

# Credits

#

Terrorism@Olympics meets the Unbearable Lightness of Being London

words Andrew Calcutt

design

Alex Cameron

You are Director of the Cultural Olympiad. Three weeks before the opening ceremony and you are panicking: the Olympic Torch has failed to ignite the country, and London 2012 is shaping up to be a Mega-Non-Event.

Surely you can do something to make London really excited about the Games?

On a night out on the town with your long-lost friend, you recall that 7/7 – the suicide bombings that followed London's selection as host city – was the last time Londoners came together as one.

With the Olympic clock ticking towards Games Time, nothing can stop you trying to recreate that feeling of togetherness. If only you had been able to stop yourself....

Games Makers: A London Satire chronicles the attempt to bomb London back to the Blitz spirit.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Andrew Calcutt is the original 'hackademic'

(journalist turned academic). He has written a dozen non-fiction books. Games Makers is his first novel.

Alex Cameron is an editorial art director and design writer.

© AC2, 2012

cbc publishing

ISBN: 0954 261828

Games Makers: a London Satire 

# Part 1. There's no there there

# 

## Prologue: courting appearances

##

His face on screen. The familiar face of my best friend Tony, looking up at me electronically.

But this is not iPhone4, face-time, intimacy-on-a-stick. This is the big picture I'm seeing. Breaking news, available now on a screen near you. And that's where Tony is – on screen, in the news, broken. The Shock! Horror! stuff that's right now – London, dateline 23rd July 2012 – is happening to him.

Dear Reader, in the league of international hate-figures, my friend Tony Skance is currently ranked between Colonel Gaddafi and Osama bin-Laden.

Every big news story must have its icon. In this instance it's the police station portrait of Tony, splayed against the wall, taken when they brought him in. I guess it was leaked to the Met's favourite blogger, and now it's out spurting out through every media outlet.

But the face in the mugshot is no bug eyed bovine.

He ain't cowed by the camera. This is Tony Skance, looking back, appraising you, Mr Police Photographer, and the millions standing behind you. Appraising himself looking back at you taking his picture.

They'll say his expression is cool, calculating.

Already have: Tony Skance, alleged mastermind of Olympic Games bomb outrage (broadsheet version).

Sicko Psycho (tabloid).

'Alleged' seems unnecessarily circumspect. Not as if Tony will be suing anyone for blotting his escutcheon.

So here I am at East Thames magistrates' court (name of Pete Fercoughsey – yes, say it fast to get the full effect), queuing for a seat on the Press bench to see my oldest friend remanded in custody, browsing the news while I wait. From the BBC to CNN to Al Jazeera, every website leads with the 'outrage' perpetrated by my childhood friend.

Meanwhile, in the street outside, anticipating the prison van and its outrageous occupant, there is a small group of hostile onlookers, and a much larger crowd of professional photographers. Through the glass doors I can see police officers patrolling like sheepdogs: grouping the press, herding the proles; keeping the two cohorts apart.

Doors opening. I power-off and fall in with the line of journalists admitted to court. I should explain, Dear Reader, that I once was a journalist but now I teach at a university in the East End of London. I'm being ushered in with the real hacks because my Press card isn't out of date yet ('Property of the National Union of Journalists, this card is recognised by the British Army, Metropolitan Police', etc etc ). Also, I'm recognised round here for sending students to cover court cases (used to be that they would learn the ropes from full-time court reporters; now my students are often the only ones doing it), so no one's going to knock me back.

In the courtroom, we take our allotted seats. I know the routine and I know what it's for. Recording court proceedings on behalf of the public, acting as the eyes and ears of the people, journalists are there to ensure that the judiciary observes the law which it is there to implement. Here endeth the lesson.

Sorry about that, folks. It's my new job to tell young people about my old job, and sometimes the job(s) take(s) over.

So come on, then, Mr Professional Persona. Take me over completely. Save me from the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. Release me from the wrenching, churning, dreadful yukkiness now that the beast in the dock - they'll bring him in at any moment - is my close, personal friend. The dearest friend I shall ever have.

I close my eyes and think of Tony. I do love him.

What else to call it, this mixture of loyalty, jealousy, and like-mindedness? We lived our early lives together. Now he's Public Enemy No 1 and I'm so frightened for him I'm losing my concentration.

An overdose of emotion can make you drowsy, or so I've heard...

'All ri-ise', intones the usher, his voice rising to emphasise the point.

We duly stand for the judge to enter. So the defendant's already here. How did I miss them bringing you in, Tony? Your grand entrance! Now we are both upstanding. We both, we both. Once there was always both of us. Who knows when we will be together again? In prison you'll refuse to see me, I know, even if I'm granted permission to visit.

It'll be quick today. Read the charge. Plead (not that it matters how you plead). Remanded. Over and out. My eyes are hungry for you, now there's so little time.

From the Press bench that stretches along one side of the court, I see you in profile: straight-backed but not quite square to the polished brass rail.

Decidedly at odds with this room of perpendiculars.

Better to find your own angle, I agree; or the unforgiving light might strike you down, dead.

The judge sits, so do we.

Forty years ago you sat next to me for our first school photograph; when we were six. I have it on the wall at home.

Every boy in white shirt and grey shorts; hair combed and parted, all eyes peering into the camera. Except your face was off-centre, turned a crucial inch to the right. Already you were watchful. Too wary of the camera's beady eye to look straight into it, even then.

From where I'm sitting I can't see your eyes. I'm not getting the full effect of your carefully controlled expression. But I can guess which performance you have selected from your extensive repertoire:

'Though the muscles in his face were tight, and his skin taut, Tony Skance managed to hint at a wry smile'. No cliché like an old cliché, you would say.

I don't want you to perform for me, Tony. I don't need to look straight into your eyes. I already know why you did it.

## (1) Trying to connect you

##

Three weeks earlier Antony Skance stepped smartly through the doors of City Hall on the south bank of the Thames. Outside, summer sunshine glinted on the river like highlights in a shampoo advert. London, because you're worth it.

But what is London worth? More to the point, how can London show its worth? Little more than three weeks away from 'Games Time', less than a month until the sales pitch of the century (remember the Mayor of Newhamlet's motto: the Olympics have nothing whatsoever to do with sport), and London's presentation is sadly lacking. At least, that's how it appears to our hero, the man in charge of the Cultural Olympiad.

The countdown is continuing, but it feels like the clock has stopped. It's happening here, but there is so little excitement about 'being there'.

Tony Skance longed for a cigarette, fondly remembered how it would light up the moment and burn it away. Instead he unwrapped a lollipop and stuck it in his gob, Kojak-style. Hands in trouser pockets, elbows out, linen jacket unbuttoned. There was even a thin, silk scarf around his tender neck.

Was this a sixth former impersonating an impresario, or London's culture czar acting the sixth-former?

Tony would have acknowledged the conundrum, if you'd been able to ask him. But just then he was busy performing a jaunty walk along the south bank of the river. Achieving an acceptable level of jauntiness required considerable effort on his part.

Tony's mind was in turmoil. The problem was...

nothing. Much ventured – much, much, loadsamoney much. Not much gained. Nearly four years into a programme of events dubbed 'the Cultural Olympiad', only 26 days away from the Olympics themselves, and London's mood was little changed. Did the capital even have a mood?

'Subdued', Tony said to himself, anticipating the moment (it'll come, it'll come) when he could look back comfortably at this difficult period of nerve-wracking doubt. He did his best to sell it to himself: 'Subdued atmosphere before the party started. Followed by a perfect storm of jubilation.

Must be, must be, must be'.

Tony inhaled the thought. For a second or two he heard London's silence as the precious instant when the house lights go down and the audience bates its breath. He remembered it well (a past life, Dear Reader, of which more later). But where were the stage lights and the wall of sound? Above all, who or what were the headliners? Without something to make it come to a head, London 2012 was set to be not only a non-event but a Mega-Non-Event. And with his name stamped through like it was a stick of rock: Olympics Failure, Tony Skance; Tony Skance, Olympics Failure.

Tony exhaled. Out (and never coming back) went the gossamer thought of London in a moment of hushed anticipation. Now he knew for sure it wasn't true; it wasn't going to be like that; it wasn't anything like that; it just wasn't anything.

Of course, Games Time hadn't actually started yet. There was still time for something to happen...

## (2) London united

##

It will have been the red coat that caught his eye.

A flash of colour at the periphery of his vision became a red coat and a woman wearing it; a red-coated woman in the midst of others-less-striking. They were clustered together, alternately peering down and turning their heads sideways to speak and listen to each other. There was something there on the ground between them; but as yet no telling what it was.

Without thinking Tony moved towards the group to find out. At five metres distance their voices came fully into range. Snapped to his attention.

'Just walking along', said Red Coat, whose lipstick was an exact match. 'He was just walking along and one of the cyclists smashed into him.'

'There were two', said a man with a frail moustache.

'One attacker, one outrider. They rode away fast towards London Bridge'. At this he stroked his silvery hair and looked along their exit route to the point where he had seen the bikers disappear.

As if his gaze might oust them from the office blocks covering their escape. He sighed, then looked back down at the ground and the man lying on it.

As soon as he could see the man on the ground, Tony got the picture: City-type, 50-something; decked and violently relieved of his laptop. Fetch a decent price down Brick Lane. Hit and ride. Bicycle thieves, BMX-style.

Shaking his head, the victim got as far as sitting up, then slumped down again. One of the group stepped away, taking out his phone. 'I'm phoning', he announced, letting the others know he wasn't walking out on them. They heard him say, 'Ambulance, please. And Police.'

While Phone Man did his bit, Red Coat took a scarf out of her bag, rolled it up and inserted it underneath City-type's head. How soon, thought Tony, they have reached an understanding. Somebody else produced a blanket. She flicked it out to full length and it floated down onto City-type.

Instinctively he moved into the foetal position, the better to receive this chivalrous gesture.

Tony's memory blurted out a picture of Walter Raleigh prostrating his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on.

Too much! Better rein himself in. Never mind chivalry, let's get cynical.

In his head, Tony's soliloquising had already changed register: less Francis Drake, more Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome: 'So if you ain't a tramp, Lady, and Blanket Lady was wearing pearls, for Chrissake, who the fuck walks around town with a fucking blanket?'

Tony took a step back from the group. The tone of his inner voice had already set him apart. As if they had heard the extravagant cynicism of his thoughts, he made himself scarce. Edging backwards, in a few seconds he was far enough away to take out his phone and photograph them. No flash, but somehow they registered it. Two of the group turned to him, a look of routine distrust welling up in their eyes: the London Look. But by now Tony was in full retreat, swivelling round towards the river, resuming the performance of his jaunty stride.

He was always taking pictures; liked to regard people. Walking away now, he sneaked a peek at the new pic, if only out of curiosity. As it turned out, though, this really was something worth seeing. For a few moments Tony kept walking, but the more he looked at the photo, the more it held his attention.

A hundred metres away he stopped, transfixed.

When he was there among them, he guessed there was something, but hadn't quite known what it was. How could he? The people helping City-type were acting without a trace of self-regard, and they almost had Tony acting the same way, for the few seconds he was with them. But having stepped out of the group, far enough way to look back at it with his camera, he now saw how the picture told a really important story: two whites, one black, two browns, one off-white Oriental, united in their concern for the man on the ground (largely unseen: it could be anyone, Everyman). In helping him, they were perfectly composed. Without thinking they had composed themselves into the very picture of integrity – a vignette of multicultural Londoners acting together in the teeth of violence.

This was London, the city as one, united in action.

And Tony had the perfect image: experience shared; iconography squared. Be a shame to waste it. But how on earth was he going to make something of it?

## (3) I have a dream

##

Tony's at home in his flat near Tower Bridge. Fell asleep with the TV on. More restless than restful.

Smoke. Dark. Can't breathe. Is that a light at the far end of the tunnel? And where are the others?

Y'know, the other people. Sitting in the carriage, how long ago?

Tony moves forward, inch by inch, holding out his hands for something to hold on to. 'I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and'. When he does touch something, his fingers recoil. What was that: snail, mouth, wound?

In bed his legs are bicycling.

Smoke. Dark. Coming out of the dark and the smoke.

The train is lifted from under ground, just like that. Coming out of the tunnel, its movement begins to sound different even before the light changes.

Now Tony is bathed in clear white light.

All over now. No war no more. City streets decked with bunting. The children sit down at trestle tables. All sticky-out ears and crooked teeth and lovely smiles. The women are smiling, too. You,ve never seen so much smiling.

'When you,re smiling...'

That,s Tony,s grandmother, there. With the polka dot frock and hair like Jessie Matthews. Who was Jessie Matthews? We were supposed to have liked her during the War, his grandma always said, though I never heard of her till they kept having her on telly.

But one of their bombers got away. We must blow him out of the sky or there will be children, dead on the ground. Limbless, headless, lifeless. Princes and princesses who will never take the throne.

## (4) Winners and losers

##

Tony raises his glass. Looks Pete in the eye.

'So here we are, then,' he announces.

'We are'. Pete. Deadpan is what he's going for.

Comes out a bit strangulated.

Show's over. That is, Tony has done what Pete asked him here to do. As Director of the Cultural Olympiad, he was asked to be guest of honour at the Media Arts Department's end-of-year show, and to present prizes to winning students.

And now, in a glass-walled room adjacent to the auditorium (really rather corporate for a polyversity in the East End), there are drinks.

There is the excited chatter of students, imbibing too quickly because it's free (except for the ones who don't drink, but they are just as excitable); there is the steady drone of university staff, networking with the people formerly known as

'urban regeneration' (now re-named 'sustainable communities'), divided between the ones who can't wait to get home and others who are really quite enjoying it; and there is a re-union of sorts between two men who've known each other since childhood, two boys who played in a band together till way past the age when they should have known better.

Even that was 20 years ago.

'So we are', adds Pete. Only one extra syllable, second time round. But Pete's voice is noticeably warmer, softer; and the muscles in his face are standing at ease, where only a moment ago they were straining to attention.

Of course he is not taken in by Tony's charm, his I-only-want-to-include-you. How many times has he seen it turn into suffocating self-promotion?

I-only-want-to-envelop-you. And how often was Pete the python's patsy? Part of him wants to run away from the horrible, hissing snake. But there is tenderness between them, too. Mixed in with the instinct for self-preservation.

I'm not going to blow this, Pete says to himself. I want him to know I've done all right without him, more than all right. That's why I can afford to like him again. And I want him to know that I do.

There's a waitress standing beside them. They duly download empty glasses and upload new ones (second round, third? Who's counting?). 'Rupa, this is Tony Skance.' Turns out the waitress is one of Pete's students, another year to go before graduating.

I'm only showing off by introducing her, Pete thinks to himself. She can't really be included in the conversation because she's got to walk round the room holding a tray of drinks. Admit it, I just wanted Tony to know I'm with the real people.

'Rupa's tipped for a prize next year,' adds Pete.

'That's if she doesn't win Britain's Got Talent first.'

The girl says nothing, smiles like a waitress should. Tony ramps up the light in his eyes as he turns to her: full wattage; charm intensive.

'Can't shake hands because mine are all sweaty', he announces. Bless him, he's found a way to apologise, making out it's his fault she's waitressing instead of networking. 'You're a contestant...?' She doesn't say no, which he takes as a yes. Gives him a clue for the briefest flirtation. 'You know the saying, Rupa, render to Caesar... It means you can snog Frankie Cocozza for now, but I'm the one to kiss when you pick up your university prize next year.'

Tony has all but dismissed her: till next year, sex slave. But he's also got rid of the awkward ambiguity – student, servant – which Pete's do-gooding only drew attention to.

Nice work, Tony. Still got what it takes.

But is that a bead of sweat on your brow?

Working the room seems to take more out of you than it used to.

(5) My show, I think you'll find From where they are standing you can see the sun bearing down on Canary Wharf. On some evenings there are pink and pale blue sunsets, even here, in the heart of the East End, with clouds tipped in gold; but this particular sunset is lurid, dripping orange-red ink. There's a stiffening breeze, too; and every time the door opens some kind of post-industrial dust blows in on the air.

The campus, it should be said, is further East than the corporate-style hospitality would have you believe.

This is (nearly) Barking, mate, not Barker's Of Kensington.

Every five minutes a little train goes by. One of those worms on stilts. Going West or East, towards either the invisible money (darling, it's all digitised now), or that good ol' poverty where even the five pound notes feel like a piece of rag.

Which way will they get to go?, Tony wonders, as he observes these Katie Price girls and boys like Peter Andre.

No, that,s not quite right, Tony. You haven,t got the measure of them yet.

'Top job – is it going well?' asks Pete.

'Mixed', replies Tony. 'Some days it comes together.

Others...'

He made as if to leave the sentence open. But Tony Skance just doesn't leave openings (takes them, silly).

'It's like being on tour', Tony resumes. 'Some gigs go better than others. That's all you can say, really.'

No it's not. Not now nor was it ever. There were many times when they came off stage and talked for hours about the show, dissecting every note played, every move they'd made, searching for the way to strike gold every night.

Pete lets that one go. It's only sparring, after all. But there's still a job to do (sparring has a purpose, don't forget). Tonight's the night for each to show the other that all was not lost that rainy day when Pete walked out on Tony, and the Heaters (three successful albums and one absolute dud) suddenly got colder.

Baahhh! Never mind getting it right. Forget about keeping a balance. Suddenly Pete's yearning for the long lost years of their comradeship. Besides parrying Tony, he's been on guard against himself, blocking the desire to see himself reflected once more in his oldest, closest friend.

Unbeatable then. Even now, we're better than the rest.

Catching himself enunciating the word, entertaining the thought of Tony and he as 'we', Pete's instinct is to take it back immediately.

Recall that message. Edit it out of your tiny mind, you fool! Too late, it's already logged in a shared drive somewhere.

'You still play?', inquires Pete.

'Only in my head.' Tony fobs him off. Just the other day he took the guitar out of its case (noticing the flecks of his own dead skin on the fretboard), and strummed a couple of chords. Bashed through a few songs, actually. Just humming, though; no lyrics.

But even that would be giving away too much.

'In my silly head'.

Nice touch, Tony. Enough to let Pete know some of it's still in there. Lots of it, if only he knew.

'Excuse me, I wonder if...'

They have an interloper. Pete feels hackles rising –

Tony's.

'Ah-hah – the prize-winning author.'

Tony the prize-giver has turned to greet one of the winners, student Dinky Dutta, last seen departing the stage having picked up this year's creative writing medal from the fair hand of Skance.

Dinky. Real name, Shahid. Nicknamed Sash at school because sometimes he sashays like a catwalk model (or a 'fucking poof' as his fake hard schoolmates would say). At university he chose to be known as Dinky (Anglo-Indians still go in for this sort of name calling), suggesting small but beautifully formed. This is no exaggeration. His body is neat and supple. His face is a picture – a Paki Pre-Raphaelite with a bit of cheekie chappie mixed in.

'I'd like to ask a favour, Tony.'

OK, I know first names are the norm nowadays, but don't get too familiar, will you?

Why's he shutting down?, thinks Pete, as the halogen lamps go out in Tony's eyes. Is Tony jealous of Dinky's young talent? Of his easy good looks? If Tony were Bill Clinton, would Dinky be his Obama?

'I've been offered an internship at the BBC,' Dinky continues. 'But I'd much rather come and work for you.'

Now it's Tony's turn to deadpan. 'Ain't got no jobs', he says, his mouth a narrow slit.

'I don't mean a paid job, Mr Skance.'

Formal use of the vocative - Dinky reads well.

'Just work experience, for the experience of working in your office.'

Tony takes a business card out of a small silver case. Pete can see a family crest on it, the one Tony swore to disown before the family disowned him (they never did). Hands the card to Dinky.

'Don't drop the Beeb,' he advises, 'because this may come to nothing. But email my PA, send her your CV, and she'll arrange an appointment.'

'Thanks, I'll do it tomorrow.' Beaming, Dinky's smile is set go on forever, but Tony cuts him short.

Tony flutters his hands extravagantly, spiriting away the previous exchange. My stage not yours, his gesture says. Then he lowers his voice and leans in towards Pete and especially Dinky, waving both of them in closer. Now they are a conspiracy!

'I'm going to speak to you in a language hardly heard at the BBC,' he confides, 'and never, ever in a mealy mouthed institution like this one.'

Caesura. If this conversation has any kind of rhythm, it's just shifted to the off-beat.

'You're a good looking boy, Dinky, and this is your big day...'

Long pause. Let it ride that extra beat, it's all in the timing.

'...So fuck off out of here and get laid.'

Now louder: 'That's what we would have done, isn't it, Pete?'

Kerching! Pete can't say yes – too revealing.

Can't say no without lying. He shuffles and clears his throat. Meanwhile Dinky is taken aback. Steeped in 'appropriate' language between staff and students, he's wrong-footed by Tony's forthright manner.

More than that, Dinky heard the hollow ring in Tony's jack-the-ladism. He saw an old man making a desperate play for playboy status. Some of the others have noticed it too, judging by the awkward silence.

Now Dinky's bowing out, like a courtier, without turning his back on Tony: 'I'll email tomorrow, first thing.'

The boy's signed out. Pete's still in play.

Though the latest show has been a bit ragged in places, one more time, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tony Skance has made the stage his own.

## (6) Over and Out

##

There is no pressing need to prolong this. Job done, and a respectable amount of networking to follow. Enough gosh-ing and joshing for each of our musketeers to have presented himself to the other with a flourish, hinting at swordplay but without any weapons drawn in anger. Surely best to leave it at that.

But it doesn't happen that way. What's best... must be happening some place else.

While Pete's been reining in his unexpected readiness to muck in with a man he swore he'd never, ever trust again, Tony, too, is surprised by how much empathy he has – finds himself having – with his old partner.

Each for the other. All over again. Like old times.

Face it, Tony, you want to feel you are both in it together again. As if a rush of memory could sweep away your current uncertainty and tide you over.

'We might make a night of it,' Tony suggests, taking care to formulate an hypothesis rather than a straightforward invitation. 'Go up town. Eat, drink, who knows? All very sedate, though. No more rock'n'roll in my life.'

He doesn't want to be rebuffed but finally he puts his cards on the table. 'You up for it, Pete?'

Pete's pleased to have been asked. Of course it would be delicious to say 'no'. He formulates refusing, rehearses it, savours the words in his mouth. 'Sorry, but Carol and the kids are expecting me home. I don't see enough of them as it is.'

Once bitten, you fucker, I will fly.

But Pete doesn't really want to fly away from Tony.

In his company he feels honeyed again, though now with a bitter taste, too. Sweet'n'sour, he tells himself, I can live with that.

Draining his glass, Pete is already phoning home: 'With Tony after the show. Into town, do you mind? So long since I've seen him, I wasn't sure I'd recognise him... Y'sure? Won't be too late.

Love.'

Now he's steering Tony towards the Dean of Media Arts and the Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Wheeled round by his attentive chaperone, their honoured guest supplies acceptable exit lines, though his delivery is a little more abrupt than the senior managers would have liked. How much are we paying him for this?, you can see them thinking.

Tony meets their gaze. I'm doing it for nowt, he's thinking. A favour for a friend, if you took the trouble to find out.

Less than five minutes after first Tony suggested it, our boys are out in the lobby, Pete with a satchel slung over his shoulder, the one that makes him look like a permanent student (Carol always says). Now Tony and he are off and away, scampering into the big city like Morecambe and Wise.

## (7) Bon Voyage

##

At this time in the evening, the Docklands Light Railway trains are not crowded. Tony and Pete sit facing each other, each of them taking up one-and-a-half of the undersized seats.

Nearly dusk. A glorious, mid-summer's day nears its end. Some clouds are already purpling, but for now the sun is holding on to its fiery redness. Still lurid, it complements the pungent aroma of cleaning fluid in the carriage.

As they trundle alongside the waterfront, looking across Albert Dock towards City Airport, Tony looks out of the window and clocks a new school, the rowing club with a Chinese restaurant built on top of it, and an enormous office block (only recently, partially occupied), constructed almost entirely of glass.

Some people are still at work there. You can see them sitting at their screens, like figures in a doll's house with the front wall taken out.

Tony becomes expansive: 'Look at all this. It's got to mean something. There is positive development.

Really, there is, if only you don't...'

With Pete in attendance, Tony has been feeling more on top of things.

With my old partner here to help... well, just him being here is helping.

Carry on like this and Tony could blow the typhoon of disaster images – 2012: the memorable year when London became forgettable – right back into the box they came from.

Pete, you,ll always be there for me, won,t you? Won,t you?

'The regeneration game,' Pete interjects, 'is not panning out as planned.'

Dr Fercoughsey will be playing the cynic. Dealing in damaged gods. Man on ground with feet of clay.

'Recent surveys of travel to work patterns', continues Pete, 'show East Londoners continuing to go West for work, returning to their East London homes in the evening. Or later in the morning, if they are office cleaners, for example. The East London area now offers fewer permanent jobs than it did in the 1960s, during the heyday of Ford's Dagenham.'

In university seminars and public consultations, Pete would have softened this bald statement with something about plans for future regeneration, the legacy of 2012, expectations of inward investment, and widening the range of participating stakeholders (he might have baulked at 'stakeholders', then said it anyway). But Tony of all people was not going to taken in by that kind of impression management: he practically wrote the book.

At Canning Town interchange they turn their backs on the harbour master's launch. From the platform they can see it making stately progress up the River Lee.

Or is it the River Lea? Answer: it depends how far up the river you are.

Tony and Pete run down the escalator in pursuit of a Jubilee Line train to whisk them up West. But the doors-closing sound – beep, beep, beep – has stopped even before their feet touch the platform. Three minutes till the next one.

Tony produces a bottle of the palest, amber liquid, uncaps it and thrusts it at Pete. 'Quick,' he insists, 'before the camera finds us.'

When Pete put the bottle to his mouth and felt whisky at the back of his throat, he thought it would be like white noise, a shouting, heckling effect. But it's not the loudmouthed firewater he was expecting. Oh, there is fire in it, all right.

A straight, true flame with all distortion distilled out of it. Now, miraculously, Tony's dram-to-share is tickling his neck and walking down his spine, taking all the time in the world.

Yes, there is time, there will be time, Pete thinks. After all we have been through, us two, there is still time to get it right.

Pete feels his lower back...lowering itself. For a second he acts taller, like he was seven years old, playing at Randy Yates in Rawhide. Then he remembers how many years have passed and pulls himself back in. At least for the now.

## (8) Oversharing

##

They emerge from the Jubilee Line at Green Park.

Must have been a short, sharp shower while they were underground. On one side of the street, moistened paving stones gleam like aluminium in the final few shafts of low, slanting sunlight. Pete giggles at the sight of four hefty youths in hiking gear (shorts included) and skull caps. Is this a tribute band for Pink and Perky, he muses, or a Jewish contingent of the Hitler Youth?

Tony makes another announcement: 'Got to have solids. Absolutely must have something to eat.'

He leads Pete into the foyer of his club. Already the noise of the street has been shut out. They walk downstairs to the Art Deco restaurant (small steps, designed to be taken fast; for a moment, every man going downstairs to eat gets to feel like Fred Astaire). Just inside the double doors (ebony inlaid with parallel lines of gold leaf), there is a lectern with the bookings book placed solemnly upon it. Our pilgrims respect the temple, and here they wait.

In a few seconds the acolyte appears. She is a young woman from Eastern Europe – girl, really, looks less than 20 – and their arrival causes her to flutter.

This evening it seems there are many bookings, and even the one or two empty tables you can see, are due to be filled at any moment.

'Of this I can assure you, Mr Skance.'

But of course Tony knows the head waiter, who is just moving away from a table within hailing distance of the lectern.

'Bona noce, Marcelli,' he calls out, raising his voice above the diners' intimate murmur, but not so loud as to break in upon them.

And Marcelli comes over, with a warm smile on his small, quick face. He and Tony seem genuinely pleased to see each other. And then Tony breaks out into his sheepish grin, asking if maybe, perhaps, at a pinch... And Marcelli nods: of course, of course; and both of them are smiling at each other until Tony takes a step back.

'But I wouldn't want to spoil your timetable, Anna.'

Already he has it from Marcelli that she is indeed Anna.

'It is no problem,' she reassures him, at the same time trying to reassure herself that she has not been made to look foolish.

Anna squares her shoulders and puts away Pete's satchel – 'you will not be wanting, no?' – while Marcelli shows them to their table. They sit. Tony tucks his napkin under his chin like Hercule Poirot.

Pete sits and looks intently at the table, a man staring out to sea. That whisky is hitting on the wine he drank on campus. Getting to the right spot, too!

This is the coolest, creamiest table linen I have ever seen, Pete thinks. If it were the sea, I might drown in it. If only it were a bed, I could crawl into it and never come out.

Tony has waived away the wine list and called for his regular bottle of vin ordinaire (Henri Le Boeuf). It's there in a trice. No need for the tasting ritual. 'Just pour', he insists.

Aggressively but not unpleasantly sharp, the white wine cuts through all the wasted hours and lost days. It brings us, Tony and me, to this moment. After so much time, to this moment and no other, this moment now.

Pete, dear Pete, is thinking that he really shouldn't let his thoughts run free like this. You'd be embarrassed, Pete, if you ever find yourself thinking these thoughts again. So think again. But no, he's not going to. Tonight's the night for not thinking right.

There are so many things I want to say to you, Tony, and maybe this is the time when I can say them, now that we are at this table, now that my voice is richer, creamier.

But at least for the time being, Pete keeps his lyrical thoughts to himself. Dear Reader, perhaps you're thinking, thank goodness for small mercies.

Meanwhile Marcelli has brushed the crumbs from the table. Tony is signing the bill, £76.34 on his club account. And something for your weekend, Marcelli, he smirks and waves a note. Marcelli inclines his head, bows – not too much – in return.

Come on, Pete, afore ye go you'd better pee in the Art Deco pissoir. Looks exactly like the one exhibited by Duchamp. Thank goodness they haven't ripped it out and replaced it.

## (9) Pete remembers how to growl

##

'Charge!' Now Tony is running down the steps into a bar that nestles under a theatre in Charing Cross Road.

They are away from the genteel restaurant, out on the town again. For their next drink, these clowns might even choose whisky and Coke because the Mods did, but will probably pass on Mateus Rose (even if The Faces really liked it).

Having me a real good time, thinks Pete.

What with the swirl of it, the joy of letting go which also feels like (but all the time you know it's not) being more... no, not in control, more in charge.

'Charge!' Tony is running into a curtain of red velvet. At the last moment, he stops and pulls it aside. Behind the curtain, the bar is eerily quiet.

Too late to keep the peace, Tony only gets louder.

Strides across to the copper-topped bar. 'Two pints of your finest ale, landlord', he bellows in best mock-thesp. By now he's brandishing a ten pound note. 'You may keep the change,' he solemnly declares.

The bar steward is wearing a short white jacket and strawberry blond hair straight out of a bottle (this is a theatre bar, sweetie). He pours two pints of Fuller's London Pride and puts them on the bar, goes to the till with Tony's tenner and comes back with two pound coins on a small silver plate. He says nothing.

Be like that, then. And I'll have my change, if you don't mind.

Tony scoops up the quids and they head off to a table. When Tony sits down, he leans absurdly far back. Hands behind his head, legs akimbo. The deckchair pose.

Chalk to cheese, Pete sits bolt upright, and when he starts to talk, his voice sounds guttural, almost menacing. As he means it to be.

'Embedded', says Pete. 'You used the word,

"embedded". You spoke of "embedded" and my good self in the same breath. Do you think my life is some kind of joke, or what?'

Is this a comedy, or what?

There had been a short taxi ride, from Tony's club (near Green Park) to the Charing Cross Road. Paid for by Pete (Tony already coughed for the dinner, remember?). In the back of the cab, there was talk of Pete's job at the university. Or rather, Tony was talking about it. Didn't stop till they arrived at their destination, right here.

'You have the satisfaction', Tony pontificated, 'of seeing something grow that will outlive even you.

Because it is embedded in the surrounding area – the poorest area of London that is served like no other by your university and its sense of obligation to local people.'

Only Tony. Only Tony after a few drinks could forget it's me he's trying to load this stuff onto.

'The word "embedded",' Pete reminds him. 'You used it spontaneously, of your own free will, in a conversation with me, about me. Don't ever use that fucking management jargon shit with me, Skance.'

Pete is growling. So far, so good. But to play the role to maximum advantage, he should remain visibly, physically intense: leaning in towards Tony, eyes fixed on him, fixing him. Instead Pete finds himself leaning back, the better to explain himself. Ever the teacher, even in anger – yes, Dear Reader, there's more here than mere performance, Pete feels the need to expand, to provide an account.

'That management jargon shit – my job is crawling with it. Every sodding little thing I try to do, it infects. It chokes the courses I write, squeezes every ounce of integrity out of them. And I don't write them, I don't teach them so they can be re-written according to the sacred text of holy management shite.

'And now I come out on a night with you' (he's no Geordie, our Pete, so where do these cadences come from?), and I find the same stuff spewing out of your droopy, fat arse-mouth.'

Pete puts the beer glass to his lips. He keeps the glass to his lips. The beer moves out of the glass.

By the slight movements in his neck you can see it is swilling down Pete's throat. He keeps the glass to his lips until there is no more beer in it.

He's downed the pint; the pint is downed. He takes the empty glass from his lips. He makes out he's going to bang it down on the table; then, when it's less than half a centimetre away, he stops; and puts it down very slowly, delicately. You would be inclined to think that it was not a beer glass at all, but a rare piece of Suzie Cooper china.

Meanwhile Pete is staring way past Tony, as if he's too angry to look at him. Until – click – he looks him in the eye and says:

'I'll go to the bar, then'.

What a scene! What a player!

But Pete doesn't actually move. Now he remembers he hasn't got to the end! His speechifying resumes where he left off:

'In case it isn't clear, Skance, I don't want to hear it from you ever again. And if I hear it again, from you, it'll be the last thing I hear from you because I'll be out of here, you'll be out of my life. Out.'

Staccato. Machine-Gun. Wilko Johnson on guitar (if you don't know, Google): 'Do. You. Understand?'

Hardly a question. Pete nearly said 'capice' but that would have been too much. He'd be obliged to laugh even before Tony did.

Dear Pete, how did you get to be such a ham? But acting up was always their way of playing down. Insurance against not being up to the task; defence against the fear of being Malvolio instead of Mercutio. In their book, the one they wrote for each other, to be angry you had to perform it properly, with just the right quantity of knowingness and exactly the right amount of really meaning it. Capice?

For you must understand, Dear Reader, that underneath the goofing, spoofing, playing around, there was real malevolence in Pete's words. Not just fear of Malvolience. That 'management jargon shit'

and all that goes with it, really is the bane of his life; and he was close to walking out, never to be seen (by Tony) again.

He might just possibly have leant right over and smacked Tony in the face. Bang. Blood. Broken nose.

## (10) A long time back

##

For there once was a group of townies in a crowded Art School pub. Full of themselves. It was Pete who glassed one of them. Somewhere in nowhere town, the scrawny little bastard – I bet he's fat by now –

will still have the scar.

The Heaters were on tour, gigging that night at the art college of a provincial city. Finished the sound check and into the pub across the road. Heaving.

In the back room there were four blokes wearing designer shirts, perms and 'taches (that long ago), holding cigs between thumb and forefinger in a show of prole culture. They teased the art school boys (too many earrings and nose rings, just asking to be ripped out in a fight), and leered at the melancholy girls, pressing against them in the crush.

One of the townies grabbed Tony's porkpie hat, and they all tried it on, posing with it and snickering and pretending to gob in it before tossing it back.

Four against two; no scope for fisticuffs. Our protagonists carried on drinking for a few minutes, then Pete told Tony to stand by the door. He picked up an empty bottle of light ale (long time ago, right?), and held it by the neck, half-hidden up his sleeve.

It felt heavy; his whole arm felt heavy. He felt too heavy to move. For a moment (how long?), Pete could see himself not moving.

Not now, not ever. If not now, then never.

Never doing it, never moving at all.

Pete raised his arm and brought it down very fast so that the bottle smashed against the side of the table. There was a crashing sound, but no time to hear it. The back of his hand was sprayed with the tiniest glass fragments, so delicate, but there was no time to feel it.

Now the neck of the bottle was a thick, stubby thing, a cock in his hand with a swollen, jagged knob at the end of it. He used it to fuck a young man's face. Which one, any one of the four townies.

'Prick,' he said, as he pushed it in and turned it, splitting the man's cheek – he felt flesh giving way, then pulled it out, and ran out of the pub still holding the broken bottle.

Pete and Tony weren't there to see the blood running slowly at first, then turning to a torrent. Or the back room up-ending into a wholesale brawl (even the boys-with-earrings had a go). By the time the police arrived at the pub, Pete and Tony were safely stowed away in their dressing room, waiting to go on stage, been here since the sound check, OK? Except Pete was still breathing fast and loud.

'Christ, Pete', said Tony. 'I wasn't expecting you to do that.'

'The point', replied Pete, finally regaining control.

Just in time: they were due on stage five minutes later.

## (11) All together on stage

##

Pete stock still, playing two saxophones at once.

Tony hanging on the microphone stand, dancing with it, dancing with himself, beaming, leering up at the crowd and schooling them like Fagin, or Richard III, or the snake in Jungle Book.

Come to me, little darlings. Come to me, believe in me. Show me who you are and there will be plenty to share. I will give you shares in togetherness. I will help you share each other.

Suddenly (oh, but we all knew it was coming), there is no sound, no movement. In a flash the stage goes dark. The whole band could have fallen into a crevasse, never to be seen again.

Yet there is a single spotlight, picking out Tony, his arms outstretched and head bowed like Christ on the Cross; until even this light is extinguished.

You don't need me, you don't need to see me, for tonight you have each other.

But the congregation is restless. They whistle and cry out. They love him and they insist that they love him. They want him, they want to be with him so they can love each other.

From the down beat when the last light goes off, thirty-one more beats of nothing, eight bars of silence. Then the band blasts back in, Tony's voice soaring even above screechy Pete and his saxophones, and the stage lights have come crashing back on, so bright and loud it hurts to look and listen.

The band had rehearsed this over and over again, then over and over again with the lighting crew. No safety net; no drummer hitting sticks for the last four beats before re-entry. It's stand or fall, do it or not at all.

Most nights it works wonderfully. On stage and off, the whole hall comes together round one man rising to new heights. In the dark, Tony has climbed onto a trapeze and now he is strung up high enough for everyone to adore him. They would kiss him if they could get close enough, and wipe his face tenderly.

They all want to be his Veronica.

## (12) Back to the future

##

'Finally'. There's a word; an unexpectedly attractive word. I hope you can understand why such an ordinary adverb sounds so alluring to our friend Dr Pete Fercoughsey (former rock musician and radical journalist, now a senior lecturer in Journalism Studies and Creative Writing)? In Pete's job, he never gets to say never. Neither does anyone else, really; perhaps not even the university's vice-chancellor. Nothing is ever finalised. Nothing is absolutely the last in the series; and nothing lasts, either. Soon 'last' might not even be a word.

Which only makes 'finally' sound doubly attractive.

The unexpectedly difficult task of making clear shapes, identifying a beginning, middle and end, these are troubling Tony, too; although his local difficulties are of greater significance, since he has the privilege (right now it seems more like a burden) of being the director of the Cultural Olympiad.

And now that Pete, for all his aggressive posturing, has started confessing his troubles, Tony is sure to follow.

'I can't get my project to work properly, either,'

declares Tony.

'So what is it that's not working, Tony, my love?'

'The whole show. It's not working because it's not a whole show. There's a bunch of people on the inside who've all got moves to make and their own trades to do. But they don't add up: the pieces don't come together. And most of the insiders don't like me anyway, because I'm always going too far. Even if I knew where to take them to, they wouldn't follow me.

Meanwhile the people on the outside don't seem to want to come in on it.

'Maybe they just can't see what there is to come in on. Can't blame them, either, because neither can I. But carry on like this, and the Olympics will be London's non-event. "Non-event",' he gestures, 'is how the Games will be seen.'

Tony, please don't do that scare quotes thing, Pete's thinking. Don't thing me, Tony would say to Pete, if Pete said aloud what Tony already knows he is thinking.

'And that makes it hugely significant,' Tony continues. 'Not just a non-event that nobody notices.

The Olympiad looks set to be our Hurricane Katrina.

If the Games don't make an impact, like New Orleans, the London brand will be broken into smithereens .'

By now Tony's almost enjoying himself. For weeks he has been unable to put his finger on the problem. At least now he can talk to Pete about it.

'Oh, the people out there' – he's gesturing again: maybe waving to them; perhaps shooing them away.

'They want it to go OK, they're not willing it to fail. If it does, they'd be implicated, too. But they sure ain't willing to believe...'

'Come of it, T,' Pete interjects. 'You want them to believe. Ha, ha, ha.'

'Mock me,' retorts Tony. 'I don't care. It will only make me stronger.' He twists in his seat. Now Tony's face is looming in at Pete.

'Look, I now it sounds dodgy, and in the wrong hands it could get really spooky. But I only want this city, this country, to have that shared experience, the kind we used to make when we were on stage. The togetherness we could produce for all those people, for them, with them. Not just for our benefit, everyone in it together at least until the house lights came up.

'So what if it was make-believe? If you could make what we made, and amplify it many times over, and make it last a while longer, you could make a city out of that. A city that feels like a city, not just a ragbag of people with nothing in common. And that would be a decent legacy, wouldn't it? And maybe the house lights wouldn't have to come up for a long time.'

Has Tony said too much, gone in deeper than he should, assumed, groundlessly, that Pete is the same old Pete? He's not sure. In any case he rows back to shore as fast as he can:

'You getting those beers in, then...?'

While Pete goes to get them, Tony can't think of anything except how much he wants a cigarette.

'It'll be all right on the night, T,' says Pete, back from the bar and the strawberry blond bloke standing behind it. 'We could never tell from the sound check how it would turn out.' But when he hears himself saying this just because Tony wants him to say something like this, Pete pulls himself up, kicks himself for falling into old habits so readily.

For your next line, Pete, find something that Tony isn't expecting. Instead of cushioning him, holding him up, try rolling with it, let it go further than Tony would have wanted it to go. See how he likes it.

He tries it straightaway. 'Still, maybe you're right, T.' Pete pauses, takes a mouthful of beer, and sucks it into his cheeks before swallowing it. Ten years earlier he would have drawn heavily on a fag and steadily, deliberately exhaled the smoke.

Even now, when he looks back at that fateful night, just a few weeks before Games Time, Pete doesn't know whether at this point he already knew what he was going to say next. And does it matter, either way?

Regardless of how much he knew, his first sentence contained yet another, highly theatrical pause:

'Perhaps the last time London felt... united' –

employing, momentarily, the high falutin' tone of wartime newsreel narration – 'was in July 2005 when some fools blew it up. That gave us something to share in.'

Tony chimes in: 'And we'd been awarded the Olympics just the day before. A winning combination.'

Pete has to top him. 'Two shared experiences in significantly quick succession', he adds. 'The winning bid, terrorism, maybe they're just meant to go together like love and marriage.'

'Athletes, crowds,' says Tony, 'horse and carriage.'

'Stadium, bombs,' Pete adds.

'The quick and the dead,' they chorus.

'Seriously, Tony,' Pete continues: he won't be bested on this. 'The Olympic Games and terrorism, hitch them back together and you've got it made.

Just one explosion, and it could be your biggest hit. Aarf, aarf. '

There, it's been said. Not that either of them had meant to go this far, had they?

It started with Pete not wanting to behave the way he was supposed to; or maybe it started with Tony always setting up Pete to do what he wanted him to. In any case, Pete took the weight of Tony's anxiety and swung it forward into full blown cynicism.

They have got to the point of saying, really, that London only comes together when it's under attack, when there's blood on the streets and bodies in bags. And when they came somewhere near to saying this, instead of stopping and leaving off, they carried on. In their silly dialogue, carrying on from how they always used to talk to each other, bloodshed first left unspecified, the blood flowing indiscriminately between the 1940s Blitz and the London bombings of July 2005, is now firmly attached to 2012. They have even begun to sketch out a new scenario: a bomb attached to the Games, a big bang during Games Time, which would produce the shared experience that Tony has been dreaming of.

Without thinking, without having to think because the calculation is staring them in the face, Tony and Pete are adding terror to 2012 and hitting the jackpot; possibly the biggest pay-out ever.

Imagine: millions of media moments, shared across the city, across the world, proliferating like fragments in a bomb blast. But instead of blowing London apart, the fragments are putting London back together again, making Londone.

London United. For all the world to see.

It's a blockbuster waiting to be made, a truly global spectacle. A solution to the Olympics happening that isn't happening. The there that isn't there. Except that this isn't going to happen either. It's just a bad, stupidly bad joke between friends, isn't it, just?

Pete's mock laughter dies a death in his own mouth.

There is a moment of awkwardness between these two, who have experienced just about every kind of intimacy with each other except sex (with each other). Then Tony cocks his head slightly and squints over at Pete.

It's his signature gesture from the old days: looking askance, making it seem like you're staring the other guy down, but really it's the cue for more.

Pete hardly needs prompting. Even after a long lay-off he's ready for the familiar game.

'That'd top Jill Dando' – his opening stake.

'I think you'll find she's been topped already.'

Tony's first response is low key. But then he plays a higher card: 'It'll be more Diana than Diana.'

Ace. Now Pete must raise the game still higher.

'The nation will be united in mourning sickness.

There will be unprecedented pomposity, pretentiousness, and primadonnas of public grief.

Never on the field of battle...'

'A field day for Charlie Brooker,' Tony interrupts.

'Predictable, boring bastard', Pete jibes, and the two of them laugh like monkeys.

Teasing out their sickening idea, they play on into the night. Laughing, snickering at scenarios that aren't really laughable. Of course the rituals they are sneering at – bow the knee at Dunblane, don't speak ill of St Dando, observe the laws of the cult of Diana ('Why all the Ds?', quips Pete) – really are idiotic. But breaking them this way, playing out bastardised scenes of blood, pain and mock-canonisation as if this were only iconoclasm, that's almost as stupid. And they know it.

Once when they were Smart Alec teenagers, they thought this kind of thing was...smart. Feeling something like shame afterwards, came as something of a surprise to them. But now they know it's making them feel dirty. Not horny dirty, just soap and water dirty. Like watching Big Brother (in recent years), or the wrestling on Saturday afternoons (many years ago), when you knew all the time you should have been doing something better.

Like old times, they tell themselves; but were they ever as tasteless as this? Then again, better not be too judgemental: this is only a couple of middle-aged guys, replaying old routines to cover the hole where their lives went. We must allow them something to cover up with, no matter what we think of it.

Over and over again, they smirk and grin; and so with this performance, acted out for each other's benefit, they make it through the night.

## (13) Indecision time

##

The horses frightened him. Dinky had got used to the shouting, the whistles and the volume of people. But when a troop of mounted police fanned out to face the demonstrators, he was scared.

This is Dinky Dutta we are talking about. Slim-hipped, coffee-coloured, nice smile, easy style.

Prize-winning student - no, former student, currently awaiting confirmation of his first class degree.

In another place, it would come summa cum laude, but Dinky's been to a university where they don't speak Latin. Nonetheless, a writer already (two short stories published in online magazines), one of them even reviewed. Certain to be a major writer someday, somebody said. Either that or he's a worthless piece of crap who's never done anything in his life and never will.

Are you a shit, sir?, he was once asked in the Gents of a posh pub off Piccadilly next door to the private view his Dad had taken him to. Probably a chat-up line, the real question being: do you take it up the arse, pretty boy? Either way, Dinky didn't have an answer, then; doesn't have one, now.

On this, the day of the national demonstration against debt, he wasn't too concerned about the helmeted warriors sitting on top of the horses.

So well coordinated they might have been a dance troupe. Too smart, too choreographed to be really threatening, he thought (how little he knows).

It was the sheer, animal bulk that got to Dinky: the weight, the smell of the horses, even some distance away.

'What are you supposed to do if they come at you?'

he asked Joe. Anarchist Joe (well, he wears black).

Joe who plays the bongos, a bit of a drongo, but really comes good when the pressure's on.

If you're in a tight spot, Dinky, you'll be glad to have him around.

'You're not supposed to be there, that's what'.

There's a chuckle in Joe's eyes. 'If you don't have the sense to get out of the way, you haven't got much sense, have you?'

Enjoys breaking in the virgins, Joe does; and Dinky is his latest trophy protestor.

Yes, this is Dinky's first time. Iraq, Student Fees, Education Cuts, while he was actually studying (sort of), he let the whole lot pass him by. Not quite the full political animal, even now. This demo's against debt: student debt, Euro-debt, Third World debt; hence 'Cancel the Debt: Tax the Bankers'. To be honest, Dinky isn't that bothered about paying his graduate tax, but he likes the thought of saying he only goes on demos now he's stopped being a student.

Counter-intuitive, or what?

Sections of the crowd are getting restless. They've watched themselves on the monitors round Trafalgar Square. (Indeed you haven't been on a demo nowadays

– nobody has, until you've seen yourself there on the monitors.) They've read the tweets supporting the demo from Stephen Fry and friends. What else to do now, except some old fashioned pushing and shoving?

It's a stand-off, but that doesn't mean standing still. Dinky is amazed at how much (some of) the students are getting away with. Surging forward every now and then, kicking and punching, eventually pushed back by riot police (on foot). Then the police drop back leaving a gap between themselves and the protestors. There'll be a quiet period, punctuated by gleeful monkey noises every time a bottle flies over and cracks open on the ground in front of the police line. One bottle – just the one

– got past the riot shields. It curved over, curled in and split a policeman's visor.

Goal!

Big cheer goes up from the away fans; stunned constable steered to the rear and replaced by one of his team mates.

There's another lull, and Joe goes into a huddle with a group of friends. Two of them come out carrying the poles of a banner which reads, 'Front Line Theatre'. One of the pole-bearers is Dinky, who he can't quite believe he is anything other than an onlooker. A third student is holding a large placard, declaring that this is 'The University of Strategic Optimism'. Meanwhile, dressed in cap and gown, Joe occupies centre stage – well, he would if there was one. In front of the placard, beneath the banner, he is the pop-up vice-chancellor for a spoof uni. Through a megaphone, Joe addresses the crowd:

'Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the University of Strategic Optimism. We at the University believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. That we are ruled by the best possible government.

That the future of our country will be tinted with gold, so long as we all believe that nothing can go wrong.'

Joe's resolute expression and stentorian tones, are deliberately at odds with his asinine words.

Instead of politicians announcing state-sponsored nastiness in the flat voice of polite conversation – the 'sofa politics' we have become accustomed to, this is airy fairy nonsense delivered with Churchillian gravity. He continues in the same vein:

'If only we have confidence in ourselves, then the benefits of wellbeing shall be ours. All we have to be depressed about, Ladies and Gentlemen, is depression itself. Thus I call upon you – nay, I implore you – to keep taking the tablets. For they have been specially made by our little helpers to be the helpmeet of your dreams.'

In widening circles around Joe, there are signs first of bemused interest, now turning to ripples of laughter. Out come the iPhones – this is becoming an event within the event. Everyone wants a picture of Joe, and he's getting into his stride: big gestures, lugubrious eyes, cavernous red mouth and a succession of elongated syllables that seem to go on for ever.

'At the Uuuuuuniversity of Strategic Optimismmmmmmmmmm, yooooooou've never had it so goooooo...!'

This last word was ever so rudely interrupted. It was going to be 'good' when Joe started mouthing the word. But it didn't end up there; didn't reach its intended destination.

Joe's on the ground, you see, trying to protect himself. His fluttering hands suggest he doesn't know which is worth saving – his brain or his balls. Meanwhile the blows rain down all over him.

In a subsequent inquiry, police officers will say that it was operationally essential to immobilize the protagonist prior to arrest.

And what of Joe's friends and his new found audience? Did they pile in to protect him from a beating? One or two steamed in looking as if they meant business, but they had no means of protecting themselves against riot batons. A couple of thwacks – blow to the shoulder, here; a bloody nose, there, and they were hesitating, soon to be retreating.

Of course there were legions of people photographing the scene, many of them starting to boo in the venerable tradition of the pantomime season. But by the time they got past the 'b', even before the

'oo', the snatch squad had him away. The star of Front Line Theatre was already behind police lines, about to be bundled into a prison van.

Less than half an hour later, Joe, now without belt or boots, stood in the cells at West End Central, asking for a lawyer. All in good time, came the reply. All in good time, said the custody officer, as he walked upstairs extremely slowly.

Meanwhile Dinky was long gone. Scarpered. Dropped the banner pole straightaway and ploughed 50 yards back through the crowd, then slowed down to a leisurely stroll. The picture of innocence; quite right too, since he had done nothing wrong. More than that, he had done nothing at all.

When they came to get Joe, the other person holding the other pole at the other end of the banner, name of Siouxsie or some such, had at least attempted to poke a policeman in the eye with it. Perhaps not a wholly convincing attempt, but more than a rhetorical gesture. She tried – that's the point, and though her brief effort was effortlessly brushed aside by a cop in full riot gear, she didn't have to feel guilty that she'd seen her mate beaten to the ground and arrested, and done absolutely nothing to defend him.

Of course, runaway Dinky was heart-stoppingly ashamed of himself. Gripped with guilt. Hating everything about his loathsome, gutless existence.

If only the ground would swallow him up in the same way that the police had engorged poor Joe. But no, he knew he didn't really mean that. He simply wasn't capable of feeling anything strongly enough to make him risk his neck. Obviously not, or he would have run the risk just now.

Five minutes after Joe was arrested, Dinky had already reached the edge of the crowd. There were plenty of people still coming to join the show, but he peeled himself away and went up Whitehall. Past the statues of war heroes and the Cenotaph. All these people ready and willing to die for what they believed in.

So what was wrong with him? What did everyone else have that Dinky Dutta couldn't share in?

## (14) Dangling man

##

An hour later, around the time Joe stopped shouting for a lawyer and sat down to wait on the blue plastic mattress in his cell, Dinky opened the front door and stepped inside the small terraced house which he shared with Rupa (paid for, it should be said, by his parents and hers). His shoulders drooped when it came home to him that there was no point in calling out to her: she'd be away, rehearsing for her next performance in the forthcoming round of the nation's

'most popular TV talent show'.

For want of something better to do, Dinky showered and shaved. While drying his hair he wandered from room to room. In the pile of papers on his workstation (he and Rupa had one each, facing each other across what, in a family home, would have been the 'dining area'), he came across a copy of the last piece of work he had done for his course, complete with highly favorable comments from the assessors. In his naturally lush voice, Dinky began reading it out to himself. Not loud, but intimately, as if to a radio microphone. It was called,

'No Face', and this is what he read: It looks perfectly all right when I wear a mask.

When I'm wearing one, you wouldn't know there is no face behind it. My life used to be so complicated, having to wait for masked balls and hanging around operating theatres. But now, thanks to the popularity of anti-pollution masks, especially in Asia, I can cover up any time and blend right into the crowd. Faceless in the crowd – that's me. All it takes is a square of muslin and a piece of elastic.

When UK prime minister David Cameron toured Beijing today, I fitted in fine with the party members and the British trade delegation. Just another Chinese official. I should think he suffers from asthma: he's got that thing on to keep the Beijing smog out of his face. Wouldn't you agree, George?

I joined the posse at Beijing Tesco's. Yes, the same company, and the same blue and white colour scheme you have in the UK. I stepped into line with the others. One minute I wasn't there; next minute I was. If you had noticed me making my entrance - and nobody did - you might have thought I'd come right off the supermarket shelves.

The next bit was trickier. I had to get close enough to David Cameron to hand it to him. I thought about dressing as a soldier and lining up on parade. But that wouldn't have helped: Chinese soldiers on ceremonial duty are not meant to move; on pain of death. Handing something to the visiting dignitary might have got me shot.

I saw my opportunity when the delegation arrived at a former temple, where Cameron was due to be photographed sitting round a table with a couple of 'social entrepreneurs'. As the scene was being set, I pulled up an extra chair and joined them.

Now there were three of us along one side of the rectangular table, backs to the camera; plus two interpreters, in profile, one on each of the table's short sides; and Cameron on the side opposite us, full face. (Such a pink and creamy white face. When I think back to that moment, I can't help imagining it on a skewer, next to a row of animal carcasses).

So I sat still while my new middle class compatriots said their little their piece – one via an interpreter, the other showing an impressive command of English. When Cameron had duly replied to the others, all eyes turned to me. Thank you for giving me my cue, I thought.

I reached out across the table, extending my right arm to Cameron as if to shake hands with him. He saw me doing it and reciprocated – too polite to do anything else, despite what his security people tell him. At which point I palmed the small circle of black card into his well manicured hand. The pirates'

summons. The black spot. A call to account imbued with the weight of history; a small sign notifying the recipient of the momentous day of reckoning.

There was no date on the back, and even I don't know when it will be. But our day will come, Mr Cameron.

Our day will come.

Not bad, Dinky is thinking. He lets himself think it again.

But not good enough. Too slight, too light. Just not enough.

He picks up his old-fashioned cigarette lighter and thumbs it. Now he's holding his piece of writing (What is it anyway? Not a short story, not a poem; a sad case of too much genre bending), holding it over a waste basket and lighting it up. He feels something go out of him as the flame gets stronger, but he's letting it burn anyway, until there are only a few crumbs of browned paper to drop into the basket.

Moving quickly now, he goes to the kitchen for a bottle of beer, opens it, flicks on the television and sits down to light a cigarette. He doesn't check to see what else is on, but sticks with whatever comes up on the channel it's already tuned to. Stays with that channel all night.

Dinky is sitting there in the dark. Stuck there, struck dumb. Dangling over the drop.

# Part 2. LIfe's a pitch

#

## (1) Rupa's got talent

##

Empty, now empty my mind, and let the song come through.

It's the same old...ssshhh! This is my time – now!

A rush of light, then the camera grabs her as she moves down stage. She is there for the taking. Come to us, little girl with lustrous eyes and blue black hair and breasts more tender than you seem to know.

We'll take you by the waist and bolt ourselves on to your delicious body. Now we've found you, we know it's true: this country's got talent.

A whole orchestra playing that riff. Then her voice: strong, tensile, reeling in the audience with a mixture of warmth and oh-so-casual disdain.

'I bet you wonder how I knew...'

By the time these words are out, she's taken over.

Before she's got to the end of the line, even. Two almost indecipherable syllables and the cadence between them, that's all it took. How'd it go?

'Aaah-uuh-I bet you wonder...' Aaah-uuh, twisted up. Not Marvin Gaye's straightforward anguish, hers is younger than that; but more complicated.

The way she sings, she's not even talking to the guy who broke her heart; instead she's looking in a mirror, putting on make-up, rehearsing how to break his. Or maybe she's doing it to webcam, for uploading on YouTube. Hey, people, look at me: this is me acting heartbroken. And there beyond the webcam that isn't really there, the television camera that really is.

Gonna make her a star.

Name of Rupa.

Ripped-up jeans. Face split between frightened eyes and a kiss-me mouth, ready to smile or snarl. We've all been ripped apart, haven't we? Then put back together in that face.

And her voice is like skin. She touches us with it.

It is how she surfaces. She uses her voice to break through to you and to hold herself together, both at the same time.

And she can do it, this double-act. In a few seconds they'll all be cheering her, because she's doing it absolutely right, right now. At this very moment, she's the do-right woman.

Only because of before. Before tonight, all those evenings through the rain and wind to the after-school music school.

When she started there, aged six, Dad would hoist her up and jog through the streets of East London, carrying his little girl on his shoulders. In sunlight, twilight, and wrapped up warm for winter nights, they kept on going. Then there were vocal exercises to do at home. Brush your teeth, sing your scales; brush your hair, sing those scales again. And now, as she moves down stage for the camera to take her, just as she gets to her mark and hears the cue for her first note, she can let go. She can afford to. Tonight she can spend, spend, spend. Because she has all those years in the bank.

When next she notices, after a burst of applause not for a high note but for having held a low one longer, so much longer than a young girl should, she finds she's still in credit.

Her voice is on the money; the audience feels enriched by it. Her singing is like an exceptional payment for all the time we have lost. Whenever she hits a note dead-on, then plays with it in her mouth, wobbles it, pulls it over like a loose tooth, we can all have a little of our life back.

Rupa's singing for her life, for the kind of life she wants to lead; and we can hear our own lives accumulating in the grain of her voice.

Last note. She curtsies. As if auditioning for the corps de ballet. Can you believe that? The West, the East, the Past: this girl's got it all.

In the auditorium, the audience goes wild for her. The judges can't get them to shut up. They have to roll the credits with cheering and foot stomping still going on. Somebody's already written tomorrow's headline:

'Supa Rupa'.

## (2) Pete at home

##

My son and daughter are bickering over what to watch on TV. One of them grabs the remote and the other groans in protest. Any second now, I'm going to yell at them to stop. My voice at the back of my throat

– I can feel it, about to come out shouting; but I manage to gag it down.

Palms out, hands slightly splayed, as if pushing my own children away, I walk quickly from the room.

This is Pete in the kitchen of his South London home (Edwardian terrace, red brick). Standing still.

Head bowed, holding on to a chair. Holding on.

A few deep breaths. Yep, just stick to the breathing for now, Pete.

This evening he's on his own with the kids and just as well. If wife Carol were here she'd worry (needlessly) that he was ill.

Only a hangover. Not the head-busting dehydration frenzy that frequently followed the drinking bouts of his youth. Now he knows (always did know, really) to drink lots of water and take two paracetamol before getting into bed; lots more water and two ibroprufen when getting up to pee two hours later.

2x2x2 is Pete's time-honoured formula for avoiding the dread head of a hangover. But it does nothing to prevent that feeling of alcohol-induced weakness, as if your limbs are repeatedly on the point of going numb before tipping back into a semblance of normality.

That and the slowing of the brain.

Pete keeps thinking of what he's thinking a split second after having thought it. Intimations of mortality, he says to himself, his mind enunciating the words laboriously (there you go, it's happening again).

All day like this. To work. On campus. Back home.

The hours dragging on, walking across his mind as slowly as Clint Eastwood.

In the attempt to get back up to speed, the trick learned from previous experience is to keep talking.

Find any excuse to carry on conversations with colleagues, students, the woman at the coffee shop, cleaners, DLR 'train attendants' – anyone will do.

Once you've struck up a conversation, their expectations of you – Dr Fercoughsey, rock musician (ret'd), former journalist, university lecturer –

will carry you through. Keep you on the straight and narrow. From which you strayed last night with your old mate Tony bloody Skance.

Last night. Only one night in God knows how long. So that's all right, then, right?

No, not at all, all right. Here you are, Dr Nobody, not only physically fragile but feeling low and dispirited, too. Hankering after a life you haven't got. Wanting the attention, the limelight you yourself turned off, that day 20 years ago when you walked out of the band.

Punched your own lights out, Pete. Can't complain now about the dark.

Pete's daughter Lily (13) comes into the kitchen because she wants a Coke. She knows her father will ask her to make do with juice or water. The two of them are bound to have a tinsy-winsy tussle over this. That's what they do, these two. But Lily starts with a different question:

'You all right, Dad?', spoken quickly because she doesn't want him to open up and say he's not. Then she leans over and just touches the nape of his neck, resting her hand there for a moment, as if she were his mother. 'Am now', replies Pete, turning round to give his daughter a fatherly hug.

'Aaah, so that's who I am', thinks Pete.

No more thinking needed. That's enough thought for the day.

## (3) Dinky goes for interview

##

Shut the front door behind me. Do not stop. No, do not stop to check if it is shut. Four, five, six paces down this street of terraced houses, a neat row like ships of the line, pause to light cigarette, shoulders hunching, bunching to keep the wind away. Zippo, heavy in my hand; a lighter not a logo. My thumb flicks the lid, fires wheel.

Almost gag on the first drag. Exhale and walk on.

First cigarette of the day. This summer's day so crisp and sunny that the air itself is blue with brightness.

In Central Park, East Ham, on my way to Canary Wharf.

The day of my interview with Tony Skance.

Managing to forget his deserting-a-demonstration debacle, Dinky has been basking in his small success (in this age of grade inflation, what else to call a first class degree from a mid-ranking university?); and also in his father's largesse.

Dad already paid for the whole family's Easter holiday in Malta, shelling out extra for Dinky and girlfriend Rupa to have their own room at the resort (hewn out of red and yellow cliff in aptly named Golden Bay); and paid again for Dinky to throw a graduation party, back at the parental home in Essex.

Dad's a banker. Rhyme it how you like.

Party night included a special highlight: Dinky and his best friend from way back when taking it strictly in turns to smack each other in the face.

Of course, not exactly Fight Club. Simply, how many punches can you stand and take without flinching?

(No blood on Mum's carpet, OK, so please remove rings and avoid nose and mouth.) Here goes another one: bang! Dinky's schoolmate Stephen even said 'bang' each time he left fly.

Obligingly. At the receiving end, it felt more like a heavy thud, then the first throb of a headache that was over almost before it started. Except after four or five of these, the headache didn't go. Lingered like an old friend should. Then someone told Rupa and she made them stop it, 'before you really hurt yourselves.' They did, but only to please her.

That night they were on top of the world, nothing could harm them, don't you see?

Now the party's over. Back in London, Dinky is waiting for the 101 bus to the Docklands Light Railway station in Beckton. He's been waiting nearly 20 minutes. He should have walked.

At last, there's a bus turning right at the old town hall (Edwardian architecture evokes the British Raj), snaking down High Street South towards Dinky's stop. Eventually.

Old woman gets on in front of me. Fluttery, bird-like. Pecked at since the day she was born. Are you all right, hen? No, that's Glasgow, doesn't translate round here.

'Maybe she even chose to be small and thin,' Dinky thinks, 'so that no one could accuse her of taking up too much room. She looks so frail, it makes me want to do something to re-assure her, let her know we're not all red in tooth and claw.'

I'd carry her shopping but the bags she's holding are still folded up and empty -

she's on her way to Asda right now. I'd put my arms around her and hug her, only it would scare her even more. But I don't want her to live another moment in fear. She'd be better off dead than a leading a fearful life. Take her to the death camp. There's nothing else to be done with her.

No, course not. I never said that. Don't know where it came from.

I get off the bus at Beckton. I'm walking up the steps onto the DLR platform. Glance towards Arshad behind the counter at the coffee stall. Know him from my course. We were in a band together in my first year. No time to stop: train indicator says 1min; but as I catch his eye his head tips back towards the pretty girl he's serving and he smiles, leers even, but not so she can see. Beep, my Oyster card. Beep, beep, beep, the doors closing right behind me. Just in time. 'This train is bound for Tower Gateway'. Not me, though. I'll be getting off at Poplar and taking the tradesmen's entrance into Canary Wharf. Past the dingy bit that's still boarded up – what have they been doing in there all this time?

In a few minutes I'll be threading my way between gleaming towers that are just about as old as I am.

I'm 23 this year. One of Thatcher's children (born just in time to qualify). And today I'll be revisiting scenes from my childhood. For instance, me and my sister Shani were the first kids ever to try the children's menu at Carluccio's in Canary Wharf. How about that? (Between you and me, it's McDonald's for the middle classes.) We grew up in this part of the world. Coming to see Dad, going to a restaurant together – it was a treat for us. The Wharf, you see, is where my dad does the business I'd rather not talk about. Also where Tony Skance has his office, courtesy of the London Committee for the Implementation of the Olympic Games.

A couple more stations to go before get off.

Gallion's Reach (no, the spelling is correct), then Cyprus, where the Docklands university campus looks out at the surrounding district like the bridge of a ship going nowhere. Another station and we're in sight of ExCel. Is it a verb? No, an enormous conference and exhibition centre, so big it dominates the landscape from Beckon Gas Works to Canary Wharf. Just before that, though, there's my favourite.

Next to the flat plane of water in Royal Albert Dock (blue water today; when there are clouds above it can be milky white), the office block made only of plate glass. Of course it isn't really, but it's made to look as if it is. When I started my course, it was totally empty – no occupants.

See right through it. Sheer emptiness, boxed up.

Emptiness squared. Now occupied by Newhamlet Council, they've even called it 'Newhamlet Dockside'. There's lots of signage which spoils the overall effect. Or is it even better for the contrast, those hoardings and transparent meeting rooms, and little black figures set against all that white space?

Don't know what they are doing in there. Is it the council's IT people, or something to do with the Olympics? That's what I've heard. Or perhaps a bit of each: computer geeks working for the council on the Olympics Legacy? You never know, maybe everything adds up after all.

Jackpot for me would be all that glass, breaking. I love the sound of breaking glass. Cliché alert, I know and I'm sorry, but it happens to be true. Even better without sound, though. Shards like arrows, piercing walls and clothes and flesh alike, puncturing veins and arteries so that blood pumps out like rich, red oil; or sprays everywhere like racing drivers' champagne. But no soundtrack: movie without music, ballet without a band, just the pitter-patter of dancers' feet, not necessarily attached to the torso they started out with.

Then the orchestra of alarms and phones and muffled voices and the most blood-curdling screams you will ever hear.

Didn't choose to think those thoughts, so don't look at me like that. Anyhow you can't see what I'm thinking. You can't, can you? Off the train fast, just in case.

Fleeting feeling of vertigo as I glance up towards the Peeping Tower – that's what we used to call it because of the warning light on top that goes peep, peep, peep. Then down the steps, avoid the clotted spit ('Hunslet oysters', my Dad says when he goes all Yorkshire, talking about Bradford and how his father met Ted Moult – farmer, broadcaster, professional Plain Man – on the train North out of King's Cross). Walking quickly away from places the plebs live in (the problem with Poplar is it's popular), towards the land of marble floors and Security, where light can be warm and pin-sharp at the same time.

## (4) Dinky and Tony: only connect

##

Fuck you, missus. No, of course I don't say it aloud. But I would if I could. Fuck her. She would be standing in front of her desk, as she is now. I would come up close, looking her over, up and down, then swing her round. Squeezing her right buttock in one hand, I would use my left hand to push her, face down, over the desk, then pull her skirt up and pants down so that her sweet fanny is smiling up at me. Meanwhile my cock is smiling back. Wye-aye! I might just dip my finger in her, and rest it there, savouring the moment before shoving in. And of course she wants me to do her like this.

'I'll show you in to Tony's office,' she purrs.

No she doesn't, but Dinky has been watching Mad Men and he wants to think that she does.

'Mr Skance is expecting you.'

Can I go through with this? How can I not? Dinky Dutta, prize winning graduate from a low-score university, dark brown eyes, caramel skin, whippet thin. Here to ask Mr Fairly Big for a nearly-job in his something office for the not quite Olympics, and why the fuck should I be asking to join this shit, except if not this shit what else?

Big space, minimal decoration. I notice two gold discs on the wall above Tony's desk. Take a step towards the meeting area (is that what it said on the blueprint?): three leather seats that look like they're from an E-type Jag; coffee table in between.

But Tony waves me back towards his desk. I'm to occupy the single chair in front of it.

What do young people really want?, Tony asks himself as Dinky is delivered unto him. What's this one looking for, really? He is sharp and neat and really quite elegant; and he says he wants to work for me.

Like fuck.

'Let's skip the pleasantries, shall we?' Tony begins. 'Tell me about yourself, Mr Dutta. What is your ambition?'

Dinky has his answer down pat: 'I hope to be a revolutionary writer but I fear it's too early to tell.'

'Noted as a small but beautifully formed response,'

replies Tony. 'Very much in character.'

Touché! Got you in one, didn't I? Dinky's downcast eyes concede the point.

'But of course,' Tony continues, 'it only prompts another question. How does the Cultural Olympiad come into this? It's not going to make you a revolutionary, is it?'

Dinky hesitates, then decides – too strong a word, perhaps – that he has nothing to lose. If Skance doesn't get what he's about to say to him, he won't get the job. But anyway it isn't a proper job and Dinky won't starve even if he doesn't get it.

There's Dad; there's always Dad. So here goes:

'If it works, if it's done right'...Head cocked at an angle, Dinky is looking at Tony in a pantomime of consideration, evaluation, appraisal. It could almost be Tony looking at Pete; it could very nearly be Pete looking at Tony. Either way, Tony is hooked.

'...if it's done right, Games Time – that's what you call it, isn't it? Games Time will be the moment when the people of London get back together. London will start to feel young again. But from where I am, looks like no one knows how to get the party started. There's your kind of people on the inside and then all the other people outside... and there's not much connection between them. No lively, dynamic connection, anyway.

'Next problem', continues Dinky. 'How do you drag them out of their coma? Both sides are like brain dead. Do you shock 'em out of it or can you kiss 'em into life again? I bet you don't know. As soon as I walked in here I could tell you really don't know.'

Pause, nicely timed.

'But maybe I can help,' he concludes.

Dinky sits back: there it is, daddio, that's how it is. At least, that's how he's played it, like he's one of those street kids who really knows the score, Man.

Tony is taken aback; tries not to gasp in amazement.

If you're seen to be shocked, Tony, it'll mean total victory for the young. You'll be Bill Grundy the rest of your life. But Tony's not gasping because of the generation gap between Dinky and himself; he's amazed how close they are.

The kid knows, this kid really knows. There is a sensation, familiar but rarely felt in recent years, half-way down Tony's spine, half-way between shivering and tingling: it works its way up, spreads across his shoulder blades and further up past his neck, pricking him (tiny, little needles) on the back of his head. Might even burst into tears, Tony is so relieved to feel excited about someone again.

'And just how do you know all this?' he asks, stonewalling.

No response. Does Dinky have anything else to say?

Maybe. Maybe not, since he's just made a do-ordie, all-or-nothing statement. Either way, he says nothing. Nothing is said. Doesn't do anything, either, except for the tiniest, repetitive twitch of his right leg, Tony notices. But what he's really noticed is Dinky's nervous appetite, the hunger for something to do; something real. Dinky's so eaten up by it, he may have handed himself to Tony on a plate.

Mr Skance leans back to consider the menu.

Let,s pick our way through him. Let,s see how much of him can be consumed. The boy (he,s not much more than that) is looking away, but Tony stares into his eyes and dares Dinky not to look back at him. He speaks only when Dinky has met his gaze.

'Are you prepared to do something about it, then?' Tony demands.

'Of course, that's what I'm here for.'

'Oh, I don't mean the usual stuff, Dinky. I'm not talking about a bit of Facebook and some Tweeting that'll make it look like we're in with the social media generation. Of course, I'm sure you could do that for us. If that's all you can do, I'm happy to arrange for you to do it. But I'm really thinking about something exceptional, that only an exceptional kind of person could do. You are that kind of person, aren't you?'

'Depends.'

'You're right. Absolutely right, old darling.

Absolutely fucking right, my sweet.'

Ttcch! Even a camp version of intimacy

\- hamming up 'the seducer' in order to seduce - is coming on too strong. Tony has to remind himself to slow down: sober syllables; precise enunciation. Still sounds too much like John Gielgud and not enough Alec Guinness.

'How right you are, Mr Dutta. There is a lot depending on it. More or less as you describe, London could come together again in the next few weeks, the same way it did over Princess Di, or during the Blitz, or on 7/7.'

Where's he going with this? Dinky is starting to look askance at Tony.

Don't pause there, but don't be in too much of a hurry, either, Tony says to himself.

'But if that doesn't happen,' he continues, 'if London doesn't take the opportunity to be what only London can be, it could lose its own identity. It might turn into one of those has-been cities that used to be important.

'Venice, Vienna, Genoa...

No, mate, don't even think of saying it.

Not 'Jamaica', either.

'...cities that gripped the world until they fell into the grip of their own, personal Alzheimer's.

And that's what could happen to London if we don't fire it up this time.'

'You mean you want London to burn, Mr Skance?'

Dinky's turn to play up the formalities. He cocks his head another 20 degrees to the right, looks up at Tony with his cat's eyes and a simpering mouth.'

Dinky, are you asking for a smack, or what?

'It's the Olympic Games we're talking about,' Dinky insists. 'Not Towering Inferno.'

Siamese cat meets lumbering bulldog; Tony has never felt so British, or so cumbersome. Knows it, but he just gets more pompous.

'Partly a metaphor, my dear Mr Dutta. And partly not. Have you read James Baldwin, by the way?' Not that Tony waits for the answer. 'The point is, even the best buildings and the best run facilities in the world, won't make the Games a success if London doesn't have any atmosphere.

'Do you know what it's like here in Docklands on Saturdays? When the big money's gone away for the weekend and the hotels take in poor provincials on short breaks, who eat too much of the breakfast buffet because they've already paid for it. Never mind the architecture or the décor, every Saturday afternoon, it all looks tawdry, desultory, sad.

Saturday morning's OK because there's a hangover from last night. Sunday evening, it starts gearing up for tomorrow. But round here, Saturday night and Sunday morning are a foretaste of London losing it. The whole place dies a little. It's London's petit mort.

'OK, you're too young to know what that feels like. I bet you can do it and get hard again straightaway... But I digress. Just think about the day in the last decade when London came most alive.

Not even the day we were awarded the Games, was it?

'Of course you remember the camera panning round to the multicultural schoolkids jumping for joy.

Whoosh! They came up off their chairs like chubby little rockets. Happiness missiles plus puppy fat.

"Momentous day", said Seb. Lord Coe, to you. But we both know what topped it, don't we? The biggest hit wasn't the sixth of July 2005, it was the day after that when the bombers struck. Death and destruction on the streets of London, and the Cockneys came together like their grandparents in 1940.

'It was a golden moment. The oldies would have been proud.'

Tony is at full stride now. There ain't no stopping him:

'The question is: how can we make our people proud of the London Olympics? As you so astutely put it:

"do we shock 'em or kiss 'em?" The answer is that we shock them into kissing each other, we frighten them into feeling like a community. And, yes, I know it's as daft as a Jimmy Savile tracksuit. But nothing else can fix it.'

Can't decide whether to get up and leave.

Did I hear him right? Have I got it right, what he's getting at? Dinky has that feeling of being there and observing the whole scene from the outside, of being on stage and in the audience at the same time. He doesn't move. Thinks he should, knows he should, thinks about saying

'I must be going now'. But nobody moves.

The seconds are clocking up. There's a phone ringing, unanswered, in the outer office. That PA person must have gone to the loo, or she's having a cigarette, or having a shag in the loo and then a fag, afterwards. Suddenly – it seemed sudden but it probably wasn't, Tony has walked round from behind his desk, now he's squatting down directly in front of Dinky. Hand on his knee, even; and he's close enough to kiss him.

Of course he's not going to push his tongue in Dinky's mouth. Then again, it couldn't be any less absurd than the speech he's just made. A stolen kiss between interviewer and interviewee - what's that compared to talking mass murder? But that can't be what he really meant, can it?

No let up from Tony: 'You know the story of Orson Welles, don't you, Dinky? You know what made his name? The spoof radio broadcast of the Martians attacking America. Imagine something as dramatic as that, but before anyone gets to know it's fake, the story goes out that the bombs have been defused, in the nick of time. And our hearts go out to the guy who breaks the story – you. "The terrorists may have managed to escape but London can breathe a collective sigh of relief that their murderous scheme has been thwarted", reports citizen journalist Dinky Dutta. You'll be a household...

'Now you want me to be a Martian', Dinky interjects.

Tony is unruffled, though a lock of hair falls down over his forehead, so that his face forms a perfect oval. The effect is less Michael Heseltine and more, well, Christ-like.

So which of them will be lamb to the slaughter? Tony or Dinky?

'Nobody will know that the terrorist plot against the Games was just a work of imaginative fiction,'

Tony insists. 'And when the story is released, it will be the shared experience that London really needs. As soon as it is aired, this city will get its mojo working again.

'This is how it'll work: the people of London come together to search for the bombers. After the manhunt has been going on for a day or so, we have confirmation that the plot is foiled, the bombers have escaped to Pakistan or the Yemen or somewhere. But London is safe. Saved by the collective efforts of its population. Proof at last: there is such a thing as society. It's Orson Welles, it's Metropolis, it's 7/7 all rolled into one. Tell me, honestly, can you come up with a sexier storyline than that?'

Dinky's not buying. For a moment he was almost sold on Tony's iconic appearance. And the chance to be in the middle of such a dense compound of truth and lies and, y'know, there's not really much difference nowadays, is there? He runs the scene through his mind for a couple of seconds and it sounds almost all right; and then the whole thing loses height, comes crashing down to an ageing pop singer turned unsuccessful cultural policy wonk and perhaps a bit pervy as well.

Don't think you can play me so easily, Tony So-and-So. You're rank, Mr Skank.

Dinky is still sitting in the same chair, the strait-backed office chair that he was invited to sit in when he came here for interview – must have been a million years ago. He shakes, shakes, shakes his head. But Tony's not quite finished.

'Society is spectacle, Dinky. You know that as much as I do. Today we live on the spectacular, and if we can't produce it, we're dead. Beijing was spectacular because of the stadium. Because there was that stadium in 2008, after less then 30 years'

spectacular economic growth. But London sold itself as the spectacular example of people coming together in a multicultural city. The city is the stadium, Dinky, and right now there is nothing spectacular about it. Nothing going on out there that the rest of the world needs to see. We have to turn that around. Détournement, kiddo – they did teach you some political theory, didn't they? Your Johnny Rotten to my Malcolm McLaren, by any means necessary. Or there's no future for any of us in this burg.'

'Burg'? You crazy, Tony? Nobody reads Dashiell Hammett no more. Anyhow, to carry that one off, you would need a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a blood-flecked, TB-infected handkerchief in the other. Naaah, you're just too pink and fat to get away with it.

Tony's voice falls way, the last phrase already a climb down. As he falters, so Dinky firms up, finally finding the courage to get up and walk out of Tony's office.

Not looking back, not mouthing any of those end-of-meeting niceties, Dinky leaves Tony's PA open-mouthed. For a moment, clocking his derrière, she almost fancies him.

Going down in the lift, handing back his visitor's badge, Dinky has time to think about how his exit must have looked. He catches himself wondering whether he really ought to have wiggled his bum a bit more. To get the full sashay.

## (5) Dinky and Rupa: home sweet home

##

Thud of the car door as I smooth my silk dress under my bottom, the way Mum taught me to. Thud, thud, thud – heavy rain drops on to the roof of the car as the driver walks round the back, gets in and starts the engine.

So this is how it would be all the time, if I hadn't messed up my last performance and got myself voted off the show. There would have been cars to studios, cars to clubs, 'car's ready when you are, Miss.' If I hadn't lost tonight, if I hadn't lost it.

Now this is a death ride and a ride home, all in one.

The one and only. Back to reality and no going back.

Where did our love go? That first night, I knew the camera wanted me so much. I wasn't wrong about you, was I? It really did feel that way. But today is tomorrow and, no, you don't love me still.

Bastard.

Dear Reader, you shouldn't feel too sorry for Rupa. Being a popstar wouldn't really have suited her, despite her despair as she goes wearily home in a taxi, through the summer rain to the East End terraced house she shares with Dinky.

Her slender, snake-hipped boy will be there to console her.

'Shahid,' Rupa calls out, as she puts the key in the door. By the time it's open he is there, arms akimbo and ready to encircle her in a comforting embrace.

That's not what Rupa wants. She strides over and kisses him, pushing her tongue through his lips, pulling his body onto her breasts and against her belly.

He knows not to speak. Instead he turns her around and unzips her silk dress at the back, planting a line of kisses all the way down her spine and up again to her neck. With just one more touch from Dinky, the sleeveless dress slides down Rupa's body to the floor, and she steps gracefully out of it.

Sweet Jesus. She is naked. Must have squirmed her way out of her knickers in the back of the car. Maybe the driver got a flash in the mirror. O Lucky Man. Lucky Dink.

Lucked in, tonight's the night – he can't keep the schoolboy phrases out of his head. But what's making him extra hard is not her body or how much he wants it. The sexiest thing is her needing him.

Standing naked in front of him, saying nothing, Rupa is light brown and blue black and her nipples are hard. He is kissing, nibbling one of them now, as he parts the pinky purple flesh of her fanny with his forefinger, feeling for the luscious wetness inside.

With his other hand he is fiddling with his fly (come on, come on), and now he's got it out, he's lifting her onto the end of his cock and holding her there.

She's feeling she wants more of him in her, but then she's thinking of herself thinking this and the

'him' becomes an 'it'; and then she's even thinking about thinking of 'it' not 'him'. All of which is too many steps removed from a feeling which was all too fleeting in the first place.

Dinky ain't daft. He can feel it going, ebbing out of her. Looks at her eyes, checks her expression, and instead of carrying on, trying to recapture the momentum of her desire, he stops, thank God, and pulls out. Holds her very tight. Doesn't let her say 'Sorry, I thought I wanted to'. Well he can't stop her, but it's only a sort of mumble into his neck. Then, face to face, hand in hand, they go upstairs to the bedroom. As they lie down, they smile at each other: a warm smile, a tender smile.

A few minutes later, despite Dinky's stiffy that hasn't gone down yet, they are both asleep in each other's arms.

And if perchance they wake in the middle of the night and do it anyway - well, that's for you to imagine.

## (6) Domestic Tension

##

Middle of the night. Awake now and wishing they weren't.

Odd to have felt so close together earlier, when they'd hung back from having sex; whereas now they've done it anyway (they did, you see), now they really should be in a tender embrace, there is only Dinky and Rupa. Rupa.

And Dinky. Distant and closed as a pair of full stops.

No major falling out. They're not splitting up, or anything. Just two people again; two different people.

Dinky is smoking in bed, which Rupa doesn't like; and he is stroking her shoulder, which she would like, normally, except she wants to talk. No, she wants him to talk and he's not.

Not talking.

So far she's prized out of him that he went to see Tony Skance and he doesn't think anything will come of it, but he's not saying why or what went wrong.

Of the day's other, major setback – Rupa's forced exit from the nation's best-loved TV talent show –

he can only say her performance was good, really it was good; no way it should be her that has to leave the competition.

He keeps saying just this, so much and no more, that she wonders whether he really watched it all.

And which would be worse – that he didn't bother to watch her on TV, or that he hasn't got anything to say about her performance?

Rupa sighs. Dinky stubs out another one. In a few minutes they will both be asleep again: not quite touching; not far enough away to be decidedly apart.

But just before going to sleep, she will have said:

'Got things to do round here tomorrow. Day after, I'll go see Mum and Dad. Haven't seen much of them for ages. Stay a few days and let them make a fuss of me. Is that OK with you?'

And he will say, 'Right, sure'. Trying to sound warm but feeling cold towards her and even more so because he's been made to feel he shouldn't show it.

Really, though, there's no great harm done. Considering they both suffered big disappointments today, they've done pretty well to keep it together this much.

So let's have a round of applause for our Mr and Mrs, Dinky and Rupa.

## (7) Only dreaming

##

Tony Blair at the airfield when Diana's body was brought back. Except it's not that Tony but this Tony. Our Tony. Except he never had a Mam and Dad to call him 'our Tony'. They weren't that kind of people, they would never have said that, our Tony's people.

Not that it matters. None of it matters. That's what.

And the street parties for VE Day (have we been here before?). And the street parties for the Queen's Silver Jubilee, 1977. The children are fatter in these pictures. Their teeth are not crooked and their ears don't stick out anymore. Not so much.

Meanwhile the Sex Pistols were playing on a boat hired by Malcolm McLaren. Having our own kind of party, Officer.

Is that Tony Skance in the photograph? No, sorry, my mistake. It,s Glen Matlock.

Surely not Dinky's dream, 'cos how would he know about the Sex Pistols? Cultural Studies, mate. Core textbook, England's Dreaming, the definitive history of Punk by Jon Savage. It's an established part of the curriculum.

Debris in the vicinity of Russell Square. Acres of mobile phone footage from underground bombings.

It's all so vague, General Haig. All smoke looks alike on camera; all cows are grey; all poppies are blood red.

Running through the blue and white tape that runs round the bloody blown-up bus. Dinky Dutta, victor ludorum.

Before university, you see, he did go to a school where Latin was the lingua franca.

'I did it for London', says Tony. Tony Who? 'I did it for Carol,' says Pete. 'London does it for me', Dinky says, definitively. It definitely is him, this time.

Dream goes off like a light. But whose head was it running in? Answer me that.

## (8) Presenting Purgatory

##

Shutthefuckupyouwankeryouabsolute pieceofshitshutup.

Tony is in another meeting. He is having to listen to yet another presentation about the significance of people making the Games their own, and the importance of inter-agency collaboration to facilitate this. Going forward.

Accordingly, the professional representatives of various Olympics-oriented agencies are sitting in a circle at this moment in time. They've done the rounds:

Hi, I'm David Allen, I lead on the Olympics for the Capital Development Agency; Hello, I'm Teresa Kelly, I'm Olympics champion in the Communities Office.

They have seen the video, yet another video, of people all round the country doing things. Any old thing. Mostly things they would have been doing anyway. But – this is all-important – doing them next to a banner that says 'London 2012'.

And now they are listening (is anyone listening?) to more talk about the value of agencies getting together so that we can get the people together.

Everyone out there, each individual at a level s/he feels comfortable with, communing with each other. The Spirit of London, Allen Ginsberg's wholly communion, brought about by inter-agency collaboration, coming out of our silos, working together sustainably, singing from the same hymn sheet.

Still in use, that one; but not 'joined up government', which is as old as New Labour.

Tony is trying to place the woman in the midst of this liturgy. The one giving the sermon. Sorry, making the presentation. Not as in name, rank, organisation. No need for that; her personal information appeared on the first slide. Rhianna Tulepo, Head of Sustainability, Olympics Legacy Commission. Also appearing on the first slide, though Rhianna was standing there for everyone to see, her photograph; and for networking afterwards, when you're speaking to the personification of the photo, she'll be wearing ID.

Is it me or are we all OD'ing on ID?

But Tony's wondering who Rhianna was before doing this, and what does she think it is she is doing now? Parentage: Hispanic and Irish, Tony reckons.

Or Scottish. Anyway, a McSpic.

Like it, must use it somewhere, appropriately ironised, of course.

Age: fit-looking early forties, which would make her a veteran of illegal raves, late eighties, early nineties, ecstasy in a field, Chill the Bill in Adidas tops.

Now it's linen dress, coffee-coloured legs (bare), maroon lipstick, asymmetrical hair, mouth like an old trout but the eyes are still young. In her younger days, she might have been attached to a dog-on-a-string. Now she is normally accompanied by a four-year-old with difficulties: her son, Hal.

Hal comes with me everywhere. Almost everywhere. He sits and draws so beautifully.

He sits so beautifully and draws. Hal is on the autism spectrum. The specialist says he doesn't know where.

But, really, I know my own son better than anyone.

Perhaps that's it. Maybe Tony is somewhere on the autism spectrum. That would explain why he's not connecting with all these people, gathered here today to make connections. Come to think of it, maybe we're all autistic now. Because nobody is.

Connected, that is. All round the circle, there are people not quite making contact. Close enough to make it seem as if they are; but all the time they are looking fractionally to the side of each other –

a glancing g(r)aze. The lucky ones are those facing the window, thankfully not blacked out for the presentation. They, at least, have something to look through to.

Through the window, so close that it seems to be almost touching the glass, there is a large, blue-grey rectangle: it's the Royal Victoria Dock (water's a bit choppy for a summer's day). Beyond the dock, and the water in it, a strip of built-up land. Then another strip of water, followed by more and more buildings as far as the eye can see. The eye can only see as far as the steep rise to Crystal Palace and its telecoms tower, which stands at the top lip of London's hollow.

'Another strip of water', described above, is really the River Thames; except from here you can't see that it is water; still less that it's the Thames. Unless you already knew the river was there, in normal circumstances you'd only notice a set of buildings, then the second set, and the gap between them which might make you wonder where the third set of buildings must have gone (the ones that ought to be there in the middle).

Not today, though. Right now, among the buildings, apparently, the masts and sails of a tall ship are moving upstream, making a mockery of the landscape, and tracing the course of the river ('cos now you've seen the masts so high, you can also work out what's down below).

At this point, nearly everyone's watching the ship as it appears to travel along North Woolwich Road.

Even attendees with their backs to the window, are first craning their necks, then swivelling right round to see it, barely pretending to pay attention to Rhianna's presentation. At last they really are looking in the same direction, sharing an experience, because for once there is something beautiful for them all to look at.

The Head of Sustainability at the Olympics Legacy Commission is trying not to be put off.

Why doesn't she stop to see? But, of course, the no-show must go on.

Distracted by everyone else being distracted, Rhianna is stumbling, starting to lose her lines when Tony experiences a sudden throb in the groin.

It's his phone, set to silent, nestled deep in his trouser pocket (pants, if you're American). He could have turned it off, or simply waited for it to stop while enjoying (slightly) the vibration.

Instead he makes it his cue to dive out of the room and take the call.

The call is from his PA, name of Lesley Dawson, the woman Dinky had visions of...y'know. The silly boy didn't pay enough attention to her voice, though. Though it is prim and proper with tints of Cheltenham Ladies' College, these are offset by the honey-gold texture of whisky and cigarettes. Quite a girl, our girl; and, of course, she is known in the office as 'Les'.

'Hi, Les', he says.

'Sorry to bother you with this, Tony'. She sounds a tad unnerved; not like Les at all. 'I've just had a strange call from that young man who was here yesterday.'

'Oh God', Tony interjects. Not an OMG or anything like it: he's feigning that cadence which implies boredom bordering on terminal exhaustion.

Les leaps back into the conversation so that Tony cannot possibly fall asleep – not even metaphorically. She reports that 'he said, and I quote, "It's a matter of life and death. You must get Tony to phone me now. Real lives depend on it".'

She rushes on: 'I can't believe it is... What he says, Tony. But he did sound so agitated, I just had to let you know in case there was something... going on, OK?'

Tony can picture her, standing behind her desk, because she too has become agitated, fiddling with the string of pearls she wears for the full Katharine Hepburn effect.

Les knows that Audrey is lovely but you've got to be hip to Katharine.

Tony, on the other hand, can now afford to relax.

For a moment, he too had been unnerved, in case Dinky had spoken to Les and spilled some beans about his invitation to terror. But Dinky couldn't have done any such thing, or Les would have to have said something and Tony would have to have been denying it by now. Instead Les is repeating what she started with: 'It's a matter of life and death. You must get Tony to phone me now.'

Yes, I'll get to the little sod, Tony thinks. But not before going into full charm mode with Les.

Smooth words poured out into what we used to call, 'a ladies' glass'.

'Lesley, munchkin, thank you so much for letting me know about this thoroughly strange boy. You're quite right, he is a weird one' – the 'r' slightly rolled; a semi-demi reference to the macabre.

'My fault for bringing him into the office', Tony continues. 'Let me have that number and I'll find out what he wants, just this once. And, Les, dear Lesley, if he ever calls again, just put the phone down on him. You're such an asset, darling. You're time is too precious for it to be wasted on the likes of him.'

Tacitly agreeing to be reassured by Tony's pantomime charm, she reads out the number which Dinky left for Tony to ring. He tells her he'll be back in the office later that afternoon. He waits for her to end the call and double checks that the connection is closed.

Can't be too careful. If Tony's going to have anything more to do with Dinky, there can be no crossed lines between his office and the toxic things the two of them will be talking about. Absolutely no leakage from one realm to the other.

## (9) But does he dare to eat the peach?

##

It occurs to Tony that maybe he should ignore Dinky altogether. Pretend what was said never was. If ever it's mentioned again, simply declare that 'the lad's making it up'. On the other hand, he can already taste the possibility; and it's starting to kick in like coffee on an empty stomach.

No coat, no bag, no need to go back into the meeting.

He picks up the low-key sound of half-hearted applause (so farewell then, Ms Tupelo) as he exits the building, punching in Dinky's number en route.

Dinky picks up but doesn't say anything. His silence puts Tony on the back foot. He might have played the next scene with the hint of a Southern drawl, slow and deliberate. Instead, Tony finds himself dithering like Charles Hawtree:

'Dinky...Shahid Dutta, is that you?'

'My dear Mr Skance', Dinky replies. 'How good of you to return my call.'

Fuck that, thinks Tony. This kid's 20-odd and he's playing me.

'Have you got something you wanted to say, Dinky?', he demands, brusquely.

'I have an offer for you, Tony. Yes, I think we're close enough now to be on first name terms, don't you? My offer is me. I'm offering myself. I've decided that it's better to do something, even if it's as contrived as you are. Better fake than never.'

Tony does his best to keep the excitement out of his voice. Slow it down, he thinks, and the kid will soon exhaust his self-confidence. He's so brittle, there can only be a limited supply. Then he'll be so much easier for me to play.

'That's very interesting, Dinky. And is there an explanation for this conversion? Have you recently passed a signpost to Damascus?

'No explanation, Tony. Not a conversion, either.

There is only the offer – take it or leave it.

Either put me in the picture, make the movie around me, or I'll take myself off and do something else.

Maybe I'll grow vegetables and tend my garden, instead of force-feeding people the way you want me to.'

Sounds cool, calm and collected, doesn't he? Quite the young James Bond, licensed to make it look like there's a kill. Of course, if you could have seen Dinky instead of just hearing his voice on the phone, you would know different. You would find him hunched, hunkered down over the phone in his hand, twisted over it and caressing it, as if it were both a new-born babe and a live grenade with the pin popped out.

But Dinky doesn't want us to see any of this. And Tony has no time to stop and work it all out. The one thing he's thinking about now is the offer of a lifetime; the bright, young man offering his own lifetime, just like that. Take it and make of it what you will.

Of course he's going to take it, and make as much use of it as he can: he's Tony Skance.

'That's great, Dinky. Y'know, I haven't had a chance... You've taken me by surprise. But let's meet tonight, on the river. I'll be on the Thames Clipper, the commuter boat going west from Canary Wharf. There's one leaving at five past nine, and I'd like you to get on it at the next stop, Tower Bridge. Meet me at the back of the boat, OK?'

Tony would have like Dinky to confirm. A single syllable could have done it. Not too much to ask, is it? But, no, not even a click, just call ended, and he's already gone. Doesn't matter, Tony tells himself, so long as he's there to meet me tonight.

## (10) Way down river

##

'Right, Dinky, here's the plan.'

They are at the back, where there's a roof over their heads but the sides of the boat are open to the elements. Still a maroon sky upriver, where the sun has not long gone down; city lights already twinkling in the darkening east.

Thames Clipper commuter craft, Woolwich to Waterloo. 9.15pm when Dinky got on at Tower, nobody else there at the back but the two of them.

Whoomph! And again, whoomph! No, not an explosion or anything like it; just their craft hitting the wash of another boat going the other way, throwing a delightfully cool spray into their hot faces.

For just that second, it could all be all right.

Dinky is looking tired now, and restless again. On the phone this afternoon he had sounded so settled, but there's not much left of his earlier resolve.

Then again, he's having to listen to Tony in full flow. Maybe that's what's getting to him.

'First thing, Dinky, is for you to set up an email account. Any name you like, so long as it sounds Muslim. Then you go to three different shops and you buy three of the essential ingredients for making a bomb: sulphuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, acetone.

But you don't buy them all at once from the same place, OK?

Just a nod from Dinky. Meanwhile Tony's gestures are getting bigger: 'OK' comes with a particularly demonstrative hand movement. Nice and swirly. He sees Dinky looking up at him and he reins in, lowers his voice.

'You've got a laptop, right? And a camera?' Another nod. 'Well, sorry. They'll have to be destroyed in the line of duty. But this will see you all right.'

Tony has an off-white envelope in the palm of his hand. There's a thousand quid in it.

Better if no one walked in on them at just this moment, what with Tony handing over an envelope that's just got to have money in it, or why would they be doing what they are doing and doing it here alone? So hurry up and take it from me, will you? On the other hand, Tony wants Dinky to know there's a transaction taking place, a contract between them, of sorts, and you could just give me a little sign, girl, boy, whatever you are, to show you know.

Dinky is quick to respond. 'I get it,' he says, looking up at Tony and pocketing the vanilla manila.

Not to be obliging, mind, but to confirm that, yes, I am going through with it, whatever it is. I am the Dice Man, throwing in my lot with you.

'So you've set up the email account, and you've got the ingredients. The next thing you do is place them at key sites around Canary Wharf. A different one in each of three places. And photograph them on location. No bomb-making, nothing incriminating like that, OK?' Doesn't wait for an answer. 'Don't worry, baby!', he declares.

It actually occurs to Tony to pinch Dinky's cheeks like people used to do to babies, until he thinks better of it; then he thinks better of thinking better and does it anyway. Dinky wriggles him away...

'Anyway, I digress,' continues Tony. 'The next part of your contribution' – he's announcing, as if it were a further task in the Generation Game – 'you upload the pictures from the camera onto your laptop and email them to me from your Fake Sheikh address.

You can do that using the local wi-fi in Docklands.

Your computer will roam around looking for the network, right? Wasn't built in the last century?'

Dinky nods for him to go on. 'Then make your way to the jetty at Canary Wharf. Apologies for the tautology,' he quips.

Dinky doesn't catch that one; Tony doesn't stop for him.

'You get on the Clipper when it comes in – going east or west, doesn't matter, just get on the first one, and you go to the back where we are now, and when the boat's midstream, you chuck your bits and pieces over the side – the camera, the computer, ingredients of the bomb that never was. You don't keep anything that connects you with those pictures, OK?

'Meanwhile, I'm head of the Cultural Olympiad and I've just received photographic evidence of bomb-making materials in the vicinity of Canary Wharf.

Of course I must pass on these pictures to Scotland Yard, without a moment's delay. And they will take me extremely seriously, because after all, I am the culture czar, and I even have a special password to let them know it is me when I say it is. But just as it is my civic duty to inform the authorities, so it is my public responsibility to communicate this information to the media. Quite legitimately, therefore, I will forward the pictures to you, Dinky Dutta, so that you are the one who gets to break the story.

'In case you're thinking that they will ask why I passed on these photographs to you, young Mr Dutta, I shall reply that I went quietly to someone relatively unknown in media circles because I didn't want the pictures being in any way associated with my office. I knew you were highly capable, and as a young graduate in the midst of a youth unemployment crisis, I also thought this could be your big break.'

Tony couldn't resist acting out his speech to a putative policeman. 'With good reason, officer, I can assure you. The young person to whom you refer, is a seriously talented young man who came looking for a job in my office. But it didn't work out. A few days later, these pictures arrived in my email, and I felt that the public had a right to know about them.

Well, I didn't want to put out this material in my official capacity. Not the thing, really. On the other hand, I didn't want to be accused of favoring any particular journalist by leaking it to one and not others. Then it occurred to me to forward the pictures to young Mr Dutta, and let him get them into the public domain. He knows how to use the new media, I thought. Now he can have his turn at making the Games.'

Another change of register:

'At which point the story's all yours, Dinky. Tweet it, blog it, go back to Canary Wharf to report on what the police are doing. You'll know just where to see them looking, won't you? Maybe you'll end up writing a novel about it, who knows? In the meantime, London will have its big story: Police Foil Fiendish Plot. Londoners Keep Watch For Bombers In Their Midst. East London Student Scoops World Media. Multicultural London Saves The Games.'

Dinky is nodding (he hasn't been struck dumb, has he? Only you hear of stress doing strange things to people.) Then he gets up and stands by the rail on the starboard side of the boat. Looking back at the Tower of London, lit up like birthday cake. Even Tony must have thought it was a birthday party, or some similar occasion: he's just snapped Dinky standing there. Tony and his camera phone, I ask you. Not that Dinky's looking into the lens – don't think he even knew the picture was being taken; but his profile is unmistakable.

## (11) Tony thinks about insurance

##

Our friend Tony, you will have noticed, is not blessed with the kind of personality that goes with thinking carefully and logically about a whole series actions and consequences. That level of forward thinking just doesn't come readily to him.

Making contact with one person, putting said person in contact with another person, and lining them up to participate in some project or other, preferably with Tony near the top of an unspoken hierarchy –

being a broker is just fine for Tony. But the point about all that, is that there is no decisive point.

No outright consequences, for good or ill. The project simply trundles on for as long people want it to, and then they invent a new one.

But now, Dear Boy, what we are getting into now, is of a different order, isn't it? People can get into big trouble just pretending to be terrorists. And if any of our people were to be caught at the wrong moment, when nobody knows it's just make-believe, when the whole point of this game is that everybody else takes it for real -

well, the consequences would be dire.

Bet you don't know exactly why you took the picture, Tony, but it's good you've got that photo of Dinky on your phone. You might need some patter to go with it one day, perhaps along the following lines (somewhat different from the lines you recently spelled out for Dinky's benefit):

'He's been pestering me, officer. Couldn't call it stalking, exactly, and I'm not the sort to bring charges unless absolutely necessary, but I snatched' - no, too much - 'I took this picture of him after he accosted me one evening on the Thames Clipper. I thought I ought to have...I considered it advisable to identify him after he pestered my secretary and tried to sell me a madcap scheme to dupe the media about an Olympic bomb scare.'

OK, enough of the scriptwriting. Let's get down to brass tacks. There are two people who know what's been going on in your mind, Tony. One of them is Dinky: he's bright, but could easily pass for strung out, unbalanced, even slightly deranged. You can't trust him, but there's no reason why anyone else would, either. Not difficult to cast doubt on anything he says. You can discredit him, if you need to.

But the other person you've been speaking to recently is the person who arrived at this idea even before you did. Which means he knows your mind better than you do; and if he suspects anything, his suspicions will carry much more weight.

Supposing something happens more-or-less the way you and Pete were talking about it, he'll know it's you. Straightaway, he'll know. But would he say?

Will he tell on you and stitch you up? Probably not.

But you don't know for sure, do you?

Seemed same as ever, Pete, but you never can tell.

When the two of you were out on the town, there was plenty of performing going on, wasn't there? And you don't know diddly about the other performances that Pete is working on these days. Home, family, job. You can't be sure what he'd do, Tony, unless you look him straight in the eye. And even then....

Doesn't bear thinking about.

Better just get round there and speak to him, find a way to lean on him if you can.

On the other hand, Tony, you could, you should leave it. Turn tail – no, it's not even that. All you have to do is walk away.

You have a home. Okay, so right now the fridge is filthy and the cooker looks like it's never left the showroom. But there is a life you can have. Someone will have your kids, Tony. Bear your children, O Patriarch. If you would only take the trouble to ask. Politely, affectionately, with all the love you are capable of.

Not that Tony speaks to himself like this.

He won't, so we are having to do it for him.

He knows, though. That there is a way out. That he could stop trying so desperately hard. Here he comes now, walking out of his office towards the minicab that's waiting for him, his face tight with tension. So tight he's waggling his jaw and gurning like a gargoyle. Not such a poster boy now, eh Tony?

Never say never, but he never, never will.

Tony's whole life has hinged on him being the hinge. The centre of attraction. And, yes, Tony is as vain as that. But there is more to this than vanity; or, if that's what you insist on calling it, then there is more to his vanity than mere self-regard.

Tony wants, craves, he is addicted to being the point of articulation between people; but the further point is, many of them really would have remained inarticulate if he hadn't performed for them. If he didn't perform on their behalf. And he knows this. After so many years with their eyes turned towards him and their breath on his face, how could he not?

Like a drunk with a story to tell. Another drink, another story, and they really are good, his stories, Tony Skance will keep coming back. The odds are impossible: one man against a whole architecture of small mindedness, and here's Tony (Heeeeeere's Tony!), trying to construct the shared experience that will hold our lives together. That will hold us together in our lives. That will stop us all spilling out into...nothing much.

Desperate, desperate man.

## (12) The sort of man Tony's doing it for

##

Bloody fool's getting in the wrong car. 'Here, mate.

Over here'.

The minicab driver is 60-something, West Indian with a grey moustache and a button of silver hair underneath his lower lip, in the style of soul singer Rufus Thomas. He's laughing because his fare has stepped out of one of those towering office blocks and tried to get into the car nearest the main entrance – some poor bloke who just happened to be waiting there – because he thought it was his cab.

The (wrong) driver had his doors locked, so the fare didn't get very far. Now the real minicab driver, name of Lenny, is calling him over, thinking: this is a fancy-looking guy, spends time on his appearance but he doesn't get it quite right.

Lenny's still cracking up over it when Tony – for it is he – climbs into the back of the passenger vehicle, licensed for private hire, pre-booked only, etc, etc. 'You should have seen his face, man,' Lenny cackles. 'Must have thought he was being car-jacked.' Others might have been put out by the laughing cabbie. My good man, I'm the fool who's paying your wages (not those words nowadays, yet that kind of snooty, snotty attitude); but straightaway Tony warms to Lenny's good humour.

'You're right', he concurs. 'If he'd had a gun he might have blown me away.'

Where to? Tony gives Pete's home address in Lewisham. Sad sod lives south of the river. South of the River. Margaret Thatcher once said, show me a man over 30 who lives South of the River, and I will show you a failure. Well, no – she didn't; but she should have. Anyway, thinks Tony, I'm not struggling out there on the DLR and then having to walk who knows where through the back streets of an evening, flashing my iPad2 with the Google maps on it so that all the local youth can see. So of course I asked Les to get me a car. And what turns up is the jovial personage of laughing Lenny, my new friend.

Nice in here. Reggae on the stereo. Bit of bass in it, not too much. Definitely Reggae, not Bluebeat or Ska, but made in the days before Dub and before it got heavy. Hea-vy.

There's a smell; every minicab, always a smell. If a man sits in a confined space for eight to 10 hours, at least five days a week, he's going to leave something of himself behind. How could he not?

But this ain't bad. Like a borrowed leather jacket; not your own but it fits OK.

Yeah, I like it in here, thinks Tony. And I like the driver. I could tell in an instant he's not the sort to wind me up. Perhaps I'll ask him to come and live with me. Like to see the look on his face.

'So, come on, then – Lenny, is it? Just saw the name on your license – apart from weird people trying to get into the wrong car, what's the craziest ride you've ever had, in your considerable experience?'

And Lenny explains how his Control is on contract to the education department in one of the London boroughs, and he has to take all kinds of kids to school, to foster homes, all sorts. And the worst is when it's his gig to take kids to the special school.

A boarding school where they go to give their parents a rest. And sometimes there's nobody else in the car with them, just the kid and me, Lenny, the driver.

'And you're driving along and suddenly, smack, the kid's taken a swipe at the back of your head, or chopped you on the neck, and it's not because he's a real nasty piece of work, but they can't communicate and they get frustrated and the first you know about it is: Bang! And you have to hold on tight to the steering wheel because sometimes it really hurts.

'As well', Lenny continues, 'there are the pimps and the thieves, and you just sit in the car waiting while they are in the shop and then they come out running with a big television, and what are you supposed to do? How are you to know until they've gone and done it? But somehow with those people you sort of do know, you can smell it on them, or something, when they're going to do something.

But the special needs kids, man, there is just no telling. Smack! That's the first you know about it.'

He's a lovely man, thinks Tony. These youngsters who've hurt him, put his life in danger (and their own) – he talks about them sympathetically, without a trace of bitterness. Not towards them. But plenty of bile directed at the construction company he used to work for.

'Twenty years I worked for that lot. Started on the motorways in the Midlands, staying in bed and breakfast with no heating in the bedroom. Imagine that, you came off the site when it got dark and you still couldn't get warm, not unless you went to the pub. After 20 years of that I couldn't stand the cold no more, so I asked for my cards and you know how much they gave me? Three months' pay. Three months – that was it, after 20 years. They want shooting, these people. I would pull the trigger myself, and I've seen a man die from gunshot wounds, so I know what it means. But I'd do it to them, any day.'

'Just pass the ammunition, eh Lenny?' Tony chimes in, not wanting to disagree with this fine old man, of an age when he should be at home in his dressing gown, feet up on the table, a can of Red Stripe whenever he wants one. Or else safely bedded down with a plump Princess for him to pamper, hair in curlers or straighteners or whatever, and her rubbing Embeco on his sore elbows and creaking knees. But instead he's out all hours, a small packet of sheer humanity weaving through the nondescript streets of south-east London with a succession of little people in the back of his clapped-out cab.

He's the one to do it for, Tony tells himself. If London can't get it on, doesn't get it up for the Olympic Games, it'll say to Lenny that he was wrong to come here in the first place. Should have tried for the States, instead; gone for a Green Card.

Or even stayed in the Windies. Should never have come here. But if London comes together, it'll mean he made the right choice. All those years ago, Lenny chose well. And the 50 years of working, with next to nothing to show for it, will have been the right thing to do, all along. So do it for him, Brother Tony. Believe me, it's not just for yourself. No need to feel sick at the size of your own vanity. This is for the small people, too, to make them feel bigger.

By this time, Lenny's pulling up outside Pete's front door. Offers to write a receipt but Tony says no, this isn't business, it's strictly personal.

Hands Lenny the fare and a fiver on top, then waves him farewell as he drives off.

## (13) Rupa's easy exit

##

Christ, it's a raid.

Bright lights on in the street outside, and rat-tat-tat on the door. Gotta be the police.

Dinky is already in the bathroom, flushing. Shame to lose that dynamite grass, genetically enhanced to reach all the right places in the shortest possible time. (If you're a baby-boomer who last smoked dope in the seventies, you don't know what you're missing.) But what else can he do? Of course anyone can always say 'only personal use, officer', but there's no telling who'll get away with it and who won't.

Meanwhile Rupa has put her knickers back on; now she's reaching for her baggiest jumper. Down to her knees. Another knock: wham, bam. Hold on, mate, she's coming. Half-way downstairs, already.

Instinctively she ties her hair up as she walks the six, seven feet from the bottom step along the hall to the front door. 'Who is it?', she calls out.

Pointless, really: only the authorities knock on doors in that peremptory manner.

'Rupa, I've come back for you', comes back the oh-so-familiar voice of her talent show mentor. 'Please open the door...I couldn't bear to leave here without you.'

Can it, could it be? With one hand she's opening the door, the other hand already half-over her mouth, perfectly positioned to perform a gasp of surprise.

It is, it is, it is. Was never going to be the police, was it? Not without Boris Johnson (or will it be Ken going out with them on raids?). And anyway, they come at dawn not in the middle of the night.

Camera's onto her immediately. Lapping up her bare legs. Beatnik jumper: breasts curving and pointing through all that shapelessness. TV lighting brings out the best. Thank God she pulled her hair up on the way downstairs. Looks like she's straight out of bed. With her boyfriend, but only if you want to think of her that way.

'Rupa, you're my wild card. I'd like you to come back to the show.' Her mentor's arms are outstretched, ready for the required embrace. Not before the camera has caught Rupa, scrunched-up face crumbling with happiness, speechless (no need to say

'gobsmacked' nowadays), nodding absolute assent.

Then they fall into each others' arms and Rupa's mentor whispers instructions into her ear:

'Get in the car just as you are. You can come back for your stuff later, or we'll send someone.'

Out of shot, the director's already waving them towards the limousine. They're arm-in-arm, bosom buddies, friends forever – or until Rupa's knocked out of the competition again. Bare feet, she's careful what she's walking on out there. At the car door, held open by a chauffeur, Rupa turns back to see Dinky, framed in the doorway. She guesses he hasn't been seen on camera, though, so doesn't blow him a kiss or anything that would specify their boy-girl relationship. Just a brief wave, a wave in general, then she bows her head, bends at the knee (knickers not showing – good girl), and she's in.

Into the cream leather interior. And exiting from all that Dinkyness. Surely for the best.

Going to see my parents, I said to him, let them make a fuss of me. Blah blah blah. But this, all this, is a much better way out.

# Part 3. Fear and Self-Loathing in East London

#

## (1) Tony the blackmailer

##

Tony Skance is standing outside the South London home of his long lost friend Pete Fercoughsey. He's just the rung the bell. You may recall, Dear Reader, that Pete and Tony played in a band together, years ago – so long ago that Pete's wife, Carol, has never even met Tony before. Bound to be Carol

She is slim, with boyishly short hair and high cheekbones. Her face is apple-round, not angular.

Sharp tongue, though.

'You must be Tony,' Carol declares. Her smile becomes her, and she uses it confidently.

'Sorry to turn up on the doorstep like this, Carol.'

Tony's dead straight with her; no David Nivenism –

one look and he knows she'd have no truck with it.

'I'd like to speak to Pete for a minute, if that's all right.'

They share the love of a fairly good man, these two, but they've never had sight of each other until now.

Can't help but eye each other up.

Carol waves Tony into the hall so she can shut the front door behind him. Meanwhile Tony is careful to wipe his feet, quite keen to be seen wiping his feet carefully before stepping onto the polished, parquet floor.

Paintings, lots of them, in the hall and up the stairs. All originals: oil, some watercolour, and line drawings. Not a reproduction in sight. These'll be hers, Tony guesses (correctly). 'Yours?' he ventures, but Carol doesn't reply. That is, she says something to him but it's not an answer:

'Pete's in his study. Up the stairs, straight ahead at the landing. It's at the back of the house. Please go up and I'll bring you some coffee, or a drink.'

'Thanks, but I'm fine for now. This won't take long, though. Just a few minutes to sort something out with Pete. Then perhaps we could all have a drink together.'

Their eyes have already met: Carol's drilling into Tony, wanting to know what he wants from Pete; Tony seeing so much of what Pete sees in her (if she stopped to think about this she would start feeling uncomfortable, but she's not going to let that happen).

Lingering for a moment at the top of the stairs, it crosses Tony's mind not to mention any of the things he came to say.

Make small talk. You could even make it meaningful, if you like. Tell Pete that your night out together has brought home how much you mean to each other. No, too strong. How much we have in common. It,s true, so why not say it and leave all the other stuff out of it?

Tony steals silently into the room. He sees books, more books and more paintings (Christ, she's everywhere), and Pete at his desk, facing the window, back to the door.

'Good evening, headmaster,' Tony intones. Pete swivels round on his office chair, ready to growl at one of his children for fooling around. Seeing it's Tony, his face breaks into a broad grin, which gets broader to make up for Carol being cool with him (her winning smile but thin-lipped underneath: Pete pictures it easily).

'Come in, come in.' Pete gets up to embrace Tony, who lets him. Then Pete stands back as if to appraise the visitor. 'Wow! Twice in two weeks, has something come over you?' This is rhetorical: he's not expecting an answer. 'Please, sit down'. Pete's waving Tony to a small settee, while he returns to the office chair. Deftly closing his laptop (no need for Tony to see that he was looking at the Human Resources page of a Chinese university), he swivels half-way round to face his guest.

Pete doesn't seem to know what to do with his arms until – can't think of anything else – he folds them in front of him.

So, Pete thinks, here you are in my house

\- just like that. All that time when you were the old friend Daddy doesn,t like talking about. Can it be forgotten, just like that? Maybe so. There could be lazy Sunday afternoons when you come round for lunch. You might even teach Lily to sing. Christ, it would be so good if the separate episodes in my life could finally fit together.

Pete's looking tired, thinks Tony. He thrives on the teaching, I bet; it'll be all the other stuff that's dragging him down. Compliance, box ticking, whatever you call it at your end. Well, sorry, old buddy, there's nothing I'm going to say that will lighten your load.

'Shan't keep you from your globetrotting, Pete'.

He clocked it, then. But of course; also, that Pete doesn't want to dwell on it. Like a good guest, Tony accedes to the wishes of his host, and moves swiftly on: 'Just need your assurance on something.'

This by way of setting up the topic. Now he takes the first line, proper:

'I have come to ask for your assurance that whatever happens to me, whatever you hear people saying about me, you won't go to the police? You won't cooperate with them. Is that clear?'

Pete's eyebrows rise like circumflex accents; or the convex roofs of two, adjacent houses. Yet aside from his exaggerated face-making, he is genuinely concerned for his friend.

'What is it Tony? What have you got caught up in?

Has somebody got their claws into you?

'My dearest friend.' Tony's fingers are fidgeting.

Looking for a fobwatch, perhaps, or a waistcoat pocket to plant themselves in. Anyhow, he's going all Dickensian. 'Great expectations, Pete, are my birthright. And I have embarked on a course of action to remove the possibility of a small but significant disappointment in my life.'

Much more of this and Tony will surely be sucked into a TV screen, destined to live in the alternative world of Sunday night costume drama.

'More than this, I cannot say. And you, dearest Peter, know better than to ask. But as it happens, I'll tell you something of my predicament.'

Change of accent; change of writer. We're in 21st century South London, aren't we? So Tony turns more Billingham than Dickensian.

'There's someone I buy cocaine from. Not often and not a lot.'

No, Tony, don't stop to do Paul Daniels.

'He's in trouble,' Tony continues, 'and, so I hear, his usual way of getting out of trouble is to drag other people into it. Anything he can find to say about high profile clients, that might prompt the police to conduct additional enquiries. My name has never come up so far, so I guess I'm due a turn in the barrel. One of the unwelcome side-effects of public life nowadays.

'What I mean, Pete, is that there might be some chapter and verse on some of the things I used to get up to in the old days. And it might be used against me. But whatever happens, whatever the blue boys are saying about me, just stay away from them, OK?'

So far, Pete's unimpressed. The police would hardly be concerned about Tony's misdemeanours from, what, 20 years ago? Pop singer takes drugs; dog bites man.

Pete's thinking that there's got to be more to this than Tony's letting on. Likely the bit about the drug dealer was just a preamble for telling me to stay away from the police, which means the kind of trouble he's in is something completely different.

Bloody hell, if he wants to buy my silence, he could pay me some respect.

Start by telling it like it is.

'Come off it, Tone. There's something else bothering you.' If I'm going to help out, Pete says to himself, at least I need to know what I'm helping out with. 'Let's have it'.

'I've already said, Pete. You should know, you do know, when's not the right time to ask. All I need is to know that you won't tell anyone about private matters, business that only concerns you and me –

and especially not the police, no matter what some people are saying about me.'

Pete hesitates. He who hesitates is lost.

Procrastination is the thief of friendship. It would be the end of our time, thinks Pete, if I don't agree to his request. So I will, but not unreservedly.

'It's not easy to make a firm promise, Tony, when you're being so flaky about...whatever it is you want me to commit to. But you know me. In principle, as a matter of principle, I don't do police. I prefer not to have anything to do with them. Always felt like that, don't ever expect to feel any different. That good enough for you?'

'It's good enough, Pete, yeah. And I know you've always stuck to your principles. But I want you to know how important it is that you stick to them through thick and thin.'

Robert De Niro is perhaps the most famous example of an actor reckoned to be far less animated in person than the characters he impersonates. Who only comes fully alive when performing; living someone else's life.

Well, Tony must be affected by the same syndrome. And now, for once in his life, he's stopped performing: no roles, no puns, no cultural reference points. His voice, his expression, are unusually straightforward (for him). On the level. Pared down. Hell, he's not even looking askance.

Is this the same guy? You may well ask.

Unfortunately, it is; unfortunately – because without the performance element, Tony Skance is lacklustre, nondescript, boring.

Reading the story so far, you could have criticised Tony for being a trickster; you may dislike him because the games he plays are nearly always self-aggrandising. You might have wanted him to be on the level, but you surely didn't think he'd be on this level; tedious, monotonous, boring.

Which is why what he says next is all the more shocking. It's a mundane man doing a straightforward thing: issuing a mean and nasty threat. But on this occasion Tony's threatening behaviour can't be ascribed to an exaggerated sense of drama, a predisposition towards the theatrical. This is plain Tony, cinema verite Tony – brutish and banal.

'It's so important to me to be able to think of you as a man of principle, Pete, that I'm going to remind you of something I don't especially enjoy thinking about, and I reckon Carol would like to hear about it even less. But should you turn out not to be a man of principle, it might well come to her attention.

'You remember a particularly pretty girl from our home town – what was her name? Robbie, Roberta, Robin – whatever. The night before we did Top of the Pops for the first time, there was a party and we all lined up to give her one. She wore a blindfold – do you remember now? Said she'd know each one of us by our knobs.

'Years afterwards – you'd already left the band so I don't think you know about this – she started saying it wasn't an orgy, it wasn't even a gang bang, it was gang rape. Which it was not. Bad sex is a much better description, and that's the term my lawyer persuaded her to agree to. But apparently she's been dining out again on the gang rape story. It's doing the rounds once more. If she takes it further

– well, the courts can spot an old boiler who's been taking all comers for 25 years, but you still wouldn't want this story to circulate anywhere near Carol, would you, Pete?'

Thankfully, this mean and malicious man is about to snap back into the Tony we know and love. Nasty, yes, but at least he's normally stylish with it.

'Your Carol', says Tony, relishing what he's going to say next. 'Still a bit of a feminist, isn't she?

If she knew about this, she'd have your balls for earrings.'

As Tony intended, Pete is aghast. It's not that he's having visions of Carol getting the knife out, but he can picture the shameful way he behaved – they all did – in that drunken scenario, all those years ago. She was the best looking girl in town, they were the rising stars, and they all had her as if by right. No, it wasn't rape because she didn't object.

But would it have made any difference if she had?

That's what they were capable of, then, in the name of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

And now we are older and more cynical, Pete thinks, what else could we bring ourselves to do, given half a chance?

Tony's managed to plague Pete with self-doubt. He's pretty much succeeded in making him hate himself.

But Pete's holding on for his life, in defence of the other life he's made in the past 20 years.

You've done all right, he tells himself.

You got out and you made a go of it. No need to go back into that Tony world. Certainly not for his benefit.

Pete knows he's spread dangerously thin. Partly, he's back there and then, partying before TOTP, and sick at the sight of himself doing it – doing it to that girl. But even in the here and now, there are two of him: one with Carol, in their home, living a life of long term plans, with the prospect of growing old in reasonable comfort and seeing their children have children of their own. The other is in Tony's territory, where the dialogue is sharper and it can get very unpleasant but you can be sure there's more to life than growing old gracefully.

Just get him out of here, Pete. Whatever happens between you and him, this is not the place for it to happen.

Carol and I, thinks Pete, will go through the motions of seeing Tony out of the house. Thankfully, he's already walking down the stairs, me behind him. She will have heard us making our way down. As we get to the bottom, Carol duly emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands. Tony's saying no to a drink. 'Sorry, can't stop'. She makes as if she's making conversation but really it's all part of scooting him out, shooing him away: 'It's a shame we can't ask you to stay for supper, Tony. If I'd known...'

Or something like it. It's working anyhow. Tony's stepping out of the house, the door is shut behind him, and Pete glances back at it to make sure there are no demons coming back in.

Keep out, he thinks. Let's keep the whole world out, at least for tonight.

## (2) Set ups and press-ups

##

Desired login name: osamaobama. Check availability.

Hey! Actually is available. Didn't think it would be. Nah, can't use that, they'll know it's a joke straightaway. But the joke's on Tony Skance, so who cares?

Password: London2012explosion. Very secure, it says. And so it should be.

Don't want London 2012 to be anything less, do we, Dinky? And now for your security question, will you write your own? I see: how long is Tony's prick?

But even his has to be longer than that.

And Tony appears again, I notice, in the 'recovery email' address box: tony.

skance@London2012.com. You know that means he'll be implicated, don,t you? Coz they'll trace every connection to the new email address the moment they get the pictures. Of course, you do. Silly of me not to catch on.

Makes you wonder, though, whether Tony's putting you in the frame, same as you're doing it to him. What is it between you two, anyway?

Dinky alone. It's getting dark but there are no lights on in the house, only the blue-white glow of his laptop. He's following Tony's instructions and setting up a new email account, though the details, from Tony's point of view, leave a lot to be desired.

Anyhow, Dinky's just pressed the button: I accept.

Create my account. And now there's a Welcome message coming in from the Email Team, 'Congratulations on creating your new account, osamaobama'.

With so much assonance in that wonderful name, you're bound to do something foolish.

Dinky hasn't eaten anything all day. There's stuff in the freezer, not very appetising but edible enough, if only he could make the effort. He won't, though. Eating seems sort of chavvy, right now.

'Gross', his kid sister would say.

Anyhow, he's feeling light-headed for lack of food, suffering occasional dizzy spells, and quite enjoying it.

'Wow! That was a good one'. He catches himself saying this aloud when the top of the kitchen table jiggled in front of his eyes; and it still hasn't come right back into position.

Not-eating is the new amyl nitrate.

Should I stay or should I go? Do I dare, or will I turn back and descend the stair?

Dinky wanders around the empty house, looking through windows into the softening dark (and catching your own reflection, brown-eyed, handsome boy), sitting on various chairs, a sofa, the bottom step of the staircase, the kitchen table, a cushion on the bedroom floor, before getting up for a drink of water, to pee, pick up a magazine, find a book, or put it back where he found it.

He can't settle because he still hasn't decided. The question is...

Och, you know the question.

Do some press-ups, then. At least it'll put a stop to this fidgeting. Shoes off, and find a space on the bare wooden floor. Breathe out, push your hands down and outwards in that tiny, private ritual of yours –

a familiar gesture to expel the noise in your head, the interference running wild through your body.

Now stretch yourself out, at arm's length above the floor, and look, think, only of that pattern, there, where the grain of the wood curls into a swirl. Cut out everything else, starting from...

Now.

Slowly down; count (out loud); slowly up. Repeat.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat... So far your body doesn't seem to weigh anything at all. You're cruising.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat...

Dinky is on 50 repetitions, and his arm muscles are starting to feel the strain. Don't tense up! Admit it (yes, it's going to hurt), accept it, and keep going. Up to 80: his arms are beginning to wobble on the ascent; 84, 85 – now also on the descent. At 90 his mouth is splayed out in a twisted grin, and the sinews in his neck are sticking out like lengths of string. Head and shoulders would make a page in Gray's Anatomy (the medical textbook, not the TV

series).

But now he's taken his big breath – holding it in, and he's determined to get to 100. One at a time, Dinky: 96, 9-7, 98, 9-9, 100.

Struggling up to 100, he's down again on the instant; face on the floor, left cheek resting on the cool wood.

Refreshing. This surface feels refreshing because I did it. 100, just as I said I would. Can't decide what to do with my life. Can't decide whether to destroy my life. But this much I can do, to put myself at rest.

Tomorrow, perhaps, the test.

## (3) Tweet, Tweet, Yeah!

##

In the morning, Dinky logs on and gets straight to it.

I am a writer, right, going to write my way out, write a way through, write myself into the centre of things.

He's logged onto his Twitter account. Fires the first one off straightaway, without a second's thought: Brutal,bloody and degrading.The spectacle I shall make of myself will not be pretty,but it will be true to the way we live now.

Tweet.

It's out there immediately, the first indication that Dinky is up to something. But what is he up to? And who's going to know? Does he even have any followers? Until now only a handful of people have ever read his tweets (though that may be about to change).

He's typing again. Not so fast this time.

Shall we go then,you and I,to launch ourselves into eternity?

Tweet.

Come on, Dinky, you mean you haven't decided yet?

It's make your mind up time, Boyo, or people are going to get bored.

Swang off with me,and we will explode together,me and the other me that's looking at me all the time.

Tweet.

'Swang'? Oh, really? I suppose that's something you do with your 'wang', is it? It's not for you to make up words, y'know. Dr Johnson, you ain't.

Like two pirates dropped from the gallows at the same time.

Tweet.

Now that's more like it. Anything to do with Pirates of the Caribbean, got to be good. You know they were filming in Greenwich a few months ago, and Johnny Depp turned up at a primary school that was doing a project on pirates. Top man.

Tappety-tap-tap. No, it's not Blind Pew from Treasure Island, but the sound of Dinky's fingers on the keyboard, rattling away again: tappety-tuppety-tap. Chirpy, chirpy, tweet, tweet.

I would be the ambassador, mediator, host.

Tweet.

I'm sure you would, mate. Don't we all want to be Jesus Christ?

In the destruction I shall cause,you and you and you,will be connected through me. That is the best I Tweet.

That's really the best you can do? Certainly not the best at counting, are you? Even when it tells you how many you've got left, you can't manage to stay inside 140 characters. Duuh!

Not that I want nirvana for myself. Just a clear night's sleep every night and wake up to a good cup of coffee.

Tweet.

And you expect us to believe that? You expect us to be interested in you when that's all you want out of life? And death. Y' know, life and death really matter to some people.

COME AGAIN, LAD. I'M SURE YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN

THAT.

I never asked to be Judas. Neither did he. I would prefer to stay a crazy dumbsaint,but I cannot return the cold stare of the stars.

Tweet.

Too bloody cryptic, mate. Too clever by half. Just give it to 'em straight. Here, I'll do one for you: Boom! Boom! Lights are going out in London town.

People are dying. Tony Skance thinks he has planned a PR stunt, but he doesn't know Dinky Dutta will be doing it for real.

Tweet.

Better, much better. Now get on with the next one.

Those women with bodies like grapes, their bodies will be crushed in the explosion. I will cause them to die so that London may live.

Tweet.

Way to go, Dinky. Tell it like it is. Tell them how it's going to be. Anyone that's listening, that is.

## (4) Locating the materials

##

Dinky has done the shopping. He dressed smart as if to take part in City-type activities, then went out to collect the bomb-making materials which, you must understand, are not to be made into a bomb; only the makings of an explosive, galvanising, London-wide, media-led experience.

Enough adjectives for you to spot the difference?

And now they – the ingredients of the bomb that isn't going to be one, are safely stowed in a capacious sports bag; while he – Dinky, the pseudo-suicide bomber, is on an escalator coming up from the Jubilee Line at Canary Wharf.

One among the stream of people flowing upwards to the mouth of the station. Walking out of the gunmetal grey atrium and back into sunlight. Once again, it's a bright, bonny day.

Turns right past Smollensky's, then Carluccio's (a couple of nervous customers on the terrace, meeting there for the pre-meeting before the board meeting that might cost them their contract), and into one of many underground shopping malls.

Of course he's on camera. On this estate, all the main thoroughfares are covered. But there's nothing to make a security guard look twice, even if he happened to be looking. Why would anyone have doubts about a slim young man, coffee-coloured, elegant, carrying a sports bag and an over-the-shoulder laptop case, wearing a pink shirt and a grey suit?

Nice camouflage, Dinky.

Good call, discarding that shirt with the cutaway collar: would have put you back in 2009; stuck out a mile.

An excellent choice, if I may say so, sir.

First stop, first drop. Where, where, where?

Promising, over there. It's a bank branch closed for refurbishment – 'we look forward to welcoming you to our new branch in December 2012'. With a hardboard partition at the front, extending out into the walkway, screening off the guys banging about inside. Except by the sound of it, there are no guys inside and no work going on right now.

Right ho!

So carry on walking. Don't stop abruptly, then fumble finding a way in. Keep it smooth. Walk on until there's a crossroads between two shopping corridors, then circle round the square and come back. Good. Now you can see the doorway on this side, can't you? Conveniently open, with a space inside that's nicely secluded.

Silly idea: write an update of the Just William stories re-located to Docklands.

This could be the Outlaws' den!

Back to business.

Call out, 'Hello?', as if expecting to meet someone in there. But no, just as you thought, there's no one there. Move quickly, then: push laptop bag behind you, so it's resting on your back, out of the way. Take camera out of jacket pocket with left hand, turn on, lens cover opening – good. Sports bag on floor, unzip with right hand, remove the rectangular can containing one litre of acetone, place it on the floor near the entrance. Now move further in and turn around so that you are looking back through the opening. You should be able to see a row of shops, nicely framed, all the way down to Waitrose. Point the camera and just in the shot is a stack of those magazines they give away round here, Docklands Life, or something like that.

The point is that the picture will show where it's been taken, right? Nice big tin of Acetone (blue Helvetica letters, white background) set against Canary Wharf location, identifiable as such. All in the frame, yes? So press the button, feel the shot (slightest vibration). When the little light goes from red back to green – there you go, take it again. Now change the camera mode to check they came out all right. Fine. Both of them fine. Replace acetone can in sports bag. Camera turned off, returned to pocket.

What's to hang around for? Let's go.

And back into the stream of human traffic, gliding quietly along the polished floors. Walking with measured purpose; not stridently so.

Put yourself in the shoes of the people around you. All of them doing a softly softly shuffle, no kerfuffle: people to see, deals to do – best done cool. So take your time, Dinky, enjoy looking around, clocking that cherry red handbag (Rupa would like it), and the wiggle in the walk of the woman in front.

Nicey, nicey. Heh, heh, heh.

Now there's a bench, no one sitting on it, and next to it a bin marked 'dry recyclables'. How convenient. Let's be the first, shall we, and have a little sit down? This time I think we'll have the contraband out of the sports bag first.

Sulphuric acid, bottle of, out of the bag into the bin (one seamless movement – very good), which is thankfully almost full so the bottle can just rest on top of all the other stuff that's in there. OK, now lean over the bin as if you've just dropped something into it that you didn't mean to. Easily done. Happens all the time. Have a half-smile ready to play on your lips: my cufflink, my wedding ring (no, that's overdoing it). O, what a fool I am. And while you're peering in there for whatever it is, the camera should come to hand; and it should get turned on.

Wow, baby! You really turn me on.

What we want is close to a bird's eye view, but not dead-on. Give it a bit of slant so you can see the bottle of acid in the centre of the top circle, and, on the side of the underlying cylinder – the bin, you idiot!, you should be able to read 'dry recycl'.

Doesn't matter if the other letters are out of shot.

It's got the Canary Wharf colour scheme to clinch it.

You are shooting in colour, aren't you? Sorry, just checking.

He is sweating now; pale and thin-lipped, like the ugly guy in Dog Day Afternoon. Unusual for Dinky, who is normally plumped up and ready for kissing.

(Of course, Al Pacino – that's who Dinky usually looks like. But a bit darker, and – not hard – taller).

Anyway, the colour comes back into his cheeks as he rejoins the irregular army: patrolling the malls, avoiding eye contact, scanning each other occasionally, constantly checking their phones.

You,re doing all right, Dinky. You,re doing all right. Only one more to go and you can sail away.

Whoops! Where's he gone? OK, we can see him again, now. He's turned left off the mall into a white-tiled corridor. Sign above the swing doors says Exit and Parking, with a little squiggle next to Parking.

Corridor goes straight for 10 metres, before a right turn, and a left shortly after; then a short stretch to the exit. Press Here to Exit, it says on a square pad next to a single door.

Dinky presses it, the door opens, he doesn't go through. (At least he knows it's working – clever.) Instead he retraces his steps back to the right turn in the corridor (though now, for him coming back, it's a left), where there is some sort of vending machine.

Now we're getting it. You put money in here to pay for car parking tickets or tokens. Something, anyhow, to swipe your vehicle through the barrier and out of the underground car park. But you don't get to the actual car park this way, and it looks like this machine is rarely used, which means the corridor it's situated in, is not much travelled, either.

Well done, Dinky, another good location!

With your nose for it, maybe a future for you in covert operations. Apply to MI5.

You'd have to forget the arty farty stuff, though.

He's already three-quarters of the way through the routine; this time with hydrogen peroxide as the featured object, posed tellingly alongside the Docklands car parking ticket machine. Photos OK –

check; returns camera to pocket. Might have been better to replace the hydrogen peroxide first: every second it's in plain view is another moment of liability; but still, this is good work. Impressive. And we're off.

Except he isn't. Instead of moving on, Dinky is getting more things out of the sports bag, and lining them up on the polished floor, in the space between the ticket machine and the left-hand sides of the corridor, where they intersect at the corner.

Very discreet. With Dinky squatted down in front of them, it's hard to make out what they are.

But it doesn't matter what they are. They shouldn't be there, you shouldn't be here, you bloody maniac!

## (5) Stir it up

##

Dinky has got the two other containers (acetone, sulphuric acid) back out of the bag, plus the hydrogen peroxide which never went back in, and alongside these, a large glass cooking dish. One of those ovenproof ones, with a lid on top. Now he's putting this into an even larger bucket – an ice bucket; and from the ice bucket he's scooping out enough of the crushed stuff to allow the ovenproof dish to fit into it.

If it were Stir Up Sunday, you could mix your Christmas Pudding in the ovenproof dish (though I bet even Heston Thingummy hasn't yet thought of Figgie pudding on ice). But it isn't a Sunday, and Dinky's mixing something else.

First, hydrogen peroxide, poured steadily into the bowl. Then the acetone. He's stirring them together with a swizzle stick. Now, the final element in the cocktail: slowly, carefully sulphuric acid, H2S04.

Do you remember it from the locked cupboard in your school chemistry lab? Since that time, if you were bold enough, you might have used it to clean a blocked drain.

Very carefully, very slowly, and with long gaps in between. So long that the pulse of heat which screen 167

Games Makers: a London Satire marks the entry of each new droplet into the bowl, has time to dissipate before the next one goes in.

By the end of this protracted process, in the mixing bowl there are three colourless liquids of different density. More use of the swizzle stick (good wrist action, Dinky), swirling them together – gently, though; and taking care not to inhale the fumes.

Dinky keeps stirring (gently, though) for a full five minutes, timing it with the watch his father gave him on his eighteenth birthday. In these few minutes he finds greater peace of mind than he has known since childhood. For years the orchestra in his head has been sawing away; but now, for once, he is not crowded by memories or pressured by his own desires.

This is it. It is what it is.

It is time to stop stirring. He puts the swizzle stick down on the tiled floor. Puts the glass lid on top of the dish with the mixture in it, then tapes the two of them together, criss-crossing from top to bottom, up and down the sides of the dish. It's not exactly sealed – you wouldn't turn it upside down (you wouldn't, anyway, if you knew anything about the mixture inside), but the lid's not coming off in a hurry.

Everything goes back in the bag, including the swizzle stick. The bag is zipped up.

## (6) It's the way you walk

##

The bag is in my hand and I am walking along the corridor to the exit. I press the pad, the door opens. Now I am coming out onto the street that runs between Cabot Square and Canary Wharf DLR station.

It's called South Colonnade – just seen the sign.

I turn left and continue walking along the pavement.

In the road beside me, a security guard whirs past in an electric patrol vehicle. Sees me. Sees somebody else three metres ahead of me. Carries on.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He does not give me a second look.

Mr Gonads is my name. All the time I was taking pictures in the three locations, it felt like my balls were trying to shrink back into my body.

But now they are out and proud! Carrying what I'm carrying, everything about me is expansive. I'm having to walk with legs apart to give my testicles room to dangle down. My cock isn't stiff, but even in its flaccid state, I could confidently slap it down on the table and insist that you get a load of that.

Time isn't thickening, though. Just the opposite; it's thinning out towards one single moment. My past and my future are all zipped up into the here and now. Highly compressed. You have worked it out, haven't you? I'm walking through Docklands with a cocktail of carnage in my bag. The unholy trinity of hydrogen peroxide, acetone and sulphuric acid will be crystallising into acetone peroxide, even as we speak. And since the process is not refrigerated, it's occurring...

This, Nessa, is what's occurring.

...at a temperature which makes both the crystals and the liquid into two of the most dangerously volatile substances in the whole wide world.

Bump into me and I might bump you off. Show me a naked flame and I will explode. I've set myself to blow up in two shakes of a sports bag (one would do it, actually). Or it could just go up at any time. No reason. Well, of course, there is a scientific explanation for the chemical reaction entailed in the explosion. But no one would have to do anything to make it happen. It might just happen that way.

On the other hand, I could still make it home. Maybe I'll even make it as a writer. You see, I'm also going ahead with the things Tony asked me to do: upload the pictures and send him the osamaobama email from my laptop, and if there's been no explosion before then, if I haven't by chance been killed, I'm going to offload the computer, camera and all the ingredients, lowering them gently into Old Father Thames.

That ol' man river is deep enough to cool them off.

If I get that far. Nobody knows how far I'll get.

There is no way of knowing, and that's the beauty of it.

## (7) In the lap of the gods

##

On South Strand, Canary Wharf, Dinky Dutta happens to be walking past a shop advertising 'the gift of Bang and Olufsen'. He avoids the smokers clustered next to a sign saying 'it is illegal to smoke here', and continues west towards the Clipper pier (Thames commuter boats), situated alongside the Four Seasons Hotel.

You see, even the seasons have been corporatised.

Whoa! Almost a collision with another pedestrian coming at him from the left. Manages to move aside, though; and, just as important, succeeds in lifting the sports bag smoothly out of the way, without jerking it or allowing it to bang against his thigh or the other guy's luggage.

Crosses his mind that it constitutes cheating, this taking care to avoid friction and flammables. But he refuses to dwell on it. Won't allow that much circumspection. He's finally managing to live in the moment, and he doesn't want anything to spoil it –

however long it lasts.

Sky's clouding over. Earlier this morning there were chinks of light dancing on the water, but right now, Dinky thinks, the Thames is a fat brown bastard.

He walks slowly down the long slope to the pier.

Sits in the glass-walled waiting room and logs on, taking care that his sports bag is not directly underneath the laptop.

Uploading photos to Pictures folder – done. Connect to Wi-Fi and Compose New Mail: Dear Mr Skance, you will be interested to see how the attached photographs illustrate London,s vulnerability to 'terrorist' attack. Best wishes, osamaobama.

Attach, no need to go Back to Message, just press Send. Already confirmed: your message has been sent.

Let the Games commence!

Now let's get on the Clipper. Like Tony said, any Clipper, going either way.

Having come this far without fateful mishap, Dinky is starting to think that maybe life's too good for him to risk blowing himself up. At last, you might say, an end to the idiocy of youth. About bloody time! But just as he's making friends with himself again, coming round to the idea that his life should not be cut tragically short, news comes up on the message display board that boats in both directions are subject to a 15-minute delay.

Jesus Christ! The bloody bag could blow at any moment.

Having put his whole existence on the line, whether Dinky lives or dies may now be determined by an unexplained delay in riverboat traffic!

Dinky marches across to the ticket office to demand an answer. Of course, the young man behind the screen doesn't know. He says he can try and find out, but adds, cautiously, that 'we are usually the last to know.' Dinky remains polite. Says he knows it's not your fault that the boat is delayed and the information is lacking, but, really, there's no need to bother. And the young man remembers to advise Dinky that it's advisable to buy a ticket now, prior to boarding.

He sits back down. Now he desperately wants to get rid of the bag. He thinks about walking to the edge of the pier and dropping it into the river, then walking quietly away. But the straps might catch on something. There may be all sorts of things sticking out of the pier, and the wash of the next boat coming in could cause enough of a bump to blow the whole thing. How much would go up in the explosion?

How many other people? Fact is, he doesn't know.

This isn't a calculated attack. It's a test of himself, by himself, to see whether he could take it. To find out who he is.

Now he's horrified by the prospect of causing death or injury to that little girl over there, talking excitedly to her mother. Or the posse of Indian tourists in the corner of the waiting room, unaccountably dressed all in white. It was one thing questioning his own existence, and too bad if some other people got caught up in the answer. But Dinky Dutta never intended for others to die before he got the chance. No way.

Drop the idea of dropping it by the pier.

You're just going to have to wait, Dinky, till the boat comes in and goes out again.

Wait until it's midstream, as planned. Shame about the extra waiting time. You could try meditating like your Dad taught you. May not help but it won't make things worse: time can't go any slower than it is now.

## (8) Tony gets ahead

##

Tony's sitting comfortably. Not as in – completely relaxed; more like – at ease, mainly, with a sequence of events successfully initiated, now proceeding more-or-less as planned.

It reminds him of the lull between exam papers - 'Finals', back in the days before continuous assessment. Like as not you knew you'd done all right in the previous paper; now all you had to do was stay on track for the next one. A monkish existence with perhaps a couple of drinks at night to help you sleep. For those few weeks, you were chaste, pure, purposeful.

The way Gandhi must have been all the time; him and Nelson Mandela.

Enough tiresome reminiscence! Let's get an update.

Dinky has taken the photos and his alter ego has sent them to Tony, complete with warning message from 'osamaobama'. Didn't he do well, thinks Tony, to identify the location in every shot? Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, an icon in triplicate. Silly email address, but terrorists probably would have a warped sense of humour, wouldn't they?

Soooooo...

A few minutes ago Tony duly forwarded the message and the photos to the command and control centre in New Scotland Yard, c/o the exclusive email address issued to senior 2012 executives and other London luminaries. A couple of minutes later, he phoned an even more exclusive number and asked for 'Bessie', as he had been instructed to do in the event of an emergency. When s/he came to the phone, 'Bessie'

was duly impressed. Having closed the call only a few moments ago, Tony is now sitting comfortably, waiting for the pace of events to pick up.

One more thing. Though it wasn't in the plan (at least, not in the version of the plan that Tony explained to Dinky), as he was forwarding the photos from 'osamaobama', Tony attached something else along with them.

Rude not to, really, when the email seemed to be crying out for further attachments.

The extra attachment was Tony's photograph of Dinky standing at the back of the Thames Clipper, helpfully labeled 'DinkyDutta.jpg'. In the covering note, Tony didn't say anything to incriminate the youth. Was careful not to. He merely wrote that

'there may have been something not quite right about this young man who recently came for interview in my office.' Nothing in what he said that couldn't be judged irrelevant when the proper police inquiry gets going. But Tony is guessing it might need an extra nudge to get it going properly. Like having a brown face to put things to, even if it later turns out to be quite the wrong face, sadly misplaced.

Even while he was setting him up, Tony also kept his word to Dinky. In between emailing Scotland Yard and his phone call to 'Bessie', Tony also sent the

'osamaobama' pictures back to Dinky, this time to the boy's official email address. As Tony promised all along, Dinky could still be the one to break the story, though he might be more intimately involved in it than he was previously led to expect. But any misunderstanding will soon be cleared up, surely.

Thus for the time being we shall leave Tony as we found him. Sitting in his office, waiting for something big.

Something big enough to Make the Games.

## (9) Breathless

##

She is struggling to get more air into her lungs.

Eyes shining, chest heaving. Yes, Pete can see but he's determined not to look at the swell of Rupa's breasts, rising and falling against the scooped edges of her low-cut top.

So out of breath she must have run up the ramp from the DLR station into the campus, and again up the stairs to his academic office.

New ruling from university managers: lecturers should not have personal nameplates on their doors. Rooms in which lecturers happen to work are to be labeled

'academic office'.

She knocked but by the time Pete answered she had already opened the door and entered the room.

Crossed his mind to be annoyed. Then Pete saw Rupa's agitated face and in quick succession he invited her to sit down, asked her if she needed a glass of water, directed her, needlessly, to take a deep breath, all the while wondering what on earth had brought her here out of term-time and in such a state.

'It's Dinky,' she declares, brushing aside Pete's solicitude for her. 'He's gonna do something stupid.

I just know it, right. You're going to help me find him.

We've got to stop him, right. Please say you will.'

Praise the Lord! Student begins conversation with tutor other than by saying 'I,m confused. Can you tell me what to write?'

Not meaning to belittle Rupa's obvious concerns, thinks Pete with his 'student-facing' face on, at least this is better than being asked to explain yet again an assignment I've already explained half a dozen times before.

'I'll do what I can, Rupa. You know I always do what I can for my students'. He's answering on auto-pilot (with plenty of automatic cheese, clearly), but even before he gets the words out, he knows they're in the wrong register. Supportive-sounding professional clichés won't do. His first instinct was correct. This is not going to be a question of university procedure, putting in a good word, or coaxing an increasingly impatient administrator into letting passable students remain registered for a module they've hardly attended.

No, no, nothing like that. Whatever's going on here, is of a quite different order.

Thank God.

Ain't no stopping her now. Words come tumbling out like dice.

Logged on. Dinky tweeting. Crazy. Not at our place, not home with parents. Tweets mention Canary Wharf.

Says explosion, people dying. Dinky not himself.

We've got to go and look.

Now she's on her knees, imploring him. Whoah, there – stop, please! In only a few seconds Pete's veered from interest to empathy to acute embarrassment.

What if somebody saw? Happened to be walking past and looked through the glass slit in the door?

Female student kneeling in front of male academic.

Doesn't bear thinking about.

Afterwards he will cringe at the thought that this is what it took to get him out of his seat. This is what nudged him into going with Rupa to find Dinky.

Not because he was unreservedly concerned, either for Dinky or for her state of mind. True, he wasn't entirely indifferent, but the main thing was to get this sexy girl out of the kneeling position before someone mistook him for Bill Clinton.

'There's something else,' Rupa is saying. Not only her eyes but her whole body is downcast, dejected. 'I was so worried about Dinky that I phoned the police.'

Would they act or hardly re-act at all?

She wasn,t sure, but she said she thought she had to try them, at least.

'They didn't seem bothered at first. I told them about the tweets and gave them Dinky's login. The phone operator took it down but I could tell he wasn't that interested. Then, when I said Dinky's full name, it was like an alarm went off.'

The urgency of finding her lost lover and rescuing him from danger, is taking over from Rupa's anxiety about having done the wrong thing. The stupidest thing. She braces herself to tell Pete the rest of the story:

'I was put on hold for a few seconds and then a very cool woman came on. She sounded different. Y'know, authority. And she wanted to know loads about Dinky, but I could tell she already knew quite a lot –

knew too much about him. Then I realised they were already looking for him, chasing him down, and I was just making it easier for them.

'So I ended the call and started running over here to find you. I thought they might come after me as well, and maybe they could use my phone to trace me, so I binned it. And I really wish I hadn't because it was a present from my mum, and she'll murder me when I go home without it.'

Here she crumples, scrunched up like a piece of waste paper, then unfolds again till she's pumped up and ready to go.

This way and that, collapsed and refurbished in just two ticks. Aaah, the resilience of youth!

But Pete isn't so supple nowadays. Frowning, he might even be mumbling to himself, he crosses the room, takes his jacket off the hook and puts it on.

From the slabs of sunlight crashing through his office window, he knows he'll be too hot. But without the homely stuff in his jacket pockets, he'd feel even more uncomfortable. There's a photo of Carol and the kids, for example, which he never knowingly goes without.

Moves through the door and turns back, momentarily, to lock it. Rupa is already impatient, like a child who won't go on without her parents and can't wait for them to catch up. But he does catch up, and now the two of them are aligned. Walking smartly along the corridor, side-by-side: the way detectives do on TV.

Down onto the DLR platform, where the train indicator says there'll be one in four minutes. No quicker way of getting to Canary Wharf.

The distance from campus to the Wharf is not much more than the length of two Royal Docks. But the docks were built for big ships and plenty of them: it's too far to walk. Call a cab and it's bound to get snarled up in traffic. So they must wait, in this place where they have waited a thousand times before, at the start of a thousand unexceptional journeys.

Today is not one of those days. Rupa can taste catastrophe, she's convinced of it, and she's pacing up and down the platform, willing the little red train to be here now. Pete isn't sure what to think.

In some ways he resents Rupa's apprehension and the impact it's having on him. And why did you come to me anyway, when I'm not even your personal tutor? Yet he's glad to be out of the office, doing something –

anything – that just might be conclusive.

## (10) On my way

##

At last, my boat comes in. I saw it first approaching, then leaving Greenland – no, not the barren island but the next Clipper stop, first one to the east of Canary Wharf. And now it's crossing the river to the pier by the Four Seasons Hotel. Walking on water towards me; to save me. One on each side, two seagulls are its acolytes. What a heavenly boat!

So close I can hear the onboard instructions: Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at Canary Wharf. If you are leaving the Clipper, please disembark from the front of the boat. Please have your tickets ready for inspection.

It scrapes softly along the side of the pier like a car tire riding the curb. Now they lower a tiny little bridge between the boat and the pier –

ingenious, really. Half a dozen passengers get off and three of us get on. No, there'll be a few more –

a late influx of strong, silent types, running down the ramp, across the pier and onto the boat.

The little bridge is pulled up right behind them. Just in time, lads.

Short hair, clean cut. White, short-sleeved shirts, matching ties and chunky sports bags. Four of these guys; by the look of them, they've arrived direct screen from corporate America. Jocks not geeks, they might be a relay team. Of course, Dinky finally realises, they'll be from Team USA, the much-heralded, widely-trumpeted, Games-Time occupants of my university campus.

Sorry, my former university. Keep forgetting I'm not going back.

So I'm making my way to the back of the boat, still carrying my laptop and that dynamite sports bag. No obstacles, no naked flames, nobody coming the other way. Even better – now I've got here, it looks like I'm going to have the rear deck to myself. Standing room and two rows of seats, open to the elements and empty of people. Perfect. Already we're moving away from the pier. Canary Wharf skyscrapers, lovely old word from the 1920s New World, starting to look like a Mondrian. Docklands Boogie-Woogie. As soon as the boat's midstream, I can sink the bag containing the acetone peroxide and its toxic ingredients, and drop the case with laptop and camera in it. Over the side, the whole lot. Only a few more seconds, and I shall be released.

Just then a party of chittering Chinese tourists comes out of the saloon to take pictures of each other. Bloody Hell! I can't let them see me chucking stuff over. And what if they use a flash? Could it set off the bomb in my bag? It's not a naked flame, I wouldn't have thought so. But I don't fuckin'

know...!

Clickety-click, I'm still here, so I guess that's the answer. They've posed and pushed buttons for each other, and now it looks like they're going back into the saloon, thank God. Such a relief: the boat's already slowing down to approach Tower Bridge, and normally the tourists can't get enough of it. I thought I'd be stuck with them until the next stop, Tower, and there's always a crowd to get on there.

Wait a minute, through the glass in the saloon door I can see one of the American relay team has been beckoning to the Chinese, calling them back inside.

I wonder what that's all about.

The Yanks are coming! Two doors into the saloon, one on each side of the boat, and there are two jocks bursting through each one. If this is part of their training, I don't want to be part of it! I start to get up and go but one of them shouts at me in a clipped, Scottish accent: 'Sit down. Don't move'.

Not quite American, then. Now I see that apart from the one doing the talking, shouting, the other three have got guns drawn, pointing at me.

So they are a team; it's just a different kind of relay.

He says I mustn't move. But I've got to do something to get my bag out of their firing line. If they fire, even if a gun goes off by accident, then the bag will blow up, and I don't know whether it will take the whole boat with it. There's a boatload of people

– well, OK, the boat's not actually loaded with people; but everyone on here, their lives are at risk, I've put them at risk, unless I manage to move my bag off the boat.

But when I do move they are going to shoot me, aren't they? And they are going to shoot me in the head, dead; because they think I'm a terrorist and they've been told that terrorists wear their explosives in vests round their chests. It's the fashion. Wounding a suicide bomber may allow him to detonate his bomb, that's what the Met Commissioner said. The policy is to take them out. Completely.

This second, the split second it takes me to talk to you about the second splitting, does seem to be going on for a very long time. So it might be true, then, what they say about the drowning man. But no, they're wrong. Truth is I am now looking inside myself and my past life is no longer churning around in there. Blessed relief! There is only this....

## (11) Aftermath

##

Thump...thump...thump. The sound of the fridge door closing. But that's nothing to the bish-bash-bosh going on in his mind's eye.

Pete's all a-jumble. It is early evening, six hours or so after Dinky Dutta died by his own hand. Or at the hands of the police. Or else it was 'suicide by cop'. You pays your money (or perhaps you don't pay, if you get your news online), and you takes your choice. Meanwhile Pete has no choice but to go over it again and again. He's alone in his study, pacing up and down the rug that runs between the door and his desk by the window. Carol's in the kitchen, preparing their dinner. This he knows because he can hear it every time she closes the door of the fridge.

The noise - for Chrissake, how many ingredients were in the fridge to start with? - keeps bringing him back to the surface; but doesn't stop him being swamped by the continuous rehearsal of recent events.

Rupa's frozen face when she heard the explosion.

The last time I saw Dinky, at the reception for prize-winning students.

TONY THAT TIME HE CAME HERE, ASKING ME TO STAY AWAY

FROM THE POLICE 'WHATEVER HAPPENS'; WARNING ME OF

DIRE CONSEqUENCES IF I BROKE WITH MY OWN TRADITION

OF NON-COOPERATION.

These are not memories. Being with Carol in their South London home, the children safely decamped to friends or drama group or whatever is tonight's routine – that's a distant memory. Dinky, Rupa and Tony are the people in the room with Pete right now.

The cleverest stupid boy in the world.

All dressed up and nowhere to go. Graceful movements, but never fitted right in; slightly awry, whatever the social setting. Too smart for your own good.

Christ, can I think of you without being trite? Or maybe that's what you always were - trite arse, Heat magazine's idea of what it means to be the Outsider.

You'll have to forgive him. Pete, that is. Talking about magazines is what he gets paid for nowadays, so of course he can't get the 'critique' out of his head, even at moments like these.

When we heard the sound across the water, I tried to keep Rupa at arm's length, regulation distance between male staff and attractive female student. But she more or less fell on me.

Not a dead feint, though without me there to stop here I reckon she would have hit the floor.

There we were on the riverbank – sounds like bullrushes and Wind in the Willows, doesn't it?

Some distance away, could not have been less than half a mile, but we saw the flash of light and heard it half a second later – crack, bang, whoosh!

Ceremonial cannon, maybe; some sort of salute. Not the queen's birthday, however. Straightaway she knew. Her face froze, I held out my hand to her, and she gripped my wrist; so hard she pinched it. She wobbled and leaned into me more and more until the full weight of her body was resting on me. Her skin was grey, ashen, but even at that moment you knew the colour would come back. Near collapse, she was still beautiful, so smart, so alive. She couldn't be anything else.

Then there's Mr Toad. Tony and his madcap schemes and his willingness to implement them by any means necessary. You'd get off on the comparison, wouldn't you, Tony? No, not the Mr Toad bit; but you'd like to think there is something of you in that famous picture of Malcolm X, standing to the side of a window, rifle in hand, out of firing range himself but looking through the glass at the source of incoming. Underneath, the caption reads: by any means necessary.

Freedom fighter, if only. Instead you entrapped Dinky and set him up, didn't you? I don't know what you did to groom him, but I don't need to know. I just know that you persuaded him to act out the fantasy we had together, one drunken night. Aahh, but before you start, the difference is that I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Whereas, you, my dear fellow, you have lost sight of the distinction. And along with it, you've lost all credibility with me. I don't owe you anything, Tony, least of all, loyalty.

Pete's taking his phone out of his pocket. Turns it on...and puts it back. You don't even have the guts to betray him properly, do you, Pete? Instead he logs on to his computer and goes to a blogspot page entitled 'Pete Bruce's Philosophical Notebook'.

What an arse!

Pete begins to type:

Dinky Dutta died today and I know that Tony Skance, director of the Cultural Olympiad, had a lot to do with his death. I know because I'm the one who introduced them to each other.

I also know that Tony was desperately worried that London was about to squander the sales pitch of the century – the Olympic Games. He didn't fear a Delhi-style screw-up, but he was scared that the Olympics would just...take place, without being the gigantic shared experience which London needs in order to renew its position in the wider world.

Tony Skance wanted London 2012 to have the same sort of effect as the miners' rescue in Chile.

To lift the spirits, galvanise and gird the loins of Londoners. And when he saw this wasn't about to happen, he started thinking about how to manipulate things, how to get Londoners united around the idea of defending themselves, supporting each other against terrorists, creating a sense of togetherness just in time for the Olympiad.

I know this because, I confess, he and I talked about the idea. But I was not party to putting it into practice. In the conversation we had late one drunken night – the first time we had been out together for years, but that's another story – there was no mention of setting up a fall guy, someone who had to go down in order for any of this to happen.

As far as I was concerned, none it was ever going to happen. But after I went home, Tony Skance took up these crazy ideas and ran with them. He ran into Dinky Dutta and groomed him to take the drop for this, the PR stunt to end all PR stunts. Now the life of Dinky Dutta, my former student, has already ended. And I am writing this in full knowledge that when the story gets out, Tony Skance will be finished, too.

Pete's finger hesitated over the button, then he pressed it:

P U B L I S H .

## (12) Tony in the limelight

##

It being a police matter, the press conference takes place in New Scotland Yard. In the biggest room they've got, on the ground floor.

Years ago, in a different century (twentieth, of course), Pete came late to a packed press conference in this very room. He stood for a couple of minutes in the dead space between two sets of double doors, waiting for a break in proceedings so that he could go in and find a seat without drawing attention to himself. At that time, as a reporter for a left-wing magazine, he did not relish the attentions of the Metropolitan Police. From where he was standing, waiting for the right moment to go in, he couldn,t see the stage but he could hear something of what was being said. Sounded like the assembled company was listening to a recording: the voice had a peculiarly metallic quality; and it was pitched high, as if the bass had got lost in the recording process. Not the Ripper tapes, obviously, but maybe a similar scenario...

But when Pete finally entered the room, he saw that the voice was 'live' - if that is quite the right word. The 'recording' was (then) Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Kenneth Newman, right there in the flesh (if that,s quite the right word); sitting bolt upright, heavily bespectacled, flatly voicing a series of angular, un-modulated sentences. Pete tried hard not to laugh at the prospect of Robocop crossed with the little creatures advertising Cadbury,s Smash (biggest thing on TV at the time); but the giggles got the better of him, and he was obliged to turn tail and walk out.

Even after all these years, the set-up in that room is still laughable; but the Met's new mise en scène could not be more different. Instead of Robocop presiding, there are pastel colours plus press officers with unprecedented degrees of emotional literacy (and the certificates to prove it). If entering Kenneth Newman's Scotland Yard was like coming on board a submarine, today Pete has to pinch himself to check he hasn't been sent here for therapy.

You never know, he might be needing some before this is over.

Pete shows his Press card, writes his name on the list along with the other reporters – under

'publication' he gives the name of his university, and picks up a copy of the speech which the Mayor of London is due to give as and when he arrives.

London's leading public official is currently conferring with the prime minister about recent developments and their impact on the Games. By way of warming up the room before he gets here (not that they put it like that), the press conference will be addressed by present-day Metropolitan Police Commissioner Alan Rudd and none other than Tony Skance, director of the Cultural Olympiad. And when we hear from Tony, depending on what we hear from him – how florid it is, how self-congratulatory, how much blame he sets at the feet of Dinky Dutta, we may also be hearing from a certain someone who just might get up and denounce him. You haven't ruled it out, have you, Pete? On the other hand, Tony may say something that shows your suspicions are unfounded, fears unnecessary, and last night's blog...a mistake, a creature of that terrible sadness in which even the brightest lights go dark.

They're coming on to the platform now – the two of them, that is. Tony in his best suit, looking sombre

– but Pete detects the hint of a smile playing somewhere under there; and the Commissioner, a jovial looking chap – smooth face, pink complexion like an eighteenth century squire. Solemnity does not sit easily with him, either.

'Ladies and gentlemen', the Commissioner begins,

'I understand that the Mayor has left Downing Street and will be joining us shortly. Also that he has invited us to begin proceedings without him, such is the urgency of the situation and the pressing need for clear and authoritative information.

Accordingly, I will update you on the dramatic events which took place this afternoon on the River Thames, before handing over to Tony Skance who will offer an appraisal of the situation and its cultural significance for the Olympic Games, which, as of course you know, are about to open here in London.

'Shortly after 2pm yesterday, Metropolitan Police firearms officers shot Mr Dinky Dutta, a British born university student of Asian extraction. Mr Dutta was understood to be in possession of explosive materials; and this understanding has since proved to be correct. Additionally, Mr Dutta had posted suicide notes on the Internet, and under an assumed name he issued a warning to the effect that Canary Wharf was his preferred target.

'Mr Dutta was apprehended on board a Clipper commuter boat travelling westwards between Canary Wharf and the Tower of London. When Mr Dutta failed to obey instructions issued clearly and repeatedly by a Metropolitan Police officer, the order was given for him to be shot, and this order was carried out in accordance with Metropolitan Police guidelines stipulating that suspects thought to be in the process of committing an act of terrorism or about to initiate such an act, should not be afforded the opportunity to detonate a bomb or perpetrate any other crime likely to endanger the public.

Accordingly, in a controlled operation Mr Dutta was shot in the head and it is believed that he died instantly. I am unable to confirm this, however, since the shots fired by my officers had the effect of detonating the considerable quantity of explosive material in Mr Dutta's possession. Unfortunately, the intensity of the ensuing explosion, which was, I hasten to add, closely confined to that part of the Clipper craft in which Mr Dutta had been sitting, means that determining the precise cause of Mr Dutta's death is now a matter for the most exacting forensic tests. And even after these tests have been carried out, we may find ourselves unable to bring this issue to a satisfactory conclusion.

'What is not at issue, however, is that prompt and decisive action on the part of Metropolitan Police firearms officers, under the direction of the command and control centre here at New Scotland Yard, has averted a terrorist attack on one of London's iconic districts – an attack which, had it proved successful, might have blighted the London Olympiad in the same way that the suicide bombers of 7/7 succeeded in blighting London's elation at having been awarded the Games, just the day before. But once again, in July 2012 as in July 2005, London, its people and its police service, have not been found wanting.'

Not bad for the old script, thinks Tony.

Would have written it that way myself.

Until yesterday.

The Commissioner seems relieved to have said his piece. The colour in his face, which had been rising and reddening (scurrilous reporters have been known to rub their palms together and hold them out to be warmed by the Commissioner's fiery cheeks), is starting to fade. He knows he'll have to take some questions, though. So his face hasn't yet come all the way back through the colour swatch to its normal shade of ruddy pink.

We might expect London's police chief to be a more natural communicator. Indeed, previous post holders have been appointed for just that reason. But don't be taken in. This one's apparent clumsiness is also part of the game: what's being communicated here is that the Commissioner has higher priorities than the communication business. Operational priorities

– securing the city and your personal safety – trump the PR game, geddit?

Please let us know if this message isn't clear enough for you.

Yet some journalists are unsettled by the discrepancy between claims that Dinky was about to blow up Canary Wharf and the admission that he was blown up while travelling away from his alleged target. A number of reporters invite the Commissioner to account for this. One of them makes an imaginative comparison to the General Belgrano, the Argentinian vessel steaming away from the Falklands islands when it was torpedoed and sunk (with enormous loss of life) by a British submarine.

The Commissioner fends off such criticism with relative ease. He merely points to the explosive material that Dinky was undoubtedly carrying.

Cynical reporters may doubt this, but we know he really was carrying it, don't we? That and his immature, suicidal tweets, and the bomb threat with more than a hint of student pranksterism in the email address it was sent from. The combination of part tragedy, part twisted comedy, and a young man's desperate attempt to be something, anything; it all chimes in with his age and our times.

Accordingly, the Commissioner can tell the story with conviction because he knows not that it is true but that nearly everyone will believe that it could be.

When life's a pitch, ladies and gentlemen, we must live by the balance of probabilities.

Tony's about to take his turn. Pete thinks he is bound to set Dinky up as 'son of 7/7', the alien creature in our midst. And when he does, thinks Pete, I'm going to have to heckle, intervene, disrupt. Enough to cast shadows of doubt over Tony before I'm frogmarched out. Preferably without coming across as a complete nutter.

Going to be a difficult balance, thinks Pete. Hard to strike it right. Indeed it would have been hard to do it, if that's what Tony had done. But of course, he doesn't.

'Dinky Dutta was a friend of mine,' Tony begins.

In response, a fleeting moment when no one in the conference room is fiddling with a phone. A moment of stillness, then the fidgeting redoubles.

'I think I can say that.' Flash of downcast eyes: Tony staging humility, which, as you should know by now, is not to say he doesn't mean it. 'We only met a couple of times, but I knew immediately that we were on the same wavelength.

'Dinky Dutta was a lost boy. As I have been, as you are, perhaps. As your sons and daughters will be or will have been, now or at some point in their lives.

And in something like the same way, fellow citizens, our city has lost its....'

Tony's hesitating, trying to find a way of not repeating the word 'way', wishing he hadn't used it in the previous clause when he didn't really need to; but he can't think of a synonym so he's going to have to repeat it.

'....way.'

Even as he hears himself saying it, he wonders whether he should have tried 'soul'. Better not, he reassures himself. Would have been too much, too soon.

But have they come after him this far? No, I don't mean, chasing him. The question is, are the people with him, are they following him up to now?

Will they recognize themselves in Tony's rhetoric?

Can they fit their feet into his logical steps?

You can usually tell by the mood of the Press conference.

But don't make ,em stretch too far, Tony, or they'll turn and bite ya.

He's going to go for it now, though. No safety net, remember. Tony Skance draws breath, smiles, not ear-to-ear but enough to show some lovely teeth; finds the television camera in the centre of the room and looks right into it. My God, his eyes are the brightest blue.

The camera operator, seeing them through the viewfinder, feels obliged to check the contrast.

Has he ever, in all his life, been more alive than this?

'Londoners, fellow citizens, we had a son who lost his way. He lost it, because we did not give him enough to find. Not enough leadership, not enough purpose, not enough spirit. No wonder he was dispirited. Now Dinky Dutta is lost to all of us.

A loss to us all. He was what we have lost, and we cannot bring him back.

'Londoners, there will be no return for this prodigal of ours. We do not live in such a story.

'But I say to you, people of London' – Jeez, can he get away with this Biblical style? Yes, he can –

'that the death of Dinky Dutta is a lesson for us all. A parable of all our lives. From his mixed up, lost boy, rebel without a cause, stupid, misguided, young man's death, we must learn to find each other once more, to live together again, to re-kindle the spirit of London. The death of my friend Dinky tells us that there is life afterwards, if only we make it so. And the Olympics......'

The room and its occupants may yet prove him right.

Among the hard-bitten hacks listening to his speech, there is a clear pulse of energy, attention, focus.

And now there's a bit of a commotion on stage. But it's not Pete. Wrong-footed by Tony, he's been sitting on his hands (yes, a mixed metaphor!), feeling out of place, wondering (again) whether he's read Tony wrong all along. Pete's not moving a muscle, so the disturbance is nothing whatsoever to do with him.

What's happening on stage is that four police officers, not actually in uniform but they can't be anything other than police officers, have encircled Tony, and, with one at each elbow, one in front, one behind, they are edging him out to the wings.

Practised technique. Nicely done. With no scuffling or shouting on Tony's part, hardly any protest at all, strangely; it's not even that disruptive.

He's gone in an instant.

Meanwhile, there has been a word in the Commissioner's ear. Now he comes to the fore. Not blushing, this time. He seems to gain confidence at precisely the moment when others would be unnerved. And he explains that his officers have obtained evidence of Tony's close involvement with Dinky Dutta, up to and including the intention to commit acts of terrorism.

Hence the extraordinary turn of events here today. In accordance with which, the Commissioner concludes,

'Mr Skance has now been placed under arrest.'

Uproar in the media circus. The lions are untamed.

Editors, speaking to them through earpieces, direct camera operators to stop recording and turn off their machines. Newsgathering must remain within the boundaries of what is conducive to public safety: it says so in the guidelines; and unfrocking a member of London's ruling elite, live on TV, is anything but. Here in the conference room at New Scotland Yard, the mayhem seems all the more intense compared to Tony's finely woven rhetoric, which went out on live feed only a few moments ago.

Still top of the Bill, eh, Tony?

## (13) Parasitical Professor Some months later] ]

##

In the university calendar there is something called an 'inaugural lecture.' The term contains two echoes of other places and different times: first, it echoes those ancient universities in which professors are led to their chairs in a Senate House; second, it recalls even more Ancient Rome, where 'augury' entailed reading animal entrails and initiating a course of action on the basis of what these gizzards had to say.

Today's version is much more prosaic. Newly appointed professors are called upon to give a lecture which serves to initiate their professorship. And so, one evening in September 2012, members of the East London university community – staff, students, alumni and friends, gathered to hear what Professor Sally Hume had to say in her inaugural lecture.

Not that Sally was entirely new to the university.

She had been appointed Head of Pete's School of Media Arts almost a year before; and she arrived to take up her post at the start of Semester B, in February 2012. But what with the spring term being especially busy, and the summer having been taken up with all sorts of things to do with the Olympics, Professor Hume's inaugural was kept back until September.

She chose as her topic, 'Dinky Dutta: unforeseen icon of London 2012'. Professor Hume approached this topic from the interdisciplinary field of psycho-social studies. Apart from various pleasantries of an introductory kind (an essential part of any such occasion, though they hardly bear repeating afterwards), this (below) is the gist of her lecture:

'Even Dinky Dutta's best friends would not have decribed him as "athletic". "Fit", yes. Extremely so, some female fellow students are reported to have said; but not a natural athlete. Nonetheless, when he sprang from his seat at the back of the Clipper, just as it was passing underneath Tower Bridge, the athleticism of his movements would have done credit to any ballet dancer or Olympic gymnast. Unfortunately, if Mr Dutta had hidden talents, they were revealed only in the last moments of his life. Thankfully, because of where he died, each of these moments was unwittingly recorded by various tourists taking snapshots of Tower Bridge, one of London's most famous attractions; and, because of when he died, in the age of citizen journalism and social media, many of these photographs have been circulated widely. Thus the dying moments of Dinky Dutta live on in a series of photographic images which have already gained the status of icons.

'In my lecture I will offer a commentary on just a few of those iconic images which have already been compared to Catholic depictions of the Stations of the Cross.

'This first photograph was taken from the north bank of the river, by someone standing at the southern perimeter of the Tower of London, looking out at the river from a position close to Traitor's Gate. The camera is set at a high level of magnification, so we appear to be much closer to the boat and the bridge.

The boat is framed between the two, main pillars of the bridge and the roadway running between the two pillars, so that these three elements seem to form a proscenium arch, with Old Father Thames as the stage itself. It is appropriately theatrical, therefore, to see what appears to be a dancing figure, rising high above the floor of the Clipper's rear deck, almost as high as the roof of the saloon. This is Dinky Dutta, arms and legs outstretched, head erect, performing the star jump which is already a legend.

'There have been a number of reports to the effect that when Mr Dutta jumped up from his seat, he was holding a sports bag in one hand and a laptop case in the other. This suggests high levels of adrenaline on his part – for him to have jumped so high while weighed down in this way. But it is not unknown for highly motivated individuals to surpass themselves in extremis, far exceeding the limited range of their normal, physical prowess. Indeed such achievements were recorded in Ancient Greek by Herodotus and in Latin by Lucretius.

'There are no bags to be seen in this picture, however. Here, therefore, we have an image of Mr Dutta in flight but without the bags which are alleged to have flown with him, which suggests that the picture has been photo-shopped to some degree.

Though this is widely acknowledged, it hasn't stopped the photograph from becoming the most famous image of this Olympic year.

'The second photograph was taken from inside the Clipper craft by a tourist standing at the window of the saloon. Looking downriver, eastwards, he had been aiming to shoot the underside of Tower Bridge as the boat passed between its two central pillars, and this duly appears in the frame as a sort of ceiling. In the centre of the frame the familiar figure of Dinky Dutta re-appears, now seen from below. But it's not just the angle which is different. You'll notice the crucial change in the shape of his body. Though the limbs are still outstretched, as in the previous picture, they are now frozen, almost on the point of collpasing inwards, and his head is slumped forwards. Again, there are no bags to be seen, but even if they were in his hands at the moment when he levitated himself from his seat, by now they would have plummeted into the river.

'From the top of the skull there is what looks like a plume of smoke, stretching up towards the steel plates which comprise the underside of the bridge. They look like Lego bricks, don't they?

Unfortunately the content of this picture is far from childish or innocent. The "smoke" coming up from Mr Dutta's head is really a spume of grey matter, issuing from the hole in his skull made by a bullet fired from a police marksman's rifle. There is no way of telling whether there was any life left in him when this picture was taken, but here we are undoubtedly close to the moment of death.

'In the final photograph of our triptych, taken by another tourist standing on Tower Bridge and looking north to the Tower of London, Mr Dutta's bodily existence....is no more. Instead there is an arc of spray and debris, rising high towards the photographer on the bridge and the sky above her.

The instant dematerialisation of Dinky Dutta's body has prompted some to say that this picture shows him ascending into heaven.

'Attempting to exclude religious elements from the discourse would be futile. But this should not prevent us from subjecting such elements to rational observation. We know that this photo depicts the moment after Dinky Dutta's body disintegrated in an explosion caused by the impact of gunfire on an unknown quantity of acetone peroxide. Though it is anything but scientifically verifiable – it is hardly, literally true, nonetheless we suggest that the idea of "ascension" is useful as a metaphor. For this was a violently disturbed young man, and yet he was no more disturbed than our violent society. And if it is the case, as some of his friends maintain, that Dinky Dutta may have found a sense of purpose in the last moments of his life, in his determination to prevent others from being caught up in the consequences of his own grave errors, then indeed he did rise to a higher level. Neither god nor devil, in the final seconds before death, this complex individual was given the chance to become a better human being. He took that chance, and so he lives on in our hearts as an example to us all.'

By this point, to anyone who cared to look, it would have been immediately apparent that Dr Peter Fercoughsey had vacated his seat at the back of the lecture theatre. Pete did his best to exit without anyone noticing, and in this endeavour he was largely successful. Nonetheless, during the week immediately following Professor's Hume inauguration, a rumour went round that Pete Fercoughsey had slipped out to be sick. Some people even said they saw a pool of blood-red puke in the centre of University Square.

## Epilogue: Is that my friend I see before me?

##

They have him in a hospital. Secure wing, nice grounds, twenty-five miles from London. Coming up the drive in a taxi, you might think you had been invited to Chequers.

To this hospital, and the inmate with whom he has been intimate since childhood, Pete has found it necessary to invite himself. Not quite an invite, it should be said. In actual fact he applied for a visit and the application was not refused, either by the visitee or his doctors. Furthermore, now that the application has not been knocked back, the visit has to happen now because in a few days' time, Pete, Carol and the kids are off on a slow boat to China.

Pete had already written another application, y'see, for a professorhsip in the People's Republic. He got it.

Visiting, but it's a five-year visit. Very soon, with references checked and even a medical (passed), they'll be out of here for long enough to come back different.

So going to see Tony, to find out whether he's the same as ever - as Pete put it to Carol: it's now or never.

Of course, before visiting a long-term resident of any state institution, you have to think about what gifts to take with you. Things to bring that the resident might want because for him they are unobtainable or in short supply; but, obviously, they should be things that the authorities will not have cause to confiscate.

Pete has guessed that Tony will have taken up smoking again. So he's brought cartons of Lucky Strike, the brand that Tony smoked when they were in the band together. He would have brought him a Zippo, too, one of the old ones. But it seemed unlikely that the guards, nurses – whatever the hell they are, would let Tony soak cotton wool in lighter fluid to make a flame that doesn't go out, whatever happens, until you tell it to. So no go on the Zippo. Instead, Pete went to Jermyn Street and bought a £500 smoking jacket: because it's posh, like Tony partly is; because it's warm and the plum colour is soft on the eyes – unlike the institutional lighting which Tony is sure to find uncomfortable; and because it folds around a man's body and holds him, hugging Tony like Pete would partly like to do.

Taxi paid off, Pete goes in through an imposing front door. But the reception area is inescapably naff. While the big house was never as elevated as Brideshead, since becoming a mental hospital in the late 1940s (first intake: the mad dogs of war), it has been brought down by successive levels of welfare state intervention. More-or-less well intentioned; each one tackier than the last.

Buzz, ping, whrrr, click, bleep, bleep, bleep.

Details checked, body scanned, ID issued, doors opening. 'Welcome to the Wing, Dr Fercoughsey'

– just 'the Wing', that's all that needs saying.

'Please come this way.'

The invitation is real enough; but it's a make-believe world that Pete is invited to enter (even more contrived than the one outside, but it's a close call, you might say). As directed, he goes into a room made to look like a sitting room in yer average three-bedroom home, and sits down on a sofa that sports just one or two cigarette burns (not so many that you would absolutely have to notice them). quite nice, really – the décor. Somebody's made a bit of an effort. Meanwhile Pete's escort (young woman, crisp uniform, physically confident) moves away from the sofa to take her seat at an occasional table discreetly positioned near the (barred) window, exactly where such a table would stand if this really was the room it purports to be. Don't mind me, her body language seems to say, I'm just like your nearly-grown-up-daughter at the back of the room, doing her homework or something very much like it. Pete begins to wonder whether this is also the location for conjugal visits. It's a big enough settee, he thinks. Does the chaperone stay on for that, too? His mind moves swifly on to something else.

Enter Tony. Small steps, each one taken deliberately.

Pete notices immediately that Tony's nails are far too long. There is an attendant at his side. The upturned fingers of this retainer's right hand are underneath Tony's elbow, gently guiding him with the lightest touch. But close enough to grab hold and seize control, should anything untoward occur.

Now Tony's making a bee-line for the sofa: he's clearly been here before. Yet his face is a picture of concentration. One small step for Tony, leads to another small step for Tony. Then he turns and lowers himself and his jogging bottoms onto the cushion; every movement necessitating his full attention.

So this is my friend, Pete thinks.

Correction: so this is what the drugs have done to my friend, thinks Pete.

Further correction: so this is what my friend has become, thinks Pete, given his condition and the regime required to treat it.

'Nice to see you, Pete', says Tony. His voice, no doubt about that, but the vowels are more rounded.

'Good of you to come.' This second clause only after a pause of Pinteresque proportions. Probably not because Tony is distancing himself from what he is saying, or drawing attention to the conventions of language. More likely it just takes him longer to make the transition from thought to speech.

But Pete's the one who really can't think of anything to say. Even the formalities have run out on him. There may be thousands of thoughts crowding into his mind, or none at all; but, in any event, nothing much comes out of his mouth.

He gets the cigarettes out of the bag (same old satchel), and Tony says, 'Thanks, Pete. Good choice.' Doesn't open them, though. Pete brings out the smoking jacket, unfolds it to show Tony, then throws it over Tony's shoulders. Very Continental.

'Lovely', says Tony. He cocks his head to one side so that he can feel the soft velvet on his right cheek. At the same time, he raises his left eyebrow and looks straight at Pete, in an echo of the quizzical look they used to share.

To this day, Pete always likes to think it was really there, that look on Tony's face, if only for an instant. But it could have been a reflex action on Tony's part (on the part of someone who is like Tony but not entirely); or Pete might have imagined it.

Who knows?

Still no great shakes on the conversation front.

Pete, that is. Instead, his right hand reaches out for Tony's left; and finds it; and finds that it isn't rejected. What a relief, Prufrock, not to be rejected! Pete's shoulders relax a little. He tenses up again when the thought crosses his mind that he ought to come back one day and get Tony out of all this. But no one could expect him to do it now, could they? Doing it 'one day' would have to mean some day, well into the future, wouldn't it?

Pete doesn't speak but when he looks up at Tony, his eyes are pleading for more time,: 'You don't want me to try and spring you now, do you, Tony?', they seem to say.

Tony's expression suggests he's not keen on going anywhere. Looking back at his unchanging, placid face, Pete feels he can afford to relax. Save it for after China, mate, he tells himself. Safe to shelve the idea for now.

From behind, the chaperone sees the backs of their heads tilting towards each other at exactly the same angle, as if reflected in a mirror. Bookends with no books in between.

And so these two men, close to being old men now, sit on the sofa holding hands like teenagers. As Morecambe and Wise would have if Eric's heart attack hadn't killed him.

