• Chauffeur and courier services
• Own limousine
• Casino consultant
• Luxury goods and Celebrity purchases
• Darts lessons given
• London operative for Ambrosio of Milan, Perfumes and Furs

There followed some more information about the perfumes, ‘Scandal’, ‘Outrage’, and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by an address and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith’s the Name, Scent’s the Game. The two middle pages of the brochure were blank. I folded it into my middle pocket, quite idly; but it has since proved very valuable to me.

With sloping gait and two casual corrections of the belt, Keith came down the garden path.

There was £143.10 on the blatting clock when the car pulled up and I awoke again.

‘Home sweet home,’ said Keith.

Slowly I climbed from the car’s slept-in, trailer smell, as if from a second aircraft, and unbent myself in front of the house – and the house massive, like an ancient terminal.

Keith paused with a flinch as he lifted my bag from the trunk. ‘It’s a church,’ he said wonderingly.

‘It used to be a rectory or a vicarage or something.’ I pointed to an engraving on the other wall, high up: ‘Anno Domini 1876’.

‘1876!’ he said. ‘Some vicar had all this …’

Making no small display of the courtesy, Keith carried my bag in through the fenced front garden and stood there while I got my keys from the lady on the ground floor. I turned. At the other end of the street, some distance away, you could see a motorcade and the drab of camouflage vehicles, and you could hear the roll and clatter, the sound of thunderous rearrangements.

‘What’s happening?’

Keith shrugged in resigned ignorance. ‘All cloaked in secrecy, innit.’

We entered through a second front door and climbed a broad flight of stairs. I think we were about equally impressed by the opulence and elaboration of the apartment. This is some joint, I have to admit. After a few weeks here even the great Presley would have started to pine for all the elegance and simplicity of Graceland. Keith cast his bright glance around the place with a looter’s cruel yet professional eye. For the second time that morning I nonchalantly reviewed the possibility that I was about to be murdered. Keith would be out of here ten minutes later, my flight bag over his shoulder, lumpy with appurtenances. Instead he asked me who owned the place and what he did.

I told him.

Keith looked sceptical. This just wasn’t right.

‘Mostly for theatre and television,’ I said.

Now all was clear. ‘TV?’ he said coolly.

For some reason I added, ‘I’m in TV too.’

Keith nodded, much enlightened. Somewhat chastened also; and I have to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he was thinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the great cities and borrow each other’s flats. Common sense. Yes, behind all the surface activity of Keith’s eyes there formed the vision of a heavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV – above it, above it all.

‘Yeah, well I’m due to appear on TV myself. Hopefully. In a month or two. Darts.’

‘Darts?’

‘Darts.’

And then it began. He stayed for three and a half hours. People are amazing, aren’t they? They’ll tell you everything if you give them time. And I have always been a good listener. I have always been a talented listener. I really do want to hear it – I don’t know why. Of course at that stage I was perfectly disinterested; I had no idea what was happening, what was forming right in front of me. Within fifteen minutes I was being told, in shocking detail, about Analiese – and Iqbala, and Trish, and Debbee. Laconic but unabashed mentions of wife and daughter. And then all that painful stuff about violent crime and Chick Purchase. True, I gave him a fair amount to drink: beer, or lager, plentifully heaped like bombs on their racks in Mark Asprey’s refrigerator. In the end he charged me twenty-five pounds for the ride (special TV rate, perhaps) and gave me a ballpoint pen shaped like a dart, with which I now write these words. He also told me that he could be found, every lunchtime and every evening, in a pub called the Black Cross on the Portobello Road.

I would find him there, right enough. And so would the lady.

When Keith left I sacked out immediately. Not that I had much say in the matter. Twenty-two hours later I opened my eyes again and was greeted by a strange and distressing sight. Myself, on the ceiling mirror. (I thought the drawing room was brothel-opulent; the bedroom is outright sex-athletic, all leather and glaze.) I looked – I looked not well, staked out there on the satin. I seemed to be pleading, pleading with me, myself. Dr Slizard tells me that I have about three months more of this to get through, and then everything will change.

I have been out and about a bit since then; yes, I have made several tremulous sorties. So far, it doesn’t seem as bad as some people say. Ten years I’ve been gone, and what’s been happening? Ten more years of Relative Decline … I’m now well in with Keith Talent. I think I cultivated him in the first place as a kind of preparation for the streets of London. I am also ingratiating myself with our third party, the fool or foil, the poor foal: Guy Clinch. But none of this would ever have got started without the girl. It didn’t have a hope in hell without the girl. She was the absolute donnée. I suppose that instant in the Black Cross set the whole story in motion. And now Nicola Six is taking things into her own hands.

The English, Lord love them, they still talk about the weather. Yet suddenly the weather is well worth talking about. It’s not just something that makes you hang your head and say, Christ … The weather is super-atmospheric and therefore, in a sense, super-meteorological (can you really call it weather?). But the reasons for it are apparently well understood. It will go on for the rest of the summer, they say. I approve, with one qualification: it’s picked the wrong year to happen in. The weather, if we can still call it that, is frequently very beautiful, but it frightens me, as indeed does everything now.

The Murderee

The black cab will move away, irrecoverably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She will walk down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger door swings open.

His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see shattered glass on the passenger seat and the car-tool ready on his lap.

‘Get in.’

She will lean forward. ‘You,’ she will say, in intense recognition: ‘Yes, you.’

‘Get in.’

And in she’ll climb …

What is this destiny or condition (and perhaps, like the look of the word’s ending, it tends towards the feminine: a feminine ending), what is it, what does it mean, to be a murderee?

In the case of Nicola Six, tall, dark, and thirty-four, it was bound up with a delusion, lifelong, and not in itself unmanageable. Right from the start, from the moment that her thoughts began to be consecutive, Nicola knew two strange things. The second strange thing was that she must never tell anyone about the first strange thing. The first strange thing was this: she always knew what was going to happen next. Not all the time (the gift was not obsessively consulted), and not every little thing; but she always knew what was going to happen next. Right from the start she had a friend–Enola, Enola Gay. Enola wasn’t real. Enola came from inside the head of Nicola Six. Nicola was an only child and knew she always would be.

You can imagine how things might work out. Nicola is seven years old, for instance, and her parents are taking her on a picnic, with another family: why, pretty Dominique will be there, a friend, perhaps, a living friend for the only child. But little Nicola, immersed in romantic thoughts and perfectly happy with Enola, doesn’t want to come along (watch how she screams and grips!). She doesn’t want to come along because she knows that the afternoon will end in disaster, in blood and iodine and tears. And so it proves. A hundred yards from the grown-ups (so impenetrably arrayed round the square sheet in the sunshine), Nicola stands on the crest of a slope with her new friend, pretty Dominique. And of course Nicola knows what is going to happen next: the girl will hesitate or stumble: reaching out to steady her, Nicola will accidentally propel her playmate downwards, down into the rocks and the briers. She will then have to run and shout, and drive in silence somewhere, and sit on the hospital bench swinging her feet and listlessly asking for ice-cream. And so it proves. On television at the age of four she saw the first warnings (thermal pulse, blast wave) and the circles of concentric devastation, with London like a bullseye in the centre of the board. She knew that would happen, too. It was just a matter of time.

When Nicola was good she was very very good. But when she was bad … About her parents she had no feelings one way or the other: this was her silent, inner secret. They both died, anyway, together, as she had always known they would. So why hate them? So why love them? After she got the call she drove reflexively to the airport. The car itself was like a tunnel of cold wind. An airline official showed her into the VIP lounge: it contained a bar, and forty or fifty people in varying degrees of distress. She drank the brandy pressed on her by the steward. ‘Free,’ he said. A television was wheeled in. And then, incredibly (even Nicola was consternated), they showed live film of the scattered wreckage, and the body-bags lined up on the fields of France. In the VIP lounge there were scenes of protest and violent rejection. One old man kept distractedly offering money to a uniformed PR officer. Coldly Nicola drank more brandy, wondering how death could take people so unprepared. That night she had acrobatic sex with some vile pilot. She was nineteen by this time, and had long left home. Potently, magically, uncontrollably attractive, Nicola was not yet beautiful. But already she was an ill wind, blowing no good.

Considered more generally – when you looked at the human wreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (and rottener divorces)– Nicola’s knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leave at the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse gear. Back in the flat, staunching her wrists, perhaps, or pressing an ice-cube to her lip (or a lump of meat to her eye), Nicola would look at herself in the mirror, would look at what remained and think how strange – how strange, that she had been right all along. She knew it would end like this. And so it proved. The diary she sometimes kept was therefore just the chronicle of a death foretold. . .

One of those people who should never drink anything at all, Nicola drank a very great deal. But it depended. One or two mornings a month, stiff with pride, deafened with aspirin (and reckless with Bloody Marys), Nicola would adumbrate serious reform: for example, only two colossal cocktails before dinner, a broad maximum of half a bottle of wine with her meal, and then just the one whisky or digestif before bedtime. She would frequently stick to the new regime right up to and certainly including the whisky or digestif before bedtime the following day. By then, bedtime looked a long way off. There was always a lot of shouting and fist-fighting to do before bedtime. And what about after bedtime, or after the first bedtime, with several bouts of one thing or the other still to go? So she always failed. She could see herself failing (there she was, clearly failing), and so she failed. Did Nicola Six drink alone? Yes, she drank alone. You bet. And why did she drink alone? Because she was alone. And she was alone, now, at night, more than formerly. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and kicking. Thus the glass banged down on the round table; the supposedly odourless ashtray gave its last weak swirl; and then the baby walk, the smudged trend to the loathed bedding. That was how it had to end.

The other ending, the real death, the last thing that already existed in the future was now growing in size as she moved forward to confront or greet it. Where would she see the murderer, where would she find him – in the park, the library, in the sad café, or walking past her in the street half-naked with a plank over his shoulder? The murder had a place, and a date, even a time: some minutes after midnight, on her thirty-fifth birthday. Nicola would click through the darkness of the dead-end street. Then the car, the grunt of its brakes, the door swinging open and the murderer (his face in shadow, the car-tool on his lap, one hand extended to seize her hair), saying, Get in. Get in … And in she climbed.

It was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer. But the murderee had always been a murderee.

Where would she find him, how would she dream him, when would she summon him? On the important morning she awoke wet with the usual nightmares. She went straight to her bath and lay there for a long time, round-eyed, with her hair pinned up. On important days she always felt herself to be the object of scrutiny, lewd and furious scrutiny. Her head now looked small or telescoped, set against the squirming refractions of the giantness beneath the water. She rose with dramatic suddenness from the bath and paused before reaching for the towel. Then she stood naked in the middle of the warm room protectively oiling her breasts and thinking about pornography.

The funeral, the cremation she was due to attend that day was not a significant one. Nicola Six, who hardly knew or remembered the dead woman, had been obliged to put in a tedious half an hour on the telephone before she managed to get herself asked along. The dead woman had briefly employed Nicola in her antique shop, years ago. For a month or two the murderee had sat smoking cigarettes in the zestless grotto off Fulham Broadway. Then she had stopped doing that. This was always the way with Nicola’s more recent jobs, of which there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, and then, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of late mornings, four-hour lunches and early departures, she was considered to have let everyone down (she wasn’t there ever), and stopped going in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew things would end that way lent great tension to each job she took, right from the first week, the first day, the first morning … In the more distant past she had worked as a publisher’s reader, a cocktail waitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, a librarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist and an actress. An actress – she had got quite far with that. In her early twenties she had done rep, Royal Shakespeare, panto, a few television plays. She still had a trunk full of outfits and some videotapes (poor little rich girl, spry newly-wed, naked houri maddeningly glimpsed through fog – smoke and veils). Acting was therapeutic, though dramatic roles confused her further. She was happiest with comedy, farce, custard pie. The steadiest time of her adult life had been the year in Brighton, taking the lead in Jack and the Beanstalk. Playing a man seemed to help. She did Jack in short blazer and black tights, and with her hair down. A million mothers wondered why their sons came home so green and feverish, and crept burdened to bed without their suppers. But then the acting bit of her lost its moorings and drifted out into real life.

With a towel round her belly she sat before the mirror, itself a theatrical memento, with its proscenium of brutal bulbs. Again she felt unfriendly eyes playing on her back. She went at her face like an artist, funeral colours, black, beige, blood red. Rising, she turned to the bed and reviewed her burial clothes and their unqualified sable. Even her elaborate underwear was black; even the clips on her garter belt were black, black. She opened her wardrobe, releasing the full-length mirror, and stood sideways with a hand flat on her stomach, feeling everything that a woman would hope to feel at such a moment. As she sat on the bed and tipped herself backwards for the first black stocking, mind-body memories took her back to earlier ablutions, self-inspections, intimate preparations. A weekend out of town with some new man of the moment. As she sat in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through Swiss Cottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems of Clapham and Brixton and beyond (where London seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would feel a pressure in those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like the stirring of new hymen being prettily and pinkly formed. By the time they reached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With what perplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, the babbling mistake at her side with his hands on the wheel. After a glimpse of the trees in the dusk, a sodden church, a dumbfounded sheep, Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage and would sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would nevertheless awake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola’s mouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on every front. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. The weekend would end that evening: a stunned and wordless return down the motorway, a single-passenger minicab drive of ghostly length and costliness, or Nicola Six standing alone on a dismal railway platform, erect and unblinking, with a suitcase full of shoes.

But let us be clear about this: she had great powers – great powers. All women whose faces and bodies more or less neatly fill the contemporary mould have some notion of these privileges and magics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief and relative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, some surrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sized woodland of rock-hard phallus. With Nicola Six the gender worship (or pimple yearning, to put it at its lowest) was translated, was fantastically heightened: it was available in the form of human love. She had the power of inspiring love, almost anywhere. Forget about making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be home in case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences. She pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. They were never the same again; they lost their heads. And the thing with her (what was it with her), the thing with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back in opposite form, not just cancelled but murdered. Character is destiny; and Nicola knew where her destiny lay.

Fifteen minutes later, dressed for death, she called her black cab and drank two cups of black coffee and tasted with hunger the black tobacco of a French cigarette.

In Golders Green she dismissed the taxi, and it pulled away for ever. She knew she would get a lift back: you always did, from funerals. The sky above the red-brick lodge she entered was certainly dull enough for a person to take leave of it with decency. As usual she was quite late, but the volley of pale glances did not pierce her. With no attempt at self-muffling she walked evenly to the back and slipped into an empty aisle, of which there was no shortage. The dead woman was not being populously farewelled. So this was all you got: zooty sideburns and masturbator’s pallor of an old ted in a black suit, and the secular obsequies. Nicola longed equally for a cigarette and the lines you sometimes heard: a short time to live, full of misery. She was always especially stirred – this was why she came – by the spectacle of the bereaved elderly, particularly the women. The poor sheep, the dumbfounded sheep (even mere nature dumbfounds them), as reliable as professional mourners but too good at it really, too passionate, with hair like feather dusters, and frailly convulsed with brute grief, the selfish terrors … Nicola yawned. Everything around her said school, the busts and plaques, and all the panels with their use of wood to quell and dampen. She hardly noticed the discreet trundling of the coffin, knowing it was empty and the body already vaporized by fire.

Afterwards, in the Dispersal Area (a heavy blackbird was flying low and at an angle over the sopping grass), Nicola Six, looking and sounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. It solaced the old to see such piety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes of premonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappointment. In the car park she was offered several lifts; she accepted one more or less at random.

The driver, who was the dead woman’s brother’s brother-in-law, dropped her off on the Portobello Road, as instructed. Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. She could hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood on the street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had been thinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round between her black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassed herself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She now progressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose name she took a liking to. ‘TV AND DARTS’ was the further recommendation of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard had been affixed, saying ‘AND PIMBALL’. All the skies of London seemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready to drop its plunger …

She entered the Black Cross. She entered the pub and its murk. She felt the place skip a beat as the door closed behind her, but she had been expecting that. Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that day would never come) when she entered a men’s room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. She walked straight to the bar, lifed her veil with both hands, like a bride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately she knew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, that she had found him, her murderer.

When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script … Now they had served their purpose and she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn’t over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon. The time had come for them to be put down.

Montherlant or somebody said that happiness writes white: it doesn’t show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn’t nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page? When I take on Chapter Three, when I take on Guy Clinch, I’ll have to do, well, not happiness, but goodness, anyway. It’s going to be rough.

The moment that Keith Talent saw Nicola Six – he dropped his third dart. Being a dart, a little missile of plastic and tungsten, it combined with gravity and efficiently plunged towards the centre of the earth. What halted its progress was Keith’s left foot, which was protected only by the frayed canvas of a cheap running shoe. The dart hurt, and drew a little bullseye of blood … I thought I might be able to make a nice play on words here. Cupid’s dart, or something like that. Arrows of desire? But it wasn’t desire that Nicola Six aroused in Keith Talent. Not primarily. I would say that greed and fear came first. Going for broke at the pinball table, Guy Clinch froze in mid-flail: you could hear the ball scuttling into the gutter. Then silence.

While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into the background. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the public house, this pub moment, I’m going to have to keep on coming back to it. Edging down the bar, I was intrigued only in the civilian sense – but powerfully intrigued. Every pub had its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross: he had to step forward to deal with the royal tourist. He had to do it for the guys: for Wayne, Dean, Duane, for Norvis, Shakespeare, Bid Dread, for Godfrey the barman, for Fucker Burke, for Basim and Manjeet, for Bogdan, Majcek, Zbigniew.

Keith acted in the name of masculinity. He acted also, of course, in the name of class. Class! Yes, it’s still here. Terrific staying power, and against all the historical odds. What is it with that old, old crap? The class system just doesn’t know when to quit. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and settee or sofa, about the proper way to eat a roach in society. Come on. Do you take the head off first, or start with the legs? Class never bothered Keith; he never thought about it ‘as such’; part of a bygone era, whatever that was, class never worried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it was class that poisoned his every waking moment. At any rate, subliminally or otherwise, it was class that made Keith enlist a third actor in his dealings with Nicola Six. It was class that made Keith enlist Guy Clinch. Or maybe the murderee did it. Maybe she needed him. Maybe they both needed him, as a kind of fuel.

Do I need him? Yes. Evidently. Guy pressed himself on me, same as the other two. Now I must further ingratiate myself with all three. You’ve got to stop having any grand ideas. You’re not in control, you can’t pick and choose. This isn’t fiction. Christ – this is really happening.

I left the Black Cross around four. It was my third visit. I needed the company, hair-raising though much of it was, and I was doing all right there, under Keith’s wing. He introduced me to the Polacks and the brothers, or paraded me in front of them. He gave me a game of pool. He showed me how to cheat the fruit machine. I bought a lot of drinks, and took a lot of savage cajolery for my orange juices, my sodas, my cokes. Taking my life in my hands, I ate a pork pie. Only one real fight so far. An incredible flurry of fists and nuttings; it ended with Keith carefully kicking selected areas of a fallen figure wedged into the doorway to the Gents; Keith then returned to the bar, took a pull of beer, and returned to kick some more. It transpired that the culprit had been messing with Dean’s darts. After the ambulance came and went Keith calmed down. ‘Not with a man’s darts,’ Keith kept saying almost tearfully, shaking his head. People were bringing him brandies. ‘You don’t … not with his darts.’

I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat at the desk in Mark Asprey’s bay-windowed office or study or library. Actually it’s more like a trophy room. Actually the whole damn place is a trophy room. Walking from living room to bedroom – and I’m thinking of the signed photographs, the erotic prints – you wonder why he didn’t just nail a galaxy of G-strings to the walls. In here it’s different. Here you’re surrounded by cups and sashes, Tonis and Guggies, by framed presentations, commendations. Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, the media and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorary degrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, Dublin. I must look at his books, of which there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Portuguese.

I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat there wondering why I just can’t do it, why I just can’t write, why I just can’t make anything up. Then I saw her.

Across the way from Mark Asprey’s bay-windowed library there is a lot-sized square of green, with two thin beds of flowers (low-ranking flowers, NUPE flowers) and a wooden bench where old-timers sometimes sit and seem to flicker in the wind. On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Asprey stands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or abandoned bath tubs, just selected refuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle. This is a London theme; the attempt at greenery would itself appear to attract the trash. The cylinders of wire netting they put up to protect young trees sufficiently resemble a container of some kind, so people cram them with beer cans, used tissues, yesterday’s newspapers. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety … But we can get back to that. On with the story. The girl was there: Nicola, the murderee.

I was sitting at Mark Asprey’s vast desk – I think I might even have been wringing my hands. Oh Lord, these chains! Something I have suffered for twenty years, the massive disappointment of not writing – perhaps exacerbated (I admit to the possibility) by Mark Asprey’s graphic and plentiful successes in the sphere. It shocked my heart to see her: a soft blow to the heart, from within. Still wearing her funeral robes, the hat, the veil. In her black-gloved hands she held something solid, ribboned in red, the load settled on her hip and held close as if for comfort, like a child. Then she raised the veil and showed her face. She looked so … dramatic. She looked like the vamp in the ad, just before the asshole in the helicopter or the submarine shows up with the bath oil or the chocolates. Could she see me, with that low sun behind her? I couldn’t tell, but I thought: Nicola would know. She would know all about how light works on windows. She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals …

Nicola turned, wavered, and steadied herself. She dropped her burden into the trash and, embracing her shoulders with crossed hands, moved off in a hurrying walk.

For perhaps five minutes of stretched time I waited. Then down I went and picked up my gift. Not knowing what I had, I sat on the bench and pulled the ribbon’s knot. An adorably fat and feminine hand, chaos, a glittering intelligence. It made me blush with pornographic guilt. When I looked up I saw half of Nicola Six, thirty feet away, split by a young tree trunk, not hiding but staring. Her stare contained – only clarity, great clarity. I gestured, as if to return what I held in my hands. But after a pulse of time she was walking off fast under the wrung hands of the trees.

I wish I could do Keith’s voice. The ts are viciously stressed. A brief guttural pop, like the first nanosecond of a cough or a hawk, accompanies the hard k. When he says chaotic, and he says it frequently, it sounds like a death rattle. ‘Month’ comes out as mumf. He sometimes says, ‘Im feory …’, when he speaks theoretically. ‘There’ sounds like dare or lair. You could often run away with the impression that Keith Talent is eighteen months old.

In fact I’ve had to watch it with my characters’ ages. I thought Guy Clinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought Keith Talent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought Nicola Six … No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

The happiest time of Guy’s fifteen-year marriage had come during Hope’s pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with complete equanimity, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talk was all of home improvement, of babies’ names, nursery conversions, girlish pinks, boyish blues – the tender materialism, all with a point. Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them, shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormone time. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed. She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abrupt passion for patching, for needle and thread. Seeing the size of her, the barrow boys of Portobello Road (and perhaps Keith Talent had been among them) would summon her to their stalls, saying sternly, masterfully, ‘Over here, my love. I got the stuff you want.’ And Hope would rootle to the base of damp cardboard boxes – rags of velvet, scraps of satin. In the eighth month, when the furniture had begun its dance round the house, and Hope sat with regal fullness in front of the television, darning and patching (and sometimes saying, ‘What am I doing?’), Guy consulted his senses, scratched his head, and whispered to himself (and he didn’t mean the baby), It’s coming … It’s on its way.

Oh, how he had longed for a little girl! In the sparse gloom of the private clinic, the most expensive they could find (Hope distrusted any medical care that failed to stretch searchingly into the four figures: she liked the scrolled invoices, with every paper tissue and soldier of toast unsmilingly itemized), Guy did his share of pacing and napping and fretting, while titled specialists looked in from dinner parties or popped by on their way to rounds of golf. A girl, a girl, just an ordinary little girl – Mary, Anna, Jane. ‘It’s a girl,’ he could hear himself saying on the telephone (to whom, he didn’t know). ‘Five pounds twelve ounces. Yes, a girl. A little under six pounds.’ He wanted to be with his wife throughout, but Hope had banned him from labour and delivery wards alike – for reasons, soberly but unanswerably stated, of sexual pride. The baby showed up thirty-six hours later, at four in the morning. He weighed nearly a stone. Guy was allowed a brief visit to Hope’s suite. Looking back at it now, he had an image of mother and son mopping themselves down with gloating expressions on their faces, as if recovering from some enjoyably injudicious frolic: a pizza fight, by the look of it. The child was perfect in every way. And he was a monster.

Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything. Two cars, two houses, two uniformed nannies, two silk-and-cashmere dinner jackets, two graphite-cooled tennis rackets, and so on and so forth. But he had only one child and only one woman. After Marmaduke’s birth, things changed. The baby books had prepared him for this; and so had literature, up to a point. But nothing had prepared him or anybody else for Marmaduke. World-famous paediatricians marvelled at his hyperactivity, and knelt like magi to his genius for colic. Every two hours he feasted noisily on his mother’s sore breasts; often he would take a brief nap around midnight; the rest of the time he spent screaming. Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief. When things improved, which they did, though only temporarily (for Marmaduke, already softly snarling with asthma, would soon be emblazoned with eczema), Hope still spent much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke, but never with Guy. All night he lay dressed for disaster in one of the two visitor’s rooms, wondering why his life had suddenly turned into a very interesting and high-toned horror film (one with a Regency setting, perhaps). His habitual mode of locomotion around the house became the tiptoe. When Hope called his name – ‘Guy?’ – and he replied Yes? there was never any answer, because his name now meant Come here. He appeared, and performed the necessary errand, and disappeared again. Now, with Hope’s requests, the first time of asking sounded like the second time of asking, and the second time of asking sounded like the ninth. Less and less often Guy would try to hoist the baby into his arms (under the doubtful gaze of nanny or night-nurse, or some other of Marmaduke’s highly paid admirers), saying, rather self-consciously, ‘Hello, man-cub.’ Marmaduke would pause, reviewing his options; and Guy’s bashfully enquiring face would somehow always invite a powerful eye-poke or a jet of vomit, a savage rake of the nails, or at the very least an explosive sneeze. Guy shocked himself by suspecting that Hope kept the infant’s nails long the better to repel him. Certainly his face was heavily scored; he sometimes looked like a brave but talentless rapist. He felt supererogatory. The meeting, the rendezvous, it just hadn’t happened.

So two of everything, except lips, breasts, the wall of intimacy, enfolding arms, enfolding legs. But that wasn’t really it. What had meant to come closer had simply moved further away. Life, therefore, could loom up on him at any moment. He was wide open.

Guy and Hope had been away twice since the birth, on doctor’s advice: their doctor’s, not Marmaduke’s. They left him in the care of five nannies, plus an even more costly platoon of medical commandos. It had been strange, leaving him behind; Guy fully participated in Hope’s dread as the cab made its way to Heathrow. Fear was gradually eased by time, and by half-hourly telephone calls. If you listened closely, everything sounded like a baby crying.

First, Venice, in February, the mist, the cold troubled water – and miraculously carless. Guy had never in his life felt closer to the sun; it was like living in a cloud, up in a cloudy sea. But many of the mornings were sombre in mood and sky (dank, failed), and seemed best expressed by the tortured and touristless air of the Jewish Quarter, or by the weak dappling on the underside of a bridge (where the pale flames pinged like static, briefly betrayed by a darker background) – or when you were lost among the Chinese boxes, the congestion of beauties, and you could have likened yourselves to Shakespearean lovers until there came the sound of a wretched sneeze from an office window nearby, then the nose greedily voided into the hanky, and the resumption of the dull ticking of a typewriter or an adding machine.

On the fifth day the sun burst through again inexorably. They were walking arm in arm along the Zattere towards the café where they had taken to having their mid-morning snack. The light was getting to work on the water, with the sun torpedoing in on every pair of human eyes. Guy looked up: to him the sky spoke of Revelation, Venetian-style. He said,

‘I’ve just had a rather delightful thought. You’d have to set it as verse.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Like this:

The sun, the sun, the … daubing sun:
The clouds are putti in its hands!’

They walked on. Hope’s oval face looked resolute. The juices in her jaw were already addressing the toasted cheese and ham sandwich she would presently enjoy; then the notebook, the little Amex guide, the creamy coffee. ‘Dreadful pun, I suppose,’ Guy murmured. ‘Oh, God.’ A press of sightseers confronted them. As they forged through, with Hope taking the lead, their arms were sundered. Guy hurried to catch up.

‘The tourists,’ he said.

‘Don’t complain. That’s idiotic. What do you think you are?’

‘Yes, but–’

‘Yes but nothing.’

Guy faltered. He had turned to face the water and was craning his neck in obscure distress. Hope closed her eyes long-sufferingly, and waited.

‘Wait, Hope,’ he said. ‘Please look. If I move my head, then the sun moves on the water. My eyes have as much say in it as the sun.’

‘. . . Capisco.’

‘But that means – for everyone here the sun is different on the water. No two people are seeing the same thing.’

‘I want my sandwich.’

She moved on. Guy lingered, clutching his hands and saying, ‘But then it’s hopeless. Don’t you think? It’s . . . quite hopeless.’

And he whispered the same words at night in the hotel, and went on whispering them, even after their return, lying in sleep’s caboose, seconds before Marmaduke woke him with a clout. ‘But then it’s hopeless. Utterly hopeless.’

In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Even-handedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke’s health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a muscle-bound wunderkind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastro-enteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing room, watched by several speechless nannies. He appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope’s relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke’s renaissance, it became, well – you wouldn’t say paramilitary. You’d say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than a day or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums. Around the house, now, there was a kind of SWAT team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bitterness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.

This time they flew first-class to Madrid, stayed at the Ritz for three nights, and then hired a car and headed south. The car seemed powerful and luxurious enough; it was, without question, resoundingly expensive. (Hope whaled on the insurance. Guy studied the gold-rimmed document: they would airlift you out on almost any pretext.) But as they cruised, as they cruised and glistened one evening through the sparse forests near the southernmost shore of the peninsula, a great upheaval or trauma seemed almost to dismantle the engine at a stroke – the manifold, the big end? In any event the car was clearly history. Around midnight Guy could push it no longer. They saw some lights: not many, and not bright.

The Clinches found accommodation in a rude venta. What with the bare coil of the bulb, the lavatorial damp, the flummoxed bed, Hope had burst into tears before the señora was out of the room. All night Guy lay beside his drugged wife, listening. At about five, after an interval reminiscent of one of Marmaduke’s naps, the weekend roistering in the bar, the counterpoints of jukebox and Impacto machine, exhaustedly gave way to the shrieking gossip of the yard – with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there a moo, everywhere an oink-oink. Worst or nearest was a moronic bugler of a cock, playing tenor to the neighbours’ alto, with his room-rattling reveille. ‘Cock-a-doodle-do’, Guy decided, was one of the world’s great euphemisms. At seven, after an especially unbearable tenor solo (as if the cock were finally heralding the entrance of some imperial super-rooster), Hope jerked upright, swore fluently and foully, applied valium and eye mask, and bunched herself down again with her face pressed to her knees. Guy smiled weakly. There was a time when he could read love in the shape of his sleeping wife; even in the contours of the blankets he used to be able to read it. . .

He went outside, into the yard. The cock, the grotesque gaio, stood in its coop – yes, inches from their pillows – and stared at him with unchallengeable pomp. Guy stared back, shaking his head slowly. Hens were in attendance, quietly and unquestioningly supportive, among all the dust and rubbish. As for the two pigs, they were yahoos even by the standards of the yard. A dark half-grown Alsatian dozed in the hollow of an old oil drum. Sensing a presence, the dog jerked upright, waking sudden and crumpled, with sand dried into the long trap of the jaw, and moved towards him with compulsive friendliness. It’s a girl, he thought: tethered, too. As he went to pet the animal they became entangled, entangled, it seemed, by the very amiability of the dog, by its bouncing, twisting amiability.

In pastel daubings the new prosperity lay to east and west but this place was kept poor by wind. Wind bled and beggared it. Like the cock, the wind just did its wind thing, not caring wherefore. Hot air rises, cool air fills the space: hence, somehow, the tearing and tugging, the frenzied unzippings of this sandpaper shore. In his tennis shorts Guy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided his gaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart – nothing else. The sky also was empty, blown clean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind went for his calves like emery; Guy gained the harder rump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It opened inhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling no closer to life than to death, feeling thirty-five, Guy pressed on, hardly blinking as he crossed the scrotum barrier; and it was the water that seemed to cringe and start back, repelled by this human touch, as he barged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himself forward in the swimmer’s embrace of the sea … Twenty minutes later, as he strode back up the beach, the wind threw everything it had at him, and with fierce joy the sand sought his eyes and teeth, the hairless tray of his chest. A hundred yards from the road Guy paused, and imagined surrendering to it (I may be gone some time), dropping to his knees and folding sideways under the icy buckshot of the air.

He queued for coffee in the awakening venta. The daughters of the establishment were mopping up; two men boldly conversed across the length of the dark room. Guy stood straight, barefoot, his skin and hair minutely spangled by the sand. An interested woman, had she been monitoring him with half an eye, might have found Guy Clinch well made, classical, above all healthy; but there was something pointless or needless in his good looks; they seemed wasted on him. Guy knew this. Stocky mat-shouldered Antonio, leaning against the pillar by the door, one hand limp on his round belly – and thinking with complacence of his own blood-red loincloth, with the good shoelace-and-tassel effect down there on the crotch – registered Guy not at all, not at all. And the poling daughters had thoughts only for Antonio, careless, drunken, donkey-flogging Antonio and his crimson bullybag. . . Guy drank the excellent coffee, and ate bread moistened with olive oil, out on the banging porch. He then took a tray in to Hope, who ripped off her mask but lay there with her eyes closed.

‘Have you achieved anything yet?’

‘I’ve been swimming,’ he said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

‘Many happy returns.’

‘Young Antonio here is apparently pretty handy with a spanner.’

‘Oh yes? The car’s dead, Guy.’

Moments earlier, out on the banging porch, a ridiculous thing had happened. Hearing a rhythmical whimpering in the middle distance, Guy had raised his hands to his temples, as if to freeze-frame the thought that was winding through his head (and he wasn’t given to them. He wasn’t given to pornographic thoughts). The thought was this: Hope splayed and naked, being roughly used by an intent Antonio … Guy had then taken his last piece of bread into the yard and offered it to the canned dog. (He also took another incredulous look at the cock, the stupid gaio.) The dog was whimpering rhythmically, but showed no appetite. Dirty and gentle-faced, the bitch just wanted to play, to romp, to fraternize, and just kept tripping on her tether. The length of filthy rope – six feet of it – saddened Guy in a way that Spanish cruelty or carelessness had never saddened him before. Down in the yard here, on a wind-frazzled stretch of empty shore, when the only thing that came free and plentiful was space and distance – the dog was given none of it. So poor, and then poor again, doubly, triply, exponentially poor. I’ve found it, thought Guy (though the word wouldn’t come, not yet). It is … I’ve found it and it’s. . . It is–

‘Well?’

‘Why don’t we stay here? For a few days. The sea’s nice,’ he said, ‘once you’re in. Until we get the car fixed. It’s interesting.’

Hope’s impressive bite-radius now loomed over the first section of grilled bread. She paused. ‘I don’t believe this. You aren’t going dreamy on me, are you, Guy? We’re out of here. We are gone.’

And so it became the kind of day where you call airlines and consulates and car-hire people in a dreary dream of bad connections and bad Spanish: that evening, on the helipad at Alicante, Hope treated Guy to his first smile in twenty-four hours. Actually nearly all of this was achieved (between meals and drinks and swims) from the control tower of a six-star hotel further down the coast, a place full of rich and frisky old Germans, all of whom, in their way (Guy had to admit), potently reminded him of Marmaduke.

Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not pointful, but not difficult. Guy Clinch looked around his life for a dimension through which some new force might propagate. His life, he found, was tailored, upholstered, wall-to-wall; it was closed. To the subtle and silent modulations of Hope’s disgust, he started to open it – he started to change his life. A hedged bet, nothing radical. He stopped doing about half the things he had done before and walked the streets instead.

Fear was his guide. Like all the others on the crescent, Guy’s house stood aloof from the road, which was all very well, which was all very fine and large. But fear had him go where the shops and flats jostled interestedly over the gauntlet of stalls, like a crowd, cordoned by slot-game parlours, disastrous beaneries, soup queues, army hostels, with life set out on barrows – the voodoo and the hunger, the dreadlocks and dreadnoughts, the Keiths and Kaths of the Portobello Road. Naturally Guy Clinch had been here before, in search of a corn-fed chicken or a bag of Nicaraguan coffee. But now he was searching for the thing itself.

‘TV AND DARTS’ said the sign. ‘AND PIMBALL’. The first time Guy entered the Black Cross he was a man pushing through the green door of his fear. . . He survived. He lived. The place was ruined and innocuous in its northern light: six or seven black dudes playing pool over the damp rag of the baize, the monochrome sickliness of the whites, old pewtery faces, the twittering fruit machine, the fuming pie-warmer, the lordly absenteeism of the barman. Guy asked for a drink in the only voice he had. He made no adjustments: he didn’t tousle his hair or scramble his accent; he carried no tabloid under his arm. He moved to the pinball table: Eye of the Tiger! A feral Irish youth stood inches away whispering who’s the boss who’s the boss into Guy’s ear for as long as he seemed to need to do that. Whenever Guy looked up, a dreadful veteran of the pub, his face twanging in the canned rock, stared at him bitterly – no forgiveness there, not ever. The incomprehensible accusations of a sweat-soaked black girl were finally silenced by a five-pound note. Guy drank half of his half of lager, and got out. He took so much fear away with him that there had to be less of it each time he returned. But going there at night was another entry.

Keith was the key: Keith Talent, the tutelary knave and joker, with his darts, his moods, his terrible dog and his terrible eyes – Keith, and his pub charisma. Plainly, Keith had to do something about Guy. With his unmistakable pub anti-charisma, Guy was far too anomalous to be let alone; his height, his raincoat, his accent – all this meant that Keith had to ban him, befriend him, beat him up. Keith had to do something. So he pouched his darts one day and walked the length of the bar (regulars were wondering when it would happen), leaned over the pinball table with an eyebrow raised and his tongue between his teeth, and bought Guy a drink. The hip pocket, the furled tenners. Keith’s house had many mansions. The whole pub shook to utterly silent applause.

Cheers, Keith! After that, Guy belonged. He sailed in there almost with a flourish and summoned the barman by name. After that, he stopped having to buy drinks for the black girls, and stopped having to buy hash and grass from the black boys. (He used to take the stuff home and bury it in the kitchen bin; he didn’t drop it in the gutter for fear that a child or a dog might get hold of it, a needless precaution, because the hash wasn’t hash and the grass was just grass …) Now he could sit in the damp corner of pub warmth, and watch. Really, the thing about life here was its incredible rapidity of change, with people growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Here time was a tube train with the driver slumped heavy over the lever, flashing through station after station. Guy always thought it was life he was looking for. But it must have been death – or death awareness, death candour. I’ve found it, he thought. It is mean, it is serious, it is beautiful, it is poor, fully earning every complement, every adjective you care to name.

So when Nicola Six came into the Black Cross and stood at the bar and raised her veil – Guy was ready. He was wide open.

‘Fuck,’ said Keith, as he dropped his third dart.

The thirty-two-gram tungsten Trebler had pierced his big toe. But there was another arrowman or darter in the Black Cross that day; perhaps this smiling putto lurked in the artwork of the pinball table, among its pirates and sirens, its sprites and genies. Eye of the Tiger! Guy gripped the flanks of the machine for comfort or support. The ball scuttled into the gutter. Then silence.

She cleared her throat and inquired of Godfrey the barman, who cocked his head doubtfully.

Keith stepped in – or he limped in, anyway, moving down the bar to fill the silence. Guy watched in wonder.

‘We don’t sell French fags here, darling,’ he said. ‘No way. Carlyle!’

A black boy eagerly appeared, and panted in triumph, as if his errand were already run. He was given crisp instructions, and a crumpled fiver.

Keith turned, assessingly. Death wasn’t new in the Black Cross (death was everyday), but tailored mourning wear, hats, veils? Keith searched his mind, seemed to search his mouth, for something appropriate to say.

‘Bereavement, innit,’ he said in the end. ‘Nobody close, I presume?’

‘No. Nobody close.’

‘Still. God? Get her a brandy. She needs it! What’s your name, sweetheart?’

‘Nicola Six.’

‘Sex!’ said Keith.

‘S-i-x. Actually it’s Six.’

‘Seeks!’ said Keith. ‘Relax, Nicky. We get all sorts in here. Hey, cock. Guy! High society, innit. Come and be introduced.’

Now Guy moved into her force-field. Intensely he confirmed the upward-glancing eyes, the Flemish nose, the dark down above the egregiously sensual upper lip, and all her eloquence of trouble. She too looked as though she might faint at any moment. ‘How do you do?’ he said (‘Oooh!’ said Keith), extending a hand towards the black glove. His fingers hoped for the ampères of recognition but all he felt was a slick softness, a moisture that perhaps someone else had readied. Little Carlyle exploded through the pub doors.

‘You must let me pay for these,’ she said, removing a glove. The hand that now attacked the cellophane was bitten at the five tips.

‘All taken care of,’ said Keith.

‘I suppose,’ Guy said, ‘I suppose this is by way of being a wake.’

‘Family?’ said Keith.

‘No. Just a woman I used to work for.’

‘Does you credit,’ said Keith. ‘To show respect for the dead. Comes to us all. The Great Leveller innit.’

They talked on. With a violent jerk of self-reproof, Guy bought more drinks. Keith leaned forward murmuring with cupped hands to light Nicola’s second cigarette. But this was soon finished or aborted, and Nicola, with a slow nod, was saying,

‘Thank you both. You’ve been very kind. Goodbye.’

Keith and Guy watched her go: the delicate twist of the ankles, the strength and broad candour of the hips, and the telling concavity of the tight black skirt, in the underspace of the buttocks.

‘. . . Extraordinary woman,’ said Guy.

‘Yeah, she’ll do,’ said Keith, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand (for he was leaving also).

‘You’re not–’

Keith turned, in sudden warning. His gaze fell to the hand, Guy’s hand (their first touch), which lightly gripped his forearm. The hand now slackened and dropped.

‘Come on, Keith,’ said Guy with a pale laugh. ‘She’s just been to a funeral. A girl like that,’ he added.

Keith looked him up and down with a critical leer: he wasn’t going to begin to tell Guy all the things he didn’t know. ‘So?’ he said. ‘A girl like what?’ Keith straightened his jacket and sniffed manfully. ‘She’s begging for it,’ he said, as if to the street outside. ‘She’s dreaming of it. Her? She’s praying for it.’

Keith pushed his way through the green doors. Guy paused for a moment, a pub moment, and then followed him.

That night, in Lansdowne Crescent, at eight forty-five, with his twelve-hour tryst with Marmaduke now only minutes away, Guy sat on the second sofa in the second drawing room with a rare second drink and thought: how will I ever know anything in the middle of all this warmth and space, all this super-shelter? I want to feel like the trampolinist when he drops back to earth and to gravity. To touch the earth with heaviness – just to touch it. God expose us, take away our padding and our room.

Keith followed Nicola out of the Black Cross. Guy followed Keith. I wish to Christ I’d followed Guy, but those were early days.

I have fallen into a promising routine. I can complete a chapter in two days, even with all the fieldwork I have to do. Every third day I do more fieldwork and write in my notebook. But I am always writing in my notebook. I have always been a writer, of a kind. Keep telling yourself that. Perhaps to counterbalance the looming bulk of Mark Asprey’s corpus (take a real look at it when you can bear to), I have laid out my two publications on the leather-topped desk, next to my humming portable. On the Grapevine. Memoirs of a Listener. By Samson Young. Samson Young. Me. Yes, you. I can embellish. I can take certain liberties. Yet to invent even the bald facts of a life would be quite beyond my powers. Why? In fact I’m so excited by the first three chapters – it’s all I can do not to Fed-Ex them off to Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. There are other publishers I could try, but Ms Missy Harter has always been the most persistent and the most encouraging. Maybe I should call her. I need the advance. I need the money. I hope your strength holds.

Keith came over this morning. He wanted to use the VCR. Of course, he has a VCR of his own (he probably has a couple of dozen, stacked away somewhere); but this was a little bit special. ‘I got a video,’ he explained. ‘I got a wife and all.’ Then he produced the tape in its plastic wallet. The front cover showed a man’s naked torso, its nether regions obscured by a lot of blonde hair. On the back, various glamour girls gawped and slavered. The sticker said £115.95, though no doubt Keith got it cheap.

It was called When Scandinavian Bodies Go Mouth Crazy. The title proved to be accurate – even felicitous. I sat with Keith for a while and watched five middle-aged men sitting around a table talking in Danish or Swedish without subtitles. You could make out the odd word. Radiotherapie. Handikaptoilet. ‘Where’s the remote?’ Keith asked grimly. He had need of the Fast Forward. We found the remote but its batteries were dead. Keith had to sit through the whole thing (an educational short, I guessed, about hospital administration). I slipped into the study. When I came back the five guys were still talking. The credits came up. Keith looked at the floor and said, ‘Bastard.’

To cheer him up (among other motives), I applied to Keith for darts lessons. His rates are not low.

I too have need of the Fast Forward. But I must let things come at their chosen velocity. I can eke out Chapter Four with Keith’s copious sexual confessions, which, at this stage, are the purest gold.

Guy Clinch was no sweat to pull, to cultivate, to develop. Already I’ve been inside his house. I’ve met his wife. I got a look at the kid. Whew.

It was easy. Again, fatefully easy. Knowing that Keith would be elsewhere (busy cheating: an elderly widow – also good material), I staked out the Black Cross, hoping Guy would show. For the first time I noticed a joke sign behind the bar. It said: NO FUCKING SWEARING. I ordered an orange juice. One of the black guys – he called himself Shakespeare – was smiling at me with roguery or contempt. Shakespeare is, by some distance, the least prosperous of the Black Cross boogies. The bum’s overcoat, the plastic shoes, the never-washed dreadlocks. His hair looks like an onion bhaji. ‘You trying to cut down, man?’ he slowly asked me. Actually I had to make him say it about four times before I understood. His resined face showed no impatience. ‘I don’t drink,’ I told him. Shakespeare was nonplussed. ‘Honest,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m Jewish. We don’t, much.’ Gradually, as if controlled by a dial, pleasure filled Shakespeare’s eyes – which, it seemed to me, were at least as sanguinary and malarial as my own. One of the embarrassments of my condition is that, while it proscribes all activities such as smoking, drinking, taking drugs and having sex – and in fact restricts me to a fibre diet and twelve hours of sleep a night plus naps – I should end up looking like a polluted satyromaniac in acute withdrawal. I look like Caligula after a very heavy year. What with the grape and the slave girls and everything, and all those fancy punishments and neat tortures I’ve been doling out …

In came Guy, with a flourish of fair hair and long-rider raincoat. I watched him secure a drink and settle over the pinball table with a stack of coins; I contemplated him; I smugly marvelled at his openness, his transparency. Then I sidled up, placed my twenty pence on the glass (this is the etiquette), and gently said, ‘Let’s play pairs.’ I impressed him with my pinball know-how and pinball lore: silent five, two-flip, shoulder-check, and so on. We were practically pals anyway, having both bathed in the sun of Keith’s acquaintance, of Keith’s pub patronage. And, besides, he was completely desperate, as many of us are these days. In a modern city, when you have nothing to do, it’s tough to find people to do nothing with. We wandered out together and did the streets for a while, and then (don’t you just love the English?) he asked me home for tea.

Once inside his colossal house I saw several further modes of invasion and consolidation. Everywhere I looked there were beach-heads and bridgeheads. His frightening wife Hope I soon had twirling around my pinkie: I may have looked like a piece of shit Guy had brought back from the pub (on the sole of his shoe) but a little media name-dropping and NY networking soon fixed that. I also met Hope’s kid sister, Lizzyboo, and checked her out for possible promotion. I even took a good look at the current au pair, a ducklike creature with a promisingly vacuous expression, who might be more my speed. As for the cleaning lady, Auxiliadora, I didn’t mess around: I instantly hired her for the apartment …

I sort of hate to say it, but the key to the deal was Mark Asprey. The Clinches were frankly electrified when I let slip my connection to the great man. From the way Hope softened, then hardened, then softened again, I inferred that her excitement was largely social (Mark Asprey as dream dinner guest) or indeed sexual (Mark Asprey as phantom lover). With Guy the interest seemed to be purely literary. He had recently seen the latest West End hit, The Goblet, which Asprey was even now escorting to Broadway. Dully asked by me if he’d liked it, Guy said, ‘I cried, actually. Actually, I cried twice.’ Then he added wonderingly, ‘To be a writer like that. Just to do what you want to do.’ I fought down an urge to mention my own two books (neither of which found an English publisher. Run a damage-check on that. Yes, it still hurts. It still exquisitely burns).

So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alone together in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him, stressing my links with various literary magazines and completely inventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. (I can invent: I can lie. So why can’t I invent?) Guy said, ‘Really? That’s interesting.’ I sent a kind of pressure wave at him; in fact I was rubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when he said, ‘I’ve written a couple of things, actually.’ ‘No kidding.’ ‘A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.’ ‘I’d certainly be happy to take a look at them, Guy.’ ‘Really? They aren’t any good or anything.’ ‘Let me be the judge.’ ‘They’re rather autobiographical, I’m afraid.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh that’s OK. It’s a start. Don’t worry about that.

‘The other day,’ I went on. ‘Did Keith follow that girl?’

‘Yes he did,’ said Guy instantly. Instantly, because Nicola was already ever-present in his thoughts. And because love travels at the speed of light.

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. He just talked to her.’

I said, ‘That’s not what Keith told me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘It doesn’t matter what he said. Keith’s a liar, Guy.’

Now here’s a pleasing symmetry. All three characters have given me something they’ve written. Keith’s brochure, Nicola’s diaries, Guy’s fiction. Things written for different reasons: self-aggrandizement, self-communion, self-expression. One offered freely, one abandoned to chance, one coaxingly procured.

Documentary evidence. Is that what I’m writing? A documentary? As for literary talent, as for the imaginative patterning of life, Nicola Six wins, hands down. She whips us all.

Guy was a cinch. But now I must get into all their houses. Keith will be tricky. Probably, and probably rightly, he is ashamed of where he lives. He will have a rule about it – Keith, with his tenacities, his unguessable grooves and ruts, his lout protocols, criminal codes, fierce brand loyalties, and so on. Keith will naturally be tricky.

With Nicola Six, with the murderee, I have a bold idea. It would be a truthful move, and I must have the truth. Guy is reasonably trustworthy; I’ll just have to allow for his dreamy overvaluations, his selective blindnesses. But Keith is a liar, and I will be obliged to double-check, or even triangulate, everything he tells me. I must have the truth. There just isn’t time to settle for anything less than the truth.

I must get inside their houses. I must get inside their heads. I must go deeper. Oh, deeper.

A word about the weather. We have all known days of sun or storm that make us feel what it is to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have made us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy. They have made us feel – and the thought is almost too much to bear – what it is to live in a universe.

Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tear through the island, as if softening it up for an exponentially greater violence. In the last ten days the winds have killed nineteen people, and thirty-three million trees.

And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe light of night-life long ago.

Photograph by cbroders