind her sheet of glass. This felt like a discovery: shadows moved at the speed of time … Xan kept thinking about his dead sister, Leda: he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and when he went to the hospital she never woke up.

His wife came, with Billie and the baby, and Imaculada.

When the girls had gone Russia called for the screens to be drawn around his bed, which she then climbed into, wearing only her slip. The way she did this made him think of the phrase petticoat government … He responded palpably to her warmth, her breadth. This was a distant reassurance, but it soon joined the pulse of his headache, and was then lost in his exhaustion and nausea and the ambient grief of his wound. He wanted to submit to a body of moving water. He wanted to let the waves do it.

Russia had put her clothes back on and was about to leave. Xan seemed to be sleeping, but as she tugged at the plastic curtain he sat up straight and eagerly pointed to the young man in the next bed along (who seemed far from grateful for the attention), saying,

‘This guy here — he’s a hell of a shitter. Aren’t you son. Not … uh, overly brill at the eating and the talking. So far. But you can’t argue with shitting of that quality. Boy can he shit.’

Xan felt that no one seriously expected him to remember the assault. When they asked him about it (the doctor, the clinical psychologist, the easily satisfied plainclothesman), he told them that he remembered nothing between going to Hollywood and going to hospital. This is what he told his wife. And it wasn’t true. He remembered it pretty well. And he remembered it as he had been promised he would remember it: in pain.

Whoever hurt me, he thought (all day long), I will hurt. Hurt more, hurt harder. Whoever hurt me, I will hurt, I will hurt.

2. Doing Beryl

Five foot eight in all directions (he was roughly the size of a toilet stall), Mal Bale carefully poked a number into his mobile (it was no bigger than a matchbox, and caused him to rely on the nail of his little finger). He said to his employer,

‘There should be two of me here. To body this fucking bloke? You come back from the Gents and he’s gangraping a waitress — all by hisself … No, mate. No, I only rang for a moan. Actually he’s not that bad tonight, with his injury: slows him down a bit. And the journalist’s here now and he’s gone a bit calmer … Yeah? Thanks, mate. Appreciate it.’

Mal referred, in the first instance, to Ainsley Car, the troubled Wales striker. One of the most talented footballers of his generation, Car was now up to his armpits in decline; and he was only twenty-five. It was three years since he had represented his country (and three months since he had represented his club). The journalist in question was the Morning Lark‘s Clint Smoker.

Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the work of a professional bodyguard consisted of one activity: frowning. You frowned here, you frowned there. You frowned this way, that way. Got to be seen to be vigilant: got to keep frowning. Some mornings-after you’d wake up thinking: Fuck. Who nutted me last night? Like your brow was one big bruise. Only it wasn’t the fighting. It was all the frowning … But Car was different. Normally a bodyguard protected the client from the outside world. With Ainsley, you protected the outside world from the client. Mal Bale, who had been hired by Car’s agent, stood at the bar of the Cocked Pinkie, rubbing his eyes like a child. He wouldn’t be called upon to do a lot of frowning. He would be called upon to do a lot of gaping — as a prelude to more concerted action. It’s weird, thought Mal. Ainsley’s just about controllable till the six-o’clock personality change. Half a shandy down him and he’s a different bloke. His eyes go.

There they sat in their booth, Ainsley and that Clint: talking business. Ainsley’s fourth cocktail looked like a Knickerbocker Glory — with a child’s umbrella sticking out of it. You’ve got to respect him as a player, Mal inwardly conceded. And Mal in his early days (a different epoch, really) had been a loyal supporter of his native West Ham: the punnet of sweet-and-sour pork on the overnight coach to Sunderland; the frenzied, lung-igniting sprints down the King’s Road; the monotonous appearances at the magistrate’s court in Cursitor Street. Then disillusionment had come to him, one Saturday at Upton Park. It was half-time, and they had these two mascots romping around in the corner where the kids all sit; they were plumply, almost spherically costumed, one as a pig, one as a lamb. Suddenly the pig gives the lamb a whack, and the lamb whacks him back. It was comical at first, with them flopping and floundering about. You thought it was part of the act — but it wasn’t. The lamb’s on his back, flailing like a flipped beetle, and the pig’s doing him with the corner-flag, and you can hear the kids screaming, and there’s blood on the fleece… Up until that moment Mal had considered himself nicely pumped for the post-match ruck; but he knew at once that it was now all over. Over. Something to do with violence and categories: he couldn’t articulate it, but never again would he fight for fun. Mal had recently become a dad himself, which might have had something to do with it. He heard later that the lamb had been stuffing the pig’s bird, in which case the lamb, Mal believed, definitely had it coming.

He consulted his watch (seven-fifteen). Darius, his relief, was due at ten.

‘Over the past two years Ainsley Car and the Morning Lark have enjoyed a special relationship,’ said Clint Smoker. ‘Fact?’

Ainsley did not demur. During his years at the top he had opened his heart to a series of mass-circulation dailies about his benders and detox programmes, about the drunken car-crashes, the wrecked hotel rooms, the stomped starlets. But that was in the days when, with a drop of his shoulder and a swipe of his boot, Ainsley could hurt whole nations, and instantaneously exalt his own. And he couldn’t do that any more. These days, even his delinquencies were crap.

‘There comes a point in every athlete’s life’, said Smoker in his loud and apparently humourless voice, ‘when he has to take off his shorts and consider the financial security of his family. You have reached that point — or so we at the Lark believe.’

No, he couldn’t do it any more: on the park. In his early pomp, Ainsley was all footballer: even in his dinner-jacket, at an awards ceremony — if he turned round you’d expect to see his name and number stitched on to his back. Ginger-haired, small-eyed, open-mouthed. In the dialect of the tribe, he was tenacious (i.e., short) and combative (i.e., dirty); but he was indubitably in possession of a football brain. His mind wasn’t cultured or educated — but his right foot was. Then it all went pear-shaped for the little fella. The aggression was still there; it was the reflexes that had vanished. Usually, now, Ainsley was being stretchered off the field before the ball had left the centre circle: injured while attempting to inflict injury on an opponent (or a teammate, or the referee). The Lark‘s most recent in-depth interview had concerned the ‘moment of madness’ at a proceleb charity match when, with the vibrations of the starting whistle just beginning to fade, Ainsley went clattering into the sixty-six-year-old ex-England winger, Sir Bobby Miles. They broke a leg each.

‘I got years left in me, mate,’ said Ainsley menacingly. ‘You know where I keep me pace?’ And twice he tapped his temple. ‘Up here. I can still do a job out there. I can still do a job.’

‘Let’s have some realism, Ains. Never again will you pull on a Wales shirt. You’re on a one-year with them slappers up in Teesside. And they won’t renew. You’ll have to drop down. In a couple of seasons they’ll be kicking chunks out of you down in Scunthorpe.’

‘I ain’t a slapper, mate. And I ain’t playing for … for fucking Scumforpe. You know who’s enquiring after me? Only Juventus.’

‘Juventus? They must be after your pasta recipes. Ains. Listen. You were, repeat were, the most exciting player it’s ever been my privilege to watch. When you had it at your feet coming into the box — Jesus. You were something unbelievable. But it’s gone, and that’s what frustrates you. That’s why you’re always in hospital by half-time. You’ve got to believe that the Lark has your best interests at heart.’

‘The people’, said Ainsley, with bitter gratitude, ‘will always love Ainsley Car. They love their Dodgem, mate. That stands. It stands.’

Resembling an all too obviously non-edible mushroom, Clint’s tongue slid out of his mouth and licked the handcuffs dangling from his nose. He said, ‘You’re done, Ains. You’re gone. You’ve given. It’s that nagging brain injury called self-destruction. You’re fat, mate. And you sweat. Look at your chest. It’s like a wet-T-shirt competition. And that wedding-ring is getting smaller every week. Which brings me to my next point.’ Then, his sadism more fully responding to the masochism it sensed in Car, he gestured at the waiter, saying, ‘Raymond! Another drink for Tits.’

Smoker paused. He was, this night, experiencing an unfamiliar buoyancy — rather to the detriment, perhaps, of his diplomatic skills. In the inside pocket of his big boxy black suit there nestled an enticing e-mail from his cyberpal, ‘k’. In response to Clint’s query, ‘What kind of a role do you think that sex plays in a healthy relationship?’ she’d e’d: ‘a minor 1. have we all gone stark raving mad? let’s keep a sense of proportion, 4 God’s sake. it should only happen last thing @ nite, as a n@ural prelude 2 sleep. none of these dreadful sessions. i find a few stiff drinks usually helps — don’t u?’ Reading this, Smoker became belatedly aware that his most durable and fulfilling relationships had all been with dipsomaniacs. To put it another way, he liked having sex with drunk women. There seemed to be three reasons for this. One: they go all stupid. Two: they sometimes black out (and you can have a real laugh with them then). Three: they usually don’t remember if you fail. Takes the pressure off. Common sense.

‘We at the Lark reckon you’ve got one mega story left in you. The challenge, now, is for us to maximise that story. We’ve discussed various ways you could make the world sit up and listen. And this is what we want you to consider. Doing Beryl.’

‘Doing Beryl?’

‘Doing Beryl. And having Donna.’

Beryl was Ainsley’s childhood sweetheart. They had wed when they were both sixteen, and Ainsley had left her two weeks later, the day after his record transfer. In a ceremony largely brokered by the Morning Lark, the pair had recently remarried: the event was designed both to confirm and solidify Ainsley’s triumph in his battle with alcohol. Central to the symbolism of the story was the fact that Beryl, remarkable in no other way, was spectacularly small. Ainsley himself was the shortest player in the Premier League — but he beetled over Beryl. Journalistically, it was felt that a tiny bride would shore up Ainsley’s protective instincts and sense of responsibility, unlike the circus-horse blondes whom he was always brawling over, or brawling with, in various spielers and speakeasies.

‘Follow me here,’ elaborated Clint Smoker. ‘You arrange for Beryl to meet you in your London hotel room at a certain time. Earlier in the day, at a piss-up arranged by us, you pull the top Lark model of your choice. Say Donna Strange. You take her back to your room, and you’re giving her one when the missus walks in. Donna scarpers and you do Beryl.’

‘Why do I do Beryl? Why doesn’t Beryl do me?’

‘Cause she’s one inch tall. No. Come on. She’s bound to give you a bit of stick.’ Smoker put his head at a craven angle and said in a wheedling voice, ‘“You were giving that model one! You betrayed me with another bird!” All this. I mean, how much shit can you take? So then you do Beryl.’

Ainsley’s open mouth opened further, thus deepening the pleat between his nose and his forehead.

Smoker said, ‘I mean every paper’ll cover that. And we’ll have Donna’s tits and arse all over pages one to five, Beryl’s black eyes all over pages five to ten, plus an eight-page pullout soul-searcher from the man himself, Ainsley Car.’

‘How much?’

Smoker said how much: a jolting sum.

‘All passengers to the rear of the plane!’ Ainsley suddenly hollered. ‘Stam back! Don’t no one go near! Fuck amfrax — this geezer’s got hepatitis G an an an-grenade up his arse! OH MY GOD! IT’S THE TOWER! IT’S BIG BEN, IT’S OLD TOM, IT’S BUCK PAL! NO! THE UMFINKABLE! OH MY GOD, WE’RE ALL GONNA—’

By this time several waiters had hurried through the silenced dining-room, and Mal Bale was there with his palms on Car’s shoulders, pressing him back into his seat, and looking round about himself, and frowning.

There’s no hard men any more, brooded Mal (this had recently become an urgent mental theme, following the matter with Xan Meo), as he made his way to the bar, two hours later: all they got now’s nutters. Nutters on drugs. Take Snort: that bloke Snort.

When he reached the bar and its ring of drinkers, Mal turned. Darius had been prompt. At this point Darius was on his first cranberry juice, Smoker was on his third litre of mineral water (he feared for his driving licence) and Ainsley was on his ninth cocktail. A seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist, Darius looked to be having some success in forcefeeding Ainsley with bread rolls.

Take Snort. No bottle. After the Xan Meo business, Mal gave Snort his drink (four hundred in cash) and said, ‘I’m never using you again, mate. All right?’ And Snort just dropped his eyes. And then Mal said, ‘So you’re having that, are you? Just think, “I’ll fuck up, I’ll get me drink and I’ll creep away”? You ought to take a pill called pride, son. You ought to take a pill called pride.’ See: no bottle. Just nutters on drugs. And playacting, too. Snort says he’s ex-SAS, but all the right dogs say they’re ex-SAS.

Mal was now joined by Smoker of the Lark, who was looking at him oddly, as if pricing his suit.

Smoker meant to say it softly, but his voice wasn’t equal to saying things softly. He said, ‘You’re a face, incha?’

The first thing Mal had to establish was whether he was being trifled with. He was barely aware of the existence of the Morning Lark (and would have been scandalised by its contents), but he knew Clint pretty well, through the Ainsley Car connection and because of that time when he, Mal, had famously bodied topless models for six months and given interviews to various newspapers, the Lark among them. Seemed like there wasn’t much harm in the bloke. Relenting, Mal said,

‘Don’t know about face. I’m a bodyguard, mate.’

‘But you put yourself about a bit, in your time. Let the Lark do this.’

‘Yeah. Well. This and that. A pint of Star please, love. I could have progressed. But I didn’t have the correct temperament.’

Clint quietly rolled his eyes and said, ‘But you’ve run with these blokes. You said in print that you’ve run with these blokes.’

‘Yeah, I’ve known a few in my time. Ah, lovely.’

‘See if this name means anything to you.’

‘Goo on en,’ said Mal briskly, tipping his head back and intending to neck a good few swallows of his first drink of the night.

‘Joseph Andrews.’

Mal emitted a sneeze of foam and dived forward with his face in his glass.

‘Whoah,’ said Clint, wiping the beer off his brow and pounding Mal’s back with a heavy white hand. ‘Yeah. See they did that bloke Xan Meo? Mate of mine witnessed it. Said they were settling a score for Joseph Andrews. Reckons he’ll flog it round the newspapers.’

It’s gone off, thought Mal. It’s all gone off.

At midnight Ainsley Car called for his crutches.

Already ashore, Mal watched the troubled striker as he levered himself along the gangway, with Darius looming in his wake. Beyond them flowed the Thames and all its klieg-lit history. Above, the moist studs of the stars, the sweating stars, seized on to spacetime.

‘Legless,’ said Clint from behind.

‘No, he’ll be getting his second wind about now. Want to be off up the clubs.’ Around eleven Ainsley had entered a quieter cycle, like a washing-machine. Any minute he’d be back to tumbling and fumbling and shuddering up and down. Mal looked at his watch and said, ‘Time for the submarine.’

And you could hear him, Ainsley, as he laboured up the slope, in a low, fiercely rigid voice, going: ‘All men in level five proceed at once to level four. All men in level four proceed at once to level three. All men in …’

Discreetly the courtesy car drew near. Mal saw with regret that Ainsley’s course would take him past, or over, the poor bastard who was sitting under a lamppost with his dog in his lap … And this homeless person was not in the position of Homeless John, who had somewhere nice to go home to; he was a genuine carpark and shop-doorway artist, a dustbin-worrier hunkering down for his third shelterless winter. The bitch had spaniel in her blood, and smooth-haired terrier; he stroked and muttered and otherwise communed with her. They looked closer than a couple: the impression given was one of intense participation in each other’s being. It was almost as if the dog was his strength, his manhood, surfacing erect from his slumped body.

So Dodgem poles himself into the frame and says, ‘Do you fancy fifty quid?’

‘… Course I fancy fifty quid.’

Out comes the money-clip and he peels off the note.

‘… Thanks very much.’

‘Now. I want to ask you a favour, mate. Can you lend me fifty quid.’

‘I’d rather not. To be honest.’

‘Honest? You know what my dad said to me?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing! Cuzzy fucked off when I was one. But me mum. Me mum said charity begins at home. And you ain’t got one. Now ghiss it,’ said Ainsley. His voice was vibrating; his whole head was vibrating. ‘Where’s your pride man …?’

‘We … we weren’t all born with a talent like yours. You’re a god, you are.’

Ainsley now turned inexorably on Clint Smoker. ‘I stood, mate. I stood. The National Amfem! The fucking King’s there just above the dugout with tears in his eyes! With the grace of a pamfer I’ve put Hugalu on his arse, nutmegged Straganza, and laid it off for Martin Arris! The Twin Towers explode! With love, mate, with love!’

‘They can’t take that away from you, Ains,’ conceded Mal.

The dog looked up at the footballer with eyes of loving brown.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it, son. Go and get arseholed on Ainsley Car. Everyone stand back! That’s not a dog! It’s a rabies bomb! ALL PASSENGERS IN SEATS FIVE TO TEN PROCEED AT ONCE TO THE SECOND LEVEL OF THE SUBMARINE! IT’S GOING OFF, IT’S GOING OFF!’

Then, like two athletes genuinely committed to winning the three-legged race, Ainsley launched his desperate hurdle into the night, Darius following, first at a jog, then at a run, then at a sprint.

Clint remained, as did Mal. Mal was wondering what kind of mood Shinsala would be in when he got back to her flat. As he swung the car door shut, as he listened to the chirrup of the lock, would he feel the excuse me of fear in his chest? Not physical fear, of course, but fear. Was fear a mood?

‘You could do it by maths,’ said Clint. ‘Divide his weekly wage by his IQ. Something like that.’

‘Clint mate,’ said Mal, winding up.

Smoker offered him a look of effusive contrition. In the last thirty minutes there had been a power-shift between the two men. Clint had tended, in his previous dealings with Mal, to regard him as an affable plonker obliged to earn a living with his fists. But male anger, male heat so easily translatable into male violence, had rearranged this view. Clint thought of himself as big and strong, and there were those ragged brawls of his that he always won. Still, Mal’s violence was efficient, professionalised and above all righteous: it was something that Clint could never counter. At this moment Clint’s fear felt to him like love — love for Mal Bale.

‘Clint mate. Are you a cunt?’

‘No, Mal. I’m not a cunt.’

‘Now. What happens if you let me down.’

‘Well, obviously the proverbial’ll hit the fan, won’t it. Obviously.’

‘If you want to know how hard, give your boy Andy a call at the end of the week. All right?’

‘Yeah mate. All the best then, Mal. Go easy. Take care, mate.’

Clint Smoker was laughing by the time he hoisted himself on to the flight deck of his black Avenger. Adrenalin: it’s very good stuff. As he put his foot down (within minutes, consecutive thought would be entirely sacrificed to motorly concerns) Clint began to compose an e-mail in his head, beginning, ‘What do you say to the hoary old chestnut, Does size matter?’

3. On the Royal Train

The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money — and the Queen was not in the parlour, eating bread and honey …

Henry was coming south on the Royal Train. This train of his had an ‘office’ car, a conference car, a drawing-room car, a bedroom car, a dining-room car, a kitchen car, a staff car, a security car, and an observation car. The potentate was in the ‘office’ car, writing his daily letter to the Princess. Like nearly all the interiors he had ever known, it was a chamber of restless lines: absolutely nothing had been left in peace. Every plane was harassed with ornament; the walls were tiled with paintings and framed photographs, the flat surfaces infested with curios and bibelots; each panel of the ceiling insisted on its cloudscape, its putto, its madonna, its nude. Denied the freedom of vast dimension, the train was like the condition of being royal: it was always on at you and it never let you be.

There were frequent and durable and much-resented delays, but the Royal Train was technically non-stop. At this stage only the King knew of the coming rendezvous, in a siding at Royston, near Cambridge, with Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, who claimed to bear both positive and negative news.

‘My darling daughter,’ the letter had begun … ‘The Lepers’, he now wrote, ‘were rather a pain. Then the nightmare of the flight back. The turbulence over the Channel was, as always, pretty good hell. On landing, straight off to the Head Injury lot, which was a fair form of medieval torture. You have to hang round listening to people who can barely talk and say how wonderfully they’re getting on. Then, in the afternoon, I went north, on the Train.’

He paused. Going north had been like a journey into organic depression, a journey into night and into winter. At first, merely the obese cauldrons of the power-stations adding their clouds to the huge grey. Then the sky turned fuzzily black, with bright seams. Every now and then the sun would appear, like a miner’s helmet coming down a chimney. They met the night at three-fifteen. And finally the Kyle of Tongue, strapped on to its crag in the North Sea.

‘There has, alas, been no change in Mummy’s condition,’ Henry wrote on, his elaborate calligraphy rendered even more tremulous by the careening wheels. ‘I must say I now thoroughly dread these visits. What’s so heartbreaking is that Mummy is quite unchanged, as serenely handsome as ever.’ He broke off, and shuddered. ‘The hairdresser still attends her once a day, they still do her nails once a week, and she is of course frequently “turned”. If it weren’t for the ghastly wheezing of the ventilator, one might expect her to open her eyes and say, with all the old joviality, “Oh Daddy, don’t just sit there! Where’s my pot of tea?” As I have often said, whilst there have been cases of people emerging from “PVS” after periods of several years, we must contine to steel ourselves for the worst. The “team”, my darling, may be reduced from three to two, but it’s still a team, you and I, my dearest one. You and I. We Two.

‘The presence of the media …’

He paused. And continued:

‘… simultaneously cheapens and confuses one’s sufferings. Of course I am moved, of course I am shaken. But must I display my wounds to the camera? And this is when they are at their most respectful! “Don’t be afraid to shed a tear, Your Majesty”! It makes one want to vom. More and more viscerally do I feel that the media are base violators who poison everything they touch.’

He paused. How had Bugger put it? ‘The Princess should be told’, Urquhart-Gordon had said, ‘that there may have been a breach of her privacy.’ No, thought Henry: too early for that. And continued: ‘It seems to me that we two ought to have a “peptalk” on this very subject, and on security in general; I will come on Saturday (5th), and we can have a lovely chat in that perfectly decent hotel.’

There followed a fantastic display of diminutives and endearments.

Henry then rang for Love.

At Royston they began to slow. Up ahead, in an almost invisibly fine mist, lay the siding where large-eyed Urquhart-Gordon now stood with a lone detective. And the black car, beyond, with its driver. The train was still moving when Brendan climbed aboard.

Henry IX said, ‘Give me the bad first, that good may come of it.’

‘The discouraging news, sir, is that the photograph is not, in fact, a photograph.’ Brendan composed the sleek lines of his eager, clever face. ‘It is a still.’

He had mentally set aside quite a few seconds for Henry to take this in. And the King’s head actually idled on its base for a full half-minute before he murmured,

‘From a film.’

‘Well, yes, sir. From a film.’

Brendan heard Henry’s sigh — long and searching, with a muted whimper at the end of it.

‘From a DVD DigiCam 5000, to be precise, sir.’

‘You know, Bugger: I hope this comet or whatever it is smeshes us all to smithereens.’

‘It won’t smash us, sir. If it hits it’ll burn us.’

‘Even better. Hellfire. It’s no less than we deserve.’

Now Brendan contemplated his monarch. It seemed a nice question: in a life so straitened, so predetermined, so locked down — you’d have thought that there was no room at all for individual variance. But Henry was an established royal anomaly. Unlike his father, Richard IV, and his brother, the Duke of Clarence, and unlike so many other males in their line, Henry had piloted no jets or helicopters, commanded no icebreakers or minesweepers, drilled no troops, bunked in no submarines, simulated no fighter-evasion sorties, parachuted athwart no mountainsides. Nor did he share his house’s enthusiasm for horticulture, music, hunting, practical jokes and eastern faiths. Henry had merely loafed his way through a geography degree at Oxford and then got on with his social life. Even before he acceded, of course, his diary was plagued with ‘functions’, and he continued to shirk and chuck as many as he could. But the minimum was already a very great deal. Brendan thought that half the secret of the royal existence lay in the fact that it was quite unbelievably boring. You became a man of action to counterbalance this; you sought danger, exertion, intense states. And you busied yourself with arcana, with obsessional crankery — anything that would fill your mind. Henry was defenceless. He simply endured it, all the boredom, like a daily dose of chemotherapy.

Unlike his numerical predecessor, that glittering Renaissance prince, who was interested in astronomy, theology, mathematics, military science, navigation, oratory, modern and ancient languages, cartography and poetry, Henry IX was interested in watching television — or in staying still while it was on. Two years earlier, Brendan would have said that the King, at fifty-one, was senescent with ennui. For some reason his preternatural indolence endeared him to the million, and he had always been popular, despite everything (the gaffes, the insensitivity, the fathomless ignorance). They liked his frown, his blink, his sandy mop. Nowadays his numbers had in fact slightly dipped from their usual 75 per cent. The public didn’t want to see their king trudging down hospital corridors and having fiendishly strained conversations with turbaned community-leaders. They wanted to see him fast asleep at the races.

‘I went to her bedroom,’ said Henry vaguely. ‘It’s still a zoo of cuddly toys. She’s still so little, Bugger …’

Brendan reached for and unlocked his steel briefcase. ‘Sir, we’re somewhat further for’ard than we were. We think we have the location.’

‘The location?’

‘See, sir.’

Again the photograph — with the body of the Princess whited out of it. Though he recognised the propriety of the excision, Henry suffered a moment of snowblind alarm. Where had she gone? Whited out, like a mummy, like a ghost.

‘I thought we’d have to start by trawling through every bathroom in all the royal households, looking for that tub, that mirror, that basin, in that particular alignment. But Oughtred’s people have rather brilliantly narrowed it down. Look, sir. To the Princess’s left is a bar of soap in its dish.’

Brendan paused, giving Henry time to say,

‘Are you telling me that this is the only royal bathroom with a cake of soap in it?’

‘No, sir.’ Brendan dipped into his case and was presently unscrolling what seemed to be a poster or a silkscreen: twenty by twenty, and glossy to the point of liquefaction, and all white.

‘And what may I ask is this?’

‘The bar of soap, sir. Or rather a detail from it: the crest.’

Henry stared into the swimming cream.

‘It’s rather worn down, sir, but you see the indentation. A lily. Three petals bound together. The fleur-de-lis. That’s the brand the household uses at Cap d’Antibes. The Princess holidayed with you there for two weeks in August. And that, I submit, sir, was when her seclusion was surprised.’

‘That’s a pretty way of describing what I consider to be a capital crime, Bugger. Well then. Now what?’

Brendan had never seen it before: the King with a kingly air. He said, ‘With your permission, Your Majesty, Oughtred and I fly to Nice tonight.’

‘Given … Oh, poor darling.’

The two men listened to the train as it slowly rocked and knocked … Brendan considered. Victoria England, naturally, had already been the theme of many a national furore. The first of them erupted when she was seventeen days old: a sacked nanny claimed she had walked out because the Queen refused to practise ‘demand’ feeding. Six months later the country was similarly divided on the question of whether the Princess was ready to be weaned. And so on. Should she be allowed to ride a training-bike indoors without a crash-helmet? Should she be eating fast food on school outings? Should she have worn ‘that’ miniskirt at the ill-fated ‘Dunsinane Disco’? It was at this stage (the Princess was eleven) that Brendan started to detect a half-conscious salacity in the native fixation. No, not salacity: something indecent, but innocently indecent. When she turned twelve there was a sudden crossfire of think-pieces on the arguable virtues of a) sanitary napkins, and b) riding sidesaddle — in which the Princess was of course never mentioned. You could feel it gathering, building; it was on the people’s mind: Victoria poised between childhood and nubility. So much disquiet, concentrated on the precious membrane of the Princess … Brendan thought that the relationship between the English and the Englands was incestuous and narcissistic but essentially subliminal (sub: under; limin-: threshold); down there all was obscure, sunless, moonless, starless.

‘You’ll see she gets this today, Bugger.’

Henry now stood and moved to his desk where, using an ivory shaving-brush and a silver saucer of water, he fixed the envelope containing his letter to the Princess, adding the Royal Seal with the ring on the third finger of his right hand.

Brendan gathered his things. First the blow-up, the grotesque enlargement, like a plastic tablecloth. Then the photograph itself. He was glad he couldn’t see Victoria’s face, with her pupils on the top left-hand corners of her eyes, which disquieted him so. He thought he knew what the Princess was doing. She was listening.

The sprawling map of the fleur-de-lis, now that was just a detail: the crest. Why, who knew? With a bar of soap that size, maybe you could wash all Fucktown clean …

Laterally the Royal Train moved across North London, continuing west.

Andy New saw it pass. He was down on the actual track (his fresh stashpoint), and he saw the curtained carriages, the crests and emblems. He thought: taxpayers’ money! Not that And was much of a taxpayer …

And was a pusher: of drugs, and of pornography.

And And was an anarchist, a street-partyer, and a committed savager of junkfood restaurants during antiglobalisation riots. Two years earlier his common-law wife, Chelci, had presented him with a child: little Harrison.

Having vaulted the gate, he made his way up the back slope, meanwhile fielding a call from his older brother, Nigel. Nigel had been a bit savoury in his earlier days but now he was dead straight just like any other cunt.

Nigel: ‘You’re not still peddling that muck, are you?’ And: ‘The videos and that: course. Freedom of expression. But not that stuff.’ Nigel: ‘Because that’s a no-no, that is.’ And: ‘Definitely no go.’ Nigel: ‘It’s not on.’ And: ‘No soap whatso.’ Nigel: ‘I worry about you, And. On the train to Manchester.’ The brothers had recently travelled to Manchester, to watch the match and see their dad. The City Hall wearing a green fishnet vest, and the cabbie’s shortwave going Britannia Ridgeway, Rodger-Rodge, Oxnoble, Tango Three, Midland Dinsbury. Nigel: ‘Us sitting on the floor between the compartments? Okay, there’s nowhere else to sit. But I look at you and I think: He fucking loves it. Down there in the dirt with his can of lager.’ And: ‘What’s this in aid of, Nige?’ Nigel: ‘I worry about you, And.’ And: ‘Well worry about your fucking taxes.’

As he came muttering up over the bridge a voice hailed him from behind:

‘I say! Excuse me! Young man!’

Turning, And saw a compact gent of late-middle years, wearing a chalkstripe suit with its three jacket buttons fastened, dark glasses, and a black borsalino.

‘Thank you, thank you. Now. I wonder if you could very kindly direct me to …’

With some difficulty he detached an envelope from his inside pocket. He smiled. ‘How are you?’ he asked heartily.

‘All right. How are you?’

‘I’ve never felt better in my life, thank you, and I’m thoroughly enjoying this spell of fine weather we’re having.’

One of those accents: posher than the King.

‘I’m looking for Mornington Crescent, do you see. Not Mornington Terrace, Mornington Crescent …’

Andy soon set him right.

‘Ah. Thank you so much.’

At this point, with an elegant rotation of the wrist, the man in the suit removed his dark glasses — to reveal the strangest eyes And had ever seen. So bright yet so pale: Antarctic blue, with yellow haloes. For a moment Andy wondered where the bloke had left his guide dog.

‘Tell me. Would you be Andrew New?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name is Semen Figner …’

Pronouncing the name in a different voice: Slavic. And New saw that the blue eyes had foully darkened.

‘Your woman is shit,’ Semen Figner said normally. ‘Your kid is shit.’

February 14 (10.41 a.m.): 101 Heavy

First Officer Nick Chopko: Hey, that’s kind of cool …

Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Excuse me?

Chopko: See it? Second to go, runway right.

Captain John Macmanaman: … Well well. The old De Hav Comet. What? Nineteen fifty-five? Where’s that going?

Ward: Croydon, maybe? The Aviation Museum?

Macmanaman: … This wait is going to eat into my retirement.

Chopko: Yeah. I would like to take off while I’m still quite young.

After the seventy-minute weather delay, CigAir 101 had pushed back from its stand and joined the queue on runway nine. Flight regulations insisted on a three-minute interval between ascents. But on this day, of course, all the transatlantic equipment had to be off the ground by eleven o’clock sharp. The tower decided on the Emergency Interval of 130 seconds. And the Captain coolly advised his passengers to prepare for some ‘slipstream turbulence’; with slipstream turbulence, he might have gone on to say, the passenger will feel more like a mariner than an aeronaut, shouldering through heavy seas at 200 miles per hour.

Tower: One oh one heavy, you are cleared.

Macmanaman: Acknowledge.

Tower: Up and dirty.

At 10.53, 101 Heavy put its head down and went looking for the escape velocity. Reynolds Traynor was bolt upright in seat 2B. She had a cigarette in her mouth and the trigger of a lighter waiting beneath the print of her bent left thumb.

Chopko: V1 … V2. Out of here.

The instant the tyres left the tarmac the Captain extinguished the no-smoking sign.

A climbing plane normally welcomes the surge of a stiff headwind; but the headwind facing 101 Heavy, while no longer describable as a storm, was still, at forty-six knots, a severe gale. The Captain thus faced two immediate dangers, one grave, one merely very serious, with or without the slipstream turbulence and its ‘funnelling’ effect. The first danger was that the aircraft would go ‘beneath the BUG’, or the minimum flying speed, and submit to its own gravity load (resulting in a black box which consisted of a brief squall of obscenities). The second danger was that of ‘nose-lift’: here, the windforce meets the plane on its rising breast and renders it vulnerable to ‘toppleback’. Nose-lift was what happened to 101 Heavy. Lighting a cigarette from its predecessor’s trembling ember, Reynolds leaned into the aisle and looked aft. The inter-compartment curtains had fluttered up to head height. She was staring into a lift-shaft — but one thickly peopled. The women she could see wore contorted faces: bared teeth, incredulous scowls. As for the others, their brows were marked by the childish, the calflike frowns of men expecting death.

101 Heavy was twenty degrees from the horizontal (it felt more like twenty degrees from the vertical), and at maximum power, when it hit the torn air of the slipstream.

At this point the locks securing the coffin of Royce Traynor snapped free from their bracket. Falling end over end for thirty-five feet, Royce powerdived into a mosaic of wall-bolted mountain bikes. Wedged at an acute angle against the cargo door, he remained more or less upright when the plane steadied and continued a shallow climb to its cruising altitude.

‘Isn’t it great to be above the weather?’ said the man in 2A. ‘I’d like to live above the weather.’

‘Yeah,’ said Reynolds. ‘But not today.’

‘Not today.’

He was staring at her legs, very critically, or so it seemed to Reynolds, who liked her legs. Now he was staring at her feet.

‘You shouldn’t have worn heels,’ he said. ‘You could puncture the inflatable emergency-slide. Which might also serve as a liferaft. You’re wearing tights.’

‘… That’s true.’

‘You shouldn’t have. They’re partly synthetic, you know,’ he said. ‘They melt and cling when they burn.’

In the hold the corpse of Royce Traynor seemed to square itself.

It was ready.

1. The publicity of knowledge

For her next encounter with the Intensivist, Russia Meo wore the most expensive clothes in her possession. A customised Italian suit of black cashmere, matching gloves and bag, court shoes. She wanted to send a clear message to Dr Gandhi: if anything went wrong, she would most certainly sue. It was also one of those days when she instinctively decided to let her figure have its head. A waisted white blouse, therefore, and her most dynamic white brassière. These luxurious expanses of silk were not aimed at Dr Gandhi (they were aimed at someone else); but perhaps the components of the olive cleavage would be making a core assertion — the assertion of life, life …

Dr Gandhi had taken due note of Russia’s appearance, and derived some doctorly stimulation from it (the relative size of the nipples was what chiefly intrigued him); but he wasn’t enjoying this second interview as much as he had enjoyed the first. The correlation of forces had already changed, as was now pretty well invariably the case. How much better it had been, how much more appreciated he had felt, when nobody knew anything — in the time before the publicity of knowledge. Now, instead of the sweating mutes of yesterday, you faced erratically wised-up mountebanks with half-assimilated case-histories, prognoses, quackeries. Dr Gandhi believed that it would be fractionally harder, henceforward, to get doctors to be doctors, such was the drain on the job-satisfaction. Russia Meo was of course an educated, indeed a distinguished woman, and he had never expected to be able to radiate downwards at her, like a Saturn. But nowadays (he reflected) every flop and waster in London had some four-eyed cousin or nephew prepared to scour the Web for all it knew … So Russia pressed from question to question; and, head injuries being head injuries, with their labyrinthine sequelae, Dr Gandhi was soon reduced to a drone of equivocation. He felt a familiar frowsiness come over him, alleviated, for a moment, when Russia turned to the white sheet of the window: the tautening of her bust allowed him to conclude that the nipples would be correspondingly large. This prompted a sexual thought, one unmoderated by the simultaneous reminder that large nipples would facilitate the business — if not the actual process — of lactation.

Russia, for her part, had not at all enjoyed her many hours in front of the computer, boning up on the head-injured. After reading one particular sentence (‘Approach your spouse as you would a completely new relationship’), she had even burst from the house and stridden to the Jeremy Bentham for cigarettes. She smoked seven of them while making herself mistress of subsections with titles like ‘Your New Domestic Life’ and ‘Your New Social Life’, and so on. What do they mean, new? she kept thinking. (And what do they mean, your?) It is better, we always assume, to be prepared than not to be prepared — but not much better; with some eventualities, being prepared isn’t any good either … Among other recent gains and accomplishments, women have naturally made considerable advances in the largely male preserve of self-centredness. And alongside the conviction that she would try her very best, there ran another — specifically, that there were some (no, many) possible outcomes, amply described on her screen, that she couldn’t and wouldn’t endure. She was not being ruthless, merely modern: come on. But then Russia confronted another sentence, one that made her hate herself, and weep, and valorously insufflate. The sentence went, ‘There is only one “miracle cure”, and that is love.’ And so now she said it a different way: come on. Come on …

* * *

As he stirred for the third or fourth time that morning, Xan Meo saw his wife, sitting, waiting, on the bedside chair. She said immediately,

‘I was just reading about you. Well, not you, but people in your condition. Now, Xan, I want to say this: don’t fall for the “two-year” myth. It’s an old wives’ tale that’s caused a lot of unnecessary pain. They say that “after two years” you’re not going to recover any further. It’s not true, Xan. You can go on recovering for much longer than that. It can take five years! It can take ten! Ask around in your support group and you’ll see that it’s so!’

Xan needed more time than he would have liked to realise that all this was in itself an old wives’ tale — or a first wife’s tale, to put it another way. This wasn’t Russia. This was Pearl. She went on:

‘You know, something like this, it can make you grateful for what you already have. I know I’m grateful for what I already have: a lump sum, and not alimony. Because you do know, don’t you, that only twenty-five per cent of head-injured patients are in full employment three months after their accidents?’

He straightened himself up and with both hands smoothed back his scattered hair; he supposed — and it was a supposition prompted or at least borne out by Pearl’s smile — that he had never looked balder. Rather more generally, his cheeks and forehead seemed to be dotted with excrescences, asperities — as if, while he’d slept, someone had sliced and daubed a loaf of bread above his face, leaving it covered with crumbs and seeds held in place by coagulating butter. He was glad that Pearl couldn’t see his knees: on the inner side of either patella, visible fluid waves, like fat worms.

‘Where are the boys?’ he said. ‘They’re here?’

‘They’re in the caff. They’ll be along … One of the things you’ll have to steel yourself for, my darling, is a net drop in your IQ. Studies show. Shouldn’t affect the acting but it won’t be too clever for the writing, will it? I don’t know about the rhythm guitar. You know what really worries me?’

Xan waited.

‘What really worries me is how it’ll affect your relationship with Russia. Sitting there at dinner, you won’t know what she’s on about. Because that was always very important to you, in the past — her mind. You used to say so. It wouldn’t matter that much if you were still with me. Not that I’d look at you now, in your state. We could just hang around staring at the wall. But with her …’

Over in the nook by the door several head-injured young men were sitting in front of the television, watching the only human pursuit dedicated to the infliction of head injuries: the two guys in the square ring, with the shiny shorts and the gumshields.

‘You’ve gone very quiet, Xan. I expect it’s a bit of a strain, putting a few simple words together.’

‘Oh I can talk all right.’

‘So you can. And don’t worry about the longer ones — you know, the ones with two or more syllables: they’ll come.’

In fairness to Pearl (and Xan, silently, within himself, had already made such a concession), it should be recorded that after reading about the attack she telephoned the hospital and screamed at various people, demanding, as the mother of Xan’s sons, a full and detailed diagnosis, which she got; and this she had passed on to her boys with the gentlest and most hopeful construction. Pearl was a good mother. She was not, perhaps, everybody’s automatic choice as an ex-wife. But she was a good mother.

‘The worst thing, they say — they say … The worst thing, they say, is what it does to your sex life.’

A woman, it has been observed (by a woman, two hundred years ago), is fine only for herself. Man is indifferent to nuance; and the only things another woman will respond gratefully to are obvious signs of poverty or bad taste. Pearl didn’t dress only for herself. She dressed for everyone — herself included. Today she wore a black leather jacket that squeaked and glistened, a snow-white cashmere sweater, and a pink flowered skirt of startling brevity (plus witchy ankle-high boots, also black, and flouncy little socks, also white). There was one more thing: one more thing she was wearing.

He had known Pearl, on and off, since infancy; and the lost world of their marriage (he had come to feel) was regressive or animalistic or even prehistoric — a land of lizards. There were things that, even today, he would never dare tell Russia. For instance, the fact that after twelve years together (years qualified by month-long silences, trial separations, separate holidays, frequent fistfights, and ceaseless adultery) their erotic life continued to improve — if improve is quite the word we want. Everything else was bottomlessly horrible, by the end: they had reached a state (as one of their counsellors put it) of ‘conjugal paranoia’. The two boys were long past going down on their knees and begging their parents to separate. It was not until Michael and David were well into their second and more serious hunger strike (eighty-four hours) that Xan and Pearl snapped out of it and called the lawyers. But throughout this period their erotic life continued to improve — or, to put it another way, continued to take up more and more of their time.

‘It can go either way,’ she said: ‘your sex life. Either you’re not interested — that’s what usually happens. Or else you’re interested in nothing else. Which d’you think it’s going to be?’

Xan waited.

‘Let’s do a little test. Ready?’

He knew what was coming, and he knew where he’d look. To fix it: Pearl O’Daniel was tall and lean (and wore her auburn hair short and spiky); her hips were narrow, but her thighs were widely set, splaying upwards and outwards from the knee; and it was in the space between her legs, in this triangular absence (the shape of a capital y), that her gravity-centre lay … Now one of the predicates of Pearl’s character was that she always went too far. Her greatest admirers would instantly admit it: she always went too far. Even in the company of those who themselves always went too far, she always went too far. And now, in St Mary’s, Pearl went too far. Uncrossing her thighs and crossing her ankles, she revealed this space, and Xan, still defeatedly low in the bed, contemplated it. His ex-wife, of course, had not committed the sexual illiteracy of wearing nothing, underneath: she was wearing something, and not just anything. He was familiar with it — pearly white, and studded with stars. On the morning of the day the decree nisi came through, Xan had had the whole thing in his mouth, while Pearl looked approvingly on.

‘Which is it?’ she asked. ‘All or nothing.’

‘Of the two, I don’t know, I’d have to say nothing.’

‘Well done, Xan. A long word: nothing. Ah. Here are the boys.’ She stood up and waved. Then from her fathomless tote-bag she removed a newspaper and stretched the page out at him: three photographs — Xan, Pearl, Russia. ‘She’s going to give you grief about this,’ she said.

As his sons approached, Xan made another effort to straighten himself against the rails behind his back. Again, with trembling hands, he rearranged the trembling wefts of his hair. The bed, the whole stall here, felt like a display-case of age and ruin, in ashtray colours … Michael and David took up position on either side of him. They regarded their father, not with solemnity, alarm or disappointment, but with acceptance; and immediately he took comfort from it.

David, the younger, kissed his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

Michael, the elder, kissed his cheek and said, ‘Dad? Who were the fucking bastards who did this to you?’

‘Michael,’ said Pearl.

‘Well that’s it,’ said Xan, who remembered, pretty much. ‘You don’t remember.’

But he couldn’t remember the impact, nor the moments leading up to it. Tilda Quant had told him that there was a fear-centre in the brain, a dense knot of neurons deep inside either hemisphere and normally associated with the sense of smell. Here was the control tower of your horrors and hauntings. Sometimes the brain could suppress the most painful memories (and military scientists, she said, were trying to duplicate the effect with a devil-pill that would quell all qualms). So now his brain was protecting him from his memory. But he wanted the memory and constantly sought it out. He wanted the smell of the memory.

‘Never fear, boys. Soon I’m going to go out there’, he said (in a voice, in an accent, that even Pearl found hard to recognise), ‘and get them fucking dogs.’

Like somebody moving from one life to another, Russia walked along a tube of glass — one hundred feet above the road that separated the two sections of the hospital. She was leaving theory, now, and entering practice.

Her anxiety, her suspense, was currently devoted to a fit of slanderous detestation aimed at Natwar Gandhi — and at all doctors everywhere. As a student of twentieth-century history, she knew about the ‘chemistry’, as opposed to the ‘physics’, of the USSR’s interrogation teams, the vivisectionists of Japan; when, in 1941, the German doctors were given a free hand in their treatment of the infirm and the supposedly insane, the following phase became known as ‘wild euthanasia’. Doctoring talent — healing — danced closely with its opposite. Given the chance (it seemed), these pulse-taking, brow-fondling trundlers would be wrapping up children’s heads in old newspapers, and strolling about, in a collegiate spirit, with the packages under their arms.

All of which they did do. But Russia, now, was hating Dr Gandhi (her chest swelled, her nostrils broadened) for his refusal to protect her from any of her fears. The prognosis was good; still, he would rule nothing out. And the glint that came into his face when he described negative outcomes: the glint of relished life-power. Yes, he must get a lot of that, in Intensive Care. While he talked, Russia found herself imagining what his senses had been trained to tolerate — unspeakable textures, fantastic stenches. Nor, as she took her leave, could she spurn the consolation that this doctor, like most other doctors, would drop down dead within a week of his retirement. It was to do with power, and when that went, they went.

She pressed the button. Something dropped in her. She sighed as the lift sighed.

‘No, boys,’ Pearl was saying, ‘Dad’ll be back on his feet before we know it. And up to his old tricks again. Won’t you Xan.’

‘… Course I will.’

‘Of course he will. Whoo-pa. Here she comes. Christ she’s fat. Russia! I’ve been admiring your picture in the newspaper!’

Explosive Anger and Irritability, Family Abuse, Grief and Depression, Lack of Insight and Awareness, Bladder and Bowel Incontinence, Anxiety and Panic, Sexual Problems, Loss of Love, Coping with Loss of Love, Letting Go … Russia walked on, making herself taller. The waisted blouse, the dynamic brassière, the olive cleavage: all this — just in case — had been for Pearl.

2. The high-IQ moron

What used to be funny? wondered Clint Smoker. What’s funny now? And is it still funny?

A hushed conference room in the sick building. On the other side of the sealed window a tubercular pigeon silently flapped and thrashed. The Chief Publisher sat at his desk with his face in his palms.

For the Morning Lark was in crisis. Desmond Heaf (who made a habit of disappearing, of fading in and out of things) had returned, on a thirty-hour flight from the South Pacific, to rally his men.

He eventually said, ‘I simply don’t see how something as extreme as this could have actually … What were you thinking of?’ Gingerly and evasively he looked down at the double-page spread flattened out in front of him. ‘Sacred heart of Jesus. I mean, it’s not in nature …’

‘When I saw the first one,’ said Clint, ‘I thought it was an exposé on Battersea Dogs’ Home.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jeff Strite, ‘or a “shock issue” about Romanian mental homes.’

‘And the actual damage, so far?’

‘This whole thing is being taken very personally,’ said Mackelyne. ‘There’s a lot of anger out there.’

‘Are we losing them, Supermaniam?’

‘Judging by my e’s, they’re all dying of heart attacks.’

‘That’s good, that is,’ said Heaf. ‘We’re killing our own wankers.’

Supermaniam said, ‘It’s like Black Thursday.’

On the Wednesday before Black Thursday, the Lark had put together a playful piece about the Guinness Book of Records and the new category saluting the biggest ever, or longest ever, male member. On the same page (with more than a little twinkle in its eye) the Lark had reproduced a twelve-inch ruler and (tongue still firmly in cheek) challenged its readers to make an invidious comparison. As an obvious tease — or so the Lark believed — the twelve-inch ruler had been renumbered to make it look like a six-inch ruler. Soon after dawn it started coming in: word of the Black Thursday suicides.

Heaf said, ‘Bill. You made up these pages. How did you physically bring yourself to do it?’

‘When the first lot came in,’ said Bill Woyno, ‘I assumed they were taking the piss. When the next lot came in I must have thought, Well, this is … this is what it’s like.’

‘Let’s face it, lads,’ said Clint, ‘we’ve gone and strafed ourselves in the metatarsus on this one. But there’s a way out of it, Chief. May I essay a marxist analysis?’

‘By all means, Clint,’ said Heaf with a frown of intense respect.

‘Right. The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The upmarket tabloids are aimed at the bourgeoisie. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat. At the Lark our target wanker is unemployed.’

‘Come to the point, Clint.’

‘Well: who can you pull when you’re on the dole? We’ve delivered an insult to all our wankers — a deserved insult, but an insult. We’re saying, we’re proving, that our readers’ richards, if any, are straight out of the Black Lagoon.’

Four days earlier the Morning Lark, with considerable pomp, had launched its new feature, Readers’ Richards. And the death threats had started coming in that morning.

‘“Your ankles will be nice and warm” ‘, Heaf incredulously quoted, ‘“as you feast your todger on another array of top-grade totty, submitted by our red-blooded …” ‘He sat back. ‘Sweet mother of Christ, will you look at that — that troll in the top left-hand corner.’

‘I’m getting e’s from blokes who’re stapling the pages together in case they see it by accident.’

‘You should have a look at what we’re not using. Every last one of them takes years off your life.’

‘You got to brace yourself, and even then …’

‘There’s not that many to choose from. And we’re already running out.’

‘Three point seven million wankers,’ said Heaf weightily. ‘And this is the best they can do. Well then. What’s our course of action?’

‘Simple,’ said Jeff Strite. ‘Scrap it. Without comment.’

‘No. See,’ said Clint, ‘that’s another insult. And it’s not what they’re after.’ He pointed at the four heaped stacks of printed protests. ‘They can’t believe it either. They’re not telling us to scrap it. They’re telling us to say it isn’t so.’

‘And there’s a road out of this, Clint?’

‘Yeah, Chief. We can turn it around. Over a period of a few days we weed out the Wives and start replacing them with models.’

‘What, our own girls? Bit obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Well, not the Donna Stranges of this world, obviously. Use more like the also-rans. And if a famous face does get in there now and then … See, it’s not overly rational, is it, their response? We’ve kicked them in the arse. We’ve insulted them. Now let’s flatter them.’

In the fight for the Lark‘s ideological soul, Clint Smoker was always alertingly radical. He alone, it sometimes seemed, had a true estimation of their typical reader. He now went on to add,

‘It’ll go down okay. You could fill that spread with filmstars and have a strap saying dream on, you stupid sods and it would still go down okay. The other thing we need to do is improve the decor. Not these bleeding … coalholes. Look at the one on the middle right.’

Heaf rotated his head ninety degrees to the left, and then realigned it very slowly before jerking back from the page.

Clint said, ‘That could illustrate a piece about white slavery or slum housing. The whole spread could. No. We want reasonable birds on three-piece suites. Or better. And if you had them in the driveways of stately homes, I assure you, our wankers would be none the wiser.’

There was a silence of about half a minute.

‘Thank you for those words, Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘Make it so. Additional points … Now. All the other papers are going on about the NEO, the asteroid or whatever it is, and I’m sure our instinct was sound when we decided we’d completely ignore it. But with all these earth-shaking events going on — aren’t we short-changing the wanker on current affairs? I think we should at least mention the main wars and plagues and famines and what have you. Now I know our emphasis is essentially domestic, but with the world situation as it is I can’t help thinking we’re slacking off a bit on our foreign news.’

‘I agree, Chief,’ said Strite. ‘I could do with another month in Bangkok.’

Everyone laughed tensely.

What’s funny? thought Clint. Gentle reader. Reader, I married him. T.S. Eliot: A Reader’s Guide. Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frere!

dear clint: your remarx about your childhood struck a chord. i 2 never felt th@ i was ‘1 of the “gang” ‘. some of us seem 2 have been singled out. We r, in some sense, ‘special’. & i no th@ if i ever find some1 2 spend the rest of my days with, then he would have 2 b ‘special’ 2.

Clint had recently read a piece in a magazine which posited the emergence of a new human type: the high-IQ moron. Wised-up, affectless, and non-empathetic, high-IQ morons, according to the writer (a woman novelist), were also supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change — an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling. So Clint was relieved, in a way, to find himself flinching and smiling, smiling and flinching, at the authorial style of his newfound penpal. In the text-messaging line, and so on, he had seen the King’s English far more miserably disfigured. But never quite like this. Never, quite, in the service of mutual exploration and courtship — and with such good grammar. Clint knew about grammar. Mr and Mrs Smoker: both schoolteachers. And old hippies. Old — now dead — hippies. Dead hippies. Jesus: what happened?

Still, Clint wasn’t about to be critical. Clint? Critical when it came to birds? Deprived for so long of female influence, he felt — well, these words of hers were like a lifeline to the guy. Like a lifeline.

He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography — with its infinities, its immortalities — Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them. And the distance was getting greater all the time.

What happened? What was emanating from him, what was he giving off? He was, he thought, no uglier (and by now much richer) than the bloke you saw all over the place with his trusting female companion who was always ready to kiss his earring or stroke the nap of his fuzz or gaze into his dark glasses with a smile of roguish forgiveness.

Must be nice, he thought. Ring it up when you’re walking down the street: so everybody knows. ‘Hello, love, it’s me. I’m walking down the street. What’s for dinner?’ Romantic evening. Table set for two. Slip it a Narcopam in its coffee: take the pressure off.

Must be nice. But it never had been nice. Even when things were bowling along all friendly, he always sensed the weight, the sinkage, the falling mercury inside his chest. Because he knew full well that they were just waiting — waiting for their chance. In bed, of course, the eternal battle was to make them feel it: to transform them with your strength. And that’s what the books said women were after too, at one remove: the metamorphosis of impregnation by the strongest available male. So they were always waiting, calculating, comparing — always ready to belittle … This, at any rate, was what Clint kept telling himself (wash your hands of them; they’re all the same; and so on). But his unconscious mind suspected otherwise. He heard from his unconscious mind, sometimes. On Sunday afternoons as he lay abed licking his nasal handcuffs in the hopeless pit of his Foulness semi, he would sometimes hear it say: ‘I don’t know, mate. There’s going to be grief. I don’t know, mate. It’s all going to end in tears.’

She was like a lifeline to the guy:

my man of the moment (& i do mean moment) is of the ‘macho’ type. u no: down the gym all Sat, football on Sun morning & 10nis in the afternoon. borlNG! i like a fella who drinx beer in front of the tele — with me on his lap! in bed, while we r having 6, he moans at me 2 scream. i tell him: i’m not the kind that will per4m @ your beck & call! don’t (me with TH@ sort! i suppose he thinx th@ screaming = abandon. but i don’t WANT abandon. y o y, clint, do people use 6 2 infl8 their own gr&iosity?

Although the piece of paper he had in his hand was merely a printout of an e-mail, Clint held it to his cuffed nostrils, as if hoping for an intimation of her scent. And he had read it, oh, three or four dozen times. I’m not going to mess this one up, he thought: no way.

the trouble is i’ve never been able 2 ‘sack’ a man. 2 anger a man. i wouldn’t dare. offend a MAN? so i have 2 go on mildly displeasing him (and th@’s bad enough) till he pax his bags & moves on. how? o u no, clint — little things. i 4get 2 praise him as of10 as i used 2. i refuse 2 wipe his p off the toilet seat. i speak up 4 myself. wh@ i’m really saying is: join the q, m8, 2 the back door! clint, i’m tired of it. let me b clear: i h8 the ‘new man’ 2, so ‘caring’ in the bedroom. ‘did u finish?’ ‘was it good 4 u 2?’ yes! 7th heaven! cloud 9! y can’t people just b themselves, clint? 2 much herd instinct, 2 much falsity, 2 much pre10ce.

ps: 3 cheers 4 ‘readers’ richards’. a real tonic 4 the gentler 6: gr8 scott, there’s hope 4 us all!

‘Your messages are like a breath of fresh air,’ mused Clint as he precomposed his reply. ‘Now you’ve seen my ugly mug often enough in the Lark. I’m no looks snob — can’t afford to be! But it would be nice to put a face to your words of wisdom. And maybe a name …’ And she still hadn’t said whether she thought size mattered.

Only one thing troubled him. Market research had shown, time and time again, that the Morning Lark had no women readers. So the question remained: what sort of bird read the Lark?

He paused there, at his desk. Clint was about to begin a piece. But he paused at his desk there.

‘… Uh, is uh, is And around?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Uh, Pete.’

‘No he ain’t,’ said a much smaller voice than the one he was used to. ‘Harrison, careful, darling. They’ve got him down as missing. No, don’t do that, sweetheart — there’s a good boy. They’ve got him down as a missing person.’

Clint said he was sorry to bother. He thought: Jesus — don’t say Joseph Andrews. Then: pop round and cheer her up. Then: no. Leave all that out. Or: the proverbial’ll—

‘— Ah Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘It’s not as serious, but something else has just blown up in our faces.’

‘And what’s that, Chief?’

‘Pervs Him Right.’

‘Ah. The Walthamstow Wanker.’

‘The same. But one crisis per day, eh? A couple of things, Clint. There’s a word in your Video Review column that gave me a bit of a turn. Where are we.’

He flattened the page out on Clint’s worksurface. The strapline said Blinkie Bob’s Video Review. In the corner was a mugshot. Not Clint, but some portmanteau imaging creation: a face grotesquely wall-eyed, and bent at an angle, tongue lolling, with two hair-matted palms loosely raised.

Heaf said, ‘Now where …? Here we are. Uh, “and have your bogroll handy for when gueststar Dork Bogarde pumps his lovepiss over the heaving norks of our very own Donna Strange”. What, may I ask, is lovepiss?’

‘Semen, Chief.’

‘Oh. Oh. I thought our house style was “manjuice”. Oh. Well that’s all right then. You know, it disgusts me, sometimes, what we do here. It does. How are things progressing with Ainsley Car?’

‘Well the ice-boot’s come off. Have to wait till he’s playing again, for the visibility. But it’s looking good, isn’t it, with the new charges.’

Clint remembered that Heaf didn’t follow football. He went on, ‘They’re nicking him for match-fixing now. Said he took half a mil from a Malaysian businessman to throw it for Rangers last season. Our wankers’ll hate him for that: sacrilege, Chief. Maybe we can get Beryl done during the trial.’

‘Proceed as you think fit, Clint. And you said you were following through with our royal coverage.’

‘I’m on it, Chief.’

‘It warms your heart, doesn’t it, Clint. We always assumed that the royals were felt to be an irrelevance — an anachronism. And old Queen Pam, of course, was a rather forbidding figure. But now she’s been gone for two years, and what with the Princess flowering into maturity, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of affectionate interest — reflected in Mackelyne’s figures — across the entire spectrum of our wankership.’

‘Yeah well what it is is, now that Vicky needs a bra, it’s reminded them that Henry’s still on bread and water. They think it’s time he started getting stuck in again.’

‘You think?

‘Read Smoker on Saturday. Long think-piece.’

‘Title?’

‘“Is The King Normal?”’

3. Excalibur

He was in a ridiculous situation.

On the day of his birth the guns of the Royal Fleet all over the world boomed forth their joy. ‘Our thoughts go out’, said Churchill in the House of Commons (the Second World War was in memory yet green), ‘to the mother and father and, in a special way, to the little Prince, now born into this world of strife and storm.’ He was only a few hours old when he made headlines in every language and every alphabet. At school he discovered that his father’s face was on the coins he presented at the tuckshop, and on the stamps he used to send his letters home. Before his visit, as a twelve-year-old, to Papua New Guinea, the island tomtoms sounded all night long. He was still a teenager when he represented his country at the funeral of Charles de Gaulle: he stood between Mrs Gandhi and Richard Nixon. Then came majority, marriage, murder — and the crown: the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, the enthronement, the homage.

All his personal dramas were national dramas. He was in a ridiculous situation. He was the King of England.

Henry IX was staying at the Greater House, his unheatable 300-room drum in Southern Hertfordshire. He had dined à deux with his little brother, Prince Alfred, Duke of Clarence, in the private room of a three-star restaurant on the Strand.

‘The barman here, Felix, is absolutely marvellous,’ he had said. ‘He makes a truly splendid drink called a Scorpion. Ah, there you are. Two Scorpions! No: make that four Scorpions … Now tell me, dear boy. Are you going to merry this “Lyn” of yours?’

‘You know, old thing, I don’t see how I can marry anyone.’

‘Why ever not, you ass?’

‘Because I’m such a disgusting lech. We all are. Except you. Old chap.’

‘… Now where are those Scorpions?’

The words stayed with him. And as he sat up, alone, at home (before the fire, under a heap of rugs and dogs), waiting for Bugger’s call, Henry thought: yes, true enough. And why? Prince Alfred, at forty-nine, was still the hyperactive satyromaniac he had been from the age of thirteen (when he raped his first housemaid). His father, Richard IV, had gratified epic appetites, before his late marriage; and his grandfather, John II, was a notorious debauchee. And Henry IX?

By the time he reached his twentieth year, the Prince of Wales, as he then was, showed no more interest in sexual intercourse than he showed in polo or parachuting. He had a hectic and quite drunken social life, and many women friends. What, then, made him decline or ignore the countless importunities, ranging from the near-undetectable to the melodramatic, that tended to come a prince’s way? It seemed to be nothing more complicated than fear of effort. A concerned Richard IV, abetted by the Queen Consort, arranged for the Prince to be visited by a lady-in-waiting — a young widow called Edith Beresford-Hale. Edith surprised Henry one night in the Kyle of Tongue. The Prince had retired after a damaging night with the forty or fifty ‘guns’ who had come up to scrag his wildlife. Of course, Henry himself never had anything to do with that. But he gamely went along with Edith Beresford-Hale. She bounced him around on top of her for a couple of minutes; then there was a smell of fire-tinged male changing-rooms, and Edith made a joke.

Then the Prince did what the King and Queen had by no means intended. He fell in love with Edith — or, at any rate, he confined himself to Edith. Though press and public assumed that he was sleeping with at least one or two of the young beauties he frequently squired, Henry was faithful for the next five years. He looked in on Edith about three times a month. She was thirty-one, and of comfortable figure and temperament. Not unlike his mother: the tweed skirt, the hardwearing shoes.

So Henry was in his mid-twenties when he began to be disquieted by a younger friend: the Honourable Pamela North. He gave Edith a house, a world cruise, and a pension, and started paying court to Pamela. On the day after the Royal Wedding (and a princely marriage, said Bagehot, was the most brilliant edition of a universal fact) Henry wrote to his brother, Prince Alfred: ‘Everything was plain sailing, which was a relief. You saw when I kissed her on the balcony and the crowd went absolutely bonkers? Well, it was a bit like that in the bedroom. I felt the country’s expectations on my shoulders, albeit in a rather agreeable way. I felt them urging me on. And everything was plain sailing. You know what I mean: I was very good!’ And how could it have been otherwise, on that night, with his blood so thrilled and brimmed by the people’s love?

The Prince had just turned twenty-seven when Richard was blown apart on a fishing-boat off the west coast of Ireland. Also on board was the King’s cousin, who was the last Viceroy of India (and its first Governor-General); thus the murders had many claimants — Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and so on, as well as the more obvious and proximate suspects … Nevertheless, this period, with all its magnified emotion (emotion magnified by fifty million), saw Henry at his erotic apogee. England celebrated the Coronation in a mood of fierce defiance and euphoria; and the power-surge, for Henry IX, was carried over into the royal bed, with its gilt posts, its four boules bearing ducal crowns, its tester of purple satin embroidered with lilies, garters and portcullises, its valance of cloth of gold. During their second honeymoon, on the Royal Yacht, as the royal couple sat at table, serenaded by a romantic medley from a band of Royal Marines, Henry smiled sternly at Pamela when the hour of retirement drew near. Sexually, being king got him safely into his thirties (for a while, one of his many nicknames was Excalibur). But by now they were ‘trying’ for an heir…

After the birth of the Princess Victoria, Henry’s lovelife no longer looked to the calendar and the lunar cycle: now it looked to the appointment-book. This duty-roster approach became a habit. It was, of course, a bad habit. Love was by royal appointment, just like everything else. And the male, even the royal male, the most brilliant edition, cannot do this. He cannot master it: expectation — the appointment with expectation. On top of all this, Pamela, as she got older, looked more and more unmistakably like a man.

One afternoon, at five past three, the Queen Consort said, with gruff puzzlement: ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty? Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ … And that was all it took. Not a single second of his waking life had a thing in common with anyone else’s, but Henry’s vulnerability, at least, was universal; here he came down from the mountain and took his chances among his fellow men. What was the matter with it? Good question. From this time forth, whenever the King saw a ‘3pm: Pammy’ on his schedule, he felt a force settle on his chest, like a harness; and it wouldn’t slacken until the rendezvous upstairs had somehow been survived. He searched his memory for a precursor of this apprehension, for he knew it to be there. Yes. The hours leading up to an earlier rendezvous, also by appointment: when he went to the housemaster’s study to be thrashed.

But the negative epiphany — his life’s cur moment — was waiting for him up in the Kyle of Tongue.

Brendan Urquhart-Gordon listened. The ringing stopped, and there were sounds of effort; and then — expressing no more than mildly hurt feelings — came a whimper of canine protest.

‘Pepper, get off. Beena. Is that you, Bugger? The bally — the bally phone got stuck under Beena and General Monck. And now there are hairs all over it, and some … disgusting flux or other. General! Get … Where are you, Bugger?’

‘I am being driven north-east from the Cap to Nice airport, sir. Rather fast.’

To his right, beyond the forecourts of the supermarkets and hotels and petrol-stations, the modest lapping of the Mediterranean; to his left, not seen but sensed, the villa colours, the spotlights and crickets and sprinklers. Beside him sat compact, handsome, ageing Oughtred.

‘Well, Bugger?’

‘We have a crime-scene, sir. Much follows from this. We also have very compelling deductive evidence that the motive or the intention could not possibly—’

‘Don’t jabber your conclusions at me, Bugger. And stop sounding so pleased with yourself. I’m ill with this, Bugger, and it’s not funny.’

Brendan reproached himself: he had failed to dissimulate the pep of forensic success. He said, ‘How insensitive of me, sir. Forgive me.’

‘Forgiven. Now get on with it, Bugger. Oh a bottle of rather good red wine, if you would, Love? And one of your savoury snacks?’

‘We’re on the tarmac now, sir. Can you hear the plane? … We’re begin break up.’

‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Sir, this is need to know. The motive, intention, not possibly pecuniary. Media nor blackmail. Talk to.’

After tapping it and shaking it, Henry slid the telephone back under General Monck; and, when Love returned, he asked him for a pack of cards.

Imagine: the kings and the queens. And what are we? Tens, twos?

Celibate himself, Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was an abnormally observant friend. And Henry, in any case, presented no challenge to the imaginative powers. He was legible; he was easy to read.

On a ‘Pammy’ day — or a day featuring ‘another bally three-o’clocker’, as Brendan had heard him put it — Henry would be quite useless all morning (incapable of consecutive thought), and would start yelling for brandy at about half past twelve. At five to three, up he trudged, returning at a quarter to four … If things had gone reasonably well, then Henry would assume a put-upon but stoical air (interestingly, there seemed to be no dividend of relief). If things had gone badly, then the King’s parched face bore the skullshadow of mortality.

So one evening, in the library at the Greater House, Brendan looked up from a preselected report by the British Medical Association, and said casually,

‘A giant step forward for mankind, wouldn’t you say, sir? Potentium. The cause of so much male insecurity banished by the wand of physic. There will be no more wars.’

‘… What are you banging on about, Bugger?’

‘Sir, Potentium. A male-potency drug. Tested and patented and freely available. You take it on an ad hoc basis, sir. A single pill and Bob’s your uncle. There will be no more wars.’

Henry stared into space for a good five minutes, blinking slowly and numbly, like an owl. Then he turned away and said, ‘No no. One can’t be doing with that monkey-glends business.’

And that would be that. And who was Brendan to carp? He used to tell himself that he thrived on his own inhibitions. But perhaps that was personal propaganda; and the obverse would never be tested. The fact remained that the bed he spent so much time trying not to think about had an occupant, and that occupant was a passive male. No, there never was a case more pusillanimous than his own. Given the choice between chastity and the reification of his schoolyard nickname, Bugger chose chastity. So it was all over very early: when he was eight.

‘After four hours in the Château, sir, I was saying to myself, “Hello, this is a bit of a frost.” We’d done all twenty-seven bathrooms. No shortage of white bathtubs, and no shortage of soap. But the alignments, the background colours, wouldn’t match. Then I remembered the Yellow House, sir.’

‘Indeed, Bugger.’

‘Where the Princess often … bathed and changed after tennis before going on to the swimming-pool. And that, sir, was where the intrusion took place. A slat on the top section of the airing-cupboard facing the bath had been partly excised. On the shelf above the boiler we found a Vortex DigiCam 5000. The videodisc had of course been removed. Oughtred, who is still there, unsurprisingly reports that there are no prints and the registration numbers and so on have been scoured smooth.’

‘So are we further for’ard, Bugger? I don’t quite …’

The two men were in a security vehicle outside the Mansion House, where Henry was due to attend an anniversary dinner of the British Architectural Association (and where he would later ‘say a few words’: keep up the good work and whatnot). For a moment the King seemed to submit to the oppression of his surroundings: a mobile granny-flat littered with display screens, transmitters, earphones. Right in front of his chin there hovered a poised mike, with what seemed to be a leather condom clipped to its shaft. There was a jar of Bovril on the counter and, balanced on its lid, a smeared tablespoon.

‘We have more, sir. But already we can make certain deductions. The unlikelihood of any pecuniary motive. At first I thought, well, the DigiCam 5 is worth about three thousand pounds — they got it in, why didn’t they get it out? And this rather handily exonerates all the staff, as I realised when I was about to corral them for questioning.’

‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘The servants simply can’t have known about it or they’d have reported it or stolen it. This was rather spectacularly confirmed by Oughtred, not an hour ago. The DigiCam 5 is amazingly portable — but not this one. The camera, sir, is inlaid with gold …’

Henry eructed liverishly behind his hand. ‘How perfectly vile all this makes me feel. My tummy’s in ruins. I shall have to give my speech with my legs doublecrossed. What are they telling us, Bugger?’

‘They’re telling us that they’re rich already and that they want something else. Not money.’

‘What else have I got but money? I am a constitutional monarch and by definition I have no power. Glory, yes. But no power.’

‘Is glory power?’ asked Urquhart-Gordon. And he added to himself excitedly: is it negative power?

* * *

The next morning, as he cautiously overcame a cup of lemon tea (he would normally have a proper English breakfast: all the usual stuff plus lots of chops and pies), Henry IX received a communication from his private secretary:

FYI, sir. Copied out while hunched over the Château visitors’ book. Please forgive informalities. Present during the Princess’s stay (chronology of arrival):

Henry R; Bill and Joan Sussex; Brendan Urquhart-Gordon; Prince Alfred and Chicago Jones; Chippy and Catherine Edenderry; the Sultan and Sultana of Perak; Boy and Emma Robville; Juliet Ormonde; Lady Arabella Mont; John and Nicola Kimbolton; Joy Wilson; Prince Mohammad Faed (and wives); Hank Davis; the Emir of Qatar (and wives); He Zizhen. NB: at one point there were 47 minors at the Château, including 15 teenage boys.

Ah, He, He, He Zizhen … Just over a year after the Queen’s accident, Henry found himself dining alone with Edith Beresford-Hale. However easily explained (and graciously excused), the straining, trembling, wheezing fiasco that followed was enough to convince the King: all that was all over. Edith was still a widow, or rather a widow once more, and there had been other changes. For example, she was sixty-three. But Henry made no allowances, and was quite prepared to tiptoe from the scene with his slippers in his hand. ‘That was a last,’ he said hurriedly to himself. ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty?’ the Queen had asked, giving Excalibur a rough tug or two before tossing it impatiently aside. ‘Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ Well indeed. What was the matter with it?

Then came He … ‘May I tell you a secret?’ she said in her accentless English, joining him as he smoked a cigar on a balcony of the Chinese Embassy in Paris. Henry turned (and noticed the sudden absence of his escort, Captain Mate). His universe was a gallery of strangers, and here was someone doubly other: the lavish black quiff, the fractional asymmetry of her lidless eyes (one eye happy, one eye sad), the strong teeth rather carelessly stacked into their prows. He inclined his sandy head at an avuncular angle … Now, to be clear: world-historical beauties (women perpetually dogged by tearful trillionaires) had come at him fairly steadily during the past twelve months. Many talented tongues had scoured — had practically drained — the royal ear. And the King might have flinched but he always leant willingly into it, hoping for an answer in himself, which never came … He Zizhen stood on tiptoe. Then there was contact. It seemed as if a butterfly had taken up residence in his tympanum — no, make that two butterflies; and they were mating. At once his collateral heart (so torpid, so workshy, so decidedly valetudinarian) felt like a length of towel-rack.

Subliminally, in his dreams, it worried him. The sexual coincidence: himself, in the Château, with the otherness of He in his arms; and, across the lawn, the Princess surprised in the Yellow House.

February 14 (11.20 a.m.): 101 Heavy

First Officer Nick Chopko: If it’s designed to do it, it’ll do it. God I’m tired. How about it, Cap?

Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Guy was telling me he was so tired coming into Honolulu it was like he was drunk. Not just drunk but totally smashed.

Captain John Macmanaman: I was reading in AUN, both pilots on a commuter fell asleep about two minutes after takeoff. Now with a sealed cockpit you don’t want to …

Chopko: The attendants were screaming and banging on the door. They were practically in space when they came to.

Macmanaman: Not where you want to be today … You know what the Aztecs called comets? ‘Smoking stars.’ Because of the trail, I guess. You’ll get your nap, Nick. But you’ll have to excuse me for a second. I want to say hello to a passenger.

‘Takeoff rough enough for you?’ he said.

‘Ah I trust you, John,’ said Reynolds.

In the surplice of his uniform, hat in hand, he bent to kiss her. The man in 2A briefly ogled the Captain, but then kept wrenching his head around and staring back through the porthole to monitor the performance of the wing.

‘Welcome to widowworld. How are you bearing up, Rennie?’

‘Good. No, I feel wonderful. There’s a gap, and the end was horrible, but let’s not kid ourselves. You knew him.’

In the hold, the corpse of Royce Traynor (full of wax and formaldehyde) was waiting with its teeth bared.

1. The thing which is called world

‘“So-called ‘Renaissance Man’ Xan Meo, attacked and hospitalised in late October,” ‘read Russia, ‘“may have been the victim of his own past, which is mired in criminality and violence.”’

Xan listened, on this his first day home.

‘“His father, Mick Meo, was a prosperous East End gangster who served numerous jail terms for armed robbery, theft, fraud, tax-evasion, extortion with menaces, and affray.

‘“In 1978, while in his sixties, Mick Meo was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for attempted murder, and died in jail. His victim was his own son-in-law, Damon Susan, the husband of his daughter Leda. Himself an ex-convict, Susan was confined to a wheelchair after the incident. He never recovered from injuries described at the time as ‘unusually appalling’, and is now in a hospice in West Sussex.”’

‘You know all that. There’s nothing new here.’

Russia inhaled. She seemed to be sucking colour into her face …

‘“Xan Meo’s first wife, Pearl O’Daniel, a theatrical costumier” — oh, sure — “emerged from a similar background. Her father and all three of her brothers have served time for crimes of violence, and she herself has two convictions for possession of cocaine.

‘“Keeping up the family tradition of injuring close relatives, Meo himself attracted the attention of the police after an incident with Angus O’Daniel, his wife’s eldest brother, who declined to press charges. And in his youth Meo was convicted of a litany of minor offences, including Actual Bodily Harm.” What’s the difference between Actual and Grievous?’

‘Uh, extent of injury. Grievous is worse. Actual’s bullshit.’

‘“While there is nothing to suggest, as yet, that the recent attack on Meo had any direct connection with his past, we do know that violence tends to double back on itself. Violence begets violence. However lucrative Meo’s background may have been in shaping his portrayals of lowlife characters, on the screen and on the page, he may find that he is now paying for his past.”’

‘It’s not a “past”. It’s a providence. I mean a provenance.’

‘“Meo’s marriage to O’Daniel was dissolved five years ago on grounds, among others, of physical abuse. Within months he married again. His second wife is dah dah dah …”’

‘No, go on. Who’s my second wife? Remind me.’

‘“Dr Russia Tannenbaum, who teaches at King’s College, London, and is the author of a university-press bestseller about the children of tyrants.” Remarkable.’

‘Remarkable how?’

‘No errors of fact.’

Russia pushed the bulky, frazzled tabloid across the sofa towards him. Xan saw that the piece was illustrated to shore up its theme. The photograph of Pearl belonged to a set she had circulated during one of the more regrettable spasms of their divorce: her left cheekbone was bruised and the eye above it was swollen shut (and Xan, in the same desperate struggle, had received a broken nose). As for Russia, she’d been taken by surprise in the street somewhere, and looked as though she was about to be mugged. Xan was represented by a still from a TV movie called 99 Stitches, in which he had played the part of ‘Striper’ McTavish: he had a broken bottle in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other.

‘Well you can’t say you wasn’t …’ said Xan. ‘You can’t say you weren’t warned.’

She contemplated him. His face now seemed to wear a coating, a cladding — the hospitalic subtraction of vigour and light. It was also, again, oddly leonine: something top-of-the-food-chain in the contented wreath of the mouth. This face feared no predator.

‘I’ll come back at them. In the press. I’ll get on to Rory,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell my side.’

Billie entered, without escort. In the last couple of months she had established her right to glide unaccompanied round the house — much to the profit of her inner life. Increasingly often you saw the eyes give a freshened bulge: new acquisitions, new annexations, in the forming brain.

‘Get a book, darling,’ said Russia, ‘and Daddy will read.’

‘Look at the size of this lousy rag,’ said Xan as he let it slip from his lap to the floor. ‘I’m on page eighty-six. That’s one good thing about being in the papers these days. If you’re on the news pages up front then they’ve got you. If not, you’re okay. Because you can’t fucking find it.’

Russia was certain: he had never done that before — sworn in front of Billie.

‘Want it this one,’ said the child.

And Xan turned his attention to a family of well-dressed elephants awaiting sustenance in a palatial dining-room.

‘I’m that one,’ said Billie. ‘And Mummy’s that one. And Baba’s that one. And Lada’s that one.’

Xan pointed to the head of the table, where the father sat. ‘Who’s that one?’

‘… No one.’

That one wasn’t anyone. It was just an elephant in a blue suit.

Deficit-denial, energy-debt, fatigue-management: they knew the kind of things to expect. And they went about it like sensible people.

Russia’s maternity sabbatical was coming to an end (and there was that conference in Germany), and Imaculada’s trip to Brazil was imminent and unpostponable; but Xan, in his condition, wasn’t going anywhere: so it seemed obvious. He would spend his days lolling and idling with the girls, and would make himself useful, as lackadaisically as he liked, about the house.

Both projects proved beyond him.

Very soon it became clear that he could be trusted with nothing. The spacious kitchen, where Xan spent most of his suddenly limitless free time (he was keen to reassert his culinary skills), became a psycho’s laboratory of molten frying-pans, blackened pots and blazing skillets; the waste-disposer would be chewing its way through one of his dropped tablespoons while the microwave juddered and seethed. Things slid through his fingers — spillages, sickening breakages. The toaster scorched him, the coffee-grinder finesprayed him. Even the fridge stood revealed as his foe.

Elsewhere he left traces of himself around the house, like messages sent from one animal to another. A sock, a vest, a pair of underpants, on the stairs, in the sitting-room — but also his wastes, his emanations. Whenever she went near it the bathtub always seemed to contain two feet of cold swill bearing a greenish mantle; there were flannels, scraps of tissue paper, wadded with mucus and earwax, and little middens of scurf and nail-clippings, leavings, peelings. Most signally, of course, no amount of asking could persuade him to flush the toilet: as you opened the front door you felt you were entering some coop in rustic Dorset, or the Zoo, or a men’s room from the Third World. Now, at night, his armpits gave off a smell of meat.

They were at the table, with the teamugs and the newspapers. If asked to describe the atmosphere, Russia would have called it pseudo-normal. Then he said,

‘Chicks like salad.’

‘What?’

‘Chicks like salad. That’s a real difference between the sexes. Chicks like salad.’

‘You eat salad.’

‘Yeah but I don’t like salad. No man likes salad. Chicks like salad. And I can prove it.’

She waited. ‘How?’

‘Chicks eat salad when they’re stoned. A bloke would want his chocolate bar or his sugar sandwich. Not some bullshit tomato. A chick’ll eat salad in the morning. From the fridge. Only a chick would do that. That’s how sick chicks are. Christ, is that the phone?’

‘It’s the fridge.’

‘The fridge?’

‘It’s new. Haven’t you noticed? It makes a noise if you leave the door open. You left the door open.’

‘Fuck off!’ he called out to it. ‘I wonder. Am I the first man on earth to tell his fridge to fuck off?’

It came again: a vicious chirrup.

‘Oi you. Fuck off out of it!’

‘Instead of telling it to fuck off, why don’t you go and shut it?’

‘You shut it. And I mean your mouth and all.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that.’

‘Why not? Are you getting your period or something. Okay, I’ll make allowances. Red Rag is running in the two-thirty. You’ve got the painters in.’

The words came out this way: ‘Please try and remember yourself,’ said Russia.

After a moment his head and his shoulders dropped and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do … I am trying. You can’t imagine how hard I’m trying. You don’t know this thing. I can tell you. It’s a real cunt.’

The doorbell buzzed. Russia swung the fridge door shut on her way to the stairs.

My room, Xan thought … Outside is cold, but my room is warm, but my fridge is cold …

When Russia came back she saw that her husband was doing two things at once. Such multitasking was now rare. Doing one thing at once was difficult enough. Still, there he sat on the sofa, where he slept and wept.

Meanwhile, the little girls handed down their judgements.

Both had at first seemed astonished but on the whole delighted to see him. Billie, in the front hall on the first day, had smiled so wide that he feared her face might break: the corners of her mouth almost disappeared into her hair. He didn’t encounter Sophie until first thing the next morning: she was what he saw when he opened his eyes. Whereas Billie, in the same situation, would have inserted herself between her parents like the crossbar of a capital h (H for home, perhaps — but with the further suggestion of a thwarting wedge), Sophie kept to the side of her mother (with whom, again resonantly, she was making the beast with no backs). Sophie too smiled. And when he opened his eyes twenty minutes later she was still smiling, and he knew it was the same smile, held good as he slept. Sophie’s smile lacked the unsustainable emphasis of Billie’s. It was faithful, grateful, and above all proprietorial; she had written him off, and now he was home. He reached out and felt her arm. The warmth this event had created, his return, came back at him through her blue-veined wrist.

Billie changed slowly. She consented to be picked up and hugged, but after a couple of seconds she would wriggle for release with disconcerting vigour. Later on, when he crouched to receive her, she twirled away and then looked up at him through splayed fingers. And when he prevailed upon her to settle down to a book (come, read: the sky is falling!), and he bent down and kissed the parting of her hair, she would jerk back and rub her head and say, ‘Oh Dad‘— as if Dad was nothing more than the name he went by. She sidled up to him and asked in an embarrassed whisper if he had brought her a present; when he offered to bathe her she declined — but said he could watch. She had begun to treat him, he realised, like a moderately intriguing family friend. Billie was of that breed of little girl who, in certain lights, resembles a twenty-five-year-old emerging (with considerable advantage) from her second divorce. This formed, knowing, worldly face was the one she turned on him now. Seventh or eighth in line, he was the louche and ponderous suitor whom, against her better judgement, no doubt, she had decided to keep on file.

Sophie changed suddenly. Sophie turned, in an instant.

It was his third day home. Some logistical entanglement had forced Russia to leave him alone in the house with the baby: a configuration never repeated. Sophie was supposedly down for the night (it was about seven o’clock), and he hadn’t thought much of it when he heard the cries from her room. She had now been on the planet for almost a year. These cries of hers were confident, almost businesslike (she knew the score). He had heard her in far greater confusion and disarray. Why was it so hard for them, sometimes, to go from one state to another? What were they separating themselves from, with such bitter difficulty? In sleep, it seemed, they lost their hold on love and life; and when they woke, sometimes, they couldn’t shake off this dream of freefall.

He went in and decribbed her and took her back out into the light. She saw his face — and all the dogs of London must have snapped to attention. A scream is a blunt instrument; this was more like a whistle, piercingly focused, and focused on him … She twisted away, quietening, stiffening. Then by degrees she tracked back, infusing her lungs with short hot gasps of suspense: perhaps — obedient to the intensity of Sophie’s wish — her father would now be transformed into Russia or Imaculada. On finding that this hadn’t happened, she reestablished herself on the outer limit of distress. Then it went on getting gradually worse.

There came a crucial interval, in the garden under the apple tree. He had somehow juggled and manhandled her down the stairs, half the time on his rump, and drawing himself along on the lifeline of the banister, with the baby wedged in his knitted armpits. They gained the kitchen; he tried all he knew, and nothing worked. So he pushed his way out of the back door — and the cooler air, and the pale-blue evening above, seemed to reposition her. After a while she was able to meet his gaze. Her eyes: to contemplate them was like floating in a pond or a slow-moving river. Competing currents and temperatures subtly coursed; one of these undertows looked like trust, and he tried to swim towards it; but it was soon lost, sluiced out, in other undertows. Then he abandoned his pleading whispers and just held her to him as he groaned and shuddered. It was like the last days of Pearl: twins joined at the chest and now under the knife, in inseparable pain. Nearly an hour later Russia returned with the fetched Billie. Within ten minutes Sophie was asleep, piteously but resignedly clutching her duck.

Thereafter he would sometimes look into Sophie’s eyes, in search of that pulse of trust. He couldn’t find it. And she cried, now, the moment he entered the room. At supper, when the baby was with them, her seat like a pair of medieval underpants bolted to the table, Xan ate with one hand in a fixed salute, shielding his face from her sight.

And Russia?

‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’ Well, he remembered that. ‘You went and named him!’ Named who?

He remembered the Dickheads, the dead duck upside down in the green canal. The sunset, like a firefighting operation. The paparazzo sparrow (‘Is that your “bird”?’). ‘Why’d you do it, son? You went and named him!’ Named who?

Xan had read in the books, in the literature of head injury, that an experience needs time to become a memory. Not long — maybe a second or two. And the blow had come so quickly, so hard upon. The significant name didn’t have time to become a memory. And perhaps (the books suggested) that memory-pause was a cerebral reflex — of self-protection. The brain didn’t want to remember the blow.

But he wanted to remember it. In epileptic longhand, with his pen shooting off, accelerating off in all directions, he retraced the steps of that October evening, saying come on, come on with an East End cadence (said in this way, come on rhymes with German; in the East End it was normally reserved for watching fights). Sometimes he could get as far back as the smell of the assailant’s breath, the assailant’s hormones, wrapped round his neck like a scarf. But no further. It was like an investigation into the very early universe, that infinitesimal fragment of time which was obscured by the violence of the initial conditions. You couldn’t quite reach the Big Bang — no matter what you did.

At his desk he also worked on his diary, as instructed. Record everything, they told him. And he recorded everything:

Woke at ten. Rose at eleven. Cold water on face. Went downstairs (lost balance twice). Baby there — cried. Ate cereal. Made tea, scalding hand. Had shit. Searched long time for address book. Phoned agent. Sat at desk. Wrote this.

He’d been in a state of combat-readiness, when he went down. And his body remembered that. But now he was a cripple: a cripple who was spoiling for war.

Outside was for healthy people, and he didn’t go there. Even his visits to the mailbox at the end of the front garden (a distance of fifteen feet) took him to the brink of a chaotic immensity. It made his face flicker.

Outside was the thing which is called world.

‘Do you mind if I use a tape recorder? You didn’t last time, as I remember. Rory said you wanted to give this a definite emphasis.’

‘Yeah well we’ll come to that. But — yes. I mean to send a message.’

‘Okay … When did you first realise that your father …?’

‘Was a villain. When I was little my mother used to tell me he was in the army. He’d go away for a year and Mum’d say he’s in — I don’t know — Vietnam. “But we’re not in Vietnam, Mum.” “Well your dad is, that’s all I know.” And then there were all these brown letters from Broadmoor and Strangeways, and he’d come back as pale as a polyp, so I had my doubts. And around then, see, the villains found a new toy: publicity. They all started doing what I’m doing now. Giving interviews.’

Xan had said much of this before — in interviews. And the sentences, even the paragraphs, were still there. But now something else was trying to ail his speech.

‘Villains? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘No, it don’t, and they all paid for it. They thought it was a great new way of winding up the oppo — you know, sticking it to the Old Bill. But you can’t have it both ways. You don’t want to be riling up a bloke who’s getting good overtime. So I’d read him in the news, mouthing off about how they couldn’t do him for this or that caper, and then he’d go away for another stretch. Where is it this time, Mum. Mozambique? Anyhow, you don’t pick your dad, do you. Or your childhood.’

‘Were you part of all that, growing up?’

‘I was me mother’s boy, and she was crooked too, but dead against the violence. I was a scrapper, mind. Don’t ask me why but I loved a fight. I’d go into pubs outside the borough. The sort of places where the carpet sucked the shoes off your feet. You ordered a pint, drank it in one, and put the glass upside down on the bar. That meant: I’ll have it with any man here. Someone went and put me in hospital for three months, just before my dad went away for the nine. Mum went absolutely spare. What with my sister already running wild. I went direct from Princess Beatrice to this fucking barracks of a boarding-school in Littlehampton on the south coast. Basically a crammer for posh dropouts. A couple of years of that and then Lit and Drama at Sussex. I changed. I was a hippie. But I could still fight. And a hippie who could fight was something to be.’

‘At university you were quite a ladies’ man …’

‘Every bloke was quite a ladies’ man in them … in those days. In those days, for a while, girls went to bed with you even when they didn’t want to. Peer-group pressure, that is. If I was above average, it was because I could offer them … pacifism from a uh, from a position of strength. I was covered in beads and flower scarves, but when some fucking great rocker come stamping up I’d say, “I smell grease.” Or go over to a gang of skinheads and call them a load of little fascist cunts. If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say. Uh, look, mate — I’m fading. Sorry. It’s, it’s my condition.’

‘If you like I can … Are you sure? Last question, then. Could you say something about your father and the attempted murder.’

‘Okay. My sister Leda, rest her soul, she got roughed up by her husband. And me dad’s done him. Give him a fucking good hiding. Said he’d gladly do ten years for him and that’s what he got. And I’ll tell you something else and all. The bloke who put me in hospital for the three months: it was him. Mick Meo. For why? I’ve gone into the yard, and there he is, having this fight to the death with some other mad prick. I dragged him off and he done me. Three months. One week later he’s done me brother-in-law, who never walked again, and gone away for his nine. Then he’s gone and done the Governor at Gartree and got hisself topped by the screws in the Strong Cell …

‘No. Wait, wait … See, I split from the villain world, but things stay with you. One is complete contempt for the police. In America the police, they’re working-class heroes. Here they’re working-class dogs. They’re scabs and traitors. They take the rich man’s shilling to guard his gear in the property war. There’s talk about honour among thieves. That’s all bollocks. But there’s rules. Now, whoever did me in October or had me done — I get the feeling they think I’ve been telling tales to the Old Bill. And that is something I would never do. When the police uh, questioned me about the attack I said I remembered nothing. And they can come round here again and I’ll tell them I remember nothing. It ain’t true, but that’s what I’ll tell them. They can stick red-hot pokers up me arse, and that’s what I’ll tell them. Understand? Me, I’m the nicest bloke in the world. You know, in the car. Come on, darling. No — after you. But if someone … Now I spit in the eyes of whoever did me or had me done. I tell him: you got business with me, then you fucking come down … you come down …’

Even in sleep his face held its distortion.

Then there was the kind of whispering behind half-shut doors that gets done around the sick and the unpredictable and the violent.

Pearl, when her ex-husband called, was dependably merciless.

‘Would you like to talk to a boy? I’ll find one in a minute. But first, Xan, I want to ask about your care-giver. I mean the — where is it? — “the non-head-injured party in your relationship”. She’ll be in mourning, Xan, for the person you once were. That’s quite natural. It says here you both have to “let go” of the “old” Xan Meo — the one who could get about the place and earn a living. He’s gone, Xan! And listen: don’t be afraid to cry. It says here you should talk about all the good old times and get the old photos out and have a good old blub.’

Xan wasn’t gone. He had to believe that he wasn’t gone. Reality was like a weak dream, in early morning. You sense the weakness of the dream-authority and in velvet revolution you rise up, you rise up; you try to take control of the nonsensical narrative — to guide it towards pleasure, or away from fear. The dream was weak, but so was the dreamer. And another wave would come and he would go under.

‘Mm,’ said Billie, ‘yummy water.’

Using both hands she placed the empty glass on the kitchen table and then drifted from the room.

‘Yummy water?’ said Xan. ‘Well, a man condemned to die finds water delicious. Air delicious. Maybe it works the other way round.’

With the broadsheet on her lap Russia watched him. They both knew that talking made Xan manic, now. They had of course discussed it. And it made him manic.

‘I can’t believe you said all this. It was your intention, was it, to sound like an animal.’

‘It’s the dialect of the tribe. It will be understood.’

‘By whom?’

‘By the party concerned. Do I swear a lot?’

‘Generally, or in the interview? … No. “Little fascist bastards”. “Mad prick”. No.’

‘And how’s me … how’s my English?’

‘Your English?’ She shrugged and said, ‘It parses.’

‘Thought I could feel my English going. Bloke must have cleaned it up. Tea’, he added, ‘is bullshit. I want coffee. You’re on your second cup of Colombian and I’m still on the bullshit. What’s for dinner?’

‘Fish.’

‘Seafood is bullshit. I want meat.’

‘You can’t have meat. You can’t have coffee. Not yet.’

‘What have I got to look forward to? This evening, before my meal, I’ll drink a couple of glasses of near-beer. And if beer is bullshit, which it is, what’s near-beer? It’s not even bullshit. It’s bullshit bullshit. And then what? A plate of bullshit. And yummy water.’

Russia stood up. He followed her to the counter, saying,

‘I should keep my mouth shut, shouldn’t I. Because if a woman isn’t liking you, she isn’t going to like anything you say. It could be fit for Hamlet and she isn’t going to like it.’

‘You know what I’m thinking? It’s not that you’ve become a brute. I’m thinking you were a brute all along.’

‘Oh, nice, that is. I get smashed over the fucking head, and now nobody loves me any more. The girls don’t. You don’t.’

‘You’re doing it again. You’re standing too close to me.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Jesus, you are really freaking me out. Get away. And guess what.’

‘What?’

‘Your zipper’s undone.’

Yes, that’s right, that’s right. The worst things of all were happening upstairs: in the master bedroom.

2. His Voluminousness

The first sentence almost made him roll over backwards:

dear clint: r u as other men r?

But he was lying down at the time: on his humid sack in the Foulness semi.

(i ask because u ask: about size m@tering.) well if u’re not as other men r: don’t worry. my current ‘other’, orl&o, wields a big 1, of which he is inordin8ely proud. but take my word 4 it, clint, u don’t want a bloody great 21.

A bloody great … twenty-one? he thought. Oh: the l’s an l.

they’re overr8ed! 1 h8 them! & what an un4tun8 effect it has on the ego: he thinks he’s the b’s knees. it’s not size th@ m@ters, clint. it’s love th@ m@ters.

u ask also 4 my name. i don’t no y i’m feeling quite so shy about it. it suddenly seems so intim8. the 1st act of commitment, if u will. u want 2 no my name. well it’s … k8. there. i’ve said it. ‘k8.’ ‘“k8 …” ‘& u ask about my loox. 1st, my figure. 1 swain was consider8 enough 2 tell me th@ my ‘tits were crap’. another ventured the opinion th@ i had ‘a crap arse’.

So she’s taken her nox — fuck, her knocks — too, Clint noted. Poor little thing.

(no young gentleman has yet proved sufficiently gallant 2 aver th@ i have ‘a crap cunt’.) in fact i am inordin8ly proud of my body as it has developed over the years. i’m not a c@walk cutout, nor a mega-boobed 6-queen: just an honest middle-w8. & @ 25, i’m bloomin’!

Age-difference: perfect, thought Clint.

as 4 my face. my i’s r green (tho not with n v!). my hair is s&y & ‘flyaway’. men have a habit of saying th@ i am blessed with a submissive & yielding manner, in an old-fashioned way: quintessentially femi9. i’m 5′7″, and i no u r a taller man, clint. which is as it should b. height m@ters: th@’s an axiom@ic rule of @traction.

And you’re right. You’re not wrong. You’re right, thought Clint. Know why? Birds want tall nippers: Darwin and that.

a while ago i did some c@alogue modelling work. i was also a bingo-caller & prize-presenter @ the Mirage in King’s X, and u have 2 b pretty pretty be4 they let u do th@. i even appeared in the pp. of your aug. journal. not what u think! (tell u 18er. just u w8 & c.) must — . 2dle-oo! k8.

Not in Readers’ Richards, surely to God, thought Clint. And then his doorbell rang.

This event, in most households no great matter, invariably represented the direst of emergencies at 24, The Grove, Foulness. There was a time when he would have simply sprinted upstairs, positioned a hand-mirror between the outer wall and the drainpipe, and eyed the front step from the porthole, treating each case on its merits. But such free and easy dealings with the outside world belonged to a happier time. Now Clint crawled across the floor and locked himself in the bathroom, where he assumed the fetal position on the damp tiles. The doorbell’s morse: how he writhed like a lab-rat to its jabs. Next came silence, increasingly gorgeous, until the silence was itself silenced — by a sound that would have taken him over the top at Passchendaele: the car alarm of the Avenger.

In his untethered bathrobe and Y-fronts tinged grey as if with the smear of newsprint, Smoker pitched himself out into the morning.

‘Oi, my car …’

It was one of those days when the ocean medium had leaked into the lower air, bodying forth a sopping mist and mast-high cloudlets that looked solid to the touch. There was the Avenger at the bottom of the dead front garden, longsufferingly honking; and there was the broad shape on the seaward side of it, leaning on it, waiting there.

‘That’s my car …’

Now the broad shape moved clear.

‘Ah. Eh up,’ said Clint, showing his palms. ‘Now, mate. No. You ain’t … you ain’t about to dispense the proverbial I hope. I’ve been a good boy, mate. Utterly oyster. I never—’

Mal Bale raised a stocky index finger to his upper lip. His manner, Clint was pleased to see, was not concertedly threatening: not all hot and righteous, like it had been that time on the Thames, outside the Cocked Pinkie. Mal’s manner was merely disaffected, inconvenienced … Clint thought for a moment. He was a newspaperman. Newspapering was in his veins. One day, at the office, he had typed out the forbidden name on a search-engine, which he never launched. For a moment he had felt like the science-fiction physicist who fears that he may obliterate the universe at the touch of a key.

‘It ain’t that,’ said Mal.

‘Then why are you here, mate?’

‘I am here as a representative’, said Mal, ‘of Ebony Escorts.’

Jesus, not the escorts again. With some people you can never … Sheer spite on her part, thought Clint. Though — okay — maybe he’d overdone it a bit on the His Voluminousness.

The girl, Rehab, had humiliated him totally and, this being the case, had thoroughly deserved the lesson he’d taught her. She went and let him down at one of the Lark‘s Sovereign Suppers (monthly occasions, held in the private rooms of prestigious Soho restaurants). Heaf was there of course, with his sheep, Mrs Heaf, and Mackelyne was there with his, Mrs Mackelyne, and Strite was there with some dolly or poppet, and Supermaniam was there with one of his many-armed subcontinental divinities …

Told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend, Rehab explained to the assembled accompany that she was an escort girl told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend.

‘Ladies. Guys,’ Clint had said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to a certain someone who’s become very special to me. Ladies. Guys. Say hi to Rehab.’

‘Charmed,’ said Heaf. ‘Sit here, dear.’

‘Dear’ is right, thought Clint. You couldn’t call them darling or sweetheart, but you could definitely call them dear.

‘Now tell me, dear: how long have you and Clint known each other?’

Rehab looked at her watch and said, ‘An hour and fifteen minutes.’

And then it all came out.

Apart from anything else it was a flagrant breach of contract. They’d done the budgeting earlier on: this much for every fondly shared reminiscence, this much for every stroke of Clint’s hand, this much for every blown kiss and melting gaze, this much for every proffered spoonful of her crème brûlée.

Afterwards, on their optioned-for but uncosted return to the hotel, Clint, using all his charm and the promise, at least, of a significant fraction of his net worth, induced Rehab to take her clothes off and go and prepare herself in the bathroom. Which he then locked, and walked out with all her gear under his arm. And that was the extent of it. There had been no suggestion whatever of the hair-tugging and nipple-twisting that had so expensively marred his encounter with Scheherazade from Escorts De Luxe. All Rehab’d had to do was screech down the fifteen floors until a passerby told the doorman.

On top of leaving himself alone for a couple of nights, Clint had prepared for his date with Rehab by taking three Potentium and five His Voluminousness. His Voluminousness was another webdrug Clint had started using. It was meant to increase the bulk of your ejaculations ‘to porno proportions’, according to the literature. And it did. You might have your doubts about the quality (the colour, the texture, the redolence, and so on), but you couldn’t argue with the quantity.

In this lay Clint’s error — and Rehab’s grievance. First, drinks in the bar, and Clint with his pen poised over the paper napkin, sketching out the manifest (and keeping his eye on all the sundries). Then the rush of the elevator beneath your feet, the heavy moment as the key entered the lock, the azure carpet, the floral curtains … Now at these prices a bloke’ll want fair dealing — and Rehab was gypping him left and right. So, when the moment came, Clint reckoned he’d do a Dork Bogarde to Rehab’s Donna Strange. He had been aiming for her chest (not her lower abdomen, as negotiated), and hadn’t meant to lash it all over her throat and neck and hair.

Then Rehab’s hubbub, yelling down the phone for the drier and the extra shampoo. They were half an hour late for dinner, and he gave her a piece of his mind in the cab. She was a professional, wasn’t she? Where was her pride? A girl like her, used to dealing with nutters and perverts and inadequates, and she raises Cain over a lad who happens to have a bit of man in him? He said it again and again: Where was her pride? And this too perhaps explained why a recently goosed Rehab, on arrival at the table, was so thoroughly out of sorts …

What would a baby look like, made of that stuff? thought Clint (and it was the second time in recent days that he had found himself thinking about babies). He hadn’t even got it on her face — which, at the time, had been rigidly averted. For fifty-five minutes, with that one brief interruption, Clint thought about the farinaceous sports bra he had daubed on Rehab’s persian breasts (before the thing whipped out of control like a rogue powerhose) as the Avenger bombed back to Foulness.

It was in the Avenger that they now sat, the two of them, Clint and Mal. The engine was whirring (like a sewing-machine), for the warmth and the muted radio; and Clint, now contritely dressed in chinos and polo-neck, had produced a thermos of coffee. Both men were smoking with dedication, perhaps because the Avenger smelt so powerfully of human feet. Clint couldn’t understand why: the great tugs of his shoes, with their claws and cleats, featured moisture-wicking fleece lining and ozone-resistant sole-beds leavened for superior sweat-management; and the semi didn’t smell of human feet, so far as he could tell. When Mal asked why they didn’t go indoors Clint said that his live-in, Kate, who was insanely jealous, would murder him if she got wind of this one.

‘You’ve got a nice bird at home. Why d’you want to be out there paying for it?’

‘Yeah. Well.’

‘And this ain’t the first time there’s been trouble, is it, mate. I don’t understand people like you. Your live-in. You bat her about and all?’

Clint said, ‘No way. Never do that.’ But he was keeping his head down.

‘Well you got to make good.’

For the second time in eighteen hours Clint had before him an itemised bill of sale. But this invoice did not consist of fancy favours, of costly caresses … ‘A grand for the clothes?’ he said, leaning back. ‘I bunged them in a flowerpot in the passage. They be okay.’

‘Never mind the clothes. It’s the distress and the humiliation you’re paying for, boy. You should be glad you’re dealing with me and not with her two brothers. Izzat and Watban.’

‘Okay, mate. Deal. Look uh, no hard feelings, all right? And I want you to know, Mal mate, that on the other matter …’

Clint trailed off, and they were silent. Then Mal said, ‘Yeah — that. It don’t … It ain’t sitting well with me, that.’

The Avenger was so high off the ground that Mal chose to clamber down rear-forward. Clint, who had been within to fetch the cheque, wondered at the great natural sweep of Mal’s backside, which seemed to rise up from the middle of his thighs and then proceed to the third or fourth notch of his spine. This gluteus maximus: it was the base of all Mal’s operations; every decision would be referred to it. And Clint? Despite the man’s size, his heavy-boned mass, there was just a vacuum, and an apologetic fold or flap, in the rump of his chinos (and not having a backside didn’t mean that he didn’t have spots all over it). In the mirror, when he looked: it was as if his buttocks belonged to a much smaller man who kept them emphatically clenched.

‘What happened here, mate?’

‘Uh, at Basildon I come off the A13 and cut through the Bends. This sheepdog shot out at me. I swerved …’

‘A sheepdog? That ain’t a dog. It’s a sheep. Look.’

‘No it was a dog. With curly white hair.’

‘What, like a poodle. A poodle in the Bends?’

‘I don’t know. Not a sheep. Just a dog.’

‘… So you’d rather kill a dog than a sheep.’

‘Don’t know about rather.’ But, yeah, Clint found he had subliminally assumed that a dog was inferior to a sheep. Which didn’t make a lot of sense. Analogously (perhaps) he noticed that he wasn’t sure whether this or that woman was attractive or not-so-attractive. He could spot the difference between a centrefold and a Reader’s Richard, but he was none too clever, he thought, on the gradations in between.

‘Why, because a sheep is man’s best friend?’ pursued Mal. ‘They have sheepdogs. They don’t have dogsheep, do they. You got a sheep in there, have you, that fetches your slippers? Or guards the back door? Clint: you take care.’

Clint gestured farewell to the stern of Mal’s elderly German saloon. I don’t know, mate, he said to himself. I just don’t know …

The mist had lifted; out to sea a wildhaired wave collapsed, not all in one piece but laterally, from left to right, like a trail of gunpowder under the torch.

Bet that sheep, thought Clint — bet that sheep … The sheep had been standing on the verge, like an old country personage wise (by now) to the ways of cars. On the verge in its drenched white woollie.

Bet that sheep felt it when I come up on it. Boof.

‘The Walthamstow Wanker’, said Desmond Heaf, ‘has alas emerged from his coma, and we’ve had a pretty stiff letter from Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice, no less. In your report, Jeff, you said he was ogling a party of little girls in the public pool. Well, according to this, you can’t even see the swimming-pool from the gallery in question. It’s over some squash courts which were not in use at the time. I don’t suppose you happened to check.’

‘Check?’ said Strite. ‘Course I didn’t check. I got it from my boy at the cop shop, Chief. Since when do we check?’

‘Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice have also taken exception to our tone.’ Heaf held up the clipping. ‘“So if you’re passing 19 Floral Crescent, and you’ve got a spare brick on you, or a bottleful of petrol, then you know where to fling it.” An incitement to violence against the family of an innocent man in Intensive Care.’

‘Innocent? He was having a wank in public,’ said Strite indignantly. ‘What’s innocent about that?’

‘Says here he was massaging his sore hip when Mrs Mop burst in on him. And she’s seventy-eight and half-blind.’

‘Then why’d he do a runner? With his trousers round his ankles. If you’ll excuse me Chief, I’ll get back to my boy.’

Clint looked on judiciously as Strite left the conference room. He also wanted to get out of there — and into Back Numbers. Arriving at his workstation, with his latte and his brioche, Clint had found a new message from Kate: ‘well, u r an importun8 1, & no mistake! i appeared in the pp of your estimable sheet on the following d8.’ Which she gave: well, month and year. ‘it was in the “casebook” feature opposite the “ecstasy aunt”. u’ll no which 1 is my 1: the 3 principals r called brett, ferdin& & sue. go & have a look c, & let me no if i’m “up 2 snuff”.’ Ah, yes: Casebook, thought Clint pitilessly. For there were few things that Clint relished more than a powerful Casebook. And now he would set eyes on the woman with whom, he increasingly felt, his destiny was somehow entwined. He said,

‘No disrespect to Jeff, Chief, but I always thought we were baying up the bum bonsai on Pervs Him Right.’

‘Please elaborate, Clint.’

Jeff Strite came back in. He looked vindicated, redeemed.

Clint shrugged and said, ‘He’s a wanker.’

‘Who’s a wanker?’

‘The Walthamstow Wanker.’

‘You mean he’s a reader?’

‘No, Chief. I mean he’s a wanker.’

‘And he is a wanker and all,’ said Strite. ‘My boy said they’d taken some “erotic material” off him. Got it stored down in the basement somewhere and he’ll be looking it out.’

‘There you are,’ said Clint, folding his arms. ‘Unless it was Nonce Monthly he had on his knees …’

Heaf said, ‘I don’t quite follow you, Clint.’

‘He’s not a paedophile. He’s just a wanker. And wankers are the people the Lark‘s on the side of. Wankers are what we’re all about.’

The Chief had a cornered look. Most of Clint’s really radical brilliancies, he found, took several days to sink in. ‘So we should … support him? No, no, Clint, I think you do our … our real wankers a definite injustice here. There were certainly grounds for suspicion that he was a paedophile. You’re forgetting the enormous groundswell of wanker response to our Nuke the Nonces campaign.’

‘You keep saying that, Chief. But as Mackelyne has often pointed out, the response to Nuke the Nonces was virtually undetectable … It’s Mrs Mop we should have gone after.’

‘For putting him in a coma.’

‘And for ruining his wank. Fling a brick through her front window.’

For a moment a bad-dream glaze descended on Desmond Heaf, and his brow was suddenly and minutely sequinned with sweat. After about ten seconds of steady recuperation he said, ‘… Royal comment. I think this is building quite well. Rather touchingly, the King’s enforced chastity is awakening the most profound concerns of our — and uh, I’ll be interested to hear your view, Clint, on the line we should take on the tragedy in Cold Blow Lane. So what’s the King to do? By the way, Supermaniam, I thought you overstepped the bounds of good taste with your think-piece … “Quick Mate While She’s Warm”. I thought Clint’s editorial the next day was far more sensitive and appropriate. Where is it? “Time To Pull The Plug On Pam”.’

Clint stood with his arms akimbo in the anarchical locker-room of Back Numbers. Over nine hundred Larks lay slumped in drunken stacks, in leaning heaps; and Clint’s arms were charcoal to the elbow by the time he had assembled the thirty issues of the relevant June.

Like all the other yellow-mast tabloids, the Morning Lark ran a Casebook feature opposite its problem page. Its problem page did not resemble the other problem pages, with their typical integration of the commonplace (Our Loving Is Over Too Quickly) and the phenomenal (I Came Home To Find My Husband In Bed With My Dad: all this). The Lark‘s problem page dealt not in problems but in outlandish gratifications; it was in-house pornography, much of it written by Clint Smoker. On the other hand, the Lark‘s Casebook veered close to mainstream: in a dozen photographs with added bubbles for speech and thought, it dramatised the confusions of personable young people who tended to be dressed in their underwear.

Needing delay, needing equipoise, Clint dug out his mobile and called Ainsley Car.

‘Right,’ said the troubled striker, after a prompt. ‘I do Donna, then I have Beryl.’

‘Other way round, mate.’

‘I have Beryl, then I do Donna.’

‘Jesus. You have Donna, then you do Beryl … Doesn’t have to be Donna, mind.’

‘What about that “Amfea” …’

Clint remembered ‘Anthea’. Cheesy little blonde who was, none the less, sixteen. Very popular: posing with her mum in matching thongs.

‘Nah mate. “Anthea” fell pregnant and jacked it in. Her mum’s a gran at thirty-two.’

‘Okay then. Donna’ll do. I’ll do Donna.’

‘Have Donna,’ corrected Clint.

Ah, yes—this was it: Brett, Ferdinand and Sue. And for a moment Clint turned away … When you entered an escort agency for the first time and were received by the madamic coordinatrix: she gave you the ‘brochure’ and left you alone with it — and that was power. In that plump album each smile, each cleavage, each towering beehive represented different futures which, nevertheless, and on varying pay-scales, all promised the same outcome. Now, in contemplating Kate, Clint would be taking up a humbler post. It was more like a youthful blind date, when you peeked round the corner, then moved forward or walked away … Clint peeked, squinting. His eyes jolted down on her. Then with deliberate force he smacked his head back against the wall, groaned, laughed, sighed. No glamour queen or ballroom dancer, but prettily unassertive, and of the crowd, like a poster of a missing person. And could he see it? Could he see it? Yeah, mate, he could see it. Him and her, and hand in hand: ‘Hey, I’d like you to meet a very special friend of mine. Ladies, guys. Say hi to …’

Clint went back to his workstation, where he deployed angle-lamp and magnifying glass. It was an exceptionally compelling Casebook in its own right: a triangular predicament, as so often, but one with universal reach. In its opening frames you saw Sue at home with live-in lover Brett. Sue scrubbing the kitchen lino in tears, tanktopped Brett standing over her with his fists clenched; Brett watching the football with a pair of Union Jack underpants over his head, while Sue does the ironing; then Brett, clutching cue and dufflebag, telling Sue he’s off on a road trip playing pool for his pub. Enter Ferdinand. You looked at Ferdinand and you thought — you know: Shelley. Poet and dreamer, with his flyaway hair, his flowers and his flattery: your eyes are like stars … Sue had her clothes off twice. In the first shot she is being taken from behind by a Brett showing all his teeth — but her body was almost entirely eclipsed by the thought-bubble, ‘Gaw, I wish Brett had ever heard of foreplay.’ In the second, she lay on her back with her legs apart, but her modesty was preserved by Ferdinand’s streaming locks, together with another bubble, saying: ‘Mmm. Brett reckons only gays do this, but I think it’s lovely.’ The final frame showed Sue sitting alone on the blondwood bed, with elbow on knee and palm on cheek, eyes raised ceilingward: ‘I know Brett has his faults, but Ferdinand seems too good to be true. How can I choose between them?’

Low self-image, that is, thought Clint. As an afterthought he skimmed the ‘Words of Wisdom’ with which every Casebook drew to a close. Sue was advised, by Donna Strange, to forget about Ferdinand and stick with Brett.

Plaintive little smile on its face. Of course, she was only acting. But with that roundness of eye, that philosophical underlip: you couldn’t imagine her giving you grief, undermining you, belittling you … Don’t fret: you’re up to snuff, my darling. You’re all right. Yeah, you’ll do.

3. Cold Blow Lane

‘We’ll need the army for this one, sir.’

‘The army? Don’t talk rot, Bugger.’

‘Just a light, calming presence, sir. It’s a most … thankless situation. Forgive the gloom, sir, but I can’t even imagine a positive outcome.’

‘Nor can I. But don’t ask me to reconsider. I can’t refuse Loulou anything — as she well knows. That’s the whole trouble. She’s my cousin, after all, and she didn’t get into this fix on purpose. We’ll just have to get on with it.’

‘Sir. I don’t suppose now would be a good moment to discuss the ramifications of the Sino-Russian entente?’

‘Ramification number one being that I shall have to give up He Zizhen, I suppose. And if the pair of them fall out, do you think I’ll get her beck?’

‘Just to remind Your Majesty that nothing affects the people’s mood so much as the cost of filling their cars.’

‘I’m well aware of that, thank you, Bugger. Ah.’

Love entered. The impressive wingspan of his ears was picked out by the low sun that lurked behind him. He gave an arthritic bow and said,

‘If you’re ready, sir?’

‘Coming, Love: I’ll follow. What is it today, Bugger? Brucellosis. No. Q-fever.’

‘Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, sir.’

‘Ouch. And what’s that when it’s at home?’

‘Viral inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, sir.’

Henry IX rose and looked about himself. ‘Not much of a boudoir, is it? Now Bugger: you won’t get an attack of thrift, I hope. Have Blaise or Henri come and have a quick recce, and then spend money doing what they say. And get some decent furniture from the French Suite.’ He looked round the room through the fine drizzle of his dislike for it. ‘This place was good enough for my grandfather. But it’s not good enough for me. And Bugger.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I hesitate to tell you this because it’ll make you watch the pennies … I’ll only be using this place once. Do you take my meaning, Bugger?’

‘Very wise, sir.’

‘It would be a catastrophe.’

‘An absolute catastrophe.’

‘But I won’t be a swine and not say goodbye to her properly. Yes, properly, Bugger. That means I’ll make the position clear the moment she walks through the door. If she spends only ten seconds in this room that’s all the more reason to make it nice … Not many men have to subordinate their hearts to the price of petrol. I am one of them. And frankly it’s a bit much.’

‘I should look upon it, sir, as one of your many sacrifices.’

‘He will give no trouble. She will give no trouble.’

And the King’s private secretary agreed, on the whole. Brendan had of course run a check on He, months ago: daughter of the long-serving Chinese Ambassador in Paris; mistress for nine years to a Scandinavian head of state; probably in need of a nestegg. And she would get a nestegg, Brendan knew.

‘Sorry to lumber you with all this, Bugger. It’s not your job, but do make it comfy.’

Brendan was left alone, in the neglected gazebo. It wasn’t his job — but what was his job? Scandal-management, scandal-control. Scandals were like periodic tidal waves of varying height and mass. This business with Loulou — Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde: the wave did not tower or hover, but its innards might churn with surprising guile. Just now, the exposure of the King’s affair with He Zizhen would hide the sun — and would not stop, would not stop till it had rolled through villages. And as for the wave that could be gathering for the Princess: it was the work of a thousand Krakatoas …

Leaning back on the striped sofa, Brendan was now warmed by a feeling of luxury quite unconnected to his immediate surroundings: John II’s chintzy — and of course chilly — lovenest reminded him of the Royal Train before Henry belaboured it with his millions. The warmth of ease had been drawn out of him by the silence — as he realised when a truck-sized lawnmower blew past like a whale before fading into the silence of distance. And that silence, emphasised by weakly festive birdsong, had allowed him to listen to his own heart and take warmth from it.

When Victoria was four she went to bed without saying goodnight, and Brendan had felt it — all the blood within him. When Victoria was fourteen … It was on the last leg of her California tour; diversion was at an end, and what awaited her now was boredom, royal boredom — boredom cloudless and entire. Halfway through the final afternoon it became clear to him that the Princess was no longer there, that she had sent out an emissary, a simulacrum, a lifesize photograph, leaving her soul to curl up in the dark somewhere while she smiled at strangers, smiled at strangers — as if being fourteen wasn’t work enough, he had thought … Later, with an apologetic inclination of the head, Brendan asked her to choose between this or that logistical punctilio as she approached the next unveiling or investiture: who should nod, who should bow. The Princess let her tongue slide out of the corner of her mouth and raised her hands towards him with the thumbs and forefingers in the shape of two V’s. ‘W’: ‘Whatever’. And he had felt it again, all of it, all the blood within him. Girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they sometimes wear a look of panic: the eyes are trapped in the changing face. Where am I heading? From childhood the presence of the Princess had always contained agitation, a tremor of electricity; but there was no dismay in it. For the time being she looked like a thrillingly ardent woodland creature in an animated cartoon. Still, there wasn’t any doubt about the destination, which was womanhood.

He wanted to protect her, but for now he was passive, he was helpless. Well, one royal scandal at a time, he thought. Brendan felt like going for a twenty-mile hike. Instead, he took his laptop from his briefcase and started learning all he could about the prison riot in Cold Blow Lane.

Early that month the Duchess of Ormonde had swept south across the Thames to Millwall, there to cut the ribbon on a new shopping mall and fitness centre in the famously and stubbornly depressed manor of the Isle of Dogs. After the ceremony a peoplecarrier full of the Duchess’s security men mounted the pavement at speed, accidentally ramming the moped of a certain Jimmy O’Nione who, at that point, had half a second to live. The Isle of Dogs was the Isle of Dogs, and so the crisis merely intensified when O’Nione stood revealed as a career criminal (much incarcerated, with a mesmerising record), who moreover, on that day (judging by the disposition of loot and tool in his saddlebag), was clearly on his way from one crime to another. Two days after the shopping mall and the fitness centre had been plundered and torched, the Duchess’s office announced its intention to install a marble plaque in Cold Blow Lane, to honour O’Nione, which the Duchess would herself unveil (‘In memory of the valued member of the community, James Patrick O’Nione, who died so tragically at this site’). In the meantime Cold Blow Prison had come out in florid riot; the inmates had now made their base on the chapel roof, which overlooked O’Nione’s cenotaph.

The Cold Blow mutiny (Brendan now learnt) had nothing to do with Jimmy O’Nione — though he had, inevitably, spent a year or two behind its walls … The cause lay in the broodings of Prisoner Dean Bull, who, during a visit from his teenage girlfriend, Diana, began to have doubts about her constancy. ‘As a young offender prepares himself for a protracted sentence,’ blogged one old lag on the quickly assembled Cold Blow website, ‘you expect sentimental relationships to come under strain.’ So Dean feared that Diana, on her next visit, would tell him that she couldn’t wait twenty-three years. He was right. And he was ready. Brendan groaned, and sighed, and read on.

Preceded by his metal chair, Dean came through the plexiglass partition and set about Diana’s face with one of its shards. Now: every last prisoner in Cold Blow, not excluding Dean Bull, fully accepted that he would face a supplementary sentence and the loss of all remission. Dean, now twenty-one, would be released in his mid-fifties: this was fair enough. What rankled was the beating he’d taken from the guards. Because Dean, it was pointed out, had conducted himself, once his deed was done, with marked restraint, dropping his weapon and (after muttering, ‘See how that goes down down the pub Friday’) raising his hands in submission — before the first nightsticks chopped him to the ground. Some of the sterner romantics now sliding around the chapel roof (they had a seized laptop up there, and several mobile phones) argued that Dean had had no choice anyway, being a man truly in love, and what more precious token could he have offered than twelve years of his prime? More sober hands agreed that that wasn’t the point. What had come to pass was ‘a personal matter, strictly between Diana and Dean’. And then word came down from the hospital cells about the severity and duration of the stoving they’d given him …

By accompanying the Duchess to the shrine of Jimmy O’Nione, Henry IX was doing his favourite cousin a kindness: that was the thing to emphasise, thought Brendan. A nasty business (and a weird conjunction), made no easier by its timing: Henry was going down to Cold Blow on the morning after his final assignation with He Zizhen.

And on that day Brendan would have an unexpected message to pass on to the King, concerning the matter of the Princess.

Barefoot, and led by Colonel Mate, He walked the length of the ha-ha in the midgey dusk, and then emerged alone between the hedgerows for the last stretch to the lovenest of John II. In that lovenest, a nestegg (two baldrics of fire opals), and a king whose hand was already at his lips, bidding adieu.

Henry shot up from his chair and listened: He’s feet on the bare boards of the veranda … Once upon a time she had shown him the shoes worn by her greatgrandmother, the warlord’s concubine, in Shandong, where the Yellow River meets the Yellow Sea: they resembled the party boots of a three-year-old. The woman’s feet had been ‘bound’ in the traditional way — broken, crushed, then dressed and swaddled. This greatly increased her erotic worth (He explained to a horrified Henry): the crippled woman, when she walked, when she stood, evoked ‘a willow wavering in the wind’. He Zizhen had then imitated her grandmother’s agonised and papery tread, and the King’s arms had surged out towards her. Why? Why did he want to enfold that willow? The spectacle aroused him — but not as much as the sound of He’s feet on the wooden slats, registering her shape, her soft mass, the grasshalms on her dewy soles, all coming closer.

Shoeless, she was smaller, now, and he was correspondingly augmented, when he took her in his arms. He whispered what he had to say, and He whispered back. And He said she understood.

It was with sound, with a whisper, that she had first enticed him; and although the faculties of touch, taste, smell and sight, He maintained, could be reasonably well served in erotic play, what of the sense of hearing? In her view, the use of mots gros, of verbal cochoneries, was a plausible but ultimately misguided attempt to redress the deficit. Dirty talk was sadomasochism without the sticks and stones; and the King, clearly, wasn’t that kind of animal. He Zizhen, who moaned so musically among the pillows, additionally deployed the geisha device, rin no tama; Henry did not enquire too closely (it seemed to be a ball within a ball suspended in liquid), and he never sensed the slightest obstruction; he felt, however, that he was pacing or jogging or sprinting (this would depend on the gear she’d put him in) through the shallows of a tropical swamp. There was another office she performed noisily, even deafeningly — to the great joy of the King … Once, slumped in a deckchair on the Royal Yacht, he had awoken to this sound: it was the swimming-pool, slopping and gulping, smacking its lips, a storm within a storm on the Bay of Biscay. He had stared out, and the brawny herring-gulls looked like sparrows before the great carry of the waves.

Now in his grandfather’s gazebo he lay back helplessly, like a child being changed. Soon (he thought) we will enter He, and she will sigh so prettily. And that is everything, everything: just to kiss and to say the name, whispering ‘Her’. Which was how you said it. Which was the sound of who He was.

‘I didn’t think it my place’, said Love, with a stretched look in his neck and forehead, ‘to confront His Majesty with it, sir. And God knows we get enough eccentrics. But the tone of it, sir, I thought …’

‘I’m quite sure you’re doing the right thing, Love,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, intrigued and encouraged by the timbre of Love’s disquiet — troubled, wondering. ‘As always.’

‘I thank you, sir.’

Brendan and other aides were at the Greater House, and climbing into their cars. The King had gone on ahead in some sort of armoured dormobile with Colonel Forster and his men, to Cold Blow Lane.

‘Chippy?’ called Brendan. ‘Have I got five minutes?’

‘At the outside,’ said Chippy Edenderry, exposing his watch.

He followed Love through the flapped door, decisively exchanging one atmosphere for another, darker, warmer, with the thick smell of sweat and soap and gravy dinners. Brendan inhaled it, and moved on, into the alternate world of belowstairs … It would have been far worse under Richard IV, of course, when domestic staff were paid the absolute minimum on principle (glory being power, and so on), but the House of England was always hedged by the smells and textures of vassalage — it was always waiting behind the flapped, floor-trailing door. Brendan knew that all servants hated their masters. Even Love, who was as loyal as they came, even Love would feel this hate. The hate smelt too: it was like the smell of mice. Brendan found unexpected relief in the contemplation of Love’s left ear: a vortex of iron filings.

They entered a brownish parlour lined with straightbacked chairs. Ceremoniously Love now donned his white gloves, waggling his raised fingers into them, and Brendan gained the brief but comprehensive impression that he was about to be examined by a doctor of humble practice and increasingly uncertain skills. With a superstitious glance over his shoulder, Love indicated a low table which bore a telephone of recent design and an answering-machine of embarrassing antiquity and bulk.

‘You’re rather at the mercy of this contraption, sir. It’s the final message, I’m afraid.’

The white finger quivered down on the Start button, and Love backed out of the room.

It was not possible to skip or hasten, so Brendan, feeling the growing weight of Chippy’s impatience, had to sit through a series of yokellish instructions and enquiries from various caterers and vendors, plus three long and repetitive plaints from a bedridden relative, who hoped for Love’s help in a move from sanatorium to hospice. Then, suddenly, this voice, so heavily deepened and distorted that Brendan took it to be the final incapacity — the death-drawl — of the old machine.

‘For the attention of the King. On the last day of this month the material on the Princess joins that which is public and open to general observation. Note well: the Palace should insist, and should continue to insist, that the material is faked. Faked, faked. Mere digital fabrication. Mere light and magic.’

Brendan became aware of the petulant honking from the drive. He pried the twin spools from the machine, which gave its contents up to him, in all innocence, seemingly scandalised by what it had housed. Then he strode down the tepid passage. The flapped door opened, and let him out, and closed again.

Just before noon Henry England debouched from Chopper F1 of the King’s Flight, hurrying low across the striped turf of Millwall Football Ground. He wore a silk cashmere overcoat, a dark lounge suit, and a black silk tie — in deference to the memory of Jimmy O’Nione (Henry’s office had already lamented the death, in evasively universal terms: a life so full of energy, cut down even as it flowered — this, despite O’Nione’s great age). On foot and under heavy plainclothes escort, he crossed Lovelynch Road, and joined the assembly on the broad forecourt of the Juno Estate. There he was greeted by the parliamentary member, the representatives of the local council, various trembling beadles and burghers, and a squad of shrunken, bemedalled regimental pensioners in their frayed crimson tunics, ready for one final war. The crowd, the press, the police, the light presence of soldiery in camouflage gear, the battlement of His Majesty’s house of correction, which beetled over O’Nione’s shrine: all this lay round the corner, waiting. But every other car coming down Cold Blow Lane gave the prisoners its toot of encouragement and support, and was answered by a ragged wail from the chapel roof.

Hearing this, Henry said vaguely, ‘Why don’t they just … get them down?’

‘They were hoping the weather would do it for them, sir,’ said the parliamentary member. ‘Best policeman in the world, the weather. Best prison-guard too. But now of course, sir, it’s unseasonably mild.’

The King might have remarked that the word ‘unseasonable’ had lost much of its force. The days didn’t care what season it was. Above them now thrummed high-pressure blue; the sky was vibrating with it. Henry was accustomed to feelings of hallucinogenic expansion: the sense that he was the same size, the same thing, as the United Kingdom (and Canada and Australia and whatnot). Now — underslept and breakfastless, sexually wealthy but also bereft — he felt that the sky, too, was his colony, and that he was at the heart of its blue vibrations.

Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, arrived in her hearse-like limousine. She wore a black suit and blouse and a black hat with pendant veil, which she lifted to kiss the King. They were standing apart, and Henry identified a sliver of moisture in the corner of his mouth; likewise her gloved fingers trailed meaningly across his palm. With a beseeching frown she told him how perfectly angelic he was being; and Henry felt the erotic component, the fractional overspill, in her gratitude. They had played doctors at the age of six; he had woken up thinking about her, for a while, during his years with Edith Beresford-Hale; and there had been an evening, not too long after the Queen’s accident, when something glazed and reptilian had settled on him between the second and the third course of their closeted dinner. Now he looked down at her muscular ankles, her chunky black shoes. She was so securely rooted to the earth, like Pammy. And Henry thought of the shoes of the greatgrandmother of He Zizhen. No, he didn’t want to see a woman wavering like a willow in the wind. But when they were so securely rooted … even in bed, with their feet off the ground: they just ‘got on with it’, in a mild kind of tizzy. They were never what He so often was; they were never lucid, never lost.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Best foot forward.’

‘Indeed. Prosequare.’

Brendan Urquhart-Gordon and Chippy Edenderry joined the procession just as it turned into Cold Blow Lane. And so there it was: the crowd-flanked arroyo and, dead ahead, the curved wall of the prison like the stern of a ship — and the inmates all over the rigging. In the hope of increasing its impact, Henry IX’s participation, on this day, had not been scheduled or canvassed, and there was, at first, a sudden caution in the burbly ruffle of the crowd, and brief desistance from the cat-calls and ear-hurting wolf-whistles of the prisoners — many of whom, after all, were technically dependent, for their release, on His Majesty’s Pleasure. It didn’t last. Brendan, as he paced behind Henry England and Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, looked left and right and tried to individualise those gathered here: those whose hearts were hurting for Jimmy O’Nione. The dead man had had no family, no friends, and no known associates or even accomplices. It was the community itself that smouldered and smarted for him. Looking beyond the weary, gritty hatred of these faces, Brendan saw the terraced streets that curled and tapered off from Cold Blow: a corner shop, a barber’s writhing pole, an encaged headline at an angle on the pavement. Here, he thought, the dust-devils, the little twisters of rubbish, would spin the other way, answering to the prison and its gravity. The air smelt of cheap ghosts — those that had died cheaply: street accidents, bludgeonings, mattress fires.

They halted. The Duchess moved forward and steadied herself in front of a black-draped table which bore a microphone and a wreath. Thirty feet beyond, O’Nione’s stolen scooter, exceeding the speed limit when it was clipped by the swerving peoplecarrier, had slammed into the knee-high kerbstone at forty miles per hour; maintaining that velocity, its helmetless rider had torpedoed into the redbrick wall of Cold Blow Prison. It was here, at the plaque, that the Duchess would lay her wreath, in commemoration of the life of Jimmy O’Nione.

‘Good-day to you and bless you one and all,’ began Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, steering her way into the fragile hush. ‘We are gathered here to bid farewell to a much-loved member of the community: Jimmy O’Nione … “He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again … Mourn not for O’Nione … While burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of O’Nione, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.” Thank you. I shall now lay the wreath. There will then be a minute’s silence.’

Oh no there won’t, thought Henry. You see: noise is all they have. Everything detachable from the chapel roof had long ago been hurled down into the courtyard; noise was all they had left; and they would use it … Even before the monkey-grunts began, the prisoners had reminded him of primates, more specifically the Barbary apes — tailless macaques — he had leerily eyed on the Rock of Gibraltar in the course of a recent cruise: the hopping and capering, the squatting and teeth-baring, the picking, the scratching … And these monkey-grunts, poundingly concerted, reminded him in their turn of an international football match he had attended five years ago: one hundred thousand voices had raised his hair and his flesh with the fanatic unanimity of their ‘God Save the King’; but when play began, and the ball arrived at the feet of a black player on the other side? The noise made by the prisoners, now (like the vibration of a titanic double bass), was in connotation sexual merely, as the womanly Duchess bustled to the wall; her head was piously bowed anyway, of course, as she approached O’Nione’s shrine, but she seemed also to be shrinking under it, the carnal thump of it, beaten, beaten down. Reflexively Henry stepped forward in his cashmere overcoat and stood with his hands on his hips and his elbows outturned.

Brendan found that he had crushed his arms to his sides, antiakimbo, as he cringed for the King.

On the chapeltop there now followed a moment of hesitation, and of arrest. And in that moment Henry was confronted by the elementary fact that the prisoners were men, not chimps or baboons (no, nor the viciously jerked marionettes to which an alternative impulse had likened them). In their singlets and half-buttoned shirts, their scrawny flares of winded denim, they were men — men in power. It was a funny kind of power, but it was power: power enough to call forth the King. And have him stand to attention. Seeing their drunkenly childish delight in this, Henry smiled. Unreservedly and unforgettably he smiled — and was answered by a savage roar. But as soon as he composed himself and turned a priestly gaze on the Duchess, now curtseying before the cenotaph of Jimmy O’Nione, and the minute’s silence began …

Despite the unsettling discoveries in the vacated bedsitting-room (the stolen property, the forged passports and pension-books, the fantastic cache of female underwear, and the carcass of her missing budgerigar), Jimmy O’Nione’s landlady was among the crowd that had gathered that day at Cold Blow — largely, it was true, to see the Duchess (she had seen the King up close before, but what an unexpected bonus that was, him coming by …). And during the minute’s silence: such a torrent of filth you never heard in all your life. It was as if those men up there had rehearsed it. The Duchess shrank back as if she couldn’t believe her senses. Suck my. Lick my. Drink my. Eat my. And what did we get when the minute’s silence was over, and they stopped? A minute’s silence: we were all in pure shock. And then when she walked away, quaking on her heels:

Get your arse out, get your arse out, GET your arse out for the boys — oogh!

Well, I must say, that was a nice welcome they give her!

‘You see them elsewhere,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. ‘Alien moral systems.’

‘Yes, Bugger, but we did rather scrag one of their lot. As they’d see it. The chap who had the prang.’

‘… I thought the people were more for you than agin you today, sir. But the prisoners …’

‘Well, they’re prisoners, Bugger.’

It was a monarchical trait: the inability to disapprove of any of his subjects. The urge to correct them, and if necessary by hard means, yes; but not the urge to disapprove of them. It would be like disapproving of yourself. And yet the King had been confusedly thinking, as he ran low under the battering blades of Chopper F1, that sex was the opposite of torture (thinking, in particular, that the sounds He made were the opposite of torture). Both were exquisitely intimate; and both relied on carnal knowledge. And then the prisoners and their chant, which was also sex and also torture. The prisoners, who were the champions of the deed of Dean Bull, and of Dean Bull’s words …

‘From a different source you say, Bugger.’

Henry and Urquhart-Gordon were briefly occupying a private apartment in a gentlemen’s club off Pall Mall (where the King was due to host a luncheon). In the neighbouring room Oughtred was accepting delivery of a tape recorder from the BBC; only the national broadcasting corporation, it seemed, could be depended on for a sufficiently ancient machine. The second communication: Henry knew its gist. He had twice excused himself and tiptoed to the bathroom.

‘Who can be sure, sir, but it may well be a positive development. Ah. Thank you, Oughtred. I’ll be in touch.’

The two men left one room for another similarly appointed: an ambience of silver and crystal and deep-brown panelling, with an elderly rictus to it, like a mask of empire. Watched warily by Henry, Brendan approached the fat contraption and started poking at its buttons. They listened to the pleading farewells of Love’s stricken relative, and then: ‘For the attention of the King …’

Brendan addressed himself to Henry’s wondering frown: ‘If this isn’t a feint of some kind, sir, it may even be that we have a waverer, if not a friend, in the camp of the intruder.’

The tape spooled on. And they heard the metallic addendum: ‘Prepare. Prepare the press. Prepare the Princess.’

‘Oh, Christ, Bugger. This is really going to happen.’

February 14 (12.01 p.m.): 101 Heavy

Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Anybody home?

Captain John Macmanaman: Oh, hi, Robynne.

Davis: Here you go. Robynne’s Fruitjuice Special.

First Officer Nick Chopko: Thank you.

Macmanaman: Mmm. What’s in it?

Davis: Secret recipe. Guess.

Macmanaman: Well … Orange juice.

Davis: You got that from the colour, right?

Chopko: And, uh, cranberry?

Davis: And?

Chopko: Lilt?

Davis: Close. Ting. Diet Ting.

Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Be even better with some dark rum in it.

Davis: Yeah, right.

Ward: A little vodka.

Davis: Yeah, right.

Ward: Or a little gin, maybe.

Davis: Yeah, right.

Ward: Or some light rum in it …

Davis: Yeah right.

Ward: Excuse me.

Macmanaman: … Where’s he gone, our wrench [Flight Engineer]?

Davis: To make a nuisance of himself with Conchita in Business.

Chopko: You can’t blame the guy.

Macmanaman: You can blame the guy. The radar, Nick? See the weather coming? Get permission to climb. Uh, three nine zero. Robynne? Put them down back there. The girls too.

Davis: You got it.

Air Traffic Control: I hear you, one oh one heavy.

Chopko: Request permission to climb to three nine zero.

ATC: … That’s a confirm. Three niner zero, one oh one heavy.

* * *

The plane revealed her silver breast to the sun. As she rose, a cross-wind jolted her fiercely to starboard: a beast of the upper air had tried to seize her, and then let her slip from his grasp like a bar of soap. The lateral motion was enough to free the coffin of Royce Traynor from the pair of mountain bikes that had lightly braced it. Royce fell flat on his face and was then shudderingly drawn towards the opening to Pallet No. 3. As the climb steepened another sideways lurch flipped him over the low partition. He rolled on his side and pitched up against a rank of canisters marked HAZMAT (Hazardous Material): Class B and Class C-3 dynamite propellants and rocket motors for fighter-aircraft ejection seats.

1. In the master bedroom

‘Pearl? It’s me.’ There must come a point (he thought) when you couldn’t still say that — to your ex-wife: It’s me. There must come a point when me turned into somebody else. You had to abdicate. ‘Uh, is there a boy to hand?’

‘Xan. Xan, I was just chuckling over a misprint in a book I’m reading,’ she said warmly. ‘I was dying to share it with you because I knew it would appeal to your sense of humour. Have you still got one, by the way? I mean a sense of humour, because it says here you can lose that too. The book’s about crazy people and the misprint comes in the chapter called “Post-Traumatic Psychosis” under the subheading “Changes in Sexuality”. Ready?’

Both his sons owned mobile phones, of course. For a while mobile phones had seemed to make them safer. The boys were like electronically tagged criminals: you could trace them, monitor them, when they went out. But when they went out they were always being attacked — by criminals who wanted their mobile phones. When Xan went out, which he now obliged himself to do, most days, he was very regularly unnerved by mobile phones — by the disembodied voices, moving up behind you or off to one side of you, testifying, with such iterative force, to the need of the human being for connection — or for self-dilution; these voices were the voices of the lonesome crowd, needing to come together … Never eager to face Pearl, Xan always tried his sons on their mobile phones. What you got was a beep for a message (rarely responded to), preceded by forty-eight bars of hate-crammed music inciting you to act like somebody crazy. As for people who talked to themselves and really were crazy, you should issue them with mobile phones; and then they could go around talking to themselves and no one would think they were crazy.

‘“The sexuality of the head-injured male” ‘, said Pearl, ‘— and most head-injured people are male, Xan, because men are generally more physical and impulsive … Yes: “The sexuality of the head-injured male may be affected by importence.” Im-portence, with an r. Don’t you think that’s incredibly funny? It says it all really, doesn’t it. I just screamed.’

‘Yeah, well …’

‘They’re both out. I’ll tell them you rang.’

He was the father of her boys, and Pearl was a good mother. She satirised his masculinity (he sometimes sensed) because she needed to know how much of it he had — and if he fell short, then so might her sons, which she wouldn’t want. More specifically Pearl hoped to enrich his desire for vengeance. On all questions of reprisal she was unreflectingly fundamentalist. And so was he, apparently; he thought he wasn’t, but he was. Pearl would understand — and Russia would not understand — that vengeance was something he had to have. All his senses wanted it, needed it. And even in his weakest moments, moments of flickering fragility, he was sure that vengeance would come. It could not be otherwise. And just by living, by lasting, by not dying, he was getting closer to it.

‘Me?’ he had once told Russia. ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ This had perhaps been true, for a while. It was certainly true no longer. Now he spent at least an hour a day, with swat and spraycan, trying to hurt them, trying to kill them: flies. Wasps he left alone if the children were elsewhere; bees he respectfully spared; and spiders — fly-eaters — were his familiars, his enemies’ enemies. Flies he hunted down: the fatter and hairier they were, the worse he needed to see them dead. Some seemed armoured: they looked like the attack aircraft of the twenty-second century. And when they rubbed their wrists together the way they did: was it in anticipation of it, or was it in satisfaction with the vengeance they had already exacted, the vengeance of ugliness? The ugliness spoke to him. When they rubbed their wrists together, they seemed to be sharpening their knives.

Such substantial creatures could not be dispatched with the brute physics of the swat; the disgust of it would travel up through your hand and along your arm and into your gorge. ‘So Potent You’ll Watch Them Drop’, said the blurb on his spraycan. And he did watch. For a few seconds they buzzed about their business, as if the fatal blast was something they would at once shrug off. Then it was all over them, like age: every possible affliction. The wings sharply shrivelled; the taut rods of their legs became as crinkly as pubic hair. They were little old men — but not dying as we do. In the hospitals, even in the execution chambers, in the last rooms, human beings didn’t hammer themselves against the windowpanes or the mirrors and then plop to the floor, enragedly buzzing, and spinning on their spines.

What were they doing here anyway, so late in the year? What atmospheric betrayal sustained them? They were living carrion — dead already, already dead.

At St George’s Avenue there had been few visitors since the night of the accident. Three or four broad-shouldered, blue-chinned men in shiny suits came to sit with Xan for an hour or so; he kept asking them if he had ‘upset’ someone, if someone had a ‘problem’ with him that he didn’t know about; the broad shoulders shrugged, the blue chins gravely shook. They stopped coming. He had actor friends, director friends, producer friends; such people (and Xan partly understood this, because he was partly one of them) cannot bring themselves to contemplate failure or distress or humiliation. His writer friends might have taken a different attitude, but he didn’t have any; so the writers stayed away too. The crowd he used to play guitar with: they came, and kept coming, for a while. And the boys kept coming.

On the Tuesday of the third week Russia conducted an experiment. With not yet entirely humourless resignation she had read, in the books, that ‘head-injured people often find it easier to relate to the elderly, who also cannot keep up the fast pace that the peers of a head-injured person expect.’ All right, she thought: but what’s in it for the elderly? Then, seated at her desk, with her head held still in her hands, Russia took her lower lip between her teeth, and alighted on the Richardsons: late seventies, and good old sports. She had a long chat with Margot on the telephone; and Margot was amenable, stressing her immunity to all extremes of boredom, embarrassment and alarm. It went ahead.

The four of them were in the upstairs sitting-room, the Meos, the Richardsons. Earlier, in nighties, their hair thickly coiled from the bath, Billie and Sophie had been presented, to considerable acclaim. Russia attended, now and then, to the drinks tray (a lone bottle of Chardonnay, plus all Xan’s near-beers, his sodas, his juices and squashes and quashes), while the man himself sat facing their guests, his expression especially leonine that evening, his mouth curved downwards at the edges, grand, sleepy, all-tolerant. Margot Richardson, better known as Margot Drexler, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at UCL, was talking about the world situation with particular reference to Kashmir.

‘It is incumbent upon the West’, she said in her seminar style, ‘to establish a cold-war culture in the subcontinent. Starting with the hotline. Plus arms-limitation talks, test-ban treaties, crisis-management channels, and the rest of the wherewithal. We waged such a war for forty years. We know how you do it. They don’t. But then there’s religion. In Gujarat some peanut-wallah refuses to say “Hail Ram” and the next thing you know there’s two thousand dead. On one side of the border there’s Hindu Nationalism, and on the other there’s Islam. Think of it: nuclear jihad.’

‘Pakistan’, said Xan Meo, ‘is bullshit.’

‘… The clinical term for it is perseveration,’ explained Russia, after a pause. ‘You don’t mind my saying this, do you, honey? When you have an accident like Xan’s you can get hooked on certain words or ideas. We seem to have drawn “bullshit”.’ Yes, she thought: ‘bullshit’, and its not very numerous synonyms. ‘There’s also a touch of Witzelsucht, or inappropriate humour. My, how they love that word “inappropriate”. It’ll pass.’

‘But Pakistan is bullshit. India is India but Pakistan is plain bullshit. They just cobbled it together on the map. “Pakistan” is a uh, an abbreviation. It could be Kapistan. Or Akpistan. Total bullshit.’

Margot said quickly, ‘Xan’s right in a way. “Pakistan” is an acronym. And if they lost Kashmir, they’d lose the k. It would have to be … Apistan.’

‘Anyway it’s Krapistan as it is. What I don’t get about Partition is this. What I don’t get about Pakistan is this. You take one country and turn it into two countries that are bound to go to war. And this was … two years after Hiroshima. Which is just round the corner. Geographically. Now you don’t have to be … what’s he called? Cosanostra …’

‘Nostradamus.’

‘Nostradamus …’

While Xan continued, Russia’s eyes settled on Lewis Richardson. As was the case with many husbands of distinguished women, his project was the radiation of quietly relentless approval. The creases of his face, when Margot spoke, gave tiny flinches of encouragement and affection and pride. Russia was reminded that Xan had had something of that in him, once upon a time: silent but expressive approbation, directed at her. Silent respect — and it was gone.

‘On the uh, woman question,’ he was saying, ‘they’ve gone backwards. In the north, guess what the punishment is if you get raped. You get raped. You know, kid,’ he said to Russia, ‘the books are wrong. It’s not old people that make me relaxed. It’s young people. Like the boys. Because they don’t know who they are either.’

Russia blew her bangs off her brow and said, ‘What a day I’ve had — beginning at five, when Sophie woke up for good. Then Billie went to school for around five minutes, and then I had both of them till two. Then three hours of teaching. And I still haven’t touched my Munich lecture. I guess I’ll work on it tonight until Sophie wakes up again.’

‘Ah,’ said Xan authoritatively. ‘There goes my fuck.’

Into the silence that followed he said, ‘So when’s the comet due then?’

‘I hate space,’ said Russia evenly.

Xan said, ‘The comet is the come of heaven.’

But maybe come here to unmake us.

Meanwhile, in the master bedroom … On the night of Xan’s return from hospital Russia had been more or less pleasantly surprised when, with the dull glow of the linoleum still on him, he had clambered up on top of her. Afterwards, she praised him and calmed him, and there were avowals. She thought: what could be more — natural? The next night it happened again, and the next. And the next morning, and the next. Having subsided, he lay there trembling like an engine. Russia thought about this engine. It would be that of a large vehicle, stationary but locked in a high gear, and the stick would be flailing and juddering in its attempt not to stall.

‘What do they say?’ said Billie, in the kitchen, during a play-date. Her friend had just produced a pair of badges; and the badges said Just Say No.

‘They say Just Say No.’

‘Just Say No to what?’

‘They don’t say. They just say Just Say No.’

Russia had started just saying no. It worked — but only for half an hour. He had started following her around the house.

When she submitted, she often felt, as he shifted her body about, as he arranged it on the bottom sheet, that he had taken on the role of her personal trainer; at other times he was like a good trencherman settling down to the systematic completion of an enormous meal. And when, after an hour or so of that, he seemed quite certain to conclude, he would suddenly go as static and abstract as a stick insect; and then he’d resume, like someone doggedly trying to shoulder his way through a locked door. Russia remembered a phrase Xan had once used anecdotally: ‘he gave her a right seeing-to’. Yes: that was what she was being given. The only time she ever considered herself aroused was when he deployed maximum animal force and she could say she was being ravished and it wasn’t her fault. But this thought more or less instantly produced a counterthought, not quite political or even intellectual, but trained up: something like — did I take two degrees and study history so I could get raped in a cave? At first she had faked orgasms. Then she started faking migraines. And now the migraines were real.

‘Can’t we go to a hotel this afternoon’, he kept asking, ‘— just for a couple of hours?’

She laughingly declined: work, children. When this response had at last proved itself incapable of changing the subject, Russia tried saying something weird. It was a thought she had had; Xan’s return had proved to be far from rejuvenating. She said,

‘Hotel bedrooms are all right. But I don’t like hotel bathrooms. I don’t like the mirrors in the bathrooms.’

Before changing the subject Xan said, ‘… But we needn’t go in the bathroom.’

She had of course talked to Tilda Quant, among others. There was a name for it: Post-Traumatic Satyriasis. It had to do with the hypothalamus and the release of testosterone. Tilda said there was a drug you could give him (or put in his coffee): cyproterone acetate. The trademark was Androcur.

One afternoon he was breathing over her shoulder while she sat at her desk.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘E-mails.’

‘But what’s this? And this?’

‘Pornography,’ she said.

Without another word he sloped off to his basement flat across the road — and sloped back again, two hours later, smelling of public swimming-pools and shorted electricity … But he still loomed up on her, later, five seconds after lights-out.

And the worst thing was that all this wasn’t the worst thing. Not any more.

Xan wanted to go to bed with his wife all the time for two good reasons: she was his ideal, and she was there. But he wanted to go to bed with all other women all the time too. If he could persuade Russia to stop working and farm out the children and spend her spare time coating herself in unguents and underwear: this would have contained it. But Russia wasn’t going to do that … When, fumblingly, feeling like it in a game of blindman’s-bluff, he groped his way into the thick detail of the city and reached the casbah — the souk, the chowk — of Britannia Junction, he seldom saw a woman of any age whose bathwater he would have declined to drink. And they wanted him too, he realised. With subtle salacity they sent signals to him, with their mouths, their eyelashes, their tongues. They dressed for him, they even mortified their flesh for him — those nuts and bolts in their heads were cuneiform, telling him what to expect, when the time came. But the time wouldn’t come, because he couldn’t be sure (and this was a massive consideration) that these women, many of them young and strong, wouldn’t hurt him. And he could be sure that Russia wouldn’t hurt him.

Sometimes an itch (say in the septum of the upper lip) announces itself as far more baldly intolerable than any pain — perhaps because there is the power to quell it, in an instant, with the swipe of a finger. But Xan couldn’t do that. His heart itched, his soul itched. It felt connected to the need for vengeance. Vengeance was the relief of unbearable humiliation. And so at night, when he invaded Russia, that’s what he was doing: seeking relief from it. More distantly, he felt that some historic wrong had at last found redress, as if his god, so inexplicably crippled, was once again more powerful than the god of his enemies.

Climax.

Russia’s day was assuming certain proportions. Awake all night anyway with Sophie (this now brought its comforts: Xan stood on the stairs for hours, waiting), she rose at six-thirty and breakfasted with the girls, at which stage she noted the first rumours of her menstrual cramps. Next, she went into college, and finished, corrected and then delivered her lecture. At three in the afternoon she would fly from Gatwick to Munich where she would sight-translate the same lecture into German at a conference on ‘Geli Raubal and Eva Braun’. The only possible return flight got her into Manchester with a good chance of making the last express to London. She hoped to be home by about half past twelve.

Late in the afternoon of the same day her husband was struck by a thought. He realised that he owed himself two drinks: two drinks, four cigarettes (and half an hour of writhing reminiscence — if, that is, he could manage reminiscence). ‘I never did have those Dickheads,’ he said out loud. ‘I was going to toast the boys but then …’ And this was an important moment for him: a new memory, and one that took him close to the epicentre. It pushed him into attempting something he had long postponed: a reenactment of October 29 … He watched Imaculada bathe the girls. At six o’clock he put on his overcoat. ‘I’m off out, me,’ he said, and opened the front door. It was darker now, darker in the year, with the sun pitching a lower ball across the sky. The sky is falling, thought Xan Meo. Where’s the king? Where’s the fox?

He approached the main road: to his right, the garden (pramlike Primrose Hill), to his left — left field, and the city … So, the rink of Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the black gallows of the traffic lights. At this time of day you saw guys in suits heading home with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a plastic bag containing provisions for one. Will this be me, myself? he thought. It wasn’t only the women: he was looking at the men differently too, weighing them, grading them — fearing them. On the phone, with Pearl, he had felt as breakable as a lightbulb when she told him that her older brother, the enormous Angus, was thirsting for a rematch. And now when he saw them (and they’re always there), the male figures in the street who disclosed the preparedness for violence (for continuation by other means), he knew he could find no answer to it; and he would have to find an answer, if there was to be vengeance … He bought his cigarettes at BestCost. Even the striplights seemed to be trying to hurt his head.

Xan glanced round the door of the High Street bookshop, and ascertained that Lucozade was no longer on the table marked Our Staff Recommends. He turned up Delancey Street and passed the café where he no longer played rhythm guitar every second Wednesday night. Then left down Mornington Crescent, under the busy trees, and a sinus whistle from the points and wires above the railtracks. ‘Harrison! Move your …’ Sometimes an aeroplane can sound a note of warning. There were four of them in the sky, but far beyond earshot. Their contrails left chalkmarks on the firmament. They are chalking us up for something, measuring us up for something … A thick and shaggy brown cloud had spread itself over the streetlamps, resembling the pelt of a bear or an ape, but with a punk colour in it (perhaps the result of chemical confusion), like the khaki of an old Elastoplast.

There was Hollywood, and he entered.

* * *

He said to the kid (a different kid), ‘Uh, I’ll have a … What happened to the Dickheads?’

‘New menu.’

‘Okay. I’ll have a Shithead. No: two Shitheads. What’s the difference between a Dickhead and a Shithead anyway?’

‘Benedictine. In the Dickhead.’

‘Well sling some Benedictine in the Shithead. Because what I really want is a Dickhead. Or two Dickheads.’

‘Or you could have a Dickhead and a Shithead.’

‘Well. Now we’ve come this far with the Dickheads …’

The paved terrace was once again deserted; more than deserted — disused. No dead duck upended in the turbid canal, no firefighting sunset. And where was his bird (‘Is that your “bird”?’), his cockney sparrow? … Six weeks had passed, and, according to the books, he was supposed to be emerging from a period of false consciousness — though Incredulity, he thought, was a better word for it than Denial. He was currently scheduled to experience a deepening of melancholy as he grasped the true dimensions of his impoverishment. But Xan had considered himself pauperised right from the start; and he feared further demotion. What was stopping his family from abandoning him? Didn’t they now see, as he now saw, the unsuspected weakness of all prohibitions? And why was he bullying Russia, why was he torturing her with the sex weapon? To bind her to him, so she had to stay — or just to get another one in, before she left? Or to punish himself, himself, and bring about his own ejection? The groan he suddenly uttered rose steadily in pitch, and a passerby, pausing to listen, might have thought that Xan Meo was about to throw up.

Minutes passed. His present condition, he realised, physiologically reminded him of his sister’s death — and its attack on his own life-force. At the time (for about a year) he had thought: We’ll never be immortal. Because it’s the deaths of others that kill us … Suddenly he felt a vibration of troubled air on the back of his neck. There followed a moment of craven brittleness, then he turned … It was she, it was she (he was now sure it was she): the paparazza sparrow, with her chattering shutters. And as the bird bobbed and fussed about him, he said out loud,

‘What happened, darling? You saw it. What happened?’

Unlike the grimly assimilated pigeons (for whom flight was simply a last resort), the paparazza remained a creature of the air, she remained haughtily other. Before she twittered off she fixed him for an instant with the neutral madness of her eyes. Xan felt a flow, or a change of temperature, in his mind. And he remembered: ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. You went and named him. In black and white.’ In black and white …

‘Bless you,’ he said.

This was fresh information. It meant that he had named his enemy in something he had written. And so, with fluttering fingers, he wrote that down too, in the notebook they’d told him to keep about the details of his day: visits to the bathroom, food eaten, words exchanged with Billie, the whereabouts of his keys.

The significant name was in Lucozade.

He now switched to Shitheads, and for a little while he felt very happy and proud.

With its moodswings, its motor-failures (its slurrings and staggerings), its weepiness, its vaulting lechery, its encouragement of words and actions that sowed the seeds of regret, Xan’s posttraumatic condition reminded him of something: drunkenness. So after a few more drinks in Hollywood it occurred to him, rather drunkenly perhaps, that drunkenness, in his new world, might give him a clear head. Intending to explore the hypothesis, he lit out for the savage pubs of Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road.

‘Now in London it’s the congestion, the congestion,’ said the slender young Irishman crushed up against the bar in the Turk’s Head. ‘Everywhere. Now back home: go a mile out of Dublin and you won’t see a sinner all day.’

Wedging his whole forearm across his breast, Xan bent his head, and lowered his underjaw, to gain access to his third quart of London Pride. We all sin. What else do we all do? There were many sinners in the Turk’s Head, many breathers, thinkers, dreamers. Not everyone can walk or talk or hear or see, but we are all of us drinkers, micturaters. Eaters, excreters, everywhere. Xan got another quart of Pride off the feeder behind the wooden slab.

He fell in with a group of fuckers round the pool-table. And it was good. The female gobblers didn’t stir him, and the male platers didn’t scare him. There was fellow feeling: they were all in this together. Some shitters left — but new pissers took their place. Every farter bought a drink. This went on for a long time. Then he bade farewell to the assembled wankers, and moved on.

Later, as he stood in the throbbing toilet of a jazz bar in Camden Road, Xan looked at his watch and was most surprised to see that it was two o’clock in the morning. But this did not undermine the spirit of squinting concentration he had entered into as he reloosened his trousers. His immediate objective? Having just consumed a very great deal of dun-coloured tapwater, Xan’s immediate objective was to find out whether he was man enough to piss his own shit off the back of the porcelain bowl. He wasn’t quite man enough to do that, but then this was very butch shit, this shit: mutton vindaloo, pork kebab, cajun pizza, jalapeñas relleñas. Coming out of his stall, and thinking with some focus about getting home — his luck turned. There was a machine on the wall which, on the insertion of a pound coin, dispensed a generous handful of rudimentary cologne: the very thing to kill the smell of pub. He had lots of pound coins and, why, he fairly soused himself in the sugary fragrance. His cigarettes had run out long ago but that didn’t matter because he’d bought lots of cheap cigars.

After a long search he found the exit and the fresh air. Pausing only to leave a stack of sick in the gutter (and chewing all the more heartily on the soaked butt of his last perfecto), Xan went home with a clear plan (he’d just fling on the light and spin round): the detailed exaction of his connubial rights.

And all this wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing had to do with Billie.

2. Storm in a teacup

‘Oh, before I go, sir. I was talking earlier today to some friends in Madrid. Do you remember a scandal of uh, five years ago or so, sir, involving King Bartolomé?’

‘Would you very kindly remind me, Bugger.’

‘Certainly, sir. There was in existence a video-recording, widely circulated at the time, of the King having some kind of session with the wife of the local polo pro.’

‘The local what? … Oh. Oh. I thought you were talking in Spanish. Well?’

‘There was a gagging order which the press pretty much obeyed, and the whole thing was forgotten in a year.’

‘A year? Is this meant to cheer me up, Bugger? Besides, Tolo’s not a real … He keeps up no kind of style at all. That business was just another … another suburban scandal.’

‘True in a way, sir.’

‘Victoria is the future Queen of England, Bugger. The eyes of all the world are on the Princess.’

‘True, sir.’

‘Oh God, Bugger, what am I going to say? No, don’t tell me now or I’ll toss and turn. And I take it you’ve chucked those mullahs for tomorrow morning.’

‘Absolutely, sir. You’re free until one. May I wish you a good night’s rest?’

‘A fond hope, but you may. And the same to you, Bugger.’

Henry IX sat slumped on the seat of easement. Every few seconds he drew his body up into a posture of acute enquiry, then slumped once more.

‘Steady on there,’ he said. ‘Yes, most painful. Have a heart, old thing. Oof.’

Henry VIII employed a man called Sir Thomas Heneage, who, in his capacity of Groom of the Stool, had the dubious privilege of attending every royal evacuation (with a damp flannel ready in his hand). But Henry IX was all alone.

‘Ow! Now I say. That was, that was …’

His tummy troubles had been complicated by an attack of ‘stress eczema’ in an optimally inconvenient site. The King hadn’t needed this assurance from the ennobled surgeon: ‘Secondary infection is of course unavoidable.’ It was already clear to Henry that, generally speaking, the arse was a disaster waiting to happen. How could you keep something clean when it was pegged out in the cloaca maxima? And you couldn’t rest the arse either, funnily enough; the arse was never idle, even when you were sitting on it. Walking was the worst: a frenzy of formication, right up the root of you. And to seek one’s bed only fomented heat, and the ants’ trail became a nest of hornets.

‘Now that’s just not on, do you hear? Out of court! Foul! Ah, here it—’

With a flinch that made his ears roar Henry ejected what might have been a medium-sized handgun; he then applied about a furlong of toilet paper, and made the exquisite switch from garderobe to bidet. The abominable tingle now subsided. It had at last been comprehensively scratched, from within. And it would be several minutes before he went back to wishing (not very constructively, true) that he was the prettiest prettyboy in an Alabaman prison … The garderobe was a genuine museum piece: with its scales and weights and pinions, it looked like an orrery, or an instrument of recondite torture. The bidet was a squat marble trough with varicose veins, and would have been perfectly at home in any old hospital or madhouse.

Now into the tub for a thoroughly good soak. Henry was near-brahminical in his hygiene, and this was unusual for an England: luxury, in the royal houses, never extended to the bathrooms, which were cold and huge and littered with washing-machines and badminton nets and basketfuls of kittens. He was his own man in other ways too, of course. Among the toiletries lined up on the slab beneath the mirror, for example, one would not find the fierce little gadget, like a pewter knuckleduster, with which Richard IV had tormented his tubes of toothpaste. Henry was an enemy of thrift: he was one of nature’s overtippers. Retiring domestics, after half a century of service, used to receive a monogrammed tea-towel, or a bathmat, or a free-visit coupon to the Rubens Room at Windsor. After Henry’s accession they got twenty cases of vintage champagne, or a nice new car. He also doubled all salaries — and then shruggingly halved them again, after the public revelation of his astronomical overdraft. The treats and bonuses he still hurled about were now being financed by secret sales from the Englands’ private Prado — a Titian here, a Delacroix there. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon could almost hear the creak of the tumbrels and the gnashing of the ringside knitting-needles when Henry said, with a pout, that ‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas’ if his gift-budget was confined to six figures.

When the King was at stool, it could be argued, he was mingling with his people. He was coming down from his castle and doing what everyone else did. First he mingled. Now he slummed, applying Lord Fletcher’s ferocious lotion by means of a disposable glove. As he did so he was ambushed by an unmanageable thought: he could hardly ask Victoria — his ministering angel, the faith-healer of every little scrape and scratch and ache and pain — to kiss it better.

The recent days had passed with fell velocity. Now he had three clear hours before they came for him — a stretch of time that suddenly seemed almost geologically vast. Seated at his desk, drinking China tea, he played patience, and solitaire. Eleven o’clock came and went without making the slightest impression on his complacency, and so did eleven-thirty and eleven-forty-five — though it was ‘a slight blow’, he had to admit, when the minute-hand gave its tic-like tick and dourly advanced beyond noon. Still, fifty-nine minutes: an eternity. At about ten to three Henry was beginning his twenty-seventh game of solo. Ten minutes — no, eleven! Donkey’s years. The red queen, the black king, the red king, the black queen. Six minutes; five … He came close to protesting that he still had thirty seconds left when there was the knock on the door, and Love loomed.

Brendan was keeping his counsel. The Royal Rolls had barely taken its place in the convoy, and the King (after a curt good-day) emphatically produced from his side pocket a paperback booklet called Pastime Puzzles—24. He was now immersed in a cryptic crossword … It always filled Brendan with affectionate amazement: the amount of time his employer was capable of devoting — around blue Caribbean poolsides, on Alpine terraces — to the same edition of Pastime Puzzles. Over the course of one long summer (New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Micronesia) Brendan had reread the complete works of Henry James while Henry frowned at, doodled in, and frequently gummed back together his copy of Pastime Puzzles—19. An intensely ticklish moment had arisen from this, when, in some Kenyan treehouse, as they sipped their gimlets, Henry said,

‘Quite a good joke in that book of mine … Uh, there’s a young chap who goes to prison for a very long time. And he’s a bit worried about how he’s going to kill all that … time. Someone tells him there are jigsaws in the book trolley they wheel round. He gets a jigsaw. It’s the sort of jigsaw Tori had when she was — hang on, I’m giving it away. You know, wooden, with about twelve pieces. He uh, he finishes the jigsaw and says to his cellmate, “I’ve finished!” And his cellmate says, “Yes, you ass, but it took you ten months.” And our man says, “Ah, but it says on the packet ‘Three to Five Years’.”’

They both reached for their drinks at the same moment. They both looked down at the same moment: on the table between them, Pastime Puzzles—19, next to the soft pigskin of The Princess Casamassima.

‘What an extraordinary colour you’ve gone, Bugger.’

And there was Henry on the veranda the next day, flexing himself into a copy of Pastime Puzzles—20 …

Now Brendan attended to the two necks, glassed off like exhibits, in the front seat, one long and thin (Rhodes, the most senior chauffeur), the other short and fat (Captain Mate). Mate’s neck was also tanned and pocked; barely a pore had escaped corruption — it looked like sand after rain.

‘Oh I say, how fearfully clever,’ crowed Henry, filling in a four-letter vertical answer in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid. He had been applying himself to his crossword for over an hour. After another ten minutes he put it aside. ‘Can’t seem to get going’, he said, ‘on these bally cryptics. Let’s watch the news.’

Rhodes’s neck and Mate’s neck were now erased from sight, as the King, by the deft use of a dial, interposed a drape of black felt. He then took the clicker from the arm-rest and poked it towards the television screen while also skilfully engaging the power button — as if he was involved (thought Brendan) in a battle of wits. The screen fizzed, and awakened.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now I have a notion that I deserve a drink.’

Henry sat back with it, his brandy, raising the balloon in both palms like a woman with a cup of something hot. For outside, beyond the treated windows, the blue morning had collapsed utterly, and the southbound motorway was a seething, sizzling mess of drenched metal and rubber, under skies the colour of dogs’ lips … When Henry came to the throne, about a quarter of the population still believed that he had been personally appointed by God; well, stress eczema, where he had it, surely exploded the Divine Right of Kings. It had first seized him, this condition, in the week after Pamela’s accident. Lord Fletcher drew the obvious conclusion; but Henry, still writhing from his epiphanic cur moment (‘Oh no, Pemmy. But at least this means … At least this means …’), suspected otherwise. It was not the accident so much as the inconceivably onerous task of breaking the news to the Princess. Henry, who could barely bring himself to be the author of the most trifling disappointment, who suffered for weeks if he denied her a final swim, a third lollipop, an eleventh bedtime story … There was a two-day hiatus (and news embargo) while she was spirited off a cruise ship in the Aleutians. Meanwhile, with tweezers and blowtorch, stress eczema was exposing the nerve ends of his nethermost fissures and faults. And when he told her, in the library at the Greater House, he additionally squirmed on his confidential nettlebed. Now welcoming the pain, now fully accepting it, he took her outside and walked her up and down the length of the stream for hours and hours and talked and talked and talked to her.

Brendan said: ‘By Christ, did you see that?’

‘He … disappeared.’

‘Hoo! They won’t be showing that again.’

‘He disappeared.’

On the television: a street scene, a loose group of shoppers, hurriers. And then one of them disappeared, leaving a hole in the world, with death tearing out of it.

After some moments Brendan said, ‘Horrorism. That’s what we’ve just witnessed, sir. An act of horrorism.’

Henry looked at him promptingly. The Royal Rolls, with its convoy of peoplecarriers, left the main road and entered the scalloped grounds of the Abbey.

‘Angst, anxiety, concern, worry,’ said Brendan, who recognised Henry’s tactic, his voodoo of deferral: no talk of Victoria until the car was quenched of motion. ‘You are being chased by a wild beast which you already fear,’ he went on. ‘That fear turns to terror as the chase begins. And that terror turns to horror when the chase ends. Horror is when it’s upon you, when it’s actually there.’

But they weren’t there, and, ahead of them, the grounds swept on.

‘Continue, Bugger,’ said Henry tightly.

Almost floundering, Brendan said, ‘The bomber … To the bomber, death is not death. And life isn’t life, either, but illusion. There is something called the demographic bomb — the birth bomb. The bomb of birth, the bomb of death.’

They pulled up.

‘A form of words, Bugger.’

‘… Well, sir, I suggest you confine yourself to what we may reasonably suppose will soon be the stuff of common knowledge.’

‘Spell it out, if you please.’

Brendan did so.

‘Mm. Perfectly decent little place. I shall need you, Bugger, at ten to five.’

Between the Royal Rolls and the double doors of the Abbey lay a gauntlet of umbrellas.

Dear Princess Victoria,

Or how about, simply, ‘Victoria’? I expect you must be fed up to the back teeth with all the endless pomp and circumstance in your life. There’s none of that nonsense round here, and I cordially extend an open invitation for you to pay us a visit any time you like. Don’t stand on ceremony! We don’t subscribe to ceremony.

We usually dine at a reasonably early hour. Good plain fare, such as has been enjoyed in England for centuries. Our caravan contains two totally separate rooms. Once Mother has gone to bed, privacy is virtually guaranteed.

We will then have the leisure to relax on the divan and get to know each other over a few beers. I’ll start by kissing you oh so slowly. So gently. So tenderly. Oh so lovingly. Then when you say the moment is right and not a moment before (this is totally your ‘call’ as they say) I’ll haul out my

Brendan yawned, and stopped reading (there were many pages yet to come). He was in the lounge, with his briefcase on his knees, going through another batch of the Princess’s restricted mail: mail she never saw. To begin with he had thought that the enemy might have shown its hand at some earlier point; he no longer thought it had, and persevered merely to give himself the feeling that he was getting somewhere. But of course these letters to the Princess were not from the world of pro-action. They came from the world of onanistic longing — and coarse sentimentality, and impotent sadism. Even at their most violent, and some were very violent indeed, they seemed to moan with inertia: a humiliated stasis. Nor would such men be going to France, bearing gold …

His wristwatch was cocked up on the table in front of him. He was ready. As he crushed the letters into their file (Restrained Correspondence) he asked himself why he had spent so long on such an obvious waste of time. He admitted that he indulged in fantasies of protection, of interposing himself between the world and the Princess. Was that his job, just now: a fantasy of protection?

* * *

With a show of capped teeth in his rubbery face, Captain Mate ushered him into the Oak Gallery — closed that afternoon, of course, for the King’s use. Henry and Victoria were on a chesterfield at the far end of the room, some sixty feet away. The remains of a substantial tea were being removed by Love and his helpers. As Brendan approached, and as the scene cleared, he found himself thinking of earlier times: father and daughter would spend whole days, whole weekends, lolling on a sofa like this, watching television or merely dozing and mumbling and occasionally rousing themselves for a game of I Spy. The King hadn’t changed; but she was older now, this autumn — more erect, and more inclined, it seemed to him, to maintain a distance between herself and her father.

‘How lovely to see you, Brendan.’

‘Always a delight, ma’am. I hope the Princess has had her fill of sticky buns?’

‘Oh yes. I had masses.’

‘And were they sufficiently “greedy”?’

‘Oh yes. Very piggy indeed.’

Brendan thought: I’m always behind — not a year behind, but always half a season. He said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve interrupted you.’

‘My daughter was discoursing on Islam, if you please,’ said Henry. Of course, the King was religious, in his way: strictly non-ecumenical Prayer Book Church of England. ‘It’s like talking to a bally mullah.’

‘Oh poo. I was making Daddy cross by saying that Muslims seem to have much more feeling for each other than Christians. There’s a real bond, and I think that’s very attractive.’

‘Is the Princess’, asked Brendan lightly, ‘feeling herself “drawn” to Mecca?’

‘God no. I don’t think I’ve got any faith in me. I just find it all very riveting.’

Henry was no longer dreaming of Alabaman prisons. He had hit upon a more aristocratic excoriation: the smoking poker administered to Richard II (for crimes of ‘effeminacy’). And then the usurper Bolingbroke journeyed to the Holy Land to purge his guilt with fire and sword … Henry had at some point been informed by the Duchess of Ormonde that fifteen-year-olds were fifteen-year-olds, and that he should be pleased it was religion she was keen on, and not anorexia. Recalling this, he bafflingly volunteered,

‘You’d be better off having another round of sticky buns, my darling — and never mind about Mecca …’

Brendan turned his frown on the Princess, who wagged her head with a look of contented inanity. Then the smile she gave him: how it decanted itself upwards, from the mouth and through the frame of the nose and into the eyes, where it lingered in the folds of the orbits … Brendan was devoted to Henry; and yet Henry sometimes made him feel as if he had kissed his life away for some evanescent frippery — for a monogrammed butter-pat, in a deadly dining-room full of the ghosts of sweating placemen. But with the Princess it was love. What kind of love he didn’t know, but it was plainly love.

‘The sands of time, sir,’ he said, tapping his watch with a fingertip.

‘Yes yes, Bugger. Sorry: Brendan. What about the women then, eh, sweetheart? I expect you’d go a bit blank, my precious, if I told you to wear a uh, a black tepee for the rest of your days.’

Victoria sat forward, rubbing her hands together as if in ablution, and said, ‘But think of the agonies that Western women go through because of their looks. The constant worries and comparisons. It’s forced on you too. This stupid vanity is forced on you. What bliss it would be not to have to think about it ever again. Oh, the privacy of it!’

‘Well we can talk about that another time. My dearest, I have some rather unsettling news.’

Within a minute Brendan believed that the whole of terrestrial existence was just a breath away from cardiovascular collapse. He stared at the King, and thought: can you not feel it, man? Can you not hear it?

Though never as hurtfully as in the present case, Victoria’s integrity had of course been pierced and breached many times before; and, since childhood, she had always reacted with the same robust indignation. There was nothing regal in it — on the contrary, there was something severely republican and every-woman in her steep frown, her straight neck. It was for a version of this that Brendan had more or less unthinkingly prepared himself. And now? While her father, gazing resolutely ceiling-ward as he writhed around on his cushion, delivered the agreed preamble (‘it appears that the vultures are up to their old tricks’), Victoria did no more than sigh and stiffen. But as soon as Henry meandered in on the particular (‘the Château’, ‘the Yellow House’), she bared the teeth that were still too broad for her face, and her head dropped, by degrees, like the resilient jolts of a second-hand. Now Brendan could feel the heartbeat of the Princess, pressing in on his exterior ear. And soon the sound of her pulse — the slow, gonging throb — was entirely subsumed by his own.

‘Well it’ll soon blow over, my dear,’ said Henry, writhing around in earnest now, like a man playing footsie with a moving target. He was practically flat on his back.

‘We’ll just have to get on with it,’ he managed to add. ‘Storm in a teacup, all hands on deck.’

Brendan thought: she wants to disappear. She wouldn’t want the nails and the bolts and the shrapnel. But that’s what she wants to do. She wants to disappear.

‘Perfectly decent little place,’ said the King as he strode through the mountain tunnel of the Abbey archway — saying it as if Brendan, and Victoria, and everyone else, kept maintaining otherwise, in tireless error. ‘I don’t know about you, Bugger, but I thought she took that fairly well.’

He couldn’t answer … During the last half-hour, in the Oak Gallery, the ambient air had made steady gains in clarity, as if a succession of blankets were being removed from an exalted skylight; and now the actors had stepped out into a blue thaw of dripping glitter. At the foot of the cliffside lay the town, waiting, palpating like a dog that has just shaken itself dry. There was an invitation to the spirit — rise up; and all this, he knew, all this was only mist and rain to the Princess …

She was standing with her back turned, and slightly apart, to one side of her own entourage (the forecourt was now a millpond of Security), on a strip of lawn between the path and a bed of pink flowers. Looking at her hunched shape, he knew again what it was like to be fifteen: when you suffered, your every cell suffered. She was wearing black jeans and a short leather jacket, and he wondered why, with the young and indivisibly wretched, it was the tensed buttocks that best expressed all this strength and pain.

Brendan marched forward. As he came round in front of her he was prepared to see tears but her eyes were their normal blue. Yet clogged with chemicals, as was her mouth, chemicals of distress, and giving off a sour breath.

So he did something for which there was no precedent. He embraced her, saying,

‘He will forgive you anything and everything, you may be sure. Without a second thought. And so will I. He will always protect you. And so will I.’

‘Forgive me?’ she said. With the words evenly stressed, he thought, as he dropped her hand and backed away.

In the Royal Rolls the King, with a showily dexterous flick of the wrist, activated the television and sat back with a contented grunt to watch the snooker for the rest of the drive. ‘Oh, perfect weight … They make it look so … Now. Has he got the angle on the yellow?’

After about an hour Brendan started to think logically, or at least consecutively. If one used one’s imagination (he told himself), Victoria’s reaction could probably be readily explained. What do we do in bathrooms? Nothing we’re very proud of. A bodily function, perhaps. The use of a tampon, conceivably. Or something rather more intimate. Which woman friend had informed him that young girls referred to the hand-held shower as ‘Rain Man’? And she was fifteen. Remember that: the outlandish disproportion of being fifteen, when you were waiting to find out who you were.

‘Shot. Now he’ll come down for the blue … Oh no, he’s gone too far … Foul stroke!’

That embrace: a startling impropriety, never to be repeated, but none the less an unalterable fact. He recalled the tragic sourness of her breath. And the rigidity of her body — and the answering rigidity of his own ancillary heart. All the blood within him: all of it.

‘Here we are. Well I’m pleased to have got that out of the way, Bugger. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been playing on my mind. In a week or two I expect this’ll all be a thing of the past.’

Brendan spoke with only an instant’s forethought. You fool, you fool, he said to himself. Didn’t you see that her fear was waiting for it — for this day, for this hour? He said,

‘I disagree, sir. In fact I suggest that I turn this car round and go straight back to St Bathsheba’s. The Princess must be taken out of school at once and then secluded — I suggest Ewelme. If the illicit material is indeed made public on the thirty-first, then I suggest also that we take the advice of uh, our mole and insist from the outset that the material is faked. It’s a ghastly gamble, I know, but the chance won’t come again. Meanwhile we must work out a strategy of damage-limitation with Downing Street. Sir, this isn’t going to be a storm in a teacup.’

‘Steady on, Bugger. Do you know something I don’t?’

‘It’s only a deduction, sir, but I think it’s sound. The Princess was not alone in the bathroom of the Yellow House.’

This is going to be a storm in all the oceans of the thing which is called world.

And the thought: God how she needs her mother.

3. Car-sweat

The two-storeyed Avenger lay in wait under the Esso sign. Welcome Break. Stop and Shop. Smoker consistently drove out here and just sat in the car or did his e’s on the laptop. You have 124 new messages. People coming and going: it’s more cheerful. You fill her up, grab a bay by the cash machine. And stroll inside if you want, for a pizza or whatever. At the Esso you often also get carpools. And women on mobile phones, women waiting alone under the lights in the forecourt with that waiting posture — doing nothing but waiting; they stand like that in the parks and recs with a leather lead in their hand: waiting for the dog to do its business. You could lower your window, saying, ‘Lost your lift then, love? Hop in.’ But the age of the random ride was over. Mobile phones: increased backup. You can have a brief exchange, there on the kerbside. Pass the time. Feel the confinement lift a little bit. It’s funny. They must think: I climb into that car, I pass through that glass, then I’m in his mirrorworld — he’ll have power, with its warp and distortion. He can turn. Every man sits on an anti-man. And the weathered saloon, ticking over in the suburban sidestreet, has its oil and coolant, its dark engine, beneath the windshield’s reflection of the leaves and the branches.

In Clint’s evening paper there was an ‘artist’s impression’ of the Princess in her bath. You know: like in a court case. The artist was not a very good artist; the impression was not a very good impression. Idealised (and, as it were, self-bowdlerised by the placement of her limbs), the image of the Princess might have graced the greetings cards sent by a suburban madam to selected members of her clientele. Reduced to an artist’s impression, on account of the shielding order. Bit late now, thought Clint: a case of bolting the stable door after the graniverous quadruped has gone AWOL. Everyone on earth was gawping at the stills, on the Net, in the foreign press — and, of course, in the Morning Lark, which, that morning, had consisted of nothing else. The official line, from above, was that the material was all faked anyway: software, pseudofilm, ‘without ontology’. Either that, or some snapper hides in the toilet for a month … What Clint couldn’t work out was who benefited. Cui bono? — apart from the Lark, with its triple print-run … Clint: never gone that big on the younger bird. But virgins had their points. Bet they felt you more. And they couldn’t tell you were crap at it, having nothing to compare.

You have 125 new messages. About 120 of them would be from commercial concerns: invitations to Clint to shower money on his genitalia — by various means and for various purposes. Three or four would be chat-room flirtations with indistinguishable career-girls, all of them apparently chasing the next leg-up or leg-over. Clint visualised a succession of fierce little hussies, with lips crimped in ceaseless calculation. But of course they could be anyone: these were rigged-up identities, summoned out of the ether. It was said of the Web that its contents were (on average) about 60 per cent true. And you, mate, he said to himself: can you swear any better? … And then it came, the voice that seemed to penetrate his solitude:

clint: how r u, dear man? i detected a note of melancholy in your most recent e, so i thought i’d cheer u up with some verbal 4play. u have asked 4 my views on anal 6 & related?s. well, i’m all 4 it if it gets the job done quicker. i said be4 th@ the best prix r small & soft, & i’m aware th@ anal 6 demands gr8er 10sion. so it’s 6 of 1 & 1/2 a dozen of the other! i’m very happy to per4m oral 6 @ any time. what’s my style? i no th@ some girls r merely rather affection8 2 the man’s 2l. i consider this ‘cock-i’d’! u should go @ it 40ssimo. rule: never kiss your man after fell8io — by god, u’d be calling him a bumb&it! as 4 cunnilingus, th@’s strictly verbo10.

Blimey: she’s ideal. Talk about taking the pressure off. With this bird, expectation’s reduced to nil … But that’s all very well, that is. That’s all very fine and large. Because the wound’s in you, my son. There ain’t anyone else who can sort this out: it’s down to you, mate. You yourself.

Before driving back to his Foulness semi, Clint topped up the Avenger at the pumps. They talked their heads off about sex and cars, but look at this: look at the mechanised brothel of the forecourt. In every bay, in every trap, there was a man with a hulking nozzle in his mitt; you lifted the cover, and there was the sliding aperture; then you poured in the power while the digits flickered.

Fat splats of water fell unevenly from the ribbed roof. Not rain: just drops of car-sweat.

‘So what was in this “dirty bomb”?’

‘Radioactive medical waste, Chief, plus ringworm, West Nile virus, liquid gangrene, and a cladding of mad cow.’

‘And what do this lot call themselves?’

‘Uh, the Legion of the Pure.’

Clint thought: what’s funny? Is it still funny? Was it ever funny?

‘And they blew themselves up on purpose.’

‘No, Chief. By accident. It went off in the airport carpark.’

‘And who were they followers of?’

‘Uh, you know: the bloke with no tackle.’

‘Actually, Chief, he has got tackle,’ said Clint. ‘Records show. It’s funny, that. Like Hitler’s only got one ball.’

‘Was he the one that went to the stripclub?’

‘That wasn’t true either.’

Heaf seemed disappointed. ‘Well we certainly spent enough space on it. Did he go near the stripclub? … Anyway, we can only keep hammering on about racial profiling at airports. This is Clint in today’s: “And at the security checkpoints, what do we see? Some gimp of a granny being fisted in half, while the dunerat called Zui’zide al Bomba sails past with a J-cloth on his bonce and a flamethrower over his shoulder. And followed by his three best friends, Hijaq, Kydnap and Drugrun.” ‘Heaf slapped the page with his fingernails. ‘That’s what I call an editorial. Anyone who looks remotely Arab should have their lives made an absolute torment for the rest of the century.’

‘What happened to “Bints in Burkas”?’ said Donna Strange, who was sitting in. ‘I did one and you never ran it.’

‘Yes. Whatever happened to “Bints in Burkas”?’

‘“Bints in Burkas”? We backed off on that one, Chief.’

Mackelyne read from the minutes: ‘“… reached the decision not to go ahead, out of deference to the deepest personal convictions of our wankers.”’

‘And we thought they might dirty-bomb us.’

‘Mm. And what about the royal angle? The list of demands. It didn’t actually reach the King, did it?’

‘No. They found it floating around in the carpark.’

‘But the tone of it. Completely outrageous. How did it begin?’

‘“Greetings, Slave. God, who controls the clouds, who —”’

‘Yes yes. But “slave”! I mean, I find that quite unbelievable. Apart from the Vatican there’s not an institution on earth that’s older than the monarchy. And along comes some little snake-charmer, some casbah cutthroat …’

‘Well this is it, Chief. That’s what unbelievers are, in their eyes. According to them,’ said Clint with a shrug, ‘we’re shit.’

‘But to say the King’s shit,’ said Heaf, who seldom swore. ‘I mean, if he’s shit, if our king’s shit, then what are we? We ought to … Ah, but religion’s a very curious thing, you know, and that’s why we’ve always steered clear of it. I’m Catholic myself, of course, though partly lapsed. I don’t think we’ve ever pinned it down, have we, Mack? We know everything there is to know about our typical wanker, but what he believes remains a mystery.’

Clint said, ‘A mystery wrapped in an enigma, Chief.’

‘The sampling varies as in no other sphere,’ Mackelyne went on. ‘There’s only one thing we know for sure.’

‘Which is?’

‘They all hate nuns.’

‘… Well I’m glad we’ve joined the fray. The smell of cordite at last,’ said Heaf. ‘Now. Can we at least have a filler on Russia-China?’

Smoker sat smoking in Room 2011 of the Bostonian Hotel on Meagure Street. Darius, the seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist, lay shoeless on the sofa, reading the Gideon Bible: Book of Revelation … In Room 2013 Ainsley Car was supposedly in the process of having Donna, prior to doing Beryl.

‘“Words”,’ keyed Clint, ‘“cannot convey the torment I am going through,” said a sickened “Dodgem” Car last night in an exclusive interview with the Morning Lark. “The pressures on the pro footballer of today are something you wouldn’t believe. And as the world knows, I’ve had a long and painful struggle with my ‘demons’. Football isn’t about winning. It isn’t about losing. It’s about glory. And yes, I’ve feasted on the recognition. Runner-up in the Premiership with Wanderers. A winner’s medal in the Ivatex Data Systems Cup with United. That ‘banana’ consolation goal for Wales in the quarter-final at the Bernabéu.

‘“And God knows I’ve had my share of grief. The endless months in hospital wards and prison yards. The tragic death of Sir Bobby Miles a scant ten days after my ‘challenge from hell’ and the crippling civil action that followed. Relegation with United. Tell me about it — the booze, the birds, the brawls. I’ve been there. And who’s stood at my side through thick and thin, through the good, the bad, and the bubbly? My childhood sweetheart and now my bride. Little Beryl.”’

‘“For the time is at hand,” ‘said Darius conversationally. ‘Her in there: that’s Jezebel. “And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.”’

‘Charming.’

‘It’s coming, man. The hour is at hand. “And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of the heaven fell unto the earth …”’

‘Oh. That. The comet. Your lot were a bit quick off the mark with the last one. Didn’t they all top themselves in advance, your lot, over in California?’

‘Not my lot. My lot won’t even be here, man. It’s all yours.’ For a moment Darius laughed quietly. ‘You think America’s powerful. Taste the wrath of the big guy, bro. Coming to getcha …’

‘Where’s the meaning in it? Just blind natural forces.’

‘No blind. The comet is like me, man. Muscle. Muscle of God.’

The room — the hotel — was postmodern, but darkly, unplay-fully so. It seemed that the gunmetal furniture was trying to look like the refrigerator, the television, the safe. Among the gaunt gadgets on Clint’s worksurface was an anomalously ovoid Babicom (supplied by the Lark‘s lone parent, Desmond Heaf). He reached for the dial. You could hear Ainsley’s slurred and labouring baritone, Donna’s bold alto.

… for the both of them. The uh, the mongrel’s Bena. The Alsatian’s Mick. Know why I love dogs?

Tell me, love.

Dogs don’t kick you when you’re down.

That’s true.

Dogs don’t nag at you. Dogs don’t rip you fucking off. Dogs don’t give you bullshit.

They give you dogshit.

Yeah but … yeah but … Dogs don’t—

‘Jesus. Well at least they’re in bed by the sound of it.’

‘How long’s he got?’ asked Darius. ‘You’d think he’d be making a pig of himself. Donna Strange?’

‘“I always enjoy the Lark’s annual Top Titcrack Competition (pages 19–26),” ‘typed Clint. ‘“It’s a chance to have a few drinks and a laugh and generally relax. After the lunch and the playoff, we sat around with the proud winner, Donna Strange, and had a few drinks. Spirits were high. And it was hard to take your eyes off Donna’s cleavage. Talk about Silicone Valley! A bit later someone suggested that we move on to the bar for a few drinks. At this stage, the thought of any monkey business was the last thing on my mind. I’m a happily married man. And after all, little Beryl was due to join me at seven.

‘“After a few drinks Donna suggested we move on to the restaurant for a snack and a few drinks. Call me naïve, but I thought little of it when Donna complained of hoarseness in the foyer and asked for a glass of water. We went up to my room on the twentieth floor. I don’t know if she was having me on about the tickle in her pipe. But this was for certain. Five seconds after that door closed behind us, Donna Strange had a frog in her —”‘

— I’ve nutmegged their number two and come haring into the box. The goalie’s come out to close me down but I’ve gone and chipped him. Two-all. The crowd’s going spare. In the eighty-sevemf minute, Gibbsy’s played a long ball out to the left …

‘The time is nigh.’

‘Yeah, well. Donna knows what time it is.’

Clint now typed very fast for fifteen minutes. ‘“At last,” ‘he went on, ‘“she smiled up from beneath my sopping knackers. I needed no second invitation when she offered to start taking her clothes off. In all the excitement I clean forgot that …”’

‘Five to,’ said Darius.

… with a power header just before half-time. Shortly after the resumption I—

Where are we now, Dodge? Kestrel Juniors?

Kestrel Juniors? No, love, this is the Under Nines. Shortly after the—

Here, darling, we’d better get started.

… I’m uh, I’m not bothered.

Pardon?

I’m not bothered. With Beryl due. Bit embarrassing for a bloke, his wife seeing him with his arse in the air. No offence.

I don’t mind, sweetheart, but it’s not up to us, is it? Look … Undo your … If I … Just get your …

‘He’s not even got his clobber off!’ cried Darius.

‘She’ll have him. Donna Strange? She’ll jack him up. She’ll be there.’

And now they could hear her, through the Babicom (its red light straining), through the matt wall: Donna, gathering it up from the depths.

Ainsley Car had impressed it upon Clint that Beryl was a woman of pathological punctuality — especially in her dealings with things like Central London, and public spaces, and Ainsley Car when he was putting himself about … Clint approached the door and opened it narrowly. The hand-mirror he held gave him a flickering view of the empty passage. He stuck his head out — his head, like the shaved hump of a camel. The Bostonian had recently been dragged into the twenty-first century, but it remained an old, sprawling, fire-haunted hotel: the corridor unreeled itself like an opium vision, as if to infinity. Clint waited. At 7.58 the specklike pixel of Beryl Car began to detach itself from the distance. So small; and already so strafed by fears. Funny: she’s getting nearer — but no bigger. And shit nerself, he thought… Her want of inches was like an exertion of humility; and the stride, too, was just a series of starts and hesitations, buffeted by invisible fingerstabs of mockery or reproach.

Sternly Clint backed into Room 2011. ‘Wait for it,’ he whispered. ‘First the waterworks. Then boof.’

With their heads dipped and their mouths stretched in grins of suspense, the two men listened to what they had heard many times before. But only on their television sets: the shuddering, self-righteous birthsong of Donna Strange — so operatically brought to bed.

He gave it half a minute longer, then stepped up and opened the door. He looked left, he looked right.

‘You little bitch,’ he said.

Clint entered the conference room, the next day, to a standing ovation. There was nothing triumphal in it. Rather, the applause expressed a grave and considered solidarity — a sense that, though much had been achieved, much abided their care; a sense that, however uncertain the outcome, the attempt itself had spoken, and not in a quiet voice, for professional intrepidity and esprit.

‘Well thanks, lads, for the moral support. Thanks, Chief. Appreciated. It was never going to be easy out there last night, but I was … “Doing Beryl” was my baby, and I wasn’t about to mess this one up. No danger.’

It was Desmond Heaf’s practice, when the paper mounted one of its coups de théâtre, to retire to the sidelines for a day or two. He now had the air of a fuddled corporal emerging from a foxhole. ‘Would you care to take us through it, Clint?’

‘Okay. Beryl’s done a runner on us. Yup. Seems she approached the door, heard Donna belting it out — and she’s done a runner.’ Down the far end of the passage she was disappearing into the motes at the vista’s end. ‘So be it: plan B. I got Dodgem out from under Donna and hauled him next door. I said, “Dodge? You know what you got to do, boy? You got to go in there and do Donna.”’

‘I almost gave birth when I saw it,’ said Heaf. That morning’s edition rattled faintly in his grip: WHY I DID DONNA BY AINSLEY CAR ^* WORLD EXCLUSIVE ^* Dodgem Goes Apes^**t After Hotel Sex Fest. ‘Why I did Donna?’

‘“Do Donna?” says Dodgem,’ said Clint. ‘“Why do I do Donna?” I said, “You don’t do Donna. What you do is you ‘do’ Donna: when I give the word, you make a racket and smash up the furniture, and we’ll do the rest.” He said, “But why, mate?” I said, “If it’s motivation you’re after, she’s just cost you your marriage.” Course I was rewriting it in my head: the piece. Like: “When I realised that those three hours of madness might mean the loss of little Beryl, my anger naturally turned on the rotten slag who’d led me astray.” Et cetera. Then I rang Marge Fitzmaurice.’

Clint’s colleagues were listening with unrelieved solemnity, their faces dry and grey. Even Supermaniam looked like Voltaire.

‘I told Marge to get her vanity case and her fat arse over to the Bostonian instanter … It was a pleasure to watch her work. If you turn the page, Chief — the bruises on the inner thigh? And on the bosom? Then we slung in the black eye and the split lip. I told Dodge to get started. Give him a minute and I’ll call Security. Well I heard a thud or two, nothing much, and I looked back in: Ainsley’s on the floor, and there’s Donna in her pants smashing his head in with a glass ashtray. Said he took a right swing at her, so she did him. After that it was just logistics.’

‘Had Ainsley been drinking?’

‘Drinking? He doesn’t remember anything from about noon on. And guess what. He didn’t do Donna — and he didn’t have her either. Rather talk about his dogs and Kestrel Juniors. Donna straddled him and that, for Beryl, but it was strictly soft-core.’

‘Well I never did,’ said Heaf. ‘Congratulations, Clint. You handled a difficult situation with considerable delicacy, and it all came out for the best. Jeff?’

‘Tomorrow’, said Strite, ‘it’s Donna’s Story.’

‘Angle?’

‘Uh … She deeply respects the strength of Ainsley’s feelings for Beryl. No way in this world will she press charges. Says the rough stuff shrinks to insignificance compared to the fivestar porking he gave her earlier. You know: have you seen the size of him?’

There’s a word for it. Don’t you worry. Oh yeah, there’s a word for it all right. Contempt.

The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy. Will gasp with envy.

You can take all the shrinks and minders and trickcyclists or whatever you want to call them … It’s down to you, mate. It’s down to you.

One told him he was crap in bed. One called him a crap fuck. At first he didn’t understand, and responded in kind. He invited them to come back and try him again when they’d lost a couple of tons and had their arses fixed. Then understanding began to dawn. ‘Oh. Is this as big as Clint gets?’ — and this, by now, was a Clint preempurpled with Potentium. Raillery, is it? Later that night: payback. ‘Gaw,’ he’d said, as she took off her bra: ‘when you have a baby, you’ll have to get it pissed, you will, before it’ll go near that little lot.’ ‘Oi. Take your ring off for God’s sake,’ she’d said, after a full minute of foreplay. ‘Ring? What ring? That’s me watch.’ But understanding was beginning to dawn. Go on, laugh, he was already muttering as he unbuckled his belt. Get your laughing done with. They didn’t laugh. They said: ‘I’m sorry, love, but I can’t feel you.’ They said: ‘I can’t feel you, Clint. I’m trying, but you’re not there.’ Not there! Those microscopic insects called no-see-ums: they bite. And Clint? No-see-um — and no-feel-um. He’s not there. Where is he if he’s not there?

The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy, gasp with envy. There’s a word for it: contempt.

You have 125 new messages: half of them offered riven virgins and pregnant grannies; the other half offered penis-enlargement strategies — and Clint had tried them all.

Meet the challenge of any woman … you will be in total command … remain your secret … discovered by Dr Trofim Frenkel, MD … why settle for … your maximum potential … herbs found in Polynesia … ‘I feel great about myself (PL, Germany) … natural scents that turn women into … 55 million satisfied customers … piston assembly … non-removable springloaded … pistol-trigger press pump … ‘I am already 12 inches but I’m going for 14′(RB, USA) …

Why stop there, mate? Why not 28? Why not 56? We’d be like the men on the Esso forecourt, with the steel nozzles, the flickering digits, the fat splats of car-sweat.

At home Clint had flexers and extenders, fancy philtres in tubs and tubes, pulleys, lozenges, unguents, humidors, all over the house, in trunks and suitcases and cardboard boxes and tengallon bags. No African scarifier had subjected himself to more thorough and various mortification; down there, Clint had undergone every possible metamorphosis — except growth. There had been temporary, and terrifying, enlargements. But nothing you’d want to keep …

Then of course there was the radical solution. And Clint (while on assignment) had once got as far as the surgery waitingroom of a Dr Christer Ekland in Stockholm; he filled in forms for ten minutes before he burst out through the door. And by now he had heard many sufficiently gruesome stories about Life after the Knife … How the shame — how the shame was predisposed to bring down more shame. Shame came from receiving, from sustaining, that other thing, contempt.

I don’t know, mate, but it’s down to you. They talk about the shrinks, the minders, the trickcyclists … And Clint had always feared such an investigation: he wondered what else they’d find … But you can’t go any further, not down this road. You’ve got to open your head, and let them in.

‘Absolutely glorious weather,’ said Heaf. ‘Today, London will be hotter than Dubai. What we’ll have here is a café society. Like on the Continent.’

Clint said, ‘The big news climatewise, they’re saying, is the Ice Age. Which is coming up. After uh, ten thousand years of decent weather, muck out the igloo, boys, and hunker down for ninety millennia of frostbite.’

‘… Then maybe global warming isn’t such a bad thing after all!’

‘Yeah, they’re saying — yeah: but if you wet your pants at the beginning of a blizzard, it won’t keep you warm for very long. You’re obviously in a brilliant mood, Chief?’

‘Well. Yes, well, it’s true. I can’t be unhappy today.’

Everyone turned to the masterscreen. This was showing the four-second loop of the Princess. Each man present had watched it a couple of hundred times; and the room fell silent as they watched it yet again. The first second: supine in the white bath, the Princess is rhythmically spooning water on to her throat with her left hand. The second second: she pauses, as if to listen; the splashing, the lapping of the water — this has ceased. The third second: she sits up suddenly. The fourth second: she turns her head to the right as her body rotates through ninety degrees, causing the water to slide and swirl across her cocked hip. Then black.

‘For us, that’s a licence to print money,’ said Mackelyne. ‘If the gagging order holds. They can download it themselves but it’s not the same. Our wankers’ll want something to keep — to cherish. And that’s what we’ll give them.’

‘Hold your fire, Mack.’ Heaf joined his hands behind the back of his neck and said conversationally, ‘Donna Strange opened an abortion clinic in Belfast — today at noon … There were protestors, of course, and it was covered on local TV. Donna looked radiant.’

Supermaniam said, ‘What about the black eye and the split lip?’

‘No trace of either.’ Heaf added brightly, ‘We can always claim she put makeup on it.’

‘What, makeup on the makeup?’ said Clint. ‘I can see why you’re not bothered, Chief. After all, April Fool’s Day is only three and a half months off. We can say we jumped the gun.’

Heaf guffawed with his head thrown back. He reached across the table for a tasselled folder, saying, ‘From Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice, no less. It seems that we are now faced with the legal question of whether our photocaptions constitute a uh, “an incitement to masturbation”.’ He held up a clipping between finger and thumb. ‘“Does Steffi give you a stiffi? Roll your sleeve up, son, and get to work!” Or the following, from your Blinkie Bob Video Review, Clint. “You’ll be needing a box of tissues for this one (make that a mansize!). And I don’t mean it’s a weepie.”’

‘Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice,’ said Clint. ‘Don’t they represent the Walthamstow Wanker?’

‘They do. You see, the “erotic material” being consulted at the public baths on that fateful day was nothing other than the Morning Lark. So the Walthamstow Wanker …’

‘Is a wanker! You’re doing my bonce in here, Chief. Tell you what. Can I have a month’s holiday starting tomorrow?’

‘Course you can, dear boy. The thing is, none of this matters, journalistically, because everyone pretends we’re not a newspaper. Well all that is about to change.’

Heaf stood. They waited.

‘I’m late, I’m late,’ he sang, ‘for a very important date …’

‘Where at, Chief?’

‘At Number Ten Downing Street. By order of the King.’

‘… They’ll gag you. They’ll gag you, Chief.’

‘Maybe they will, maybe they will. Uh, what did we have in mind for tomorrow?’

Supermaniam unfurled the mockup. It said: ‘Souvenir Issue ^* The Little Princess Frame By Frame ^* FUTURE Q. OF E. GANGF^**KED ON CAMERA??’

‘Mm. Await my call. That may need some toning down.’

‘If you feel strongly about it, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘we’ll add another question mark.’

It came through when he was back at his workstation and talking to the travel people, Virtually There. It said:

fl@ e, 49 m@tock est8, n7

dear clint: @ last — the dex r clearing! he’s not a gr8 hint-taker, orl&o, & he hasn’t noticed i’ve stopped talking 2 him. but he has noticed i’ve stopped making his t. ‘y don’t u make my t any more?’ & i say, ‘you can make your own bloody t!’ but he’s as obstin8 as a mule. th@’s the word 4 him: asi9. he still wants 6 every nite, but i’ve got a new str@agem: not washing. let’s c how long he can st& the s10ch! … a whole new future is opening up 4 me now. a new 2morrow, clint. my thoughts & hopes r turning 2wards some1 else — some1 not a 1,000 miles from where u st&, my v dear friend. on our first d8, whenever th@ may b, if we feel like a cuddle, y the 1 not! but th@ doesn’t have 2 lead 2 anything but sleep, & in the morning i’ll make the t! still, i think it’s a good thing 4 u 2 take a journey 2 distant 1&s — 2 reflect, 2 ponder, 2 rumin8. i shall be w8ing here 4 u — like a nun, a noviti8, ready 2 become a bride of X! well, dear 1, i kiss your h&s. fare 4th, & find the lite! k8.

So on his last Sunday before jetting off, Clint drove to N7: just to reconnoitre, and maybe catch a glimpse. Trapped in traffic on Parkway, and gazing out, he noticed a smart-looking woman whom he thought you’d call fanciable, despite the doublepram she wielded. As he watched, she pulled up short, came round in front of the two nippers — and crouched, in earnest interchange. Shit: if he’d been in a normal car, instead of the Avenger, he’d have been able to see right up her skirt. Clint moved on.

‘Start again. He what?’ said Russia Meo.

‘He hugged me too hard,’ said Billie.

‘Start again. Where was Imaculada?’

‘In the kitchen with Baba. I went out to the shed where Daddy was and we saw the fox on the roof.’

‘You saw the fox through the skylight? Through the glass? And then?’

‘I couldn’t breathe. Daddy hugged me too hard.’

* * *

February 14 (12.25 p.m.): 101 Heavy

The man in 2A returned to his seat. The woman in 2B, Reynolds Traynor, said,

‘Why do you keep doing that? Don’t look so stricken. You’re making me nervous.’

‘It’s just a precaution.’

‘Relax. Have a drink. Flying’s safe. It’s safer than walking.’

‘Depends how you figure it. Per passenger-mile — right. But if you figure it per journey, it’s about the same as motorcycling.’

‘… When you grope your way up and down the cabin — why do you keep doing that?’

‘It’s so I can get to the emergency doors with my eyes shut. In case of smoke. Only I’d be doing it on my knees. More oxygen. Avoid the flashover. Twenty-two per cent of aviation fatalities are caused by fire.’

‘Really.’

‘Second only to blunt trauma.’

Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Ah, that’s better. I am a whole new hombre … If, as they say, you can judge the health of a carrier by the age of the flight attendants, then you’re in okay shape.

First Officer Nick Chopko: That’s because they’re all dead by the time they’re thirty-five. This is CigAir, pal.

Ward: Flew Air K last week and the broads could hardly walk … That one in Business, what is it, Conchita? Awesome bod. Oh, mercy, I could do her some harm.

Captain John Macmanaman: The hell with that kind of talk, Flight Engineer. Not in my cockpit, son.

Ward: Sorry, Cap.

Macmanaman: Forget it. Hey, Nick. Look at the power. Look at the speed. Oh sure. We’re going to stall at maximum up here … Nick? Hal? See what I see? Thrust-reversers are engaged.

Chopko: Jesus Christ. It’s fictitious, right?

Macmanaman: Damn right it’s fictitious. Or we’d be in cartwheel. If it’s fictitious — what else is fictitious?

In Pallet No. 3 the corpse of Royce Traynor minutely rearranged itself. Its chin now rested on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. Extreme turbulence would be needed before Royce could make his next move.

His mahogany coffin was hard and heavy. Like the past, he was dead and gone. But Royce was still hard and heavy with it: hard and heavy with the past.