

What others have said about John Dodds

"One of the most promising new writers I have read for some time.  
I highly recommend his work."  
– Michael Moorcock, commenting on Dr. North's Wound.

"With the possible exception of the (Dean R.) Koontz, The Anatomy of Seahorses by John Dodds is the finest story The Horror Express has to offer."  
– Peter Tenant, Whispers of Wickedness.

"A highly unusual, and profoundly unsettling tale."  
– Alasdair Stuart, in his introduction to Rapunzel's Room on the Pseudopod podcast.

"An excellent story."  
– Mystery Dawg, in his introduction to Crossing the Border on the Crimewav podcast.

Honourable mentions, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror   
(ed. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow)

Dr. North's Wound

A Crow Among the Starlings

Rapunzel's Room

DR NORTH'S WOUND

And Other Stories

By John Dodds

Website

http://bonemachines.wordpress.com

Published by Smashwords

All stories © John Dodds 2010

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Print Version

A print version of this book is available from: www.lulu.com.

### Dedication

###

### Thomas Dodds 1932 – 2009  
This one's for you, dad.

##

##

##

## Credits

_Dr. North's Wound_ originally appeared on www.fantasticmetropolis.com, and was republished in 'Breaking Windows: A Fantastic Metropolis Anthology' (Prime Books, ed. Luis Rodriguez); _A Crow Among the Starlings_ , _The Anatomy of Seahorses_ and _Rapunzel's Room_ originally appeared in The Horror Express magazine; _Eight-Lane Messiah_ originally appeared in 'Old Blood, New Souls' (Horror Express publications, ed. Marc Shemmans); _Crossing The Border_ originally appeared in www.bluemurder.com; _Sugar Ceremony_ originally appeared in Judas ezine; _Freeloader_ originally appeared in the chapbook, 'Gameplayers' by John Dodds (Whispers of Wickeness press); _Origami_ originally appeared in Fusing Horizons magazine. Two of the stories in this collection are also available as free podcasts: _Crossing the Border_ , from www.crimewav.com and _Rapunzel's Room_ from www.pseudopod.org.

#

CONTENTS

Dr. North's Wound

A Crow Among the Starlings

Eight-Lane Messiah

Crossing the Border

Origami

Sugar Ceremony

Freeloader

Rapunzel's Room

Lost Gifts

The Anatomy of Seahorses

Levitation

# DR. NORTH'S WOUND

It is generally supposed, by poets and philosophers if not by men of science, that love resides within the heart. Until my apprenticeship to Dr. North, indeed, I too believed this to be so.

Late in the year of 1878, in the tenth month of my indenture to him, the doctor chose to make an example of me before his dinner guests at one of his renowned soirées. There were eight of us at table, and to my mortification Arabella Fanshawe was one of the party; I could have forgiven my employer anything but cutting me down before her, which he chose to do with some relish. Dr. North, handsome, sallow-faced with a smile like a fox said, in response to my comment on the question about where love resides, "As an analytical thinker, Jerome, a chemist – of some talent I might add" – and here he winked provokingly at Arabella who sat to his left – "you surely cannot subscribe to such rhetorical rot."

I felt myself grow pale as I saw the blush flare on Arabella's cheek; but whether this was from anger at Dr. North or shame for me I could not say. And I could look neither the Doctor nor Arabella in the eye, such was my humiliation. This was particularly the case when my employer compounded the slight with, "Perhaps you should relinquish your training as an apothecary and take to writing romantic doggerel for spinsters and young girls."

Laughter rippled like the legs of a centipede around the table. Arabella thankfully did not participate.

Harold McKenzie, the wealthiest landowner in the county of R–, by contrast, brayed, even as he was playfully slapped across the back of his hand by his usually timid wife.

"Write something for my dear Gwendolyn, too," he said, pinching his wife's cheek. "For she says I have not a romantic bone in my body. Though," he added, "I did not hear you complain last night, eh, my dear?"

The ladies around the table, the ancient Mrs Quinn and her prissy daughter Jane in particular, were horrified at this off-colour remark, and some of the men too, myself included, took to studying intently the remains of the entree on their dinner plates. Dr. North, however, saw this as another opening.

"Oh," he said, "I am speaking not of physical love, of lust, of animal passions, but of the so-called union of souls."

"Ah, so you believe in the soul, doctor?" This from my friend and cousin, Robert Theakston, a playful irony in his tone.

Dr. North stiffened somewhat at this. Arabella put a napkin to her lips, and I could have sworn by the fetching creases at the corners of her eyes, that she was smiling behind it.

"I speak in the sense of energy fields, Mr Theakston. Galvanic experiments, the new work with electricity, have demonstrated the existence of such energy. It is no small matter to. . ."

Robert interrupted. "Reanimating the amputated leg of a dead frog is hardly proof of universal energy, sir."

Now it was my turn to try to conceal a smile. Robert cherished debate and was contradictory never from strong conviction by merely from the pleasure of the game. My mentor's eyes took on the cyanotic hue of rainclouds, and I feared another tantrum building. I need not have worried, for now that I know him better it is clear that he is too clever, too manipulative to make such an exhibition before guests who might be of service to him in the future. Yes, I know the man now: these dinner companions commanded power in the community, and if Dr. North desired anything it was that power, or at any rate the ability to harness it. The desiccated Mrs Quinn, who sat next to my cousin opposite her daughter, would easily identify with this desire, for the widow of the mill owner, Bartholomew Quinn, had acquired power through just such social engineering, forming alliances and committees and political collectives of the wealthy and influential around her to further her own ends; her daughter, Jane, showed no such cleverness, unless her fluttering and obvious admiration of Dr. North and her flirtatiousness with him were a ruse by which she hoped to gain such power for herself.

The debate continued a while longer, the doctor's motion being for the existence of universal energy as the spark which animates all life, and within which love – if such a thing can be empirically proven – must be a part. Robert, sometimes abetted by Mr. McKenzie, presented counter arguments, or toyed with the doctor's point of view, now seeming to side with it, now knocking it down again in light-hearted ways, to the amusement of all at the table, including, it appeared, Dr. North himself. His witty counter arguments drew smiles and admiring glances from the ladies.

It was within my power to break the stalemate by revealing the nature of the doctor's lifelong work. But to describe or even hint at the experiments in which I presently assisted him, would have put in jeopardy not only my present position and sole means of income, but also any prospects for my future here or anywhere else.

In any event neither side won. Love was to remain a mystery for the evening.

The meal proceeded civilly enough, as these occasions must, with further polite conversation, and more robust banter between the men when we retired to the smoking room. Between the men the subjects of love and universal energy were laid to rest, replaced with talk of money and society and matters of politics, none of which interested me one whit (unless my fear of failure and becoming a pauper constitutes an interest in money and society). My thoughts, even as I tried my utmost to be an entertaining companion, were elsewhere.

In speaking of love so foolishly, I found none in that house that evening, other than that which I secretly and unrequitedly held for Arabella Fanshawe.

# # #

One of my duties as the doctor's assistant was to keep a logbook, a register if you will, of his studies and experiments. This was not his physician's casebook, mind, for that he recorded in his own hand. The log was a dated record in tabular form of each experiment, its purpose and protocols, its successes and (most often) failures.

For example, it is recorded that, on the 13th of May 1869, in a treatment of Mrs. Susan Middlemiss for influenza, a swab was taken from the inside of each cheek pouch, and droplets of perspiration from her temple. These were distilled with a chemical compound of the doctor's devising and examined under his brass microscope through the finest ground lenses from Switzerland. The log records the microscopic organisms in both the saliva and the perspiration, the degree of salinity in each, and so on. In the box for comments, I was instructed to write "Bacterium. Are the feelings, the senses, also a result of bacterium being transmitted between one person and the next? Are the emotions of anger, desire, or love for that matter, a consequence merely of the humours which can cause fever?"

I knew better than to comment upon these findings, but my increasing discomfort with the unwitting nature of his subjects' participation in his experiments, troubled me.

Another troublesome aspect of working with the doctor was his regular disappearances from the town. It was known that he was seeing a woman, though it was not in his nature to discuss their relationship, or even hint at who she was. What was apparent was that his acquaintance never visited Dr. North at home. At first I considered he might be having an affair, but given his lack of passion for anything but work this seemed unlikely.

One day I was preparing laudanum for one patient, Mercurochrome for another, and belladonna extract for a man who had been poisoned. In the latter case Dr. North was convinced that one poison would counteract the other, though it must be administered with great care.

Tired from long hours of work, the experiments being conducted outside my normal working hours, unwaged I might add, that I turned as the laboratory door opened and my sleeve caught the laudanum bottle and dashed it to the ground, where is smashed and the pungent liquid was blotted by the Persian carpet.

"Oh!"

"Dammit, man, how can you be so careless?" my employer hissed at me. "You are a buffoon, at times, Jerome! This will come out of your wages." The doctor had just now returned from one of his trips, but I did not have the good grace to put his response down to travel weariness.

Instead I was furious, and I stood up to gaze steadfastly at him; at half a head taller than he I should not have felt intimidated, and yet I did, and my intestines twisted as I rebuked him. "Doctor, how can you expect the best of me if you drive me day and night like a beast of burden? I work hard for you, do I not? And while I am grateful for your tutelage it is more than repaid with my time in assisting you in your experiments."

"How dare you! I ask nothing of you that I do not ask of myself, and if you are so ungrateful. . ."

I lowered my eyes, trying in vain to retain my stance of righteous indignation, but said, "It is not only that, doctor, but in truth I have concerns about the. . .other work."

Having spoken out finally I looked at him again, and to my surprise saw his countenance soften; the cloudy brow cleared and his eyes sparkled with mischief. I saw there his undoubted attractiveness, his appeal to the women in his care, but also how he would play with the emotions of others while feeling nothing himself, unless calculation is an emotion. Nevertheless, I let him influence me as he usually did, and I was even grateful when he said, "Jerome, my boy, you dwell on matters of the heart too much. You are led by your feelings rather than your thoughts. I have harmed no one, and these people are too simple to understand why I test them in less conventional ways than they might expect."

Less conventional? Euphemistically, the attachment of electrodes to the basal ganglia and cerebral lobes of a man with brain fever, the placement of such devices and the application of electrical charges of various voltages, inducing fits or the facial rictus of a man unmistakably experiencing erotic pleasure, might be said indeed to be unconventional.

He added, as if reading my thoughts, "I do no one harm, and indeed I hope I do everything in my power to cure my patients of their ailments, and when that is not God's will, at least to provide them with any comfort I can."

"Perhaps," I replied cautiously. "But is it not. . .unscrupulous: to use these people against their will?"

"Against their will? How can it be against their will when they have no consciousness of what is being done to them?"

With that, he ushered me into his drawing room, and poured us both a glass of sherry, which I was too tired to decline and which I drank without relish.

"I must clean up your rug, doctor. . ." I began.

"No, leave it, Jerome, Harris will do it." Harris was my employer's maid, a woman of advanced years who had once been the midwife of the practice under Dr. North's predecessor, Oliver Marsden.

"I hear incidentally, that Arabella's father is opposed to your marriage."

He changed the subject with the speed and deadliness of a viper. It was true: my relationship with Arabella Fanshawe had blossomed in the past months, the dinner party having unwittingly been the catalyst to our growing romantic attachment, developed with the assistance of Dr. North who contrived to invite her to parties and outings at which I would be present, and who contrived occasions and locations for us to be alone together. Indeed, thinking back, it seemed that the doctor often praised Arabella's beauty and cleverness and sensitivity to me, so much so that I thought him in love with her himself, until I found that he had equally praised me to Arabella. Should I be grateful for this matchmaking? Did I seem so incapable of attracting Miss Fanshawe on my own? In truth I did feel a little below her, and the more gracious part of me was only grateful for the doctor's generosity towards us both.

And yet. And yet her father thought less of me than I did of myself. I, a mere student with no dowry to offer, could hardly be considered a suitor for his youngest daughter, his most precious jewel. That she was no less precious to me was of no consequence, since Mr. Fanshawe held all the cards. Or so it seemed then.

I said, mockingly, "It is a wonder to me that he allows me to see her at all. It would not surprise me if he were to lock her in a tower like Rapunzel."

Dr. North gave a short, hoarse laugh at this, and said, "You may be no prince in his eyes as yet, but I see your potential even if he does not. And besides. . .I have some influence with him. And I have at least some understanding of the politics of love."

This provided the opening I needed.

"I do not think of my relationship with Arabella as political in any respect." Trying to retain a jovial tone I added, "Perhaps your relationship with your mysterious lady friend is of a more governmental persuasion?"

He smiled, but with no sincerity. The doctor had common sense enough to appreciate his relationship must be known about, but also the cleverness not to show surprise at its being remarked upon.

"I have known Madeleine for several years, and I have no doubt that she loves me. I have feelings for her. I. . ." – and here he stumbled over his words – "She is. . .wilful. Beautiful. A warm and generous spirit. And yet. . ."

"And yet you cannot reciprocate her feelings?"

He looked searchingly at me, and I fleetingly glimpsed a vulnerability in his countenance.

"I wish more than anything that I could. If any woman could inspire such feelings it is she. But when I am with her I feel. . .nothing. The pleasure of her company, of course, and the tenderness of a deep friendship. Yet it is not enough. I seek more, much more." Dr. North spoke with unaccustomed passion, but it was the passion of a deep thinker and strangely devoid of emotion; a puzzling juxtaposition of opposite states of being.

My eyes sought his in silent enquiry, but it was clear that he was done with the subject for the moment. "Now, to other matters. Work to be done. But only after a night's rest. We must set off early in the morning, as we have a number of patients to see, a childless couple most particularly."

I was greatly surprised at this. "A childless couple? But that is not your. . .my. . .area, doctor. I have scant knowledge of such things."

What he was about I could not say, but I felt greatly discomfited. My imagination placed images before me that I did not wish to examine too closely.

"Congestion, that is all," he explained with a smile. "If love is an exchange of etheric fluid, or energy, which is what I am growing to believe, then procreation is merely an exchange of fluids, and fluids can be dammed or redirected at will."

His bluntness often astonished me. I had watched fascinated a month previously as Dr. North made furious notes while observing a stallion impregnate a filly; the filly had been unable to bear the weight and the doctor had helped the farmer devise a harness which made the coupling possible and less painful for the poor female. Aversion filled me, not so much at the mechanistic means of achieving the desired result, but the dispassionate way that the doctor looked on as the poor filly whinnied in distress, and the stallion's front hooves, which dangled from the harness, struck again and again at her haunches until the act was completed.

"I am. . .sorry that I was angry with you, Jerome." His tone was soft and earnest and soothed me, the way it must soothe his patients in their distress. "I confess I am tired myself. We will feel the better for letting Morpheus do his work."

And so we retired for the evening, though I wished the Lord of Dream would not visit me with further nightmares that had lately begun to plague me. A recurrent dream was of walking through an archway, with Doric columns of white marble, Arabella by my side. As we passed through her hand slipped out of mine and she fell over the edge of a precipice. I screamed her name and rushed to the edge, only to find it was not a cliff at all, but a riverbank. And there, beneath the ice, lay my bride to be, in her lace wedding dress, her hands, her dear pale fingers, crossed over her breast, her lips as blue as her eyes, frozen and still, a petrified Ophelia. In the portion of the dream that woke me, I was attacking the ice with a woodsman's axe, but the blade would only skip over the surface, as though my arms had turned to mist; and I wept and tears froze in crystal droplets on my cheeks.

# # #

Yellow broom plants around the cottage that was once mine and Arabella's, vanilla-scented in the breeze. The perfume always takes me back to my wedding day, as I waited in the churchyard, Robert by my side trying to calm me while in the distance, Dr. North stood in the archway of the graveyard's yew trees, the threshold between this world and the next.

But I am ahead of the tale, my garden's perfume through the window as I write distracting me from what I must set down that others may read it when I am gone from this world. Though I write for myself primarily, in penance or in an attempt to understand, part of me hopes that a scholar, or merely a curious individual may find my manuscript and through it come to better understand the nature of love. It is the only inheritance I shall leave.

Next morning I awoke refreshed, my nightmare having not returned. Perhaps the good doctor had put a potion in my drink that I would rest easier, and if he did, I inwardly thanked him for it.

We chose to walk to the patients that day, for it was fine, blustery and with flashes of sunshine between scudding banks of cloud. We saw ten people in the morning and although it was not my custom to join the doctor on his visitations he felt it would be educational for me to witness how my pills and potions were put to use, and to understand that often they need not be used at all.

"Illness is often merely a matter of willpower, Jerome," he explained as we approached the house of the Allardyces, the childless couple. "One may choose to be well or to be ill, I have found."

"But surely there are infections over which willpower has no control?" I myself had seen many people overcome severe illness by sheer force of will, but I did not subscribe to the doctor's over-generalisations, although I expect they were stated to provoke discussion rather than to be statements of fact.

"True, but how one deals with illness is a matter of choice. We can lie down and die or fight against inertia. A man who works in the fields all day expects his wife to cook his meals, wash his clothes and so on, and if he takes ill he expects her to nurse him. But in that nursing he will do nothing to help himself, but instead reverts to an infantile state. When my parents died – did I tell you they died in a fire when I was eight? – I had to master my grief, since I knew otherwise it would overwhelm me."

I made no reply, sensitive to the delicacy of such a rare confidentiality though unsure what might have prompted it.

He continued, "My nanny was a wicked woman and would punish me for any sign of weakness or bad behaviour. She once beat me across the back with the handle of a broom for stealing apples from a neighbour's tree. But I never cried. Not once. The power of the will, you see? Grief, pain, illness, love; I have mastery over them."

He smiled distantly as if unaware for a moment he was not alone and that his assistant was by his side.

At last we arrived at a small cottage and the doctor knocked upon its door. Frank and Pauline Allardyce were a handsome pair, he in his early forties perhaps, she in her mid thirties. That she should want a child now I wondered at, and thought it unlikely they could conceive at their time in life, though I confess I know little of the gynaecological science.

As we waited for tea, Frank filling his pipe at the fireplace while we sat at the oak table by the small cottage window, the doctor whispered to me, "She had a child last year. Stillborn."

Frank Allardyce was greying but had the fresh rosiness in his complexion of one who works outdoors all day long, and the ready smile of an innocent. After some initial discomfort at my presence, he relaxed and drew meditatively on his pipe. The discussion went back and forth about the probability of a child, about the causes of the death of the first child, of diet and so on. And then Dr. North said something very queer.

"Mr Allardyce. Frank. Do you. . .love your wife?"

I was aghast, and saw our host first pale then a flinty look come to his eye.

"Doctor. I have loved that woman since I was sixteen; and to this day she can make me feel the age I was when I first met her. I don't know what's behind your question, sire, but there it is."

Just as he finished speaking I realised his wife was in the doorway, carrying a platter of food. She put a hand to her mouth, either surprise or pleasure, and moving towards us said playfully, "Don't listen to that rogue, doctor. It was that soft talk that let him catch me in the first place."

We all laughed a little at this. Then the doctor stood, touched the woman's elbow and led her aside and whispered to her briefly. Then he turned to Mr Allardyce and myself and said, "Jerome, you and Frank take tea. Mrs Allardyce and I have some business to attend to."

And that seemed to be an end to it. Other than the doctor later explaining that he had instructed Frank Allardyce to perform the act of love before our arrival, so that he might take a swab and test the vitality of the excretions. But he took more than one sample; one for the diagnosis, and several others for purposes I suspected he did not reveal to his patient: his experiments.

In his laboratory later he subjected the samples to microscopic examination, electrical charges, mixed them with chemical compounds, and even made potions with them.

Now permit me to tell you about the potions. Dr. North kept them in stoppered phials in wooden racks. These in turn were locked in a cabinet in the coolest place in the house, the pantry, where meat and milk was kept and where salted fish sat in a barrel. It was my supposition that he drank these potions, a supposition confirmed one day when I stumbled upon his diary.

The doctor was suddenly called away to a man in his death-throes, a choking illness that filled his lungs with water. I noticed his desk drawer had been left ajar and, to my shame, I opened it and found the diary. Why I took the invitation of the open drawer I am not sure to this day. In part it must have been a need to understand my employer better, and his diary might explain his sometimes unpredictable character.

Within the pages of closely written script was the hand of a man meticulous and always in control. I found that, indeed he tested upon himself potions distilled from material drawn from his patients' bodies, sometimes drinking them, sometimes opening a vein and injecting them. He made inhalations with them, heated them or plunged them in icy water, made gels to be applied to the skin. But all in vain, I gathered, from the results discussed in the diary. I thought his actions dangerous, for if anyone from whom he had extracted blood or tears or sweat or the moisture of procreation had a congenital illness, or was diseased, the doctor could himself grow ill, or even die.

But it was the back of the book that gave me at least part of the answer to the reasoning behind these experiments. In it was folded a letter on yellowing paper, in a loose, childlike hand, a trace of perfume retained in the weave of the paper, and a signature: Madeleine.

The letter, dated a week ago, began thus:

My darling Andrew (the doctor's Christian name, which I never used),

It pains me to write this, but I now realise you can never love me as I have loved, and still love, you. That you are, in fact, incapable of love, though you have always shown me the greatest kindness and endearments. You have a great sorrow about you would you but recognise it. It may be that the darkness within you was there at your birth, and it breaks my heart to see it.

You are delightful company, greatly admired by everyone, and yet it as though you are not really present. Rather you are an absence, as if your mind searches vainly for feeling it cannot conjure up. But, my love, I know that you wish more than anything else to feel something other than that which your clever mind can calculate. But love is not a formula, or an equation, but a gift.

The letter continued in this vein for a page, the authoress recalling her pleasant times with Andrew North, how she first admired then fell in love with him. How she had accepted his proposal of marriage but how, in the months leading to it she had come to know his pain more and his incapacity. Dr. North's wound is an invisible one, and over time has grown cancerous.

I pitied him.

If he could have felt a mere fraction of my happiness that day I married my Arabella, he would have been one of the happiest men alive. Not even her father's snorting and insincere good wishes as we left the church (I noted the avaricious glance he gave Dr. North and wondered what influence my employer held over my father in law), not even that could dispel my well-being.

"Oh, Jerome," Arabella said in the carriage as we set off upon our short honeymoon at Lake Garda, "I am joyous today. You have made me feel so. . .joyous. And now that you are qualified we can live content in our little home and grow old together."

My tears start in me as I write these words "grow old together," for how could such a thing ever be, when it was never intended. I curse God for his cruelty. How can I ever be resigned to this?

And now it comes to this, the part I have dreaded in my narrative. My career as an apothecary was not mercurial, but I set up a small and successful business in town, and Dr. North always refused to send for his supplies from the more prestigious chemists in London and Bath but always put his business my way.

Jane Quinn had lately departed the shop with a package of blood pills for her mother, hair oil for herself and some cough mixture for the cold she persisted in imagining she perpetually had – "The house is very damp, you know."

The doorbell chimed as Dr. North entered and placed his prescription with me personally, as he usually did, inscribed in his fine hand on a sheet of vellum. He never sent his manservant on this errand, and I believe he enjoyed his short conversations with me. I came from behind the counter and shook his hand warmly, for my mentor was in no small way responsible not only for the finer points of my training but also for sponsoring me, both financially with the deposit, and as a referee, when it came to acquiring the let for my small shop in the high street.

"And how is the mother-to-be, Jerome?"

"She insists she is passably well, doctor, and it will not be long now before the birth. Though I fear in truth she is very weak in spite of your advice and ministrations."

Indeed my darling wife had become a pale imitation of herself, white as frost with lips bloodless and thin and eyes distant. She would wake in the night with cold sweats, often screaming with pain in her spine, clutching her swollen womb.

"Arabella is a strong woman, Jerome, have no fear. She is capable of overcoming any obstacle."

# # #

Those words echo in my dreams now, a perverse inverted prophecy, for she was capable of nothing in the end, and her dire shrieks of pain as she tried to give birth to our son will haunt me until the day I die.

That final night, the doctor insisted we take her to his home, in spite of my protests that she was too weak to be moved. But always, always, the doctor knew better than I, and we made her as comfortable as we could and placed her in his closed carriage, swaddled in blankets and bed covers, and we rocked gently through the town and up the drive to Dr. North's home in its five acres of woodland. Everything she needs will be there, I told myself over and over as Arabella moaned and whimpered in her fever. Everything she needs.

A maid assisted us when we arrived, and the doctor took me with him to his laboratory, for his instruments and drugs, ordering me to find this and that for him, as much I suspect to keep my mind from my wife's torture as to assist him.

The night was long, so dreadfully long. And yet there must have been some while of quiet as I sat in a hard chair outside of the bedroom, for I dozed fitfully as though drugged: I had not slept for many nights and was exhausted.

I was awakened by an animalistic wail: but not Arabella's. I did not realise it immediately but my darling girl, my light and my life, had fallen silent forever long before the terrible sound roused me from sleep. Startled, heart hammering in my breast, I rushed to the door and threw it open.

What I saw was a vision of Hell, and if there is a Hell after life it can never burn me the way the scene before me did.

The bed linen was awash with gore, dyed red and fitfully black in the guttering candlelight. Arabella's strangely peaceful face contrasted horrifyingly with her eviscerated womb, split from chest to reins, my twisted bloody child locked in its chamber lifeless, curled and stilled in the midst of its struggles to live, the umbilical around its neck. But it was the doctor who almost stopped my heart: his hands, his arms, his chest, were covered in my dear wife's blood, and he was smearing his face with the gore, over and over, wiping it across his lips and cheeks and eyelid.

"It's not here," he said, coldly, angry. "Not here. I'll never find it now, never."

And then he looked at me, no emotion in his eyes, not so much as a hint of pity for me or sorrow for my wife.

"Look, Jerome," he said, gesturing at Arabella's open womb. "This is all we are. How can this. . .this. . .be conceived of love?"

Something had broken in him finally; I can see that now though I can never forgive it. So far as I am concerned he murdered Arabella and may he be damned for it. I will never know whether he tried to save the child, or save himself, but he failed on both counts, and succeeded only in taking away my hope and joy. But though love was never alive in him, he will never kill mine.

I see him now as I write these final words, recalling him standing in the archway of yews on the day I waited for my bride to join me at the alter. He was fascinated by the yew tree archway, the door from one state of being to the next, as though it might permit him, Dr. Andrew North, to move from his fated way of being to the one he most desired. It unnerved me how he circled their monstrous calloused trunks as though plotting their diameter by guesswork, or considering how deep their roots might grow. I now care not what he thought or felt, if he felt anything, for I know only Arabella lies there now, ensnared by those roots for ever.

But Dr. North was a good tutor above all else, and what I learned from him ultimately was this: love does not indeed reside in the heart, or in the head or in any physical organ in either a real sense or a metaphorical one. And yet, how can it be that while my heart remains alive I feel at its very core a love which burns for my dearest one with a flame that can never be quenched?

# A CROW AMONG THE STARLINGS

There had to be a flaw in the lens. No matter which print Saul examined, or from which angle he'd shot Martin Pearson's portrait, the result was the same. There was no reflection in his left eye. The last thing his victims might have seen in that eye, instead of the tiny image of their screaming faces, was a black hole.

In fifteen years as a photographer, Saul Meers knew how capricious light could be. How flirtatious, how seductive or perverse and unresponsive. So if it wasn't the lens, then the light was toying with him again.

One of the qualities that picture editors liked about Saul was how he always referred to himself as "a snapper." Not an artist. Many editors treated him as a mere "snapper," – even though they recognised him as a superb photographer – in case they had to cough up a larger fee. But once in a rare while a prestigious magazine would pick up his work. On this occasion it was Metropolitan magazine, which commissioned work that often ended up in a gallery or garnered awards. And when that commission was a series of portraits of psychopathic murderers, with a large cheque attached, Saul could hardly say no.

Lately good commissions had been few and far between. He had even been supplementing his income photographing weddings and children's parties. And resenting every moment of it.

Instead of trying to fix the flaw in the photograph, he chose to leave it the way it was. Let the editor decide for herself if the pictures were compelling enough for her exacting standards. If not, he would just have to re-shoot. And that would raise the stakes even higher. He still felt bad, though, about the deal he'd made with Pearson. Before giving permission for his portrait to be taken, the killer wanted to see the forensics pictures of his last victim, a 23-year-old man named Rankin. And he wanted to choose one of them to keep. The Metropolitan provided Saul with funds to buy the loan of negatives from the forensics photographer. He made prints overnight and returned them before anyone could find out.

What Pearson was doing with the photograph he had selected Saul tried not to imagine. In the psychiatric evaluation unit where Pearson was presently housed he would be allowed certain privileges, though access to photographs like this was unlikely to be among them.

He clipped the prints to the drying line. With the darkroom door closed behind him, he went to the dining table, where an A3 size portfolio wallet lay open. The portfolio contained his pictures for the Metropolitan mounted on card in clear plastic wallets. Four serial killers, one a woman. All of them with one more thing in common besides murder; a blankness, a lack of emotional engagement. Yes, they were good talkers, some even telling him they knew and admired his work. Saul had studied their case records for background. No good asking why they'd committed their atrocious crimes. Because in it always came down to a single answer: because they could.

The phone rang. He picked up the receiver and gave his number.

"Will you use the one of me smiling? Mother always said I have a great smile." Saul recognised Pearson's papery dry voice.

"How did you get this number?" Anger popped in him like a flashbulb.

Pearson said, "Oh. . .you know. . .ways and means."

Saul took a deep breath. "Never mind. Yes, I probably will send that one. But they'll only use it if the editor likes it. It shows you in a different light."

"You mean it doesn't make me look like Charles Manson. You don't want to make an icon out of me."

He was about to answer "no," but then thought that maybe that was what he really did want: his personal iconography of killers, a series of portraits, which would make his name.

"What is it you want, Mr Pearson?" Saul was unsure how to address him, and formality seemed the safest course.

"It's okay, you can call me Martin." There was a lengthy pause. "You know, I've been thinking about that. What I want. It's a question that's kind of preoccupied me since I was a kid. I wanted people to respect me, but they never did, at least not when I was growing up. They do now, though, don't they?"

Saul glanced at his watch: 8.30pm. Pauline should have been here an hour ago. They were supposed to have a meal together then go to the Stanley Kubrick retrospective at the FilmHouse. Through the bay window he watched the setting sun make a silhouette of Calton Hill. A flock of starlings with a huge crow in their midst took flight from the roof of the tenement building opposite.

Saul said, "Yes. . .Martin. . .I suppose they do."

"Saul. . .you don't mind if I call you that, do you?" The voice was quieter, a lover's whisper.

Saul was anxious not to antagonise him. Even although he was incarcerated for life there was a quality about him that suggested he could cause harm at arm's length. Saul's grandfather had been a student of the Quaballah, and his stories of the pan dimensional realms frightened him as a child, and no matter how rational, how urbane he was as an adult he could never quite scoff at mysticism the way many of his non-Jewish friends did. The idea that, simply by wishing someone ill you could hurt them, remained in his subconscious.

"No," he said. "That's fine. Everybody calls me that."

"Well, then. . .Saul. . .I have another favour to ask. As you know, I am fond of photographs, and your skill impresses me. I managed to obtain back issues of magazines and papers in which your work has appeared. You manage to capture just the right moment, the telling expression. I don't know, it's. . .well, you're gifted, there's no doubt about it."

Saul was not immune to flattery, even the flattery of a homicidal psychopath.

Before he could answer, Pearson went on, "The thing is, I need you to get another picture for me. Several, preferably."

"You know I can't. . ."

"Oh, but I think you can, Saul." The voice instructed as much as cajoled. "You see, my last victim was never found. And you have a chance to find him, and let the police know where he is."

Saul was certain Pearson would hear the hammering of his heart down the phone line.

"But first, I need you to photograph him: the way I left him, from every angle."

"I don't believe you, Pearson. Why don't you tell me what you really want?" Saul sensed Pearson was trying to frighten him, and he wanted to call his bluff.

Pearson said, in what sounded like genuine surprise, "Oh? How odd. Why would I like about something like that?" A long pause and then he added, "Well, why don't you sleep on it first?" and hung up.

When Pauline arrived an hour later he was hugely relieved. The phone call had unnerved him.

She was still wearing her business suit, which told the whole story. The accountancy firm exploiting her again. Pauline was too ambitious to leave them, and justified the long hours as a necessary step on the ladder to the top.

"I tried to ring you," she said, kissing him quickly and went to the kitchen cabinet to pour them both a stiff whisky.

"It was. . .an editor. Wants some celeb shots at the Festival." He was annoyed with himself for lying to her. If he was honest, though, it wasn't to protect Pauline from the sinister phone call but because he hadn't made up his mind about what he was going to do about it.

"Hey, that's great. You might be able to sell them around." Pauline's smile changed her whole persona: the stern, somewhat serious facade she presented to clients was part of her, too, but Saul preferred the side of her he got. Hair down, so to speak. She added, "Listen, do you mind if we don't go out tonight. . ."

He grinned and moved towards her, but she pushed him back with a playful shove on the shoulder. "Sorry, mate, not that either. I'm knackered. A quiet drink in front of the telly, yeah?"

He must have looked crestfallen, because she added, "Well, okay, maybe later. But I'll need some serious persuasion first."

# # #

What the Metropolitan thought of his photographs was difficult to say. When Saul handed over the hardback envelope, the editor's assistant simply said, "Great, thanks." And that was it. A fortnight passed before he heard anything more. A cheque arrived with a compliments slip and an unrecognisable signature. In spite of receiving his largest fee ever, he was disappointed at the lack of comment.

"If money was all that mattered to me, I'd be doing something else." Saul wasn't sure if Pauline were asleep or not.

She had her arm curled across his chest as he lay in bed watching shadows from a bonfire on the Calton Hill writhe across the ceiling. She mumbled an answer. He couldn't make it out, and before he could ask her to say it again he realised she had fallen asleep. For the last few nights he'd been suffering from insomnia. Usually this happened from being stressed by a job or being unable to switch off the creativity cogs as they ground against each other to no apparent purpose. Lately it was the phone calls and emails. Martin Pearson either had access to the Internet or he was routing his messages through a partner. Working with a partner seemed more likely, unless the psyche units were more liberal than he supposed. The email address was: 124678@hushmail.com. Encrypted. No way of tracing the originator. It said, He must be dead by now. Too bad. You might have saved him.

Pearson was messing with his mind. There was no way he could have left his last victim alive and kept him alive for the months after the arrest and trial. Unless, again, he had an accomplice. The idea chilled him, and he was almost overwhelmed with a sense of guilt for not informing the police immediately after Pearson's first phone call.

Next day the guilt was endorsed by a second email: I taped my phone call to you, incidentally. The police might want to know about it.

Once Pauline had gone to work, he put a call through to the psychiatric unit. He wanted to know, as background to the photo shoot, if Pearson was allowed special privileges. The duty officer, an educated sounding man with a hint of Gorbals Glasgow in his voice, said, "Aye, I'm sure he's got plenty. More than us that's looking after him I bet." Saul took this to mean access to a phone. The numbers would be registered of course, but the content of the calls not necessarily recorded. He requested a meeting with the prisoner.

# # #

Saul worked hard, long hours, well into the night. He saw Pauline less and less these days. Their relationship was beginning to feel the strain.

"Am I just a convenience for you, Saul? Sex when it suits you?"

This wasn't like her. A sharper tone had been entering their conversations lately, mild recriminations occasionally, as now, escalating into accusations.

"I have to work, Pauline," he said. And he added his feeble rider, "Freelancing isn't a nine to five job. Plus it doesn't offer a pension scheme."

Taking this last to be a comment about her own job with its decent salary, perks and pension, Pauline spat, "I knock my pan out for every penny, mate. Which you always seem to bloody forget. You and your fucking artistic ego."

After that they didn't see each other for nearly a fortnight. Saul tried to apologise.

"Don't," she said. "I hate that. When you mean something, just say it. Let me decide how to handle it."

# # #

The private visiting room was small, with white tiles and a single barred window. Pearson wasn't chained, but a guard observed both of them from a wooden chair in the corner nearest the locked metal door.

"They're transferring me to a high security prison next month, did you hear?" Pearson, close-cropped balding head gleaming in the stark light, watched for a reaction. Saul was in equal measure drawn to, and disgusted by, Martin Pearson. His smile appeared generous and honest, yet both of them knew there was nothing but calculation behind it.

"Yes, they told me."

"I mean, my fellow inmates might kill me if I murdered kids. But that's not my thing. Still, they're not likely to be too keen on me. It's not the outcome I hoped for, to be honest."

"Look, can we just get on with this?"

Pearson stopped smiling. "It's all business with you, Saul, isn't it?" He made a clicking sound with the tip of his tongue. Then he coughed into his hand and reached for the pack of cigarettes Saul had brought for him. Instead of taking the whole pack, he withdrew three and handed the pack back.

"I'm trying to give up," he said. Then he signalled to the guard that the interview was over.

Once Saul was back in his Audi, he poked a finger into the opened pack and withdrew a tiny foil envelope, still moist with the saliva from Pearson's cheek pouch. Unfolded, it proved to contain a notelet with an address on it. And a date: 2nd December, 8pm.

He realised his hands were trembling. He had to smoke one of the cigarettes before the trembling stopped.

# # #

Ice-edged wind sliced through his wool jacket as he pushed through the gap. Behind the construction company's plywood hoarding the sandstone walls of the old hospital looked damp in the wash of moonlight. Saul remembered how the old Victorian building had looked in daylight, how he had once visited his grandmother on her deathbed here. He smelled again the sharp tang of disinfectant intermingled with his mother's perfume. Huge artist's renderings of the hospital under development at another site papered the hoarding, but no matter what an architectural masterpiece the new hospital would be, people would still die there, like his grandmother did here in the old building when he was ten years old.

As Pearson had promised, the sash window to the kitchen slid up without obstruction: the rotting wood meant the wheel lock would have just pulled away when the killer entered the first time. On the steel worktop against the window there were dark stains, which he hoped were not blood. The metal boomed as his boots hit it and he slid to the floor. He swung the torchlight across the greasy cookers, freezers and worktops.

Sweeping the beam about the kitchen he caught site of the mask-like face of a man. He stumbled back in horror, even as he realised it was only his reflection in a darkened glass door panel. He turned away. Then he dumped his camera bag on to the central worktop, glancing uneasily upwards at the metal frame with hooks from which once would have dangled pots and pans and chef's utensils. The frame bounced the dim light back at him. He fumbled with lenses and flashgun and checked his supply of film rolls. The latter he stuffed in his shirt pockets. He draped the Pentax with its heavy telephoto lens across his chest and headed for the stairwell. He'd managed to obtain ground plans of the hospital from the Royal National Incorporation of Architects and had tried to memorise the route to Ward 27. It was two flights up. The stairwell enclosed the dead lift shaft. As he ascended the stairs every so often he shone the torch over the tiled walls and the grille enclosing the shaft.

Saul had never been afraid of the dark. Even as a child. What scared him was losing people. People he loved. Death was not so much the horror of decay for him, but the horror of the great absence and loneliness it brought the living.

Ward 27 was three doors down from the central stair, on the right. The number had significance for Pearson: it was the age of the man he said he had murdered. In his final email he explained to Saul how he had bound the man to the bed frame without its mattress and started cutting him with a scalpel. A scalpel because they were in the hospital where the victim worked as a nurse. Pearson always chose his weapon for appropriateness and irony. He had left the man alive, with a supply of food and water, and one arm free to reach for it. The chains on his other arm and ankles made it impossible for him to break free. Ward 27 was to the rear of the hospital, so no matter how much Pearson's prey screamed, no one would have heard him.

I wanted to find out what would happen, Pearson explained in his email. Having heard that an animal will chew its leg off to escape a trap, I wondered if a man was capable of the same.

Saul felt the slickness of perspiration on his palm as he laid it against the cold door to the ward.

He pushed it open.

It was some time before he could begin to understand what he saw when he entered the room.

Had someone from the upper floors of the tenements, which backed the hospital grounds, been looking hard, they might have seen after a time an intermittent flash from one of the hospital's upper windows, as if sheet lightning were trapped inside the building and trying to escape.

When he was done Saul returned quickly to his flat, where he found Pauline waiting for him.

"Where have you been? I've been frantic." She pushed her hair back whenever she was angry. And as she spoke she hooked hair behind her ears and slid her hands across the top of her scalp as if to flatten her curls.

Tenderly, Saul held her wrists to stop her. "I. . .had to take some night shots. For an article about the city after dark."

She scowled at him. "That's a lie, isn't it? I can always tell. If it's another woman you better tell me now, or I'm out that door."

He saw that she meant it but feared involving her. He sat down on the couch and wondered how he could help her understand.

"I could be in a bit of trouble, Pauline. I did something bloody stupid and now I'm paying for it."

Strangely, she appeared to relax then. Being in trouble was something she could at least understand, and maybe even be able to help with. Pauline was pragmatic in that respect. She waited for him to speak, but by way of reply he went to the darkroom and emerged with a photograph of the serial killer Martin Pearson.

"He wants photographs of his victims. And he wants me to be the dealer."

She recognised the face, which had been plastered across all the papers only months previously. She looked more closely at the print, at the dead space that was Pearson's non-reflecting left eye. Pauline may not have understood why that eye was fascinating but she seemed to pull away from it reluctantly.

"Tell the police, Saul," she said.

"I can't," he said. And then told her why.

They went to bed after some unfruitful debate. They didn't make love, but fell asleep holding hands.

A tapping sound woke him. It took him a second or two to adjust to the grey light of dawn and another second to realise what woke him; a crow was sittings on the window ledge, tapping the glass experimentally with its beak. It tilted its head from side to side as though puzzled. Not a very smart crow, then, Saul thought. Maybe a rural crow come to the city for the first time. For an instant its eye watched him, cold and impassive as a camera lens. When he threw back the duvet, the bird took flight. The room was cold, and he shivered, reminding himself to adjust the central heating to its winter setting.

Pauline's long hair snared around her head like damp fishing net. He wanted to brush it clear of her face but hesitated when he saw how soundly she slept.

After a shower and coffee, he crept into the darkroom like a thief. Once he was inside Pauline wouldn't enter unless invited, and if she wanted to see the photographs she would need to wait for him to decide if he could show them. As soon as the negs were developed he loaded them into the enlarger. The negative images, even enlarged on the plate made no more sense now than when he'd shot them, nor would they be likely to make sense after they were developed. The black ragged shape that would be pale white in the final print might have been a map of an unknown country. But he knew what it was. It was a swathe of human skin, bits of fat and muscle tissue still adhering to it, and pieces of bone, which were unmistakably vertebrae.

Pearson had skinned his victim like a cat, careless of removing other tissue as well. Clothes pegs pinned the flesh to the bedsprings, bloody tissue uppermost, in a mocking simulacrum of a human torso.

As a child Martin remembered his parents taking him around Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, and the boxed, dried and pinned butterflies and exotic beetles were brought to mind by the expanse of pale skin, which had once wrapped a man. Pearson, like any collector, would have a catalogued filing system of his kills; he would know who, when, where, what was done and what results he got.

Every angle. That's what Pearson's instructions were, and Saul obeyed them to the letter. But Pearson had lied about what Saul would find. Who could say this victim was tortured and killed in Ward 27, or whether it happened elsewhere and the skin brought there for a specific purpose.

While working, Saul was always emotionally detached, whether it was behind the lens photographing his subjects or developing prints. His focus was on perfection, rarely achieved but always striven for: the perfect moment for the shutter to click, when the light was right, framing and subject just so; using only the best tools for printing, the most expensive chemicals and paper, a darkroom many a professional photographer would envy. But it was never enough to satisfy him. Perfection was always just out of reach, and that made him angry and frustrated.

He wanted to photograph something that no one had ever done before. And photograph it well. And Martin Pearson was giving him the opportunity to do just that. Well, if that was what Pearson expected of him, so be it. Saul was part of a game that Pearson had set in motion and, if there was a prize to be won, then Saul needed to do more than accept he was part of that game. He must also try to master the rules.

Pearson's first move had been blackmail. His second was offering bait. So far Saul had neither defended nor attacked but he was starting to understand, like a chess player, that he must be willing to make a sacrifice in order to stand a chance of winning.

He made a call to the psychiatric unit, only to be told that Pearson was mid-transfer to a prison just outside Stirling; he would need to wait a week or so before he could apply for visiting privileges.

Saul was annoyed with himself for forgetting the date. He packed up the prints and decided to return to bed. Maybe Pauline could go in to work a bit later today, he thought. But when he got back to the bedroom, she'd gone. She would have shouted goodbye but so intent must he have been on his work that he hadn't heard.

He switched on the computer to check his emails; there was another one from Pearson.

The message said, I killed the others. You see why I need a good photographer.

And there was an attachment, which Saul saw was an image file, identifiable by the .jpeg suffix. He clicked to open it and an image gradually revealed itself, occupying half the screen space. It was dark, with a greenish hue, clearly taken with a digital camera without proper lighting or image resolution. The terrified face of a man came into view. The face was severely bruised and cut, with one eyelid cut away to expose the white bulb of an eyeball. The blood-splattered shirt was indistinct at first, until Saul realised that what looked like shadows on the shoulders were actually epaulettes, and upon closer inspection the insignia on the shirt pocket was unmistakably that of HM Prison Service.

"Oh, Christ," Saul murmured. "Jesus Christ."

Pearson must have worked so quickly. His guards might have been at the end of their shift and perhaps the prison wasn't expecting them back that day. But what about the driver? He must surely have been in radio contact with his office. Martin Pearson had been prepared, that much was clear. The idea of there being an accomplice seemed more feasible than ever, and a chillier prospect than Martin working on his own. And, hadn't he already made Saul his accomplice in providing post mortem photographs of one victim, as well as the flayed hide of another? What else was he capable of?

In spite of what was happening, Saul found himself weighing options the way he had done as a war photographer. On the one hand, telephoning might mean Pearson would be caught. On the other, it meant implicating himself. He reasoned that the guard and the van driver would be dead by now in any case. Saving their lives wasn't remotely feasible. And if the police were to find Pearson's emails on his computer, which they could probably do even if he erased the files, he was likely be imprisoned for aiding and abetting murder.

His chest felt tight with anxiety. More than once he glanced over at his camera bag. A thought kept coming to him, like thinking about sex at a funeral. The thought was this: maybe I can photograph Pearson with one of his victims.

An image of Pauline's face came to his mind, too. Her smile was at war with his cold-blooded determination to achieve something no one had ever done before. And there was also the opportunity of selling the photographs for a lot of money. Fame and fortune.

No. No, that's impossible. Completely bloody insane, Saul.

That Pauline loved him he never doubted. For his part he had always believed that he loved her in return. And yet it was as if he were always seeking something indefinable. Once he had asked himself a question: could he really love anyone completely, or was love just a mirror of his selfish needs?

Pauline told him once, "You're too hard on yourself, Saul. Such high standards all the time. I never said I wanted Mr. Perfect." And she added, smiling, "Besides which, Mr. Perfect doesn't exist. Apologies to your ego."

In some respects being with Pauline was what he wanted more than anything. The best part of him felt that, at any rate.

But there was his continual sense of dissatisfaction. With his life. With his work. A voice inside that cried out for something more. Incoherently and irrationally.

He thought, too, of all the editors who had rejected his work, how little he was paid for the work that was accepted, and how little recognition he got.

For over an hour he alternately paced the room and threw himself on the couch and tried to unravel his tangled thoughts. But all along he knew what he wanted. If he were honest, the mental reasoning was simply a way of trying to justify himself.

It was as though he watched himself from outside his own body as he reached for the camera bag, stocked up with film and lenses, pulled the bag across his shoulder and walked to the door. He was completely alert, adrenaline-pumped, but nevertheless he kept walking, and even jogged down the stairs. He knew where Pearson was. There was only one place en route to the prison where Pearson would able to perpetrate his atrocities without being seen.

It was only once he had got into the car, turned on the ignition and floored the accelerator that he started to wonder what exactly he was doing. A man was being tortured and murdered. And he, Saul Meers, was planning to photograph the act.

As he crossed the river onto the bypass the motorway lights on their gigantic poles swept past in a pulsing rhythm. After a time his eyes began to sting from the strobing lights. He tried to piece the puzzle together. The Ward 27 business still mystified him; Pearson couldn't have staged it for Saul: he wasn't to know he would be going to prison and he didn't know Saul then. It must have just been one of Pearson's grotesque rituals. And he had built a story around it to draw Saul in. Perhaps to make himself feel as powerful as he did during the act of killing, even though he was behind bars.

He switched on the radio. A retro rock station, playing Tom Petty, then Neil Young. And then the news. Pearson's escape had made the headlines. Saul heard the words "vehicle and occupants still missing" before switching off. He started building an alibi for himself: how Pearson had lured him to the scene by threatening to kill the man if he brought the police; how he had made him bring his camera. It sounded feeble. If this was going to work he'd need help to make it plausible. He needed a Martin Pearson game plan.

His mind raced. Thoughts tumbled over one another like clumsy acrobats, creating a stew of generalised anxiety and determination.

On the way to the high security prison there were a few disused buildings and factory premises. Only one would provide an appropriate stage set. Saul estimated it would take forty minutes to drive there.

# # #

The colliery had closed years ago. All part of the general decline of the industry in this area. Although the wheel hoist which had taken the miners below the earth had been dismantled, the county still had a pit bing as its major landmark: a mountain of earth and shale and coal dust which many men had died of emphysema creating. The cages that had taken them deep underground must have been like prison cells. Saul remembered the video and the crosshatched grillwork that he now knew was a miner's elevator cage.

A damp breeze banged the corrugated-iron clad warehouse building. Massed clouds overhead threatened rain while a band of lilac light across the horizon provided just enough visibility once the car headlamps were off. He crunched his way across gravel. Distant moans from the building might have been the wind through openings in the structure, or something else. Then there came a horrifying scream. It seemed endless.

Saul wanted to turn and run then, but fought the instinct. He trembled, even as he stepped forward to the door that hung off its hinges, and entered the building.

This is a war zone, he told himself. Just another war zone. Saul knew how to survive those. First, you needed to lock down emotional responses. To be dispassionate. Survival instinct in its purest form. Not fight or flight. Something else. It had enabled him to stand his ground and photograph all manner of atrocities. Neither hails of bullets nor random explosions or eviscerated soldiers, prevented him doing his job.

It was colder inside than out. At the far end of the warehouse shapes moved, a halogen lamp casting a fretwork of writhing shadows. There was just enough light where Saul stood to make the frost on the inside of the corrugated walls sparkle.

"Pearson?" he called, but it came out croaky. He coughed and called louder, "Pearson. . .I came. . .like you said." And, for the benefit of the guard, just in case he made it out alive, "No police, you said, and you'd let him go."

All he got by way of response was a deep chuckle. Gameplayers like Pearson would be inclined to participate in falsehoods. If they were to move the game along.

When he reached the cage, he had to avert his face for a moment. The guard's arms had already been removed and only bloody meat and the stumps of his shoulders remained. There were tourniquets on the stumps to slow the flow of blood so he would not die too swiftly. He was tied to a chair with what looked like electrical cable.

Pearson was the epitome of calm. He smiled gently, politely. Both men were inside the cage that had obviously been thrown in here along with disused mining equipment such as drill bits, shovels, pick axes, helmets and the like.

Saul focussed his attention on Pearson and Pearson alone as he unshouldered his camera bag and put it on the ground between his feet. He squatted down to open it, keeping his eyes on Pearson the whole time, continuing to do so even as he fixed the lenses, checked shutters on the two cameras he'd brought. Like a highly trained infantryman who could fieldstrip his rifle in pitch-blackness under heavy fire, Saul could take apart and re-assemble his cameras and load film with his eyes shut. Or while he was watching his subject while deciding the best way to shoot it.

He risked a glance at the prison guard. The man was unconscious, his head forward as though ashamed of his ruined face.

"Why are you doing this?"

Pearson used a yellow duster to wipe the blade of the tenon saw he was holding, polishing off the blood. He replied, "Why are you?"

There were more tools on the ground before him. He must have stolen them, maybe from a garage. A thought struck Saul then. He realised there was something different about Pearson, and the difference was that he was wearing the uniform of a prison guard. The uniform of the guard he had killed.

Without being asked, Saul started to shoot the scene. He shot through the mesh of the tilted cage, and stepped inside with Pearson and his victim and took close-ups of Pearson with his torture implements, of his victim's face, of his dismembered arms which had been laid on the ground in front of him, the hands curled in on themselves tightly like the claws of a trussed turkey.

Pearson said with a giggle, "The long arms of the law."

Then the guard came to and started shrieking, and begging for his life. The camera flash startled him. The realisation that someone else was there seemed to enliven him more, as though the presence of another could afford some hope.

"Jesus, please. . .don't let him kill me!"

The man was clearly deranged with terror. But Saul had switched off. In real war zones he had seen much worse than this. He told himself this man was already dead, and let the idea take hold.

For the next hour Saul took carefully framed photographs of the slow butchery of a human being. He saw the meticulous, almost loving way, Pearson cut away the guard's clothes, made horizontal slices with a knife across his chest until the skin looked like a Venetian blind. He cut off the man's ears, and then his feet until he was no more than a tailor's dummy or a discarded child's doll that had been ripped to shreds.

Saul continued to take photographs.

Pearson did something to the guard's vocal cords so his screams became frantic whispers. Fortunately for the guard he was comatose long before Pearson finished.

Pearson sighed with discontent, "I just don't have the right materials, Saul. Not like you, eh?" He indicated the cameras with a nod of his head.

Saul dared not speak. He felt omniscient behind the camera. The unforgiving eye of the lens took in everything with neither rebuke nor praise. The camera, after all, was only doing its job.

"You know why I'm doing this, Saul? Really? For the same reason as you. We're not part of the crowd. You know what it feels like, don't you? You walk among them in the street, in their hundreds, flocks of them, darting around aimlessly. Day after day.

"No purpose, you see? Of course you do. When we observe them in a mass like that, we know their lives have no purpose. And, if you don't mind a photographic analogy, no. . .focus. I can give them that focus. It's as though their lives have been leading to this one moment. A sharpness, a clarity comes to them. It's as if they realise finally what their lives have all been about. It's quite a beautiful thing, really."

Pearson finished then. He pushed his hand into the flayed ribcage and simply squeezed the exposed heart until it stopped. Why it hadn't stopped long before now was a miracle.

"I use drugs," Pearson explained. "I have a contact who supplies me with stuff, stops the shock killing people too soon if I use replacement fluids, too." He took from his jacket pocket a syringe with clear liquid in it and waggled it by way of illustration.

Saul sat on the ground suddenly, as though his legs could no longer support him. He felt the frozen mesh of the metal cage against his back. He looked at the cameras in his lap without really seeing them.

"How can I?" he said.

"How can you what?" Pearson crouched down in front of him, the right eye which had no reflection in Saul's photograph, reflected something now: Saul's inverted face.

"How can I develop this film? I can't. I can't show it to anyone."

Pauline. How could he go back to her now? He was so confused. He was finding it so hard to concentrate. A dark shape loomed over him. A scent of engine oil and rusty machinery infiltrated his consciousness and he looked up.

Pearson was expressionless, but his voice soothing, calm as he spoke. "You have nothing to lose, Saul. After this, you need to begin again. You do see that, don't you?"

Yes, he saw, quite plainly, and finally. Life as he had known it was over; this one act had closed a door on him. Even if he went back to Pauline now, to his old life, this wouldn't go away. He had watched, and photographed, a human being disassembled like a used car for spare parts.

"You're going to be fine, Saul," the voice went on. "After all, you passed the test: the Ward 27 test. That was when I knew I could trust you; the way I knew I could trust the friend who set it up for me." Pearson put a hand on Saul's head as though baptising him. "Sure, the film is worth a lot of money. I have connections. But that's not the point, is it?"

Saul was tired. Pearson's tone was so reassuring, and he could see now just how. . .ordinary. . .his life had been up until now. The banality of struggling to pay his bills, to keep the proverbial wolf from the door. And it was not that Pauline hadn't meant a great deal to him; she had, but he found it so hard to love her the way she seemed to want. He wondered if he had ever really loved anyone. No, Martin Pearson was right, it wasn't the money.

But he was still uncertain. At the back of his mind something told him his life was over. But he was also being born into a new one, and his voice was a child's as he said to Pearson, "What am I going to do, Martin? What now?"

And gently, ever so gently, Pearson crouched down, pushed hands under Saul's arms, laced them together around his back and slowly pulled him upright. Saul was too dazed to be aware of how tenderly Martin treated him. He couldn't fix on anything. But Martin continued to whisper softly in his ear, a mother to a child, "Everything's going to be alright, Saul. Don't worry. You're with me now."

And as they walked slowly together out of the shed and into the cool night, huddled like lovers, Martin folded his right arm like a huge black wing covetously around Saul's shoulders.

# EIGHT-LANE MESSIAH

The readout showed that they had so far travelled only twelve of the sixty plus miles between Median and Hartwell. Already the brazen sun had heated the car to thirty degrees centigrade but the humidity made it seem twice that even with the ventilation going full blast. The wind, which had earlier poured through the fully rolled-down windows, had been superheated and forced Mark to shut them again. It had reminded him of the Sirocco when he was a boy and dad had taken the family on a driving holiday across France, when it had been legal to travel there.

Clare and he had hardly exchanged a dozen words since the Median checkpoint five miles out of town. She said the guards freaked her out and that they were nothing but thugs and wasters.

"Those ned haircuts and combat trousers just make it worse," she'd said one time after a shopping trip where they detained her for the best part of an hour while clearing her passcard. It had been her own fault, really, for using one of the temporary markets that had sprung up beyond the town boundaries in order to subvert local bylaws and avoid trader tax. They'd checked what was in the boot and clucked over its contents. And when she'd unpacked back at home she discovered that a bottle of whisky and a pair of lace knickers she'd bought were missing.

"Arseholes!" Clare felt violated but knew she was powerless in the situation.

Slouched across the passenger seats in the back Amber sniffed from time to time as she rifled through some grubby teenage magazine or other.

His daughter's passive aggression finally got to Mark and, catching her eye in the rear view mirror, he couldn't help himself saying, "Maybe you ought to be reading Mother and Baby instead. A bit more educational."

"And maybe you ought to fuck yourself," Amber retorted.

Mark swung round with a snarl and tried to grab her arm. Clare knocked his hand away with her shoulder. "Pack it in you two. And Amber, you just bloody watch yourself. We're doing this for your own good you know. Don't forget that."

"Yeah, yeah," Amber replied with that heavy irony perfected by teenagers. She twisted around to face the seatback. Her feet, clumpy in huge Doc Marten boots, were propped against the sidelight window where they left black smears on the glass.

Mark still found it difficult to imagine anyone wanting to have sex with Amber. The idea of her being a mother was even more appalling. She was sullen and ill tempered and that, combined with the greasy lank hair and the studs in her bottom lip, would have presented a serious challenge to even the most lecherous of suitors. Okay, one of their neighbours was always creeping around her – at least according to Amber – but he was middle-aged even compared to Mark and was probably a pervert.

"You're quite sure he's going to be there?" Clare said to Amber while gazing listlessly ahead through the windshield at the endless vista of motorway and bumper-to-bumper cars ahead of them.

Amber made a grunt of assent.

"And you're sure you'll recognise him?" Mark couldn't resist adding. Perspiration from his palms was making the steering wheel slippery. He held onto it like it was lifebelt. Almost as soon as he said the words, he felt a little guilty. He realised he was being unpleasant and unreasonable but he just couldn't help himself. In truth he missed the closer relationship they'd had when she was younger, playing together, the stupid jokes he used to tell her which always made her laugh. What happened between Amber and her parents seemed to mirror what has been going on politically around the country since the township system started emerging after the collapse of central government in 2018.

The traffic – already an unknowably long, jerky conga line of motors – was slowing to a crawl.

"Can you see anything?" Clare asked anxiously. She rose up in her seat and peered ahead as though she might see beyond the shallow rise of the horizon shimmering in the heat haze.

"Not a thing. I've never known it like this." On the rare trips they made in their ageing sapphire blue Ford Focus they had usually found the motorways to be relatively quiet. Few people travelled on them nowadays and not just because of the danger of bandits but because the roads themselves were cracking and pitting from lack of maintenance. In some areas it was so bad that mosses and grasses had begun to spring up on the hard shoulder and sometimes the growth caused lateral splits in the tarmac across all four lanes until the split was halted at the concrete central reservoir. Mark had once seen a car overturned after smashing into the roots of a tree that had punched through the blacktop.

Amber lowered her magazine and said, "Any juice left, mum? It's boiling in here."

Clare reached down and located the almost-empty litre bottle of water (a recycled plastic Coke bottle) and handed back to her daughter.

Amber drained what was left and made a sound of distaste. "It's warm!"

"Air conditioning's packed in, folks," Mark said. "We'll just have to put up with it, I'm afraid. I. . .fuck!"

A sudden blow threw them forward in their seats, and Mark slammed on the brakes. Amber, lying sideways without a seatbelt, was dumped into the space between the front and back, banging her hip painfully against the gear housing.

The Focus had barely been moving so the car behind must have rammed them.

Furious, Mark slapped the clip to free his seatbelt and threw open the driver's door. Operating on autopilot, he almost forget to check on his wife and daughter, so when he looked in on them he was relieved to see they were both okay. Amber was groaning as she dragged herself back up on her seat. She cupped a hand protectively against the top of her right hip.

"I think I've broken something," she complained as she gingerly lowered herself down. She untucked her t-shirt and pushed down the waistband of her jeans. The flesh around the hipbone was fiery but it seemed unlikely that serious damage had been caused.

"You'll be okay, Amber." Clare patted her reassuringly on the knee. "It's just a bump I think."

The impact hadn't been enough to trigger the airbags. Mark was thankful for that, since he had no idea what he would have done with the safety feature deployed. It might also be that they weren't working, of course, given that it had been more than five years since the car had last been serviced.

"And what about the baby, mum?" Amber failed to hide the sarcasm in her tone.

Clare and Mark exchanged a look that said "don't antagonise her any more" and Clare replied, "I'm sure it's absolutely fine, love. You're not that far gone, and we weren't travelling fast."

Mark was already outside as she finished her sentence. The car that had shunted them was a grimy white Volkswagen Beetle, the last model in the range before the importation ban and the collapse of the local factories.

Mark leant in across the driver's window and snarled at the woman behind the wheel, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" But she ignored him. Her hands were still on the wheel but she was gazing across the fields beyond the hard shoulder.

"Are you listening to me?" he demanded and banged the heel of his hand against the windowsill to make her to look at him. She didn't flinch.

With his attention on the crash and on his anger with the woman, he didn't at first notice the people emerging from their vehicles, or the growing number of them, until their bodies started to press against him and jostle him out of their way. He pulled back and started to protest at their rudeness, but there were so many of them it was clear they were simply indifferent to him rather than being ill-mannered.

The woman the car, a blonde in a plain blouse and jeans, her hair lank and unkempt, but with carefully manicured and crimsoned fingernails, said, "Ssh. Can't you hear it?"

Mark was barely listening. People in their hundreds were approaching now, abandoning their cars which lined both the east and west carriageways. East and West carriageways were halted, and the drivers and their passengers from the West lanes were clambering over the central reservoir to get to Mark's side. Saloons, coupes, sports cars, trucks, even a few buses and motorbikes, had braked and killed their engines. The silence was disturbing somehow. The vehicle occupants were emerging like nocturnal animals, stunned and blinking in the surprise of sunlight. Everyone was heading for barrier bordering the former farmlands that were returning to the wild and undulating gently into the far distance as far as the eye could see.

"Is it him?" a plump, middle aged man with a comb over, asked a short woman next to him.

"I can't tell," the woman said. Then, "Aye, it must be." She sounded Scottish but might have been Northern English so far as Mark could tell. He'd never been much good at accents, especially now that even individual towns were developing territorial dialects. Even place names had changed after the collapse of central government.

Before he could ask the question that was forming, the woman shoved open her car door and shouldered past him, muttering, "Sorry about your car, by the way. I'll cover any damages."

"Hey, hang on a second," he began. But already she was halfway to the safety barrier. Baffled he watched her vault the aluminium fence and drop down to the slope leading to the overgrown fields below. Others followed her, brushing past Mark and vying for position at the parts of the fence that were not obstructed by gorse or holly bushes. Through these gaps they poured like water from an undammed reservoir.

To a teenage boy about Amber's age Mark said, "What the hell's going on?"

The boy shrugged. "I'm just following the rest. We're stuck here anyhow."

"Mark?" Clare was beside him now and sank her fingers into his forearm. "Mark, this is scary. I don't understand where everybody's going. Why've we stopped?"

The crowd was thickening around them, the carriageways of the motorway clotting like blood in a dying body. The human tide was rising in waves, bumping and slapping into the stationery vehicles, making them rock to and fro.

Pressed back against the doors of a mini-van, Mark and Clare held onto each other and they could hardly believe the density of the crowd. Young and old and middle aged. Children. Some people who were evidently disabled. A blind woman, arms outstretched and waving in front of her, weeping. A man with no legs being carried on the shoulders of two heavyset men with dark scowls on their perspiration-beaded faces.

The blind woman was whimpering, "Sandra? Sandra, where are you? Help me. Please help –" But her frail voice was carried off by the wordless drone coming from the crowd. It was like chanting, or some kind of secular litany. Some voices in the crowd had begun it, and others were taking it up. The sound was swelling like the deepest of church organ pipes.

Beside Mark Clare was beginning to tremble. People kept pressing against them and sliding away to slip over the barrier like a river encountering rocks and flowing around it.

Through the droning he started to make out another voice, and the shape of a word forming, repeated over and over. "Mu-u-um! Mu-u-u-um!"

"Jesus," Clare gasped. "It's Amber."

But as his wife tried to push her way back through the crowds, Mark snatched her hand and pulled her back against the van.

"Stay here. You'll never get through that."

The metalwork of the van's doors was baking and through Mark's shirt it felt as though a hot frying pan were being laid against his back. Someone was banging the doors from the inside. The force of it made the doors tremble. He turned and peeped through the grimy window. At first there was just blackness. Then a sudden shockwave and he leapt back as a set of bared fangs glanced off the glass. Clare screamed. It was a dog, an Alsatian or something, and it was furious. It slammed against the doors again, desperately trying to escape. Mark risked a look through the window. Across the shadowy hulk of the animal's shoulders he could see, beyond the animal fence separating the beast from the driver's cab, that both driver and passenger seats were empty. The occupant or occupants must have followed the crowd.

For an instant, the press of bodies seemed to slacken. Mark saw a gap between where he stood and his car and he leapt into it, shouting back to his wife, "Stay where you are."

Pushing and shoving as hard as he could against the onrush of humanity, Mark felt like he was trying to swim inside a waterfall. Bodies boiled around him. He was kicked and scratched and shoved. People shouted at him to get out of the way. They swore at him. The growing rage was palpable. Ahead he could see Amber vainly trying to open her door as the car was rocked violently by the crowds pressing past it. At one point the rear the offside wheels came off the ground and the car started to tilt. He yelled "no!" as Amber screamed in terror. Next second the car dropped back again and rocked briefly on its suspension before settling to a halt.

But just as his fingers curled around the door handle they were snatched away. A sharp blow just below his sternum knocked the wind out of him and toppled him backwards. He fell flat on his back and his head banged against the tarmac. For a dizzying second he thought he was blacking out. But he recovered himself just in time to roll on his side to avoid being trampled. Reaching above his head he managed to claw and hook his fingers into the front wheel trim. Fighting for breath, he dragged himself closer to the body of the car while people rushed past. Knees and shoes banged against him again and again. Someone trod on his shin and the point of a boot caught him an excruciating kick in the small of his back. He was panting with the effort to stand up. With a final, painful push, he managed to drag himself to his knees and finally to push his body upright, using the body of the car as a brace and a surface to slide against.

"Roll. . .open. . .the window," he managed to shout to his daughter. She looked terrified and her arms were folded protectively around herself. She shook her head furiously.

"Amber!" Mark demanded. She frowned at this. It seemed an accusation. You got us into this, Dad, the look said. It's all your fault. "Amber. . ." He wanted to plead with her but knew if he demonstrated the slightest sign of weakness she would simply shrivel in on herself. "I said, roll the bloody window down. I have to get you out!"

Someone threw a punch and it caught his eye. Blood spurted out of the wound and sprayed the window.

"Dad!" Amber screamed. "Dad. . .no! Wait. . ."

Frantically, she threw herself across the passenger seat and tried to turn the ignition so the electrics would work. Mark cursed the death of manual window systems. And the bloody automatic child locks. The car was completely surrounded. Hands and faces pressed against the glass as people were being squashed together in the mindless rush. Mark elbowed and pushed away the man who may have punched him – he couldn't be sure it was him but by now he didn't care less.

"Fuck!" The man he'd hit reared up and grabbed his right wrist and slammed his arm against the car body, almost dislocating Mark's shoulder. The man was burly, and wore spectacles and dark clothes. The left lens of his spectacles had a spider web of cracks across it. "Leave it, man. It's not worth it."

Leave what? Was the man warning him that he was a superior force or did he mean something else?

Then the man said, "We're all here for the same reason. So just. . .leave it!" and suddenly let him go.

"What?" Mark began to say just as his daughter's voice, clearer now through the opening window, whimpered, "Dad. . .please. Help me!"

As Mark reached in and tried to put his arms around his daughter, feeling her hands lock around the back of his neck, the man said, "Here. I'll help." And somehow both of them were hauling Amber through the passenger window, taking her weight as she toppled through the opening. She started to sob and clutched her father with all her might.

"It's okay, love," the man was saying, patting her on the back. "You'll be okay."

"M-my wife?" Mark managed and frantically looked around to find the van. The man looked across the lessening tide of bodies, said, "The red-haired woman? Yeah, she's fine. She's okay."

With the aid of their rescuer Mark and Amber managed to make it back through the crowds to Clare, who clutched her daughter to her chest and sobbed, "Thank God. Thank God you're okay."

By now the crowds were abating. They took their chance and moved over to the fence, taking care to stand by the blockade of bushes and stunted trees, and watched the stragglers ease through the gap.

"Thanks. Thanks a lot." Mark held out his hand to the man. But the other was too intent on watching the tidal wave of humanity rising up the fields below to some point on the horizon.

"No problem," he said absent-mindedly. Then he turned and shook Mark's hand. "Edward. Call me Ed."

"Mark. I thought. . ."

Ed shrugged. "It was kind of hairy for a minute there. Stupid bastards."

Clare said, "You seem to know what's going on. Don't you?"

"Some of it –"

"Clare," she introduced herself, and added, "And this is Amber."

Amber wiped tears from her eyes. "Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for helping me. They could have killed me."

Behind them came the sound of the dog barking inside the van.

"Poor beast," Ed said. "I think I should. . ."

"No!" Mark said, grabbing at Ed's jacket as he started to walk off. "If you open those doors it might rip your throat out."

Ed smiled. "Not mine. He's my dog. I saw you were in trouble so I had to leave him."

Mark let out a sigh of relief and felt himself on the edge of laughter. "Shit, I thought it was the Hound of the Baskervilles back there."

"I'm sure Blackie'd appreciate the compliment," Ed laughed.

But Mark didn't feel reassured by this claim.

"Don't worry, Mark. He'll be okay back there for a bit. I think he's just scared. Like your daughter there."

Reminded about their situation, Mark turned towards Amber. "Are you okay, baby? I'm sorry I've been such an arse."

Amber managed a half smile. "You have, yeah. Don't worry about it. So, Ed, what's the plan?"

Typical Amber. Partial acceptance of an apology while at the same time reminding dad that she still didn't trust his sincerity. Or his abilities as a father.

Ed pulled off his glasses, peered at the broken lens, and then thrust it into a pocket of his jacket, a black North Face mountaineering parka. "They're mostly for distance anyhow." Then, responding to the question, "Plan? Uh, don't have one. Other than we need to be down there with the rest." And he pointed to a spot where a line of trees fringed a low rise beyond some abandoned farmhouses. Where the crowd was headed.

Looking more closely Mark saw that the trees were blurry. At first he assumed it was heat haze from the sunlight. Then he saw dark strands weaving through it. Bonfires. Indeed, once he realised that he could just make out the flames at the base. There appeared to be an empty area in front of the farm buildings, perhaps the main courtyard abutting stables and grain houses. It was to this spot the crowd was headed.

"But. . .why? What's going on? Why is this happening?" Mark was in a state of shock. He couldn't seem to think clearly. The sense of unreality in their current situation was overwhelming.

"It's a rally," Ed informed him. "A gathering of the clans, sort of. Down there's the rebel chief –he's called The Pope in some territories, The Core in others. Nobody knows his name. He's. . ."

"But, I know who you're talking about," Amber said with a grin. "The Pope. Yes. I've seen him. Heard him. He's been to some of the raves, told us about the whole thing. How it's time for everything to change. How we're all prisoners of the territories. Imprisoned tribes. He promised us it was all going to change, and soon. I just didn't believe it then. But some of us did. Paul for one." She risked a glance at her father who never wanted her to speak her lover's name.

Mark had forbidden Amber to go to the raves but had known in his heart it had been a vain hope she would listen to him. Raves took place outside the territories. Kids drove miles out of town, having heard through the grapevine the locations and dates of each one. And they would always turn up faithfully, in their droves. They'd park their cars in circles like old American settlers in their covered wagons, while sound systems on the back of flatbed trucks and run by portable generators would blast out forbidden music while torches and fires burned around their primitive dancing, drug-taking and copulating.

Mark said, "So that was where you.."

"Got pregnant?" Amber sneered. "Get real, dad. That's so cheesy. You oldies are all the same. You just don't like missing out, that's the truth of it."

He ignored her and gave his attention again to the crowd.

"Might as well join them, then." And, in spite of Clare's protests, they followed Ed's lead and climbed the fence.

As they trod across the flattened grasses and through the torn foliage and muddy tracks he watched the sun start to sink below the horizon. The relatively cloudless sky meant that twilight encroached slowly, almost imperceptibly, with the sun firing sharp, blinding shafts of dying as it started to sink below the horizon. And the low light gradually brought the shadowing shape of the shuffling crowd into high relief.

"What is he, then?" Mark panted, struggling to walk through the boggy ground, the earth trying to suck his feet deep inside itself and releasing them only reluctantly.

"Someone who's had enough." Ed seemed earnest. Serious now as though he appreciated the importance of the story they were all living through. "Like the rest of us. We don't hardly speak the same language any more. A few towns outside of here they've got their own lingo. Some of them'll kill you if you try to get in, too."

This was news to Mark. But on the other hand he and his family had led consciously sheltered lives. Amber was the only one of them who clearly knew more. Except that she'd chosen not to share it with her parents..

"We have a right to live where we want. To be with who we want." And here he looked knowingly across at Amber, who had stopped briefly to catch her breath. She'd heard what he said and she looked back at him with an expression of sadness.

"But there are rules," Mark said. "We've got to have rules, for our own protection."

Ed barked out a short laugh. "Says who? You call that back there being protected?"

Clare said, "But that's nothing to do with us. We're just trying to help Amber. And. . ."

"Help her how?" Ed said.

Amber was trudging forward again. "They want to get Paul – my boyfriend. . ."

"The guy who got you up the stick," Mark added coldly.

Amber sniffed, but continued, ". . .my boyfriend. They want him to get a passcard, acceptance into the Median. Legalise him."

"Oh," Ed says. "I see. So your daughter doesn't go to jail and her baby isn't aborted. It's the law, am I right?"

"Yes," Clare put in. "That's right. Amber doesn't deserve this. They're only. . .kids."

"See," Ed said. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. The rules. Who are they for? Who are they protecting? The civic leaders, that's who. The people who run the territories. That's why he wants to put a stop to it. I. . ."

Bam! A sudden burst of pressure. Then an explosion in their heads. Mark's sinuses felt like they were bursting. As though all the air had been sucked out around them and left a vacuum. Several more concussions followed by a sudden rise in temperature. A wall of flame shot up in front of them. They were at the back of the crowd now, at the crest of a rise leading down to the farm courtyard. In the centre of a circle of oil drums with flames pumping out of them, was a group of men and women. In their midst, wrestling against the ropes they had bound him with, was a naked man smeared in black stuff which could have been oil or tar. Even his face was black with it and the whites of his eyes against the blackness made his eyes appear to bulge.

Some of the oil drums had tipped over and exploded, setting fire to the surrounding foliage and forcing the crowd of people back. People were still chanting, that rhythmic drone rising and falling like the tide. There was a word amid the chanting, becoming clearer as more and more voices took it up.

"Liar!" They shouted. "Liar! Liar! Liar!"

"I didn't lie!" The man screamed at them and wrestled against his bindings. The group of men held onto the ropes shackling his wrists and arms and chest, like they were training a wild horse. "You just didn't listen. I could have cured you. All of you."

Someone hit him across the face. Mark, to his horror, saw the face split diagonally, from the top of an ear to the edge of the chin. It must have been a knife, or a flail of some kind. The man's lips and right eye burst open, pumping blood and the jelly of the eye.

He screamed again. "You want things to stay they same. And they can't. I told you that. All this has happened before. You know that. It's got to change, for God's sake! Why won't you listen?"

"You promised!" A woman at the front of the crowd promised. "You promised you'd set us free. But we're still prisoners. That's why we came. You've told us nothing. You've just bloody pontificated, telling us how we should live our lives."

With that the man was hauled back and with some sort of shackle they trussed him with his elbows behind his back, to a pulley suspended from a grain silo. Three of the men hauled on the rope until the man was dangling a few feet off the ground. Then five others started to beat him with metal rods that might have been lengths of rusty railing. His flesh burst wherever he was hit. Flesh pulled away to expose ribs and internal organs. They struck his legs, too, breaking them in several places. His screams were agonising.

A few people howled, but whether in fear of pleasure it was impossible to tell.

Mark turned. "We have to get away."

"No!" Edward, bigger and stronger than Mark, grabbed him by the shoulders. "You have to look. Fuck it. Fuck! It's no use. He's no use. Not this one."

Clare, her face white with the horror of it all, said, "What. . .what do you mean, 'not this one'?"

Ed looked down at her. His face was filled with scorn, even hatred. "I mean it's not him. Is it? We thought he was the one. But he's not. He can't save us. It's someone else." Silvery tears were streaming down Edward's face. Profound disappointment, fear, and something else?

And then he gave his attention to Amber. He gazed at her in silence for several long seconds and gradually he began to smile. He said, "But it could also be, maybe, that the right one, the one we've been waiting for, hasn't even been born yet."

Mark reached out protectively and put his arm around his daughter's shoulder. This man was clearly dangerous and who knew what he was capable of?

Ed giggled but without humour. "Oh, come on, man. I'm not that stupid. I mean, she's hardly the Virgin Mary, is she?"

Mark punched him. Just threw his whole body at Edward and slammed a fist into his nose. He felt the crack of bone and droplets of blood spray his face.

Ed was on his back then and Mark was straddling his chest. He began mercilessly to pound his fists into the face, first the left, then the right, over and over in a steady rhythm like pistons until the face became black and misshapen like a rotting apple.

"Christ, Mark!" Clare was yelling at him, and both she and Amber were trying to pull him off.

"Leave him!" someone said. Several dozen people at the back of the crowd had gathered around Clare and Amber to watch the beating.

Mark was getting breathless and a bolt of pain in the knuckles of his right hand suddenly stopped him. It felt like he'd broken a bone. Dazed, he looked up. His wife and daughter were gazing at him in horror. But the people behind them were oddly calm.

They just stood there, breathing shallowly. The faces of the crowd, which was now growing again from dozens to hundreds of people, all wore the same, stony lack of expression. No, that wasn't entirely true. There was something there when you looked closely. It was deep inside their eyes.

It was the distant but bright flame of anticipation.

# CROSSING THE BORDER

Crawling out from beneath the battered truck, Harry stood and surveyed his handiwork. The makeshift patch on the exhaust would hold for a while longer, but he'd need it fixed properly sooner or later.

Through the flyspecked window of the shack he could see Gail folding the sheets they'd soaked in a tub of water and then lain beneath last night against the sweltering heat. The peeling paint on the bedstead revealed the sleepless rust; the floorboards creaked, and grime and mildew clogged the floral pattern in the once white lace curtains. She was neat and orderly as a rule, and he could see that place disgusted her.

"How long do we have to be here?" she'd asked in the middle of the night, failing to keep the accusatory tone from her voice.

"Till we're ready." Harry had craved a cigarette at that point, and wondered why he'd decided to give them up.

He'd driven twelve hours with only ten-minute breaks, too tired to be impressed by the absence of a single town or a single landmark for most of that time. His memory of mountains and green places struggled against a starkness that tried to devour them like the belly of a whale.

It was only the thought of the money that kept him going. That, and the prospect of a place to lay their heads, a place they could stop running for a few days.

Only Harry knew they were running, though, and why.

He failed to comprehend why she wasn't angrier, having dragged her across more borders than he could count. These past months they'd eked a meagre living in part-time jobs, Gail more often than not waitressing while Harry picked some pockets and rolled some dice. He told her he'd been doing some joinery on a farm or pumping gas. He no longer called it petrol, and England was a dim memory. He was one of the dispossessed, with nothing he called home but Gail, the only anchor he'd known his entire life.

The one time she'd said to him "Do you love me?" he got furious. How could she ask him that? Was she so insecure? But it was just a reflection of his own feelings. He'd often wanted to ask her the same thing, but thought it a weakness.

"Just 'cos I don't say it all the time," he growled.

"You don't say it at all."

He softened at that, put his arms around her, and loved the way she folded into him like a letter into an envelope. What did they need the word for? It was just a word. Words mean damn all.

Inside the shack, he sluiced his hands under cold, cloudy water sputtering from the tap. The tin basin rang from the spray. Harry thought about the note from Calder, and the locker key in the zip pocket of his aviator jacket. The railway station had to be two hundred miles from here and he couldn't free his mind from the satchel of cash waiting for him there. Of course there was the risk of being caught. A big risk.

Harry had only been the driver, but if any one of them had been caught the police would know everything. It was Calder's and Harry's share, but Harry had the key. Harry knew that if he took it for himself Calder would kill them both; and he was out there somewhere, and seemed to know where they were at all times. That was how he'd got Calder's note: from the desk clerk of a motel they'd stayed in four nights ago.

The note said:

It's time to get the money. You'd best leave the old lady behind.

Harry couldn't make up his mind about what to do. If he went, the police could be waiting for both him and Calder. Or Calder could be police bait. Or he would lose Gail.

Harry did what he always did. He flipped a coin. It spun in the scorched air.

"Heads I go," he said to himself, caught the coin and slapped it across the back of his hand. The silver head looking up at him when he lifted his hand left the metallic taste of fear in his mouth.

They waited at the shack two days, barely speaking. Harry got supplies from town, twenty miles away. They tried to make love but the heat was too much, and so they slept.

In the night he thought he heard her say, "You never make decisions, babe. I'm always the one."

By morning, Gail was gone. He found Calder's note laid out on the rickety kitchen table. Beneath it, she'd written:

I'm going to have our baby on my own.

Get your money or don't. Just decide.

He sat on the porch a long time, a light breeze rustling the paper in his hand. His eyes were wet, the only bit of moisture in the dry landscape.

They'd both kept their secrets, then, his own less well than Gail's. If she'd told him she was pregnant, he'd only feel obligated to her. That would be her logic. But she was wrong, so wrong. Now she'd be going home and she'd be in no doubt he would know that. But Gail wasn't one for ultimatums, one of the things he loved about her. She just wanted him to decide for himself.

Drought had cracked the land here like ancient leather and the light even in the shade of the wooden awning was hot enough to dry his tears.

It wasn't until towards twilight that Harry finally stood up, and, stretching the cramp out of his legs, withdrew the last silver coin from his jeans. Flipped it.

"Heads I get the money."

He slapped it down and waited, gazing at his right hand folded over his left like a backwards handshake.

He waited. At last, he repocketed the coin without looking at it. He stepped inside the shack, got his jacket and took the locker key out of it. He studied it for a while, rubbed his thumb across the plastic tag with the locker number on it, walked outside and got into the truck. It would be a long drive south, but if he was lucky, he'd catch up with Gail's bus before she got home.

Shortly after midnight, it started to rain.

Puffs of steam rose off the truck's bonnet and the roof rattled with the pounding it was getting. Two hours' driving and it was as if he'd passed from the Gobi desert straight into a monsoon. He couldn't stop glancing at his mobile phone, which lay on the passenger seat, its fluorescent screen winking at him, calling his attention from the road. Something had made him switch it on. He'd been saving the battery, but now it was his only chance of contact with Gail or. . .

The phone chirruped at him. He grabbed it.

"Gail?" Harry waited for the relief that her voice would bring.

"Hi, pal. You in a hurry, or what?"

"Calder. Shit, man, I thought. . .I mean, where the hell are you?"

"Waiting for you." He paused. "With Gail."

Harry almost dropped the phone. He hauled the wheel to the right and mounted the grassy verge, a stream of cars honking at him like angry hornets.

"If you've touched her –"

"Hey, Har. . .as if I would. She's your woman ain't she?"

"She's got my baby inside her," Harry wanted to scream at him. "My baby!"

"But I need a bit of insurance, know what I mean, Harry? Sort of like a pension plan. When we dumped the stuff we agreed to split up, you got the locker key. But Harry, man, you shouldn't have put your gun on me. I would have trusted you. You know that, right?"

Calder trusted no one, of course. Harry always intended to split the money with him, mainly because he knew how dangerous the guy was, but the locker was crucial since the cops were already on the lookout. The bank clerk never really expected that Calder would shoot him, and he was still showing that terrified smile when the bullet entered his forehead and decorated the calendar with the picture of the Seychelles behind him with brain matter and blood.

"Where are you, Calder?" Harry tried to keep the tone in his voice even.

"Right where you think I am."

"The cops will be watching the station."

"That's what I thought." Harry could almost hear Calder's self-satisfied smile. "But, see, they're dumb. I already checked it out. They have no idea, not a clue, man. Maybe it was the other robbery that made them think we were on a spree up country."

Harry's throat tightened. "What other robbery?"

Calder snorted. Unbelievably, he found the whole business amusing.

"What robbery, Calder?"

"I just needed some immediate cash. It was getting kind of expensive and my wallet was running dry."

"You kill anyone?" Harry knew what the answer was going to be. The truck's engine was still running, so he swung it back into the river of traffic, keeping the mobile clamped to his ear. He was maybe another 80 miles away from the station.

"These convenience stores, man. They're not really. . .convenient. You know, queue jumping, jostling for the last discounted pack of cigarettes and, like, people just GET IN THE FUCKING WAY!"

Jerking the phone away from his ear left of Calder's psychotic screeching hanging in the air. It was a trick he played on people, making them think he was unbalanced, whereas really he was cool and calculating. The psycho act just gave him an edge, kept everyone on their toes.

Almost afraid of the answer he might get, Harry said, "Where's Gail? Is she. . .is she okay?"

Calder made no reply.

"If she's not okay, Calder, you're a dead man."

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he regretted it. Calder was easy to antagonise, even if he didn't show it, the way a dog is infinitely more dangerous as soon as it stops barking.

"She's fine." Like a doctor calmly telling you the cancer's devouring you from the inside and you've only got two months to live.

A pair of yellow feral eyes caught in his headlights and Harry slammed the brakes. The coyote, or whatever it was, skulked back into the shadows, unconcerned by its near miss.

Harry hadn't noticed that the rain had stopped or that the traffic had lightened. The truck's engine stalled and he had to twist the key in the ignition five or six times before it coughed back to life. He was perspiring; the rain had left everything humid, the thing he most hated about this part of the world. As he booted the truck along the highway he fought back the pornographic image of Calder's 45 jammed into Gail's mouth, her copper-coloured hair wrapped around his fingers as he yanked back her head to expose her throat.

By the time he reached the mall car park, just behind the station, it was dawn, the low sunlight bouncing off puddles of oily water, forcing him to scrunch up his eyes. He heard shutters being ratcheted up, the echo of cleaner's voices as they swabbed the tiled walkways between the stores.

Calder, dressed in a powder blue suit with yellow t-shirt (his pathetic idea of dressing to impress), stood examining a display of Timberland boots through the hexagonal shutters over the plate glass. His hands were folded together loosely behind his back. Harry could slit his throat now without any difficulty. Except he'd never find Gail, if he knew Calder as well as he thought.

"Where is she, Calder?"

"Harry. . ." Calder's shovel-flat face broke into a smile. He pulled up his lapels, re-aligning the shoulders of his jacket. "What do you think? Got me a Rolex, too." And he shot his cuff to display an ostentatious gold timepiece.

"Shit, Calder, are you off your fucking head?"

Calder flinched but tamped down any further emotion. "No problem, Padre. Just get the stuff out of the locker and I'm out of here."

"And Gail."

"Best blowjob I ever had."

Harry went blind for a second and found himself with his hands around Calder's snaky throat, his thumbs jammed deep into his Adam's apple.

Something was pressing into Harry's abdomen. A hunting knife of some sort with a smooth edge and a saw tooth back that would spill his belly onto the tarmac in a single twist. He should have pulled the pistol out of the waistband of his jeans, but that would have put Gail – and our baby, he reminded himself – even more at risk.

He withdrew, catching from the corner of his eye a man with a dripping mop deliberately turning away in a pantomime of getting on with his job.

The blade was spirited away. Calder had always been a magician with blades.

"I told you she was okay. Now, get the money, asshole."

Last chance, Harry told himself. This is the last I'll get.

Back home he'd killed a man. A boy, really. It had been purely accidental, even although Harry truly wanted him dead at that moment. The orphanage where Harry had been raised naturally had its resident bully, in this case one who was into drug dealing and cutting his enemies with a craft knife: a surreptitious slash across the back of the hand here, the point jabbed into a shoulder blade there. And one day Harry just had enough. He pushed back, punching into Barlowe's unyielding chest, punching again and again while Barlowe merely smiled, waiting for his moment. Enraged, Harry delivered an uppercut beneath the bully's ribs, winding him and sending him hurtling backward, knocking his head against a bollard in the visitor's car park. Blood streaked the black iron as Barlowe slid to the ground.

Harry never forgot the gleam fading from his opponent's eyes. Harry ran, and he's never stopped since. But Calder was Barlowe in another guise, and he felt a complex mixture of remorse and loathing as he dug into his pocket and clasped the key to locker 427.

"I want to see her first."

Calder worked the shoulders of his jacket again, twisted his head to one side to release his constricted neck muscles. "I could kill you right here," he said in a low tone.

"And if I haven't got the key? Remember, you don't know the locker's combination number."

"Chance I'll have to take."

Harry presented a calm he wasn't feeling. "Tell you what. You're a gambling man right, like me?"

Calder nodded suspiciously.

He showed Calder the coin. "Heads, I get half, tails you get everything. But first you tell me where Gail is."

Harry noticed Calder thinking, not something Calder did very often.

"So," he began slowly. "I win both ways."

"Yep. Oh, and also I called the cops. They'll be here in an hour."

Calder was visibly tense, and Harry knew he had him. He turned on his heel without a word and led Harry to the wheelie bins behind the Safeway. He lifted the lid of one, revealing Gail, trussed up with clothesline, a strip of electrician's tape across her mouth. Her eyes implored as Harry tenderly lifted her out, and cut away her ties. She was sobbing and coughing bile. Some of it splashed on Calder's new loafers, which made him mad but he didn't do anything about it.

"Okay," said Harry, tossing the coin in the air. He let it drop to the ground, and stepped on it. Raising his foot, pretending to look, he said, "Shit. It's tails."

Calder grinned, the moron. He withdrew his revolver, keeping it waist-high, and motioned with it.

"The money better be there."

"It's all yours, Calder."

They walked through the mall, the straggling early morning shoppers stepping back in horror at the sight of the gun. When the reached the station platform, Calder had no sooner got the key in the door than he found six police shotguns pointed at his head. The cops just materialised from thin air. Harry knew they'd be there; he'd called them to make sure of it.

Both he and Calder were cuffed, and led to the exit.

"Harry?" Gail wailed. "Harry, what's happening?"

A policewoman gently put a blanket across her shoulders, as though this could assuage her grief and fear and puzzlement.

"It's okay, baby," he said. "It'll all be okay. I just thought it was time I made a decision."

# ORIGAMI

My mother was famous in her day, at least within the hermetic world of the circus and its audience. But fame is fragile, so I barely believe in her existence, far less in what she was famous for.

I followed her trail down the years, through self-important suburbs and rural hamlets of whinstone and granite, my heart growing hard and brittle as slate with each failure to find a clue as to her whereabouts, or who she really was. She was so hard to track down that she might have had a good career as an escapologist.

To be honest I never understood the reason for my quest until now. It was as though I couldn't place myself in the world, understand who I was until I found my real mother. Even my stepmother abandoned me once I was old enough to find my own way.

Strangely enough, my real mother wasn't even a memory to me. She was an idea, and ideas have more power and resonance than memory.

My hands burn and itch so much now. It's all I can do not to tear off these white cotton gloves, but I know if I do I'll have to look at my naked hands, and I can't. Not yet. My feet swell in my shoes as though they might tear through the leather.

To master the fear and pain I think about Frankie. I can see him in my mind's eye, the way he was that day he told me who he really was. If I focus I can forget briefly what I am becoming. I can pretend it doesn't have to end the way I know it must.

Looking back I can see how ironic it was that Frankie had lived all those years in St Brame's, the place we first met. Ironic because of how he would have lived before that stillness, after all his restless travels and adventures. The miles he must have covered. The things he must have seen. And then, to be stuck in one place for so many years. I can't begin to imagine how it must have felt for him.

St Brame's is one of those English seaside towns best visited in its melancholy off-season. The day I stepped off the train, I caught a rickety old bus that dropped me on the outskirts. I found the main street, such as it was, a narrow corridor of closed shops and dismal bed and breakfast accommodation. I took the third street on the left, a narrow vennel that opened presently on the harbour. Over the low tide stretched the cracked wooden tongue of the pier. I turned around and scanned the harbour front until I spotted The Golden Lion, where Frankie said he would meet me, the only pub he could recommend because of its lack of large screen television or karaoke machine. For some reason I didn't want to see him right away. I needed to look around first. Maybe being so close to my goal made be feel achieving it would be anti-climatic.

Frankie had told me through a crackling phone line, "They have my picture on the wall. You can still make out my autograph."

The wife I imagine for myself in another life would have walked out on me by then. I had spent most of my money and time looking for my mother. The idea of my mother.

Last month my war of attrition against the adoption agency finally ended. I conceded defeat, having failed to wear them down. They flatly refused to tell me who my parents were. It was a legal thing, they told me. And so, with a chunk of my remaining savings, I hired a private detective. He was good. He even found my birth certificate.

Circus performers must be the most difficult people in the world to trace, urban nomads moving between cities where they flare brightly as comets and fade as suddenly in streaks of truck tail lights. My mother was one of them, one of the brightest. My mother, the origami woman, who folded herself away one day for the last time and simply disappeared.

When I entered the Golden Lion, the barmaid glanced at my face and took my order for a pint of ale too quickly, as though embarrassed by my presence. By the fact of me. The overlapping plates of scaly flesh beneath my eyes crinkled disgustingly when I tried to smile at her and I dabbed a handkerchief at the saliva I imagined trailing in a rope from the frozen left side of my mouth. A couple of girls in a booth by the door bent over to whisper to each other, punctuating their exchange with furtive glances in my direction. Tongue pressed to the points of my saw blade teeth I wondered what it would feel like to use these teeth to tear out the tongues they used to whisper about me. Hotspill of metallic blood in my mouth a swift revenge upon their scorn.

But who could I blame my condition on?

Sipping my drink at the counter I studied the photographs and posters covering the walls, some of them tucked behind the inverted bottles of spirits and their optic measures because wall space was so scarce. Many of the photographs were old studio shots of mediocre crooners, comedians and vaudeville acts signed with a flourish of optimism that did not match their life experience. Who had heard of these people other than the locals and the undiscriminating tourists who would settle for the dregs of the entertainment world, believing they were really enjoying themselves when they laughed at hoary old jokes, ogled clumsy scantily-clad chorus girls and pretended not to know the villain of that season's murder mystery play? My mother might be up on these walls. I looked for the old circus poster, which might advertise the Folding Woman or something along those lines. But if there was only a photograph and a signature I had no way of recognising her; she would have used a stage name.

"Looking for me?" Burly and lumpy as a sack of coal, Frankie McGruder was taller than expected from the split-reed squeak of a voice. The white scar on his throat might have been where a cancerous growth had be excised and damaged his vocal cords. Or maybe it was one of his acts gone wrong.

He nodded at photograph of himself in his youth: a tawny, sunken-cheeked and passably handsome young man, scowling darkly in one of those high contrast film-noir images popular back then. His autograph was an unreadable scrawl of faded ink. "Geek means something different these days. Computer obsessed kids. And 'fore you ask, I only bit off chicken heads a few times. My act was more extreme body mutilation, pulling a car with hooks through my nipples, hanging off ropes with rings through my ribs, that sorta stuff."

His matter-of-fact tone was more surprising that the acts Frankie described. His accent was difficult to place. Mid Atlantic, perhaps.

"What would you like?" I asked.

"I don't wanna drink at the moment; let's walk."

No sooner had we left the bar and begun walking down the concrete steps off the promenade to the night-darkened beach, than Frankie grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me against the metal banister. As he yanked open my coat I tried to push him away, but my energy had drained out of me, either through the surprise of the attack or because I was beginning to appreciate how pointless my life was becoming.

He pushed his hand under my shirt and dug his nails into my abdomen. And just as I thought he was about to undo my trousers, Frankie stepped back.

He examined the glistening half-moons of hardening flesh he had torn away, like gigantic soft fingernails or scales. Frankie pushed them around in his hand like a miser counting gold.

"It really is you," he breathed. "I knew you was after somethin', money anyways, but mebbe somethin' else, too. She ain't got none left, in case you're askin'."

Rebuttoning my coat, I sneered, "I thought you were the one who was after money. Money doesn't matter anymore."

He appraised my coat. "It's okay for those as got it to say that."

There was a button missing, and the wool torn where it had been ripped away. I showed him it and said with an attempt at irony, "I'll subtract the damage off your fee."

Frankie laughed dryly. "I could snap your neck and just take the money off you. You'll have it in the hotel."

"What makes you so sure of that?" He was right of course. My last withdrawal of nearly a thousand in cash, which took me to my overdraft limit and cleaned out my bank account, was in the base of my suitcase wrapped inside socks.

At the edge of the darkness silvery foam washed the fringes of the beach. Pebbles and small stones clicked together like billiard balls being racked. Right now I felt as lonely and frustrated as the solitary seagull crying mournfully above us.

We stumbled down the remaining steps and my feet sank into wet sand. Frankie's glossy leather biker jacket made him seem even more menacing and I hesitated to go any nearer the shoreline with him; not that I was afraid of dying, but I was afraid of pain and I could see that Frankie could inflict it. Brutally, if he so chose. He wanted the money, yes, but he might want more than that. To torture me just for fun, for instance. His body might have been able to take extremes of pain, but mine was weak from lack of food and exhaustion. I hadn't eaten in five days, and now slept hardly at all.

# # #

My bones are melting. I can feel it. What used to be a rubbery-skeleton beneath translucent skin is changing again, liquefying. In the mirror I watch the tangled motorway of veins and arteries twisting around my arm bones, and below my collarbone where the shirt is open at the neck. A sluggish heartbeat makes my lifeblood pulse listlessly, and I can see every beat in the jittery vein at my temple. Frankie was right about me: I am different, but not in the way he meant, or in any conventional understanding of a monstrosity or a deformity. It's the essential me, my essence, my soul which is the most different and strange. Frankie taught me how to tolerate, if not exactly celebrate, the role of the outsider, but I can never grow accustomed to change. Frankie and my mother could embrace change because of a fixed sense of who they were. Frankie said mother was "very together." Whereas me, I am in a state of flux.

At first he refused to tell me where she was. As I ball my fists and touch my thumbs together to ground my thoughts, I remember how angry he would get if I asked about her. One time he nearly knocked me unconscious. He threw me to the floor of his dusty flat and straddled my chest and punched me repeatedly in the face. I blamed the booze, of course. Frankie had difficulty staying away from it; that first meeting had been an act while he sized me up in as sober a condition as was feasible for him. But there was a grim kindness to him as well. Like the time he invited me to stay once he realised how broke I was.

"You don't look that bad, you know," he informed me one night over a meal of gammon steak and fried egg. Frankie was a terrible cook. The gammon was crispy at the edges and the egg almost raw.

"Compared to what? This food's disgusting, by the way." Pushing my plate away, I stood up unsteadily and tipped the empty bottle of wine experimentally to the bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Three empties sat on the tabletop. Oddly enough I couldn't seem to get as drunk as I wanted, oblivious-drunk. If I hadn't opened the bottles myself I would have sworn that Frankie had watered down the wine.

"Drinking won't help," Frankie offered. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

"You said you'd take me to my mother. I need to see her."

Frankie sighed. "I told you, boy; all in good time."

By now I was beyond exasperation at this litany of his. How do you define "good" time? Good for whom?

On this occasion I let it pass, but next night, as I had done several times before, I followed Frankie as he left the bar. Instead of walking to the pier and sitting on a bench to watch the oily black waves flex like muscles in the starlight, he turned down a side street. Slanting moonlight across the rooftops blazed on the high whitewashed seawalls that had once protected the houses behind them when storms forced the tides all the way up here. I had seen a photograph of just such a storm in the local museum that had once been a schoolhouse. Dated 1901, it had been the last devastating tidal wave on this part of the coast. The ancient cobbled street rose to a ridge, beyond which lay woodland and a moor. At a bend in the road, I had to duck back out of sight. There, at the edge of town, I saw a shape, which must have been Frankie turning. Checking that he wasn't being followed. I held my breath for a few seconds then leaned forward as far as I dared. And saw Frankie drop on all fours and lean down to sniff the ground like a dog. His leather jacket seemed to melt onto his torso, moulding to his musculature like a second skin, and the flat plates of his shoulder bones thrust upwards, pushing back from his spine like vestigial wings. His neck lengthened and his head pulled back with a jerk as though someone had grabbed him by the hair and tried to rip it off. His face lengthened, melting, blackening and pushing forward into a curved shape of what seemed like a gigantic beak sharp as a knife blade.

My heart thudded in my chest as I exhaled a long, ragged breath.

I turned and ran away, terrified by what I had seen, disbelief unable to quell the fear. Running, my shoes scuffed loudly on the cobbles and I stumbled and fell, cracking my right knee painfully. Pain was good; at least it was real. But as I righted myself, the act of standing sent searing agony up my thigh and stabbing into my hip. I sucked in air to help me manage the pain.

As the pain began to subside, a racketing of wings startled me.

Just a seagull, ghostly white in the moonlight.

When I got back to the flat, I rushed to the bathroom and splashed cold water over my face. My face: the scaliness beneath my eyes was more pronounced, my flesh was waxy, and when I pulled my fingers against my cheeks they left furrows like moulded clay. The finger marks remained in the dead flesh.

"What have you done to me, mother?" I asked my reflection in despair.

Ever since running away from my step-parents when I was 15, I must have begun to change. Before then, probably. Inside something must have been happening to me. Unlike the others children, who wanted a stable home more than anything else, my biggest dread was remaining in one place for any length of time. It was in my heart and bones to move from place to place, and the upbringing by my sour, dull, stepparents in a claustrophobic suburb of London was my worst nightmare.

Making my way in the world has never been easy. Part-time jobs were few and far between, but always I managed to get by. What I realise now was my restlessness was more than gypsy blood or the genes of carnival people; it was also fear of forming relationships.

Change. It was my nature. Movement was one manifestation of it, and now I knew another. Change, entropy, whatever you want to call it, Frankie had learned to control it whereas I was at its mercy. Not only was I an outsider to normal society but now, too, no part of the society that had bred me. The society of which Frankie and my mother were a part.

Franklin McGruder had been a carnival geek in the last years of the 19th century and the first forty-five or so of the 20th. If I hadn't found the evidence through an academic who had written a history of the sideshows and carnivals in America, the story might not have come to light. Paul Jacobs even had reproduction newspaper clippings and he kindly e-mailed me the one extant photograph of this sideshow freak McGruder, seen sticking his tongue out at the cameraman, a harpoon spike through his cheeks. It was clearly the Franklin McGruder I knew. But, judging by the date of the photograph and the fact that he looked the same middle-aged man I had spent time with, must now be around 160 years old. What caught my attention mostly, though, was the edge of the poster behind him advertised the carnival. Headlined in lurid gothic typography was an act called "Madame Origami."

St Brame's is long behind me now, the search for my mother given up if not forgotten.

My life until recently, such as it was, consisted of living in homeless shelters, or on the street, until I was picked up by some Samaritan or other while I was laid out in an alleyway with incipient pneumonia. My hospitalisation proved to be my way out. I told the doctors who I was and shortly after that papers arrived announcing the death of a man who claimed to be my father. He'd left me his home and belongings. A condition of the inheritance was that I make no inquiries about who he was. I could only suppose guilt and fear of the afterlife persuaded him to give me in death what he had refused to do in life, the old bastard.

No one in the hospital spoke of my condition; even the specialists who examined me were baffled, but put it down to a genetic disorder. My condition was not then so advanced, and might have been taken for nothing more than a mutant form of eczema. One bonus was that, with a permanent address and a doctor's certificate, I could collect social security and disability benefits.

Frankie caught up with me again in a bitter, late October evening. The phone rang in the middle of the night, and I checked the luminous dial of the radio alarm: 3.25am. I slept so little that the ring found me awake.

"I never told you who I am," he said.

"How did you find me, Frankie?"

"We can always find our own."

The Municipal Library was an unlikely venue for us to meet, especially since I feared going out in public; as usual I was swaddled in a long coat, gloves and a scarf, the icy weather making this garb seem relatively normal, though I would have worn it on a hot summer's day so ashamed was I of my appearance.

Frankie was sitting in the reference section, poring over a huge tome. He looked smaller than I remembered, hunched inside a shapeless pullover and a pair of denims two sizes too big for him, like a boy in his father's clothes. His face was grey and when he looked across his shoulder at me his expression was furtive.

"Going to show me dirty pictures?" I said without smiling.

He motioned me to sit opposite him. Low whispers of other readers, a chorus of pages being rustled and the echo of whispers, provided the library's ambient sounds. A middle-aged woman at a table opposite frowned at us and went back to scribbling in a notebook.

Frankie's book was opened at a page about carnivals, with photographs of circus freaks, mutants with two heads, a foetus in a jar of formaldehyde, a bearded lady, the usual fare: all fakes, I presumed.

"Some of us are the real thing, James. Not this. . .pap."

And then he waited until I looked him in the eye, and changed himself. His pupils and the whites of his eyes bulged and melted to become black marbles, like the eyes of a raven.

I jerked back in my seat, terrified. His hand reached out and clutched mine, sharp claws digging into my softening flesh, impaling me.

"Mother's dead, Jimmy. It's only us now, us and the others."

"What are you trying to do to me?" I was trembling, ready to run the moment he let go of me, but he wasn't about to do that, not yet.

"Come," he said.

And I died. Or felt I did.

It wasn't anything like sleep or a fever. Perhaps a coma, I told myself, with no knowledge of what a coma would feel like. All I know is that I dreamed terrible dreams. I dreamed I was flying, and the earth below me was on fire, blazing from horizon to horizon.

We were standing over a grave. The memorial stone read: Marion Armitage, 1832–1901.

"Not her real date of birth, or date of death, neither. We faked it."

Frankie seemed smaller, his head barely reaching my shoulder.

"She lived a long time. A very long time. We scattered her ashes in the wind, the way she asked us. But we wanted a memorial, so we paid a lawyer to get some faked birth certificate, saying she'd been buried in the States but her family was here and wanted this stone. So here it is."

"But. . .why didn't you tell me?"

"I needed to be sure. We. . .all needed to know it was really you, that you really are one of us."

And in the trees at the edge of the graveyard I saw blurry shadows that could have been men, or animals or part both.

"You don't belong with them, Jimmy," Frankie swept his arm out, indicating the rest of the world, normal life.

"No" I said. And louder, "No. . . I'm going home. I don't need your sick games, Frankie. I'm tired."

And so I was. Tired of the search. And I knew it was over.

"You belong with us, James. You have to listen, you have to know that."

"No," I said.

Frankie reached out to me and I pulled back in disgust.

"But. . ." Frankie lowered his head, thinking. Then he said, "I'm your brother, Jimmy. Your brother."

I ran, his voice echoing behind me.

How long have I been on this earth? Was I a child for half a century? Or born late in this one, many years after Frankie. Childhood was an eternity for me. My mother might have died when I was born; she might have died the week I stood over her memorial stone. Why did she give me up? Maybe she was ashamed of me.

My feeling is she must have seen what I would become, and wanted something different for me. She wanted me to be part of the world she could never be at rest in, the world she was condemned to travel, moving from town to town like the outcast she was, with her outcast companions. She wanted me to be able to stop. And to rest. I was born in 1962, so by any standards my mother might have been an old woman by the time she gave birth to me. But that's only measured against conventional standards. The standards of the real world. Which has never been the world in which I actually belong.

At first my brother had wanted money, and he took all that I had left. He'd never intended, back there in St Brame's, to tell me the truth, and so I left. But society is changing so fast. Maybe Frankie realised finally that a tribe like ours needs to stay together. Strength in numbers. Or maybe you're simply less lonely if there are others like yourself.

But it's too late. I don't want that. Mother wouldn't have wanted that for me, either, I'm sure.

But I know she wouldn't have wanted it to come to this either.

Now as I gaze at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, my body the colour and texture of paper; as I bend back my hand, flat against my forearm, and breathe out so that my chest creases and I begin to fold in on myself; and as my face begins to crumple like tissue, I know one thing and hope another.

The thing I know is that I am my mother's child.

The thing I hope is that that I can finally become and accept my true self.

I study the light dancing on the blade of the open razor that I have laid on the edge of the washbasin full of scalding water.

Paper wraps stone.

Scissors cut paper.

# SUGAR CEREMONY

On the shaded slope of the hillside a dozen children formed a ragged circle and bowed their heads.

At the crest above them, where Marianne stood watching, an easterly wind subdued the grass. She rose on the tips of her toes, craning her head this way and that, but the children's crenulated shoulders were as impenetrable as a medieval fortress.

They were burying something, she knew that much.

Flies dive-bombed her, but she recognised the futility of slapping them away.

"Buzz, buzz," she mumbled in irritation, "zzub, zzub."

She enjoyed playing with words, reshaping them like plastecine. Rhyming some, inverting others, she warped conventional meaning to her own ends. Her current favourite word was "weary," out of which she'd made a rhyme:

I weared, and weared, and weared

My weary way downstairs

Sometimes she added a tune, composed on the hoof. It was surprisingly melodic often, and with a lack of affectation many a composer would envy.

Jamming a lump of toffee into her mouth, she probed with her tongue at the scrap of paper bag still stuck to it. The paper gave her saliva a sour tang and she was relieved when the soggy patch came free and she could spit it out. During that first week in school, her inability to express a range of confused emotions impelled her to tear a jotter to shreds. She'd packed some of the shredded pages inside her cheeks like a squirrel storing nuts, pressed her lips tight and sat there like a bad case of mumps until Mrs Dortman insisted she get rid of it.

"Amen." A single word, the only comprehensible one from the droning eulogy chanted by the children below, drifted into her hearing.

"Men-A," Marianne added.

Presently, the circle began to lose its shape, the children breaking apart and sauntering off. All except one, Paul McPherson, who raised an interrogative gaze. His chocolate-coloured eyes were unflinching until something in them flickered and he turned away as though caught out being naughty. He ran to catch up with the others.

Marianne leaned against the ash tree, which was ancient and the only tree for a mile in any direction. Its warmth comforted her, and the chattering leaves were like friends. From here she could see that at the centre of where the circle of children had been was a mound of earth as big as a man. Moving closer, she saw something reddish and shiny poking out the earth where a headstone should have been. She dropped to her knees as if in supplication, and began digging with her bare hands.

The soil was unpleasantly moist, clinging to her fingers and soiling her nails. She levered out what proved to be a red lacquered shoebox, its lid held closed with purple wool tied in a bow and several knots.

Loosening the bow and working the knots free, she prised open the lid.

Inside was a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. They were all of the same sort, pictures of naked, bruised and cut children, gazing emptily into an unnaturally harsh light which turned their shadows against the grey concrete wall behind them into elongated tortured shapes, like primitive cave paintings of a hunt.

Marianne knew at that moment the answer to the larger secret the mound concealed. She dropped the box and the photographs fluttered out like desiccated butterflies. She started to wheeze, to fight for breath, as if someone was cupping a hand over her noise and mouth, stopping air from getting in or out, the bitterness of the leathery nicotined fingers the last thing she smelled. She fumbled the blue inhaler from her coat pocket, and held it to her mouth, thumb pushing down on the gas cylinder to puff Ventolin into her throat. She was supposed to breathe out first, but her system screamed for an in breath. The drug made her heart hammer and she had to suck two more times before her lungs opened enough to fill with oxygen.

"Buried treasure?"

She looked up.

It was Catherine Maxwell, a friend of her mum's, hunched inside a man's navy blue parka. Her feet were bare, which for some reason didn't seem odd to Marianne. She could see that the toenails were dirty, the crimson nail varnish dried and peeling away, and there were traces of the red clay soil between the toes and across the arches of the feet. The hems of her jeans, too, were muddy.

"He's quite dead, you know," Mrs Maxwell said, nodding at the mound of earth.

Marianne looked at it, trying to discern the shape of a man.

"Who is?" Nerves cracked the question in her throat, and it came out a whisper.

"The candyman. The man with the sweets."

Mrs. Maxwell's daughter, Janey, would have been Marianne's age by now; she'd heard mum talk to Mrs. Maxwell about her girl, while her friend sobbed and howled and raged against her loss. It was as if Janey had stepped on a train with an unknown destination, telling no one she was leaving, neither waving goodbye nor offering hope of her return.

Catherine Maxwell now did a strange thing. She reached into a canvas sack at her feet and withdrew a large white bag, a two pound bag of refined sugar with blue printing on it, then pulled the glued and folded edge away from the side so as not to tear a hole in the paper, meticulously opening the pocket. Standing at the side of the mound she carefully poured a stream of sugar onto it, making a vertical line up the centre. Crystal particles sparkled in the air, blown by the strengthening wind. Once the bag was empty, she produced a second and made a white crosspiece, intersecting the other line a third of the way from the top of the mound. A sugar crucifix.

"So he never comes back," she explained to Marianne.

But the candyman isn't really dead, Marianne wanted to tell her. He isn't dead because he's in my house now, kissing my mum maybe, or gulping beer straight out of the can. Or smoking. Her mum never let him smoke in the house so instead and he would at the doorway, the light from the kitchen behind him making an apron across the back lawn, while he studied the wintry stars through the smoke curling up from his fingers.

The woman crouched down and rescued the scattered Polaroids, shuffling them into a neat stack, squaring off the edges, their black backs uppermost; she couldn't seem to look at the pictures themselves.

"They could easily have been friends of theirs," she said, nodding in the direction in which the children from the funeral had gone, through the crumbled gap in the wall dividing the housing estate from this wasteland. It had been zoned for housing once, but the candyman's crimes had cursed the place, and even the police rarely came here; after all, they'd found all of the bodies, hadn't they? There was no need to go looking for more. "They understand. Why I did it, I mean. They helped me drag the bastard out here and put him in the dirt where he belongs. Someone saw us put him in the back of the car. They looked the other way, what you think about that? They knew his house, you see. We all did."

"It's not him." Marianne wanted to say. To whisper it like the worst secret she could imagine. "It's not the candyman," she would tell her if she had the courage. "He isn't the one who gave us sweets. I know the man with the sweets, and that's not him."

But she didn't say it. She couldn't, it wasn't allowed. And she was too young to allow it, to give herself permission to tell.

"You're so easy, aren't you, Marianne?" Her own name sounded strange to her, strange in this bleak place, out of the lips of a woman with no emotion left in her. "Easy to bribe. A few sweets, that's all it takes to win your trust. That's right, isn't it Marianne? A handful of sweeties."

She replaced the photographs in the shoebox, retied the wool around it and shovelled the earth aside with her hands, pushing the box deep into the hole and scooping the soil back over it. Standing up, she clapped her hands together to clean them. Marianne watched her impassive face for a sign of what she might be thinking. There was no indication whatsoever.

"Off you go, now. Go home, Marianne." Mrs. Maxwell pushed her shoulder, urging her towards the distant housing estate.

# # #

Paul and Marianne sat opposite each other at a melamine table in Café Olè, formerly Kath's Kaff. Fellow conspirators.

"We're going to get caught, I just know it," he said. Paul was 13, two years older than her, and she fancied him like mad. She wasn't part of the gang, though; so dating was out of the question.

"Rubbish." Marianne sucked the small puddle of Coke from the lid of the can. "You didn't do anything."

"We helped her. We. . ." leaning forward to say it under his breath, "dug the hole and put him in it. And we covered it up."

"He was already dead." Marianne had a logical turn of mind and would not be disabused of the notion that her friend had been just another victim of womanly wiles. Just as her real father had been.

"The police'll ask you questions, Marianne. And you'll have to tell the truth. They always get you to tell."

Paul's face was the colour of clay and she could just imagine his vision of future events: Marianne being interrogated, naming names, the police coming to his door, his parents in a state of shock. And there would be the newspaper headlines, of course: Schoolboy Gravedigger; High-school Ghouls; and Vigilante Youths Pray Over Their Tormentor.

The local newspaper, The Telegraph, had been in an uproar when Alexander Lassiter, a convicted paedophile, was released on parole and set up in a council house in town. A national newspaper had conducted a name and shame campaign, which The Telegraph leapt upon like a bullmastiff on a poodle. It was the only proper story they'd had for a year.

No one could say where the Polaroids had come from. No one except Marianne.

She hadn't been sure, not really. Not until that night when Catherine Maxwell slit Alexander Lassiter's throat with a bread knife, bundled him in some bin bags and persuaded her dead daughter's friends to help her bury him. Not that she'd planned that part, but Sandra Pearson and her friend, Ellie saw her struggling to push the bundle into the boot of her Ford Escort. Paul told Marianne all this, trembling all the while, furtively looking about him in case he should be overheard.

"We were all glad he was dead when we knew what he'd done. She showed us the photos of. . .of the others."

The others. Victims of the candyman in his travels over the years. Mercifully, though, Janey's picture wasn't there.

With the tip of her tongue Marianne worried a flake of skin on the inside of her cheek. Her habitual chewing of the delicate flesh had left it raw and flayed.

"The TV this morning said he never killed them. This doctor said Mr Lassiter touched kids up, but he never knew the ones in the pictures. They did, whatsit, DNA tests or something."

"That's rubbish, Mar." Marianne hated being called that. It was what he called her, not in front of mum, though, never around her, it was their secret. Like the other thing. Secret.

"Between you and me," he would always say afterwards. He was invariably just so bloody nice to her before doing it, giving her presents – toys and jewellery mostly, because he decided she was too old for sweets now. But afterwards. Afterwards he'd be angry with her. Threatening.

Marianne believed the threats to be real; but now that she had seen the photographs this reality had taken a form she could touch, and it burned in her heart like a hot poker.

# # #

Marianne was absorbed in pushing the sausages and beans around her plate until they merged into a sticky stew and failed to notice her mother studying her. Her mum's husband was too busy filling his face and watching a television game show to care.

"What?" she asked provocatively, staring her mother down.

Patricia Welles stared back, opening her eyes wide to show that she meant it. "Eat it, miss, or no TV tonight."

Marianne knew she didn't mean it, so she called her bluff. "Can't. I'm a vegetarian."

Kieran Welles made a noise through his nose, as if he had a severe head cold. "Since when?" he said through a mouthful of potatoes and beans. A droplet of tomato sauce on his chin held Marianne's attention; if she looked into his eyes she'd start shaking again, she just knew it.

"Since yesterday."

"Oh yeah? What about the ham omelette you had for tea, then?"

Patricia put a placatory hand across the back of his, which was clasped around a mug of tea. "Marianne had a plain one. Told me she didn't like ham."

"Meat gives you BSC," Marianne said knowledgeably.

"It's CJD that humans get," Kieran replied. "BSC's the mad cow version. You're not a mad cow are you?"

"Kieran. . ." Her mother withdrew her hand is though she'd been scalded.

On the news once Marianne had seen a dead cow on a slope of mud in the doorway of its byre, two men dragging its hooves to slide it toward the waiting truck where it would be piled in with others to be cremated. Its single bulging eye, the glutinous white contrasting with its mud-caked face, haunted her for weeks. The poor creature had no way of understanding what was happening to it as it died, too weak to swipe away the squadrons of flies with its tail, trapped in its own world of unnameable terrors.

"If I was I'd be dead now, wouldn't I? You'd like that, mum, wouldn't you, so you and him could be on your own."

Patricia Wells froze. A simmering rage pulled down her brows. Then she said in a low voice, "Go to your room. Now."

Without a word, Marianne stood up, but first picked up her plate and turned it upside down, plopping the contents on the carpet, then turned and walked out.

"Mar. . . You little brat . . . get back here. Get back here right this instant!" It was mum's husband. She ignored him.

No one came after her as she ran upstairs, but a door slammed behind her and she entered her room with the muffled sound of argument rising from the dining room.

# # #

Two weeks crawled past before he came to her room again. A longer interval than usual. Her mother was visiting her sister for the day, a Saturday. He clamped his rough, tobacco-smelling hand across her mouth to stop her screaming. But Marianne didn't scream anymore; screaming wouldn't save her.

# # #

Rested and dressded.

Dressded arrested.

Much of the night the litany had whirled around in her head, killing sleep, and as she approached the school gates she found herself chanting it softly over and over again.

Among the children forming lines in year order at the entrance doors to Shakespeare Street Secondary, she could see Paul near the back of the second year queue, his face a smear in the bright autumnal sunlight. Even without her spectacles she could discern him from the others. It was because of the way he held himself, like an adult pretending to be a child.

"'s'up?" he mouthed as she completed the tail of the first queue.

Marianne shrugged.

Rested-A

Arrested, eh?

Breakfast TV this morning reported that Catherine Maxwell's trial for the murder of Alexander Lassiter ended abruptly when she changed her plea. Everyone could tell the jury was sympathetic and she would probably have been convicted of manslaughter had she not confessed. Marianne had studied the sketches of the court proceedings on the screen, and then a photograph of Alexander Lassiter's face, which was boyish and looked not unlike the faces of some of his victims. No children had been arrested, nor had any been questioned so far as she knew.

It seemed to Marianne that a child could get away with a crime more readily than an adult.

Her reverie was broken by the rector's voice ushering everyone inside the building.

The remainder of the morning she found herself distracted by the school clocks; the big one in assembly, the wooden-framed one in the maths class identical to the ones in the other classrooms, and the one set inside a circle of huge yellow plastic petals in the dining hall, where she was now having lunch.

Seeing her on her own, Paul left his group and sat opposite, depositing between them his tray of sandwiches, crisps, coke and king-sized Twix.

Marianne tore her empty crisp packet into small pieces and pushed them one by one into her empty coke can.

Paul watched this process with fascination.

"What the hell's the matter with you, Mar?"

"I thought I told you not to call me that."

"Sorry, I . . . is that lipstick you're wearing?"

At break she'd smeared the scarlet lipstick lifted from her mother's handbag across her thin, pale lips. When Cullen, the gym master, questioned her about this, she said she'd been eating an ice lolly.

Instead of answering Paul she contemplated him for a moment. There was an openness to him, a trusting quality, and she quickly decided it would be okay to show him the Polaroid.

Pushing it face down across the shiny tabletop, she waited until he turned it over.

He recognised it, of course. She could tell by the way his pupils shrank to pinholes. He'd seen the other pictures. Marianne realised that Catherine Maxwell must have. Shown the pictures to all of the children, to convince them that what they were doing was natural justice.

This picture was one Paul wouldn't have seen, but would recognise it for what it was. Another cave painting. Another wounded, frightened animal.

"Where. . .where did you get this?"

"Off my stepdad. The man with the sweets."

For the first time since her father left them, Marianne started to weep. Tears thick as honey spilled across her cheeks.

"He doesn't know I found it," she explained, trying to still the feverish shudders in her body. "He thought he planted them all on Lassiter."

Paul grabbed her wrist, halting the tears.

"Tell the police, Marianne." It was an automatic response, not thought through. Paul MacPherson, aged 13, naively imagining it could all go away so easily. Not understanding anything, really. "I can't believe you. . .I can't believe. . ."

"He'll kill me, too," Marianne explained simply. "I want you to take it, Paul," nodding at the picture. "Keep it safe, in case. . ."

"In case what? I don't want it." He shoved it back at her.

"You know in case what."

By his bleak expression it was clear that he did know, that he understood perfectly.

# # #

On yet another interminable shopping expedition, her mother kept telling her to hurry up and decide what she wanted. Jeans and trainers, a skirt and a t-shirt, or what?

"Nothing," she said into her sweater, the turtleneck pulled over her chin. "Don't want anything."

"You look like a tramp," said her mother's husband. She could feel his eyes roving all over her body.

"Oh, leave her alone, Kieran, for God's sake." Patricia Welles crouched down, putting a hand on either shoulder and looked softly into her daughter's face. Marianne was squirming with embarrassment; there were people in the supermarket aisles nosing in on the scene.

"What's the matter, baby? What is it, eh? You hardly talk to us anymore."

Marianne checked the emotion that surged up inside her, and stared her mother down.

"She's okay, Pat. Leave her be." Her mother's husband said this through clenched teeth.

It was then that Paul MacPherson and his father, David, ran into them. And naturally Paul had to study Kieran Welles, staring as if trying to waken himself up. Marianne noted her stepfather's beetling brows as he puzzled out the boy's reaction to him.

Neither of the children was clever enough to prevent an exchange of guilty looks between them. And her abuser saw this.

When he looked accusingly into her eyes, directly into them as though he could read her thoughts, the ground fell away from her and she started screaming. A high, piercing, sound, a sustained note almost out of the top range, suddenly stopped then started again. She screamed so much she couldn't catch her breath. The odd part was she didn't feel frightened or upset. Her scream was all that existed in the whole of the world.

A slap across her cheek threw her head sideways, wrenching her neck. She fainted, knowing her mother had delivered the blow.

# # #

It was daylight when she awoke. No, that wasn't right. It wasn't daylight, but a huge photographer's lamp, its silvery parabola amplifying the searing white heat of the bulb. She was cold, and wet between her legs. She was wearing only a t-shirt and knickers; and she'd peed herself. The shame was almost as bad as the terror when she saw her spidery shadow against the familiar grey wall.

The wall from the Polaroids.

"You told him, didn't you?" The charcoal sketch of a man behind the halo of light was as familiar to her as her own body. "You told him, you little cow."

Mad cow, she added in her own head. Little mad cow.

A deep, sorrowful howl bloomed inside her and echoed inside the cold, brick prison. The photographer's studio. The candyman's sweet shop.

"No use crying, Mar. No one'll hear you. You're just another missing kid, that's all. You're mum will never suspect me. Not in a million years."

The sketch gradually resolved itself into a man, or something that should have been one but wasn't. He was still charcoal, really, like a man who'd been burned to cinders long ago.

Marianne hawked some snot into the back of her mouth and spat it at him, hitting his ear. He remained calm as he wiped the greenish slime away with a handkerchief.

"Nice shot," he said.

When he pushed his chain-smoker's finger into her mouth, she bit it down to the bone; his blood spurted satisfyingly in her mouth, and she spat that in his face, too even as he bellowed in pain and rocked away from her.

Unexpectedly, he didn't hit her. It appeared he had other plans.

As his thorny fingers started to work their way up under her t-shirt, blood from his finger streaking her abdomen, she informed him simply that he'd forgotten one of the photographs.

"What?" At last, a reaction.

"I found it. And I saw all the ones in the shoebox, too. Bet they've got your fingerprints all over them."

He smiled weakly, his eyes shadowy with the light behind him. "You watch too much television, sweetheart. All those police soaps. Complete rubbish. The real police are clueless. Wouldn't know a fingerprint from their arses. Yeah, I planted the pictures. Because they were looking for someone closer to home, and I couldn't risk it."

"It was Janey," Marianne said. "Janey Maxwell. You had to take her picture, too, didn't you? Didn't you?"

He moved toward her. She could sense the uncertainty in him, the sourness of his increasing anxiety on his breath.

"I doubt you had it. You're making it up. Her mother went to prison, case closed."

"You took the picture here. She was just where I am now."

Marianne had begun to tremble violently, the cold and terror and faint hope mixing in a cocktail of primitive emotions. Had her hands been free she would have ripped his face to shreds; her legs would have carried her for miles in a blind race against her final nightmare. The candyman has a sweet tooth, but in dreams the sense that's always absent is taste.

Coldly then, he informed her that she had given the missing Polaroid of Janey Maxwell to her friend, Paul McPherson.

His eyes confirmed that she'd been unable to hide the truth from him.

He melted into the dark again and re-emerged with a mobile phone in his hand.

"What's his number?" The blooded finger poised over the rubberised keypad. "I said, what's his number?"

She made no reply.

"I can get it from enquiries easily, so you might as well let me have it."

So Marianne did, and when he got through, he said something polite to Paul's mother and asked if Paul could come to the phone.

He held it against her ear. She squirmed on the camp bed he'd laid her on, a metal crosspiece under the canvas pressing uncomfortably into her ankle.

"Tell him," he said, "to meet me at the ash tree. You know which one. He needs to bring the photograph, if he wants to see you again."

Marianne did as she was told, and although the grave beneath the tree was long-since upturned she imagined the hissing of sugar as it was blown off the top of the mound by the wind in the darkness.

Refusing to accept that she would die in any event, she repeated the instructions robotically to Paul, who fearfully mumbled his assent.

Her captor had established this base for his crimes, his studio-cum-slaughterhouse, where he brought his victims from miles around, located who knew where, yet Marianne's survival instinct coursed through her being without missing a beat.

"Are. . .are you going to kill me?"

He hesitated. "Of course not, darling. I love you. Didn't I tell you so often enough?"

He had told her, and Marianne would never forget the circumstances of the telling even if she lived till she was 90.

A cool hand cupped the side of her face, and she wrenched herself away from it, the rope around her wrists twisting and burning with the sudden movement.

"I'm thirsty," she said in a flat voice. And she was, a hot dryness shrinking her gums and the roof of her mouth.

"Wait," he said, as if she could go anywhere.

Behind him she could discern the dim outline of wooden shelving bolted to the wall on angle brackets, almost to the ceiling. A shiny glint with coloured sparkles inside it, like a jar of fireflies, caught her attention, and Marianne understood what she was seeing: a shelf full of sweet jars, the big heavy glass containers one could still find in confectioner's shops with plastic lids the diameter of an outstretched child's hand. Orderly rows of them lined the shelves, filled with every kind of sweet you could imagine; boilings, cola drops, jap desserts, sherbet lemons, wrapped mixed toffees, and some with chocolate bars, stuffed full.

Reappearing from his sweet shop, with a big jar of Liquorice Allsorts under his arm, and a bottle of lemonade dangling from his hand, he hunkered down beside her. As he drew nearer, Marianne kicked out violently with her bound feet and started screaming again. She couldn't help it. He'd given those sweets to the ones he was going to torture and photograph and murder.

Startled, he raised his arms to restrain her and lemonade bottle and sweet jar fell to the floor. The bottle bounced on the camp bed and rolled to her feet but the jar smacked onto the bare concrete floor and smashed, spilling yellow and black and red and striped Allsorts everywhere.

Kieran Welles stopped and a look of dismay passed over his face as he saw the scattered sweets.

Marianne rolled on her side. Her stepfather started whimpering like a baby and started to pick the sweets up one by one.

There was glass all over the place. Marianne looked over the edge of her cot. She noticed one shard, larger than the others, nearby. It was a crescent of glass from inside the lid, the thread intact; it had come away, taking with it part of the jar's side, shearing and tapering to a rough point.

Unthinkingly, Marianne rolled off her cot and fell the ground, spikes of glass impaling her knees, one hitting a nerve and sending a jolt of searing pain into her head.

Kieran Welles lurched for her even as she picked up the shard with both hands, its the edges slicing her palms. As he fell toward her she lifted the glassy blade and punched it at his face. It glanced off his eyebrow, hitting bone, then plunged into the jelly of his eye. She felt something crack as the blade went past the socket and entered his brain.

The most appalling thing was that he didn't yell. Indeed, he was completely silent as he toppled onto his side, arms flailing mechanically, scattering sweets like so many dice.

She watched him until his chest stopped moving up and down and he was finally quiet.

Thirst burned her throat still. She managed to hop across the floor to the shelves, and eventually found an open toolbox there. It was a surgeon's kit, not a mechanic's. Scalpels and bone cutters, ranks of stainless steel implements she couldn't name.

Panting, she picked a scalpel up between her hands and levered its handle in a gap between a shelf and the bracket holding it up. She sawed the ropes against the tiny blade, slowly and painfully. The sawing seemed endless until the strands of twine eventually began to spread apart and her hands separated.

She freed her ankles and almost fell as she staggered over to the mobile phone which hummed on the floor where it must have fallen in the scuffle.

Picking up the lemonade bottle, and opened the stopper she began dialling. As she listened to the phone ringing at the other end of the line, she started choked down the juice, so thirsty that she didn't taste the lemon.

All she could taste was sugar.

# FREELOADER

None of them could remember how they first met Brady, or how he had come to be living with them. He was a friend of somebody, or somebody's brother. All that Claire and Rachel and Dave could recall throughout the gruelling interrogations was that he had shown up at a party they had scammed their way into. No, they couldn't remember whose party or where it had been held. But that was the night when Brady first entered their lives, even although each of them was certain they had met him before then.

Brady had one of those faces. The one that looks familiar, that you cannot quite place. The one whose name you cannot quite bring to mind. With his mop of unruly blond hair, beatnik goatee and tight cod-60s shirt, Claire thought him cute, and flirted with the idea of seducing him; Rachel advised her against it, her only argument being that he had eyes like a ferret. "You know," she explained, "Sort of sizing up the chicken coop for the fattest and slowest hen." Claire didn't appear to be amused by the analogy, and further antagonised her friend by playing up to Brady, making him seem the most fascinating person there.

Next morning Claire stumbled into the kitchen, nursing a hangover. Brady was there, making himself at home, a slice of buttered toast in his mouth and in his hands a tray of coffee and more toast on a plate. She saw there were two cups on the tray. Brady grinned a good morning around the slice of bread and went into Rachel's room from which, presumably, he had emerged.

He'd finished off the Lavazza, so Claire had to settle for Nescafe. She returned to the living room and sat on the ancient couch, which looked like a well-travelled carpetbag. A pair of black knickers – Rachel's –peeked out from beneath a pillow. Claire threw them at Rachel's door.

"You see that tenner I left for the electricity cards, Claire?"

David appeared behind her. He was awake, alert and businesslike as ever –the main reasons he was their flatmate; otherwise everything would revert to chaos. The girls thought he was gay but could not be sure since he showed little interest in either sex.

"It was on the telephone table. Try the new boy" – nodding at Rachel's bedroom door.

A shadow of anger flitted across Dave's usually passive features. He banged his fist on the door and demanded to know where the money was. Rachel emerged with a towel wrapped around her, a briar hedge of sandy hair framing panda eyes. Claire felt smug that she looked such a mess, since for Rachel appearance was everything.

Rachel said, "I lent him it. He needed some. . ."

Before she could finish her party pickup appeared behind her shoulder. At least he had the good grace to look sheepish. "Sorry, man, I was desperate. You'll get it back when my giro's through."

The money never was repaid, of course, and somehow Brady ended up living with them. In the beginning he shared Rachel's room, but she couldn't bear sleeping with one guy more than a few nights together, so Brady got the box room and they managed to acquire a single bed from Claire's mother who was always giving them things. Her mother, who came to visit once and realised that "poor" Brady was sleeping on the couch, insisted on giving him Claire's old bed, reminding her that she would not be needing it again.

For a time, once Brady was out of Rachel's clutches, Claire began to like him a little better. He was funny, and he could play the guitar pretty well. When she asked whose name was engraved on the scratch plate, Brady replied, "Ma brother's. He let me borrow it."

"Don't you have a first name, then?"

He smiled, "It's only taken you a month to ask me that. Jonathan. Never use it, it's a crap name."

Once Brady asked to borrow Dave's car. Dave declined. Typically of Dave there was a logical argument against the loan, that he was not insured for another driver, although he would have found some excuse no doubt since he was convinced Brady had never driven in his life. Contrarily, though, Dave continued to lend money to him without any real expectation of its being returned. An apprentice in a legal firm, he argued, is bound to be better placed that a person on the dole. More than once Claire wondered why she didn't fancy Dave; maybe he was just too nice.

Brady would surprise them on occasion. Like the time he produced a carry out Chinese meal for all of them, and two bottles or red wine. His way of repaying his debt, or persuading them to forget what he owed. And somehow they all did forget, or at least they didn't make a fuss about it. Claire and Rachel's college grants were at full stretch as it was, barely enough to pay their share of the rent, but with Dave's help they made it work somehow.

At some stage, for no reason that she could explain, Claire started to become uneasy about Brady's presence in the flat. One night in particular consolidated her feelings. They got stoned on some primo hash that Brady had acquired, and they were setting the world to rights and laughing uproariously about nothing in particular, when Brady threw down the gauntlet.

"Do yez no' get sick of being broke all the time?"

"You're never broke, Brady. We see to that."

"Dave. . ." Claire cautioned, catching Brady's darkening scowl.

"How d'ye mean?" When Brady was stoned or drunk his soft West Coast accent mutated into edgy Glaswegian. Claire recalled the smooth accent he affected when they ligged their way into a gallery opening the previous weekend, and how articulate he had been in talking to the artist, a sculptor who made pieces from "found objects."

Dave was white, as though seeing something in Brady's eyes that was apparent to no one else.

Suddenly, Brady brightened and smiled broadly. He leant over Dave, slapped his face gently, said, "Ah, you're just a pussycat, are ye no'? A big softie." And then he pushed his hands around David's lips, pursing them and then kissing them, a slow lascivious kiss from which David was unable to break away. Largely because Brady held the back of his head tight with his other hand.

When it was over Dave rocked back in the armchair, and dragged his shirtsleeve across his mouth. But he said nothing.

"Look, I'm goannae pay yez all back. With interest. Soon." He paused, and added, "Honest."

Lunchtime that day David phoned Claire. It was a study day, supposedly, but her Social Economics textbooks lay unopened on her desk and she dragged herself away from the Ricky Lake show to answer the ring.

"They've keyed my car."

"Oh, no. Is it bad, Dave?"

"All the way up one side, from the back bumper to the front. That's my no claims bonus up the spout. Bastards . . ."

Claire considered this information from another angle. "But I thought you had your own parking space."

"I do, but you can get in from a break in the fence that's never been fixed. It's supposed to be secure, but it isn't."

Claire didn't relish the uncharitable thought she had next. Once she had managed to calm Dave down, she went into the living room. Brady's leather jacket was hanging up in the hallway, but he was nowhere in sight. It was teatime before he got back, and he was wearing Dave's hooded clubbing jacket.

"Better get that off before Dave sees you; that's his favourite."

"Okay, well. Don't get yer knickers in a twist." Brady shouldered the jacket off and tossed it on the couch. Once he had gone to the bathroom, Claire picked up the garment and returned it to Dave's wardrobe, hoping that the only empty hanger was where it usually belonged. Some instinct told her to search the pockets. Rummaging about, she fished out a set of keys; Brady's, she knew, because of the distinctive chrome fish key ring. Fanning them out she found herself peering at one of the two Yale keys in the bunch. The end was discoloured, a mark that could have been dark blue paint on it. Dave's Audi was the same colour. But their front door was dark blue, too, and she herself had scratched it with a key once or twice coming home drunk and being incapable of pushing the key into the lock without several attempts at it.

Emerging from the room she was confronted by Brady, who said, "Those mine?"

He caught the keys as they arced through the air towards his face.

That same evening Brady arrived back in the flat and started doling out fat envelopes to them all. He was returning all the money he had borrowed, with interest. Dave's was the largest amount, close to six hundred pounds.

"But I never gave you near that amount," he protested.

Rachel laughed, "I'd take it and shut up if I were you."

Brady laughed. "Right. Dead right, Rachel. See, ye never know where yer next buck's comin' frae."

Claire's stomach had a huge stone sitting in it. She played with the sheaf of five-pound notes she had slipped out of her envelope. The leaves of a money tree, she thought bizarrely, but it was the only explanation she could offer to herself for the windfall. Three hundred pounds.

"What's is it, Claire? You look like you just had some bad news." Dave sucked at a bottle of San Miguel, froth pearling his florid lower lip.

She wanted to ask. To ask Brady where he got it. The question dried in her throat. "Nothing, just a bit surprised that's all."

Brady said, "Heh. Well, dinnae spend it all at once."

In the days that followed Claire found herself scanning newspapers and listening to radio news bulletins more intently than usual. With no idea of what she might read or hear she nevertheless experienced a sort of dull dread. Breakfast times were the worst. Watching the others eat so heartily made her queasy, and the mere sight of a fried egg was enough to bring bile to her throat. What the hell was wrong with her? She kept thinking of the money Brady had returned, and the interest that was three times what she'd lent him in the first place; she couldn't bring herself to bank it, and instead shoved it in a plastic wallet in the ring binder of lecture notes. She'd put the ring binder carefully on the shelf with the others and hoped no one noticed they weren't scattered about the floor and bed as usual.

Rachel made a point of ignoring her, putting Claire's demeanour down to ill humour, but David would sometimes look askance at her as if waiting for her to do or say something. She never did. At least not just then. She waited until Brady went out for the evening, to Megabowl with his mates he'd said, and then cornered Dave before he could go out, too.

"I need to ask you something."

"What?" Dave pulled her clutching hand from his upper arm. "What's up, Claire?" She could see he thought she was acting weird but he was too polite to say so.

"Rachel doesn't see it, but I do." Claire glanced anxiously back at Rachel's room even although there was no one in the flat but her and Dave. She sat on the couch and Dave sat beside her, reluctantly it seemed.

"Where did he get the money, Dave?"

"What are you on about? He told us where."

Claire smirked. "And you believed him, yeh?"

"Maybe he robbed a bank, eh? Or –."

"There was car paint on his Yale key."

Dave frowned. As though he had no idea what she was talking about, and that she'd finally lost the plot altogether. "Navy blue paint. Your Audi, remember?"

He sat back. "Oh, for. . . give us a break, Claire. That's daft, man."

"Yeah? Remember the look on his face when you said you wouldn't let him drive it? Don't tell me you didn't. And what happens? Two days later it gets keyed."

Dave gave an odd, lopsided smile then. "And I suppose you really know who killed JFK, too."

"Okay, fine." Claire stood up, her face clouding with fury. "Fine. Let's see shall we?"

And she stormed towards the curtained alcove, Brady's "nest" as Claire thought of it. They had rigged up a wardrobe of sorts with a recycled department store clothes rack draped in plastic, where he hung all his clothes. Claire raked through everything furiously, turning pockets inside out, throwing trousers and jeans to the ground. There was an old pine dresser with drawers at the end of the bed, and she yanked all of them open. They were stuffed with shirts, socks, pants and assorted bits and pieces from CDs and books to a tin with rollies, and piles of papers an notebooks, including correspondence from the Benefits Agency, bank chits and countless receipts from everywhere from off-licences to newsagents to second hand clothes shops. Receipts fluttered around her like confetti. Claire then pulled at the bedding, curled her nose up at the crusty tissue lying beneath the pillow, and finally dragged the mattress to the floor.

Dave stood watching all this, speechless. Finally finding his voice he said quietly, as though trying to calm a prospective suicide, "What do you think you're doing Claire?"

She stopped, stock still. Stopped as suddenly as she'd begun. She sat down on the ruin of the bed, or rather slumped there, lifeless.

Dave moved forward, trying to clean up like an automaton, shoving heaps of clothing and papers into drawers. He did it randomly, with no attempt to conceal what had been done but merely tidying away, it seemed, for the sake of it. As if he would tell Brady what Claire had done one way or another, as if. . .as if he was protecting Brady. Was that it?

Realisation dawned then. "You've screwed him, haven't you?" Claire's tone was flat.

In the midst of hastily bundling a few shirts to make a flat package of them, Dave looked up. He was noticeably paler. "What?"

Claire stood, stepped closer. "I said, David, you've slept with Brady, haven't you?"

Dave considered this for a moment. If he had been a qualified lawyer he would never have admitted to losing his case, but his expression betrayed him. Defensively, he said, "So? What business is it of yours?"

"Well, that bloody explains everything. You're such a hypocrite, Dave, you know that?"

"Claire, look, I . . ." But she was already halfway to her bedroom doorway. She passed through it and slammed the door behind her.

For a moment she expected to hear a knock. David coming to apologise or something. But she was relieved that it didn't happen.

Brady was starting to obsess her. If it was only his irritating personality she could put up with that, but the way he had attached himself to them all, and had sex with both David and Rachel, how he had leeched them for money, cigarettes, food and lodging and then made an exaggeratedly generous recompense, was weird. And creepy. Rachel more than tolerated him; she was even quite friendly, though not as much as when Brady had first come to stay. But David's behaviour seemed worse in a way. She felt. . .betrayed by him.

She slept fitfully that night. A clattering awoke her. Brady was in her room, standing at the end of the bed bearing a tray of coffee and a plateful of bacon and eggs. She sat up sharply, drawing the covers up to her throat.

"What the Hell are you doing?" She'd intended to shout but in her half-awake state only a croak emerged.

"Breakfast?" Brady grinned inanely. He smelled of David's Paco Raban aftershave; the crisp white shirt he worn loose over his jeans could have been David's also for all she knew.

Rachel followed him into the room. She must have seen Claire eye the breakfast, which Brady had propped onto her thighs, because she said, "Made it myself. Just to say. . .well, sorry."

The breakfast did look good, and the smell of sizzling rashers made her nostrils twitch, and Claire realised suddenly she was starving. So she dug in. She clapped two rashers between triangles of toast and took a bite. Through the mouthful she said, "What for?"

Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. Brady stepped back and lit a cigarette. He answered on Rachel's behalf.

"Dave said you were. . .out of sorts yesterday. That I was pissing you off. And Rachel thinks she's been ignoring you."

"Shut up, Brady," Rachel admonished; and to Claire, "I just thought you weren't talking to me or something. So I figured I must have done something to offend you."

Claire shrugged. "You didn't. Look, Brady, if you're waiting for an eyeful, forget it. Oh, sorry, not that you'd be interested anyhow."

Rachel raised her eyebrows questioningly.

"Shagging David, aren't you, lover boy?" Claire said.

"What? No way, Claire, he – "

Brady didn't react, other than to tilt his head slightly to one side as if to say, "well, you know how it goes."

Then he stepped forward. "Look, if yez must know, it was David gave us the cash. For the payback, I mean. Thought I was trying to blackmail him for fuck's sake."

Claire set aside the remainder of her breakfast, the untouched coffee cooling. Then she lunged out of bed, in her pants and t-shirt, and punched Brady in the chest. She punched him hard, knocking him backwards. "Lying shit. . . You lying shit. . ."

Brady glared at her and rubbed his chest.

Rachel put a hand on her shoulder, and said to Brady, "What would you be blackmailing him for, eh?"

Brady's face betrayed a fleeting thought contrary to the words he spoke, "He doesn't want the firm to know he's a shirt lifter. Thinks it'll spoil his chances of promotion."

"Crap," said Claire. "Nobody cares about that stuff."

"No? Well, it's a dead traditional firm from what I hear. Old school tie shite. Rugger, macho men, an' that."

"Rubbish. . ." Claire found her voice now, and it was becoming shriller by the second. "David wouldn't give a monkey's."

"Then how come he never told youse two?"

Claire couldn't answer that one.

David didn't come home that night. They didn't see him again for almost two weeks.

Claire had been deeply worried about him. Rachel and Brady tried to reassure her. They said he was a free agent, and that they weren't his parents.

She wanted to call the police. But there was no need. Three days after David went missing, the police knocked on their door. A burly detective inspector called Granger asked if a Mr David Patterson lived with them. Claire said "yes" but that they hadn't seen him for days.

"You're landlord will have papers, references and that, I assume," said Granger. "We'll be back in touch."

And that was it. Silence. Claire repeatedly tried phoning Dave's mobile, but all she got was the answering service.

Towards the end of the second week they received a call from Granger asking them to come to the police station.

"David has turned himself in," Granger told them. Rachel and Claire sat holding each other's hands in the overheated box the detective called his office. Brady hadn't come with them. Which came as no surprise. "Said he'd thought things over, knew he would never really have got away with it."

"Got away with what?" Claire asked.

"Sorry," Granger replied. "You'll need to wait for the trial for the details. Unless he tells you himself."

The detective looked up and Claire and Rachel turned to follow his gaze. David, dishevelled, gaunt, was walking between two policemen and trying to roll down his shirtsleeve while his handcuffed hand kept being pulled back by the constable who was linked to him. Claire stood up quickly and rushed to the window. She didn't see much, but enough: track marks on his arm. Dave turned to look at her. He looked lost, ashamed.

Trail was set for 17th March. David had refused visits to anyone but his parents. Claire attended every day of the proceedings, Rachel turning up only on the day of the verdict. Brady had packed up and gone.

It turned out a drugs dealer had been murdered. David's firm were to be defending him against an importation charge. The dealer's flat had been ransacked, and his wall safe emptied. David had been researching the brief for the defending lawyer, which involved interviews with the client and frequent contact with him.

Claire now knew what the blackmail was really about. Brady must have known everything, and may even have helped David kill the dealer, though there would be no proof of that. The interviewing policeman told her as much; the flat was covered in evidence that David had been there.

The court asked to interview Brady, but he was nowhere to be found. And in the absence of any evidence against him, they let it drop.

In the early days of the trial Rachel and Claire endured long, arduous interviews, Rachel growing more and more upset as the truth about David's drugs habit and killing for money was revealed. Claire simply felt empty inside.

It wasn't until some months later, David having begun his sentence of life imprisonment, that she saw Brady again. Or maybe it wasn't him. This Brady had dark hair instead of blond, and he was clean-shaven. He was in a pub, chatting animatedly to a group of people who could have been another Claire, Rachel and David, except it was two men and a girl this time.

She pushed her unfinished drink aside and started to leave, but as she passed the booth she overheard the familiar, but more refined, voice, this time with quite a convincing Welsh accent, say, "Okay, okay, if you insist. I'll have a Glenmorangie. A double, if that's okay. But I'm buying next week, deal?"

# RAPUNZEL'S ROOM

The fat woman on the treadmill was staring at her again. Pamela was convinced of it and wished she had chosen leggings today instead of Lycra shorts, and a sports shirt instead of a crop top.

She tried to ignore the woman but kept thinking about what Maureen told her yesterday at the cocktail bar where they met up once a week, "If you don't go for more than a fortnight, it's a disaster." She had been so right. Maureen was always right about such things.

Only this morning Pamela had discovered stubbly hairs in her armpits. And her calves looked positively Neanderthal. After yesterday's razoring her skin was tender as veal, but the thought of putting on opaque tights to conceal the pinprick scabs and regrown down made her shudder. She could have worn jeans, of course, but Thomas hated her to wear anything but skirts (knee length was okay, minis preferable but ankle length completely banned).

She glared at the woman on the treadmill, who continued to wobble and perspire as she pounded along at a speed obviously too fast for a person her size. Pamela felt that fat people shouldn't be allowed in health clubs. It was a disgrace, given the annual fee she was paying for the privilege of using the facilities four days a week.

Maureen was the only one who understood her – apart from her mother, that is. God only knew what she would do without a friend like her.

Maureen even understood her complaints about Thomas, and though she had more than once encouraged Pamela to leave him, she also understood why that was difficult to do.

Thomas had this ability to surprise and irritate all at once. Like that time he'd sprung a with a fortnight's holiday in Thasos on her. Literally. It was a case of "pack your bags, we're leaving tonight." There had been no time to book an appointment for a full depilation treatment. Missing appointments made her anxious. What's more she never went on holiday without at the very least having the severest of bikini-line waxings. She used to have nightmares about being on the beach with hanks of hair long enough to plait hanging from the edges of her bikini bottoms. In these dreams the beach was always crowded and everyone was gazing at her crotch and were either looking horrified or howling with laughter.

She'd protested, "I can't go, Tommy. Look at the state of me."

Thomas flicked back a cowlick of dirty blond hair. He had that mean look in his eyes again; a hardness that cooled their misty blue colour to hard diamond when he was angry.

"What state?" he said tersely. "You look amazing, as usual." There was no warmth to the compliment.

At least he never hit her, she reasoned. Not like Nick used to. Nick had made her feel ugly, unloved and worthless. But all her friends admired him, a successful businessman who provided well for her and was incredible in bed. Also, he had enjoyed showing her off, and never struck her where people could see an injury. His favourite technique had been to punch her repeatedly in the stomach until she passed out.

If there was any sign of hair on her legs, her armpits or her pubis, Nick refused to have sex with her. The only hair he admired was the voluminous waves of it cascading down and over her shoulders.

"I'll need to dress like a nun," she said only half-joking.

"Sounds okay by me," Thomas grinned, "So long as you're wearing black stockings under your habit."

She sniffed. "They'd only ladder. You could grate cheese on my legs at the moment."

Thomas's eyes creased with revulsion. "I'll buy you an electric razor at the Duty Free. Now shut up and get your things. The cab'll be here in two hours."

Two hours. . . How could he do that to her? It took her the best part of that time to do her hair and makeup, never mind pack a suitcase for two weeks holiday.

Immediately they returned from Thasos, Pamela rang the parlour. The earliest appointment she could get was three days away, and so she decided to go straight to the health club to work off her anxiety. On holiday she had gone swimming a lot, but after all that oily Greek food, the feta cheese, the tiramisu (which, admittedly she could never resist), and gallons of red wine, she felt again fat as a pig. Not as big as the woman on the treadmill next to her, of course. Pamela's love handles, no thicker than a finger, were nothing in comparison to that.

Already this morning she had spent an hour on the cycle, twenty minutes on the rowing machine, half an hour on the cross-trainer and done fifty pulls on each of the toners for her abs, pecs, abdomen, thighs, calves and arms. Fifty lengths in the pool would follow this – the pool was not Olympic length, unfortunately, but enough to finish up her regimen for the day. On the wall of TV screens, there was a selection of news, sport and pop videos. She had clamped on her headphones and tuned in the MTV channel.

In the showers later, she raised her right arm and examined her armpit minutely. Even after having shaved it yesterday with the LadyShave it still seemed hairier than it should. Normally, at worst, it was like the chin of a cartoon character like Desperate Dan or Fred Flintstone, a constellation of black dots. Now it was almost full length again. The hair had grown long enough to curl into a matted bush beaded with droplets of perspiration. It simply wasn't possible. Unless it was caused by those vitamin supplements she had been taking. Those, and the performance enhancers so she could work out longer and harder.

# # #

Her father used to say it was no wonder boys weren't interested in her. "Look at you," he said. "I've seen more meat on a butcher's pencil." Father scorned anything faintly working class, but Pamela took secret delight when his vocabulary unwittingly revealed her family roots. He would try to force Pamela to eat and often made her sit at the dining table until late into the evening while her uneaten meal congealed on the plate before her. And once, he got so angry with her that he pushed her face into a plate of cold savoury mince and potatoes.

"It's only because he worries about you," her mother had explained. She could see the pain in mother's face, pain for her daughter but mostly pain for herself and her inability to do anything to help. Her love was sometimes overpowering to Pamela; and sometimes this love made her angry because of her mother's neediness.

Mostly her father shouted, and certainly never struck her. In the night, though, she would sometimes hear her parents arguing, then a sudden silence followed by mother's quiet sobbing. It was her mother who took this brutality by proxy. Pamela had often wanted to protect her even more than she wanted to protect herself. She used to fantasise about running dad over with his own car, or stabbing him to death with one of the Sabbatier knives mother kept in a block on the kitchen worktop.

It would have been a mistake to reveal to mum the fact that Nick had used her as a punch bag for two out of the three years of their relationship. Her mother had in recent years developed the evangelical zeal of the former-victim. Years of counselling and women's groups and drawn her to the conclusion that victims were self-made. Discovering that her daughter was suffering the way she herself had might also plunge her back into her old way of being. Also, she would blame herself for her daughter's misfortune. Pamela loved her too much to let that happen.

She took the razor from her wash bag, furiously soaped her armpits and shaved them as close as was possible with a double-bladed Gillette disposable. Wishing she'd brought the electric razor with her, she turned on the shower spray once more and sculled the water with her left foot to wash any telltale hairs down the drain. To make extra sure she took the spare towel from the ceramic hook outside the booth and wiped the ceramic basin with it until it gleamed.

It took her twenty minutes to get dressed. Checking her watch, she realised she would be late for the photoshoot if she took any longer. The drive to the studio would take half an hour in the lunch hour traffic.

By the time she arrived at Elysium Elite Photography she was perspiring with anxiety. Already half an hour late, the magazine wouldn't be happy about paying for the extra time. If the photographer was Barry, all would be well. Barry was a sweetheart, invariably polite, sensitive and jokey, even when he was taking explicit shots of her.

Unfortunately, when she presented herself at reception, the girl at the desk sniffed, "Angela's nose is out of joint. She's put her head around the door twice asking where you were."

Pamela did not know the receptionist's name, only that she perpetually seemed to have a bad smell under her nose and took delight in trouble.

Without replying, Pamela pushed open the studio door, nodded at the lighting technician who was adjusting a square reflective umbrella to light the set with its crimson couch and photographic sky background.

"Very artistic," she said to him with a quick smile.

The technician, a skinny middle-aged man named William, only gave a warning nod in the direction of the camera table. Angela Bluth turned from the table, dipped her spectacles to rest on her chubby cheeks, sized up Pamela, and said, "This is becoming a habit, Pam. Lingerie shots today. Stuff's in the back."

"Yeah. Sorry, Angela. Traffic's murder this morning."

Angela shook her head and gave her attention again to the table full of camera bodies and rows of lenses laid out like so many chimney pots.

In the changing room, she allowed herself to be made up by Ian, who was gay and disapproved of Pamela's line of work while nevertheless deriving most of his income from it. His main work was stage makeup, but it was this job that paid most of the bills.

As he leaned across her to apply mascara, his face loomed close to hers until it filled her vision.

"My God," he said, "You look like bloody Frida Kahlo. Don't you pluck your eyebrows any more?"

Sure enough, as Pamela pushed Ian aside and drew the compact mirror up to her face, she could see that her eyebrows were thick and had started to join in the middle.

Upwelling panic made her launch herself out of the chair and rush to the toilet. In the tiny cubicle, she stood over the washbasin and retched. She couldn't breathe. Something filled her throat. A solid lump that she tried to swallow over and over. It made her stomach heave, and she bent forward and coughed hard.

The lump seemed to move higher. She pushed at it with her fingers. She could feel something there, a bulge the size of a golf ball. She pressed her fingers into it, pushed upwards, tried to breathe in and coughed hard again. Coughing and retching alternately she at last felt something at the back of her tongue.

It didn't want to come out.

She shoved two fingers into her mouth – the way she used to when she would force herself to vomit to keep her weight down – and felt something sticky and bristly. She spread her fingers like a pair of tweezers, clamped them on the object, and pulled back. As the obstruction broke free her stomach heaved and she coughed up a string of bile. Disgusting, she thought. She grabbed a towel and wiped her chin.

Now she gratefully sucked in a great lungful of air, ignoring Ian's rapping on the door, his calls of "Are you ok in there, love? Are you sick or something?"

In the washbasin sat a bolus of black hair glistening with saliva and stomach juices. Like a hairball her cat Peppermint would sick up. As she studied it, the bolus started to unravel. Sticky strands of hair began to stretch across the width of the washbasin, snaking across the ceramic surface with slowly, sinuous movements. A bundle of them began twisting together into a rope and reaching up towards the tap. Pamela quickly turned away and put her hand on the door. She had forgotten to lock it. She slid shut the bolt.

"Pamela?" came Ian's muffled query.

"I'm okay, Ian. Bit of a hangover. Be out in a min."

"Okay. . .party girl. You're lucky you don't have bags under your eyes. I'm a makeup artist. . ."

". . .not a plastic surgeon," Pamela chimed in unison with him. It was one of his choice put down lines.

Looking back at the writhing mess of hair in the washbasin, she sighed, "Jesus, not now. That's all I need."

Luckily, the studio provided tampon disposal facilities, though if you had your period you were not expected to turn up for work. The bin had to be there by law, that was all.

Yanking a plastic tampon disposal bag from the dispenser, she took it to the basin. She reached down and clutched the handful of hair. The stray strands dutifully retracted like snapped elastic bands and formed a solid bundle once more. She stuffed the ball into the bag, pulled the drawstrings and closed her hand around the package.

Before sitting down again, she lifted her rucksack from its hook on the wall, unzipped a side pocket, stuffed the tampon bag into it and reclosed the pocket.

Ian stood waiting for her, grinning and holding out to her a red leatherette all-in-one, with laces to cinch it across her breasts.

"Mmm," she said sarcastically, "Lovely. I still wonder why guys like this stuff?"

Ian tossed the garment on the makeup table and said, with his camp voice, "Don't ask me, love."

To be fair to Ian he was anything but camp. Pamela used to wonder if he might be bisexual. But over a drink one evening after work, he put her right on that score, saying, "No chance, Pam. I'm strictly a man's man."

Back in the studio, in the unforgiving glare of the lights, she stood in front of the couch, folded her arms and waited. Ian had expertly plucked her eyebrows, and operation that delayed her even more and displeased Angela further.

The photographer examined her subject through the viewfinder. Pamela could see her distorted reflection in the big telephoto lens.

"Jesus. . ."

Pamela jumped when Angela shouted. The photographer's voice could have shattered a plate glass window.

"What?" Pamela tried to react with antagonism. It didn't work.

"Your legs," Angela said, "You look like a baboon. And is that –?" She came up to Pamela, clasped her forearm and forced her arm upwards. "Hell's teeth, woman, this is too much. I can't airbrush this out."

Horrified, Pamela saw that her armpit hair had grown back again, fully and luxuriantly. And, nervously glancing down, she could see stray black hairs trying to merge with the lace trim of the outfit at the top of her legs. Her calves, too, had a light covering of dark hair. But no more than if she hadn't shaved her legs for a few weeks. Which she never did. The last time her legs were like this was when she was a teenager and left them hairy as a form of protest against her mother.

Pamela started to protest, "But, I had the full treatment on Tuesday."

Angela merely shook her head. "Waste of a morning." She sighed heavily. "Right, Pamela, you can tell your bloody magazine I shall be billing them for my time. But don't bother coming back until you've got yourself sorted."

When she got home it was only to encounter Thomas's displeasure. In the eight months she had known him he rarely mentioned money and yet it was clear that it meant a good deal to him. His income as junior accountant did not match her's. Modelling provided both of them with a generous income, most of which was spent by Thomas himself.

"We've got bloody bills to pay," he rasped. "Two cars and an expensive apartment to keep."

She started to protest but he cut her off.

"It's not just the money, it's your reputation. If the studios start bad mouthing you, you're finished."

The urge to cry was overwhelming. Pamela's chest tightened with suppressed emotion, the emotion she dared not show lest Thomas started shouting again like a predator goaded by wounded prey.

He finished with the words, "I'm off out now. Maybe you should think about doing some more tits and ass work."

"But I thought we were going for a meal. . .." she began.

"Change of plan. Plus I don't feel like it anymore." Thomas straightened his tie and rotated his shoulders to better adjust his Hugo Boss suit jacket. "There's a new club opening. I'm invited. No partners, apparently. Business."

Tits and ass work. Pamela had done enough of that. The fashion modelling had largely replaced it, thankfully, but it was always an option whenever money was tight. The wigs and makeup she wore for these would make her unrecognisable to her own mother, never mind clients who might be offended if they knew.

Only after Thomas had left for the evening did she feel able to relax, first by letting out a sigh of relief, then by pouring herself a large glass of Chilean red wine. She stood over the kitchen worktop and raised the glass to her lips. Then, thinking the better of it, she set it down again and strode to the bathroom, where she stripped off all her clothes and studied herself in the full-length mirror. In the glass, misty still from the hot shower Thomas must have just taken, she saw how dark her calves looked. There were dark shadows, too, in her armpits. Normally neatly trimmed into a vertical strip like an exclamation mark, her pubic naked on either side, her pubic hair was a dark, matted tangle so thick she could bury her fingers into it up to the first knuckles.

Stepping back the mist in the mirror turned her reflection into a blurred ghost. A milky, hairless sketch of a woman which seemed to her preferable to the more sharply -focused, flawed reality that was her body.

A wave of anxiety rippled through her like electricity. Once she had showered and drunk a glass or two of wine, maybe watched a soap opera on television, she would feel better.

The water was scalding and it took her minutes to adjust the taps to get a temperature she could bear. Thomas usually emerged from a shower with his skin scalded; her own skin was sensitive, perhaps from the multiple waxings, depilation cream and shaving.

As was her daily ritual she soaped beneath her arms and with a wet razor shaved the hair there clean. The same procedure would follow for her legs. But, as she bent forward to lather them she noticed a single hair, black and wiry, emerging from just below her belly button.

Without soaping, she dragged the razor across the hair. It was no go. The hair simply flattened against her firm belly and sprang upright again.

After two more attempts, shaving first upwards, then down again, she gave up with a growl of exasperation. On the shelf next to the shower nozzle was a collection of bath products – shower gel, moisturising cream, talcum powder, shampoo, conditioner –as well as a loofah, a pair of scissors and a pair of tweezers. Why she kept the latter objects there was a puzzle to Thomas, who was largely unaware of her daily war with body hair.

She took up the tweezers, pinched the hair as close to her skin as possible, digging into the flesh to get closer to the root, and yanked hard. A sharp stab of pain made her yell out. Instead of coming away, the hair only doubled in length.

Pamela sighed. Then she wrapped the hair around her forefinger and, locking it down with her thumb, she pulled slowly. Hair unspooled from her abdomen like a length of fishing line, growing longer the more she pulled. She wrapped it around her finger again and again and pulled firmly once more. This time something punched at her belly from the inside, as though the hair was attached to a piece of coral she had hauled up too quickly from the depths. Her abdomen began to distend and, eyes widening as she continued to pull, bulged until her belly button opened like a tiny mouth. A dark shape emerged.

Using both hands now, she pulled on the hair hand over hand like someone pulling in a sounding line into a boat. The shape squeezed through her belly button, widening it like a baby's head emerging into the world. With a final heave it came free and smacked damply onto the bathroom floor.

As she looked down at the thing, the floor seemed to tilt up towards her as though the house was being tipped on its side and she realised for a brief, lucid moment, that she was fainting. Just before she blacked out she saw a host of tiny stars sparking into life and fading inside her eyelids.

And then she came to, opening her eyes to find that she was looking up at the underside of the porcelain washbasin, which was still beaded with droplets of moisture from the shower steam. She mustn't have been out long.

With some effort – her right foreleg had somehow got trapped beneath her left thigh and choked the circulation enough to make it tingle when she tried to move it – she stood up. She took a deep breath and gripped the rim of the washbasin before daring to look in the mirror. Her face was unmarked, luckily. The last time this had happened she had cracked her jaw on the side of the bath. And then of course Nick had marked her some more for making herself temporarily unsuitable for modelling work.

She looked down at the floor and saw only a pool of water where she had lain. And then she gingerly pressed her hands into her abdomen, studying her bellybutton, which looked no different from normal.

Where was Thomas now? she wondered. Fucking another woman again. She had no doubt about this. It wasn't the first time. Nor would it be the last, if he was true to form. Thomas always got what he wanted. As had Nick. And, now that she thought about it, everyone who claimed to be close to her, usually got what they wanted. And sometimes – only sometimes – what they deserved.

It was this notion that sustained her through her most difficult moments. Her mother used to say, "The universe will provide." Not God, because mother was an atheist. Or an agnostic. Pamela could never remember which it was. In the end, though, it was God she had called upon to deliver her, as was to have been expected; mother had always been inconsistent, as wavering in her loyalties as she was inept as a parent.

She started to weep silently, fat tears spilling down her cheek as her chest heaved with contained sobs.

She realised at last what the problem was. She was invisible. That was why she sought to perfect herself, chose a career as a model. A stupid, futile attempt to make people see her.

A week passed and Thomas had still not returned. She had kept trying his mobile, but only got a recorded message – the default message, not his own voice; the anonymity would suit him. Today was Monday and she was suffering from a massive hangover. Had she been partying last night with her girlfriends? She couldn't remember. That worried her. Pamela rarely got drunk and tended to drink gallons of Volvic whenever she went clubbing. Mind you, she did drink wine when she was alone.

She rolled out of bed and slouched into the kitchen. The wine rack on the floor by the cooker had only three bottles left in it. She was sure she'd bought a dozen on Friday. Maybe she'd taken some to a party. No, she didn't remember any party.

The cooker vent, which took away steam and stale odours, had a pyramid-shaped polished chrome hood, and it bounced her reflection back at her. Her eyes were sooty smudges, her mouth a red smear across the white oval of her face. An abstraction of a face. It frightened her. Do I really look like this? Is this me?

There was something around her neck. Moving. She snatched at it violently. Her fingers found a band of something. Not the chunky Aztec necklace Maureen had given her last Christmas. It was more ropelike. She tugged. It held fast around her throat, and even seemed to tighten.

"Worthless." Dad's voice whispering in her head. "Who'd love anyone like you?"

And Nick's voice, "You tart. Tits and ass on legs, that's all you are. A fuck bunny."

That phrase, that vile expression "fuck bunny" would come back to her time and again. She would be flirting with an attractive man, who was lavishing all his attention on her, a really sexy, "dangerous" guy, with a bit of an edge, and she would be loving where it was all going when, out of the blue, she would hear those two words in her head, "fuck bunny."

NO. . . Her own voice in her head, competing with the others. You're dead, Nick. So shut the fuck up. And you, dad.

The rope was trying to strangle her. Her fingers were trapped against her neck as circlet tightened, biting into them, stopping the blood flow and beginning to choke her.

She stumbled to the bathroom and slammed against the washbasin. She kept trying to wrestle her fingers free. In the mirror, she could see that the thing around her neck was her own hair. It must have wrapped itself around her neck while she was asleep. It was long enough for that. But it had twisted itself into plaits. It tightened even more. Strands of it were sharp and taught as guitar strings which cut into her fingertips. She screamed as her fingertips swelled with blood and then the skin on them split, spraying a fine mist of scarlet droplets on the washbasin mirror. More of her blood trickled down her hand and her throat, rivulets running across her collarbone towards her breasts.

Coughing and gagging, she pulled as hard as she could against the tightening hair. It was no use. She was dying. Her eyes started to bulge, her lips turning blue as the thing slowly choked her.

Panic was overwhelming her. She was drowning. But then another voice – her own again? – said, "All is well, Pamela. Just give in."

And then, quite without warning, her body relaxed. She gave in. The way she always did. To the beatings. To the abuse. To the knowledge that she was, indeed, a worthless human being.

Except this was different. Something was happening to her, something larger than all the tortures of her life. She found suddenly she could breathe again, and the rope of hair relaxed from around her neck.

The bathroom mirror had turned black. As though she were looking at an oil slick. The surface rippled with oily rainbows against the blackness. There were shapes in there. Gradually, the shapes emerged, moulded out of the oil, like the blown plastic trays in chocolate boxes. The shapes were pieces of furniture, chairs, a coffee table, a window, a lamp stand, and bookcases. Entirely black, shiny as plastic, no detail visible. The sketchy suggestion of furniture, like the abstraction of her face in the cooker hood.

Someone was sitting in an armchair next to the window. A black plastic mannequin. She peered more closely and the features resolved themselves. Nick. It was clearly Nick. He seemed to be part of the chair, moulded from the same black material. On closer examination, though, the black stuff wasn't oil. It was fibrous and shiny, millions of black threads gleaming and moving like a sluggish tide. It was hair, of course. Her own hair.

Of course. All that hair she had removed from her body over the years. She considered again the idea that her hair would continue to grow after her death. Filling her coffin. Her hair was the living essence of her, her pride. She should have known this all along. People envied her long, shiny hair, and she'd set out systematically to destroy it. The hair on her head, yes, she was proud of that, but she detested every other sign of it.

"I didn't know," she heard her own voice in her head say. "It's all one thing. I'm all one thing. Whole."

In the mirror Nick was thrashing against his restraints, only the whites of his staring eyes visibly human. Pamela knew he must be screaming. But he was a prisoner. Yes. He would be a prisoner forever.

Why had she forgotten this room? When it made her feel so peaceful. It had been there the whole time, waiting for her.

Pamela, freed of the collar of hair around her neck, picked up a hairbrush and brushed her hair slowly, watching the mirror resolve itself back to normality, and to reflect only her small, pretty, pale face and luxuriant, shiny, black hair.

She stopped, laid the brush on the side of the washbasin, and looked down at her body. While she usually slept in pyjamas, last night she must have just dragged off her clothes and fallen into bed. She was wearing only her knickers.

As she walked down the hallway she became aware of the doorbell ringing as though from a great distance. A voice behind the door, muffled by the thick oak, was saying "Pamela? Are you okay, Pamela?" It was Maureen's voice. Maureen must have been worried about her. When had she last seen her friend Pamela couldn't remember.

On any other occasion she would have answered. But not now. Not yet. "I love you, Maureen," she said to herself, "but I don't need this right now."

Maureen's voice, and the hammering on the door that followed, simply must be ignored. Pamela walked slowly up the stairs. There was a door at the top. Only she knew it was there. She'd just forgotten about it for a while. Nick hadn't known about it, neither Tommy nor her parents. Only Pamela did.

The door opened to her touch, welcoming her.

Inside the room beyond was some furniture: a coffee table, chairs, a lamp stand, bookcase, and a window with black glass that you could not see through. The furniture seemed to move. A writhing mass of slick, shiny hair, tons of it, sliding over every surface, across walls and ceiling, moulding itself into the shapes of furniture and other objects in the room. The shape that was Nick, sculpted from human hair and bound forever to his armchair, was emitting a continuous, muffled howl. Nick had been howling forever, but he would never be released.

It keeps growing even after you're dead, Pamela reminded herself.

There were two shapes dangling from the ceiling, too. Like wasp nests but made out of hair. Something moved inside them. From inside one came a continuous weeping and whimpering; from the other a wordless begging, an incomprehensible plea for release. They contained her father and Tom, of course. The shapes that moved inside the walls were the others who had abused her all through her life: the mocking school children, the aggressive teachers, employers, and old boyfriends. They had all been delivered here, without her knowing or really believing. Or, perhaps not. This was her room, after all. As much part of Pamela as her own skin and limbs and organs.

She was tired now. Exhausted. And so she allowed herself to be enfolded in the arms of the unoccupied, fat armchair opposite Nick's.

The voluptuous hair enfolded her like rising water. She felt herself drifting. She started to float freely into a deep sleep, like a boat on a still, gleaming moonlit ocean.

Pamela dreamed, and in her dream she was invisible. But that didn't matter, after all. It didn't matter because there was no one left who wouldn't see her.

# LOST GIFTS

I'm a collector. Over the years I've collected old books, comics, 60s records – 45s specifically – and, more recently, toys.

It's been said that collecting is an addiction. Or a profound psychological search for something lost. Or something you've never had in the first place. Like love. Or acceptance. Or a proper childhood. The psychobabble, oddly enough, is directed purely at those of us who go for pop memorabilia. But why we should be ranked so much lower than antique dealers I can't say. Surely the impulse is the same for them, too.

I collect stuff simply because I enjoy it. The thrill of the chase, the joy of the catch. I read all the books and comics I buy. My plan has never been to silt my purchases away, against the day in some unimaginable future when they might be worth considerably more than I had spent on them. What critics fail to understand is the enjoyment one gets from the act of collecting for its own sake, not for its monetary value.

What money I could set aside once the mortgage and the bills and a little socialising had been accounted for, I used to grow my museum of childhood. But not having any spare cash never got in the way of me heeding the siren call. And in the story I want to tell you, it was the siren call of a plastic doll.

Up until the day I first met Carmen, I thought I knew every collector's emporium in the city, from Forbidden Planet to Arcane Antiques to the Salvation Army shops where you could find a real jewel in amongst the paste ones. But Maude's Mod Museum? A new one on me. The place was tucked into a cul-de-sac in the West End of town. Not far from the main road, but certainly nowhere you'd choose to enter unless you had a down-at-heel friend living in a grungy one room flat down there. Or if you'd been invited for some dodgy deal or other.

It was broad daylight, but the closeness of the walls of the buildings on either side threw my path into shadow. The only illumination came from a small neon sign with cheerfully balloon-like lettering declaring the name of the street's single shop: Maude's Mod Museum.

Intrigued, I drew closer and what I saw in that window made my heart skip a beat. The display, lit with pink and blue neon tubes on the ceiling and down the window frames, was filled with wonders from the 1960s. A Muffin the Mule puppet; a die-cast Stingray submarine; a host of model cars, including an original James Bond Aston Martin with working ejector seat; more puppets from ancient TV shows like Four Feather Falls (the world's first, I'd guess, puppet Western); books like the Doc Savage and The Avengers; crime and science fiction pulps; a pinup mag or two; and some 60s clothes, like white plastic boots and belts, a check Mary Quant mini skirt displayed on a mannequin complete with bobbed hair and red plastic hoop ear-rings. There were even a few rolls of cheesy wallpaper from the period, with abstract starbursts, psychedelic splodges and geometric patterns that would make your eyes water if you looked at them too long.

What really stunned me though wasn't the abundance of treasures. I'd seen a couple of these pieces already, in other shops, at collectors' fairs and the like. No, what it was, to be honest, was the fact they were in mint condition. Swear to God. Like they'd just come out of the factory that day. Don't get me wrong, I've met collectors who are even geekier than me, one or two even going so far as to vacuum seal their treasures. But even that step doesn't change the original condition in which the item was purchased. Old Corgi cars, for example, usually have some fading on the box artwork, and dings and tears in the cardboard, with little scratches or paint peels on the bodywork of the little motors inside. Comic books tend to have small rips and repairs in them, and leeched-out inking. All that distressed plastic and paper and metal is, of course, a sign of the times in which they emerged: the disposable society. Even the treasures of the infinitely more ancient tomb of Tutankhamen, were in better condition.

A second surprise was the doll. Still in her cardboard box with the clear plastic window displaying its contents, she stood about twelve inches tall, slender, with extensible blonde hair, long-lashed eyes and red lipstick, and a sparkly disco dress with the hem just to the knee, and hot pink go-go boots. The floral pattern of the packaging wove itself in and out of the bold cursive lettering, the doll's name: Carmen.

Barbie and Tracey I was aware of. But I'd never heard of Carmen. Of course there were a host of countless cheaper dolls, emulating the top of the range American ones. That the name didn't trip off my tongue came as no surprise then. Plus, there's the fact that I was a boy when the thing would have come on the market originally. Therefore of no interest to me whatsoever.

Still this didn't stop me entering the shop and asking the price from the mumsy-looking woman behind the counter. Maude – I presume it was she – had a tall peroxide beehive hairdo atop a face as wrinkled as the surface of Mars. But she had a winning smile and a warm tone to her voice. I liked her immediately.

"Wot's that, luv? The Carmen doll, is it?" She paused, pursed her lips and went on, "Well, I'm not terrifically keen to part with her, to be honest. She's quite rare, you know. And I've grown sort of fond of her."

Oh, here we go, I thought, she's giving me the runaround. Had me down as a dribbling addict that she could clean out with the appropriately worded temptation. In this assumption she would be correct, which didn't help my temperament just then.

"Well, she may well be, but I'm guessing she's rare because nobody bought her five decades ago when she first appeared on the market."

I was being deliberately rude. Being taken for a mug always pisses me off. But as her lovely smile vanished I suddenly felt guilty.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound harsh. What I mean is, I don't have much cash, and. . ."

Maude, assuming that's who she was, reached out, picked up my right hand and held it between hers, patting the back of it in a comforting way. Normally I'd withdrawn from such displays of affection – one reason I never married, I suppose – but something in her eyes rooted me to the spot. Was it her look that signalled reassurance, or pity, perhaps? Or the icy coldness below the surface warmth? I don't know. Whatever it was I could no more withdraw my hand than I could conjure up a million pounds from thin air.

Then, all at once she let my hand drop and became businesslike again. "How's two fifty sound?"

I was, as they say, gob-smacked by the unmitigated cheek of the woman. "I take it you don't mean two pounds fifty."

She shook her head and gave an ironic smile to indicate, no, she didn't mean that. What she meant, in fact, was the same words, just in a different order.

I had forty pounds in my pocket. For no reason I could explain, then, or now, I asked her to hold the doll for me and that I had to go the hole in the wall. And having maxed out my bank card for the day, I paid the £250 for Carmen and we left together like newly-weds, she in a virginal plastic bag and me with an inane young bridegroom's grin (not that I am young by any stretch of the imagination, it was just that right at this moment I felt young. And, oddly, carefree.)

You must be wondering, I expect, what peculiar impulse drove me to buy a plastic doll, rather than any of the wonderful laddish content that made the shelves creak inside. I used to wonder, too. But not anymore, because now I know the real reason, as surely as I know you won't believe it.

When I got back to the flat a stack of mail awaited me. Bills, mostly. And a letter from mum and dad. Mum, really; I recognised the handwriting. Dad never was one for writing letters. Or expressing himself or communicating in any form for that matter.

It was the usual. A follow up to several problematic phonecalls inviting me over for Christmas dinner. Most years I refused, relenting only occasionally because of the assured presence of my hilarious uncle Gerry, or Mrs. Warren from across the road. I loved Mrs. Warren, for everything she'd meant to me as a child. More than either of my parents, to be honest. Although it hadn't started out that way. Up until I was nine years old I'd loved my parents unconditionally. Mrs. Warren had sort of taken me under her wing after that, little wounded bird that I was, when I had no one else I could trust enough to turn to. Still, as the Rolling Stones put it so eloquently in my London label 45rpm single, "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

There was a message on the answering machine also. Dad this time. Awkward as ever.

"Well, son, hope you got our letter. And, ah, your mum would be so thrilled if you'd come this year." Not "your mum and me." Never admit to any familial ties, my old dad. Next he played the usual guilt card, "You know how emotional she gets."

Yeah, well, I thought, at least she's got some emotions left dad. You had yours surgically removed years ago.

No other messages. Maybe I would go. Maybe I wouldn't. The truth is I really couldn't be bothered. All that rage and hurt had drained out of me in my 20s. Now that I was in my 40s I simply didn't have the spare energy for it.

So, anyhow, I downed a bottle of wine in front of some crappy romantic comedy on the telly and went to bed. I barely looked at my purchase. All I did was drag the box out of the plastic bag and stick little rare Carmen on the shelving unit above my bed. Tucked in with the Action Man and superhero figurines. Once she was up there she seemed out of place and I was already beginning to regret buying her.

I went out cold. Red wine always does that to me. I was awakened by the sound of breathing. No my own. It was twilight-dark in the room, the curtains not entirely shutting out the streetlights. Colour drains from everything at this time of the morning, my usually rainbow-like figurines moulded in shades of grey, their edges blurry like melted plastic. I listened. And heard it again. A small, barely-discernible puff of air. I sat bolt upright, slapped the bedside light on even as I felt chilly fingers stroke the hair on the back of my neck.

The central heating pipes, I reasoned. Except I then remembered the heating was off. The bedroom door was ajar and I was convinced there was someone standing in the doorway, a really small person, like a dwarf. Or, I should say, the shadow of a dwarf. Nothing would make me leave my bed right in that moment. Which is profoundly irrational, don't you think? If some pint-sized burglar or a druggy kid was out to stab me and rob me, a duvet wasn't going to be the most effective defensive weapon. But the very next moment the shadow was gone. I could see down the entire length of the hallway. My eyesight adjusting, that was all. Like blinking after a flashbulb has popped in your face.

Nothing. It was nothing. A wine-induced dream state. But, as I turned to switch off the light and go back to sleep, Carmen caught my eye. Rather, her packaging did. The clear plastic window had a small circular area of misting. Exactly at the level of the doll's mouth. Like when you breathe on the inside of a windowpane on a cold day.

I lifted the box off the shelf to examine it. Brushing my thumb against the window confirmed that the misting was not on the outside, but on the inside. Condensation, I told myself, and put the box back on the shelf.

The clock on my bedside table said it was 3 am. That's the time when the death rate in hospitals soars. Did you know that? In any case, I fell back into a fitful slumber and had the strangest dream. Unlike a normal dream there were no images at all. Only a sound. The sound of squealing tyres on tarmac. Not that I heard the ensuing crash – the one which was inevitable and which could never, ever be prevented – only an endless scream of rubber protesting against tarmac. The scream went on forever.

Next day, I plodded through work as usual. I hate accountancy with a vengeance, but it's all I'm any good at. Barely exchanged two words with my colleagues. In turn they respected the fact that I was a surly bastard in the lead up to the festive season and kept well out of my face. Some of them may even have had similar feelings to my own. But they put a brave face on it, God love them.

On the way home I picked up a carryout Chinese, plonked myself between my speakers and played a Metallica CD loud enough to make my ears bleed and my neighbours want to dismember me.

I ignored the beep of the answering machine; it would only be dad again. Unless uncle Gerry had decided to intervene with that light-hearted persuasiveness of his that made my folks seem unimaginative and deeply dull by comparison.

That night I went to bed earlier than usual. It was only eight o'clock. Must have needed to catch up on my disturbed sleep from the night before: I'm an eight hours a night man or I'm no good to man or beast.

Feeling rather foolish I checked Carmen's box. The misting had gone. I could see her beaming plastic face quite clearly. Except. . .was that? No, she must've been this way when I bought her. What I noticed was this: Carmen's eyes were closed. As far as I was aware this doll, like Barbie, had fixed position eyes. Which is to say moulded open. Not like those creepy baby dolls whose eyelids open or close depending on which way you tilt them. I looked closer. Sure enough these were solid, and not animated eyes. But tightly closed, even down to the detail of tiny wrinkles on either side of the eyes and at the bridge of the nose. As though Carmen were squeezing her eyes shut. As though against a sight she couldn't bear to look at.

I involuntarily jumped back. Jesus, I chided myself, get a grip.

Naturally my accountant's reasoning came into play again. This time arguing the doll's eyes had always been closed, that they were a manufacturing fault and perhaps that was one reason for the doll being so rare. The same reason a postage stamp with a particular fault, like the Queen's head facing the wrong way, can attract big bucks from the right quarter.

Sleep arrived fast nonetheless. As quick as being dropped down an empty lift shaft. Once again the dream of squealing car tyres. I woke up with tears streaming down my face. Tears which dried as unexpectedly as they'd begun. The room was darker than the night before. Which made the sound I heard next seem that much sharper than if there had been any light in there. A sound unmistakably like cellophane being crumpled. You know how people always crumple the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes before tossing it away? Exactly the same as that.

I was scared, let me tell you. Terrified, in fact. So much so that nothing in the universe could induce me to crane my head and look up at that damned doll sitting up there on the shelf, pleased as punch with herself. Except not looking was never really an option. My left hand, as I reached out for the lamp switch, felt as though I was trying to lift massive dumbbell. I had to exert all my willpower upon it to move it as far as the lamp switch.

The light going on made me feel all of sudden less afraid. Funny how darkness and the imagination are such an effective partnership. In much the same way that the most powerful monied businesses have double-barrelled names: Saatchi and Saatchi, or Greedybastard and Son.

What I saw when I could finally bring myself to check up on Carmen convinced me that, yes, indeed, I had definitely parted company with reality. And not in the way I do when I'm immersed in a graphic novel, or a good movie. No, sir, this was the real deal. Insanity plain and simple.

Carmen's hand was stretched out, pressed against, and pushing a bulge in her plastic window. I waited, some deep impulse informing me I should not be surprised at what happened next.

And, strangely enough, I wasn't.

Carmen slowly lowered her hand and spoke. Her lips didn't move but she said, in a voice I knew so well and which had haunted me all these years since the age of nine: the voice of my poor dead kid sister, Anna, "Let me go, bruv." She'd always called me that. Bruv. With a "v" on .

The sound of the car tyres had stayed in my head all these years too, but mostly subsumed and pushed away by the larger, brighter, more cheerful jangle of my daily life. Although it was always there in the background, never quite gone. And sometimes it would came back, as it had in the previous night's dream, with the volume and insistency of a heavy metal band. Even Metallica couldn't drown out that sound, not matter how loudly I played their music.

Not looking at Carmen – or Anna, whom I realised now inhabited that doll, because now I also remembered who the doll was, too – I sat up in bed with my head lowered, my whole body trembling, and said in voice choked with suppressed emotion, "I – I can't."

Anna spoke in her seven year old little girl voice. That voice I thought lost to me forever the night my horribly drunk parents insisted in driving her home from my aunt's, who'd been baby sitting while they were at dad's office Christmas party. They killed my darling baby sister when they jumped a traffic light and swerved to avoid the huge truck careering toward them. The back of the car swung against the truck's front end, which drove through the back of the car where Anna was sitting, singing to herself probably, the way she often did, and crushed her to a bloody pulp. Both vehicles careened on for a time, the truck and dad's car smashing through a group of shop windows. My dad's ended up in a clothing retailer's display, ghost-white plastic mannequins – giant versions of my own figurines – slumped over the bonnet and roof.

I wasn't there at the time, or I would have died to. That's what should have happened. And that's what I've never forgiven myself for. Selfish little toe-rag that I was, I'd demanded to accept the sleepover at my friend Martin's rather than keep company with my kid sister, whom I loved to bits but who essentially didn't get guy stuff. So that's why I didn't die in that crash with Anna, the way I should have. But I've always been able to see what happened, in my mind's eye at least. Mostly, though it's that sound that stays with me. Not the slow motion action movie of the crash itself. The sound of squealing tyres.

"You must, bruv. It can be your Christmas present to me. You never missed a birthday or Christmas. Only the one, and it wasn't your fault."

My trembling worsened with those words. My chest heaved and a dam broke inside me. I started to sob uncontrollably. Sobbing for the longest time, the floodgates opened. I cried the way I should have cried at Anna's funeral, the way I should have cried a year after her death when a counsellor was trying gently to let me know it was okay to cry, and that I could do that by saying goodbye and letting my sister go. But I never did cry over Anna, not from that day until this. All I am is a plastic figurine inside a box printed with 1960s graphics. I cried so hard and long it gave me the hiccups. And the hiccups made me laugh, until I was laughing and crying and hiccupping all at once.

Once the storm died down I realised it was morning. Dawn sunlight leaked around the edges of the curtains. Sliding out of bed, I turned around, not bravely as you might imagine, but with the confidence of a certain knowledge that required no act of courage on my part, and picked Carmen off the shelf. She was restored to her normal self, eyes open with what I imagined was a mischievous twinkle, a half smile on her rosebud mouth, hand relaxed again at her sides.

Upending the box I saw what my subconscious had the knowledge about all along: the blue biro scribble of the nine year old boy self – handwriting which hasn't improved that much in all the years since – that said, "Happy Christmas, Anna, love Jack."

It took a couple of weeks for me to pluck up the courage to telephone my folks. When my dad answered, I kept it brief, since he was never, like I hope you've realised by now, much of a conversationalist.

I said, "Hi, Dad, so what time did you say Christmas dinner would be again?"

# THE ANATOMY OF SEAHORSES

My bed isn't for sleeping in. Not anymore. And I can't bring myself to wash the sheets, because that would erase the stains and creases that are the roadmap of my life. Okay, the map is blurry, and it's difficult to distinguish sweat from blood from semen from shit and other stains I have no name for, but it anchors me to reality. This stained map reminds that I haven't completely left my humanity behind. Wash it clean and I will lose my way in that arctic whiteness.

Down in the streets kids are squealing, competing with the seagulls harrying the fishing boats. It's a forlorn sound. I used to be one of them once. Seems such a long time ago, but in truth can't be more than fifteen years since I was out in the streets back home with youngsters just like them. Playing, and stealing, doing glue, beating up tramps. You know: kid stuff.

Out there in the lounge – what I've come to think of as the waiting room – Di Zhai is waiting; and watching, like he can see through walls or something; like he can see me in my bed and spy on the world outside the apartment. Up here, eight storeys high, he's God. Or maybe more like a vulture. The Chinese girl visits sometimes, bringing him bowls of steamed vegetables or trays of sushi and crispy seaweed. She can't be more than 14 but here eyes are ancient.

The thin walls muffle their conversation. Not that it makes any difference, because they're speaking in Cantonese. Babble. No more comprehensible to me than the bright noise of Tokyo or the otaku boys worshipping their virtual pop idols and masturbating over anime and manga girls. All I know is the meaning of Di Zhai: it means "bird with long feathers." And the girl is called Lei, "rain over fields."

They're talking about the drowned man again. How I know this is by the hushed tones they're using. Whispers that you accord to mysteries and to darkness. Full voice is reserved for the daylight hours, for the ordinary business of life. Not for me, though, because my world now is entirely whispers.

# # #

First time I ever saw Zhai was in Ghansu province, on the upper reaches of the Yellow River. My boss instructed me to meet him at a roadside temple at some anonymous crossroads or other. I had travelled through the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to reach him, subsisting on my journey mostly on rice and the occasional slice of pork. I was prepared for some oriental bruiser armed with imported Magnum .45s, eight-cut knives and a tiger fork, with maybe a machine gun thrown in for good measure. East meets West. Instead, what I see is a tall (for a Chinaman), slender man in his early 40s, wearing a black t-shirt and linen trousers, a backwards baseball cap with the Coke logo on it, and carrying a small rucksack. His skin in the colour of a lychee.

"Paul Wilbur," I told him, thrusting out my hand.

"What does your name mean?" he asked, taking my slight hand in his meaty one and giving it a single firm shake.

I must have looked bemused, because he shook his head and went on, "Not worry. I look it up on Internet."

For some peculiar reason his statement made me want to laugh. But his earnest inquisitiveness forced me to stifle it. I noticed when I stood close to him that he had a distinctive scent, of ginger perhaps, mixed with cloves.

Puffs of dust devils blew around us on the road – it was more of a dirt track, really – and I squinted at the horizon where the sun was melting with a final yellow-white flare into the ground. The driver had dumped me from his "taxi," an army surplus jeep – you could still make out the Communist Chinese star on it, albeit scratched and pockmarked and faded over the years – at a crossroads where I found myself alone, disorientated and travel-weary. What I wanted most at this point was a long cold beer and something to eat. And to sleep. Oh, yes, more than anything else in creation, I wanted to sleep.

As if reading my mind, Zhai said, "You hungry? I know good place."

His good place turned out to be a bar on the outskirts of some nameless village, but the food was decent even if the beer was lukewarm.

"So," he said, "Your boss. An importer, yes?"

Too many questions, I thought, and played it cagey. "Sort of. Based in the States. He travels a lot." And he's dying of colon cancer, I didn't add. And he's a thief and a wide-boy, like me, I also didn't add, or that I knew he was probably only getting what he deserved, the way we all get our comeuppance: right in the arse. I mean, doing the job I do, and people like me in the same line of work, we all know we're going to get shafted one day. Later is better, but sooner means you don't have time to dwell on it so much.

"Time to go," Zhai announced when I was only halfway through my beer. Glass half-raised to my lips, I said sharply, "Okay if I finish my drink, first? I've been on the road for four days and I'm thirsty."

Zhai shrugged. How he could be so determined one second and so indifferent the next was a puzzle, which came to annoy me more and more as it revealed itself as his major personality trait.

Later, having struggled up a densely wooded hillside with no recognisable path, we stopped for a cigarette (rather I did, since Zhai doesn't smoke), and I tried to make conversation.

"How come you're not wearing a uniform?"

"A uniformed cop wandering the hills with all the bandits about? As you Westerners say, 'Yeah, right. . .'."

I laughed at that. Zhai can be a funny guy. "I'm English, Zhai. Try 'not on your nelly'."

It was Zhai's turn to laugh. "Now you are – what is it? – 'taking the piss'."

That cracked me up and I spluttered a lungful of cigarette smoke right in his face. He grimaced and swiped at the smoke like it was a cloud of mosquitoes. On reflection, the bottle green police uniform with its yellow piping on the trousers and crimson epaulettes on the jacket could have been a potentially serious sartorial misjudgement.

Zhai was a well-read man, as it turned out, and he took The Times and The Guardian, – "for balance," he said, balance and harmony being his guiding philosophy – from which he learned of the West what he did not glean from Sky TV.

After I stubbed out my cigarette on the bole of a tree, we pressed on. By the time we'd walked another hour or so my lungs were starting to get the better of me as the air thinned and the incline steepened. But presently we reached a rather incongruous short flight of stone steps with Chinese dragons carved in the balustrades. At the top was a flagstone plaza with a temple to Buddha at its centre. The Buddha's gold foil skin was flaking like an horrific case of eczema. But his skin was a baby's compared to that of the drowned man, whom we found after another half hour of searching. The map coordinates had been more or less correct. Our informants may not have know what we would find exactly or if they did had chosen not to tell us.

Zhai kicked aside drifts of dry leaves that half concealed the mystery beneath. The corpse was lying facedown on the red earth. Its formerly cream coat – a Burberry, by the looks – was smeared with oil and mud and, weirdly, strands of seaweed. His scalp had simply slipped off, the blackened flesh glutinous and puffy and stinking from the drowning. Imagine a melted Jelly Baby. As for the smell, I'd rather not describe it; I'm not squeamish as a rule but I had to pinch my nostrils shut and breathe through my mouth.

Zhai cast about with his eagle eye. No sign of any footprints apart from ours. Perhaps they had been brushed away. Or there never had been any in the first place.

We found the drowned man 3,000 feet above sea level.

# # #

For all the strangeness of my time in Japan I encountered nothing of this magnitude. Back in Tokyo the volatile mercantile atmosphere, the relentless downpour of information rain, creates a kind of high tech avarice. The businessmen who operate in this climate play a very adult game that stands in marked contrast to their "real" selves with their secretive, fetishistic, puerile sexuality. Try not to understand Tokyo, especially the city I know. Tokyo sweeps away anything from which meaning might be construed. And yet it has its internal logic. But logic like the workings of a clock rather than human logic, the cogs and gears meshing and turning, turning and meshing, setting off chain reactions with no apparent purpose than to demonstrate that time is moving on or, in the case of Japan, that it waits for no man.

Twice I had evaded assassination in Tokyo by a ganglord who blamed me for the death of his son, even though it was clear he had just taken off, most probably with that idiot cyberkid boyfriend of his. My real boss back in the States managed to persuade him that I had done my job as a bodyguard, and that even first class bodyguards like myself cannot legislate for the behaviour of the young and foolish.

My boss had lent me to Prince Li – he declined to acknowledge his given name of Chow Li – as a bodyguard, business liaison and, secretly, spy. Prince had been re-routing portions of the boss's drugs take. So he had him killed. By yours truly. And that was why I needed to leave so fast. The Prince still had his acolytes.

# # #

Zhai was crouching down and pushing at the drowned man's clothing with a twig. Flipping back the coat and the jacket on the left side – he had to roll the corpse back a little to lever the garment from under the torso – he withdrew with the tips of his fingers a small polystyrene Ziploc packet. He wiped the mud away and held it up to the sunlight. The dark object inside resembled a tiny foetus. On closer inspection it turned out to be a desiccated seahorse.

He stood up, slipped the packet into a pocket of his rucksack, which he then shouldered and turned to me. "This is bad place, Englishman. Bad for you. Bad for me. We leave, yes?"

In his eyes there were moving flecks of phosphenes like the afterimage of the sun, the floaters you see behind your eyelids; I might have imagined them, or it was some weird prismatic effect of twilight approaching.

I stood firm. "You seem to know something. And we're both here for the same reason, right?"

"Your boss's courier. Yes. That is him."

How he could be so certain I could not imagine. The corpse looked like four gallons of snot spread on a log; the face would be unrecognisable even to the man's own mother. News had got round that the courier (I preferred the "mule"), Che Quifu, was dead. But this news was too old for it to make any sense that his body would here, drowned, on the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere.

"Is that all he has on him?" I asked, a deep-rooted anxiety knotting my guts. The anxiety arose from the need to find a certain package, the fear that I might not find it, and the bigger fear that I might.

Operating out of Beijing, and sometimes the South China Sea, Quifu traded in commodities, particularly those that attracted a high price in the West. The boss was a good customer. It was drug trafficking mainly, but lately, and rather oddly, I thought, in traditional Chinese medicines. Some of these medicines were illegal. Which set me to wondering if dried seahorse belonged in that category.

"Nothing more," Zhai confirmed.

"So that's it?" I said, "This is what we're paying you for, to find some flattened cartoon character that you claim is Quifu? I mean, he could be anybody. Some bandit you decided to get rid of, for instance."

"Bandits not wear Burberry," he quipped, but I was either too nervous or too hacked off to smile.

He added, "It is him. But does it matter if it is not? Your boss does not get delivery either way."

I sighed. Zhai was being obtuse now. My information was that there had been more of the stuff and that Quifu had most likely hidden it in a safe place. Maybe even on this hillside somewhere, though that seemed highly improbable.

"My Boss just wants what he paid for. Quifu had it and we asked you to find him for us. Which you're saying you did. But. . .I don't know. . ."

I had been warned to be cautious around Zhai. He could be trusted up to a point, but beyond that there were attributes ascribed to him that suggested ulterior motives. I am cynical from the years I have spend in my trade, the name of which varies from "thief" to "assassin" depending on who's paying for what, and so I chose suspicion over reason. If it appeared that I was not prepared to accept that the corpse what that of Che Quifu, I would force him to question if I had ulterior motives of my own.

I said, "Okay, say it is him. I still need to take back with me what my boss paid him for."

"And what is that, Englishman?"

"A cure for cancer," I told him.

# # #

The first person I ever killed was my girlfriend, Rebecca. Not that I loved her or anything, though she was great in bed and grateful for the attention, but I did feel a sense of ownership over her. She had betrayed me, stolen from me and – worst of all – betrayed The Core. The Core was our group, or gang, if you like, comprised of heavy-hitters in business and streetwise kids like me that they treated like equals. I liked that about them. My boss was one of them, the Execs, and he was on his way up and it helped that he developed a special affection for me. Not in a gay way, you understand, though I know he's homosexual, but in a male-bonding kind of way.

"Oliver, that's what we'll call you," the boss said before he was the boss and just another smart kid on the ascendancy, "Twisted Oliver." Because of me being an orphan and all, and having been brought up at the expense of The Core, I didn't appreciate the "twisted" part and told him so.

He laughed in that languid way which suggested he was joking but not completely. "Lighten up, my man. Just wordplay. Sorry. So, are we cushti now?"

I nodded. "Cushti. Yeah."

Rebecca, the boss informed me, had been riding the diamond courier. All the while he was creaming inside her, she was some of his stolen "earnings:" earnings that rightfully belonged to my boss. The guy thought that a few weeks in the sack Rebecca meant they were an item. Innocent sod. Anyhow, I shot her first, a bullet nicely placed between her lips that burst open the back of her head. And naturally he got it right in the balls. Natural justice, you might say.

I cried for a couple of days after that. It was doubt, you see. What if I really had loved Rebecca after all? Still, I would never know and I had to console myself with the promotion and the heavy bonus. The Core even paid for an extended holiday for me in the East, which is why I'm here now.

I have operated in the East for more than four years and this is where I have to remain. I mean, it's not like I have much choice in the matter.

# # #

Seahorses are strange. It is the male that gives birth. Their genus is hippocampus, derived from the Greek "hippos" for horse and campus meaning "sea monster." Early taxonomists were baffled by them.

Di Zhai discovered this through research on the Internet. While surfing he also found, and presented to me as if it were a gift, the meaning of my surname. Wilbur means "beloved stronghold." I liked that.

"And," he went on, swivelling on his computer chair towards me, the glow from the monitor in the darkened room making a chiaroscuro abstraction of the left side of his face. "The trade in them for Chinese medicine, trinkets and curios, is illegal."

I had been awake for all but two days in the six months since Quifu's death. It was now less than 24 hours since we had found Quifu on the hillside. Now of course I know for sure it was him. Oh, yes, it was definitely him. That hill, with its Buddha, was a sacred place, one of the places where the wall between this world and the other world, is weakest. One of the places in which the doorway between can be opened. I had been summoned there. Because what happened to be could only be brought about by opening one of these doorways, as I must have done then, on that hillside, stupidly and without realising it.

To say I haven't slept would be an understatement. Oddly enough, I didn't feel tired, not even so much as having to stifle a yawn. I haven't felt anything approaching that for a very long time.. You need to understand me clearly here, so I'll spell it out: I am not an insomniac. This is not sleep deprivation, sleep apnoea or any disorder associated with that part of the brain that controls the tides of wakefulness and rest. So when I tell you that I have not slept since that day that is precisely what I mean.

"Which tells us what?" I asked him.

"Nothing. Much about man, perhaps. And crime. Nothing yet about why."

"He was being punished," I said. "Simple."

Zhai squinted at me suspiciously. "For?"

"Stealing, I guess." I shrugged non-committally. "Raping, murdering, doing a runner, cooking the books, who knows? All comes to the same thing, like I said. Punishment. Ret-ri-bu-tion."

I was stringing Zhai along. Right now I didn't give a damn about the drowned man and could not know just how much of a damn I would give later. It was my hope merely that Zhai's investigations would lead me to the rest of the missing substance promised to the boss.

Zhai reapplied himself to his task without saying another word for five minutes or so. He pulled up police records onscreen, the software searching all the known databases for a match of the DNA samples and dental records of the drowned man. There hadn't been much left of him by the time Zhai's investigations and forensics people had cordoned off the site. And what a motley crew they were: jittery as horses before a thunderstorm. I heard a word repeated in Cantonese and later I asked Zhai what it meant.

"Hungry ghost," he said without irony. We'd come back to his house last night and I had accepted the offer of a bed there for a few nights. We were on our second glass of Glenmorangie when the subject arose. Quite suddenly he leapt up from his afghan-pattern couch to his book-lined walls, rifled the spines on the third shelf high with the tips of his fingers and made a small grunt of satisfaction as he stopped at a title and withdrew it. The book's title was something about mythology and I guessed it was a dictionary of some sort. Quickly flipping through it, stabbed his finger as a place marker on a page and turned the book towards me to show me the entry.

It said:

Greed is the emotion of the hungry ghost realm. The hungry ghosts are beings with huge, hungry bellies and tiny mouths and throats. Some inhabit parched lands where there is not even a mention of water for hundreds of years. Others may find food and drink, yet if they swallow even a little through their tiny mouths, the food bursts into flames in their stomachs.

This was all nonsense. There are no such things as ghosts, at least in the way our culture understands them. Here's my explanation, because I see the truth of the matter now. A by-product of my inability to sleep is that my dreams are manifest for me. That's what ghosts really are. I wonder if I am the only one who knows their real natures? After all, in the absence of the realm of sleep, dreams need somewhere to live.

You might think this wouldn't be so bad, the idea of your most vivid, empowering, erotic or deliriously creative dreams emerging into the waking world. Except I don't have those cool sorts of dreams. Me, I have the other kind: the guilty ones, the sick ones, the lonely, shrieking, angst-ridden ones, the ones that twist every fear, every anxiety you have into grotesque, distorted shapes in an MC Escher landscape. You know the ones I mean. Nightmares.

Worst is this one: The Drowned Man. When I try to sleep he stands at the foot of my bed, his translucent skin shimmering with its network of blue and red and purple veins and arteries, revealing the organs beneath and the bones beneath them. In my "dream" he has only the sketch of a face, the mouth and nose mere smudges, only the terrible accusing eyes in high definition. His eyes are a bright and a violent shade of indigo (the colour that's not supposed to exist but which I can clearly see, encircling those ghastly silver pupils).

Sometimes he plunges his hand through my temple and tries to wrench my eyeballs out so he can play marbles with them. I can feel the tug on my optic nerves and muscle fibres, like he's yanking out an electrical cord from a socket. Sometimes I squeal when he does this. But I realise he cannot in actuality achieve his goal. He is only a nightmare, after all.

He will also, for variety, reach into my chest cavity and try to squeeze my lung sacs like bagpipe skins or bellows. Or he will try to crush my heart. All of this fails. The awful part is not that he might succeed, because I know that is impossible. No, what terrifies me the most is that he keeps trying so hard. How can I describe what this is like? One way would be this: you know when people tell you the only thing to fear is fear itself, or the sheer stress of approaching the unknown, like the first time you are about to do a bungee drop into a 1,000 foot gorge? It's that kind of fear. The worst kind. The kind that can only be alleviated by meeting the fear head on. Except that last part isn't an option for me. I never can meet it head on. I will never be able to do that until the day I die. And maybe not even then.

Can you imagine now what it's like?

# # #

While I lie here on my bed, my limbs pale from lack of sunlight, my wasted muscles singing with pain like plucked banjo strings, my insides an inferno, I find myself remembering something, the one thing I now realise really matters most, and always has.

It is the memory of my boss, in one of his rare moments of tenderness. He said something to me I shall never forget. What he said, or confessed if you will, was this, "I love you, Paul. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes," said, feeling uncomfortable but also strangely elated. Truth is, I loved him, too. Like a brother, a father, like a wife. He saved my life on more than one occasion, he kept me out of jail through his network of contacts and by calling in favours, and he comforted me in my sorrow after I killed Rebecca and the others. Some of the people I killed drove a stake of remorse into my heart, because I had known them or a long time, or had been friends with them, and I would weep each time inconsolably, often for days. My boss always saved me. But now that he is dead there is nothing he can do to help me.

I miss him.

# # #

The bandits finally caught up with us at Wharves. We were there interviewing longshoremen, fishermen, and assorted seadogs. One of these, a squirrelly short-arse with a face the colour and texture of the roots of a bonsai tree, led us behind a stack of rank lobsterpots to a hatch in the pier. He flung the hatch back and pointed with an excited chattering to the metal ladder leading to the churning oily surface of the water. It was 7pm and still light. Zhai had been investigating the circumstances of the drowned man's death for a week, and even more urgently trying to locate the package he was meant to have been carrying. When I suggested to Zhai on the drive to the harbour that the package must have been long gone, he shook his head and said, "Nothing as valuable as this goes missing. We now know someone has it."

How could Zhai know anything of the sort?

His team had left the drowned man on the side of that hill. They had been too superstitious to move it, as though it had appeared there for a reason.

"He's telling us to go down," Zhai said.

I frowned, puzzled. "To what? There's nothing there but water."

"What we are looking for is down there," he said. "They are afraid to go near."

"And why would he tell you this?" I asked pragmatically.

"Money, of course. And I have – what you say, 'the goods?' – on some men here. I can be nice or not nice to them. Information is power, as you Westerners believe."

"But you don't?"

Another of his equivocal expressions. Agreement, disagreement, indifference or irony, they were all there in that half smile of his.

And then he started down the ladder, only briefly looking up at me to say, "I understand seahorse now." The rest of his words were erased by the increasing agitation of the waves against the pilings, by sound of forklift trucks and cranes manoeuvring palettes and containers, and by the rising wind.

Before I joined Zhai I looked down at his foreshortened figure ten feet below. He was standing on the water.

"A walkway," he shouted up and stamped a foot up and down, splashing water. "Concrete."

In the shadows of the pier I hadn't seen this, but once I had descended it was clear enough: a broad slab of concrete between the wooden pilings to clamber onto small boats when the tide was low. The brine was going to ruin my calfskin boots

Down here the wind was much stronger, the geometries of the pier and its array of pilings as thick as oak trees creating a vortex of restless energy that plucked at our clothes and carelessly flung away each word we spoke. Communication was problematic and so gestures had to suffice.

Zhai indicated a junction in the walkway and we took this left fork, almost slipping several times on the mosses and weeds coating the walkway, and we were led deeper into the darkened recesses below the pier, where sunlight did not penetrate.

Something made me turn around. He wasn't here, thank God. The drowned man wasn't following me. Or any of his entourage. I didn't tell you about them, did I? I have been seeing them all since the day we found the drowned man and every day since. They are here in my room even now, around my bed. To be honest, they are difficult to talk about because impossible to describe. They are like huge flying beetles with rusty iron carapaces, and a variety of human mouths scattered across their tough backs. The mouths speak rapidly like people with Tourette's, cursing and muttering and spouting obscenities. They fly at me, these things, and the mouths try to tear at my flesh. The bloodied rows of sharp teeth bare themselves as they close in on my body. They try to rip off my ears, the meat of my cheeks, my nose, my cock. They terrify me, these things. But not at much as the drowned man. He is more frightening because he is closer to my perceptions of the real world and just enough to one side of it to threaten to unhinge me. Not that I could tell Zhai any of this. Because, I suspect, he would either not have believed me, or he would have had me sectioned to an asylum. Ironically, I now appreciate the Zhai would have believed my story without question. Because of who he really is.

Before coming on the interrogation with Zhai I sat on his toilet pedestal with my left arm cinched in a length of rubber tubing. I smacked the crook of my arm to bring up a vein, then picked up the syringe from the cistern behind me. My hand trembled. I've always been suspicious of doctors and medicine, but regular drugs like heroin and morphine have no effect on me, so I don't take them any more. This stuff, the grey powder, liquidised with a flame held below its foil container and sucked up into the needle, had to do the trick. It was a matter of belief more than scientific research. I had to believe it would let me finally fall asleep. I felt sure the boss would forgive me; he was a dead man anyhow, and both of us knew that. The stuff was meant for him, but I felt I needed it more.

We soon found ourselves in the darkest regions of the seaweedy underworld of the pier. Weeds clung to every surface, dripping ferns of it hanging from the underside of the wooden walkway above us, mucous-like snakes of it, seaweeds of all kinds from bladderwrack to flat straps and some that were like bushes and miniature leafless trees, all of it seeming to slide and coil and uncoil as we approached. I took this as just another aspect of my waking dreams. And even when strands of weed like sodden leather straps snaked around my wrists and tried to pull be backwards – to fall into the sea perhaps, or to tie me to a stanchion until high tide drowned me – I chose to ignore them as best I could. My body shivered with cold and stress. The shivers I can't help. But I try not to give the nightmares my full attention. When I manage to ignore them, which is rarely, the gaps between their visits lengthen.

Zhai stopped. We had come to an ancient wall composed of massive red stones that must once have been the foundations of a fortress or a prison. He turned. His eyes were featureless silver orbs: I had not imagined their strangeness.

He levelled a revolver at me. The weapon seemed prosaic given the circumstances.

"It was you, then, after all," Zhai said, his English suddenly dramatically improved.

I admit I was surprised that he found out and could not imagine how. As far as I was concerned Zhai was just one more stupid oriental cop, who took backhanders like many of them, from my boss.

"You killed him," he went on.

Ah, the drowned man again. The courier. Mean culpa, I'm afraid. I did it, yes. First I gutted him like a fish then I tipped him off the side of the boat I'd hired to meet him on a beach for the pickup. It had all been planned immaculately. What the courier was asking on behalf of his clients was a huge some of money. The fact that we didn't know the identity of his suppliers made us suspicious, but the boss confronted by mortality was prepared to try anything and pay any amount. His contacts had heard rumours of some substance that would cure his cancer, but warned him there would be a high price to pay. The boss thought in fiduciary terms. Cash is the compass by which he navigated, the love he prized most highly. Next to me, that is. But the word "price" has more than one meaning.

"You know the superior quality that seahorses have?" Zhai asked me. From the shadows behind him emerged a group of shapes that might have been men, but because of my feelings about the drowned man would have preferred to be ordinary monsters. "They are loyal to a fault. To their wives and their children. Seahorses are monogamous, did you know that?"

"No," I said, abruptly, aware that the wind had ceased and that we appeared to be in a zone of silence, in a vacuum flask. The shapes that stepped forward were men after all, all of them Asian, some Chinese, some Japanese. They all wore jeans, some of them had on baseball caps or sported long manes of straggly hair. A few I recognised as members of the investigations crew on the hillside. Nothing extraordinary about them at all. Except, I imagined, their loyalty to their gang-lord or whoever was the source of the stolen substance.

The men above had confirmed Zhai's suspicions, of course. And his crew were waiting for me below to deliver justice in some ritualistic way that would balance the books.

"Our boss needed the stuff also," he told me. "His daughter is dying. With this material he could save her. He paid well for it. But your hungry ghost, Che Quifu, was greedy.

I said wearily, "How did you find out?"

"We have contacts. You remember Prince Li in Tokyo, do you not? His people also were looking for you and know what you did. The rest they leave to us."

Zhai's beloved Internet was nowhere near as convoluted an inexplicable as these networks of criminals and mystics; here was the final arena in which the sacred and the profane operated in harmony.

I nodded sadly. Zhai's men, stepping across the grid of concrete walkways beneath the rising tide, surrounded me and stood watching me with their arms folded.

Zhai said, "I did not know for sure until yesterday. I search in your room. You have hidden it well. You give us the drug and we let you live."

I shrugged, feigning indifference. "It's all gone. It let me sleep for a while, then there was no more of it."

"I had to go through the motions, you see," I went on, feeling the need to explain, to expiate myself. "And I was running out. I needed more. I need to sleep. You got any idea of what it's like not being able to sleep, having nightmares while you're awake? I know there's more of it somewhere, and I thought you might lead me to it. You were my last chance."

"You were supposed to find Quifu and the substance." Zhai shook his head in disbelief. "At first I did not know what this was about. I thought, more money for us, for our cause. Saving the boss's daughter. And now this."

I waited while Zhai took a deep breath and craned back his head as though studying the underside of the pier for divine inspiration.

He went on, "When I saw him, drowned, on the hill like that, I knew. Knew the ghosts were at work. The other world. Things you do not understand. But that you bring into this world because of your poisoned spirit: your sick spirit is a doorway which lets them through to this world, all the bad things."

"What are you talking about?" I say.

"The cancer," Zhai says. "You are injecting your boss's cancer into yourself. And you will not sleep until it claims you finally and tortures you to death because no drug will be able to stop the pain. There is a reason for this. You know what it is."

I was sweating, aware of the weeds drawing back from me, slipping back into inertia.

Zhai was right. I do know the reason for this thing that is happening to me. It is the price that must be paid. What the price would have been for my boss I have no idea. Provided he had obtained the "drug" – or whatever that damned grey powder was – through an honest transaction, perhaps it would only have been financial, albeit extremely high. But my disloyalty, my theft, brought with it the highest price of all.

Zhai, seemingly satisfied, looked around at the group of bandits, levelling his gaze at each pair of eyes and making a slight nod to each in turn. Each then turned away and stepped back into the darkness. At last Zhai did the same, but not before saying to me, "I do not think you are an evil man. Your spirit is sick, that is all, and you are full of fear. Fear is not real, but you do not believe that and so that is how you will end. With fear."

He stepped back and the darkness closed around him. But this was not all, because a voice emerged from behind that black curtain. It was Zhai's voice and it said, "Because of your fear and because of what you must yet go through, I will be with you at the end. If I am to honour the other world, and show it respect, I must also show pity. I will wait with you."

# # #

In a world without sleep, the dreaming man is king.

My hands tremble as I draw the ineffectual morphine into the syringe and inject it into myself, pretending it will let me sleep at last and release my emaciated body from the torture of the infinite waking world.

Zhai enters and stands in the doorway, and whether he sees the drowned man waiting at the end of my bed I cannot say. "Is it time?" he asks.

"Christ, Zhai," I say, "I hope so. Please. . ."

"Sweet dreams, then," he says. "No more nightmares, Englishman."

My bed waits for me, as it always has done, unrequitedly longing for me to fall into my long, blessed slumber.

#

# LEVITATION

When she was four Katya brought back to life a big trout meant for family dinner. She watched the trout curl up and repeatedly slap its tail against the wooden chopping board laid across the sink to catch bloodspill and guts.

Katya had forgotten this until last night's dream, in which she relived the moment as vividly as if it were just happening. She wondered if the dream and the memory had something to do with the lunar eclipse. The night of the red moon – that's what they called it when she was a girl in Poland.

She remembered something else about last night. Warm breath on her neck and the familiar scent of almonds and freshly baked bread. She was awake, but afraid to open her eyes in case the scents would disappear.

But Katya had more pressing thoughts on her mind today. Her visit to the doctor especially. She did not want to dwell on that, however, and so tried instead to concentrate on binding the stems of wildflowers to prepare them for drying. The clothes pulley above the kitchen table already held a dozen upended bouquets snagged on butcher's hooks. Wild roses, willow branches, furze, cornflowers, poppy pods, dandelions, hawthorn twigs, and coconut-scented broom, more she could not name in English – nowadays she spoke only English and tried hard not to even think in Polish. The desiccated blooms were sold to gift shops and to regular customers through her mail order business. The only magic she could perform these days was to reanimate flowers. And even that was just a parlour trick to imbue them with pungent scents they never had in life, distilled from her own special blends of herbs and aromatic oils.

But the door to her childhood had been left ajar by her dreams, and now she remembered that when Matka wasn't looking, and only when she wasn't looking, she would levitate things. Cups and saucers. Vegetables. Balls of coloured wool, which she spun in the air like the planets in an orrery. Delight had to be contained, because if she let the joy out, if she giggled or laughed aloud, her concentration would go, and the balls of wool would tumble to the floor.

Matka had known about the trout all along, of course. "You never ate fish again," she told Katya years later. Secrets cannot be kept from mothers.

"Will he come today?" Matka said. She never allowed herself to be called "mum" or "mother", insisting always upon "matka". Let her daughter anglicise herself to "Kate" if she must. But there should always be respect for the person who pushed you into the world.

"Perhaps he will," Katya replied but without heeding the oft-repeated refrain. "What do you think, Matka?" She held aloft the completed spray themed in russets, browns and yellows.

The old woman made a dismissive backhanded wave and gave her attention back to solitaire. Jonathan, the part-time gardener, sometimes played cards with her, the unvoiced understanding being that she must win at least half of the time. Katya added a little extra to his wages for this understanding.

Only detritus remained on the scarred oak table. Not enough to make another spray. Katya swept all of it into a plastic refuse sack. In the top of the sack filled with kitchen scraps were several empty Coca Cola cans. Matka was addicted to Coca Cola. She bought the stuff by the trayload and once, when Katya helped herself to one, lost her temper and accused her daughter of thieving.

"Sucrose addiction," the doctor had suggested. "As bad as heroin, if you ask me."

"She gets bored." Katya had felt an irrational need to apologise. Since the stroke her mother had developed compulsions, of which an obsession with sweet things was one.

Doctor Howard still visited from time to time, though there was nothing more to be done. The paralysis of Matka's left side had not stopped her pursuing her passions, however. Card games especially. Matka played solitaire as if she had an opponent, with as much attack and slyness as when she played poker with Jonathan. Her spreads were mounted on a specially made wooden rack, a giant version of the kind used for holding Scrabble tiles. Her mother made Katya think of the court suite, the Queen, King, and Knave who only their best side, the side that worked. Perhaps the whole royal family had suffered a stroke. Or they might be concealing their other sides for other, more mysterious, reasons.

"No," Matka announced, triumphantly slapping down her final card, completing the game. "He will come, I am sure of it. Knock on the trunk of the ash tree three times, raise your hands to the heavens, that was how they used to pray in the old days." As she spoke she scornfully eyed the pair of dwarf apple trees just beyond the window.

The Yuletide ritual of knocking on the ash trunk was part of Matka's endless fund of myths and stories harking back to the old days. Matka, like some others of her generation, subscribed to two religions, the Christian and the pagan. And at the heart of it all was a belief in the Great Goddess who was a snake and a bee and a bird. A belief that nothing could shake.

"Coca Cola," Matka demanded. There was no Polish equivalent.

Katya sighed and went to the refrigerator. One shelf was half-filled with the scarlet and silver cans. She popped one open and set it on the table next to her mother's good hand.

"Glass or straw?"

"Straw," her mother said in Polish and Katya mentally translated into English. Already she was doing a one-handed shuffle of the cards in the rack ready for the next game. "You see I am busy."

A glass is too much trouble when you need to concentrate. It meant looking away from the cards.

She glanced up at the wall clock and realised she was twenty minutes late for her appointment. The receptionist in the surgery could be a frosty bitch if one was late for an appointment. Well, too bad.

She slid open the cutlery drawer and rummaged among the unsorted piles of knives and forks and spoons until her fingers alighted on the hard green plastic straw with the loop at the top. Plonking the straw into the Coke can she said, "I'm going shopping now. Do you need anything while I'm out?"

Matka, not looking up, said: "Doughnuts. The ones with jam in."

"But you know what the doctor – " It was useless to protest. "Ok, fine, then. Doughnuts."

She wished today were Wednesday. Apart from Jonathan, only her painting workshop gave her some respite from taking care of her mother. While Simon was alive, at least in the first few years of their marriage, she believed love was all encompassing and had room in it for difficult times, difficult people. Now it felt like a brittle rubber band that showed cracks when stretched even a little.

She left the house without another word and climbed into her blue Volkswagen Beetle. Once a week, Katya would take her mother into town in the car, for window-shopping, or a stroll in the park on warm days. Matka was not as enthusiastic about the car as her daughter, insisting it was far too small and uncomfortable to ride in.

"Why do I need a bigger car when it's only the two of us?"

"You have money, Katyinka. Spend it, why don't you?"

Matka often tried to encourage her to squander the money Simon had left her in his will. But, apart from buying the Beetle, the only luxury she had allowed herself, she could not bring herself to spend any of it, and the funds had lain untouched in a building society account for nearly three years.

She started up the engine. She was not sure she felt ready for what the doctor was going to tell her.

# # #

Jonathan was in the living room when she returned. He wasn't due today. Nodding hello, he indolently shuffled the pack of cards. If he must be here, she thought, why isn't he out in the garden working? Matka, across the table, dozed in her wheelchair, a fan of late morning sunshine across her face.

She offered tea and he answered, in that perpetually amused tone of his, "Sounds good." Matka had awakened by the time tea was brewed, and she asked for some, too. Katya brought her a glass in a silver holder, with slices of lemon on a saucer, and a jam doughnut to go with it. Matka always drank her tea Russian style, black, sipped through a sugar cube held between her teeth. Jonathan drank his tea the same way, and had told Katya he now preferred this tea to coffee, which he had drunk to excess in any case.

They drank in silence until Matka exclaimed, "Did I hear the door?" She turned to face her daughter. "Answer it, why don't you!"

"There's no one there," Katya replied.

"Jonathan," her mother insisted, seeking an ally, "Jonathan, you go and answer it, there's a good boy." She said this in English. Jonathan was the only one she addressed in English. After all, she needed English to successfully bluff at card games.

Jonathan nodded and got up. Katya followed him into the hallway.

"Must you do everything she says?" She was irritated by the way he obeyed her mother's every whim.

He smiled and drew her towards him. "I'm not doing it for her."

She shrugged him off.

"Hey," he said, "what's wrong? What are you angry about?"

She sighed. "I saw the doctor."

He pulled away. She felt him withdraw in a way that was more than physical.

"And?"

Matka's voice from the living room, said, "Who is it?"

"No one, Matka," Katya said. "No one." And to Jonathan, "Later."

The afternoon was interminable, Jonathan playing game after game of cards with Matka until she grew tired and asked to be helped to bed for her afternoon nap.

She and Jonathan often used this time to make love.

Sometimes, in her room, on her bed in the house her mother owned, she welcomed his dry, warm lips on hers, or pressing into her throat. If she closed her eyes she imagined that his body smelled of almonds, his breath warm and yeasty like freshly baked bread. But if she opened them he smelled only of himself, a smell she could not quite describe, subdued as it often was by cologne. Matka sleeping in the room below them imposed its own limitations yet made their secretive fucking all the sweeter.

Once Matka was asleep, they tiptoed upstairs. Jonathan pushed her backwards onto the bed. Hurriedly, he unbuttoned her blouse, put a hand inside her brassiere and cupped her breast and squeezed. She could respond if she wished, but it was not what she wanted.

Once again she resisted the advance, and pushed against his chest. "No. Not now. I need you to listen now."

He drew back as if he had been burned. She sensed the germ of ill temper as he leaned his back against the headboard. He reached out for the pack of cigarettes Katya kept on the bedside table, lit one and puffed at it a couple of times.

She looked into his eyes. And as she looked she saw how little warmth they contained. Strange how she had never seen that before. It was a look she had seen before, in the eyes of her father when she was a girl. Expressionless. Cold. And if there was an emotion in her father's eyes at all there was only one it could be: rapaciousness.

Her throat tightened. She had to speak. But she was afraid.

"What? What is it, my love?"

"Don't call me that. You know you don't love me."

He shrugged. This had been a mannerism of her father's, too. Why hadn't she seen it before?

Father had devoured her with his greed and robbed her of childhood.

She felt in those times like Golden Curl a fairytale Matka used to tell her. Of all the tales, the stories of fox women, were-wolves and the rest, the story of Golden Curl was the one she never forgot. It was the tale of the little girl who could not speak the secret of what she had seen in the hundredth room, cursed by the wood witch, even when her silence caused the death of her baby brother and her husband.

Jonathan said, "Aren't you going to tell me what's on your mind?" He paused. Then, rather reluctantly she thought, added, "What did the doctor say?"

She nodded. "I'm not pregnant after all."

She looked into his face then. Hoping for a change in him. Hoping that he would see how wrong he had been, and see that everything could change for the better. But in the end she saw no more than she had expected. Relief. She saw relief.

Jonathan's kinship with her father now gelled in her mind. Instead of feeling hurt, this oddly reassured her. It was familiar. Something she knew how to survive. She looked away from his face and down at his hands and saw the traces of dark soil beneath his gardener's fingernails, imagined the loamy earth curled in his very fingerprints. She wondered why she had ever those hands touch her.

Rebuttoning, her blouse, she stood up and said, "You'd better go."

Jonathan knew better than to argue. In the hallway he tried to kiss her goodbye, but she turned her head aside.

She felt good about one thing, though. Lying about the baby.

As she closed the door a wave of tiredness enveloped her. She needed to rest and so decided to go to bed. The staircase rising above her wavered, as if she had been crouching and had tried to stand too quickly. The stairs seemed to rush away from her to a far horizon. Her head felt gigantic, the top of the stairs tiny, too small even for a human foot. It was a form of migraine, she knew, but it always took her back to the half-wakenings she'd had as a child, sitting up in bed with a start, the perspectives of her bedroom distorted as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. She would cry for her Matka and Matka would always come to rescue her. The tiny door of her bedroom would open and her tiny Matka would enter, looming larger as she drew closer and closer to the bed. Matka would give her a glass of water to drink. The water always dissolved the vision. Her fear took longer to dissolve. She would always imagine that, without the glass of water her Matka gave her, the world would stay the way it was, horribly distorted like the reflection in a convex mirror.

Once she had closed the bedroom door behind her, she lay down on the bed and tried to slow her breathing. She closed her eyes to subdue the onset of panic. If she saw nothing the fear was less. Arpeggios of blackbird song drifted through the window and she rolled onto her side, cradling her belly with her hands.

After a time she must have slept. A touch on her back awakened her. The flat of a hand, its shape and texture and temperature as familiar as her own voice. And there was something else, too. The scent of almonds and freshly baked bread.

If she turned around she would break the spell, but it no longer mattered that she could not see him. All she cared about was that he was there.

"I betrayed you," she said, fighting tears.

"No," he said. "You could never do that."

"Are you really here? Have you really come back to me?" Perhaps she spoke. Perhaps she only thought the words.

"For today," he said.

And she realised that it did not matter if it was only for a day. Or only for an hour.

Will he come today? Is this what Matka had meant? Katya had grown so accustomed to her mother's eccentricities that she had stopped questioning what she meant when she said certain things over and over.

He kissed her softly on the back of the neck. He said, "Your mother knows things. Things you forgot."

"I didn't forget," she said. "I just...my father stole them from me. The possibilities. The magic."

"These things can't be stolen. Unless they are forgotten completely, they never really disappear."

"I'm carrying your child," she said, but no answer came other than a soft kiss on the back of her neck. And presently her eyes grew heavy and a long, deep sigh drew her down and down into a profound sleep.

A voice wakened her. Matka's voice, calling from her room.

"I'm hungry, girl," Matka said, as she helped her into the wheelchair. "Pasta, I think. And how about some wine?"

Katya said, "Do you really think wine is a good idea?"

"Pah! What else would I have with pasta? Lemonade?"

At least she hasn't asked for Coca Cola, Katya thought as her mother set the wheelchair in motion and steered a course for the table.

Katya removed the card rack so that she could lay a tablecloth and set the table for dinner. Picking up the pack of cards, she paused and, handing them to her mother, said, "Show me a trick, like you used to. In the old days." The words were out of her mouth before she realised she had asked this in Polish.

Matka looked solemn. It was a sign that she was trying not to smile.

Deftly, she began to shuffle the cards one-handed, fingers and thumb weaving the deck into a new configuration. Then she placed the deck facedown on the tabletop and fanned them out.

"Now," she said in a challenging tone, "Pick a card."

# # #

Thank you for taking the time to read _Dr. North's Wound and Other Stories._ If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it. You will find more works by this author at his blog, http://bonemachines.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback and comments on his work, so please feel free to comment through his blog.
