The Affirmation

Suddenly, I knew that Seri, by whom I tried to understand Gracia, had never existed. Gracia, holding me as tightly as I held her, defied definition.

Gracia was Gracia: fickle, sweet-smelling, moody, unpredictable, funny. I could define Gracia only by being with her, so that through her I defined myself. I held her more tightly still, pressing my lips against her white neck, tasting her. The fur coat had opened as she raised her arms to take me, and I could feel her thin body through her blouse and skirt; she had been wearing the same clothes when I last saw her, at the end of the previous winter.

At last I stepped back from her, but held her hands. Gracia stood looking down at the ground, then let go of my hands, blew her nose on a tissue. She reached into the car for her shoulder bag, then slammed the door.

I held her again, arms around her back, but not pressing her to me. She kissed me, and we laughed.

"I didn't think I'd see you again," I said.

"Neither did I. I didn't want to, for a long time."

"Where have you been living?"

"I moved in with a friend." She had looked away, briefly. "What about you?"

"I was down in the country for a time. I had to sort things out. Since then I've been with Felicity."

"I know. She told me."

"Is that why you--?"

She glanced at James's Volvo, then said: "Felicity told me you'd be here. I wanted to see you again."

Felicity had arranged the meeting, of course. After the weekend I had spent in Sheffield with Gracia, Felicity had gone out of her way to befriend her. But the two women were not friends, in the usual sense. Felicity's gestures towards Gracia had been political, significant to me. She saw Gracia as a victim of my shortcomings, and helping Gracia was her way of expressing disapproval of me, and something more general: responsibility, and sisterhood between women. It was revealing that Felicity had not arranged the meeting at Greenway Park. She probably despised Gracia without knowing it. Gracia was just a wounded bird, someone to be helped with a splint and a spoon of warm milk. That I had done the wounding was where her concern began, naturally enough.

We started walking into the village, holding hands and pressing shoulders, heedless of the cold and the wind. I had become alive in my mind, sensing a further move forward. I had not felt like this since before my father died. I had been obsessed with the past too long, too concerned with myself. All that I had been damming up in me now flowed towards an outlet: Gracia, part of my past yet returning.

The main street of the village was narrow and winding, pressed in by the grey houses. Traffic went through noisily, throwing up fine spray with the tyres.

"Can we find somewhere for coffee?" Gracia said. She had always drunk a lot of cheap instant coffee, made too weakly and with white sugar. I squeezed her hand, remembering a stupid argument.

In a tiny side street we found a café, the front room of a terraced house, converted with a large pane of plate glass and metaltopped tables.

Little glass ashtrays rested exactly in the centre of each one. It was so quiet as we went in that I assumed the place was closed, but after we had been seated for a minute or two, a woman in a blue gingham kitchen overall came to take our order. Gracia ordered two poached eggs, as well as coffee; she had been driving since half_past seven, she said.

"Are you still staving with your friend?" I said.

"At the moment. That's one of the things I want to talk to you about.

I've got to move out soon, but there's a place coming up. I want to know whether to take it or not."

"How much is it?"

"Twelve pounds a week. Controlled rent. But it's a basement, and not a very good area."

"Take it," I said, thinking of London rents.

"That's all I wanted to know," Gracia said, and stood up. "I'll go now."

"What?"

I watched her in amazement as she turned towards the door. But I had forgotten Gracia's odd sense of humour. She leaned forward against the condensation-covered window, made a squiggle with her fingertip, then came back to the table. She ruffled my hair as she passed. Before sitting down again she shrugged off the fur coat and let it fall over the back of the chair.

"Why didn't you write to me, Peter?"

"I did . . . but you never answered."

"That came too soon. Why didn't you write again?"

"I didn't know where you were. And I wasn't sure your flatmate was forwarding mail."

"You could have found me. Your sister did."

"I know. The real reason is ... I didn't think you wanted to hear from me."

"Oh, I did." She had the ashtray in her fingers, turning it around. She was smiling slightly. "I think I wanted the chance to throw you out again. At least, I did at first."

"I really didn't know how upset you were," I said, and the devil of conscience reminded me of those hot summer days, obsessively writing about myself. I had had to put Gracia from my mind, I needed to find myself. Was this the truth?

The woman came back then, and put down two cups of coffee. Gracia heaped in the sugar, stirred the liquid slowly.

"Look, Peter, it's all passed now." She took my hand across the top of the table, gripping it firmly. "I got over it. I had a lot of problems, and it was difficult for a while. I needed a break, that's all. I saw some other people, talked a lot. But I'm over it all now. What about you?"

"I think so," I said.

The fact was that Gracia exerted an irresistible sexual influence over me. When we split up, one of the worst things about it was the thought of her in bed with someone else. She had often used that as an unstated threat, one used to hold us together yet one which eventually drove us apart. When I had finally convinced myself that we had reached the end, the only way I knew of coping was to close my mind to her. My possessiveness was irrational, because in spite of the sexual magnetism we had not often been good lovers for each other, but nonetheless my awareness of her sexuality pervaded everything I did with her and every thought I had of her. I was aware of it now, sitting there in the bleak café with her: the unbrushed hair, her loose and careless clothes, colourless skin, vagueness behind the eyes, tension within. Above all, perhaps, the fact that Gracia had always cared for me, even when I did not deserve it, or when her neuroses came like radio interference to our attempts to communicate.

"Felicity said you weren't well, that you've been acting strangely."

"That's just Felicity," I said.

"Are you sure?"

"Felicity and I don't get on too well," I said. "We've grown apart. She wants me to he like her. We've got different standards."

Gracia was frowning, looking down at her cup of coffee.

"She told me frightening things about you. I wanted to see you."

"Is that why you're here?"

"No . . . just a part of it."

"What sort of things was she telling you?"

Still avoiding my eves, she said: "That you were hitting the bottle again, and not eating properly."

A sense of relief that that was all. "Does that seem as if it's true?"

"I don't know."

"Look at me and tell me."

"No, it doesn't."

She had glanced at me, but now she kept her eyes averted as she drained her cup. The woman arrived with Gracia's eggs.

"Felicity's materialistic," I said. "She's full of wrong ideas about me.

All I wanted to do after we split up was get away somewhere on my own, and try to work things out."

I stopped talking because I had suddenly been distracted by the kind of stray thought that had come so often in the last few weeks. I knew that I was not telling Gracia the whole story; somehow that kind of wholeness had been sucked out of me by my manuscript. Only there lay the truth. Would I one day have to show it to her?

I waited while Gracia finished her meal--she ate the first egg quickly, then picked at the second; she had never had a long attention span for food---and then I ordered two more coffees. Gracia lit a cigarette. I had been waiting for that, wondering if she still smoked.

I said then: "Why couldn't you have seen me last year? After the row?"

"Because I couldn't, that's all. I'd had enough and it was still too soon. I wanted to see you but you were always so critical of me. I was just demoralized. I needed time to put things right."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have said those things."

Gracia shook her head. "They don't mean anything now."

"Is that why you're here?"

"I've sorted things out. I told you, I'm feeling a lot better."

"Have you been with another guy?"

"Why?"

"Because it matters. I mean, it would have mattered." I sensed myself heading into danger, disrupting something.

"I was with someone for a while. It was all last year."

Last year: the words made it sound as if it was a long time ago, but last year was still only three weeks ago. Now it was I who looked away. She knew the irrationality of my possessiveness.

"He was just a friend, Peter. A good friend. Someone I met who's been looking after me."

"Is that who you're still living with?"

"Yes, but I'm moving out. Don't be jealous, please don't he jealous. I was on my own, and I had to go into hospital, and when I came out you weren't there, and Steve came along just when I needed him."

I wanted to ask her about him, but at the same time I knew I wanted to ask to stake territory, not to hear answers. It was stupid and unfair, but I resented this Steve for being who he was, for being a friend. I resented him more for arousing in me an emotion, jealousy, that I had tried to rid myself of. Leaving Gracia had purged me of that, I thought, because only with her had it been so acute. Steve became in my mind everything I was not, everything that I could never he.

Gracia must have seen it in my eyes. She said: "You're being unreasonable about this."

"I know, but I can't help it."

She put down her cigarette and took my hand again.

"Look, this isn't about Steve," she said. "Why do you think I've come here today? I want _you_, Peter, because I still love you in spite of everything. I want to try again."

"I do too," I said. "But would it go wrong again?"

"No. I'll do anything to make it work. When we split up, I realized that we had to go through all that to be sure. It was me that was wrong before. You made all that effort, trying to repair things, and all I did was destroy. I knew what was happening, I could feel it inside me, but I was obsessed with myself, so miserable. I started to loathe you because you were trying so hard, because you couldn't see how awful I was being. I hated you because you wouldn't hate me."

"I never hated you," I said. "It just went wrong, again and again."

"And now I know why. All those things that caused tension before, they're gone. I've got a job, somewhere to live, I'm back in touch with my own friends. I was dependent on you for everything before. Now it really is different."

More different than she knew, because I had changed too. It seemed she possessed all the things that once were mine. My only possession now was self-knowledge, and that was on paper.

"Let me think," I said. "I want to try again, but . . ."

But I had lived for so long with uncertainty that I had grown used to it; I rejected Felicity's normality, James's security. I welcomed the unreliability of the next meal, the morbid fascinations of solitude, the introspective life. Uncertainty and loneliness drove me inwards, revealed me to myself. There would be an imbalance between Gracia and myself again, of the same type but weighted the opposite way. Would I cope with it any better than she had?

I loved Gracia; I knew it as I sat with her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, including myself. Especially myself, because I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalization and faulty memory. There was a perfection to myself as shaped by the manuscript, but it was the product of artifice. I had needed to re-invent myself, but I could never have invented Gracia. I remembered my faltering attempts to describe her through the girl, Seri. I had left out so much, and in making up for the omissions I had made her merely convenient. Such a word could never be applied to Gracia, and no other would describe her exactly. Gracia resisted description, whereas I had defined myself with ease.

Even so, making the attempt had served its purpose. In creating Seri I had failed, but then I had discovered something else. Gracia was affirmed.

Minutes passed in silence, and I stared at the table-top as I felt my complicated emotions and feelings turn within me. I experi_ enced again the same sort of instincts that had driven me to my first attempt at the manuscript: the wish to straighten out my ideas, to nationalize what perhaps would be better left unclear.

Just as from now I should always be a product of what I had written, so too would Gracia be understood through Seri. Her other identity, the convenient Seri of my imagination, would he the key to her reality. I had never been fully able to understand Gracia, but from now Seri would he there to make me recognize what I _did_ comprehend of her.

The islands of the Dream Archipelago would always be with me; Seri would always haunt my relationship with Gracia.

I needed to simplify, to let the turbulence subside. I knew too much, I understood too little.

At the heart of it all was an absolute, that I had discovered I still loved Gracia. I said to her: "I'm really sorry everything went wrong before.

It wasn't your fault."

"Well, it was."

"I don't care about that. It was my fault too. It's all in the past."

Distractingly, the thought came that it too, the split-up, had been somehow defined by my writing. Could it all have been as easy as that? "What are we going to do now?"

'°Whatever you like. That's why I'm here."

"I've got to get away from Felicity," I said. "I'm only staying with her because I've nowhere else to go."

"I told you I'm moving. This week, if I can manage it. Do 'you want to try living with me?"

As I realized what she had said I felt a thrill of sexual excitement; I imagined lovemaking again.

"What do you think about that?" I said.

Gracia smiled briefly. We had never actually lived together, although at the height of the relationship we would often spend several consecutive nights together. She had always had somewhere of her own to stay, and I had mine. In the past we had resisted the idea of moving in together, perhaps because both of us feared we might tire of each other. In the end it had taken less than that to split us up.

I said: "If I lived with you because I had nowhere else to go, it would fail. You know that."

"Don't think of it like that. It invites failure." She was leaning towards me across the table, and our hands were still clenched. "I've worked this out on my own. I came up here today because of what I decided. I was stupid before. It _was_ my fault, whatever you say. But I've changed, and I think you've grown too. It was only selfishness that made me react awa from you before."

"I was very happy," I said, and suddenly we were kissing, reaching awkwardly towards each other across the table-top. We upset Gnacia's coffee cup, and it fell on the floor, breaking into pieces. We started trying to mop up the spilled coffee with paper serviettes, and the woman came with a cloth.

Later, we walked through the cold streets of Castleton, then followed a path that led up one of the hills. When we had climbed for about a quarter of an hour we came to a place above the tree line where we could see down over the village. In the car park the back door of the Volvo was open. A few more cars had driven in since we were there, and these were parked in a line beside it.

Amongst them was Gracia's; she had told mc she could drive, but in all the time I had known her she had never owned a car.

We stared down at Felicity's little family group huddled around their car.

Gracia said: "I don't really want to meet Felicity today. I owe her too much."

"So do I," I said, knowing it was true, yet nevertheless continuing to resent her. I would as soon never see Felicity again, so troubled were my feelings about her. I remembered James being smug, Felicity being patronizing.

Even as I took advantage of them, and sponged off Felicity, I resented everything they stood for and rejected anything they offered me.

It was cold on the hillside, with the wind curling down from the moors above, and Gracia held close to me.

"Shall we go somewhere?" she said.

"I'd like to spend the night with you."

"So would I . . . but I haven't any money."

"I've got enough," I said. "My father left me some, and I've been living off it all year. Let's find a hotel."

By the time we had walked down to the village, Felicity and the others had gone off again. We wrote a note and left it under the windscreen wipers, then drove to Buxton in Gracia's car.

The following Monday I went with Gracia to Greenway Park, collected my stuff, thanked Felicity effusively for everything she had done for me, and left the house as quickly as I could. Gracia waited in the car and Felicity did not go out to see her. The atmosphere in the house remained tense all the time I was there. Resentments and accusations were suppressed. I had a sudden, eerie feeling that this would be the last time I should ever see my sister, and that she knew it too. I was unmoved by the idea, yet as we drove down the crowded motorway to London my thoughts were not of Gracia and what we were about to start, but of my ungracious and inexplicable resentment of my sister.

I had my manuscript safe in my holdall, and I resolved that as soon as I had the time in London I would read through the sections dealing with Kalia, and try to understand. As we drove along it seemed to me that all my weaknesses and failings were explained to me in the manuscript, but that in addition there were clues to a new beginning.

I had created it by the force of imagination; now I could release that imagination and channel it into a perception of my life.

Thus, it seemed to me now that I was moving from one island to another.

Beside me was Seri, behind me were Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the other.

12

The ship was called _Mulligayn_, a name which we could trace to neither geography, personality nor reason. Registered in Tumo, she was an elderly, coal-burning steamer, given to rolling in the mildest swell. Unpainted, uncleaned and lacking at least one of her lifeboats, the _Mulligayn_ was typical of the hundreds of small passenger ships that linked the populous southern islands of the Archipelago. For fifteen days Seri and I sweltered in her airless cabins and companionways, grumbling at the crew because it was expected of us, although privately neither of us felt we had much to complain about.

Like my earlier voyage to Muriseay, this second leg of the journey was in part a discovery of myself. I found that I had already absorbed some island attitudes: an acceptance of crowding, and of general uncleanliness, and of late ships and unreliable telephones and corruptible officials.

I frequently remembered the saying I had heard from Seri, the first time we met: that I would never leave the islands. The longer I stayed in the Archipelago the more I understood it. I still had every intention of going back to Jethra, regardless of whether or not I took the Lotterie treatment, but with every day that passed I felt the rapture of islands grow within me.

Because I had lived all my life in Jethra I accepted its values as the norm. I never saw the city as prim, old-fashioned, conservative, over-legislated, cautious and inward-looking. I had simply grown up in it, and although I was aware of its faults as well as its virtues, its standards had become my own. Now that I had left, now that the happy-go-lucky outlook of many islanders was becoming something I liked, I wanted to experience more of the culture, become a small part of it.

As my perceptions changed, the thought of returning to Jethra became less and less attractive. I was enthralled by the Archipelago. On one level, travelling around the islands was undoubtedly a bore, but the constant knowledge that there was going to be another island, somewhere else to visit and explore, opened broad internal vistas in me.

During the long voyage to Collago, Seri told me about the effect the Covenant of Neutrality had had within the Archipelago. The Covenant was the invention of governments in the north, imposed on the islands from without. It enabled both warring factions to use the Archipelago as an economic, geographic and strategic buffer against the other side, distancing the war from their own territories by adventurism in the great empty continent to the south.

Once the Covenant had been signed, a sense of timelessness and apathy had descended on the Archipelago, sapping cultural energy. The islanders had always been racially and culturally distinct from the people in the north, although trading and political links went back as far as could he remembered.

But now the islands were isolated. It affected Archipelagan life on every level. Suddenly there were no new films from the north, no books, no cars, virtually no visitors, no steel or grain or fertilizer, no oil or coal, no newspapers or academics or expertise or industrial equipment. The same sanctions closed the islands' only export markets. All the dairy produce of the Torqui Group, the fishing, the timber, the minerals, the hundreds of different types of arts and crafts, no longer had the mass consumer markets of the north open to them. Obsessed with its local squabble, the northern continent closed its doors to the rest of the world, and it did so because it considered itself to _be_ the world.

The worst effects of the Covenant had been felt in the years immediately following it. Both it and the war had by now become a part of everyday life and the Archipelago was beginning to recover, both economically and socially.

Seri told me there had been a noticeable change of mood in recent years, a reaction against the north.

A kind of pan-islandic nationalism was growing in the Archipelago. There had been a renewal of religious faith, for one thing, a sweeping evangelism that was taking worship to the Orthodox cathedrals as never before in the last thousand years. In step with this there had been a secular revival: a dozen new universities had been built or were in the process of construction, and more were planned. Tax revenue was being put into the new industries appearing to replace the imported goods. Major discoveries of oil and coal had been made, and counter-Covenant offers of assistance or investment from the north had been pointedly turned down. Arising with this was a new emphasis on the arts and agriculture and the sciences: investment and grant money was obtainable with a minimum of bureaucratic delay. Seri said she knew of dozens of new settlements on previously uninhabited islands, each pursuing a way of life centred on their own interpretation of what cultural independence really meant. For some it was an artists' colony; for others, subsistence farming; others, an opportunity to experiment with lifestyles, educational programmes or social structures. All were united, though, by the renaissance spirit, and by a common instinct to prove to themselves, and to anyone else who cared to inquire, that the old hegemony of the north was at an end.

Seri and I intended to become two of those who would inquire. Our plan, after Collago, was to go island-hopping for a long time.

Before all this, standing in the way, was Collago. The island where living was bestowed, where life was denied. I had still not decided what to do.

We were following one of the main sea-lanes between Muriseay and Collago, and so it was inevitable that other lottery winners would he aboard.

I was unaware of the others at first, preoccupied with Seri, watching the islands, but after a couple of days it was obvious who they were.

They had formed a clique, the five of them. There were two men and three women, all of an age; I judged the youngest, one of the men, to he in his late fifties. They were invulnerable in their conviviality, eating and drinking, filling the first-class lounge with jollity, often drunk but always tiresomely polite. Once I started watching them, fascinated in a rather morbid way, I kept willing them to break out, perhaps to swing a punch at one of the stewards or eat to such excess that they would be sick in public; already, though, they were superior beings, above such veniality, humble in their imminent role of demi-gods.

Seri had recognized them from the office, but she said nothing to me until I had worked it out for myself. Then she confirmed it. "I can't remember all their names. The woman with the silver hair, she's called Treeca. I quite liked her. One of the men is called Kerrin, I think. They're all from Glaund."

Glaund: the enemy country. There was enough of the north still in me to think of them as foes, but enough of the islands to recognize the instinct as irrelevant. Even so, the war had been going on for most of my life, and I had never before left Faiandland. We sometimes saw propaganda films in Jethran cinemas about the Glaundians, but I had never given them much credence.

Factually, the Glaundians were a fairer-skinned race than mine, their country was more industrialized and they had a history of being territorially ambitious; less authentically, they were supposed to be ruthless businessmen, indifferent sportsmen and incompetent lovers. Their political system was different from ours. While we lived under the benevolent feudalism of the Seignior, and the whole impenetrable apparatus of the Tithe Laws, the Glaundians operated a system of state socialism, and were supposed to be socialized equals.

These five appeared not to recognize me as being one of them, which suited me. I was disguised from them by my youth, and by the fact I was with Seri. To them we must have seemed to be mere drifters, island-hoppers, young and irresponsible. None of them seemed to recognize Seri without her uniform.

They were wrapped up in themselves, united in their impending athanasia.

As the days passed I went through a number of different states of mind about them. For a time I simply disliked them for the vulgarity of the way they displayed their luck. Then I began to pity them: two of the women were obese, and I tried to imagine what an eternity of waddling breathlessness would be like. Then I felt sorry for them all, seeing them as plain people to whom great fortune had come late in life, and celebrating it in the only way they knew how. Soon afterwards I underwent a period of self--dislike, knowing that I was patronizing them and that I was no better than them, just younger and healthier.

Because of the link between us, because I was just like them, I several times was tempted to approach them and find out what they thought about the prize. Perhaps they had the same doubts about it as I had; I only assumed they were hurrying to salvation, and did not know for sure. But the thought of being drawn into their card-playing, good-natured drinking circle deterred me.

They would be, inevitably, as interested in me as I could not help being interested in them.

I tried to understand this stand-offishness and explain it to myself.

Because I was unsure of my own intentions I did not wish to have to explain myself, either to them or to me. I frequently overheard snatches of their conversations: rambling and imprecise, they often spoke of what they were going to do "afterwards". One of the men was convinced that great wealth and influence would he his after he left Collago. The other kept repeating that he would be "set up for life", as if he only needed enough athanasia to see him through the rest of his retirement, a nice little nest egg to tell his grandchildren about.

I knew, though, that if someone asked me what use I should put my own long life to, my answer would be equally vague. I too would utter homilies about embarking on good works in the community, or returning to university, or joining the Peace Movement. Each of these would he untrue, but they were the only things I could think of as worthwhile, as sufficient moral excuse for accepting the treatment.

The best use to which I could put a long life would he the selfish one of living for a long time, of avoiding death, of being perpetually twenty-nine years old. My only ambition for "afterwards" was to travel around the islands with Seri.

As the voyage progressed I therefore slipped into a more introspective mood than ever before, feeling unaccountably sad about what I had become involved in. I concentrated on Seri, I watched the ever-changing islands. The names slipped hy--Tumo, Lanna, Winho, Salav, Ia, Lillen-cay, Paneron, Junno--sorne of them names I had heard, sonic of them not. We were a long way south now, and for a time we could see the distant coast of the wild southern continent: here the Qataari Peninsula reached northwards into the islands, stacked high behind rocky cliffs, but beyond this the land receded southwards and the illusion of endless sea returned, more temperate in this latitude.

After the barren appearance of some of the islands in the tropics, the scenery here was soothing to the eye: it was greener and more forested, with tidy towns rising up the hills from the sea, and domestic farm animals grazing, and cultivated crops and orchards. The cargoes we loaded and unloaded also revealed the gradual southwards progress: we carried bulk food and oils and machinery in the equatorial seas, later we carried grapes and pomegranates and beer, later still it was cheese and apples and hooks.

Once I said to Seri: "Let's get off. I want to see this place."

The island was Ia, a large, wooded island with sawmills and shipyards.

Watching from the deck I liked the way Ia Town was laid out, and I admired the unhurried efficiency of the docks. Ia was an island I wanted to walk in, and sit on grass and smell the earth. From the look of the place you could visualize cold springs and wild flowers and whitewashed farmhouses.

Seri, suntanned from her long idle hours on deck, was beside me as I leaned on the rail.

"We'll never get to Collago if we do."

"No more ships?"

"No more resolution. We can always come back here."

Seri had the will to get me to Collago. She remained something of a mystery to me, however much time we spent together. We never talked together very much, and so we argued rarely; by the same token, though, we reached a level of intimacy beyond which it seemed we would never proceed. The plans for islandhopping were hers. I was included in them, and included to the extent that when once I revealed a hesitancy about them she was prepared to abandon them, but I felt I was incidental to them. Her interest in lovemaking was disconcertingly sporadic. Sometimes we would crawl into our tiny bunk in the cramped cabin, and she would say she was too tired or too hot, and that would be the end of it; at other times she would exhaust me with her passions. She was sometimes intensely caring and affectionate, and I liked that. When we talked she asked me all sorts of questions about myself and my past life, yet about herself she was uncommunicative.

Throughout the long voyage, as my doubts about the athanasia treatment remained, the relationship with Seri was dogged by a growing feeling of my own inadequacy. W7hen I was apart from her--when she sunbathed alone, or I was in the bar on was speculating about my fellow would-be immortals--I could not help but wonder what she saw in me. I obviously fulfilled some need in her, but it seemed an unselective need. I sometimes had a suspicion that if someone else came along she would leave me for him. But no one else appeared, and in general I judged it better not to question what was in many ways an ideal, casual friendship.

Towards the end I unpacked my long-neglected manuscript, and took it to the bar, intending to read it through.

It was now two years since I had finished work on it, and it was strange to hold the loose pages again and remember the period I had been writing them.

I wondered if I had left it too long, if I had grown away from the person who had tried to resolve a temporary crisis by committing himself to the permanence of the written word. As we grow we do not see ourselves changing--

there is the apparent continuity of the mirror, the daily awareness of immediate past--and it takes the reminders of old photographs or old friends to point out the differences. Two years was a substantial period, yet for all that time I had been in a sort of stasis.

In that sense, my attempt to define myself had been a success. By describing my past I had intended to shape my future. If I believed that my true identity was contained in the pages, then I had never left them.

The manuscript was yellowing and the corners of the pages were curled. I slipped off the elastic band that held them all together, and started to read.

The first thing I noticed came as a surprise. In the first two or three lines I had written that I was twenty--nine years old, noting it as one of the few certainties in my life.

Yet this must have been a conceit, a falsification. I had written the manuscript two years ago.

At first this confused me, and I tried to remember what I had had in mind. Then I saw that it was perhaps a clue to understanding the rest of the text. In a sense, it helped account for the two years of stagnation that had followed: my writing had already taken _itself_ into account, disallowing further progress.

I read on, trying to identify with the mind that had produced the manuscript and finding, against initial expectations, that I could do so with ease. After I had read only a few chapters, much of which dealt with my relationship with my sister, I felt I needed to read no more. The manuscript confirmed what I had known all along, that my attempt to reach a higher, better truth had been successful. The metaphors lived, and my identity was defined amongst them.

I was alone in the bar; Seri had gone early to our cabin. I sat by myself for another hour, thinking over my uncertainties and reflecting on the irony that the only thing in the world I knew for sure was a rather tattered stack of typewritten pages. Then, exhausted with myself and tired of my endless inner concerns, I went below to sleep.

The next morning, at last, we came to Collago.

13

When I first won the lottery, and realized that athanasia was mine for the taking, I had tried to imagine what the clinic on Collago would be like. I visualized a gleaming glass-and-steel skyscraper, filled with modern medical equipment, and doctors and nurses moving about the shining corridors and wards with purpose and expertise. Relaxing in the landscaped gardens would be the new immortals, perhaps reclining in bath chairs with blankets over their legs and cushions behind their heads, while orderlies wheeled them to admire the profusion of fiowerbeds. Somewhere there would be a gymnasium, where rejuvenated muscles would be exercised; perhaps there would even be a university, where newly acquired wisdom could be disseminated.

The photographs I saw in the office in Muriseay made literal whatever imaginings I might have had. These I had reacted against: the smiling faces, the saturated colours, the blatant attempt to sell me something I had already unwittingly purchased. The clinic, as depicted in the brochure, looked as if it would be somewhere between a health farm and a ski-resort, with physical well-being, exercise and social intercourse predominating.

The ways of the Archipelago were always surprising me, though, for I found none of this. The brochure was a lie, but only in the way all brochures are lies. Everything in the pictures was there to he seen, although the faces were different and now there was no photographer to be smiling for, but when I saw the place for myself everything seemed subtly different. Brochures, by omission, encourage you to bring your own wishes to what you do not see. I had assumed, for instance, that the clinic was in open countryside, but this was the product of careful choice of photographic angle, because it was on the very edge of Collago Town itself. Then I had thought that the gardens and chalets and antiseptic corridors were all there was of the place, but the pictures had not shown the central administrative building. This, an incongruous, dark-brick mansion, loomed over the tastefully spaced wooden chalets. That the interior of the place had been gutted, modernized and equipped with advanced medical facilities I discovered later, but the first sight of the old house gave one an oddly sinister feeling; it had the quality of moor and wind to it, as if it had been transplanted from some romantic melodrama of the past.

We had been met from the ship by a modern minibus operated by the clinic. A driver had stacked our baggage in the back of the vehicle, while a young woman, wearing the Lotterie uniform, took a note of our names. As I guessed, my five fellow passengers had not realized I was one of them. While we drove up the hilly streets of Collago Town, there was an almost palpable sense that Seri and I were interlopers in a private panty.

Then we came to the clinic grounds, and our first sight of the place.

The incongruities registered themselves, but what I noticed most was how small it was.

"Is this all there is?" I said quietly to Seri.

"What do you want, a whole town?"

"But it seems so small. No wonder they can only treat a few people at a time."

"The capacity's nothing to do with size. It's the manufacture of the drugs which is the problem."

"Even so, xvhere's the computer, where do they keep all the files?"

"It's all done here, as far as I know."

"But the clerical work alone .

It was a minor distraction, but my weeks of self-questioning had given me the habit of doubt. Unless there were more premises elsewhere, the Lotterie-Collago could not operate on its pannational scale from this place.

And the tickets would have to he printed somewhere; the Lotterie would hardly subcontract the work, with all the risk of fraud.

I wanted to ask Seri, but I suddenly felt I should be careful what I said. The bus we were in was tiny, the seats crammed close together. The uniformed young woman, standing at the front beside the driver, was not showing much interest in us but she would be in easy hearing of me if I spoke in normal tones.

The bus drove around to the far side of the house; on this side there were apparently no more outbuildings. The gardens stretched away for some distance, blending imperceptibly with wild ground beyond.

We alighted with the other people and went in through a doorway. We passed through a bare hall and went into a large reception area at the side.

Unlike the other people I was carrying my luggage: the holdall, which I slung over my shoulder. My five fellow passengers were now subdued, for the first time since I had noticed them, apparently overawed by the fact that they had finally entered the very building where they would be made to live forever.

Seri and I hung back from the rest, near the door.

The young woman who had met us at the harbour went behind a desk placed to one side.

"I need to verify your identities," she said. "Your local Lotterie office has given you a coded admission form, and if you would now give this to me I will assign you your chalets. Your personal counsellor will meet you there."

A minor upheaval followed, as the other passengers had left their forms in their baggage, and had to retrieve them. I wondered why the girl had not said anything on the bus; and I noticed the bored, sour expression she wore.

I took the opportunity to go forward first and identify nwself. My admission form was in one of the pouches on the side of my bag, and I laid it on the desk in front of her.

"I'm Peter Sinclair," I said.

She said nothing, but ticked my name off the list she had compiled on the bus, then punched the code number on my form into a keyboard in front of her. Silently, and invisibly to me, a readout must have appeared on the screen facing her. There were some thin metal bracelets on the desk, and she passed one of them through a recessed channel in the surface of the desk, presumably encoding it magnetically, then held it towards me.

"Attach this to your right wrist, Mr Sinclair. You will be in Chalet 24, and one of the attendants will show you how to find it. Your treatment will commence tomorrow morning."

I said: "I haven't finally decided yet. Whether or not to take the treatment, I mean."

She glanced up at me then, but her expression remained cold.

"Have you read the information in our brochure?"

"Yes, but I'm still not sure. I'd like to find out more about it."

"Your counsellor will visit you. It's quite usual for people to be nervous."

"It's not that I'm--" I was aware of Seri standing close behind me, listening to this. "I just want to ask a few questions."

"Your counsellor will tell you anything you wish to know."

I took the bracelet, feeling my antipathy harden. I could feel the momentum of my win, my travels, my arrival and induction here, taking me ineluctably on towards the treatment, my reservations cast aside. I still lacked the strength to back out, to reject this chance of living. I had an irrational fear of this counsellor, visiting me in the morning, uttering soothing platitudes and propelling me on towards the operating table and the knife, saving my life against my will.

Some of the other people were now returning, their admission forms clasped like passports.

"But if I decide against it," I said. "If I change my mind . . . is there any reason why I shouldn't?"

"You are committed to nothing, Mr Sinclair. Your being here does not imply consent. Until you sign the release form, you may leave at any time."

"All right," I said, conscious of the small group of elderly optimists assembling behind me. "But there's something else. I've got my girlfriend with me. I want her to stay with me in the chalet."

Her eyes turned briefly towards Seri. "Does she understand that the treatment is for you alone?"

Seri exhaled breath sharply. I said: "She's not a child."

"I'll wait outside, Peter," Seri said, and went out into the sunlight.

"We can't allow misunderstandings," the girl said. "She can stay tonight, but tomorrow she will have to find accommodation in the town. You will only be in the chalet for one or two nights."

"That suits me fine," I said, wondering if there was still a chance _Mulligayn_ was in the harbour. I turned my back on her and went outside to find Seri.

An hour later Seri had calmed me doxvn, and we were installed in Chalet 24. That evening, before going to bed, Seri and I walked in the darkness through the gardens. Lights were on in the main building, but most of the chalets were dark. We walked as far as the main gate, where we found that two men with dogs were on guard.

As we walked back, I said: "It's like a prison camp. They've overlooked the barbed wire and watchtowers. Perhaps someone should remind them."

"I had no idea it was like this," Seri said.

"I had to go into hospital when I was a child. What I didn't like about that, even then, was the way they treated me. It was as if I didn't exist, except as a body with symptoms. And this place is the same. I really resent that bracelet."

"Are you wearing it?"

"Not at the moment." We were following a path through the fiowerbeds, but the further we moved from the lights of the main building the more difficult it was to see, A patch of open ground was on our right, so we sat down, discovering that it was a lawn. "I'm going to leave. First thing in the morning. Will you understand if I do?"

Seri was silent for a while, then said: "I still think you should go through with it."

"In spite of all this?"

"It's just a sort of hospital. They've got the institutionalized mind, that's all."

"It's most of what's putting me off at the moment. I just feel I'm here for something I don't need. As if I volunteered for openheart surgery or something. I need someone to give me a good reason to go on with it."

Seri said nothing.

"Well, if it was you, would you take the treatment?"

"It doesn't apply. I haven't won the lottery."

"You're avoiding the question," I said. "I wish I'd never bought that damned ticket. Everything about this place is wrong. I can feel it, but I can't say why."

"I just think you've been given a chance to have something that very few people have, and that a lot would like. You shouldn't turn your back on it until you're sure. It will stop you dying, Peter. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"We all have to die in the end," I said defensively. "Even with the treatment. All it does is delay it a bit."

"No one's died yet."

"How can you be sure of that?"

"I can't be completely, of course. But in the office we got annual reports on all the people who have been treated. The records go back to the beginning, and the list always got longer. There were people on Muriseay. When they came in for their check-ups, they always said how well they felt."

I said: "What check-ups?"

In the darkness I could see Seri was facing me, but I could not make out her expression.

"There's an option. You can monitor your health afterwards."

"So they're not even sure the treatment works!"

"The Lotterie is, but sometimes the patients aren't sure. I suppose it's a form of psychological reassurance, that the Lotterie does not abandon them once they leave here."

"They cure everything except hypochondria," I said, remembering a friend of mine who had become a doctor. She used to say that at least half her patients came to the surgery for the company. Illness was a habit.

Seri had taken my hand. "It's got to he your decision, Peter. If I was in your position, perhaps I'd feel the same. But I wouldn't want to regret turning down the chance."

"It just doesn't feel real," I said. "I've never worried about death because I've never had to face it. Do other people feel that?"

"I don't know." Seri was looking away now, staring at the dark trees.

"Seri, I realize I'm going to die one day . . . but I don't _believe_

that, except cerebrally. Because I'm alive now I feel I always will he. It's as if there's a sort of life force in me, something strong enough to fend off death."

"The classic illusion."

"I know it's not logical," I said. "But it means something."

"Are your parents still alive?"

"My father is. My mother died several years ago. Why?"

"It's not important. Go on."

I said: "A couple of years ago I wrote my autobiography. I didn't really know why I was doing it at the time. I was going through something, a kind of identity crisis. Once I started writing I began to discover things about myself, and one of them was the fact that memory has continuity. It became one of the main reasons for writing. As long as I could _remember_ myself, then I existed. When I woke up in the mornings the first thing I'd do would be to think back to what I'd done just before going to bed. If the continuity was there, I still existed. And I think it works the other way . . . there's a space ahead that I can anticipate. It's like a balance. I discovered that memory was like a psychic force behind me, and therefore there must be some kind of life force spreading out in front. The human mind, consciousness, exists at the centre. I know that so long as there is one there will always be the other. While I can remember, I am defined."

Seri said: "But when you die in the end, because you will . . . when that happens your identity will cease. When you die you lose your memory with everything else."

"But that's unconsciousness. I'm not scared of that because I won't experience it."

"You assume you have no soul."

"I'm not trying to argue a theory. I'm trying to explain what I _feel_.

I know that one day I will die, but that's different from actually believing it. The athanasia treatment exists to cure me of something I don't believe I have. Mortality."

"You wouldn't say that if you suffered from cancer."

"So far as I know, I don't. I know it's possible I might contract it, but I don't really believe, deep down, that I will. It doesn't scare me."

"It does me."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm scared of death. I don't want to die."

Her voice had gone very quiet, and her head was bent.

"Is that why you're here with me? Because of that?"

"I just want to know if it's possible. I want to be with you when it happens, I want to see you live forever. I can't help that. You asked me what I would do if I won the prize . . . well, I'd take the treatment and not ask why. You say you have never faced death, but I know all about it."

"What happened?" I said.

"It was a long time ago." She leaned towards me and I put my arm around her shoulders. "I suppose it shouldn't matter anymore. It was when I was a child. My mother was an invalid and she was dying slowly for ten years. They said there was no cure for her, but she knew, and we all knew, that if the Lotterie had admitted her she would be alive now."

I remembered our walk in the village by the petrifying pool, when Seri had argued the Lotterie's case for turning away the sick. I had had no idea of the degree of her contradictions.

"I took the job because I'd heard a rumour that after some years the staff qualify for free treatment. It wasn't true, but I had to stay on. These people who win, who turn up at the office . . . I loathe them but I have to be near them. It's a kind of rapture, knowing that they will not die, that they can never be ill. Do you know what it is to be in real pain? I had to watch my mother die, knowing there was something that could save her! Every month my father went out and bought lottery tickets. Hundreds of them, whatever cash he had spare. And all that money came to this place, and the treatment that could have saved her is given to people like you and people like Mankinova, and all the other people who don't really need it."

I drew away from her, and picked stupidly at the grass with my fingers.

I had never known pain, beyond the transient agony of a neglected tooth, of a broken arm in childhood, a twisted ankle, a septic finger. I had never considered it before, never thought about death in any way except the abstract.

I failed to measure the value of the clinic's treatment, but this was only because I did not understand the alternative.

Life seemed long and untroubled because it had been so far. But good health was a deception, a variant from the norm. I remembered the hundreds of prosaic conversations I had heard throughout my life, snatches of dialogue in public transport and restaurants and shops: most of them seemed to be about illness or worries, their own or those of close ones. There had been a little shop near my apartment in Jethra where for a time I bought fruit. After a few weeks I had found somewhere else, because for some reason the shopkeeper encouraged his customers to talk about themselves, and waiting to buy fruit was always attended by nightmare glimpses into other people's lives. An operation, a seizure, an unexpected death.

I had shrunk away from that, as if by contagion I would suffer too.

"Then what do you think I should do?" I said at last.

"I still think you should go ahead. Isn't that obvious?"

"Frankly, no. You just contradict yourself. Everything you say makes it worse for me."

Seri sat in silence, staring at the ground. I realized that she and I were moving away from each other. We had never been close, except for affection and the temporary proximities of sex. I had always had some difficulty in relating to her, sensing that we had landed accidentally in each other's lives. For a time our lives were running parallel, but inevitably they would diverge. Once I had thought it would be the athanasia that would divide us, but perhaps it would take less than that to split us up. She would move on, I would move on.

"Peter, I'm getting cold." There was a wind from the sea, and the latitude was temperate. Here it was just the beginning of summer, as in Jethra it had been the first weeks of autumn.

"You haven't explained yourself," I said.

"Do I have to?"

"It would help me if you could. That's all."

We walked back to our chalet, and Seri linked her hand in my arm.

Nothing had been resolved, the decision would have to he mine. Because I looked to Seri for an answer I dodged the uncertainty in my own mind.

Like that house in the village, the chalet felt warm after the relative cool outside. Seri sprawled on one of the two narrow beds and began reading one of the magazines we had found. I went to the other end, where an area was furnished as a writing space. There was a desk and a chair, both well made and modern, a wastepaper basket, a typewriter, a stack of clean paper and a number of different pens and pencils. I had always had an enjoyable appreciation for clean stationery, and I sat at the desk for a few minutes, fingering the keys of the typewriter. It was much more efficiently designed and solidly built than the little portable I had used for my manuscript, and as you sometimes feel when you sit at the controls of an unfamiliar can that you could drive it fast and safely, so I got the impression that were I to work at this desk I could write fluently and well.

"Do you know why they've put all this stuff here?" I said to Seri.

"It's in the brochure," she said in an irritated voice, not looking up from her magazine.

"I'm not disturbing you, am I?"

"Would you just shut up for a while? I want a rest from you."

I took down my holdall and found the brochure. I flipped through it, glancing again at the photographs. One was of the interior of one of the chalets, brightly lit and unoccupied. There were no sandals scattered on the matting on the floor, no clothes thrown untidily on the ends of the beds, no empty been cans lined up on the shelf, no shadows on the brilliant white walls.

In the caption to this photograph it said: ". . . each of our chalets includes modern facilities for the writing of your private account, which is a crucial part of our exclusive treatment".

This must mean the questionnaire Seri had told me about. So I was to write of myself, to tell the story of my life, so that afterwards I could be made into the words I had written. No one here at the clinic could have known that this was something I had already done.

I mused for a while, thinking of the sort of people who had been on the ship with us, each tonight sitting at a desk like this one, contemplating their own lives. I wondered what they would find to say.

It was a return to the hubris I felt whenever I thought of the others.

What, indeed, had I found worth saying? While writing, I had been humbled by the discovery that very little of interest had happened to me.

Was this perhaps the real reason I had invented so much? Was it not, after all, that truth was best found through metaphor, but that self-deceit and self-embellishment were the principal motives?

I looked along the cabin at the top of Seri's head, bent over the magazine while she read. Her pale blonde hair fell forward, concealing her face. She was bored with me, wanted a break. I had become self-obsessed, introspective, endlessly questioning. My inner life was constantly externalizing itself, and Seri had always been there to bear the brunt of it.

I had spent too much time in my inner world; I too was tiring of it, wanted an end to it all.

Seri ignored me as I undressed and climbed into the other bed. Some time later she turned off the lights and crawled into her own bed. I listened to the sound of her breathing until I drifted off into sleep.

In the middle of the night, Seri came to lie with me. She held me tightly, kissed my face and neck and ear until I wakened, and then we made love.

14

The following morning, while Seri was taking a shower, the counsellor arrived at the chalet. Almost at once it was as if my doubts were focused.

Her name was Lareen Dobey; she introduced herself, invited me to use her first name, and sat down in the chair behind the desk. I was on my guard from the moment she arrived, sensing the momentum of the Lotterie's system behind her. She was here to counsel me, implying she was trained to persuade me.

She was middle-aged, married, and reminded me of a teacher I had had in my first year at senior school. This alone gave me the instinct to resist her influence, but on a more rational level it was clear she took it for granted that I would be going ahead to take the treatment. I now had an object for my doubts, and my thoughts clarified.

There was a brief, irrelevant conversation: Lareen asked me about my journey, what islands I had visited. I found myself taking a mental step back from her, secure in my new objectivity. Lareen was here to counsel me through the treatment, and I had at last reached my decision.

"Have you had breakfast yet, Peter?" she said.

"No."

She reached behind a curtain beside the desk and pulled forward a telephone receiver I had not known was there.

"Two breakfasts for Chalet 24, please."

"Would you make that three?" I said.

Lareen looked at me inquisitively, and I explained briefly about Seri.

She changed the order, then hung up.

"Is she a close friend?" Lareen said.

"Fairly close. Why?"

"We sometimes find that the presence of someone else can be distressing.

Most people come here alone."

"Well, I haven't decided--"

"On the other hand, from our point of view the rehabilitation process can be greatly assisted. How long have you known Seri?"

"A few weeks."

"And do you expect the relationship to go on?"

Annoyed by the frankness of the question, I said nothing. Seri was within earshot, had she chosen to listen, and anyway I could not see what it had to do with this woman. She stared at me, until I looked away. In the shower cubicle I heard Seri turn off the water.

"All right, I understand," Lareen said. "Maybe you find it difficult to trust me."

"Are you trying to psychoanalyse me?"

"No. I'm trying to learn what I can about you, so I can help you later."

I knew I was wasting this woman's time. Whether or not I "trusted" her was not the issue; the confidence I lacked was in myself. I no longer wanted what her organization offered me.

Just then, Seri came in from the shower cubicle. She had a towel wrapped around her body and another about her head. She glanced at Lareen, then went to the other end of the chalet and pulled the screen across.

Knowing that Seri could hear me, I said: "I might as well be honest with you, Lareen. I've decided not to accept the treatment."

"Yes, I see. Are your reasons ethical on religious?"

"Neither ...well, ethical I suppose." The promptness of the question had again taken me by surprise.

"Did you have these feelings when you bought the ticket?" Her tone was interested, not inquisitive.

"No, they came later." Lareen was waiting, so I went on, noting subconsciously that she was expert at manipulating a response out of me. Now that I had stated my decision I felt a strong compulsion to explain myself. "I can't really describe what it is, except that my being here feels wrong. I keep thinking of other people who need the treatment more urgently than I do, and that I don't really deserve it. I don't know what I'm going to do with athanasia. I'm just going to waste it, I think." Still Lareen said nothing.

"Then yesterday, when we arrived here. It's like a hospital, and I'm not ill."

"Yes, I know what you mean."

"Don't try to talk me into it, please. I've made up my mind."

I could hear Seri moving around behind the screen, brushing her hair out.

"You know you are dying, Peter?"

"Yes, but that doesn't mean anything to me. We're all dying."

"Some of us sooner than others."

"That's why it doesn't seem to matter. I'll die in the end, whether or not I take the treatment."

Lareen had made a note on the pad of paper she carried. Somehow it indicated that she had not accepted my rejection of the treatment.

"Have you ever heard of a writer called Deloinne?" she said.

"Yes, of course. _Renunciation_."

"Have you read the hook recently?"

"When I was at school."

"We've got copies here. Why don't you borrow one?"

"I wouldn't have thought that was approved reading here," I said. "It doesn't exactly agree with your treatment."

"You said you didn't want to be talked out of your decision. If you're not going to change your mind, I want you to be sure you've not made a mistake."

"All right," I said. "Why did you mention it?"

"Because the central point of Deloinne's argument is that the irony of life is its finite nature, and that the terror of death is caused by its infinitude. When death comes, there is no reversing it. A human being can therefore only achieve whatever it is he aspires to in a relatively brief time. Deloinne argues--mistakenly, in my personal opinion--that it is the temporary nature of life that makes it worth living. If life is prolonged, as we can prolong it here, then life's achievements become attenuated. Deloinne also points out, correctly, that Lotterie-Collago has never made guarantees against eventual death. He therefore comes to the conclusion that a short, rich life is preferable to a long and impoverished one."

"That's how I see it," I said.

"So you prefer to live your normal span?"

"Until I won the prize, I'd never even thought about it."

"VVhat would you call a normal span? Thirty years? Forty?"

"More than that, of course," I said. "Isn't normal life expectancy somewhere around seventy-five years?"

"On average, yes. How old are you, Peter? Thirty-one, isn t it?

"No. Twenty--nine."

"Your records say thirty--one. But it doesn't matter."

Seri came out from behind the screen, fully dressed but with her hair hanging loose and wet. She had a towel around her shoulders, and a comb in her hand. Lareen took no notice of her as she sat down in the other seat, but instead unclipped a large fold of computer print_out paper and examined the top sheet.

"Peter, I'm afraid I've got some rather hard news for you. Deloinne was a philosopher but you try to take him literally. Whatever you _say_, you believe instinctively that you will live forever. The facts are rather different." She was moving her pencil oven the sheet. "Here we are. Your life expectancy, at present, is put at just under four and a half years."

I looked at Seri. "That's nonsense!"

"I'm sorry, but it's not. I know you find it difficult to believe, but I'm afraid it's extremely likely."

"But I'm not ill. I've never been ill in my life."

"That's not what your medical records say. You were hospitalized when you were eight, and you were under treatment for several weeks."

"That was just a childhood illness. Kidney trouble, they said, but the doctors told my parents I was all right and I've never had any trouble since."

Again I looked at Seri, seeking reassurance, but she was staring at Lareen.

"When you were in your early twenties, you went to your G.P. several times. Headaches."

"This is ridiculous! That was just a minor thing. The doctor said it was because I was working too hard. I was at university. Everybody gets headaches!

Anyway, how do you know all this? Are you a doctor?"

"No, I'm just a counsellor. If it was as minor as you say, then perhaps our computer prognosis is wrong. You can be examined if you wish. At the moment, all we have to go on is your records."

"Let me see that," I said, pointing at the sheet of paper. Lareen hesitated, and for a moment I thought she was going to refuse. But then she passed it over.

I read through it quickly. It was in detail accurate, though selectively. It listed my birth date, parents, sister, addresses, schools, medical treatment. Further on were more unexpected details. There was a list (incomplete) of my friends, places I had often visited, and, disturbingly, details of howr I had voted, the tithes I had paid, the political society I joined at university, my contacts with a fringe theatre group, my connections with people who were monitoring the Covenant. There was a section on what the computer called "imbalance indications": that I drank frequently, had friends of dubious political affiliation, was fickle with women, was given to unreasonable rages when younger, was described as "moody and introverted" by one of my tutors, was described as "only So per cent reliable" by a former employer, had been granted deferment of the draft on "psychological" grounds, and that for a time I had been involved with a young woman descended from Glaundian immigrants.

"Where the hell does this stuff come from?" I said, brandishing the sheet.

"Isn't it accurate?"

"Never mind that! It's a complete distortion!"

"But is it factually accurate?"

"Yes . . . but it misses out a lot of things."

"We didn't ask for these details. This is just what came out of the computer."

"Do they have files like this on everyone?"

"I've no idea," Lareen said. "You must ask your own government that. All we're concerned with is your life e.xpectaney, although this extra information can have a bearing. Have you read the medical summary?"

"Where is it?"

Lareen left her seat and stood beside me. She pointed with her pencil.

"These figures are our codes. Don't worry about them. This is where your life expectancy is printed."

The computer had printed 35.46 years.

"I don't believe it," I said. "It must be a mistake."

"We're not often wrong."

"What does the figure mean? Is that how long I have to live?"

"That's the age at which the computer says you are most likely to die."

"But what am I suffering from? I don't _feel_ ill!"

Beside me, Seri took my hand. "Listen to her, Peter."

Lareen had returned to her seat behind the desk. "I can arrange for a medical examination, if you like."

"Is there something wrong with my heart? Is it something like that?"

"The computer doesn't say. But you can be cured here."

I was hardly listening. All of a sudden my body felt as if it were a mass of previously unnoticed symptoms. I remembered the numerous aches and pains I had felt: indigestion, bruises, stiff legs, a sore back after working too long, the hangovers I sometimes suffered, the headaches at university, the coughing with head colds. All seemed innocuous and explicable at the time, but now I wondered. Did they hint at something worse? I imagined clotted arteries and neoplasms and gall-stones and ruptures, lurking within me, destroying me.

Yet it still had a faintly ridiculous aspect: in spite of everything I continued to feel as healthy as ever.

I resented utterly the fact that the Lotterie had thrust this on me. I stood up, looked out of the window, and across the lawns towards the sea. I was free, under no compulsion; Seri and I could leave immediately.

But then the realization: no matter what was wrong with me, there was a cure for it! If I took the athanasia treatment I should never again be ill, I should live forever. Illness thwarted.

It was an exhilarating feeling, one that seemed to give me great power and freedom. I suddenly realized how inhibiting was the prospect of illness: that one was cautious with food, or wary of too little exercise, on too much, aware of the signs of advancing age, shortage of wind, not getting enough sleep, or drinking on smoking too much. I would never need worry about such things again: I could abuse my body as I wished, or ignore it. I should never weaken, never decline.

Already, at the advanced age of twenty-nine, I had felt the first stirrings of envy of those younger than me. I saw the effortlessly agile bodies of younger men, the slender unsupported bodies of girls. They all looked so fit, as if good health were something to be taken for granted.

Perhaps someone older than myself would find this amusing to contemplate, but from my point of view I had already noticed myself slowing up. After the athanasia treatment I would remain forever twenty-nine. In a few years' time, those young adults I secretly envied would be my physical equals, yet I would have extra years of insight. And with every new generation I would acquire a greater mental stature.

Given the jolt, the news of my life expectancy, I began to recognize that the Lotterie's treatment was subtly different from Deloinne's interpretation. Because I read his book at an impressionable age, Deloinne had influenced me too much. I made his ideas my own, without questioning them.

Deloinne saw athanasia as an abnegation of life, yet really it was an affirmation.

As Seri had pointed out, the coming of death brings the destruction of memory. But life is memory. As long as I am alive, as long as I wake every morning, I remember my life, and as the years pass my memory becomes enriched.

Old men are wise, not by nature but by absorption and retention, and by the accumulation of sufficient memories to be able to select what is important.

Memory is continuity too, a sense of identity and place and consequence.

I am what I am because I can remember how I became it.

Memory was the psychic force I had described to Seri: the momentum of life, driving from behind and anticipating what is to come.

With increased life span the quantity of memory would increase, but a mind can fine-tune this into quality.

As memory is enhanced, so is one's perception of life.

This is the fear of death. Because it is unconsciousness, the obliteration of all physical and mental processes, the memory dies with the body. The human mind, at pivot of past and future, vanishes with its memories.

Thus, from death there is no remembering.

The fear of dying is not just the terror of pain, the humiliation of the loss of faculties, the fall into the abyss . . . but the primeval fear that afterwards one might _remember_ it.

The act of dying is the only experience of the dead. Those who are living cannot be alive if memory includes that of the state of death.

I was aware, beyond my new introspection, that Seri and Lareen were speaking to each other: polite exchanges and pleasantries, places for Seri to visit on the island, an hotel she might stay in. And I was also aware that a man had brought a large tray bearing breakfast, but I was not interested in food.

Lareen's computer print-out lay on the desk, the prediction of my life expectancy visible on the face I could see. 35.46 years . . . a statistical probability, not really a prediction.

A young man in his early twenties would have an expectancy of half a century. Of course, he might only live another three weeks, but the statistics were against this.

My own expectation was said to be another six years. I could live to be ninety, but the statistics were against this too.

However, I had no way of knowing if the figures were reliable. I looked again at the print-out, stamped with all the implacable neatness of a computer, and read again through the sundry evidence against me. It was a biased picture, saying almost nothing about me that could be construed in my favour. I was said to drink a lot, was moody, had a certain political dubiety.

This was supposed to influence my general health and well-being; from this the computer had estimated my life span.

Why had it not taken other facts into account? For instance, that I often went swimming in summer, that I enjoyed wellcooked fresh food and ate plenty of fruit, that I had given up smoking, had attended church until I was fourteen, was generous to charities, kind to animals and had blue eyes?

They all seemed just as relevant or irrelevant to me, yet each would presumably influence the computer, and some might predicate a few extra years for me.

I felt suspicious. These figures had been produced by an organization that sold a product. No secret was made of the fact that Lotterie-Collago was profit-making, that its principal source of revenue was the sales of its tickets, and that every healthy athanasian who emerged from the clinic was a walking advertisement for their business. It was in their interests that winners of the lottery accept the treatment, and therefore they would offer any inducement they could.

I reserved judgement on the treatment, but I resolved that I would make a decision only after an independent medical examination. I continued to feel healthy; I was suspicious of the computer; I found athanasia a challenge.

I turned back to the other two. They had started on the toast and cereals the man had brought. As I sat down, I saw Seri looking at me, and she knew I had changed my mind.

15

The clinic's medical centre occupied one wing of the main building. Here all recipients of the athanasia treatment were given a screening before progressing further. I had never before undergone a complete medical, and found the experience in turn tiring, alarming, boring, humiliating and interesting. I was readily impressed by the array of modern diagnostic equipment, but I was intended not to understand the functions of most of it.

The preliminary screening was by direct interaction with a computer; later I was placed in a machine I took to be a whole-body scanner; after further more detailed X-raying of specific pants of my body--my head, my lower back, my left forearm and my chest-- I was briefly interviewed by a doctor, then told to dress and return to my chalet.

Seri had left to fluid an hotel, and there was no sign of Lareen. I sat on my bed in the cabin, reflecting on the psychological factors in hospitals, in which the removal of the patient's clothing is only the first step of many by which he is reduced to an animated slab of meat. In this condition, individuality is suppressed for the greaten glory of symptoms, the former presumably interfering with the appreciation of the latter.

I read my manuscript for a while, to remind me of who I was, but then I was interrupted by the arrival of Lareen Dobey and the man who had interviewed me, Doctor Corrob. Lareen smiled wanly at me, and went to sit in the chain by the desk.

I stood up, sensing something.

"Mrs. Dobey tells me you are in doubt as to whether or not you will accept the treatment," Connob said.

"That's night. But I wanted to hear what you had to say."

"My advice is that you should accept the treatment without delay. Your life is in great danger without it."

I glanced at Lareen, but she was looking away. "What's wrong with me?"

"We have detected an anomaly in one of the main blood vessels leading to your brain. It's called a cenebro-vascular aneurysm. It's a weakness in the wall of the vessel, and it could burst at any time."

"You're making it up!"

"Why do you think that?" Corrob at least looked surprised.

"You're trying to frighten me into having the treatment."

Corrob said: "I'm only telling you what we've diagnosed. I'm retained by the Lotterie as a consultant. What I'm telling you is that you have a serious condition, which if left unattended will certainly kill you."

"But why has this never been found before?"

"Perhaps you have not been examined recently. We know that when you were a child you suffered a kidney condition. Although this was dealt with at the time, it has left you with a higher than average blood pressure. You also admit to a drinking. habit."

"Just a normal amount!" I said.

"In your case the normal amount should be none at all, if you cane for your health. You say you are a regular drinker, taking the equivalent of a bottle of wine a day. In your condition this is extremely foolish."

Again I looked at Lareen, and now she was watching me.

"This is crazy!" I said to her. "I'm not ill!"

"That isn't really for you to decide," Corrob said. "According to the results from the cerebral angiognam, you are a very sick man." He stood with his hand on the door, as if anxious to leave. "Of course, the decision is yours, but my advice is that you should take the treatment immediately."

"Would that cure this?"

Corrob said: "Your counsellor will explain."

"And there's no danger?"

"No . . . the treatment is perfectly safe."

"Then that settles it," I said. "If you're sure--"

Corrob was holding a small file I had thought must he the case notes on a patient; now I realized it must be on me. He passed it to Lareen. "Mr.

Sinclair should he admitted to the athanasia unit immediately. How much time do you require for the rehabilitation profile?"

"At least another day, perhaps two."

"Sinclair is to be given priority. The aneurysm is a severe one. There's no question that we can allow an attack to happen while he's in the clinic. If he tries to cause delays, he must he off the island tonight."

"I'll clear him by this evening."

All this had been said as if I were not there. Corrob turned back to me.

"You must take no solids after four this afternoon," he said. "If you're thirsty, you may drink water or light fruit juice. But no alcohol. Mrs Dobey will visit you in the morning, and then you'll be admitted for the treatment.

Do you understand?"

"Yes, but I want to know--"

"Mrs Dobey will explain what will happen." He went through the door, and closed it quickly behind him. He left a whirling air space.

I sat on my bed, ignoring Lareen. I accepted what the doctor had said, even though I continued to feel as well as even. There was something about the medical manner, the way a symptom was made to be inferior to the doctor's knowledge. I remembered visiting my G.P. a few years before, complaining of blocked sinuses. After examining me he had discovered that I had been sleeping in a centrally heated bedroom, and, worse, I had been using a proprietary brand of decongestant nose drops. Suddenly, the sinusitis was the consequence of my own misdeeds, I was to blame. I left the surgery that day feeling guilty and humbled. Now, with the departure of Corrob, I felt that I was again guilty in some way of inflicting a weakened blood vessel on myself. I had been a patient as a child, I was a drinker when an adult. For the first time in my life I felt defensive about drinking, felt the need to deny on explain or justify.

It must have been something to do with the clinic's own defensiveness; the staff, acutely conscious of the controvery surrounding the treatment, made the recipients a party to the system. The willing were inducted smoothly and conspiratorially; the unwilling or the reluctant were psychologically manipulated then medically intimidated.

I wished Seri were with me, and I wondered how long she would be gone. I wanted the chance to be a human being again: perhaps go for a walk with her, or make love, on just sit around doing nothing.

Lareen closed the file she had been reading. "How do you feel, Peter?"

"How do you think I feel?"

"I'm sorry . . . there's no satisfaction for me in the computer being right. If it's any consolation, at least we can do something for you here. If you were still at home, it probably wouldn't have been diagnosed."

"I can still hardly believe it." Outside, a man was mowing the lawn; in the distance I could see a part of Collago Town, and behind it the headland by the harbour. I moved away from the window by the bed, and went to sit with Lareen. "The doctor said you would explain the treatment."

"For the aneurysm?"

"Yes, and the athanasia."

"Tomorrow you'll go in for conventional surgery on the diseased artery.

What the surgeon will probably do is implant a temporary by-pass until the artery regenerates itself. This should happen quite quickhr."

"What do you mean by regenerate?" I said.

"You'll be given a number of hormonal and enzymal injections. These stimulate cell replication in parts of the body where it doesn't normally take place, such as the brain. In other parts, the enzymes control replication, preventing malignancies and keeping your organs in good condition. After the treatment, in other words, your body will constantly renew itself."

"I've heard that I have to have a check-up every year," I said.

"No, but you can if you wish. What the surgeons will also do is implant a number of microprocessor monitors. These can be checked at any of the Lotterie's offices, and if anything is going wrong you will he given advice on what to do. In some cases you can be ne-admitted here."

"Lareen, either the treatment is permanent, or it isn't."

"It's permanent, but in a particular way. All we can do here is prevent organic decay. For instance, do you smoke?"

"No. I used to."

"Suppose you were to start again. You could smoke as many cigarettes as you wished, and you would never develop lung cancer. That's definite. But you could still contract bronchitis or emphysema, and carbon monoxide would put a strain on your heart. The treatment won't prevent you from being killed in a road accident, and it won't stop you drowning, and you can still get hernias and chilblains, and you can still break your neck. We can stop the body degenerating, and we can help you build immunity to infections, but if you abuse yourself you can still find ways of causing damage."

Reminders of a body's frailties: ruptures and fractures and bruises. The weaknesses one knew about, tried not to think about, observed in other people, overheard in shop conversations. I was developing sensibilities about health I had never had before. Did the acquisition of immortality simply make one more aware of death?

I said to Lareen: "How long does this take?"

"Altogether, about two or three weeks. There'll he a short recovery period after the operation tomorrow. As soon as the consultant thinks you're ready, the enzyme injections will start."

"I can't stand injections," I said.

"They don't use hypodermic needles. It's a hit more sophisticated than that. Anyway, you won't he aware of the treatment."

"You mean I'll be anaesthetized?" A sudden dread.

"No, but once the first injections are made you'll become semiconscious.

It probably sounds frightening, but most patients have said they found it pleasant."

I valued my hold on consciousness. Once, when I was twelve, I was knocked off my bicycle by a bully, and suffered concussion and three days'

retrospective amnesia. The loss of those three days was the central mystery of my childhood. Although I was unconscious for less than half an hour, my return to awareness was accompanied by a sense of oblivion behind me. When I returned to school, sporting a black eye and a splendidly lurid bandage around my forehead, I was brought face to face with the fact that those three days had not only existed, but that _I_ had existed within them. There had been lessons and games and written exercises, and presumably conversations and arguments, yet I could remember none of them. During those days I must have been alert, conscious and self-aware, feeling the continuity of memory, sure of my identity and existence. An event that _followed_ them, though, eradicated them, just as one day death would erase all memory. It was my first experience of a kind of death, and since then, although unconsciousness itself was not to be feared, I saw memory as the key to sentience. I existed as long as I remembered.

"Lareen, are you an athanasian?"

"No, I'm not."

"Then you've never experienced the treatment."

"I've worked with patients for nearly twenty years. I can't claim any more than that."

"But you don't know what it feels like," I said.

"Not directly, no."

"The truth is, I'm scared of losing my memory."

"I understand that. My job here is to help you regain it afterwards. But it's inevitable that you must lose what you now have as your memory."

"Why is it inevitable?"

"It's a chemical process. To give you longevity we must stop the brain deteriorating. In the normal thanatic body brain cells never replicate, so your mental ability steadily declines. Every day you lose thousands of brain cells. What we do here is induce replication in the cells, so that however long you live your mental capacity is unimpaired. But when the replication begins, the new cellular activity brings almost total amnesia."

"That's precisely what frightens me," I said. A mind sliding away, life receding, continuity lost.

"You'll experience nothing that will scare you. You will enter the fugue state, which is like being in a continuous dream. In this, you'll see images from your life, remember journeys and meetings, people will seem to speak to you, you will feel able to touch, experience emotions. Your mind will be giving up what it contains. It's just your own life."

The hold released, sentience dying. Entry into fugue, where the only reality was dream.

"And when I come round I'll remember nothing about it."

"Why do you say that?"

"It's what surgeons always say, isn't it? They believe it comforts people."

"It's true. You'll wake up here in this chalet. I'll be here, and your friend, Seri."

I wanted to see Seri. I wanted Lareen to go away.

"But I'll have no memory," I said. "They'll destroy my memory."

"It can be replaced. That's my job."

In the fugue the dream dispensed, leaving a void. Life returned later, in the form of this calm-eyed, patient woman, returning my memories to me as if she were a hand writing words on blank paper.

I said: "Lareen, how can I know that afterwards I'll be the same?"

"Because nothing in you will be changed, except your capacity to live."

"But I am what I remember. If you take that away I cannot be the same person again."

"I'm trained to restore your memory, Peter. To do that, you've got to help me now."

She produced an attractively packaged folder, containing a thick wad of partially printed pages.

"There isn't as much time as we would normally have, but you should be able to manage this during the evening."

"Let me see it."

"You must be as frank and truthful as possible," Lareen said, passing the folder to me. "Use as much space as you like. There's spare paper in the desk."

The papers felt heavy, auguring hours of work. I glanced at the first page, where I could write my name and address. Later, the questions dealt with school. Later, with friendships, sex and love. There seemed no end to the questions, each phrased carefully so as to promote frankness in my answer. I found that I could not read them, that the words blurred as I flicked the pages across.

For the first time since sentence of death had been pronounced on me, I felt the stirrings of revolt. I had no intention of answering these questions.

"I don't need this," I said to Lareen. I tossed the questionnaire on to the desk. "I've already written my autobiography, and you'll have to use that."

I turned away from her, feeling angry.

"You heard what the doctor said, Peter. If you don't co-operate they'll make you leave the island tonight."

"I'm co-operating, but I'm not going to answer those questions. It's all written down already."

"Where is it? Can I see it?"

My manuscript was on my bed, where I had left it. I gave it to her. For some reason I was unable to look at her. As it was briefly in my hands the manuscript had transmitted a sense of reassurance, a link with what was soon to become my forgotten past.

I heard Lareen turn a few of the pages, and when I looked back at her she was reading quickly from the third on fourth page. She glanced at the last page, then set it aside.

"When did you write this?"

"Two years ago."

Lareen stared at the pages. "1 don't like working without the questionnaire. How do I know you've left nothing out?"

"Surely that's my risk?" I said. "Anyway, it's complete." I described the way I had written, how I had set myself the task of expressing wholeness and truth on paper.

She turned again to the last page. "It isn't finished. Do you realize that?"

"I was interrupted, but it doesn't matter. I was almost at the end, and although I did try to finish it later, it seemed better the way it is." Lareen said nothing, watching me and manipulating more from me. Resisting her, I said: "It's unfinished because my life is unfinished."

"If you wrote it two years ago, what's happened since?"

"That's the point, isn't it?" I was still feeling hostile to her, yet in spite of this her strategic silences continued to influence me. Another came, and I was unable to resist it. "When I wrote the manuscript I found that my life formed into patterns, and that everything I had done fitted into them.

Since I finished writing I've found that it's still true, that all I've done in the last two years has just added details to a shape."

"I'll have to take this away and read it," Lareen said.

"All right. But take care of it."

"Of course I'll he careful."

"I feel it's a part of me, something that can't be replaced."

"I could replicate it for you," Lareen said, and laughed as if she had made a joke. "I mean, I'll get it photocopied for you. Then you can have the original back and I'll work with the copy."

I said: "That's what they're going to do to me, isn't it? I'm going to he photocopied. The only difference is that I won't get the original back.

I'll be given the copy, but the original will be blank."

"It was only a joke, Peter."

"I know, but you made me think."

"Do you want to reconsider filling out my questionnaire? If you don't trust the manuscript--"

"It's not that I distrust," I said. "I live by what I wrote, because I _am_ what I wrote."

I closed my eyes, turning away from her again. How could I ever forget that obsessive writing and rewriting, the warm summer, the hillside view of Jethra? I particularly remembered being on the verandah of the villa I had borrowed from Colan the evening I made my most exciting discovery: that recollection was only partial, that the artistic recreation of the past constituted a higher truth than mere memory. Life could be rendered in metaphorical terms; these were the patterns I mentioned to Lareen. The actual details of, for instance, my years at school were only of incidental interest, yet considered metaphorically, as an experience of learning and growing, they became a larger, higher event. I related to them directly, because they had been my own experiences, but they were also related to the larger body of human experience because they dealt with the verities. Had I merely recounted the humdrum narrative, the catalogue of anecdotal details in literal memory, I should have been telling only half the story.

I could not separate myself from my context, and in this my manuscript became a wholeness, describing my living, describing my life.

I therefore knew that to answer Lareen's questionnaire would produce only half-truths. There was no room for elaboration in literal answers, no capacity for metaphor, or for _story_.

Lareen was glancing at her wristwatch.

"Do you know it's after three?" she said. "You missed lunch, and you're not allowed food after four."

"Can I get a meal at this time?"

"At the refectory. Tell the staff you're starting treatment tomorrow, and they'll know what to give you."

"Where's Seri? Shouldn't she he back by now?"

"I told her not to be back before five."

"I want her with me tonight," I said.

"That's up to you and her. She mustn't be here when you go up to the clinic."

I said: "But afterwards, can I see her then?"

"Of course you can. We'll both need her." Lareen had tucked my manuscript under her arm, ready to take it away, but now she pulled it out again. "How much does Seri know about you, about your background?"

"We've talked a bit while we were travelling. We both talked about ourselves."

"Look, I've had an idea." Lareen held out the manuscript for me to take.

"I'll read this later, while you're in the clinic. Tonight, let Seri read this, and talk to her about it. The more she knows about you the better. It could be very important."

I took the manuscript back, thinking of the way my life and privacy were being invaded. In writing of myself I had exposed myself; in the manuscript I was naked. I had not written to promote or excuse myself; I had just been honest, and in the process had found myself frequently unlikable. For this reason, the very idea of someone else reading the manuscript would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. Yet two women I hardly knew were now to read my work, and presumably would know me as well as I knew myself.

Even as I resented the intrusion a part of me rushed towards them, urging them to close scrutiny of m identity. In their interpretation, passed back to me, I would become myself again.

After Lareen had left I walked across the sloping lawns to the refectory, and was given the authorized pre-treatment meal. The condemned man ate a light salad, and afterwards was still hungry.

Seri reappeared in the evening, tired from being in the sun all day and walking too far. She had eaten before returning, and again I glimpsed the effect of what was happening. Already our temporary liaison was disrupted: we spent a day apart, ate meals at different times. Afterwards our lives would proceed at different paces. I talked to her about what had happened during the day, what I had learned.

"Do you believe them?" she said.

"I do now."

Seri placed her hands on the sides of my face, touching my temples with light fingertips. "They think you will die."

"They're hoping it won't happen tonight," I said. "Very bad for publicity."

"You mustn't excite yourself."

"What does that mean?"

"Separate beds tonight."

"The doctor said nothing about sex."

"No, but I did."

The energy had gone out of her teasing, and I sensed a growing silence within her. She was acting like a concerned relative before an operation, making bad-taste jokes about bedpans and enemas, covering up a darker fear.

I said: "Lareen wants you to help with the rehabilitation."

"Do you want me to?"

"I can't imagine it without you. That's why you came, isn't it?"

"You know why I'm here, Peter." She hugged me then, but turned away after a few seconds, looking down.

"I want you to read something this evening," I said. "Lareen suggested it."

"What is it?"

"I haven't enough time to answer her questionnaire," I said, fudging the answer. "But before I left home I wrote a manuscript. My life story. Lareen's seen it, and she's going to use it for the rehabilitation. If you read it this evening, I can talk to you about it."

"How long is it?"

"Quite long. More than two hundred pages, but it's typewritten. It shouldn't take too long."

"Where is it?"

I passed it to her.

"Why don't you just talk to me, like you did on the boat?" She was holding the manuscript loosely, letting the pages spread. "I feel this is, well, something you wrote for yourself, something private."

"It's what you've got to use." I started to explain my motives for writing it, what I had been trying to do, but Seri moved away to the other bed and began to read. She turned the pages quickly, as if she was only skimming, and I wondered how much of it she could take in with such a superficial reading.

I watched her as she went through the first chapter, the long explanatory passage where I was working out my then dilemma, my series of misfortunes, my justification for self-examination. She reached the second chapter, and because I was watching closely I noticed that she paused on the first page and read the opening paragraph again. She looked back to the first chapter.

She said: "Can I ask you something?"

"Shouldn't you read a bit more?"

"I don't understand." She put down the pages and looked at me oven them.

"I thought you said you came from Jethra?"

"That's right."

"Then why do you say you were born somewhere else?" She looked again at the word. " 'London' . . . where's that?"

"Oh, that," I said. "That's an invented name . . . it's difficult to explain. It's Jethra really, but I was trying to convey the idea that as you grow up the place you're in seems to change. 'London' is a state of mind. It describes my parents, I suppose, what they were like and where they were living when I was born."

"Let me read," Seri said, not looking at me, staring down at the page.

She read more slowly now, checking back several times. I began to feel uncomfortable, interpreting her difficulties as a form of criticism. Because I had defined myself to myself, because I had never imagined that anyone else would ever read it, I had taken for granted that my method would be obvious.

Seri, the first person in the world to read my book, frowned and read haltingly, turning the pages forward and back.

"Give it back to me," I said at last. "I don't want you to read any more."

"I've got to," she said. "I've got to understand."

But time passed and not much was clear to her. She started asking me questions:

"Who is Felicity?"

"What are the Beatles?"

"Where is Manchester, Sheffield, Pinaeus?"

"What is England, and which island is it on?"

"Who is Gracia, and why has she tried to kill herself?"

"Who was Hitler, what war are you talking about, which cities had they bombed?"

"Who is Alice Dowden?"

"Why was Kennedy assassinated?"

"When were the sixties, what is marijuana, what is a psychedelic rock?"

"You've mentioned London again . . . I thought it was a state of mind?"

"Why do you keep talking about Gracia?"

"What happened at Watergate?"

I said, but Seri did not seem to hear: "There's a deeper truth in fiction, because memory is faulty."

"Who _is_ Gracia?"

"I love you, Seri," I said, but the words sounded hollow and unconvincing, even to me.

16

I love you, Gracia," I said, kneeling on the threadbare carpet beside her. She was sprawled against the bed, half on, half off, no longer crying but silent. I was always uncomfortable when she said nothing, because it became impossible to comprehend her. Sometimes she was silent because she was hurt, sometimes because she simply had nothing to say, but sometimes because it was her way of taking revenge on me. She said my own silences were manipulative of her. Thus the complexities doubled, and I no longer knew how to behave. Even her anger was sometimes false, leading me to a response that she would call predictable; inevitably when her anger was real I took her less seriously, infuriating her more.

A declaration of love was the only common language left, yet it was spoken more by me than by her. The context of our rows made it sound hollow, even to me.

Tonight's now had been genuine, albeit trivial in origin. I had promised to keep the evening free to go with her to see some friends for dinner.

Unfortunately I had forgotten my promise and bought some tickets for a play I knew she wanted to see. It was my fault, I was absent-minded, I admitted it all, but she blamed me all the same. Her friends could not be telephoned; we had wasted money on the seats. Whichever way we acted something was wrong.

It was just the start. The impasse led to tension, and this in its turn brought out the deepen differences. I was unloving, took her for granted, the flat was always in a mess, I was moody and withdrawn. She was neurotic and mercurial, slovenly, flirtatious with other men. It all came out, spreading through the room like a damp cloud of recrimination, making us less well defined to each other, colder and further away, more likely to hurt by blundering into places we could only dimly see.

I was holding her hand, but she was unresponsive and cool. She lay with her face turned away from me, staring into the pillows. She was breathing steadily; the tears were past.

I kissed the back of her neck. "I do love you, Gracia."

"Don't say that. Not now."

"Why not? Isn't it the only thing that's still true?"

"You're just trying to intimidate me."

I grunted with exasperation and moved away from her. Her hand fell limp.

I stood up and went to the window.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm just pulling the curtains."

"Leave them alone."

"I don't want people looking in."

Gracia was careless of curtains. The bedroom was at the front of the house, and although the flat was in the basement the room could be clearly seen from the road. If Gracia went to bed before me she often undressed with the lights on and the curtains open. Once I had walked into the bedroom to find her sitting naked on the bed, drinking coffee and reading a book.

Outside, people leaving the pub were walking down the road.

"You're a prude, Peter."

"I just don't want people to see us rowing." I drew the curtains anyway, and returned to the bed. Gracia had sat up, and was lighting a cigarette.

"What are we going to do?"

I said: "We'll do what I suggested half an hour ago. You drive to Dave and Shirley's, and I'll go on the Underground to try to change the tickets.

I'll meet you later."

"All right."

Earlier, the same proposal had been fan from all night; it had reduced her to tears. I was trying to cover up my mistake, trying to get out of seeing Dave and Shirley. Now Gracia's mood had abruptly changed. I was forgiven and soon we would be making love.

I went into the kitchen and ran a glass of water. It was cold and clean but it tasted flat. I had become used to the sweet Welsh water in Henefordshine, the soft Pennine water in Sheffield; in London it was the Thames, chemically neutralized and endlessly recycled, tasting like an imitation of the real thing. I emptied the glass, rinsed it and left it to drain on the side. The dishes from yesterday's evening meal were still stacked there, greasy and odorous.

Gracia's flat was in a street typical of many inner London suburbs. Some of the houses were privately owned, others were council property. The house we lived in was due for modernization, but until then Camden Council was renting out the flats it contained on short leases at subsidized rents. It was sub-standard housing, but no worse than the expensive privately let flat I had lived in before. On the corner of the street was a take-away kebab house run by Cypriots; a number of bus routes went down the main street, from Kentish Town to King's Cross; there were two cinemas in Camden Town, one of which showed minorityinterest films by foreign directors; in Tufnell Park, about a mile away, a Shakespearean theatre company had taken oven and converted an old church. These were the principal amenities of the area, and it was being slowly converted from low-grade workingclass residential to desirable inner-London middle class. The pseudo-Georgian doors, Banham locks, pinewood kitchen tables and Welsh dressers were arriving in many previously neglected houses, and already a number of craft shops and delicatessens were appearing in the main street to serve this discriminating and affluent group.

Gracia had come up behind me. She put her arm around my chest, pulling me against her, and she kissed me behind my car.

"Let's go to bed," she said. "We've got time."

I resisted her because of the inevitability of it. Gracia was able to use sex for healing, and never really understood that rows were anaphrodisiac to me. I wanted to he alone afterwards, to walk the streets or go for a drink.

She knew this because I had explained it, and, by inability to respond, sometimes demonstrated it. She realized now that I was resisting her, and I felt her go taut. Because of that, not wanting to renew the trouble, I turned around and kissed her very quickly, hoping it would be enough.

Soon we were undnessed and in bed, and Gracia, her change of mood now complete, became an expert, sensitive lover. She sucked me until I was ready, then a little longer. We only became explicable to each other in bed. I liked to kiss and caress her breasts: they were small and soft and rolled in my hands. Her nipples were pliant, rarely erecting to my touch. I was loving Gracia, truly, but then I remembered Seri, and suddenly it was wrong.

Seri in bed beside me, her pale hair folded untidily across her brow, her lips parted, her eyes closed and her breath sweet. We always made love on our side, she with one knee raised, the other tucked beneath me. I liked to kiss and caress her breasts: they were small but firm, filling my hands, the little stud nipples stiff against my palms. Gracia, dark hair tousled on the pillow, unwashed in four days, was holding my head against hers; I was on top of her, trying to roll to the side, breathing her scents. It was wrong and I could not think why. Gracia felt me withdraw; her instinct for my loss of desire was unerring.

"Peter, don't stop!"

She arched her back, thrusting herself against me, then moved suddenly to clasp my penis at the base, jerking it up and down a few times, then leading me to her. I went on, physically capable but emotionally distant. I felt her nails gripping my shoulder blades, and I kept my eyes closed, hair in mouth and nose. I finished, but it was Seri who was there with me, turned to the side so I lay on her leg. Gracia gradually relaxed, still sensing my emotional withdrawal from her, but because she was physically satisfied the tension faded from her too. I pretended she was Gracia, even though she really was, and held her close while she smoked another cigarette.

Later, when Gracia had driven to Dave and Shirley's flat in Fulham, I walked down to the Underground station in Kentish Town, and caught a train to the West End. The exchange of tickets was simply done; seats were available for the following night's performance, and tonight people were waiting for cancellations. Sure that I had at last done the right thing, I caught a second train to Fulham.

Dave and Shirley were teachers, and they were into wholefood. Shirley thought she might be pregnant, and Gracia got drunk and flirted with Dave. We left before midnight.

That night, while Gracia was asleep, I thought about Seri.

I had once believed that she and Gracia were complementary to each other, but now the differences between them were hecoming obvious. That day in Castleton I had used my knowledge of Seri to try to understand Gracia. But the fallacy in this was the assumption that I had consciously created Seri.

Remembering the way I had written my manuscript, blending conscious invention with unconscious discovery, I knew that Seri must be more than a fictional analogue of Gracia. She was too real, too complete, too motivated by her own personality. She lived in her own right. Every time I saw her, or spoke to her, I felt this growing in her.

But so long as Gracia was there, Seri was in the background.

Sometimes, I would wake in the night to find Seri in bed with me. She would pretend to be asleep, but my first touch would rouse her. Then she would become, sexually, everything Gracia was not. Lovemaking with Seri was exciting and spontaneous, never predictable. Gracia knew I found her sexually irresistible, and became lazy; Seri took nothing for granted, but found new ways to excite me. Gracia was sexually adept, an expert lover; Seri had innocence and originality. Yet after making love with Seri, when we were fully awake and had the light on, Gracia would sit up to smoke a cigarette, or get out of bed to go to the loo, and I would have to adjust to Seri's withdrawal.

During the days, while Gracia was at work, Seri was an occasional companion. She was often in the next room, where I would be aware of her, or she would wait for me in the street outside. When I could get her near me I would talk to her and explain myself. Our excursions were the times when we came closest to each other. Then she would talk to me of the islands: of Ia and Quy, Muriseay, Seevl and Paneron. She had been born on Seevl, had married once, and since then had travelled widely in the islands. Sometimes, we walked together through the boulevards of Jethra, on took a tram ride to the coast, and I would show her the Seignior's Palace, and the Guards in their exotic, medieval costumes.

But Seri only came to me when she wanted to, and sometimes I needed more of her.

Suddenly, Gracia said: "You're still awake."

I waited several seconds before answering. "Yes."

"What are you thinking about?"

"All sorts of thing's."

"I can't sleep. I'm too hot." She sat up and switched on the light.

Blinking in the sudden brightness, I waited for her to light a cigarette, which she did. "Peter, it's not working, is it?"

"You mean my living here?"

"Yes, you hate it. Can't you be honest about it?"

"I don't hate it."

"Then it's me. There's something wrong. Don't you remember what we agneed in Castleton? If it went wrong again we'd he straight with each other about it?"

"I am being straight." I noticed that Seri had unexpectedly appeared, sitting on the end of our bed with her back turned and her head tilted slightly to one side, listening. "I've got to adjust to what happened last year. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so." She turned her face away, then played with the end of the cigarette in the ashtray, twisting it to niake the ash shape into a cone. "Do you ever know what _I_ mean?"

"Sometimes."

"Thanks a lot. The rest of the time I just waste my breath?"

"Don't start another row, Gracia. Please."

"I'm not starting a row. I'm just trying to get through to you. Do you ever listen to what I say? You forget things, you contradict yourself, you look through me as if I'm a pane of glass. You were never like this before."

"Yes, all right."

It was easier to concur. I wanted to explain, but feared her anger.

I thought of the times Gracia was at her most difficult, when she was tired after work or something had happened to upset her. When it first happened I had tried to meet her halfway, and offer her something of myself. I wanted her to expend her frustrations so that they became something that united us, rather than divided us, but she put up emotional barriers that I found impassable. She would dismiss me with a petulant gesture, on flare with anger, or retreat from me in some other way. She was extremely neurotic, and although I tried to accept this sometimes it was very difficult.

When I had first started sleeping with her in London, a few months after Greece, I noticed that she kept a little pot of liquid detergent by the bedside. She told me it was in case she needed to remove her finger rings in the night. (I asked her why she did not take them off before getting into bed, but she said that was supposed to he unlucky.) When I knew her better she explained, half embarrassed, that she sometimes suffered claustrophobia of the extremities. I thought it was a joke, but it was not. When tensions mounted in her she could not wear shoes, rings, gloves. One evening, shortly after Castleton, I came in from the pub and discovered Gracia lying on the bed sobbing. The seam of her blouse, beneath the armpit, was torn apart, and my first thought was that someone must have attacked her in the street. I tried to console her, but she was hysterical. The zip fastener on her boot had jammed, the blouse had torn as she writhed on the bed, the boot was stuck fast on her foot. She had broken her fingernails, smashed a glass. It took me just a few seconds to free the fastener and remove the boot, but by then she had withdrawn completely into herself. For the rest of that evening she walked around the flat barefoot, the torn blouse flapping by her breast. A terror, blank and unapproachable, put silence in her swollen eyes.

Now Gracia stubbed out her cigarette and pressed herself to me.

"Peter, I don't want it like this. We both need it to work."

"Then what's wrong? I've tried everything."

"I want you to care for me. You're so distant. Sometimes it's as if I don't exist. You act . . . no, it doesn't matter."

"It does. Go on."

Gracia said nothing for several seconds, and the silence spread mistily around us. Then: "Are you seeing someone else?"

"No, of course not."

"Is that true?"

"Gracia, there's no one. I love _you_

why should I need someone

else?"

"You act as if you do. You always seem to be dreaming, and when I talk to you what you say comes out as if you've rehearsed it with someone else. Do you realize you're doing that?"

"Give me an example."

"How can I? I don't take notes. But there's no spontaneity in you.

Everything has been made ready for me. It's as if you've worked me out in your mind, how you think I should be. As long as I do what you expect, I'm reading the script you wrote for me. And then I don't, because I'm upset or tired, or because I'm me . . and you can't cope with it. It's not fair, Peter. I can't just become what you imagine I am."

"I'm sorry," I said, and slipped my arm around her back and pulled her closer against me. "I didn't know. I don't mean to do that. You're the only person I know, the only one I want to know. I went away last year because of you. There were other reasons, but it was mostly because we'd split up and I was upset. Now I've got you back, and everything I do and think is about you.

I don't want anything to go wrong again. Do you believe that?"

"Yes . . . but can you show it more?"

"I'm trying, and I'll try again. But I've got to do it my way, the only way I know." At the end of the bed I could feel Seri's weight, pressing down the bedclothes over my feet.

"Kiss me, Peter." Gracia drew my hand to her breast, and brought her leg across my thigh. The nervous energy in her was exciting; I responded to it, sensing the same charge in myself. So we made love, and Seri was not there.

Afterwards, drifting into sleep, I wanted to tell Gracia about her, explain that Seri was just a part of my orientation around her, remind her of the rapture of islands, but it was too late for that.

Later there was dawn light beyond the curtains. I was woken by Gracia moving. Her breath was quick. The bed shook as if trembling, and I heard her rings clatter lightly on to the bedside table.

17

The next day, while Gracia was at work, I felt listless. There were small cleaning jobs to do around the flat, and I did these with my usual lack of enthusiasm. Seri did not appear, and after I had been to the local pub for lunch, I found my manuscript and went through it, seeking references to Seri in the hope of separating her from Gracia. It seemed to me I was confusing Gracia in my mind; Seri distracted me. In the night I had learned that Gracia was more important than anything.

But I was tired, and the only tensions eased by sex were physical. Both Gracia and I were unsure of our identities, and in seeking them we were damaging each other. My manuscript was a danger. It contained Seri, but it also contained myself as protagonist. I needed it still, but it drove me inwards.

Inevitably, Seri appeared. She was real, independent, tanned from the islands.

"You didn't help me last night," I said. "I needed you then, to reassure Gracia of what I am trying to do."

Seri said--I was upset and felt lonely. I couldn't interfere.

She was remote from me, drifting on the periphery. I said: "But can't you help me?"

Seri said--I can he with you, and help restore you to yourself. I can't say anything to you about Gracia. You're in love with her, and that excludes me.

"If you came closer I might be able to love you both. I don't want to hurt Gracia. What shall I do?"

Seri said--Let's go out, Peter.

I left my manuscript scattered on the bed, and followed her to the streets.

It was spring in the city, and along the boulevards the cafés had put their tables out beneath the canopies. It was the time I liked best in Jethra, and to leave the flat to enjoy the mild air and sunshine was like a tonic to me. I bought a newspaper. We went to one of the cafés I liked best, situated on the corner of a large, busy intersection. Here there was a tram crossing, and I enjoyed the distinctive clang of the bells, the clatter of the wheels on the crossings and the overhead tracery of the power lines. The pavements were crowded with people, conveying a sense of collective bustle and purpose, yet individually most of them seemed merely to be enjoying the sunshine. Faces were upturned after winter. While Seri ordered some drinks I glanced oven the headlines of the newspaper. More troops were to be sent to the south; the early thaw had brought avalanches to the mountain passes, and a patrol of the Border Police had been wiped out; the Seigniory had announced further grain embargoes to the so-called non-aligned states. It was depressing news, discordant with the reality of the Jethran day around me. Seri and I sat in the warm light, watching the passers-by and the tnams and the horse traffic, and aware of the people at the other tables. There was a predominance of unaccompanied young women; an intimation of the social effect of the draft.

"I love it here in Jethra," I said. "At this time of year it's the best place in the world."

Seri said--Are you going to stay here for the rest of your life?

"Probably." I saw the sun in her hair, and she was coming closer.

Seri said--"Don't you feel the urge to travel?"

"Where to? It's difficult while the wan's on."

Seri said: "Let's go to the islands. Once we're out of Faiandland we can go anywhere we please."

"I'd love to," I said. "But what can I do about Gracia? I can't just nun away from her. She's everything to me."

"You did it once before."

"Yes, and she tried to kill herself. That's why I have to stay with her.

I can't risk that happening again."

"Don't you think you might be the cause of her unhappiness?" Seri said.

"I've watched the way you two destroy each other. Don't you remember what Gracia was like when you met her in Castleton? She was confident, positive, building her life. Can you still recognize her as the same woman?"

"Sometimes. But she has changed, I know."

"And it's because of you!" Seri said, flicking back her hair oven her right ear, as she sometimes did when she became agitated. "Peter, for her sake and yours, you've got to get out."

"But I've nowhere to go."

"Conic with me to the islands."

"Why is it always the islands?" I said. "Couldn't I just get out of Jethra, like I did last year?"

I became aware that someone was standing beside my table, and I looked up. The waiter was standing there.

"Would you mind keeping your voice down, sin?" he said. "You're disturbing the other customers."

"I'm sorry," I said, looking around. The other people seemed unaware of me, busy in their own lives. Two pretty girls walked past the tables; a tram clattered by; on the far side of the boulevard a council employee was sweeping up horse droppings. "Would you bring the same again, please?"

I looked back to Seri. She had turned away while the waiter was there, neceding from me. I reached over and found her wrist, gripping it lightly, feeling the substance of it.

"Don't leave me," I said.

Seri said--I can't help it. You're rejecting me.

"No! Please . . . you were really helping me then."

Seri said--"I'm scared you will forget who I am. I'll lose you."

"Please tell me about the islands, Seri," I said. I noticed the waiter was watching me, so I kept my voice quiet.

"They're an escape from all this, your own private escape. Last year, when you went to your friend's house, you thought you could define yourself by exploring your past. You tried to remember yourself. But identity exists in the _present_. Memory is behind you, and if you depend on that alone you will be only half defined. You must seek balance, and embrace your future. The Dream Archipelago _is_ your future. Here, in Jethra, you will just stagnate with Gracia, and damage her."

"But I don't believe in the islands," I said.

"Then you must discover them for yourself. The islands are as real as I am. They exist and you can visit them, just as you can speak to me. But they're also a state of mind, an attitude to life. Everything you've done in your life so far has been inward-looking, selfish, hurtful to others. You must go outward and affirm your life."

The waiter returned and put down our drinks: a glass of beer for myself and an orange juice for Seri. "Please settle your bill as soon as you have finished, sir."

"What do you mean?"

"Just he as quick as possible. Thank you."

Seri had receded again, and for an instant I glimpsed another café: a dingy interior, plastic-topped tables stained with old tea, steamed-up windows, a milk cooler and a placard for PepsiCola . . . but then a tram went by with a flash of brilliant blue sparks from its conducting antenna, and I saw the pink blossom in the trees, the crowds of Jethrans.

Seri said, returning-- "You can live forever in the Archipelago."

"The Lotterie, you mean."

"No . . . the islands are timeless. Those who go there never return.

They find themselves."

"It sounds unhealthy to me," I said. "An escape fantasy."

"No more than anything else you have even done. For you, the islands will he a redemption. An escape from escape, a return to outwardness. You must go deeper inside yourself to find your way out. I'll take you there."

I fell silent, staring dow-n at the paving stones beneath the tables. A sparrow hopped between the customers' feet, looking for crumbs. I wanted to stay there forever.

"I can't leave Gracia," I said at last. "Not yet."

Seri said, receding-- "Then I'll go without you."

"Do you mean that?"

Seri said--I'm not sure, Peter. I'm jealous of Gracia because as long as you're with her you're just using me as conscience. I'm forced to watch you destroy her, and damage yourself. In the end you would destroy me too.

She looked so young and attractive in the sun, her fair hair glowing, her skin mellow from the south, her youthful, unsupported body glimpsed through thin clothes. She sat close beside me, exciting me, and I longed for the day when I could be with her alone.

I paid my bill and caught a tram heading north. As the streets closed in and the rain began, I felt a familiar depression growing in me. Seri, sitting beside me, said nothing. I got off the bus in Kentish Town Road and walked through the mean side streets to Gracia's flat. Her can was parked outside, crammed between a builder's skip and a Dormobile with an Australian flag in the window.

It was getting dank, but no lights showed at the window.

Seri said--There's something wrong, Peter. Hurry!

I left her there and went down the steps to the door. I was going to put the key in, but the door had been left ajar.

"Gracia!" I switched on the lights in the hall, hurried into the kitchen. Her shoulder bag was in the middle of the floor, its contents spilling out over the worn linoleum: cigarettes, a crumpled tissue, a mirror, a packet of Polos, a comb. I scooped them up and put the bag on the table.

"Where are you, Gracia?"

The sitting room was empty and cool, but the door to the bedroom was closed. I tried the handle, and pushed, but something had been jammed against it.

"Gracia! Are you in there?" I shoved at the door with my shoulder; it moved slightly, but something heavy grated on the floor beyond. "Gracia! Let me in!"

I was trembling, and I felt the cartilage of my knees shaking uncontrollably. With a dread certainty I knew what Gnacia had done. I put my weight against the door and pushed as hard as I could. The door moved an inch on two, and I was able to reach inside and switch on the light. Peering round towards the bed I saw one of Gracia's legs dangling down towards the floor. I shoved the door a third time, and then whatever had been pushed against it toppled over with a crash. I forced my way in.

Gracia lay in blood. She was supine, half on the bed. Hen skirt had ridden up as she had thrashed on the bed, revealing the unhealthy pallor of her stockingless legs. One of lien boots was pulled uncomfortably over her foot, stuck halfway; the other lay on the floor. There was a metallic glint from a blade, lying on the carpet. Blood pulsed from her wrist.

Gasping with the shock I lifted her head and slapped her face. She was unconscious, and barely breathing. I groped for her heart, but I could feel nothing. I glanced helplessly around the room in terrified anguish. I was certain she was dying. Stupidly, I moved to make her comfortable, resting her head on a cushion.

Then scything through the shock, sense sliced my immobility away. I lifted her savaged arm and tied my handkerchief as tightly as I could above the wound. Again, I felt for her heart, and this time I found its beat.

I dashed back into the hall, picked up the pay phone and rang for an ambulance. Soon as possible. Three minutes.

I returned to the bedroom. Gracia had rolled from the position I had left her in, and was in danger of sliding to the floor. I lowered her, trying not to bruise her, so that she was propped up by the bed. I paced the room, mentally urging the ambulance to arrive. I cleared the chest of drawers from where Gracia had moved it against the door, I propped the front door open, and stood in the street.

Three minutes. At last the distant city sound: the two repeated siren notes, approaching. A blue light flashing; neighbours at windows, someone holding back the traffic.

The ambulance driver was a woman. Two men hurried into the flat: an aluminium trolley left by the vehicle, a stretcher carried in, two bright red blankets.

Curt questions: her name, did she live here, how long before I had discovered her? My own: is she going to live, where are you taking her, please hurry. Then the departure: turning in the street with agonizing slowness, accelerating away, the blue lamp electric, the siren receding.

Inside the flat I used the phone again to call a taxi. While I was waiting I went to the bedroom to tidy up.

I pushed the chest of drawers back to its place, straightened the bed coven, stood stupidly and numbly in the centre of the room. There was blood on the carpet; splashes on the wall. I found a mop and some cloths, cleaned the worst of it away. It was awful to do.

The cab still did not arrive.

Back in the bedroom I at last confronted what I had so fan avoided. On the bed where Gracia had been lying were the scattered pages of my manuscript, the typewritten sides facing upwards.

Was it to this my writing had led?

Blood spattered many of the pages. I knew what was written on them, even without reading the words. They were the passages about Seri; her name came out of the pages as if underlined by red.

Gracia must have read the manuscript, she must have understood.

The taxi arrived. I picked up Gracia's shoulder bag, and went out to the cab. We drove through the evening rush hour to the Royal Free in Hampstead.

Inside, I found my way to the Casualty Wand.

After a long wait a social worker came to see me. Gracia was still unconscious, but she would survive. If I wished I could visit her in the morning, but first there were a few questions.

"Has she ever done this before?"

"I told the ambulance crew. No. It must have been an accident." I looked away to divert the lie. Wouldn't they have records? Wouldn't they have contacted her G.P.?

"And you say you live with her?"

"Yes. I've known her for three or four years."

"Has she ever shown any suicidal tendency before?"

"No, of course not."

The social worker had other cases to go to; he said the doctor had been talking about making out a Section on her, but if I would vouch for her...

"It won't possibly happen again," I said. "I'm sure it wasn't deliberate."

Felicity had told me that after Gracia's last attempt she had been sent for a month's compulsory psychiatric treatment, but she had been released at the end of it. That was in another hospital, another part of London. Given time, the people here would find that out, but hospital casualty wards and the social services were constantly overworked.

I gave the address to the social worker, and asked him to let Gracia have lien shoulder bag when she came round. I said I would visit her in the morning. I wanted to leave; I was finding the modern building oppressively neutral and disinterested. What I perversely wanted was some kind of authoritative recrimination, a change from this social worker that I was somehow to blame. But he was preoccupied and harassed: he wanted Gracia's case to be a straightforward one.

I went outside, into the drizzling rain.

I needed Seri as never before I had needed her, but I no longer knew how to find her. Gracia's act had jolted me; Seri, Jethra, the islands. . . these were the luxuries of idle inwardness.

Yet by the same token, I was less able than ever to cope with the complex real world. Gracia's terrible attempt on her life, my complicity in it, the destruction Seri had warned of. I shied away from them, appalled at the thought of what I might find in myself.

I walked down Rosslyn Hill for a few minutes, then a bus came along and I caught it, getting off at Baker Street Station. I stood for a while outside the entrance to the Underground, staring across Marylebone Road at the corner where Gracia and I had once before reached an ending. On an impulse I walked through the pedestrian subway, and stood in the place. There was an employment agency on the conner, offering positions for filing clerks, legal secretaries and P.A.s; the high advertised salaries surprised me. It had been a night like this the last time: Gracia and I at an impasse, Seri waiting somewhere around.

From there I had found the islands, yet now they seemed to be beyond reach.

The evocations of place: it was as if Gracia were there with me again, rejecting me, willing me to leave her and propelling me towards Seri.

I stood there in the drizzle, watching the late rush-hour traffic accelerate away from the lights, heading for Westway and the Oxford road, the countryside fan beyond. Out there I had first found Seri, and I wondered if I would have to go there to fluid her again.

Feeling cold, I paced to and fro, waiting for Seri, waiting for the islands.

18

This much I knew for sure:

My name was Peter Sinclair, I was thirty-one years old, and I was safe.

Beyond this, all was uncertain.

There were people looking after me, and they went to great lengths to reassure me about myself. I was totally dependent on them, and I was devoted to them all. There were two women and a nian. One of them was an attractive, fair-haired young woman called Seri Fulten. She and I were extremely fond of each other because she was always kissing me, and, when no one else was around, she played with my genitals. The other woman was olden; her name was Lareen Dobey, and although she tried to he kind to me I was a little frightened of her. The man was a doctor named Corrob. He visited me twice a day, but I never grew to know him very well. I felt rejected by him.

I had been seriously ill but now I was recovering. They told me that as soon as I was better I should be able to lead a normal life, and there was no chance of a relapse. This was very reassuring to know, because I was in pain for a lot of the time. At first niy head was bandaged, my heart rate and blood pressure were constantly monitored, and a number of smaller surgical scans on other pants of my body were protected by plasters; later, one by one, these were removed and the pain began to ease.

My state of mind, described broadly, was one of intense curiosity. It was a most extraordinary feeling, a mental appetite that seemed insatiable. I was an extremely _interested_ person. There was nothing that bored me or alarmed me or seemed irrelevant to my interests. When I awoke in the mornings, for just one example, the sheer novelty of the feeling of sheets around me was enough to hold my full attention. Sensations flooded in. The experiences of Warmth and Comfort and Weight and Fabric and Friction were enough sensations to entertain my untrained mind with all the permutations and nuances of a symphony. (Music was played to me every day, exhausting me.) Bodily functions were an astonishment! Just to breathe or to swallow was a miracle of pleasure, and when I discovered farting, and that I could imitate the noise with my mouth, it became my funniest diversion. I quickly worked out how to masturbate, but this was just a phase which ended when Seri took oven. Going to the lavatory was a source of pride.

Gradually I became aware of my physical surroundings.

My universe, as I perceived it, was a bed in a room in a small chalet in a garden on an island in a sea. My awareness spread around me like a ripple of consciousness. The weather was warm and sunny, and during most days the windows by my bed were opened, and when I was allowed to sit up in a chain I was put either by the open door on on a small, pleasant verandah outside. I quickly learned the names of flowers, insects and binds, and saw how subtle were the ways in which each depended on the other. I loved the scent of honeysuckle, which came most pleasantly at night. I could remember the names of everyone I met: friends of Seri and Lareen, other patients, orderlies, the doctors, the man who every few days mowed the grass that surrounded the little white-painted room in which I lived.

I hungered for information, for news, and I devoured every morsel that came my way.

As the physical pain receded I became aware that I lived in ignorance.

Fortunately, it seemed that Seri and Lareen were there to supply me information. Either or both of them were there with me throughout the days, at first nursing me while I was most ill, later answering the primitive questions I framed, later still spending painstaking hours with me, explaining me to myself.

This was the more complex, intangible, _inner_ universe, and it was infinitely more difficult to perceive.

My principal difficulty was that Seri and Lareen could only speak to me from outside. My sole question--"Who am I?"--was the only one they could not answer directly. Their explanations canie to me from without my inner universe, confusing me utterly. (An early puzzle: they addressed me in the second person, and for some time I thought of myself as "you".) And because everything was spoken, so first I had to understand what they _said_ before I could work out what they meant, it lacked conviction. My experience was wholly vicarious.

Because I had no choice I had to trust them, and in fact I depended on them for everything. But it was inevitable I would soon start thinking for myself, and as I did, as my questions were directed inwards, two things emerged which threatened to betray that trust.

They crept up on me, bringing insidious doubts. They might have been connected, they might have been quite distinct; I had no way of knowing.

Because of my passive role, endlessly learning, it took me days even to identify them. By then it was too late. I had ceased to respond, and a counter-reaction had been set up in me.

The first of the two came from the way in which we worked.

A typical day would begin with either Seri or Lareen waking me. They would give me food, and in the early days help me wash and dress, and use the lavatory. When I was sitting up, either in bed or in one of the chairs, Doctor Corrob would call to make one of his perfunctory examinations of me. After that, the two women would settle down to the serious work of the day.

To teach me they used large files of papers, which were frequently consulted. Some of these papers were handwritten, but the majority, in a large and rather dog-eared heap, were typewritten.

Of course I listened with close attention: my craving for knowledge was rarely satisfied in one of these sessions. But simply because I was listening so attentively, I kept noticing inconsistencies.

They showed themselves in different ways between the two women.

Lareen was the one of whom I was more wary. She seemed strict and demanding, and there was often a sense of strain in her. She appeared to be doubtful of many of the things she talked to me about, and naturally this colouration transferred itself to my understanding. Where she doubted, I doubted. She rarely referred to the typewritten pages.

Seri, though, transmitted uncertainties in another way. Whenever she spoke I became aware of contradictions. It was as if she was _inventing_

something for me. She almost always used the typewritten sheets, but she never actually read from them. She would sit with them before her, and use them as notes for what she was saving. Sometimes she would lose track, or would correct herself; sometimes she would even stop what she was saying and tell me to ignore it. When she worked with Lareen beside her she was tense and anxious, and her corrections and ambiguities came more often. Lareen several times interceded while Seri was speaking, drawing my attention to her instead.

Once, in a state of obvious tension, the two women left me abruptly and walked together across the lawns, speaking intently; when they returned, Seri was red-eyed and subdued.

But because Seri was kind to me, and kissed me, and stayed with me until I fell asleep, I believed her more. Seri had her own uncertainties, and so she seemed more human. I was devoted to them both, but Seri I loved.

These contradictions, which I carefully stored in my mind and thought about when I was alone, interested me more than all the bare facts I was learning. I failed to understand them, though.

Only when the second kind of distraction grew in importance was I able to make patterns.

Because soon I started having fragmentary memories of my illness.

I still knew very little about what had been done to me. That I had undergone some form of major surgery was obvious. My head had been shaved, and there was an ugly pattern of scar tissue on my neck and lower skull, behind my left ear. Smaller operation scars were on my chest, back and lower abdomen. In an exact parallel with nw mental state, I was weak but I _felt_ fit and energetic.

Certain mental images haunted me. They did so from the time I was first aware, but only when I found out what was real in the world could I identify these images as phantasms. After much thought I concluded that at some point in my illness I must have been delirious.

These images therefore had to be flashing memories of my life before my illness!

I saw and recognized faces, I heard familiar voices, I felt myself to he in certain places. I could not identify any of them, but they nevertheless had a quality of total authenticity.

What was confusing about them was that they were utterly different, in tone and feeling, from the so-called facts about myself coming from Lareen and Seri.

What was compelling about them, though, was that they were congruent with the discrepancies I was picking up from Seri.

When she stuttered or hesitated, when she contradicted herself, when Lareen interrupted her, then it was I felt Seri was telling the truth about me.

At times like these I wanted her to say more, to repeat her mistake. It was much more interesting! When we were alone I tried to urge her to he frank with me, but she would never admit to her errors. I was incapable of pressing her too far: my doubts were too great, I was still too confused.

Even so, after several days of this, I knew two separate versions of myself.

The authorized version, according to Lareen and Seri, went like this: I had been born in a city called Jethra in a country called Faiandland. My mother's name was Cotheran Gilmoor, changed to Sinclair on her marriage to my father, Franford Sinclair. My mother was now dead. I had a sister named Kalia.

She was married to a man named Yallow; this was his first name only. Kalia and Yallow lived in Jethra, and they were childless. After school I had gone to university, obtaining a good degree in chemistry. I worked for some years in industry as a formulation chemist. In the recent past I had contracted a serious brain condition, and had travelled to the island of Collago in the Dream Archipelago to receive specialist treatment. On the way to Collago I had met Seri and we had become lovers. As a consequence of the surgery I had suffered amnesia, and now Seri was working with Lareen to restore my memory.

On one level of my mind I accepted this. The two women painted a convincing picture of the world: they told me of the war, of the neutrality of the islands, of the upheavals in most people's lives because of the war. The geography of the world, its politics, economy, history, societies, all these were described to me plausibly and evocatively.

The ripple of my external awareness spread to the horizon, and beyond.

But then there was my perseveration, based on the inconsistencies, and in my inner universe the ripples collided and collapsed.

They told me I had been born in Jethra. They showed it to me on a map, there were photographs I could look at. I was a Jethran. However, one day, describing Jethra while she glanced at the typewritten pages, Seri had accidentally said "London". It shocked me. (In my delirium I had experienced a sensation that was located and described by the word. It was certainly a place, it might or might not have been where I was horn, but it existed in my life and it was called "London".) My parents. Seri and Lareen said my mother was dead. I felt no shock or surprise, because this I had known. But they told me, quite emphatically, that my father was alive. (This was an anomaly. I was confused, within my other confusions. My father was alive, my father was dead . . . ... which was it?

Even Seri seemed unsure.)

My sister. She was Kalia, two years older than me, married to Yallow.

Yet once, quickly corrected by Lareen, Seri had called her "Felicity". Another unexpected jolt: in my delirious images the sister presence was called

"Felicity". (And other doubts within doubts. When Lareen or Seri spoke of Kalia, they imparted a feeling of sibling warmth to our relationship. From Seri I sensed friction, and in my delirium I had experienced hostility and competitiveness.)

My sister's husband and family. Yallow featured only peripherally in my life, but when he was mentioned it was in the same terms of comforting warmth as Kalia. (I knew Yallow by another name, but I could not find it. I waited for Seri to make another slip, but in this she was consistent. I knew that

"Felicity" and her husband, whom I thought of as "Yallow", had children; they were never mentioned.)

My illness. Something inconsistent here, but I could not trace it. (Deep inside me I was convinced I had never been ill.) Then, finally, Seri herself. Of all her contradictions this was the least explicable. I saw her every day for hours at a time. She was daily explaining to me, in effect, both herself and her relationship with me. In an ocean of cross-currents and hidden depths, she was the only rock of reality on to which I could crawl. Yet by her words, her sudden frowns, her gestures, her hesitations, she created doubt in me that she existed at all. (Behind her was another woman, a complement. I had no name for her, just a total belief in her existence. This other Seri, the _doppelgänger_, had haunted my delirium. She,

"Seri", was fraught and fickle, unreliable and temperamental, affectionate and very sexual. She invoked in me strong passions of love and protectiveness, but also of anxiety and self-interest. Her existence in my underlife was so deep-rooted that sometimes it was as if I could touch her, sense her fragrance, hold her thin hands in mine.)

19

The doubts about my identity became a permanent and familiar part of my life. If I dwelt on them I saw myself in reverse image, subtly different, like a black-and-white photograph printed from the wrong side of the negative. But my central preoccupation was my return to health, because with every day that passed I felt stronger, fitter, more equipped to return to the normal world.

Seri and I would often go for long walks through the grounds of the clinic. Once, we went with Lareen to Collago Town and watched the bustle of the traffic and the ships in the harbour. There was a swimming pool at the clinic, as well as courts for squash and tennis. I exercised every day, enjoying the sensation of my body returning to co-ordination and fitness. I started regaining the weight I had lost, my hair grew again, I tanned in the warm sunshine, and even the operation scars began to fade. (Doctor Corrob told me they would vanish altogether within a few weeks.) Meanwhile, other skills returned. I learned to read and write quite quickly, and although I had difficulty with vocabulary, Lareen lent me one of the clinic's retraining books, and after a few hours I was in command of the language. My mental receptivity continued: anything I came across that was novel to me could he learned--or relearned, as Lareen insisted--with speed and thoroughness.

Soon I developed taste. Music, for instance, had been at first an intimidating scramble of noises, but later I was able to detect melody, then harmony, and then, with a sense of triumph, I discovered that some kinds of music were more enjoyable than others. Food was another area where I developed likes and dislikes. My sense of humour became tuned: I discovered that bodily functions had a limited scope for fun, and that some jokes were more amusing than others. Seri moved back from her hotel to live in the chalet with me.

I was restless to be leaving the clinic. I thought I was back to normal and was tired of being treated like a child. Lareen often angered me, with her pedantic insistence that my lessons continue; my sense of taste was developing here too, and I was resenting the fact that things were still being explained to me. Now that I could read I did not see why she could not merely give me the notes she worked from, nor let me read those typewritten sheets.

A breakthrough of sorts came with a paradox. One evening, while having dinner in the refectory with Lareen and Seri, I happened to mention I had lost the pen I had been using.

Seri said: "It's on the desk. I gave it to you this afternoon."

I remembered then, and said: "Yes, of course."

It was a trivial exchange, but one that made Lareen look sharply at me.

"Had you forgotten?" she said.

"Yes . . . but it doesn't matter."

Suddenly, Lareen was smiling, and this in itself was so welcome a change that I smiled too, without understanding.

"What's funny?'' I said.

"I was beginning to think we had made you into a superman. It's good to know you can he absent-minded."

Seri leaned over the table and kissed me on the cheek.

"Congratulations," she said. "Welcome back."

I stared at them both, feeling aggressive. They were exchanging glances, as if they had been waiting for me to do something like this.

"Have you set me up for this?" I said to Seri.

She laughed, but it was happily. "It just means you're normal again. You can forget."

For some reason I felt sulky about this; I was a domestic pet that had learned a trick, or a child who could dress himself. Later, though, I understood better. To be able to forget--or rather, to be able to remember selectively--is an attribute of normal memory. While I was learning voraciously, accumulating facts, remembering everything, I was abnormal. Once I began to forget, I became fallible. I recalled my restlessness of the past few days, and I knew that my capacity for learning was nearly full.

After the meal we returned to the chalet, and Lareen collected her papers.

"I'll recommend your discharge soon, Peter," she said. "Perhaps by the end of the week."

I watched her sort her papers into a neat pile, and slip them into her folder. She put the typewritten pages into her bag.

"I'll be back in the morning," she said to Seri. "I think you can tell Peter the truth about his illness."

The two women exchanged smiles, and again I felt that paranoia. The sense that they knew more about me than I did was grating on me.

As soon as Lareen had left, I said: "Now what did that mean?"

"Calm down, Peter. It's very simple."

"You've been keeping things back from me." And more, which I could not say: the constant awareness of the contradictions. "Wh don't you just tell me the truth?"

"Because the truth is never clear-cut."

Before I could contest that she told me quickly about the treatment: I had won a lottery, and the clinic had changed me so that I would live forever.

I received this information without questioning it; I had no scepticism against which to test it, and anyway it was secondary to my real interest.

From the revelatory manner in which Seri spoke, I was expecting something that might explain her contradictions . . . but nothing came.

As far as my inner universe was concerned I had learned nothing.

By not telling me this before, the two women had been indirectly lying.

How could I even know what _other_ omissions and evasions there were?

I said: "Seri, you've got to tell me the truth."

"I have done."

"There's nothing else you should tell me?"

"What else is there?"

"How the devil do I know?"

"Don't lose your temper."

"Is that like being absent-minded? If I get angry, does that make me less than perfect? If so, I'm going to be doing it much more often."

"Peter, you're an athanasian now. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Not really, no."

"It means that one day I'm going to die, but that you never will. That almost anyone you meet will die before you do. You'll live forever."

"I thought we'd agreed I was less than perfect."

"Oh, you're just being stupid now!"

She pushed past me and went out on to the verandah. I heard her walking to and fro on the wooden boards, but then she slumped into one of the chairs.

I suppose, in spite of my resistance to the idea, that I was psychologically child-like still, because I was incapable of keeping my anger.

A few moments later, full of contrition, I went out to her and put my arms around her shoulders. Seri was stiff with frustration at me and she resisted at first, but after a while she turned her head and nested her face against my shoulder. She said nothing. I listened to the night insects, and watched the flashing lights on the distant sea.

When her breathing had steadied, I said: "I'm sorry, Seri. I love you, and I've no reason to be angry with you."

"Don't say any more about it."

"I've got to, because I want to explain. All I can be is what you and Lareen have made me. I've no idea who I am on where I came from. If there's something you haven't shown me, or told me about, on given me to read, then I can never become that."

"But why should it make you angry?"

"Because it's frightening. If you've told me something untrue I've no power to resist it. If you've left something out I've no way of replacing it."

She drew away from me and sat facing me. The soft light from the window lit her face. She looked tired.

"The opposite is true, Peter."

"The opposite of what?"

"That we're keeping something from you. We've done everything we can to be honest with you, but it's been almost impossible."

"Why?"

"Just now . . . I told you that you've been made into an athanasian. You hardly reacted."

"It means nothing to me. I don't _feel_ I'm immortal. I am what you've made me believe I am."

"Then believe me about this. I was with you before you took the treatment, and we talked about now, about what would happen after the operation. How can I convince you? You didn't want the treatment because you were scared of losing your identity."

I suddenly had an insight into myself before this had happened: frightened of what might happen, frightened of this. Like those delirious images it was temptingly coherent. How much of him, myself, remained?

I said: "Does everyone go through this?"

"Yes, it's exactly the same. The athanasia treatment causes amnesia, and all the patients have to be rehabilitated afterwards. This is what Lareen does here, but your case has given her special problems. Before you came here you wrote an account of your life. I don't know why you wrote it, or when . . .

but you insisted that we use it as the basis for restoring your identity. It was all a rush, there was no time. The night before the operation I read your manuscript, and I found you hadn't written an autobiography at all! I don't know what you would call it. I suppose it's a novel, really."

"You say _I_ wrote this?"

"So you claimed. You said it was the only thing that told the truth about you, that you were defined by it."

"Is this manuscript typewritten?" I said.

"Yes. But you see, Lareen normally works with--"

"Is that the manuscript Lareen brings every morning?"

"Yes."

"Then why haven't I been allowed to read it?" Something I had written before my illness; a message to myself. I had to see it!

"It would only confuse you. It doesn't make sense . . . it's a sort of fantasy."

"But if I wrote it then surely I would understand it!"

"Peter, calm down." Seri turned away from me for a few seconds, but she reached back to take my hand. Her palm was moist. Then she said: "The manuscript, by itself, doesn't make sense. But we've been able to improvise.

While we were together, before you and I got to this island, you told me a few things about yourself, and the Lotterie has some details on file. There are a few clues in the manuscript. From all this we've pieced together your background, but it's not completely satisfactory."

I said: "I've got to read the manuscript."

"Lareen won't let you. Not yet, anyhow."

"But if I wrote it, it's my property."

"You wrote it before the treatment." Seri was looking away from me, across the dark grounds and into the warm scents of flowers. "I'll talk to her tomorrow."

I said: "If I can't actually read it, will you tell me what it's about?"

"It's a sort of fictionalized autobiography. It's about you, or someone with your name. It deals with childhood, going to school, growing up, your family."

"What's fictional about that?"

"I can't tell you."

I thought for a moment. "Where does it say I was born? In Jethra?"

"Yes."

"Is it called Jethra in the manuscript?"

Seri said nothing.

"Or is it called 'London'?"

Still she said nothing.

"Seri?''

"The name you give it is 'London', but we know this means J ethra. You give it other names, too."

"What are they?"

"I can't tell you." At last she looked at me. "How did you know about London?"

"You let it slip once." I was going to tell her about the ghost memories of the delirium, but somehow it seemed too difficult, too unreliable, even in my own mind. "Do you know where London is?''

"Of course not! You made the name up!"

"What other names did I make up?"

"I don't know . . . I can't remember. Lareen and I went through the manuscript trying to change everything to places we knew. But it was very difficult."

"Then how much of what you've taught me is true?"

"As much as possible. When you came back from the clinic you were like a vegetable. I _wanted_ you to be who you were before the treatment, but I couldn't just will it. Everything you are now is the result of Lareen's training."

"That's what scares me," I said.

I stared up the rising lawn to the other chalets; most were in darkness, but lights showed in a few of them. There were my fellow athanasians, my fellow vegetables. I wondered how many of them were suffering the same doubts.

Were they even yet aware that somehow their heads had been emptied of all the dusty possessions of a lifetime, then refurnished with someone else's idea of a better arrangement? I was frightened of what I had been made to think, because I was the product of my mind and I acted accordingly. What had Lareen told me before I acquired taste? Had she and Seri somehow acted in well-intended concert to instil in me beliefs I had not held before the treatment? How would I even know?

The only link with my past was that manuscript; I could not ever be complete until I read my own definition of myself.

There was a wan moon, misted by high clouds, and the gardens of the clinic had a still, monochrome quality. Seri and I walked along the familiar paths, postponing the moment when we went inside the chalet, but at last we headed hack.

I said: "If I get the manuscript, I want to read it on my own. That's my right, I think."

"Don't mention it again. I'll do my best to get it. All night?"

"Yes."

'We kissed briefly as we walked, but there was still a remoteness in her.

When we were inside the chalet, she said: "You won't remember, but before all this we were planning to visit a few islands. Would you still like to?"

"Just you and me?"

"Yes."

"But what about you? Haven't you changed your mind about me?"

"I don't like your hair as short as that," she said, and ruffled her fingers through my new stubble.

That night, when Seri was asleep beside me, I was wakeful. There was a quietness and solitude on the island that in a sense I had grown up with. The picture drawn by Seri and Lareen of the world outside was one of noise and activity, ships and traffic and crowded towns. I was curious to experience this, to see the stately boulevards of Jethra and the clustered old buildings of Muriseay. As I lay there I could imagine the world disposed around Collago, the endless Midway Sea and the innumerable islands. Imagining them I created them, a mental landscape that I could take on trust. I could go out from Collago, island-hop with Seri, invent the scenery and customs and peoples of each island as we came to it. An imaginative challenge lay before me.

What I knew of the world outside was similar to what I knew of myself.

From the verandah of the chalet Seri could point out the neighbouring islands, and name them, and show them to me on a map, and describe their agriculture, industries and customs, but until I actually went to them they could only ever be distant objects drawn to my attention.

Thus was I to myself: a distant object, chanted and described and thoroughly identified, but one which so far I had been unable to visit.

Before I went out to the islands I had some exploring of my own to do.

20

Lareen returned in the morning, and brought the welcome news that I was to he discharged from the clinic in five days' time. I thanked her, but I was watching to see if she produced the typewritten manuscript. If she had it with her, it remained in her bag.

Although I was restless, I settled down to a morning's work with her and Seri. Now I knew that fallibility was a virtue, I used it to strategic effect.

During lunch the two women spoke quietly together, and it seemed for a moment that Seri had put my request to her. Later, though, Lareen announced that she had work to do in the main building, and left us in the refectory.

"Why don't you go for a swim this afternoon?" Seri said. "Take your mind off all this."

"Are you going to ask her?"

"I told you--leave it to me."

So I left her alone and went to the swimming pool. Afterwards, I returned to the chalet but there was no sign of either of them. I felt useless and wasted, so I signed for a pass from one of the security guards and walked down to Collago Town. It was a warm afternoon, and the streets were crowded with people and traffic. I relished the noise and confusion, a hustling, discordant contrast with the solipsism and seclusion of my memories. Seri had told me that Collago was a small island, not densely populated and well off the main shipping routes, yet it seemed in my unpractised life to he the very hub of the world. If this was a sample of modern life, I could not wait to join the rest!

I wandered through the streets for a while, then walked down to the harbour. Here I noticed a number of temporary stalls and shops, erected in a position overlooking the water, where patent elixirs could he purchased. I walked slowly along the now, admiring the photographically enlarged letters of testimonial, the exciting claims, the pictures of successful purchasers. The profusion of bottles, pills and other preparations--herbal remedies, powders, salts for drinking water, isometric exercises, thermal garments, royal jelly, meditational tracts, and every other conceivable kind of patent remedy--was such as to make me think, for a moment or two at least, that I had undergone my ordeal unnecessarily. Business along the row was not brisk, yet curiously none of the vendors solicited my business.

On the far side of the harbour a large steamer was docking, and I assumed that it was this arrival that had caused the congestion in town.

Passengers were disembarking and cargo was being unloaded. I walked as close as I could without crossing the barrier, and watched these people from the world beyond mine as they went through the routines of handing in their tickets and collecting their baggage. I wondered when the ship would be sailing again, and where it was next headed. Would it he to one of the islands Seri had named?

Later, when I was walking back to the town, I noticed a small passenger bus loading up by the quay. A sign on the side announced that it belonged to the Lotterie_Collago, and I looked with interest at the people sitting inside.

They seemed apprehensive, staring silently through the windows at the activity around them. I wanted to talk to them. Because they came, so to speak, from a world of the mind that existed before the treatment, I saw them as an important link with my own past. Their perception of the world was undoctorcd; what they took for granted was all that I had lost. If this was consistent with what I had learned, then many of my doubts would be allayed. And for my part, there was much I could suggest to them.

I had experienced what they had not. If they knew in advance what the after-effects would be, it might help them to a speedier recovery. I wanted to urge them to use these last few days of individual consciousness to leave some record of themselves, some personal definition or memento by which they might rediscover themselves.

I moved in closer, peering in through the windows of the coach. A girl in an attractive, tailored uniform was checking names against a list, while the driver was stowing luggage in the hack. A middle-aged man sitting by a window was nearest to me, so I tapped on the glass. He turned, saw me there, then quite deliberately looked away.

The girl noticed me, and leaned through the door.

"What are you doing?" she called to me.

"I can help these people! Let me speak to them!"

The girl narrowed her eyes. "You're from the clinic, aren't you? Mr. . .

. Sinclair."

I said nothing, sensing that she knew my motives and would try to stop me. The driver came round from the back of the vehicle, shouldered past me and climbed up to the driving seat. The girl spoke briefly to him, and without further delay he started the engine and drove off. The coach moved slowly through the traffic, then turned into the narrow avenue that led up the hill towards the clinic.

I walked away, running my fingers over my newly regrown hair, realizing that it marked me out in the town. On the far side of the harbour, passengers from the ship were clustering around the elixir stalls.

I reached the quieter side streets and wandered slowly past the shop fronts. I was beginning to understand the mistake I had made with those people: anything I said to them now would of course he forgotten as soon as their treatment began. And their role as representatives of my past was a fallacy. Everyone else had the same undoctored quality: the passers-by in the street, the staff at the clinic, Seri.

I walked until I felt footsore, then made my way up the hill to the clinic.

Seri was waiting for me in the chalet. She had an untidy pile of papers on her knee, and was reading through them. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the manuscript.

"You've got it!" I said, and sat down beside her.

"Yes . . . but conditionally. Lareen says you're not to read it alone.

I'll go through it with you."

"I thought you agreed to let me read it by myself."

"I agreed only to get it back from Lareen. She thinks you've recovered well, and so long as I explain the manuscript to you she has no objection to you knowing what it's about."

"All right," I said. "Let's get started."

"This instant?"

"I've been waiting all day for this."

Seri flashed a look of anger at me, and threw her pencil on the floor.

She stood up, letting the pages slide into a curling heap by her feet.

"What's the matter?" I said.

"Nothing, Peter. Not a damned thing."

"Come on . . . what is it?"

"God, you're so selfish! You forget I have a life too! I've spent the last eight weeks in this place, worrying about you, thinking about you, talking to you, teaching you, being with you. Don't you think there might be other things I want to do? You never ask how I am, what I'm thinking, what I'd like to do . . . you just take it for granted I'm going to go on being here indefinitely. Sometimes, I couldn't give a damn about you and your wretched life!"

She turned away from me, staring out of the window.

"I'm sorry," I said. I was stunned by her vehemence.

"I'm going to leave soon. There are things I want to do."

"What sort of things?"

"I want to see a few islands." She turned back to me. "I've got my own life, you know. There are other people I can be with."

There was nothing I could say to this. I knew almost nothing about Seri or her life, and indeed had never asked about it. She was right: I took her for granted, and because it was so true I was speechless. My only defence, one I could not bring myself to summon at that moment, was that as far as I knew I had not asked her to be with me, that from the first days of my new consciousness she had always been there, and because I had not been taught to question it I never had.

I stared down at the untidy pile that was the manuscript, wondering if I should even know what secrets it contained.

We left the chalet, went for one of our curative walks through the grounds. Later, we ate supper in the refectory, and I encouraged Seri to talk about herself. It was not a token gesture prompted by her frustration: by losing her temper with me Seri had opened my mind to yet another area of my ignorance.

I was beginmng to appreciate the scale of the sacrifice Seri had made for me: for nearly two months she had done all the things she said, while I, petulant and child-like, rewarded her with affection and trust, seeking only myself.

Quite suddenly, because I had never thought of it before, I became scared she would abandon me.

Feeling chastened by this I walked back with her to the chalet and watched as she tidied up the scattered manuscript pages. She checked through them to make sure they were in correct order. We sat down next to each other on my bed, and Seri riffled the corners, counting.

"All night, these first few pages are not too important. They explain the circumstances in which you started writing. London is mentioned once or twice, and a few other places. A friend was helping you out after you had had some bad luck. It's not very interesting."

"Do you mind if I look?" I took the sheets from her. It was as she had said: the man who had written this was a stranger to me, and his self-justifications seemed elaborate and labouned. I put the pages to one side. "What's next?"

"We get into difficulties straight away," Seri said, holding the page for me to see and pointing with her pencil. "'I was born in 1947, the second child of Frederick and Catherine Sinclair'. I've never even heard of names like that!"

"Why have you changed them?" I said, seeing that pencil lines had been scored through the names. Above them she, or Lareen, had pencilled in the names I knew as being my parents' connect ones: Franfond and Cotheran Sinclair.

"We could check those. The Lotterie has them on file."

I frowned, appreciating the difficulties I had made for the two women.

In the same paragraph there were several more deletions or substitutions.

Kalia, my elder sister, had been named as "Felicity", a word which I had learned meant happiness or joy, but which I had never heard used as a name.

Later, I discovered that my father had been "wounded in the desert"--an extraordinary phrase--while my mother had been operating a switchboard in

"government offices" in somewhere called "Bletchley". After the "war with Hitler", my father had been among the first men to return home, and he and my mother had rented a house on the outskirts of "London". It was here that I had been born. Most of these obscure references had been crossed out by Seri, but

"London" had been changed to "Jethra", giving me a pleasant feeling of reassurance and familiarity.

Seri led me through a couple of dozen pages, explaining each separate difficulty she had found and telling me the reasons for the substitutions she had made. I agreed with them all, because they so obviously made sense.

The narrative continued in its mundane yet enigmatic way: this family had continued to live outside "London" for the first year of "my" life, and then they had moved to a northern city called "Manchester". (This too had been changed to Jethra.) Once in "Manchester" we reached descriptions of "my" first memories, and with this the confusions came thick and fast.

"I had no idea," I said. "How on earth did you manage to make sense of this?"

"I'm not sure we have. We've had to leave a lot of it out. Lareen was extremely angry with you."

"Why? It's hardly my fault."

"She wanted you to fill out her questionnaire, but you refused. You said that everything we needed to know about you was in this.''

I must have sincerely believed that at the time. At some stage of my life I had written this incomprehensible manuscript, devoutly believing that it described myself and my background. I tried to imagine the sort of mentality that could have held such a belief, against all reason. Yet my name was on the first page. Once, before the treatment, I had written this and I had known what I was doing.

I felt a poignant loneliness for myself. Behind me, as if beyond an unscalable wall, was an identity, purpose and intelligence that I had lost. I needed that mind to explain to me what had been written.

I glanced through the rest of the pages. Seri's deletions and substitutions continued. What _had_ I intended?

The question was more interesting to me than the details. In answering it I should gain an insight into myself, and thus into the world I had lost.

Had it been these fictitious names and places--the Felicitys, the Manchestens, the Gracias--that had come to me in my delirium, haunting me afterwards? Those delirious images remained a part of my consciousness, were a fundamental if inexplicable pant of what I had become. To ignore them would be to turn my back on understanding more.

I was still mentally receptive, still urging to learn.

After a while I said to Seri: "Can we go on?"

"It doesn't become any clearer."

"Yes, but I'd like to."

She took a few pages from me. "Are you sure this means nothing to you?"

"Not yet."

"Lareen was certain you would react wrongly to it." She laughed, shortly. "It seems a bit silly now, when I think of all the trouble we went to."

We read a few more pages together, but Seri had spent too long with the manuscript and she grew tired.

"I'll go on by myself," I said.

"All right. It's not going to do any harm."

She lay down on the other bed, reading a novel. I continued with the manuscript, working painstakingly through the inconsistencies, as once, several times, Seri must have done. Occasionally I asked for her help, and she told me what she had had in mind, but each new interpretation only made my curiosity greaten. It confirmed what I knew of myself, but it also confirmed my doubts.

Later, Seri undressed and went to bed to sleep. I read on, the manuscript nesting on my lap. In the warm evening I was shintless and barefoot, and as I read I could feel the rush mat abrading pleasantly against the soles of my feet.

It struck me that if there was any truth at all in the manuscript, then it could only be the truth of anecdote. There seemed to be no deeper pattern, no sense of metaphor.

It was the anecdotes that Seri had most frequently deleted. One or two of them she had pointed out to me, explaining that she found them incomprehensible. So they were to me, but because I was making no headway against the shape of the story, I began to look more closely at the details.

One of the longest deleted passages, occupying several pages of the text, dealt with the sudden arrival in "my" childhood life of a certain "Uncle William". He entered the stony with all the bravado of a pirate, bringing a scent of the sea and a glimpse of foreign lands. He had captivated me because he was disgraceful and disapproved of, because he smoked a vile pipe and had warts on his hands; yet he also fascinated me while I read of him, because the passage was written with conviction and humour, a plausible-seeming account of an influential experience. I realized that Uncle William, on Billy, as I seemed to remember him, was as attractive a personality to me now as he had been when I was a child. He had really existed, he had really lived.

Yet Seri had deleted him. She knew nothing of him, so she had tried to destroy him.

So far as I was concerned it would take more than a few pencil strokes to remove him. There was a truth to Uncle William, a truth that was far higher than mere anecdote.

I remembered him; I remembered that day.

Suddenly, I knew how to remember the rest. It was not whether the material could he crossed out, on whether names could be substituted. What mattered was the text itself, its shapes and patterns, those meanings that were only alluded to, the metaphors that until then I had been incapable of seeing. The manuscript was full of memories.

I went to tile beginning of the text, and started to read it through.

Then of course I remembered the events that had taken nie to my white room in Edwin's cottage, and all that had gone before. As I remembered I became reassured, united with my real past, but then I became scared. In remembering myself, I discovered how profoundly lost I had become.

Outside the white-painted chalet the grounds of the clinic were quiet.

The nipple of my awareness spread outwards: to Collago Town, to the nest of the island, to the Midway Sea and the innumerable islands, to Jethra. Yet where were they?

I read to the end, to the unfinished scene between Gracia and myself on the corner by Baker Street Station, and then I collected the typewritten sheets and shaped them into a tidy stack. I found my holdall beneath the bed and packed the manuscript at the bottom. Quietly, so as not to wake Seri, I packed my clothes and other possessions, checked that I had my money, then prepared to leave.

I looked back at Seri. She was sleeping on her stomach like a child, her head turned to one side. I wanted to kiss her, gently stroke her naked back, but I could not risk waking her. She would stop me if she knew I was leaving.

I watched her for two or three silent minutes, wondering who she really was, and knowing that once I left I should never meet her again.

The door eased open quietly; outside was darkness, and the warm sea wind. I returned to my bed to collect my holdall, but as I did so I kicked something that lay on the floor by Seri's shoulder bag, and it clinked against the metal leg of her bed. She stirred, then settled. I crouched down to pick up whatever it was I had kicked. It was a small bottle, made of dark green glass, hexagon shaped. The cork was missing and the label had been removed, but I knew instinctively what it must once have contained, and why Seri had bought it. I sniffed at the neck of the bottle and smelled camphor.

Then I nearly did not go. I stood beside the bed, looking sadly down at the sleeping girl, innocently tired, selfless to me, vulnerably naked, her hair folded untidily across her brow, her lips slightly parted.

At last I put down the empty elixir bottle where I had found it, collected my holdall, then left. In the dark I got through the gate and walked down the hill into Collago Town. Here I waited by the harbour until the town woke up, and as soon as the shipping office opened I inquired when the next steamer would be departing. One had left only the day before; the next would not he for another three days. Anxious to leave the island before Lareen or Seri found me, I took the first small ferry that came, crossing the narrow channel to the next island. Later that day, I moved again. When I was sure no one would find me--I was on the island of Hetta, in an isolated tavern--I bought some timetables and maps, and started to plan my return journey to London. I was haunted by the unfinished manuscript, the unresolved scene with Gracia.

21

The fact was that Gracia had brought me to an ending. Hen suicide attempt was too big to be contained in my life. She swept everything aside, admitting of nothing else. Hen drastic act even overshadowed the news that she was not to die as a result. Whether or not she had seriously intended to die was secondary to the gesture she made. She had succeeded in shocking me out of myself.

I was obsessed by an imagined picture of her at that very moment: she would be lying semi-conscious in a hospital bed, with bottles and tubes and unwashed hair. I wanted to be with her.

I had come to a place I knew: the corner where Baker Street crossed Marylebone Road, a pant of London forever associated in my mind with Gracia.

The rain was intensifying, and the traffic threw up a mist of fine droplets that gusted around me in the cityducted winds. I remembered the cold moor wind of Castleton, the passing lorries.

It was hours since I had last eaten, and I felt the mild euphoria of low blood sugar. It made me think of the long summer months of the year before, when I had been so intent on writing in my white room that sometimes I went two on three days without propen food. In that state of mental excitation I always imagined best, could perceive the truth more cleanly. Then I could make islands.

But Jethra and the islands paled before the reality of London's damp awfulness, just as I paled before my own. For once I was free of myself, for once I looked outwards and thought sorrowfully of Gracia.

At that moment, when I did not hope for her, Seri appeared.

She came up the steps and out of the pedestrian subway on the far side of Marylebone Road. I saw her fair hair, her straight back, the bobbing walk I knew so well. But how could she have entered the subway without my seeing her?

I was standing by the only other entrance, and she had not passed me. I watched her, amazed, as she walked quickly into the booking hall of the Undenground station.

I ran down the steps, slipping slightly on the rain-glossed treads, and hurried through to the other side. When I reached the booking hall she had passed the ticket barrier and was at the top of the stairs that led down to the Metropolitan Line. I went to follow her, but the inspector at the barrier asked to see my ticket. Angrily, I returned to the ticket office and bought a single fare to anywhere.

A train was standing at one of the platforms; the indicator board said it was going to Amersham. I walked quickly along the curving platform, looking through windows, looking towards the carriages ahead. I could not see her, even though I walked the whole length of the train. Could she have caught another? But this was the evening; there were departures only at ten-minute intervals.

I rushed back as the guard shouted that the doors were about to close.

Then I saw her: she was sitting by the window in a carriage near the back of the tnain. I could see her face, turned down as if she wene reading.

The pneumatic doons hissed loudly and slid towards each other. I leapt aboard the nearest carriage, forcing myself through the closing pressure of the doors. Late commuters glanced up, looked away. Bubbles of isolation surrounded them.

The train pulled away, blue-white discharge sparks flashing on the wet rails as we crossed the points and moved into the long tunnel. I walked to the back of the carriage to be at the door nearest to Seri when we stopped at the next station. I leaned against the heavy, shatterproof window set into the door, watching my reflection against the black wall of the tunnel outside. At last we reached the next station, Finchley Road. I pushed through the doors as soon as they opened, and ran down the platform to the carriage where I had seen her. The doors closed behind me. I went to the place where she had been sitting, but she was no longer there.

Now the train was on the surface, clattering through the crowded, decrepit suburbs of West Hampstead and Kilburn; here the line ran parallel to the street where my old flat had been. I walked the length of the open carriage, looking at all the passengers, making sure Seri had not changed her seat. At the end I looked through the windows of the two connecting doors to the next carriage, and saw her.

She was standing, as I had done, against the sliding doors and Staring out at the passing houses. I went through to her carriage--a cold blast of damp air, a moment of swaying peril--and passengers looked up, thinking I must he a ticket inspector. I went quickly to where she had been standing, but once again she had moved. There was no one there who looked even remotely like her, that I might have mistaken for her.

While the train rushed on to the next station, I walked to and fro in the aisle of the carriage, preferring the illusion of doing something to the tensions of idleness. Outside, the rain ran in quick diagonals down the dirty windows. At Wembley Park there was a delay of a few minutes, as here was the interchange with the Bakerloo Line and a train was expected on the other side of tile platform. I walked the length of my train, searching for Seri, but she had vanished. \Vhen the Bakerloo train arrived she was aboard it! I saw her step down, cross the platform, and climb into the carriage I had first been in.

I returned to the train, but of course she eluded me again.

I found a seat and stared down at the worn and slatted floor, littered with cigarette ends and sweet wrappers. The train moved on, through Harrow, through Pinner, heading out into the countryside. I again felt myself moving into a passive state of mental laziness, content to know that I was supposed to he following Seri. I was lulled by the warmth of the carriage, the motion of the train, and peripherally aware that passengers were getting off as we stopped at stations on the way.

The train was almost empty when we came to a station called Chalfont & Latimer. I glanced out at the station as we drew in, seeing the wet platform and shining overhead lamps, the familiar advertisements for films and language schools. Passengers waited by the carriage doors, and amongst them was Seri.

In my somnolent state I barely realized she was there, but when she smiled at me and stepped outside I knew I was to follow.

I was slow and clumsy, and only just got through the doors before they closed. By then, Seri had slipped through the ticket barrier and was again out of sight. I followed, thrusting my ticket at the collector and moving on before he could check it.

The station was next to a main road; as I came out, the train I had been on went noisily oven the ironwork bridge. I looked to left and night along the road, seeking Seri. She was already an appreciable distance away, walking briskly along the road in the direction of London. I hurried after her, pacing myself with short bursts of running.

The road was lined with modern detached houses, set back from the traffic with concrete drives, neat lawns and flowerbeds, and flagstoned patios. Lighted reproduction carriage lamps glittered their reflectioiis on the rainy ground. Behind curtained windows I could glimpse the hand blue glare of television screens.

Seri stayed effortlessly ahead of me, maintaining her brisk walk without seeming to hurry, yet however much I ran she was always the same distance ahead. I was getting out of breath so I slowed my pace to a moderate walk. It had stopped raining while I was on the train, and already the air was milder, more in keeping with the season.

Seri reached the end of the lighted section of the road, and moved into the strip of countryside between Chalfont and Chorleywood. I lost sight of her in the dark, so I ran again. In a minute or two I had also passed into the darkness, but I could see Seri whenever cars passed with their headlights on.

Farmland lay on either side of the road. Ahead of me, in the south-eastern sky, the sodium radiance of London was lighting the clouds.

Seri halted and turned back to face me, perhaps to he sure I had seen her. Cars passed, throwing spray and light in drifting veils. Thinking she was waiting for me I ran again, splashing in the puddles of the unmade verge. When I was within distance, I shouted: "Seri, please stay and talk to me!"

Seri said--You've got to see the islands, Peter.

There was a gate where she had waited, and she passed thnough as I came breathily up to her, but by the time I followed she was already halfway across the field. Her white shirt and pale hair seemed to drift in the dank.

I staggered on again, feeling the turned soil clogging around my shoes.

I was tiring, there had been too many upheavals. Seri would wait.

I came to a halt, slithering on the lumpy sods, and leaned forward to catch my breath. I hung my head, nesting with my hands on my knees.

When I looked up again I could see Seri's ghostly figure at the bottom of the dip, by what appeared to be a hedge. Behind her, on the gently rising slope of a hill, was the lighted window of a house. Trees stood darkly blurred on the close horizon.

She did not wait: I saw her white movement, sideways along the hedge.

I sucked a deep breath. "Seri! I've got to rest!"

It made her pause momentarily, but if she called an answer I did not hear it. It was difficult to see: paleness moved like a moth against a curtain, then it was gone.

I looked back. The main road was lights sweeping behind trees, and the distant sounds of wheels and engines. To think made m head hurt. I was in a foreign country, needing translations, but my interpreter had left me. I waited until my breath steadied, then walked on slowly, raising and lowering my feet with the deliberation of a shackled man. The mud made deadweights of my legs, and every time I managed to scrape some of it away more clung on.

Somewhere invisible to me, Seri must he watching my ponderous, arm-swinging progress through the clay.

At last I reached the hedge and wiped my feet in the long grass that grew there. I moved on in the direction taken by Seri, and peered towards where I had seen the house with the lighted window, seeking a reference. I must have been mistaken, though, because I could now see no sign of it. A wind, mild and steady, came from beyond the hedge, laden with a familiar tang.

A gate was let into the hedge and I went through. Beyond, the ground continued to drop away in a barely perceptible gradi ent. I took a few steps in the dark, feeling for the unwelcome cling of waterlogged soil, but here the grass was short and dry.

Ahead was a horizon: distant and fiat, flickering with a few tiny lights almost invisible in their remoteness. The sky had cleared, and overhead was a display of stars of such brilliance and clarity as I had rarely seen. I marvelled up at them for a while. then returned to the more earthly business of cleaning the remainder of the mud from my shoes. I found a short branch on the ground and sat down to poke and scrape at the gluey muck. When I had finished I leaned back on my hands to stare down the slope at the sea.

My eyes were adjusting to the starlight, and I made out the low black forms of islands; the lights I had seen were from a town on an island straight ahead. To my right was a shoulder of land, which ran out to sea with an aged, rounded resilience, forming the high end of a small bay. The land to my left was flatter, but I could see rocks and a sand-bar, and beyond these the coastline curved back and out of sight.

I walked on and soon came to the beach, clambering down a small cliff of soil and flints, then running out across dried seaweed and powdery sand that seemed to crush beneath my feet. I ran as far as the water's edge, then stood still in the darkness and listened to the special sound of the sea. I felt utterly reassured and complete, able to face anything, free of worry, cured by the essences of the ocean. The faint pungency of salt, warm sand and drying seaweed held powerful associations with childhood: holidays, parents, minor accidents, and that sense of excitement and adventure which, for me, had always overcome the envies and power struggles between Kalia and myself.

My clothes had dried in the warm air, and I felt invigorated and fit.

Seri had vanished, but I knew she would reappear when she was ready. I walked the length of the beach twice, then decided to find somewhere to sleep. I found a place in the dry sand that was sheltered by rocks, and here I scooped out a shallow bowl. It was warm enough to sleep uncovered, so I simply lay on my back, cupped my hands behind my head and stared up at the dazzling stars.

It was not long before I fell asleep.

I awoke to the sound of the sea, and to brilliant sunlight, and to the crying of gulls. I was instantly alert, as if the transition from sleep to waking was as easy as turning on a light; for months I had been used to a slow, sleepy recovery, dogged by mental and physical clumsiness.

I sat up, regarded the glistening silver sea and the sweep of bone-white sand, and felt the sun warm on my face. To the side, the headland was yellow with flowers and beyond it was a clean blue sky. Lying on the sand beside me, an arm's length away, was a small pile of clothes. There was a pair of sandals, a denim skirt, a white shirt; resting on the top, in a shallow recess made by a hand, was a small silvery cluster of rings and bracelets.

A small head, black against the light, was bobbing and ducking in the swell. I stood up, narrowing my eyes against the glare, and waved. She must have seen me, because as soon as I was standing she waved back and began to wade out towards me. She came with sand-crusted feet and matted hair, and beads of cold water were dripping from her. She kissed me and undressed me, and we made love. Afterwards, we went for a swim.

By the time we had walked along the coast to the nearest village, the sun was high and the unmade track beside the shone was burning beneath our feet. We ate a meal at an open-air restaurant, while the air was drowsy with insects and distant motorcycles. We were in the village of Paio on the island of Paneron, but it was too hot for Seri and she wanted to move on. There was no harbour in Paiö; just a shallow river running down to meet the sea, and a few small boats tied to rocks. The bus would arrive in the aftennoon, but we could rent bicycles. Paneron Town was a three-hour ride away, on the other side of the central range.

Paneron was the first of several islands we visited. It became a compulsive journey, travelling, travelling. I wanted to slow down, to relish each place as we found it, to discover Seri. But she was discovering herself in a way I barely understood. To her, each island represented a different facet of her personality, each one vested in her a sense of identity. She was incomplete without islands, she was spread across the sea.

"Why don't we stay here?" I said, in the harbour of an island with the odd name of Smuj. We were waiting for the ferry to take us on to yet another island. I was intrigued by Smuj: in the town I had found a map of the interior, where an ancient city lay. But Seri needed to change islands.