ET IN ARCADIA

EGO.

Still there and gone away at the same time. Here and there, lost and found, in the everlasting present.

I can't help thinking that, if you want to stay alive, you have to love something. I used to have a friend, a boy called Liam Nugent, and I think I loved him, but now he's gone, and I don't know if I love anybody. Not Dad, that's for sure. Once upon a time, yes, but not now, because he's not really here now. He's lying in bed, silent, far away, and it's like he's dead already. Maybe I could love Elspeth, but I can't really see it. Sometimes I don't even think I like her, but then she does something funny, or she just says something outrageous, and I think I could almost be in love with her, like some character in a book. Though everybody says there's a big difference between being in love and actual love. It gets difficult around about there and I don't like it when things get difficult for no good reason. Complicated, yes; I can do complicated. The world is complicated, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Some books are really complicated. But love probably isn't that complicated, it's just difficult. And maybe love is the wrong word here, anyway, at least when it comes to people. People are hard to love, even if you're having sex with them, or good, funny conversations like the ones Elspeth and I sometimes have. People are difficult, that's just how they are made.

Still, if you want to stay alive, which is hard to do in a place like this, you have to love something, and the one thing I love is the chemical plant. Well, that, and books. I love books. In a place like this, that's almost as weird as saying you love the plant, but at least it's more or less normal. Because you're definitely not normal, you're definitely weird, if you love the plant.

The thing is, I know everybody says it's dangerous, that it's making us all sick, that they should have razed it to the ground years ago and cleared the entire eastern peninsula instead of just leaving it to rot—and that's all true, I know that, but you still have to admit that it's beautiful. Maybe there are more obviously beautiful places in Canada or California, maybe they have gardens and parks with clear lakes and honest-to-Betsy live trees with autumn leaves and all the stuff you see on television, but we don't have those things. All we have is the plant. We're not supposed to go there and I suppose most of the kids don't, but there are plenty who do.

I don't think anybody spends as much time out there as I do, though. When the storms come, I go out and stand at the entrance to one of the old kilns, to watch the rain pouring down. Or I sit up on a ruined crane above the docks and look out over the water, to a point on the horizon that seems to belong, not just to another place, but also to a different time, the past maybe, or maybe the future, when the derelict buildings rot away and the poison in the ground, the poison nobody can see, loses its deadly power. I'm not supposed to go there—nobody is—but it doesn't scare me and it doesn't scare some of the other kids, because I see them out there sometimes, moving like shadows among the ruins, not wanting to be seen, and not wanting to see that anybody else is there with them. I imagine they go out there for the same reasons I do: because it's peaceful, and it doesn't belong to anybody, and, maybe, because it's the only beauty they know. It's odd to say that, but it really, really is beautiful, the way those old horror films they show on TV are beautiful, or the way Annette Crowley in 4B is beautiful, with the white scar running across her cheek and neck where her face was cut open in a car crash.

This beautiful place is called the chemical plant because that's what it once was, though now it's just hundreds of derelict buildings and a network of abandoned railway tracks running past the edge of the Innertown to what remains of the old harbor. If you were to draw a map of this end of the peninsula, you'd have the Outertown first, all mock-Elizabethan and ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges. Then there's the former golf course, conveniently situated so as to divide the good people in the nice houses from the ghosts and ruffians of the Innertown, now nothing more than a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers like my old man. Finally, with virtually nothing to separate it from the town, what remains is an industrial wilderness where the plant used to be. It's called the chemical plant, because it never had any other name, even the land it stands on is almost nameless, a stretch of nowhere that people sometimes call the headland, though the adults rarely talk about it and, when they do, they mostly just refer to it as out there. If you listen to some of the great and good around here, the whole lot comes as one unit, which they've started calling Homeland, and they've got big plans for us all, what they call a “regeneration program.” That's Brian Smith's territory, though, so nobody in the Innertown is holding his breath.

The chemical plant is always beautiful, even when it's frightening, or when you can see how sad it is, when all the little glimmers of what was here before—the woods, the firth, the beaches—show through and you realize it must have been amazing, back in the old times. Sometimes you can still get that feeling. Like when it's early on a summer's day: half-light, ruined buildings looming out of the shadows, the last owls calling to one another from hedge to hedge on the old farm road that runs past the east woods and down to the water. An hour later, and it's completely different. The farm road is straight as a rod and ash white, still ghostly at this hour, soft and uncertain, as if it hadn't quite recovered from the moonlight. The hedges are dotted with pale, brave-looking flowers. Sometimes you can see a boat in the channel, far out on the water and, sometimes, it will be a passenger boat, not the usual utility vessels that wander back and forth, bearing cargos of industrial waste or spent fuel to the lucky towns farther along the peninsula. You can't see anyone on the decks, but this boat is in good condition and it has little round porthole windows all along the side, where there might be cabins. Maybe the people are asleep down there, or sitting in cheerful little circles in the dining room, having breakfast and planning the day ahead. This end of the peninsula isn't a place they would want to see, not even for curiosity's sake. If they did look out at some point—farther along the headland, say, beyond the last of the concrete piers—they might see smoke in the east woods, thin yellowish wisps of it among the leaves like the smoke signals in old Westerns. That might be me, or some other boy from the Innertown, sitting out all night because he can't stand to listen as his father lies breathing in the next room, every breath a step away from total absence, a reason to be afraid, but also for celebration.

There are plenty of places to go out on the headland: the poison wood, the docks, the warehouses, the kilns. The old processing plants, where the smell is still so strong you can almost taste the poison you are breathing. There are places to go, and there are still places you can't get into, inner rooms within rooms that you don't know for sure where or what they are, though you know something is there. I like the strips of ground between one place and another, and all the places where you can go and never see anybody, the mudflat-and-oil smell of the farther edge, the old loading yards with their rusting cranes and that one crippled boat, eaten away by years of wind and salt water, deserted, of course, though I always feel that someone might be there, not a ghost, or anything of that ilk, but not a man either, or not a man from anywhere I know. It would have been immense once, that boat; now it's just a broken hull, the decks rusting, the lower levels a mass of rotting stairs and gangways, dangerous and unsteady under my feet, leading down to a reddish darkness, where the vast, stagnant tanks lie, heavy with salt and nickel. This was where everything led to once: the road, the train tracks, the walkways—their only purpose had been to fill huge boats like this with unimaginable quantities of poison and fertilizer and dark, oily liquors that would travel halfway around the world in the sealed hull while great oceans raged around them. When one of those anonymous-looking ships broke on rocks, or foundered in difficult waters, you can imagine all the government types and PR folks back home figuring out the angles— what lies to tell, what they think they can get away with, what they know for sure they can deny. And all the way down, in sweet water teeming with the cast of The Blue Planet, the ship would fall, split open like a coconut, pouring out gallon after gallon of its venomous cargo.

Sometimes I think the headland is at its most beautiful in winter, when everything you take for granted, everything you don't bother to look at during the rest of the year, all the hidden angles and recesses, the unseen pipework and fields of rubble, come back new, redefined by the snow and, at the same time, perfected, made abstract, like the world in a blueprint. Everything looks closer together and, at the same time, it's like there's more space than there was in autumn. When the first snow comes, you start to see new things, and you realize how much of the world is invisible, or just on the point of being seen, if you could only find the right kind of attention to pay it, like turning the dial on a radio to the right channel, the one where everything is clearer and someone is talking in a language that you understand right away, even though you know it's not the language you thought you knew. And then there's the way it's all transformed, how it all looks so innocent, as if it couldn't hurt you in a million years, all those drums of crusted and curdled effluent, all those pits with their lingering traces of poison or radiation, or whatever it is the authorities want to keep sealed up here, along with the dangerous mass of our polluted bodies. Under the snow, it all looks pure, even when a wet rust mark bleeds through, or some trace of cobalt blue or verdigris rises up through an inch of white, it's beautiful. Really, they should send an artist out here, some artist who isn't squeamish, but isn't just cutting sharks in half, either. A war artist, maybe. Because if this resembles anything, it's a war zone. But then, isn't a war zone beautiful too, if you look at it the right way?

Years ago, the railway still ran along the coast, bringing in freight cars full of raw materials at night, when the people were sleeping, so their dreams were laced with the noise of goods trains and the shifting of points, an undercurrent of shunts and whistles that continued into the daytime, reminding them that they belonged to this place, that it was in their blood and their nerves. That's what I imagine, anyway: for about as long as I have been alive, the plant has been closed—not only closed, in fact, but condemned, a government-certified zone of irreversible contamination that no one is officially supposed to enter. Not that anybody makes any great effort to keep us out, either. That would mean drawing too much attention to the place and people would start getting worked up again about what might be out there. Because, really, nobody knows what's out there. This is what makes it interesting, for me, and the others like me: for as long as I have known it, the plant has been empty and silent, a vast labyrinth of corridors and abandoned rooms, some open to the sky, others with glass or metal roofing and, above each kiln—we call them kilns, but there's no real evidence to say what they were used for—a giant chimney rises up into the clouds, a wide brick chimney that, in the wet months, fills with great cascading falls of rain, just as the glass roofs and the sheets of corrugated metal on the storerooms will break into a music that sounds repetitious when you first hear it, but soon begins to reveal itself as an infinitely complex fabric of faint overtones and distant harmonics that is never quite the same from one moment to the next. Maybe they should send a musician out here, not a painter. Turn it into music. That would be something. I can picture trendy people in warehouse apartments, people in public relations or something, sitting on their prayer mats and meditating to the sound of the rain bouncing off the corrugated roof of an old storeroom, all of it carefully sampled and filtered through a hundred synthesizers or whatever, with some Tibetan singing bowls and a dulcimer thrown in.

They don't make any huge efforts to keep people out now, but they don't really need to, do they? To begin with, we had scavengers and such, industrial beachcombers looking for something to sell, but they soon gave up. Now, nobody comes out here except a few kids, and I know that we all feel the same way when we are out on the headland by ourselves. I've stumbled upon others now and then, and I've felt something break, not just in my own mind but in theirs, too: a sense of being part of the quiet, of being outside time and, harder to put into words, and impossible to convey to someone else, a feeling of reverence for the place, whether for the clumps of wildflowers and grasses that grow amid the broken glass and rubble, or for how still it can be on a summer's afternoon—so still, it's as if nothing has ever happened, here or anywhere else. So still, it's as if no one had ever existed, and time was just about to start. Maybe it seems daft to talk about reverence, but this complex of ruined buildings and disused railways that runs as far as I can walk in any direction, whether along the coast, or inland through scrubby woodlands and fields of gorse, this apparent wasteland is all the church we have, and I know, when I meet someone out there, some boy with a kite or a box of matches, some girl I recognize from school, I know I am interrupting, not some childish game or one of those acts of supposed vandalism the adults are always complaining about. No: what I have chanced upon is a secret ceremony, a private ritual. When that happens, I can tell that the other person, this other boy or girl, is unquiet, unsettled, as if he or she has been caught out in some way: perhaps we stop and talk, exchanging a few pointless words before going on our way; more often, we exchange shy, almost guilty looks, then steal away, hurrying back to the safety of the long grass or a dank storeroom, out of the flow of time, and away from the gaze of others.

I used to come out here with Liam. That was before he disappeared— before he went away, as the adults always say, though I know they are hiding something. I know something bad happened to him, just as I know—we all know—that something bad happened to the others who have vanished. Five, now: all boys around my age, with parents and friends and school desks, vanished into thin air, leaving nothing but a tangle of sheets, or a book set facedown on a bedside table, to show they had once been present. Five boys from the Innertown, a place nobody cares about, a polluted, discolored town at the far end of a peninsula most people don't even know is there on the maps. Five boys: Mark Wilkinson, William Ash, Alex Slocombe, Stewart Riva—and Liam Nugent, the last to go, lost somewhere between his house and the sports hall, and nothing to show where he had gone, or when he was last here. No mark, no clue, no sign of a struggle, no note, no stain on the air at the point where he turned and walked away—if, as the adults tell us, he chose to go, of his own free will, tired, as the others were, of this dying town at the end of a desolate peninsula, a place where nothing good can ever happen, where boys like Liam, or Alex, or Stewart, have nothing to look forward to. Liam was my best friend. He was a long, thin guy, a good swimmer, not handsome or anything, though some of the girls liked him for his personality. He was fucking crazy, to be honest, and he didn't have much of a home life, but then there's not many of us have much of a home life. His dad was then and still is the peninsula's number-one piss artist, and the only way that Liam's disappearance has changed his life is that he occasionally gets bought a sympathy drink at the club that he mightn't have got otherwise. That old fucker has got grief down to a fine art: humble, stoical, but essentially a shattered man, he sits at the bar and waits for one of the gullible to wander by. He never had a good thing to say to or about Liam when he was still here. He even stole his paper-delivery money to buy vodka. Liam was pretty pissed off about that, and he'd taken pretty much all he was going to take from the old fucker, but if he'd been planning to leave, he would have told me about it. He would have wanted me to go with him, for God's sake. That was how things were with us: I can't remember a day going by when I didn't see him; we had secrets that nobody else knew; we did everything together. If he had decided to leave, there's no way he would have gone without me.

But he didn't go away. Nobody goes away. The kids talk about it all the time, but the truth is, none of us really knows what's out there, twenty, or fifty, or a hundred miles along the coast road, because nobody has ever gone that far. People from the Innertown don't leave, not even to go on holiday or visit relatives. They talk about leaving all the time, of course, but they never actually get out. So when the adults put about the story that Liam had gone off to seek his fortune in the outside world, just like those other boys before him, I knew something was wrong. Liam hadn't left the Innertown, he wasn't halfway along the peninsula, walking away in the evening rain, he wasn't standing by a road a hundred miles distant, hitchhiking to some city he had seen on television. He wasn't just gone from his desk in Room 5A, he wasn't just missing from the five-a- side team, he wasn't swimming somewhere in a big, Olympic-size pool or off some beach in Greece, he was gone from the world altogether. Lost. I knew it, because I could feel it.

It was like when the snow melts, and afterward it seems that something is missing. Some essential piece of the apparatus of the world, some necessary presence has vanished overnight in the quiet patter of rain and wind gusting through the cracked pane in the landing window. That was how it felt to me when Liam disappeared: something essential was gone, and it didn't seem right that everything else should just continue, the way it had done before. I missed his voice, and the way he had of making faces at me in the changing-room mirror, just as I missed the white glare of the snow on the railings of the public library: it was the same thing, the same local flaw in the world that should have caused the whole system to crash. I think about him all the time, and I know he wouldn't have run away without me. It might be a funny old world, like my dad used to say when he was still talking, but it's not that funny.

When I say the plant is beautiful, I'm not saying that I think it was ever a good thing for the town. I know it's made people sick, and I can't imagine all the hours I spend out there will do me any good when I'm older. But then, who knows if I'll even get older. Some kids don't even make it to twenty, and when they die, nobody knows what was wrong with them. So I have to be realistic. I have lived here for fourteen years. Fourteen and two-thirds. I have breathed this air for more than five thousand days. I have breathed and swallowed and digested the smuts and tainted dust and blackened rain of the headland for around seven million minutes. How many breaths does that come to? How many pints of water? How much bread? How many eggs? With every breath I take the world into my lungs, with every swallow I take in, not just food and drink, but everything that it contains, all the traces and smears and soot falls, all the threads of copper and nickel and 2,4,5-T and who knows what else. People say we are what we are, the future is written in our blood—and you have to admit, there's no avoiding chemistry. If you lived out here, I don't think you'd argue with that.

A large percentage of the people who worked in production at the plant are either sick or dead now. My dad, for example. My dad has been sick for almost as long as I can remember. I don't suppose he ever was much of a talker, but now he doesn't say anything, not one word. Of course, folk from the Innertown don't like to talk anyway, not unless they're teachers, but at least they exchange greetings, a “good morning” here, a remark about the weather there, the little bits and bobs of conversation that allow people to get around one another peaceably. My dad doesn't do any of that. When he was first ill, he would sit in the kitchen listening to the radio, or he would go out into the garden if it was warm and watch the weeds growing. After my mother left, though, he just collapsed in on himself. These days, he stays in his room most of the time, living in utter silence. Sometimes he sleeps all day, but quite often he just lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling. When he does get up, he just sits in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. It never does, though, because he keeps forgetting to switch it on. When Elspeth comes round, we go into my room and play games that we make up as we go along, but we do it quietly so he can't hear. I don't think he'd like it if he knew what we were doing. Not that he suspects anything, as far as I can tell, and he likes Elspeth. Sometimes he even smiles when he sees her. It's good when he smiles. I wished he'd do it more, and preferably not just when my cute girlfriend comes round.

Though I suppose I ought to be glad he doesn't talk much because, if he did, he'd probably just go on about my mother and how unhappy he was when she walked out. Or worse, how much he loved her and how great she was. In fact, I know that's what he would do. My mother wasn't really that interested when she was here, as far as I remember, but at least she was around. I remember when she left, she sat me down at the kitchen table and tried to explain what she was doing. She didn't try explaining herself to Dad, she just threw a few things in a bag and pissed off while he was upstairs sleeping, but she took a few minutes to give me the lowdown on how difficult it was for her.

“I'm going to be gone awhile,” she said. “So you'll have to keep an eye on your dad for me.” She was doing that tone of voice she'd used since I was two, only now I was ten, and I knew exactly what she was doing. “Can you do that for me?” she said. “Can you look after your dad for a bit, till I get back?”

I shook my head. “You're not coming back,” I said.

Her face crumpled a bit. I suppose she was hoping I wouldn't make this any more difficult for her than it already was. “Why do you say that?” she said, all pathetic.

“ ‘Cause you're not,” I said. “You're going for good.”

She started to cry then. Christ, it was so fucking hard for her all the time, looking after my dad, looking after me, no time to herself. She was still young, she had a life ahead of her. I heard her say that once to Jenny Allison's mum outside the Spar shop, and I knew exactly what she was up to. “I'm not,” she said. “I just need to get away for a bit.” She smiled through her tears. “You can understand that, can't you?” she said.

I didn't smile back. “Sure,” I said.

She nodded and put her hand on my shoulder. “Of course you can,” she said.

“I mean,” I said, “you're still young. You've got your whole life ahead of you.” I started to wonder, then, how old she was. I don't think I knew.

She looked at me as if I'd slapped her. “What?” she said, all innocent. “Where did you get that from?”

“You,” I said. I looked her in the eyes. She'd stopped crying now and she wasn't smiling anymore. She stood up. Here we go, I thought. Time for the tough, what's-love-got-to-do-with-it routine. That woman could go from sweet salt tears to hard as nails in thirty seconds flat.

“Well,” she said, “I thought you'd understand. I mean, you're not a little kid anymore.”

“I never was,” I said. “You just liked to think I was.”

She didn't say anything. Her suitcase was in the hall and she headed out there then, hard bitch, nobody understands her, so fair enough, she'll just get on with it. She put her coat on, and those fancy leather gloves Dad bought her, then she opened the front door and picked up the suitcase. The last thing she said, before she disappeared forever, was, “Let your dad sleep. He needs his rest.”

Translation: Don't go waking the bastard up till I'm long gone, I don't want him coming after me and making some big scene. Which, as it happens, is exactly what I didn't want either. I didn't want him humiliated, maybe on the street or somewhere else in front of a lot of people. Not by this selfish bitch. She didn't even close the front door behind her, she just walked off down the path and that was it. Haven't seen her since.

Thing is, when I think about it, I remember how she looked standing in that doorway, and I remember that she was pretty. Prettier than she had looked in a long time. She had lipstick on, and she was wearing that nice winter coat that made me think of Ewa Krzyzewska in Ashes and Diamonds. Plus, she had done her hair up, and she looked fucking amazing. At that moment, I had to admit, she was something special. A young woman with the rest of her life ahead of her. If she hadn't been my mother, I would definitely have fancied her. But she was my mother, and there she was going out the door, and I knew I'd never see her again. And all I could think of was how pretty she was, no matter what a hard bitch she was being. I didn't say anything to her when she was going. I didn't want her to think I was accepting anything. As the door closed, I was starting to pack things up in my mind and move on. You have to move on. After a minute, I stood up and went over to the sink. There was a little stack of dishes on the draining board and an ashtray, with one lipstick-smeared stub in it. She must have forgotten to wash that up before she packed. And I was standing there, staring at the little pile of ashes and the red of the lipstick, and the words of some old song came into my head. I don't know where I'd heard it.

Laura is the face in the misty light,
Footsteps that you hear down the hall …

That was her name. Laura. I fucking hated her.

After a while, I went upstairs and looked in on Dad. He was sleeping like a baby and I was about to leave him to it when I saw the envelope on the dressing table. Very quietly, my mind on tiptoe, I walked over and retrieved it. I wasn't sure what I intended to do, but I wanted to see what it said before I let him see it. I went downstairs, closing the door behind me so he could sleep in peace. When I got back to the kitchen, I opened it as carefully as I could. I could easily put it back in another envelope, I thought, before he woke up. But when I read what it said, I couldn't help myself, I just tore the stupid thing into small pieces. What it said was: Gone away, can't say where. I'll send somebody for my things. That was all she said. Two sorry little sentences. She couldn't even do him the courtesy of a paragraph.

They say I was a quick birth, that it was all over before they even got old Laura as far as the maternity unit. I'm not surprised really. Once it figured out whose belly it was in, my little infant brain probably decided to get the hell out of there and try its luck in the wild cold world. Trouble is, the wild cold world is mostly two things I'm not very good at, which is other kids and school. I mean, I don't mind other kids that much, it's just that the politics is so fucking boring. X is friends with Y, but he doesn't like Z, and Z is Y's mate. Cathy wants to go out with Tommy but he wants to go out with Kerry, who is Cathy's best friend. Meanwhile, Kerry wants to go out with him, but she doesn't want to hurt Cathy's feelings. God knows why anybody would want to go out with Tommy in the first place, because he's as thick as two short planks, but there you go, that's kids for you. Little adults, all hurt feelings and consideration. Then, suddenly, they all go crazy for a while, everybody fucks or fights everybody else and, before you know it, you've got history with all kinds of people you wouldn't even give the time of day if you could avoid it.

That's my view, anyway. But then, I'm not that keen on kids. Mr. O'Brien told me once that I was misanthropic, and the other kids in the class all laughed, though I can't imagine any of those fuckers even knew what it meant. I can't remember why he said it, what I'd said or done to provoke such an outburst on his part. Usually he was so positive, all JOY OF DISCOVERY and AMAZING FACTS and ISN'T NATURE BLOODY WONDERFUL. Ironically enough, if there was any kid in that class who could have agreed with him on all that, it would have been me. Up to a point, anyway.

“You're a nasty little misanthrope, Wilson,” he said, standing over me, gazing into my face with a sudden and surprising air of loathing. I was quite taken aback. “Do you know what a misanthrope is, Wilson?” That was something he did, he always used our names. At the end of the sentence when he was asking a question, at the beginning if he wanted you to stop doing something. He was a big man, very tall, with lank grayish hair and a long, thoughtful-looking face, like a Swedish actor. Think Max von Sydow as the Knight in The Seventh Seal. All he needed was the accent.

I nodded. “Misanthrope,” I said. “Somebody who, for good reason, doesn't think much of the human race. Also a play by Molière, the French dramatist.”

Mr. O'Brien snorted. “Which you, of course, have read,” he said.

I did smug for him. “As a matter of fact,” I said “I have.”

“Well,” he said. “We're very clever today, aren't we, Wilson?”

“I'm very clever every day,” I said. Some of the other kids laughed. I could see Liam out of the corner of my eye, shaking his head and making cut-throat signs with his finger.

“Are you now?” O'Brien said. “Well, if you're so clever, Wilson, perhaps you could write me a nice long essay about—let me see … ‘Great Philanthropists of History' How does that strike you as a title, Wilson? I think it has a certain ring to it.”

“All right, then,” I said. I picked up my pen.

O'Brien laughed a sad, dry laugh. “Oh no,” he said. “Not on my time. I have the education of your highly advanced little brain to attend to.” He smiled graciously. “Give it to me tomorrow,” he said. “You've got till lunch -time.”

He looked around. “Do any of you know what a philanthropist is? Cunningham?” He walked over to the smallest boy in the class and stood towering over him. You find that with teachers: as soon as they have a run-in with somebody, they go straight to the weakest cub in the pack. It's how they restore order. Just like hyenas.

Cunningham looked up at him hopefully. “Is it a stamp collector, sir?” he said.

I didn't know what to write at first, for O'Brien's essay. I didn't want to do it the way he wanted me to do it, writing shit about Andrew Carnegie and stuff. I wanted to do what I needed to do, so I wouldn't get any more extra assignments, but I had to work in something else, too. Something oblique. Then I remembered this old story about three brothers. Or maybe it was seven. How, one after another, the eldest first, they leave home and go out into the world, to travel the gorse-scented roads in search of fortune and fame, or to perform some task, to find a horse that can run faster than the wind, or a bird with feathers of gold. The older brothers are strong and confident but, in the end, they fail the test. Perhaps they come close, perhaps they catch the bird, or they find out that the horse is concealed in some far valley where nobody goes, but each has a fatal flaw, not a vice so much as a failure of attention, a tendency to be pulled off course by the noise and warmth of a busy tavern, or the smile of a pretty girl. Only the youngest comes through. He is smaller and weaker than his brothers, but he is clever and modest and he is wise enough to know that good fortune comes from the least promising encounters. He understands that, when you meet a talking animal, you had better listen to what you are being told. He knows how to pass the door of a tavern and not be drawn in; he knows how to flirt with a pretty girl, then move on unscathed. At the end of the story, he captures the golden bird and he gets to keep the magic horse; sometimes he even marries the princess—and because of the cunning he has shown, and his readiness to accept the good luck that the world offers to those who come ready to accept it, he gets to help his wayward brothers. He drags one from some vile tavern, the other from the King's prison, he settles debts and pacifies wronged fathers and, at the last, he brings his brothers home to share in his happiness. Which does not please them in the slightest. They feel humiliated, they want to steal away the princess, they wonder why the pipsqueak of the family got all the luck. Maybe they try to betray him, but they do not succeed, and he forgives them even this sin, as he forgave all the others. It's the one thing he can do by himself, this forgiveness. Everything else was a gift: he was born small, and cunning, and modest, and all he did, as he traveled through the same adventures that ruined his brothers, was to follow his own nature. Except for the forgiveness, nothing really came from him. It was grace, pure and simple. A grace that, for one reason or another, his brothers never got to share.

So that's what I write about. Grace. Then I put in some stuff about the Innertown and its problems and how the self-appointed philanthropists in the Outertown aren't doing much to help us. I tell how the people who live here are trapped, how they can't imagine any other life. I give a little history of the place: how, two generations ago, there was almost nothing here, just a couple of farms and some cottages along the shore. How most of the people who live here are the children, or at most the grandchildren of people who came from somewhere else. I say how it's a fairly young community, how, for example, Constable Morrison is only the fourth policeman to live in the police house, full time at least. We should be connected in all kinds of ways to the outside world, and yet we're not. The Innertown is a young settlement that grew old before its time, old and tired, the people bound to this soil, not by work or family or some more general fondness for the light or the weather, but by inertia. I even chuck in a bit of mystical stuff, about how it sometimes feels as if the headland has some kind of hidden power, drawing people in for no real reason and holding them there for what seems like an eternity. By the time I've done with it, the Innertown is starting to sound like hell. Still, it's not a bad essay and it says something, I think. Not about philanthropists, of course, because I don't believe in any of that crap. Guys like that, the ones who spend their whole time getting rich, they don't love other people. For them it's all tax deductions and PR. Still, whatever the essay might have said, however faulty its logic, O'Brien never got back to me about it. When I handed it in, he took it and said some mealy-mouthed stuff about me learning a lesson, though I'm not sure what lesson he wanted me to learn. He didn't mark the essay and give it back to me. In fact, he didn't say anything more about it. I wonder if he even read it. Not that I care, I'm just curious. It would say a lot about a teacher, if he could make you write something like that and then just chuck it in a bin, because he'd only set it as a punishment for cheek, or whatever. Like he threw out a challenge that he couldn't be bothered to live up to himself. Like he was a fucking wanker to be frank, and all that JOY OF DISCOVERY stuff was just plain bullshit. Something like that, it could make a kid cynical for life. Didn't bother me, though. After all, I'd kept my side of the bargain.

The one thing you can count on kids to do is talk. Round here, they talk about all the usual shit, but they also talk about what is happening to the boys who disappear, and speculate as to where they are. The boys get all sensitive, and the girls put on sentimental voices for the lost boys. Or they argue constantly about how to get away from this poisoned little town. It's the same argument Liam and I always had before he disappeared: he would tell me various plans he'd made for us getting out into the big wide world and making our way, but I would just shake my head and laugh, while he went on, making up more and more incredible stories about the possibilities the outside world might offer, if only we would dare to go and find out. To be honest, those stories of his made me feel a bit desperate: I couldn't understand how he could believe in stuff like that, all that stupid naïve crap, like the stuff you get on TV.

“We can't go anywhere,” I would say. “Not without money.”

“We could get money,” he would say.

“How could we do that?”

“We could ask people to help us,” he would say. “Like those sponsored bike rides. They could sponsor us to see how far we'd get.” He thought about this for a moment and decided he liked the idea. “Yeah,” he said. “A sponsored escape. We could go around door to door, put up posters, the whole shit.” He marqueed his hands. “Sponsor a new life,” he said. “Send these boys out into the world and watch them prosper.”

I encouraged him. “Make the impossible possible,” I said.

“Make the possible impossible,” he said.

“Make the probable unlikely,” I said.

He did a double take. “What the hell does that mean?” he said.

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Anyway, you don't get the sponsor money till afterward. You have to do the bike ride first, that's how it works. First you do, then they pay.”

“Well, that wouldn't work,” he said. “Couldn't we do it the other way round?”

“It wouldn't be proper sponsoring then,” I say. “How would people know you were going to do what they were sponsoring you to do?”

“Why wouldn't we?” he said. “Why else would we want the money?”

“They don't know that, though.” I looked at him. He seemed genuinely frustrated, like the idea had been some kind of a go before, and now I was ruining it. “They don't know that, do they?” I said.

He was quiet for a minute, then he shook his head. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I look at you in awe and wonder.” That was a quote from a film we'd seen on TV. And the Band Played On. It was just this little piece of badinage that runs through the film, between the Centers for Disease Control guys, played by Matthew Modine and one of my favorite actors, Saul Rubinek. Liam and I had sort of adopted it. Usually it was funny, but this time it felt a bit sad. A couple of weeks later, he was gone.

What I felt, when he disappeared, was grief. But it didn't start with him going, it started long before that, maybe on that day, or during some other conversation we had about getting out. After he disappeared, I wanted people to do something, to make something visible, to say something that wasn't already scripted. At the same time, though, I couldn't stand all that public stuff. Because the public stuff isn't grief, and it doesn't help anybody. It isn't grief, it isn't anger, it's just going through the motions, doing all the stuff that you think you're supposed to do. Anger might have given rise to something, it might have made a difference, but this was all uncertainty and constant second-guessing, that feeling you have that it's probably somebody you pass on the street who is doing these bad things, some pervert maybe, who just looks like a saddo, or maybe like an ordinary guy, maybe one of the Outertown people, somebody with a wife and kids and a big car and an office somewhere. Brian Smith, maybe. Because you have to ask yourself how a creep like that operates. Anybody who gets away with the kind of crap he's gotten away with for so long either has to be very clever, or he's got some kind of power. That's how the world works. The bad people win and the rest pretend that they haven't noticed what's going on, to save face. It's hard to admit that you're powerless, but you have to get used to the idea. That's why they have school, of course. It's there to train you in the vital discipline of being powerless.

Of course, the opposite of school is books. Me, I love books, but I can't afford to buy them. Nobody round here can, except maybe the business people over in the Outertown. But then, the Outertown kids all go to college somewhere, and they probably don't read anyway. I heard Suzie What's-her-name is doing Business Studies now, whatever that is, and little Steven Fuckface whose dad has the nice midnight-blue Mercedes is away at some fancy school where they dress up in funny clothes and toast muffins all day. I don't imagine it involves much reading in either case. It's so typical of how the world works: the people who love books, or whatever, can't afford to buy them, while the people with tons of cash do Business Studies, so they can get more money and keep the book readers powerless. All us poor folks have is the public library. Though I keep seeing in the papers that Brian Smith and the other bigwigs gave loads of money, tax-deductible, for that, so I suppose that trickle-down crap works after all. I mean, hardly a day goes by when I don't thank my luckies that the Brian Smiths of this world have enough money to spare to maintain the public library in the Innertown. Hardly a day goes by when people don't ask themselves how the Brian Smiths of this world got all that hard-earned in the first place, but there's a whole ecology of cash flow and accounting to ensure we don't work that out. And to keep us sweet, they build libraries and sponsor charities.

So they built a new public library, right next to the old snooker hall— and a very fine building it is, by Innertown standards. I imagine they even bought some new books but, for a long time, I didn't see them. Most of the books in the library are crap, romances and thrillers and cowboy stuff, because that's what the people of the Innertown like, right, moronic books about cowboys and nurses and spies that are all scuffed and old. What new ones they have are even worse: fucking self-help books and novels about rich people having mad passionate affairs with their tennis coach and shit, books about home improvements—really useful to us Innertown folk, what with all our disposable income—and folkloric hemstitching or whatever. How to make a patchwork quilt from leftover sweaters. Novels by former politicians who were never that good as politicians, or television celebrities who need a sideline to pay for their alimony settlements. Cookery books by ex–rugby stars and models, books about Pilates by former soap actors, books about traveling around France or Bolivia on a donkey or a motorcycle, books about plastic surgery, books about how you ended up hating yourself and why you should love yourself in case you, like the celebrity author, develop a cocaine habit and a seven-figure debt. These are the books we have in the Innertown library, mostly, because this is what morons like us like to read. This is what we need to know. How some celebrity did ten years of barbiturates and vodka, then saw the light. How some fucking millionaire made his money. How some government minister fought his way out of the inner city so he could take bribes with the best of them.

Almost, but not quite. Nowadays, there's this mad librarian called John, a big fat bloke with bad hair and worse glasses, who sneaks a few good things in under the radar every now and then. I didn't like John when I first met him. Now I think he's all right—though I imagine he could do with getting laid sometime in the next fifty years. I mean, I love books, but John is a pathologically compulsive reader, which mostly means that he can turn up for work in the morning with egg yolk on his tie and hair out of a Godzilla movie and he hasn't even noticed. To begin with, I thought he was wrapped too tight for the Innertown, but I more or less like him now. He loves books, and he knows everything there is to know about music. That's all the life he has.

When I first met him, though, I have to admit that he got up my nose. I'd been browsing the shelves, looking for something new and coming up stumped. I'd read all the Dostoyevsky they had, the complete fucking works in some ancient edition with red-and-yellow dust wrappers, so they looked like boxes of cheap sweets. I'd read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which was the only book of hers they had managed to acquire. Not much happened, but I liked the way she looked at things, and I'd have liked to read more of her stuff. I'd have enjoyed knowing what she thought of the Innertown; that would have been an amazing book. I read Nostromo and Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and I'd try to imagine what it would have been like to have Joseph Conrad as a mate, or maybe an uncle, when you were a kid. I'd read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and I'd almost cried at the end, around about the point where Gatsby's dad turns up. I'd read fucking Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and wondered why nobody ever bought the guy a dictionary. I'd read Diary of a Nobody, and all the Charles Dickens stuff they had, and they were great, but I couldn't get on with Trollope. I'd read the anthology of poetry from 1400 to 1945. I'd read some history books, some biographies, and a book about English folk music that looked like it had been used as a doorstop for fifty years. By the time John arrived at the library, I was running out of stuff to read, next step sniffing glue and juvenile delinquency. Or worse still, celebrity memoirs.

That was when I found Marcel Proust.

It was a nice edition, almost brand-new and nice colors, all dust-wrapped and smelling of the printers. Blue on the cover, like some French song about la mer. Weird titles. When I saw the complete set on the shelf I almost cried, it was so beautiful. I grabbed the first four volumes, the limit of books I could borrow on my ticket, and carried them off to the checkout desk. That was when I met John. He had just arrived, to take over from the stuck-up cow who used to be head librarian, and he was working what budget he had for the Greater Good of all. That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it. And every now and then, you get to pass something on.

John looked at me a bit snooty, that first time, when I wandered over to the checkout desk clutching my prize. I think he was a bit of a snob; he probably figured he'd ended up working in the Innertown library because of some cruel twist of fate. “You'd do better to read these one at a time,” he said, picking up the first volume, which was intriguingly called Swann's Way. “It's slow, but satisfying reading. Definitely not Rider Haggard.”

Of course, I'd never heard of Rider Haggard, though it was a pretty good name for a writer. Too good really. Maybe he'd made it up. “Is it good?” I asked.

“Good?” He looked at me over his wobbly glasses. “Yes. It's good. It's better in French, though, it has to be said.”

“French?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have it in French?”

“Why?” He smiled slightly. “Can you read French?”

“Not really,” I said. I was doing languages in school, but I was pretty sure Miss Lemmon's French classes hadn't quite equipped me for this yet. “Un petit peu,” I added, hopefully.

“Not much point, then,” he said.

I was a bit annoyed by that. “So,” I said, “have you read it in French?”

He nodded. Smug fucking bastard.

“What, all of it?”

“It's a real page-turner.”

“I thought you said it was slow.”

“Definition of a page-turner,” he said. Then he grinned, and I knew he was just mucking about, and I kind of liked him from that moment on. It was John, after all, who made me go back and read Herman Melville. I'd consumed some kids' version of Moby-Dick they had in the junior library, but not the real book. For some reason, the powers that be decided many years ago that Moby-Dick is some sort of kids' book, and they put it out in all kinds of weird editions, all abridged and illustrated and gutted to the bare bones of an “adventure.” Worse still, they had Melville down as a one-book wonder, so I didn't even know about The Confidence-Man, or Bartleby the Scrivener or Billy Budd, until John came along. Nobody should ever forget the debt of eternal gratitude they owe to whoever it was who first got them to read Herman Melville properly. According to John, the real version of Moby-Dick was a page-turner, too—and he was right about that, just as he was right about Proust and all those others. The definition of a page-turner really ought to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one. Or something like that. Of course, as right as he was about all things literary, John was wrong about pretty much everything else.

After that first meeting, I spent as much time as I could in the library. Before John arrived, I'd just gone in, browsed the shelves, picked four books, got them checked out, and ran home. Some woman my dad's age, with the same gray skin as his, only upright and walking about all by herself, would stamp them for me, looking like she'd rather call the police than let me borrow these particular fucking books. Once, she'd stopped midway and looked me in the face, possibly for the first time ever.

“Do you actually like Henry James?” she said.

I nodded. “Can't get enough of him,” I said.

“You know, we've got some great books for teenagers in the Young Adults section,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not really my kind of thing,” I said.

She frowned then and stamped my copy of The Turn of the Screw. “I hope you enjoy it,” she said. “Henry James may be just a bit old for you.”

I smiled happily. “Well,” I said, “I only read him for the sex scenes.”

I thought she'd crack a smile then, but she didn't.

So I was pretty happy when the old cow suddenly retired and John showed up. I tried to imagine his life: where he lived, what he did. I thought maybe he wrote books in his spare time. If he did, I can't imagine they were any good. He liked books too much. Though I sometimes wondered what he liked them for. There was one night, for example: I was in late, and John was sitting at the desk, reading a book with a bright, gaudy-looking cover. It was quiet, and he was completely absorbed in whatever it was he was reading. That made me curious, so I went over and tried to sneak a closer peek at the cover, to see what the title was. But as soon as he saw me, John laid the book flat on the desk and started reading out loud.

“When engaged in hand-to-hand combat” he said, “your life is always at stake. There is only one purpose in combat, and that is to kill your enemy. Never face an enemy with the idea of knocking him out. The chances are extremely good that he will kill you instead. When a weapon is not available, one must resort to the full use of his natural weapons. The natural weapons are—” He looked up at me. “What are the natural weapons, Leonard?” he said.

I shook my head. I didn't want to interrupt the reading.

John shook his head likewise and went on. “One” he said. “The knife-edge of your hand. Two: Fingers folded at the second joint or knuckle. Three: The protruding knuckle of your second finger. Four: The heel of your hand.” He gave me an amazed-and-happy look. “Isn't it great, Leonard? This is a book that actually tells you how to kill people with your bare hands.”

“What the fuck is it?” I said.

“The Anarchist Cookbook” he said. “Listen.” He went back to reading from the book. “Attacking is a primary factor. A fight was never won by defensive action. Attack with all of your strength. At any point or any situation, some vulnerable point on your enemy's body will be open for attack.” He flicked the page, then went on. He'd obviously been reading this for a while. “This bit is good,” he said. “There are many vulnerable points of the body. We will cover them now: Eyes: Use your fingers in a V-shape and attack in gouging motion. Nose: (Extremely vulnerable) Strike with the knife-edge of the hand along the bridge, which will cause breakage, sharp pain, temporary blindness, and if the blow is hard enough, death. Also, deliver a blow with the heel of your hand in an upward motion, this will shove the bone up into the brain causing death. Adam's Apple: This spot is usually pretty well protected, but if you get the chance, strike hard with the knife-edge of your hand. This should sever the wind-pipe, and then it's all over in a matter of minutes.” He grinned at me. “Et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “Isn't it fantastic?”

“Why's that then?” I say.

He looked at me. “This book teaches you how to kill and maim people,” he said. “I mean, at last a book that is actually useful.” He quoted again. “Ears: Coming up from behind an enemy and cupping the hands in a clapping motion over the victim's ears can kill him immediately. The vibrations caused from the clapping motion will burst his eardrums, and cause internal bleeding in the brain.” He genuinely was excited. “I didn't know that,” he said. “Did you know that, Leonard?”

I didn't say anything. I hadn't realized John had such a deep and abiding interest in fucking people up.

“Here's a good bit,” he said. “Listen: There are many more ways to kill and injure an enemy, but these should work best for the average person. This is meant only as information and I would not recommend that you use this for a simple High School Brawl. Use these methods only, in your opinion, if your life is in danger. Any one of these methods could very easily kill or cause permanent damage to someone.” He was so happy. “This guy tells you how to kill people, and then he tells you not to do it.”

“Well,” I said, “that's very responsible of him.”

John snorted. “Hell, that's not going to make any difference,” he said. “Once you've got stuff like this at your fingertips, you're going to use it, right?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Who are you going to use it on?”

He laughed. “Well,” he said, “I've started a list. I'm up to twenty-seven now.”

“Am I on it?”

John looked hurt. “Why would I want to kill you, Leonard?” he said. “I mean, you of all people. The one other bibliophile in town?”

“Edmund Hillary,” I said. I felt a bit grim, to be honest.

“Edmund Hillary?” He looked puzzled.

“Because I'm there,” I said. Of course I knew that it doesn't matter what you read in a book, because you have to have the will to kill somebody to actually do it and you can't read up on will. It doesn't matter what techniques you master, you actually have to be prepared to do it. The surprising thing about most people, considering how much we all hate one another, is that they're not prepared for that. They fantasize about it all the time, but they couldn't do it. At some unspoken level, that fact defines everything that happens between us. It's that simple. Even in the most law-abiding place, what makes the difference is that one man is capable of killing and another isn't. You put those two men in the same room, and it doesn't matter what else comes into play. It's the difference between giving a shit and not. No matter how bad things get, most people still care about something. That's what makes them so fucking sad, and that's what makes them beautiful. Still, I don't say any of this to John. I just wait for his answer.

“I'd never kill you, Leonard,” he said. He looked unhappy. As if he was hurt that I asked.

“That's fine, then,” I said.

He gave me a wry smile. “Fucking Anarchist Cookbook” he said.

“Mrs. Beeton's what I go by,” I said.

He nods. “Yeah,” he said. “She's got a really good recipe for rhubarb crumble, I hear.”

I made a face. “Now there's how to kill somebody,” I said.

So. A pretty dubious character when all is said and done. A mixed bag. Still, it was partly because of John that I met Elspeth. After he arrived, I had permission, I could hang about for hours and that was exactly what I did, partly because I was curious about John, but mostly because he had all kinds of secrets tucked away there, in back rooms, in forgotten boxes that he'd pulled out and started going through. Sometimes he would be too busy to talk, but when he was free, he'd get stuff out of the archives or the Reference section for me to look at. Sometimes, he'd just pull out a pile of stuff and let me go through it while he did his work. So one afternoon, after school, I've been sitting for a while, head down, going through a dictionary of quotations—sometimes that's the way to read, in little snippets, the sushi version of food for thought—when, all of a sudden, I look up and I realize it's evening already. I can see the soft green of the evening trees and the splashes of orange between the leaves. I have this amazing sensation, then, a kind of quiet happiness, to think that everything—the park, the street-lamps, the little petrol station on the corner opposite—has all just arrived from nowhere, temporary, like a film set. Then I look into the space facing me and that is when I see her: a girl my age, but older-looking, in her short leather jacket and blue jeans, her hair cut short, like a boy, the plaid shirt under the jacket unbuttoned enough to show the thin gold chain around her neck. After a moment, she catches me watching her and shoots me a questioning glance. “Can I help you?” she says. She isn't being snotty, but she means it as a challenge. It makes me think she's been looking at me before I saw her, and she was just waiting for me to notice.

“What time is it?” I say. This is the best I can come up with.

She looks round at the clock on the far wall, then back to me. “Well,” she says, “the big hand is at six, and the little hand—”

“All right,” I say.

She laughs. “What's the problem?” she says. “Is there someplace you have to be?”

I shake my head. “No problem,” I say. I'm trying to place her. I think she looks like somebody at our school, some girl in fourth year, but she also looks different. Then I figure it out. “You used to go out with Jimmy van Doren,” I say. It sounds a bit like an accusation.

She smiles. “Oh my,” she says, “don't I have the checkered past.”

That makes me laugh, but I don't say anything.

“Well,” she says. “I don't go out with Jimmy van Doren anymore. He's archived.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

“So what are you doing here?” I say. On reflection, that sounds like a rude question, but she doesn't mind.

“Watching you read,” she says.

“That must be interesting.”

“It is,” she says. “I like the way your lips move when you come to the big words. It's very touching.”

“Ha ha,” I say.

“Ha ha,” she says. “So. Now that I'm free and everything, do you want to go out with me?”

“Why would I want to do that?” I say.

“Because I'm very sexy and very, very beautiful.”

“Is that so?”

“Absolutely,” she says. “So. What do you think?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know if you'd like to go out with me?”

“Don't rush me,” I say.

“We could stay in, if you like,” she says. “I'm not fussy.”

“I told you,” I say, “don't rush me.”

“Well,” she says, “suit yourself.”

“I will.”

“You don't know what you're missing.”

“I can imagine,” I say.

“Oh no you can't,” she says. She smiles real beautiful then, and I know I'm wasting my time pretending.

“I didn't say no,” I say. “I said don't rush me.”

“Well, you better make up your mind quick,” she says, “or you'll regret it forever.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. “How do you know that?”

“Believe me,” she says. “I know.”

I have to smile. She's pretty, that's for sure.

“So,” she says. “What's it to be?”

I don't say anything. Maybe, right at that moment, I am in love. Romantically, that is.

“I'll give you a blow job, if you like,” she says.

I'm a bit taken aback by that, but I manage not to show it. Or not too much. “Oh yeah?” I say, trying to look nonchalant.

“Absolutely,” she says.

“When?” I feel hollow deep down, like somebody has just scooped out my insides.

“Now,” she says.

“Where?”

“We can go outside,” she says. “Back of the library.” She looks over at John, who is pretending to put away books under the Home Improvements section, but is really watching us. “Where John goes to smoke reefer,” she says, just loud enough for him to hear.

By this time, she's pretty sure she has me, and she does, but not for the reason she's thinking. She's thinking I've never had a blow job before, but I have. Some old woman stopped me when I was going down the West Side Road toward the shore. She was in a car, and she just pulled up beside me and asked if I wanted to go for a little ride. I'd never seen her before, her or the car, which was odd because you don't get many tourists driving down the West Side Road. So I asked her what she meant and she said she would give me ten quid if I'd let her give me a blow job.

I wasn't sure, to be honest. She was pretty old, and she wasn't nice-looking by any stretch; if anything, she looked more like a bloke than a woman, with loads of makeup and dark red lipstick. But then, I thought, ten quid is ten quid. So I got in the car and she drove me down to the shore, which was where I was going anyway. It didn't take long, and she seemed happy enough. She told me I was a nice boy, and she gave me the ten quid. Then she gave me another five. “That's for your little brother,” she said. “Have you got a little brother?”

I didn't have a little brother, but I wasn't going to tell her that. “Yeah,” I said. “I've got two.”

“That's nice,” she said. “What are their names?”

“Liam and Benny,” I said. It was the first names I could think of.

“Lovely,” she said, but she didn't give me any more money and, I have to say, I was a bit disappointed for little Benny. “Well, now. I hope you don't mind if I drop you here, sweetheart.”

I shook my head. “This is fine,” I said.

“Thank you, dear,” she said. She waited for me to get out, smiling sweetly all the while, then she put the car in gear and drove away. I didn't see her after that.

Of course, it didn't occur to me till afterward that I shouldn't have got in the car, or that she might have anything to do with the lost boys. That was what the town were calling the boys who went missing. The lost boys. Like in Peter Pan. Now, I don't know if anybody else around here has read that book—I mean, read the book, not watched the film—but I don't think it's all it's cracked up to be. All that stuff about Wendy being their mother is a bit sickly, if you ask me. And you've got all these people going around killing one another, but you never get any details and you can't help thinking it isn't real. It's like in “Little Red Riding Hood,” when the Woodsman cuts the Wolf's belly open and Grandma comes out right as rain and ready to finish the next line of her knitting. I mean, what's all that about? People shouldn't be telling kids stories like that, where something bad happens and then it's all OK in the end ‘cause Mummy kissed it better. They should be telling it like it really is in the big wide world, which is: when you're fucked, you're fucked. Kind of Anna Karenina for kiddies.

Anyhow, I don't think Elspeth will go through with it, but she does. Right there, behind the library, next to the bins. It's really good, too, not like the old woman. After that, I want to do something else, but she just laughs and says I have to wait till next time. Which is how we come to be going out. Not very romantic, but then we're not really that interested in romance. I think, on the whole, romance is something that should be saved for later, when you're old enough to deal with it. In the meantime, there's fucking. Kids are better at that than romance and all that difficult shit.

We've been going out for a few months now, and it's an eye-opener to say the least. I'd fucked a couple of girls before, but nothing like this. Elspeth and me, we play games, all kinds of stuff, things I never heard of. Elspeth is the one who thinks them up mostly, because that's not really my thing. Leave it to me, and it would be all blow jobs and mad shagging, because I'm fairly straightforward in matters of the heart. Still, I like the games, most of the time. It can seem a bit contrived, but when it's good, it's great, and when it's really good, it's scary.

It started with just little things, but then Elspeth read an article in a porno magazine about what some French kids were doing and she thought we could try it. It was called yea du foulard, which means the scarf game, more or less. The first time, she hid the scarf in her pocket and only brought it out when we were safely past Dad and in the room; it was a long, poppy-red and dark-blue silky-looking scarf that she'd found among her mum's stuff. What I was supposed to do was tighten it round her neck until she passed out from not being able to breathe. It was supposed to be an amazing sensation, she said. I thought it sounded a bit dangerous, but it was exciting too, and we did it twice. I did it to her first, then she did it to me. It really was an amazing feeling when you were blacking out, not what I expected, because it wasn't just a sensation of passing out and things going dark, there was this amazing light, a pure white light that happened in my head just before I lost consciousness. The actual blacking-out part didn't last very long, and it was a bit uncomfortable when the scarf was being tightened, but Elspeth wanted me to do it to her again and the second time we did sex afterward. That was beautiful. We left the scarf round her neck when we were doing sex.

I've always liked Elspeth for sex. I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did when we first started, but it's really beautiful with her, really exciting and pleasurable. She likes to do sex whenever we can, mostly in my room, but also outside, in the woods, or out at the plant. A lot of the time, she wears this big dress and she just sits down on me and spreads the dress over us, so nobody would see what was going on if they stumbled upon us. Once, when we were out walking in the woods, she just lifted up her dress and she didn't have anything on under it. She held the dress up round her waist and pressed her back to me. She looked round and gave me a really nice smile, then, like butter wouldn't melt, “You can stick it in my arse if you like,” she said. I thought that was a bit risky, out there on the footpath and everything, but we did try it for a while, before we had to give up. Later on, though, we worked out how to do it nicely, and we do that sometimes.

Of course, if Dad knew about any of this, he'd be pretty upset. He'd probably think we're too young, or that there was a risk of Elspeth getting banged up. He'd be wrong, though. We've done it plenty of times in loads of different ways and nothing bad has happened. Elspeth thinks it might be because a lot of men round here have dead sperm, because of what is in the ground around the plant. She says I might be one of them, which means I'll never have children, which is fine with me, considering how silly things are around here. She also makes it pretty clear she's not interested in love, or anything like that. Which also is fine by me, when she's saying it at least. Me, I sometimes think the real trick is to keep things like love and such abstract. Abstract can be complicated but, when it's all said and done, it's not difficult.

I don't know if what Elspeth says about the little white cells is right, but there might be something in it. The authorities go to great lengths to make it clear there's nothing wrong with us still living next to the plant, but they still do all kinds of tests on people—like when they go to see the doctor, for example. Some people, like Dad, are really sick for reasons nobody can explain, and he's had all kinds of tests. A week or so after Elspeth and I discovered jeu du foulard, I got a letter from the health center with three wooden sticks, like very thin ice-lolly sticks, a laminated-looking envelope with STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS CLOSELY printed

on it, a card with colored writing, and a printed instruction book that told you how to take samples of your bowel movement. The steps were very clearly written out, so anybody could understand what had to be done, and the packet was addressed to me, not Dad, so somebody somewhere obviously thought I was at risk. I got a bit alarmed about that for a while, because it probably meant they knew something they weren't telling people. I didn't tell Dad, though, because I didn't want to upset him. I didn't do the test either. I was a bit curious, but when I read the instruction SUGGESTIONS TO CATCH YOUR SAMPLE ARE: FOLDED PIECES OF TOILET PAPER, YOUR HAND IN A SMALL PLASTIC BAG, OR ANY CLEAN DISPOSABLE CONTAINER, I couldn t go on.

Now, though, I do wonder if maybe there's something in me. Lurking. Some chemical trace, some cancer. Because after I got that test kit through the post, I started to have all kinds of minor symptoms: sudden nosebleeds, numbness in my fingers, swollen knuckles, bleeding gums, gut pain. It was as if my body was just waiting for a suggestion of sickness and as soon as that suggestion came, the sickness was already there, waiting to happen.

I didn't tell Elspeth about all this, of course. She seems to think that we've all been affected one way or another, and we can't do anything about it. We don't all have the same diseases, but there's abnormal groupings, she says—statistically rare clusters of problems to do with the nervous system, or respiratory diseases, or cancer of the colon. Some of us are still healthy, but it's only a matter of time. She doesn't seem that put out, though. She talks about it very matter-of-fact, like she was talking about catching a cold. That's how she is about everything, I suppose. Nothing seems to bother her. But then, she's different from other people. She's healthy and she doesn't give a fuck about anything. She just wants to cram as much life as she can into the time she's got, and after that, it's no big deal one way or another. She's not sentimental, about that or anything. Which I miss sometimes, to be honest. She's so tough and matter-of-fact, I sometimes wonder if she has any feelings at all, besides being more or less permanently horny. Not that I have any complaints about that. It's just, I wish she would be softer, now and then.

Still, you have to take the gifts the world gives you. There's nothing worse, in people like us, than ingratitude.

For quite a while after Liam disappeared, Elspeth was the only friend I had. What with having to help look after Dad for so long, I got into the habit of keeping myself to myself, more or less. Besides, when you lose someone like Liam, you're a bit cautious about new acquaintances. You don't want to hitch up with some weakling and suffer all over again. A couple of times, though, I'd see some kids out by the plant, or on the landfill, and I'd be curious about them. The only one I knew was Jimmy van Doren, Elspeth's old boyfriend, and I only knew him in passing. As far as I knew, his little crew were the only kids who ever went out to the plant in a gang. The rest of the gang didn't look like much, but I was curious about Jimmy because he'd had sex with Elspeth. It's always difficult to imagine the girl you're fucking as being with somebody else, even if it is water under the bridge. It always seems like bad taste, like she couldn't wait for the best, and had to waste her time with second-raters till you came along.

The way I met Jimmy was this. We'd had a school assembly, and the Head, Mr. Swinton, had had a sudden rush of blood to the brain and gone apeshit about the book of Job, reading to us straight out of the Bible, the King James version no less, which is always a mistake with kids, because if ever there was a book just begging to get the piss taken out of it, it's the Bible. Especially the King James version. Old Swinton, he's going on about Job's dead kids, and his boils, and how God's just handed him over to the Devil to do what he likes with him, even though Job has always been a bit of a Holy Joe. It makes you wonder what kind of a prick God is, on His off days.

Anyhow, I get out of this crap and I'm walking along feeling a bit mystified, thinking maybe Mr. Swinton is having a midlife, when I spot Jimmy van Doren walking next to me, matching me step for step, his head down, a perfect reflection of me in my reflective state. I stop dead then and get ready for whatever's coming—maybe he wants a go at me because of Elspeth, though he's waited long enough—but he just keeps on walking for two or three paces before he turns and smiles at me. As he does, another boy materializes beside him, shorter, not as broad, but similar enough to Jimmy at first glance that they could be brothers. They aren't, as it happens, and when you look close, you can see that the similarities are pretty superficial. I ignore the little guy and look at Jimmy. He just smiles, though.

“Boy, that Job,” he says eventually, still smiling. As he speaks, I am aware of other kids too, standing off to either side of me. One I sort of know, the other I might have seen about the place. The one I know is a gangly, pikey-looking girl who everybody calls Eddie. A lot of the kids round here know her, she's got the reputation of being a bit parboiled in the little gray cells. The other guy is fat, kinda ugly, not too bright-looking. Jimmy notes me scouting his little crew, though I've kept it all very minimal, but he just goes right on talking, friendly as ever. “Yeah,” he says, “God really fucked that guy over.”

“And then some,” the little guy next to him throws in. He's not smiling. He looks like he'd rather perform delicate surgery on my tender parts than stand here gassing.

“Worse than living round here,” Jimmy says.

“At least we haven't got Almighty fucking God to contend with,” the little guy says.

The other kids aren't talking, they're just spectators. You can tell, they have absolute faith in Jimmy. He speaks for them. They would probably do anything he told them to do, no matter how stupid. All this for a kid with a joke name. He's called Jimmy van Doren because his dad changed it by deed poll from O'Donnell. Patrick O'Donnell, part Irish, part pikey, but he's got his own little landscape-garden business, so he changes his name to Earl van Doren, for more class. He's got letterheads printed with this and he's sending them out all over the peninsula, hoping that somebody will see the “Earl” part and think he's some kind of minor aristocrat. Apparently, minor aristocrats do well in landscape-garden design, which is sad in all kinds of ways that I don't even want to think about. Though, doubtless, this is what gives Jimmy his edge. He'll scrap with anybody, he'll take it further than anybody, he's a born leader and you don't mess with him. We're kind of in Boy Named Sue territory here.

Now, he's looking at the little guy in awe and wonder, like he's amazed, not just by the wit and wisdom of his remarks, but by the fact that he can actually speak at all. He looks just long enough to let him know he's been duly noted, then he swings back. “Hey,” he says, mock-surprised, as if he's just noticed me standing there, “isn't your dad the guy who's got some disease nobody knows what it is?”

He fixes me with his eyes and stands there, grinning. I grin back. They're just playing, I know that. They don't bother me at all. It may be a crew of four, but it's only Jimmy really, and I think I could probably take him. So I just hunker in and wait to see what transpires. It goes through my mind that maybe I need the exercise. “Yeah,” I say. “He's the one.”

“Yeah.” He looks around at the others, like he's about to tell them some big important secret. “He goes to see the Head Doctor and the Head Doctor says: Cheer up. It's not every day somebody gets a disease named after him.”

The other kids laugh, all except the little guy. He snorts and gives Jimmy a disgusted look. “I suppose you think you made that up,” he says.

“Sure I did, Tone,” Jimmy says. The little guy's name is Tone, apparently. What an inappropriate fucking name for this short-arsed little twerp.

“No you fucking didn't,” Tone says. “I read that in my brother's joke book.”

“Your brother's got a book?”

“Yeah,” Tone says. “Sometimes, when he's good, I read it to him.”

They're going on like this, Jimmy and Tone, bouncing words back and forth at each other like Ping-Pong balls, Jimmy good-humored and forgiving, Tone trying to see how much he can get away with, and I'm just standing there, watching, listening, like the others. Then, suddenly, right in the middle of it all, they stop with the banter and the whole gang looks at me.

“Well, Leonard,” Jimmy says, “what do you think of that Job story, then?”

“It's just a story,” I say.

“Fuck, no,” Tone says, indignant. “That's the Bible, Leonard. That's God's honest fucking truth, that is.”

I put on a serious look. “Well,” I say, “if it is, God's got a lot to answer for.”

“Yeah?”

I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “All those plagues. All that smiting.”

Jimmy pretends to look impressed, kind of stopped in his tracks by the sheer weight of my knowledge. “You have to give it to him,” he says at last, turning to the others for confirmation, “this boy knows his Bible.”

Tone nods. “He sure does,” he says. “Tell us, Leonard. Have you read the Good Book, like, all the way through?”

I nod back, but I don't say anything. I look at Jimmy.

Tone looks at the others, then he turns back to me. “Jesus, Leonard,” he says. “Get a life, would ya?”

They all laugh, but they know it's all coming out pretty lame and I just give him a long look, like he was something I'd found floating in a toilet bowl. “Exactly my plan,” I say, giving him the stare, only light, pleasant, couldn't-give-a- fuck style. “Just as soon as I wipe the mud off my boots.” The gang laughs again. Tone glowers.

Jimmy comes over to me, puts his hand on my shoulder. “You're all right, Leonard,” he says, all Hollywood buddy movie. “You wanna be in our gang?”

I smile. “Not particularly,” I say.

Jimmy smiles madly, a zany Mel-Gibson-on-triple-vodkas smile. “OK, then,” he says. “Be seeing ya.”

With that, he turns and walks off in the direction of the West Side, the others loping dutifully after him—only the two hangers-on, Eddie and the fat kid, keep turning back and waving, as if it was all some parting-is-such-sweet-sorrow deal. Tone looks back too, but he's not waving. I think we might have some silly stuff to work through later, if I'm not careful. I don't really need that trivial kind of hassle at the moment; if there's any nonsense to be gone through, I'd rather just do it with Jimmy and get it over with. Still, it hasn't come to that. Not yet. And it's a wise man who knows when it's better to keep the peace. Always better to keep the peace, if you can manage it, I think. And when you can't, get in quick and hit hard. Dog-eat-dog and all that.

I don't tell Elspeth about my run-in with her ex—I'm assuming this is what the run-in is all about—so things just go on as per. We fuck, we talk, we make it clear we're not in love. I don't go out of my way to avoid Jimmy's gang, but I don't go looking for them either, so the next time I see them is about a week later out at the plant. Which isn't a surprise because, as I say, I'd seen them out there before, a couple of times. Still, it's always a disappointment, that kind of thing. It's much better if people stay where you left them, and don't turn up where they're not supposed to be. I'd rather it would stay as it was out at the plant: no gangs, just the odd solitary individual slipping away through the bushes and rubble when they realize they've got company, or passing by in silence, furtive and awkward, like sad animals. A few days after that first encounter, though, I find the whole crew on a patch of ground near the old waste-disposal unit, in one of the few places I thought was mine and mine alone. Like it's my secret, private garden, only there's pipes and rubble and pineapple weed instead of roses. They're all there, crouched around a fire, poking at something in the flames with sticks. I would prefer to work my way around them and move on, but Jimmy looks up and sees me, so I haven't got that option. I'm not about to slink off when I know he's clocked me, so I go over, all casual and not that friendly.

Jimmy gives me a big welcoming smile, then he turns to Tone. “Hey, Tone,” he says, “here's your mate Leonard.”

Tone draws himself up to his full height and looks around, like one of those meerkats on the David Attenborough program. When he sees me, he puts on this ugly, vicious-sidekick smile. Biding his time. Waiting till the pack leader gives his say-so. The more he goes on like this, the more ridiculous he's going to look. He's about as scary as custard.

“Hiya, Leonard,” Jimmy says. “You following me, or something?”

“Nah,” I say. “I'm visiting a sick relative.”

Jimmy grins dangerously. “I thought you had one of those already,” he says.

I smile. “Can't have too many sick relatives,” I say. “It's the healthy ones you've got to worry about.”

Jimmy laughs at this, which is good of him. I'm feeling pretty lame, to be honest. I've been up all night, reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Fucking great book, once you get into it. I've come out to the plant for some peace and quiet, not to trade badinage with Jimmy and his scout troop. Jimmy looks around. “I don't think we've all been properly introduced,” he says. “I'm Jimmy. This is Tone. That bloke over there who looks like a girl is Eddie. The one who looks like something out of Jason and the Argonauts is more than usually earnest.”

The fat boy squawks at this. “My name's not Ernest,” he says. He's got these odd eyebrows, one black and hairy, like he's got a caterpillar stitched to his head, the other almost invisible. It makes his face look all lopsided.

Jimmy laughs. “I didn't say it was,” he says. “Can't you just lighten up?” He turns to me. “We've only just had lunch,” he says. “There might be some left, if you're hungry.”

I look at the fire. There's something there, in amid the flames, something that used to be furry, all blackened now, with dirty-brown skin and bone showing through the singed fur. A cat, maybe; it's hard to tell.

“No, thanks,” I say. “I'm not a big fan of nouvelle cuisine, if I'm honest.”

Jimmy looks nonplussed. “OK,” he says. “Suit yourself.” He glances at Tone. “We're going hunting,” he says. “Tone here was wondering if you'd like to come.”

I nod. “Love to,” I say. This could be a mistake, but I don't have any choice. Back out, and I've got wuss written all over me. Not to mention another insult and injury to stoke little Tone's fires.

I'd heard stories about hunting before. Mostly bragging, the usual kids' bullshit, but I knew even before we got to where we were going that it was real with these guys. I wouldn't have expected anything otherwise with Jimmy, I suppose. I'll give him that much, he takes himself seriously. We head out toward the east side, Jimmy leading the way.

It's Eddie who takes it upon herself to fill me in. As we lope along, heading toward the landfill, she gets in step with me. “It's just rats, mostly,” she says. “Not always, though. Sometimes you get a seagull, but they're usually too quick. Sometimes you get something special.” She pulls out a big hatpin, the kind that old ladies used to have and you only ever see in junk shops nowadays. “This one is yours,” she says. “It's my lucky pin.” It is, too. I can see it in her face. She's doing me a special honor. “I've got some big fuckers with that one,” she says.

I slow a little and look at her. I'm quite touched. “I don't want to deprive you of your lucky pin,” I say.

She grins. “That's why I'm letting you have it,” she says. “ ‘Cause it's lucky. Your first time and all.” Her face suddenly goes serious, as if she's just figured something out that she hadn't realized before. “Just this once, though,” she says. “I want it back after.” She stops walking altogether and looks a bit worried.

I stop walking too. There's a terrible sadness about this girl that reminds me of the sick people I've seen at the clinic when Dad goes in for his tests. “Absolutely,” I say. I take the pin. I suddenly feel sorry for her. Maybe I even like her a bit. She's gangly and spiky and she's probably borderline nut job, but she's not bad-looking when you get up close. She shouldn't be hanging around out here with Jimmy and his boys, though. She should be at home, watching reruns of Dr. Kildare and swooning over Richard Chamberlain, or something. I can just imagine her swooning, and it's a strangely satisfying idea. I venture a smile. “Thanks,” I say.

Her face brightens, and now I see that she's really quite pretty. Sexy, too. I mean, I like Elspeth and all that, but if it came to it, I wouldn't mind a quick one with Eddie. I suppose my face betrays that thought, because she smiles real happy at me and blushes. Then she gets out another pin—a long, coppery-looking thing—and lopes off after the rest of the crew toward the landfill. The hunting ground.

The landfill isn't officially a landfill. It isn't officially anything at all. There was a farm out here once, a long time ago. Johnsfield Farm it was called. The farmhouse itself, and quite a few outbuildings, are still more or less standing, though nobody has lived there for decades. The fields are just weeds and rubble, with the odd bit of machinery here and there, rusting in a stand of tainted willow herb or nettles. The actual house is off to the south of where we are, a ruin among newer ruins, but nobody ever goes inside, or if they do, they keep themselves well hidden. I've gone in there a couple of times, but it's dank and ugly inside, even in the summertime, and I didn't linger. There's nothing to see. Nothing to find. People in the Innertown tell a story about a gang of blokes who dosed some girl up with rum then took her out to the old farmhouse and did stuff to her, but I think this is all just talk to scare the little ones. They say she was raped and tortured for hours before she died. That girl's ghost is supposed to wander about the place crying and begging for mercy, but it's all too storybook to take seriously. If somebody tells that story, all you have to do is ask what the girl's name was, or when all this occurred, or what happened to the blokes afterward, and they don't know a thing.

Still, that story might have something to do with Johnsfield ending up as an unofficial landfill, because it probably gives people permission to do whatever they like there and of course they've ruined it. It was probably a nice little farm once, but after the plant closed, and with that gang-bang story for backup, the people round about started driving out here years ago to dump stuff in the last field at the end of the dirt road that runs out to the Ness. They don't do it in the daytime, they only come at night, since officially it's illegal, what they're doing. Though I can't imagine that the authorities would ever prosecute them with the full force of the law for dumping more crap on a place that's already up to its eyes in poison and garbage. Better here than somewhere else. I don't know if the fly-tippers are locals, or if they come from outside; whoever they are, they know that it doesn't matter what they do. Nothing matters really. Those people probably tell themselves the place is past caring about, but it's still surprising to see what they leave out there, mixed in among all the usual household rubbish: rusted birdcages thick with lime and millet, dead animals, bags of needles and plastic syringes, swabs, old power tools, body parts. It's fairly open country out at Johnsfield, no pits in the ground, no fences, just a long jagged hedge that stays black till well into the summer, when it puts out a few thin, painfully tender leaves and the occasional miraculous, sweet-scented flower. I once saw a picture of an old wishing tree, like they used to believe in around these parts, a gnarled and twisted old rowan covered in notes and cards and cheap decorations fixed to the branches with scraps of ribbon or baling twine. That's what the boundary hedge looks like, like one long row of wishing trees dressed with blown plastic and calico and hanks of what might have been dog or cat skin. It's almost jolly, like Christmas at the mall. If we had a mall.

Anyway, this is where we are and this is our hunting ground. These are our games. I'm pretty much in favor of the old Be Here Now way of going about things, so having got myself drawn into this particular folly, I decide I'm going to enjoy it. Maybe get to know Eddie a bit. Of course, it's just pointless scouting at first. Jimmy and his crew—with me along for the ride, though I'm keeping just enough space between us so they don't start imagining I'm one of them—all of us, together and individually, wander aimlessly across the piles of rubbish, sinking in, bouncing out, sometimes tumbling into a nasty pocket of mush and fumes, bearing our simple weapons, looking for any sign of life. We can use what other tools we like, though the hatpin is de rigueur. The hatpin is the weapon of the right hand, and has to be gripped just so, to avoid losing it in the melee, but the others all carry their own specially prepared weapons for the left hand: Eddie has a double-edged knife. Ernest, or whatever his name is, has a long, possibly Teflon-coated fork, like one of those implements people have at barbecues. Tone brandishes a vicious screwdriver carefully sharpened to a point, and I can imagine him working on this, with love and care and anticipation, in his quieter hours. Best of all, Jimmy has a Chinese-made clasp knife with a six-inch blade, double-sided, in nicely tempered dark steel. He says it's a flensing knife, but it isn't.

I have nothing, of course, having come unprepared. But I don't care. I don't really want to be chasing little furry animals around with a hatpin and a fake flensing knife, not at my age. We're not going to catch anything edible. There are rats, seagulls, hedgehogs, maybe a few feral cats living among the rubbish, and, to be honest, I'd rather just leave them to get on with it. They've been breeding out there for years, those cats. If you come down this side at night, you can hear them wailing, females in heat, toms fighting, and you'll see them wandering about, all scrappy faces and vicious scars, missing ears, torn fur. Some of the kids come down here to play games not that different from what we are doing now, just wandering up and down looking for animals and birds to torture with blades and matches and burning oil. The only difference is, those kids set traps and nets to get their prey, while we are hunting. All the same, it feels like a childish game, especially the hatpin rule, and I'm a bit embarrassed about it.

Finally, Eddie spots a big rat and we all set off in pursuit. Ernest isn't much use to anybody, he just jumps about waving his weapons and shouting tally-ho, but Eddie really throws herself into it, scrambling across the garbage, her hatpin hand lunging at the little furry body—and then there's more of them, a whole family of rats, big ones and little ones, all fat and healthy-looking, plump bodies full of blood and organs, just begging to be skewered. Only they're too fast, and nobody gets anywhere near them. They just disappear into all the rubbish and we just keep toppling in after them, getting ourselves covered in wet and slush, snagging on old bed frames and defunct Silver Cross prams, dangerous little nicks appearing on our knuckles and wrists. Pretty soon, I'm ready to give up, but Eddie keeps on, and she's more than making up in enthusiasm for what she lacks in stalking skills. Finally, she lunges and sticks her hatpin right through something that squeals and struggles, then hangs, well and truly speared, twitching, but silent now, the life running out of it a little too quickly. She looks at what she's got, then she shows it to me.

“It's just a baby,” she says. I look at it too, but I'm not sure what it is. Up close, it looks pale and fake. “It's only little,” Eddie says. She seems sad now, though I'm not sure whether this is from pity or disappointment.

“Not much meat on it,” I say.

“Yeuch!” She looks at me like I'm some kind of crazy person. “I wasn't going to eat it.” Then she grins and holds it out to me. “You want it?” she says, and I can feel something starting now. It's like when a cat brings you a bird or a mouse it's caught. That's a sign of affection.

“So,” I say. “What else do you catch out here? Other than baby rats?”

“How do you mean?”

“You said you sometimes got something special.”

“Oh.” She grimaces. “All kinds of stuff,” she says.

She gives me an odd look and I wonder if she's offended about the baby-rats dig. I don't want her to think I'm putting her down, so I soften it up a bit. “Like what?” I say. The way I say it, though, it still comes over as a challenge, and I have to backtrack a little more. “Really,” I say. “I'm interested.”

She's been thinking all the time and she jumps in then, all bright and excited. “I got a mooncalf once,” she said.

“A what?”

“A mooncalf,” she says. She's not sure, now that she's telling it to me, but there's a part of her that wants to be and she gets all defiant. “It was huge. With these big saucery eyes, and a pointy snout.” She looks back fondly at the image of whatever it was she once caught—and I believe right away that she's telling the truth. She's all tender and excited, so I'm absolutely certain that she caught something.

“What did you do with it?” I ask.

She thinks a moment, then shakes her head. It's like air going out of a balloon. “I killed it,” she says.

“Really?”

“I didn't mean to. I just—”

“A mooncalf?”

“Yes.” She gives me a sad look. “That's what it was,” she says. “There's mooncalfs all over, out here along the shore.” She gazes at me expectantly. When I don't say anything, she looks sad again. “I'm not making it up,” she says.

I shake my head. “I know,” I say. Everybody has a theory about the secret fauna of the headland. People tell stories about all kinds of real or imaginary encounters: they see herds of strange animals, they catch glimpses of devils, sprites, fairies, they come face-to-face with terribly disfigured or angelic-looking mutants from old science-fiction programs on late-night TV. And it's not just animals they see. You hear all kinds of stories about mysterious strangers: lone figures stealing through the woods, gangs of men roaming around at night, a criminal element who come in from the shore side to see what they can steal from the plant, troublemakers and pikeys, sex perverts and terrorists. John the Librarian says the buildings down by the docks provide a perfect hiding place for insurgents to lay up and store their weapons. Or maybe they're counterinsurgents, he'll say with a twinkle in his eyes: revolutionaries, agents provocateurs, terrorists, counterterrorists—who can tell and, anyway, what's the difference?

“They have them in books,” Eddie says. “They used to be all over, but now they hide in places where nobody ever goes. Like squirrels.”

I nod.

“They're in Shakespeare,” she says.

I reach out and touch her arm. “I know,” I say, softly. I want her to believe that I believe her, but I don't think she does.

We haven't seen Jimmy in a while. Ernest and Tone are just standing about on a firm island among all this crap, standing up on the highest point, scouting their little horizon, and my mind goes back again to that meerkat film on TV. Finally, Jimmy turns up, and he's got this huge rat on the point of his Chinese knife. He grins at us all as he waves it in triumph. “He shoots, he scores,” he says. Then he looks back and forth to Eddie and me curiously. “You catch anything,” he says to me, and I can see he's not talking rats.

I don't say a word.

“I got one,” Eddie says. “It's just a baby, though.”

“Never mind,” Jimmy says. “You got something, at least.” He gives me an amused look.

After we finish killing stuff, we flop down on a grassy bank and Tone and Ernest start building another fire. Jimmy has gone back out into the sea of rubbish, searching for bigger game. I can see he wants a special kill, or maybe an especially disgusting find to mark the occasion of my first outing, but he's not coming up with anything. I sit down with Eddie. I've noticed two things about her: first, she's got this really sexy mouth, real blow-job lips, but sweet with it, and her legs, in her tight black jeans, look almost impossibly long. I saw a John Singer Sargent portrait in a book once, where the girl had long slender legs like this, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. Still, I don't push anything. I don't think it would be wise to make Eddie blush twice in one day. Instead, I do the old conversation deal. Playing catch-up.

“So what happened to Ernest?” I say. He's just out of earshot, helping Tone with the fire.

“Who's Ernest?” she says. She's already forgotten the introductions. I nod at the fat kid. “Oh, Mickey,” she says. “His name's not Ernest, it's Mickey.” She gives me a puzzled look.

OK, I think. Not the sharpest toothpick in the box. Sweet, though. “So,” I say, “what happened to Mickey, then?”

“How do you mean?” She looks over at the guy a bit worried, as if she's expecting him to have his arm hanging off, and she hadn't noticed it before.

“His eyes,” I say. “I'm assuming he wasn't born like that.”

“Oh,” She puts her hand to her mouth and giggles, cute as anything. You have to wonder if she does things like this on purpose. “He got his eyebrow and his eyelashes blown off,” she says. “With a firework. They haven't grown back yet.”

“How did he manage that?”

“Oh, just mucking about.” She looks back to the page in her head marked Guy Fawkes Night. It isn't a big book, but it is clearly labeled. “He lit a banger and threw it at Tone. But nothing happened. So he goes over and picks it up and puts it to his eye. Like he's trying to figure out what's wrong with it. ‘This things's a dud,' he says and then—BANG!—it goes off.” She grins happily. “We all thought he'd blown his eye out.”

“Nice,” I say.

She settles down and looks a bit disappointed. “He hadn't, though,” she says. “He just blew his eyelashes off. And his eyebrow.” She thinks for a moment. “It hasn't grown back.”

I nod. “You said,” I say.

“Maybe it never will,” she says, continuing in her reverie. She seems to be trying the idea out for size. Having one black eyebrow might be OK on a temporary basis, but it's obvious that, to her mind, forever is a different thing altogether.

“So how did you get to know him?” I ask. “Mickey, I mean.”

“Mickey?” She looks confused again.

“Yeah,” I say, softly. “Mickey.”

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “He's my brother.”

“Really?” I say. I don't want it to be too obvious, but I'm wondering if she's got this wrong.

“Half brother, actually,” she says.

“No shit,” I say.

She looks at me and grins. Then she blushes again. “Don't take the piss,” she says.

“I'm not.”

She studies me for a moment. She's gone all serious suddenly. “Really?”

“Really,” I say.

She looks pleased. I've made her happy, I suppose. It's quite touching. Then she jumps up and squeals. “Come on,” she shouts, to nobody in particular. “Let's killsomething.”

When I get home, after a happy day's hunting, I'm starting to wonder where this is all going. I've already told myself not to dig in too deep with Jimmy and his crew, but I have to admit it, I like Eddie, and Jimmy's kind of a challenge. Still, better not to get too comfortable. If I do shag Eddie, it's bound to get back to Elspeth, and that will not only piss her off but it'll put a big smile on Jimmy's face, too. Maybe that's what this is all about, of course. I'm not saying Jimmy would actually tell Eddie to do me, it would have to be subtler than that. To begin with, he probably just wanted to check me out, then Eddie maybe said something after our first run-in and he just told her to go for it. Or something along those lines. Though whatever it is that's going on, I think I'd better watch my step. I remember old Paul Newman, when somebody asked him if he was ever tempted to cheat on Joanne, what with all those women throwing themselves in his general direction, and he said, “Why go out for burger, when you've got steak at home?” Which probably looked like a pretty cool answer at the time, him being put on the spot like that, but it doesn't make that much sense. You can't eat steak every day and they do say that variety is the spice of life. Besides, if Elspeth is steak, that doesn't make Eddie burger. I'd think of her more as pudding, to be honest. Angel Delight, maybe. Crème brûlée. Tiramisu. Definitely not semolina.

Jesus H. Christ, I tell myself, I'm going to have to snap out of this. What I need is a distraction. After I look in on Dad, I head off to my room and try to pick up where I left off with Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But I can't keep my mind on it. I keep thinking about Eddie's legs and those sweet, pouty lips. Eventually, I drift off, lying on the bed with the book over my face, and I have amazing dreams all the way through to morning, but it's not camels I'm dreaming about.

Still, the fates are kind, even if we do work hard to ignore their occasional mercies, and the next day I get the distraction I need, because the Moth Man is here and, for once, I am—as they say in the self-help books— unconditionally happy. It won't last long, but it's something pure, which isn't that common a phenomenon if you live in the Innertown.

But then, that's the big problem with life in this place: there's more to it all than the bad days of wondering when another boy will disappear, because it hasn't happened for a while and so, according to a logic we all know, is bound to happen again soon. And it isn't just those other days, when we all go around in a stupor of fear and anger because, having finally given in to the temptation of thinking that those bad days have come to an end, we receive the news that another soul has been lost, some boy you know at least by name, some kid who plays the trumpet, or picks his nose at assembly, or likes to go swimming. Of course, you can tell yourself that he's gone away, like some fairy-tale character, to seek his fortune in the big wide world. You can tell yourself that, if this is the story the police put out, then they must do it for a reason, but in your heart you know that the boy has been taken, maybe dragged off to some secret place and killed, maybe worse. Maybe alive somewhere and waiting for someone to come, in some pit at the plant, or chained up and helpless in some sewer. And then, even if it's been quiet on that front for a while, there's always the chance that somebody has just died from a disease that nobody's ever seen before. We're definitely not talking Salad Days, out here in the Innertown.

So it might be better if there was no relief, if there were no happy times. Like that bit in Tom Sawyer when Tom wonders if maybe Sundays are just a more refined form of sadism than the usual weekday run of chores and school. Every week, you get one day off, just to remind you how awful the other six are—and even that one precious day is marred by a morning in church, gazing out of the window at the sunshine while some old fart drones on about God. At least we don't have much church here.

Still, it might be better just to get on with the ordinary routine of Dad being sick, and me having to wash out the bowl that he keeps by the bed, all the vomit and bile and spots of blood running out into the sewage, into the water that I will one day drink, after it has been processed and treated, because water goes round and round, the same water all the time: the same, but different. Water is everywhere. You can't escape it. When Miss Golding told us, in Religious Education class, that God was omnipresent, I remember thinking, while she was explaining omnipresent to the nincompoops, that God must be water. Even afterward, when I had grown out of the idea, I was still afraid of water; or rather, I feared something the water contained. I found a magazine once, out on the landfill, with an article about how some French guy had worked out some theory about water having a memory: it keeps a record of everything it has ever touched written away in its molecular structure, a whole history of piss and sick and insecticide, laid down in a submicroscopic, illegible script that will take centuries to erase. Everything has its own clock, its own lifetime: stars, dogs, people, water molecules. Human beings only know one version of time, but there are thousands of others, all these parallel worlds unfolding at different rates, fast, slow, instantaneous, sidereal.

Anyhow, whatever else might crop up, you don't normally get unconditional happiness round here. It's always tainted by something: worry, or fear, or just the idiot feeling that it's something you don't really deserve, so it's probably some kind of trap. That day, though, I am happy, pure and simple—because the Moth Man has come, and I like it when the Moth Man comes.

I hadn't been expecting him, because you never know when he'll be here. He comes and goes according to some law that only he understands, and I only know he's back when I see his van, parked just off the road at the gate to the old meadows on the east side, or maybe farther toward the shore somewhere, his little green van, with faded lettering on one side from whoever owned it before, some guy called Herbert, who did some kind of repairs. The first time I saw the van, the Moth Man had just pulled in at the gate to the meadows, and I watched him take his gear out of the back, all the netting and lighting equipment, the tiny, ice-blue tent that he would set up in the middle of the meadow, the rucksack full of cooking utensils, the ancient camping stove. It was like watching a magic trick, the way he got all this stuff out of this tiny van, and then there was more, and still more, till he'd made a little settlement around himself, all the instruments and lights and piles of netting. He didn't say anything to me, all the time he was unloading, though he knew I was there. It was only when he was done that he turned to me and gave me a questioning look. He still didn't say anything, though.

I was thirteen then, if I remember. I bet, for him, I was just some gosse who had turned up, one of those local kid spectators he probably got all the time. I didn't want him to think of me like that. “What's all this shit for?” I said. Big kid, blasé as fuck.

He laughed. “What do you think it's for?” he said.

“Dunno. You some kind of photographer?”

“Nope.”

“Scientist?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, if you're here to measure the pollution, you'll need more stuff,” I said.

He laughed again and shook his head. Then he explained about the Lepidoptera survey, and what you could tell about a place by the number and type of different butterflies and moths you found there. Finally, he stopped talking and looked at me, to see if I was getting bored. “So,” he said, “what's your name?”

“Leonard,” I say. “Leonard Wilson.”

He nods and stores the name away in his head, but he doesn't tell me who he is. He just starts getting some stuff out of a bag to make himself some lunch. As he does, he asks me if I'm hungry. I say I am, and so I get into it with him, fetching stuff and helping him get it all together. Finally, when we're sitting down to baked beans and sausages, he looks at me. “Some people say there are no mysteries anymore,” he says. “Do you think that's true, Leonard Wilson?”

I don't say anything at first. He's treating me a bit too young, maybe, but I don't mind. Later on, I'll let him know that I read books and such, and he can talk normal. Besides, right now, I'm enjoying being treated like a kid. Most of the time, I'm fixing Dad's food, or his medicine, or I'm doing stuff around the house, or shopping. It's fun to be a kid for a while, so I play along, just a bit. “I suppose,” I say.

The man grins. He's beginning to work me out, maybe, but he's started, so he's going to finish. “You suppose?” he says. “OK. What about that tree over there? What kind of tree is that?”

I don't move my head, just glance over with my eyes. “It's a sycamore,” I say. Pretty dumb question: it's all sycamore round here.

“OK,” he says. “No mystery there, then.”

“Nope.”

“OK. So how did it get there?”

I know this one, I think. Any minute now, he'll be talking about God and eyeballs and all that Divine Craftsman stuff, like Mr. O'Brien in full-on MYSTERIES OF NATURE and THE BENEFICENCE OF THE DIVINE ORDER mode. Still, I'm happy to go along. I like his voice. It's all soft corners and friendly, but it's in its own place, it doesn't intrude. “Well,” I say, “I don't know for sure. But I imagine a seed blew there on the wind and—”

“And how did the wind get here?”

“What?”

“How did the wind get here? How did you get here?” He's making a point, but his voice doesn't change. He doesn't do the JOY OF DISCOVERY like old Mr. O'Brien. “How did any of it get here?” he says.

I shake my head. Here comes the God part. “ I don't know,” I say.

“So that's the mystery,” he says. Then he just sits there, smiling.

He sits there smiling, then he looks up into the leaves overhead, like there was something he'd forgotten to check, before he turns back to me. “Let's go,” he says. He gets to his feet in one quick movement and starts off into the trees to show me something that, for him, is of vital significance. I mean, here is a guy who can read the landscape. I thought I knew a bit about the headland, from coming out here so long and checking things up, birds and flowers and such, in field guides at the library—but I'm just looking at the pictures, while this guy is reading the fine print. Over the next several months, as he came and went, he showed me all kinds of stuff, from downright silly to little pieces of natural magic. He showed me how to nip the back off a flower and suck out the nectar inside. He showed me what henbane looks like and told me about how the witches used to smoke it in a pipe when they had toothache. He told me more than I will ever need to know about various obscure moth species. What I get from him is that he likes kids, and he listens to what you are saying. Sometimes he gets all enthused about something, and when he's like that, he can talk for hours. And sometimes he's a bit too grown-up-to-kid, but you can see he really cares about this stuff and he wants to share it with you, not to make himself look smart, but because he loves it all so much. Sometimes I think he might be lonely, because I get the impression he hasn't got a proper home, he just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases, or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way. It must be a fine life, sometimes, just camping out in one place for a while, then moving on, like some nomadic tribesman, at home, not in one place, but everywhere. But he doesn't seem to have a wife, or a girlfriend or anything like that, and I sometimes wonder what he does for sex. Maybe he's got some floozy he sees someplace, as he passes through. Maybe he's got a few. I think, though, that he's really married to his work. Which means that the Innertown probably isn't his favorite spot, because the results he gets here can't be all that satisfying. Not that he doesn't catch anything. On the contrary: he nets thousands of moths every night, but they're all the same, small, peppery creatures that blunder into the net so readily it almost seems they're doing it on purpose.

So he's a bit of a mystery, in some ways. I like him, though. That first day, I knew he was going to be a friend to me, even though he was old—he's probably about forty, maybe a bit younger. He'd been talking about moths and mysteries, and about his work, then he realized it was getting on for evening. “Right,” he says. “It's probably time you got home to your family, Leonard Wilson. You do have a family, don't you?”

“It's just my dad now,” I say.

“Oh?”

“My mum left,” I say. “When Dad got ill she just fucked off and left us to it.”

He shakes his head. “I'm sure there was more to it than that,” he says.

“Maybe,” I say. I don't really believe it, but I'm not going to argue about it and spoil things. I've argued with myself for long enough about it. “So,” I say, “what about you?”

“Me?”

“Well,” I say, “I suppose you have a family too?”

He laughs. “Not really,” he says. “But I'm all grown up. I can look after myself.”

“So can I,” I say. I like him, but he's a bit insulting sometimes, with all this grown-up stuff. He might not be all JOY OF DISCOVERY but he's treading a fine line right now.

He smiles. “I didn't say you couldn't,” he says. He seems sad, now, as if he's thought of something that he'd rather not remember.

“So where's your dad, then?” I ask him, just to break the mood, but then I see from his face that it's thinking about his dad that made him sad in the first place.

“He's dead now,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. I feel awkward. “Sorry,” I say—which makes me feel even more awkward, and fucking stupid too. What am I sorry about? What difference does that make?

“Don't be,” he says. “He was getting on. And he wasn't himself at the end, there.” He looks away, off into the trees, like he's trying to picture something.

I read once, in this really terrible book, that you have to talk to people about things like this. I don't know why, but I suppose it's good for the dead to be remembered. Maybe not when they were sick, but how they were before, when they were still young, or happy, or something. And I can see the logic of that. It bothers me, that I can't remember Dad from before his illness. It would be useful to be able to remember him as a young man— dancing, say, or at a football match, shouting for the home team. Or maybe sitting in the pub, just after opening time on some warm summer morning, sitting there on his own before the crowds come in, with a paper and a pint of bitter, the bluish smoke from his first cigarette of the day spiraling up in a long thin streamer through a fall of golden light. That would be good and maybe it would be good for the Moth Man to think about something like that. So I give it a go. “So,” I say, “what was he like, your dad?”

He looks at me, the kind of look that says: Do you really want to know, or are you just being polite? I'm not sure I know myself, but he seems satisfied. “My dad was an engineer,” he says. “That was how he earned his living, and that was what he loved. That's why he came here, to do a job of work. Later, though, when he came back, he was supposed to be retired. A lot had happened to him between his first visit here and his last.”

“What happened to him?”

“My dad was a bighearted, innocent man,” he says. “He was an enthusiast, which also made him something of a fool. He trusted people, which can be fine, but he was too open, too easy to reach. He also liked a drink. In the end, he was just wandering about the world, bumping into the furniture. He would fall over from time to time, but he always got up again. Sometimes, I wished he would just quit and stay down.”

I listened. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, but I could see how sad it all was. Still, I couldn't help being surprised at the way he talked about his old man. It was like he was talking about somebody he hardly knew, or some character in a book.

“Your father worked at the plant,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, surprised at the sudden change of tack. “Till they shut it. Then he got sick.”

“My father helped build the plant. He worked on the first plant, back in the early days. At that time, there was a whole group of companies working for the Consortium, divvying up the first, highly lucrative contracts. Arnoldsen's. Nevin's. Lister's. My dad knew them all, they were like family to him. Sometimes, when he was talking about those days, he would be saying the names, and you'd realize how much they meant to him. They were familiar, like the words he used in his work, all the technical stuff, which he would also talk about, even though he knew nobody understood it. But those names were special, too. They were his litany. All the deep words that he treasured, the way somebody might treasure the words of prayers or old songs.” He stopped and looked back to where his dad was inside his head, saying his private litany.

“So what went wrong?” I said. I hadn't expected to say this, but when I did, it was like I'd been waiting years to ask somebody this exact question.

He snapped out of his reverie and looked at me. I think my question startled him, but he did his best to give me an answer. Not the one I was looking for, but an approximation, a good guess. “Dad was proud of the work he did here,” he said. “People were proud of the plant back in those days. Even later, people would reminisce about the time when old George Lister himself came out there, when they finished the first phase and the plant was officially opened, but that wasn't so. People like my dad—and yours—never saw those people. They made their money from far away, and they spent it far away on things that working men couldn't even imagine.” He looked off into the distance and I thought I'd lost him again.

“So,” I said, “the big boss didn't come to the opening?”

“No,” he said. “He would have sent some deputy, or maybe one of the younger sons. There were four sons, if I remember.”

He looked at me curiously. “Come on,” he said. “It's time for you to go. Your dad will be worried.”

I shook my head. “If my dad's even awake, I'll be fucking surprised,” I said, and he shook his head in mock disapproval at all this obscenity in one so young.

That was the only time we ever talked about that kind of stuff. Later, it was all about the work he was doing, or maybe stories of the places he'd been to, or little tips for going around in the world and not having too bad a time. That's how it is. He doesn't come very often, maybe once every couple of months, and I never know when to expect him. So that morning, when I catch a glimpse of his van, half hidden behind the big hedge out by the meadows, I'm happy. I don't want him to see it, though, so I just drift over to where he is working and stand watching. He doesn't make a big fuss, either. He's setting up a big net, a high thing taller than he is, and it's obviously got all his attention, getting it just right. Still, he takes the time to register the fact that I am there. “Leonard Wilson,” he says. I think there is a pleasure in the way he says my name, like he's been looking forward to seeing me again. He pauses for a moment and looks at me sideways. “So how are you?” he says.

“I'm fine,” I say. And I'm happy because it's almost true. True enough to be able to say it without thinking I'm pretending.

“That's good,” he says. “You want to come over here and help me set this thing up?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

He nods. “OK, then,” he says, and we go to work, careful and competent and good-humored, as if we'd been doing this forever. It doesn't take long with us working together, and once it's all done, he sends me off to get some wood for a fire, which I do, but by the time I get back, my arms laden with twigs and fallen branches, he's sitting on this huge fallen log by a fire that has obviously been burning for some time, brewing something in a little saucepan that sits amid the flames, all blackened and scabbed with years of heat, like a miniature witch's cauldron. When he sees me, he looks up and gives me a big smile, one of those smiles that imply a world of shared secrets and a future that only he and I know about.

“You're back,” he says. He gestures to the place next to him on the log. “Take a seat,” he says. “I'll fix you some of my special tea.”

I laugh. I'm not annoyed that he sent me off on a wild-goose chase. “Oh yeah?” I say. “What's special about it?”

He smiles and gives the pot a careful little stir. “You'll see,” he says.

It takes a while for the tea to brew the way he wants it. It smells terrible, a bit like those traces of greeny shit a caterpillar leaves when you keep it in a jar or a matchbox for a while, or the slurred nubs of rotten cabbage stalk in a rainy field after the machines have been over it. The Moth Man doesn't seem to mind, though; he crouches over the pot, stirring and breathing great whiffs of it, humming to himself absently all the while, completely absorbed in the alchemy of it all. Finally he's satisfied. He looks over, gives me this big grin, and picks up one of the cups. He holds it to his nose for a moment, then he drinks it down quick. I follow suit; the stuff tastes even worse than it smells, but I manage to gulp it down without choking. The Moth Man laughs, then he slips down and sits on the ground, so his back is leaning against the log. I do the same. For a long time—maybe ten minutes, maybe longer—we just sit there like that, two campers out in the woods by their fire, communing with Nature and all that shit. After a while, though, I start to feel odd, kind of warm from the inside, but not feverish, and things look different. The trees have more detail, the colors are subtler, everything looks more complicated and, at the same time, it all makes more sense, it all seems to be there for a reason. I don't mean it's designed, I'm not talking about some isn't-nature-wonderful shit. I mean—it's there, and it doesn't have to be explained. It's all shall be well and all manner of thing, and all that. I look around. The green of the grass is like something out of Plato, every twig and leaf is perfect, but it's not just that, it's not just that the objects I see are perfectly clear and logical and right, it's something else. It's wider. From where I'm sitting, I can see everything around me in perfect, almost dizzying detail, but I can also feel how one thing is connected to the next, and that thing to the next after that, or not connected, so much, but all one thing. Everything's one thing. It's not a matter of connections, it's an indivisibility. A unity. I can feel the world reaching away around me in every direction, the world and everything alive in it, every bud and leaf and bird and frog and bat and horse and tiger and human being, every fern and club moss, every fish and fowl, every serpent, all the sap and blood warmed by the sun, everything touched by the light, everything hidden in the darkness. It's all one. There isn't a me or a not-me about it. It's all continuous and I'm alive with everything that lives.

Then, almost before it's there, that oneness breaks, and I see someone. A boy. He wasn't there before, and now he is, standing at the edge of the clearing, like he's just come out of the woods, and he's staring at me, not surprised at all, but more like he'd expected me to be there and has been trying to make me notice him, trying to get my attention with that piercing stare. There is something odd about him that I can't figure out, something about his face that seems familiar, though not so much the features as the expression; it's like an expression I know from the inside, an expression I've tried out at some point then given up on, the way an actor might try to get in character by looking at the mirror in a certain way, psyching himself into happy or wise or deranged by changing the way his face works. The expression in this boy's face is faraway, not distant so much as remote, not proud or cold or offended, more plaintive than anything, as if he wanted to call out to me but has momentarily lost his voice. He wants to call out, that's it, and the look on his face is the result of that failed desire to speak. He wants to call, for help maybe, or maybe because he thinks I need help—and I'd felt that plaintive appeal before I saw him, I'd felt the stare that he'd been directing at me a moment before I turned, even though I was happy, or not so much happy as fully alive, totally connected to everything around me, to everything I could see and everything I couldn't see, to the woods and the sky, to the warm blur of headlamps running away along the coast road, or over the hills and away, to the life beyond, the roads and cities, the lights in the office blocks, the paintings in museums and galleries, the Flemish courtyards I've seen in art books, the piazzas and canals, the rice fields and snowcapped mountains, the skies that same blue I've seen in picture books for years, but never in real life, never here: a blue like forgetting, the deep, cool blue of the room where the newly dead are absolved of their names and memories. When I see him, though, I am suddenly back: a local, isolated thing in the woods, a little cold in my own skin and trapped in the slow run of time like a swimmer caught in a current that's too strong to resist, too strong even to tread water—and after a moment I see what is odd about him. It's his face, yes, but it's not just the expression, it's who he looks like. I think, for a moment, I'm seeing one of the lost boys but at the last minute, before he slips back into the green shade under the alder trees, he turns and gives me a long, questioning look—and he doesn't look like Liam, or any of the other boys I know about. For what feels like a long time, I stare at him, trying to hold his eyes, but he's gone before I can even register in so many words that, if he looks like anyone I know, it's me. The same face I see in the mirror every morning: the same face, the same questioning look, the same doubt in his eyes, the same defiance. He looks like me. He was staring at me, and I was staring at him, and now it's as if I've been split in two, as if the whole world has split, one part of it flowing away to the harbors and cities I'd seen in my vision of a moment before, the other fixed, cold, predestined.

A moment later, this me/not-me vanishes into the woods and, when I turn to the Moth Man, I see that he is also staring at me, with a friendly, slightly questioning look on his face—questioning, but with just the hint of a smile behind it, a good smile, I think, a smile that says everything is fine. From the look on my face, I suppose, he realizes that I've seen something that bothered me and he looks off in the direction I'd been staring into a moment before. His eyes search the trees quickly, then he looks back at me, but he doesn't speak. My face is sad now, I can feel that, I can feel how my expression looks to him, and it's sad, maybe frightened, the face of someone who's been going along on what feels like some big adventure and suddenly gets scared. Like a kid on his first roller-coaster ride who realizes, too late, that he's afraid of heights. But the strange thing is, I'm not sad at all, I'm not scared, I've just fallen back into the flow of time too suddenly, after that beautiful stillness of before. I've come back too abruptly and, for a few seconds, I'm so disappointed that I want to cry.

That's when everything changes again and the Moth Man's face suddenly lights up, like he's understood everything and he's seen what a stupid mistake I've made, only he's not judging me, he's not pointing out my error, he's seeing the funny side of it, and he's laughing, a silent, fond laugh, with me, even in my folly, because he knows that, once it dawns on me, I'll see how wrong I was to be frightened, or worried, or sad, all things being good and cause for celebration, no matter how bewildering or terrible they seem.

The news comes on a Friday, at the end of the afternoon. This time it's Tommy O'Donnell's parents who have found their son's room empty that morning, the bed not even slept in, the boy gone. He must have disappeared sometime in the night, because Mike O'Donnell—who is Jimmy van Doren's uncle—had popped his head round the door at around ten on the Thursday night to see if everything was OK and he'd found Tommy at his desk, listening to his Walkman. He'd asked Tommy if his homework was done, and not believed the answer, but he'd not had the heart to nag. Then he'd gone to bed early, leaving his wife downstairs watching a documentary on cosmetic surgery and his only son safe in his room, happily skiving. No, there was no reason for Tommy to go out, he knew the rules about going out on his own at night and, anyway, if he wanted to go somewhere, he only had to ask and Mike would drive him there. Mike O'Donnell worked with his big brother in the landscape business, but he wasn't a partner in the firm. The general view was that, while Earl van Doren swanned around the place pretending to be one of the elite, Mike did all the real work, which meant he often came home exhausted. But that wouldn't have stopped Tommy asking for a lift somewhere, and the temptation to say no wouldn't have occurred to Mike. Everyone knew Mike O'Donnell for a good sort: hardworking, dutiful, absurdly loyal to his brother, a kind husband to a rather ungrateful wife, and a doting father—he would rather have died than deny his son anything. Now the boy was gone but, because there was no sign of forced entry at the house, or any evidence to suggest that he hadn't simply run away, we all know that this is going to be another of those cases that gets quietly buried, while the authorities, including the police, go on with the real business of promoting Brian Smith's Homeland project.

After that, on the Monday, it's supposed to be school again, but nobody goes. It's one of the small gestures that we have available to us: on the school day after one of our kindred disappears, we wander around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no repercussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us. We should burn down the town hall and the police house on days like this and maybe force their hands at last. But we never do. We smash windows. We steal cheap wine from the Spar shop. We go out to the plant and sit around sniffing solvent or getting pissed on the wine we've stolen, then we roll home out of our heads and sit around in all our separate bedrooms, plugged into our separate sound systems, crying our hearts out, or just sitting on a windowsill or a roof somewhere, looking at the sky. Some of us—the lonely ones, the outsiders—just go out to the plant and look for something dangerous to do, some death-defying stunt that will go unwitnessed by others, but will always be there, in the flesh, and in the spirit, a living testament to how willing we are to be done with the world.

After his cousin disappeared, Jimmy started harping on about Andrew Rivers. Rivers lived alone in an old cottage by the poison wood; everybody said he was a child molester and some of the kids were scared of him, but to me he just looked like a sad inadequate who preferred to keep himself to himself. A smart move in the Innertown. Still, Jimmy couldn't get it out of his head that the guy had something to do with the lost boys and he would talk to the others about how somebody should do something. I was pretty sure he was wrong but I didn't think it would do any harm to let him talk. Get it out of his system. “He was always out there, mucking about in the woods,” he'd say. I didn't even bother to point out that I'd spent a fair bit of time out there too, and I'd seen Rivers in his garden, or twitching the curtains in his front room. I'd passed him right by and I'd seen him looking at me, but he'd never tried anything on. I mean, there wasn't that much to him. Maybe he was a bit of a perv, but I think he probably just liked to look. Besides, I couldn't see someone like that overpowering anybody. Certainly not anybody Liam's size. But I didn't say anything, I just let Jimmy run on. And run on he did. “That fucking pervert was probably just waiting for the right moment,” he says.

Tone sees this as his cue. “He's a known pedophile,” he says. “He's on the sex offenders list at the cop shop and everything.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. “Who told you that?”

Tone gives me a dangerous look. “Everybody knows about it,” he says. “He's got stacks and stacks of gay porn in his house. He just sits there looking through sicko magazines all the time, he never goes out, he hasn't got any friends or anything.”

“Well, Tone,” I say, “that makes him sad and lonely, but it doesn't make him dangerous.”

That's where Jimmy jumps back in. “Same thing, sometimes,” he says. “The fucker thinks about it till he can't stand it anymore. Or there's a full moon or something. Then he goes out and grabs somebody.”

“I can't see that bloke grabbing anybody,” I say. “I've seen more muscle on a fart.”

Jimmy shakes his head. “He's probably got chloroform, stuff like that.”

“What's the chloroform for?” Mickey asks.

Jimmy gives him an impatient look. “It's an anesthetic,” he says. “You put it on a rag and hold it over somebody's mouth just for three seconds, and he's out like a light.”

“Really?” Mickey thinks this is great. “So, is that like the stuff you get in plants?”

Jimmy is getting annoyed now. “What the fuck are you talking about, Ernest?” he says.

Mickey looks miffed. “Well, that's what you get in plants,” he says. “Chloroform. We did that in biology.”

“That's chlorophyll” Jimmy says. “Chlorophyll, not chloroform. You stupid fucker.”

Mickey doesn't say anything. He's looking hard done by, because it was a perfectly legitimate mistake, right? They sound more or less the same. Chlorophyll, chloroform—how is he supposed to keep up when they keep making it so difficult?

“Anyway,” Jimmy says, “like I was saying. We should look into this guy. This Andrew Rivers.”

Immediately, this sets alarm bells ringing in my head. But I have to be careful. There's a bit of the if-you're-not-with-us-then-you're-against-us going on here. Not just with Jimmy, but with the whole town. Everybody wants to do something. “What do you mean, ‘look into this guy'?” I say.

Jimmy gives me a look, but he doesn't answer the question. Instead, he turns to Eddie, who's been sitting there all the time, not saying a word. Which doesn't necessarily mean she's been listening, either. “What do you think, Eddie?” he says.

“What?” She grins, like she's missed the joke or something.

“Do you think we should look into this guy Rivers, or what?”

Eddie thinks for a minute, all serious. She sneaks a quick look at me and I can see she has no idea what we're talking about. Finally, she nods and grins. “Absolutely,” she says.

Jimmy purses his lips and looks around. “OK,” he says. “Eddie's in. Who else?”

Tone doesn't miss a beat. “Deffo,” he says.

Jimmy nods appreciatively, then turns to Mickey. “What about you, Ernest?”

Mickey is still sulking, but he sees his chance to rejoin the pack right here. “Let's do him,” he says.

“All right,” Jimmy says. Finally, he turns to me. He's saved me for last deliberately, of course. He's probably expecting me to wuss out. I notice Eddie's watching me closely now, too.

“We're going to check him out, right?” I say. I want some terms of reference set, so it doesn't go pear-shaped. Which it will anyway, but I still want some terms of reference.

“Right,” Jimmy says.

“Ask him what he knows,” I say.

“Ask him what he knows,” Jimmy says, his eyes fixed on mine.

I consider it for a second, but really, there's only one way I'm going to go. It's pretty dumb, and I know it, but I'm not going to let them go without me. Not Eddie, anyway. “All right,” I say.

Jimmy wants full confirmation, though. “You're in?” he says, his voice all quiet-but-firm.

I look at Eddie. She's watching me hopefully, like she doesn't want me to screw up. Like some mother at the school sports watching little Herbert in the egg-and-spoon. I can't let her down. “I'm in,” I say.

Jimmy nods. Eddie grins happily. Tone isn't sure he likes it. He'd probably prefer it if I'd wussed. I look at Mickey. He's sitting there off to Jimmy's left, still nursing hidden wounds, but he's looking at me with an odd expression on his face, as if he's just discovered a new possibility that he hadn't known was on offer. It's a scary moment, that, I have to admit.

Because, looking at Mickey, sitting there in the half-light with that weird expression on his face, I have an overwhelming sense that something very bad is about to happen. And I'm totally signing up for it, right on the dotted line, though I have no idea why. Once I am in, though, I know there can be no turning back.

The next day, when I see Elspeth, I'm in a bad mood. We don't go back to my place, because some professional type is round there, doing stuff around the place for Dad, some nurse-cum-home-help type. He gets that off the social, or somebody, because of his condition. So we can't go back there, and we can't go to Elspeth's for the same reason we never can, which is that her parents are there, and she fucking hates her parents. Plus they watch her like a hawk, and they'd know right away what we're getting up to. So we go out to the plant, but it's raining and it's wet everywhere, so we just sit in a corner in one of the storerooms, where there's an old table and some crates. It's dry in this corner, more or less, but rain is dripping through a hole in the roof on the far side, and it's not that warm. I just sit there, moping, not even trying to get anything going.

“So what the hell's wrong with you?” she says.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Oh, right,” she says. “Doesn't look like nothing.”

“I'm tired,” I say. “I had to get the house all tidied up for Jenny or whatever her name is coming round.”

She comes over to me then and leans against me. “Tired? Lacking in energy? Can't seem to concentrate?” she says in this voice-over tone.

I nod.

“Need a pick-me-up?” she asks.

“Probably,” I say.

She steps back and gives me a wounded look. “Well, don't put yourself out,” she says.

I don't say anything. I do need a pick-me-up, but I'm not in the mood for her brand of pick-me-up. What I want is something more—I don't know. Personal. Like the other day, when I was talking to Eddie, just talking and mucking about.

Elspeth isn't a quitter, though, I'll give her that. She waits a moment for her point to register, then she leans back in and puts her hand up my sweatshirt. It feels cold, which is nice, actually. She moves her hand in slow strokes over my chest and then slides it down to my belly. Then she leans in closer and starts nibbling on my ear. I have to give it to her, she has a very special gift. A talent. She sticks her tongue in my ear, then she draws back a little. “Resistance is futile,” she whispers, then she bites me, very gently, in the softest part of my neck.

So we end up on the floor, getting all dusty and damp, fucking like bunnies. It's pretty amazing, because it always is with her, no matter how unpromising the venue, but afterward, when we stop and roll just that little bit apart, I feel like she's miles away and it all feels stupid and pointless. I sit up then, and start doing up my belt.

“Where you going?” she says. “I'm not finished with you, sonny.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I say.

She sits up too. She's about to speak again, some saucy and smart remark no doubt, but she gets distracted by something she's seen over on the far side of the room. I follow her look and I see it too: it's some kind of animal, lying on the floor, barely moving, though even from here we can see it breathing, or maybe not breathing so much as gasping for breath. “Fuck,” she says. “I got a fright there.”

I pick myself up and go over to where the thing is lying. It's quite big, but I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like it before. It's about the size of a small dog, with a piggy-looking head and big, staring eyes. It's obviously in a bad way because, even when I get close, it doesn't do anything. It just lies there, staring at me and panting.

“What's wrong with it?” Elspeth asks. She is up now too, but she's standing a little way off. “Is it sick?”

“Worse than that,” I say. “I think it's dying.”

She gives an odd little shout then, and turns away. “Oh shit,” she says. Then she turns back, her hands half covering her face. “Leonard,” she says. She hardly ever says my name. In fact maybe this is the first time she's ever said it in earnest. “You've got to do something.”

“What?” I say. “I can't help it. I'm not a vet.”

“Put it out of its misery,” she says.

“Why?”

“‘Cause it's suffering,” she says.

“How do you know?” I say. I know how ungracious I'm being, but the idea of killing something just because it happens to be dying in Elspeth's general vicinity strikes me as wrong. The animal isn't wailing, or screaming in agony, it's just lying there, trying to breathe. Maybe it's saying goodbye to the air. Maybe it's making its peace with the god of its small world. I have no idea what it's thinking, but I have no intention of killing it just because Elspeth is feeling squeamish.

“Come on, Leonard,” she says. “Do something.”

I shake my head. “No,” I say.

She shivers. “Christ!” she says. “It was probably lying there all the time we were fucking.”

“Probably,” I say.

“You bastard,” she says. She's really upset about this now.

“Probably,” I say. I'm just being stupid, I know that. And this is just an excuse. I know that too.

Anyhow, that's it for Elspeth. She starts straightening her clothes out. “If you don't do something, right now, I'm going,” she says.

“OK,” I say. I'm watching this animal and trying to figure out what it is. It's not a native species, that's for sure. Maybe an escapee from some wanker's private zoo. You hear about that, sometimes: some jerk gets together a whole collection of exotic wildlife, then he forgets to lock up one night and the countryside is overrun with boa constrictors or bobcats. Maybe that's what's happened here. At the same time, while I'm trying to figure it out, I'm also trying to send out an aura of compassion and concern, because I don't want the thing to be scared. It will be better when Elspeth goes. Right now, she's just scaring it.

“That's it,” she says. She storms toward the door, giving the dying creature the widest possible berth. “By the way, Leonard Wilson. You're chucked.”

I don't say anything. I don't really care right now. I just stand there, a few feet away now, while the animal slowly dies. And I know it's probably fanciful to say this, but I think, toward the end, it knew that I didn't mean it any harm. I think it knew that I was a friend, and I think it might have been glad I was there, to keep it company in those last minutes. Because there is something about its eyes, a kindness, a softness, that I think I understand. It's like a person's face when they smile: the way you know it's a real smile is by the eyes. Not that this animal was smiling, but it had that look in its eyes. The look that makes a smile genuine in a person. Only it's an animal, and it can't smile. Or maybe what I mean is, whatever this animal does to smile is something that I could never recognize, because the only kind of smile I know is a human smile.

Afterward, when I know for sure it's dead, I go out. I'm expecting Elspeth to be long gone by now, but she's not. She's standing out by a patch of willow herb about ten yards away. I go over to her and she gives me a slightly tearful look. “Is it all right?” she says.

“It's dead,” I say.

She starts to cry, then. For a moment, I think she's going to walk out on me again, but she doesn't. She throws herself against me, and just cries on my chest, waiting to be held. It's like the young Elizabeth Taylor in one of those movies where you can't believe how beautiful she is, even at that part in the movie when her horse has just died, and she goes to some man and her body language silently says, “Hold me.” So I hold her. Not Elizabeth Taylor, of course. I should be so lucky. Young Elizabeth Taylor is gone now and, as they say, they don't make ‘em like that anymore. So I suppose nobody's ever going to be that lucky again.

I was trying to find a way of getting Eddie away from the rest of the crew. It was all going fine with her, but I didn't want to take it any further with the others watching. That might be exactly what Jimmy is waiting for. Then, a few days after the animal-in-the-storeroom incident, I receive a gift.

Sometimes that happens. The world just turns around and gives you a gift, and the only thing to do is accept it. Not that gifts don't sometimes have consequences you could have done without.

I'm sitting in the front room with Dad. He is stony silent as per, sitting in the chair by the fireplace staring at a fashion magazine he's found somewhere. It's a really old magazine with those washed-out pictures that look like they've been left out in the rain. I have no idea where he found it. That's what he does, he goes around the house looking for stuff that reminds him of the old days. That face in the misty light and all. It's not healthy. I just wish he would forget about the so-say beautiful past and make the best of what's left to him.

He's so absorbed in reminiscing, he doesn't even look up when the doorbell rings. I look at him. “Somebody at the door, Dad,” I say, but he still doesn't look up. I wait a few seconds. “Might be for you,” I say. Still nothing. I get up quietly then and go see who it is.

It's Eddie. She's looking really good, like she's cleaned herself up nice and done her hair a bit less spiky. She's wearing a white blouse and this really short pleated skirt, kind of school uniform for prize day. “Hiya,” I say.

“Hiya.” She stands there on the doorstep looking at me, with a sweet, but slightly absent smile on her face.

“Want to come in?”

“Yeah,” she says. She steps inside, but I hardly move, so we're really close together now, and I can smell her hair and her skin. I close the door, and it's just us, standing in the hallway. “I've got a message from Jimmy,” she says.

I shake my head. “No you haven't,” I say.

She looks confused for a second, then she figures I'm mucking her about. “I have, though,” she says, and she grins.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “Tell me later,” I say. Then I kiss her. At first she doesn't do anything, then she kisses me back, and it's really wet and sweet, not like Elspeth at all. I mean, I like Elspeth, and she is amazing in all kinds of ways, but there's something a little bit hard about her. Something too deliberate, as if she's thinking things up all the time instead of just letting them happen. With Eddie, it's all soft and wet and sweet and a little bit helpless, like we're just falling into each other. I like that. I could stand here all day, just kissing her, but then I think about Dad. He's just behind the door and I don't want to disturb him. I'm not that keen on his stardust-memories routine, but I can't really begrudge him his one small pleasure. Besides, he might be decades away in his own mind right now, but that doesn't mean he won't snap out of it and come wandering through, on his way back to bed. I peel myself away from Eddie for a moment. “Let's go upstairs,” I say.

“What about your dad?”

I nod to the front room, and she makes a little aha face, then she smiles. “You're not going to lead me astray, are you?” she says, but she doesn't wait for an answer. We just go up the stairs, very quiet, and shut the door behind us. Dad never comes into my room, so I've finally got Eddie all to myself. “Alone at last,” I say. She giggles and we start kissing again. Everything else disappears, Dad, Jimmy, the plant, the town, the lost boys and, for a moment there, I think I am in love. Just like in the movies.

Over the next three hours, I find out a few things about Eddie. First, that she's not really as dumb as she acts, it's just that the way she thinks is a bit different from how other people think. She's not that good at attention, so everything is all over the place. She starts a thought, then she goes off somewhere else in her head and she doesn't often come back to the same place she started. A really straightforward little question will get all twisted till it's some big complicated thing and she just gives up. She has this little squeal she does when she's happy, and this giggly little laugh that makes people think she's not right in the head. Maybe she isn't. But she's not dumb, either.

She's a bit like me, in some ways. She's in a lone-parent household too, only it's her mum who's at home, not her dad. She doesn't have any real brothers and sisters; Mickey is almost exactly the same age as her, just a couple of months younger, and he's the child of her dad's first marriage. What happened was, he ditched the first wife and got together with Eddie's mum, who's got this beautiful old-fashioned name, Dorothy. I've never see Eddie's mum that I know of, but I've got this picture of Dorothy Lamour in my head and I can't let it go. I don't suppose she's anything like Dorothy Lamour, but it's nice to imagine her like that, because then I'm in bed with Dorothy Lamour's daughter, which is more than kind of sexy. Anyway, Dad, who sounds like a bit of a rascal, gets Dorothy pregnant with Eddie, but he meets the old wife and they have a bit of a tumble, for old times' sake. This is just a few weeks later, before Dorothy even knows she's expecting, so it's probably a bit of a shock when Dad gets the news from both wives about the patter of tiny feet. While Eddie's telling me all this, I keep remembering that Groucho Marx bigamy gag and I'm trying to keep from laughing, because now I've got Groucho Marx and Dorothy Lamour having it out about all this, with the first wife—I'm thinking Maureen O'Hara—standing by with this big seen-it-all-before look on her face. Anyway, Groucho decides that he's going to stay with Dorothy, but he's going to keep both kids, and Maureen O'Hara doesn't mind, because she doesn't really want any big connection to Groucho, what with all she knows about him from the first marriage. Which is acceptable, if not exactly hunky-dory, in Dorothy's book, only now Groucho changes his mind and pisses off with some other woman he's met—Veronica Lake, let's say—and leaves Dorothy with both kids. Meanwhile, Maureen O'Hara has vanished, last seen walking out along the West Side Road with a cardboard suitcase and a hatbox. When Eddie's telling all this, she's really funny and she strings it all together somehow so it sounds like a really daft movie script. “So that's how I get to have a brother who's the same age as me,” she says.

“Ernest,” I say.

She laughs. “Mickey,” she says. “After his mum.”

“What? His mum is called Mickey?” Actually, this is OK, when I think about it. It doesn't change anything, in fact. I can see Maureen O'Hara as a Mickey. Some John Ford thing, where she's a tomboyish beauty waiting for some man to come and find her. John Wayne, probably.

“No,” she says. “Michaela. It's Mickey for short.”

“Oh,” I say. “So what's Eddie short for?”

She looks at me like this might be a trick question. “How do you mean?” she says.

“Well, how did you get to be called Eddie?”

She thinks about this. “I dunno,” she says.

“It's not short for anything?”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't think so?” I say. “You mean your parents called you Eddie?”

“Yeah,” she says.

I'm not convinced. She's hiding something. “It's short for something,” I say.

She gives a little shrug and looks worried, but she doesn't say anything.

“Edwina,” I say.

That makes her squeal. She gives a half-disgusted, half-incredulous laugh. “No!” she says, all indignant.

“Edina,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“Edaline? Edwardiana? Éditions Gallimard?” I say this with the best French accent I can manage and she rolls her eyes.

“You made that up,” she says. She's not annoyed, though.

“Theodora?”

“No.”

“Thandra?” I say, lisping it.

“No.”

I jump up, and do an Archimedes. “I know,” I say.

She looks excited, like I'm about to tell her something she's needed to know her whole life. “What?” she says.

“It's Rumpelstiltskin!”

She punches me then, in the upper arm, and she hits hard. “Fuck you,” she says. Next minute we're laughing at each other and a minute after that I'm fucking Dorothy Lamour's daughter again, and it's just like it was the first time, all salty and sweet and close-up-and-personal, just like before, only better. When we stop again, and I'm thinking I could do this forever, she leans up on her elbow and looks at me. “Did you know,” she says, all grave and didactic, “that if you pick a Chihuahua up by the scruff of its neck, its eyeballs pop out?”

When I sneak Eddie out again, Dad is still in the front room, only now he's got the radio on, which is actually quite a promising sign, because at least he's listening to something. I mean, something is going into his head. Sometimes he watches TV, but he always has the sound turned down low, or even mute, and you can see from his face that he's not really making any sense of what's going on, he's just looking at the colors and movement in between sleeps. So the radio is good. It's Radio 4, some arts program, and some new young American director is talking about a film he's either made, or wants to make, where he and Janet Leigh—he's put himself in the film—are building this sculpture in the desert from pieces of magnetic rock. Only the work keeps getting interrupted, because some guy with a huge silver knife is after them, and then there's a gang of kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and stuff, who are also after them, so they have to keep escaping and starting again, over and over, just him and Janet against the world. I stand and listen for a while, then I give up trying to follow it. Obviously, here's a guy who's seen too many movies. I look at Dad to see what he's making of it all. He looks absolutely rapt, his head turned to one side, like a bird, just sitting in the big armchair, listening.

I decide to leave him and go upstairs and tidy up. I'd wanted Eddie to stay longer, but she'd said she had to go. So, just before we say goodbye, I ask her about the message.

She looks at me all confused. “What message?” she says.

“The message from Jimmy.” I'm grinning at her. “Remember?” Her face is a blank. “You told me, when you got here, that you had a message for me. From Jimmy.”

She shakes her head. “I dunno,” she says. “I forget.”

I laugh. “Well,” I say, “it can't have been that important.” Now, this being Eddie, I don't know if there really was a message and she forgot it, or if she just made it up as an excuse to come round and see me. Either way, I'm glad she came, and I'm sorry she has to go.

I'm lucky she did, though, because twenty minutes after I've finished sorting the room out, Elspeth turns up. And she is not happy. “Where the fuck were you?” she says, as soon as I open the door.

I make desperate hushing signs, but she just ignores me.

“I was waiting for you, you bastard,” she says. I'm looking to the front-room door, thinking Dad will be out any minute to find out what's going on. As if. “Did you forget, or what?” Elspeth says.

“Come on,” I say. “Let's not argue. Dad's in there having a rest.”

“Sounds like he's watching telly,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “he's listening to the radio. But we should let him get some quiet.” She's giving me this totally pissed-off look, but I'm not sure it's for real now. I think she's starting to remember that I'm not that good with time, plus I've got him next door to look after. Plus—well, she likes me, doesn't she? “So,” I say, “let's go for a walk. We can talk about it, right?”

She gives me this incredulous look. “A walk?”

“Yeah. A walk.”

“You want to go for a walk?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“I'm not going for a walk” she says. “I'm too upset to go out for a bloody walk.” She starts up the stairs, not even bothering to look back to see if I'm following. Which means, of course, that we're going to fuck. And after that, everything's negotiable. Almost before we get through the door, she turns round and starts working at my jeans. “Come on,” she says. “I'm in sore need of a good seeing-to.”

I just stand there and let her get on with it. “You wanton hussy,” I say.

She looks up and smiles. “That's me,” she says. Then we're on the bed, sideways, doing it in our clothes and I'm feeling a bit guilty about Dorothy Lamour's daughter, though not that guilty. Tiramisu and steak in one day. All I got wrong was the order. Then, when we've both calmed down and started taking it slower, she looks up at me and laughs. “A walk” she says. “He wants to go for a bloody walk.”

It turns out Eddie did have a message for me, but since she'd forgotten what it was, I don't find out till the next afternoon, when Tone catches up with me outside the library.

“Jimmy says to ask if you're ready for tonight, or what,” he says, barely concealing his distaste.

“Why?” I say. “What's tonight?”

Tone sneers. “I thought you'd fucking back out,” he says. “I knew you wouldn't go through with it.”

“Ready for what?” I say.

Tone gazes at me in awe and wonder. “I suppose you're going to tell me you didn't get the message,” he says.

The penny drops then. “Oh,” I say. “Eddie told me she had a message for me, but she forgot it.”

“Yeah, right.”

I give him a look to let him know if he doesn't cut this crap I am going to break his fucking neck. He gives me the same look right back. I have to hand it to Tone, he isn't the one to play statistics. I've got height, strength, and speed over him, and he probably knows it. He just doesn't give a damn. If ever we get to the point when I have to fuck him up, it won't make any difference to him. He'll just keep coming right back till he gets something over on me. It's a fairly chilling thought. “Yeah,” I say. “Right. So just calm down and tell me the when and the where.”

“You mean you're in?” he says.

“I said I was, didn't I?”

Give him his due, he does look slightly penitent then. Not much, but enough. “Ten o'clock,” he says. “At the old substation on the West Way. You know the place?”

I nod. “I'll be there,” I say, and I can see that he believes me now. I can also see that this is going to be one big mistake from start to finish. Hammer Horror time, or some kind of sad farce. Or maybe a little of both. I ask myself what the fuck I'm doing all this for, or how I ever got involved with Jimmy and his crew in the first place, then I shake my head and turn for home, to get ready.