The Gone-Away World

Chapter Twelve

RONNIE CHEUNG might seem like an odd sort of mentor. You might reasonably expect, as I stand there, hallucinating in the dark outside the Rheingold circus tent, that I would be visited by Master Wu, or by Old Man Lubitsch. If I were in the business of choosing my spiritual guide, I probably wouldn’t choose Ronnie. On the other hand, it seems that I, some part of me at least, would choose Ronnie, because that is who I end up talking to. Not the real one of course—rumour has it he survived the war but I’ve no idea where he is. This is a sort of ghost.

We all carry a multitude of ghosts around with us: impressions of other people, strong or weak, deep from long acquaintance or shallow with brevity. Those ghosts are maps, updated with each encounter, made detailed, judged, liked or disliked. They are, if you ask a philosopher, all we can ever really know of the other people in the world. It’s usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things. Be that as it may, Master Wu and Old Man Lubitsch—even in portable form—are both too wise for this moment. There is a level of enlightenment to which it is painful to confess your failings. To admit to either of those elders that I have failed in my life, been so incompetent as to be cuckolded and shot within hours of saving the world (partially), is too much. To be forgiven by them would be to suffer another wound.

Ronnie Cheung, on the other hand, is familiar with screw-up. His advice is of the harsher sort, and it is spoken with the gentleness of a man replete with his own failings and conversant with shame and victim’s guilt and all the rest. Ronnie Cheung is the kind of Buddha you can imagine meeting in a bar, the kind who will save your soul and then rob you blind at the pool table. He is the sort of saint who will smack you repeatedly about the head and neck with a codfish if that’s what you need to get back on track. My subconscious chooses him, so it is Ronnie’s ghost-in-the-head which marches up to me to hear the whole sad story and give advice.

The night is cool. An indecisive moon is hanging above the circus tent while a murmur of approbation filters out through the canvas backdrops. I sit on a stump and stand up again, then sit. Then I stand up. We like to believe we are complex creatures, but sometimes we just get perfectly balanced between conflicting drives, and we dither. Up, down. Up, down. I’m a dog caught between a piece of steak and a comfortable chair. It’s tearing me apart. Up, down. Down. Hmm, no. Up.

“Bumhole. You are giving me a pain. I will not say where. The location of the pain you are giving me is so vile and intimate it would turn your man-parts to water even to contemplate it. I am not in the least bit joking.”

Ronnie’s voice. It’s not that I’m hallucinating. I know perfectly well he isn’t there. And yet I know also what he is saying and where he is standing, and how his big ugly fingers make a casually obscene gesture.

“Come on then. Out with it.”

And out it comes, all of it, in a great awful blurt, delivered without mercy or self-concealment to the empty air, and Ronnie—who isn’t there—paces impatiently.

“Oi,” he says, when I am finished and hanging my head. “You want to know what I think?”

“No.”

“Bollocks. And I’m telling you anyway.”

“Go away.”

Ronnie, who is intangible, hits me extremely hard in the nose. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but a cold rush washes over my face where his fist makes landfall. It makes me shiver, and little fizzy things happen in my brain. It sort of clears out the fluff.

“Bumhole, I am not here to amuse myself. I can do that with my own two hands and a jar of Swarfega. I am here because you, in your tiny wisdom, are seeking me, in mine. All right? So stop being a tosspot and pay attention.”

I pay attention, but in a surly way which conveys that I am only doing so to please him. I do not want his advice. I do not want anyone’s advice.

“The question is whether you were listening to your Uncle Ron all those years ago when he whispered salient truths in your ear, or whether you were in fact jerking off. Do you recall my tactical driving course?”

“Yes.”

“Do you recall every last detail of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Almost certainly not, because I am a fountain of wisdom and you are a twerp. However. What I am about to impart to you was not in the basic course. I do believe that you took the advanced. Did you?”

“Yes.”

“In the advanced we consider longer-range missions with better opportunities for planning. In other words, strategic and logisticsbased driving missions. And in that context we talk about the value of local knowledge, understanding your enemy’s objectives and theatrewide intelligence. We talk about the minimum threshold for planning. Without a decent picture of what is happening around you, any decision you make is for shit. Still with me? Making sense?”

“I don’t know.”

“ ‘Yes, Ronnie, you are!’ ”

“Yes, Ronnie, you are.”

“All right then. So, you are fucked. Am I right?” Ronnie Cheung waves to indicate that I should respond.

“Yes, Ronnie, you are.”

“Yes, I am. You are fucked. You are desirous of getting unfucked. Unfucking is considerably more difficult than fucking. The Second Law of ther-mo-dynamics—because if you were thinking even for a minute that you are better educated than I am and therefore superior, Bumhole, you were mistaken—does not look with kindness upon unfucking. The level of fuckedness in a system always increases unless something acts on it from the outside. Worse yet, Bumhole, you do not own your own fuckedness. You do not appreciate the fullness of the fucking which has happened to you. You cannot hope to amend your situation without knowing what it is.”

“I do know.”

“I do not think that you do.”

“I do!”

“Then by all means, Bumhole, explain to me why you are not dead—indeed, why you are positively chipper—when you were recently shot in the digestive tract; why your best friend of many years seems to have been conducting an affair with your wife so secret that you never had an inkling, yet so astoundingly absolute that he has moved into your house, exchanged your furniture for his own and bought a bloody dog; and how he was able to do all these things for years when you have been living with your missus all that time.”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah. Well, then perhaps you might want to find out. And while you’re at it, you might want to ask who in all the world might want to damage the Jorgmund Pipe and why; and what name we give a man who wears black, appears from nowhere and cuts his way through a moderately competent fighting force as if they were made of yak butter. You might probe the origin of the mysterious phone call which advised you—presciently, I think we can now say—to avoid this job as if it were a dose of Mongolian Sausage Rot. And since you are a loyal student and friend of dear old Wu Shenyang, you might also give some thought to whether this black-clad sanguinary fucker, who pushed you and your former chum under a shower of the most awful and corrosive muck since the Goss brothers stopped singing, and who tried to cut your head off, is related by some chance to the other black-clad, sanguinary fuckers who may or may not have murdered your teacher and set his house on fire. All of which begs the question of how it is, Bumhole, that you were not warped, twisted and buggered in the eyeholes like anyone else would have been when you were drenched in a shedload of ontologically toxic goop, and whether your current problems derive in some measure from this close encounter with the poisoned lifeblood of the world. Am I right?”

I nod.

“ ‘Yes, Ronnie, you are!’ How will you do these things?”

“I don’t know!”

“Fuck me, Bumhole—which now I come to think of it is a very strange invitation and you should ignore it—but you don’t know much, do you?” And this is so transparently accurate that I lose the surly and just want a hug.

“No, Ronnie. I really don’t.” And at this Ronnie Cheung peers at me a bit more closely.

“Balls,” he says at last. He slumps next to me on the stump and lights a dog-end from behind his ear.

“Your situation, Bumhole, is a mess. You know nothing. You cannot go over the top in that condition or you will die. You may have noticed that you have escaped death not once but three times in the last little while. Everyone around you is playing for keeps. You are playing with your sister’s doll’s house or—God help us—your own tiny winky. They are on home ground. You are in enemy territory. Pay close attention, Bumhole, because this is the burden of my song: you were set up. Is that clear? If someone knew enough to warn you—by phone, personally—then what has happened has in some measure happened according to a plan. We may assume that this plan does not especially favour you. We shall therefore regard it as an enemy plan. That being the case, you need to know about it. You need the cui bono?, which is to say who benefits? You need maps and charts; you need weather reports and field intelligence. You need these things because everybody else already has them. You haven’t got a prayer until you know what’s going on.”

“How much of it?”

Ronnie Cheung shrugs.

“All of it, for preference.”

“I don’t care about all of it. I just want to know my bit.”

“Bumhole,” says Ronnie Cheung, taking a deep drag on his gasper and tilting his head back to examine the sky, “what in all this ever gave you the impression that anyone was paying attention to what you want?”

And then I can still smell his dog-end, but he’s not there any more.

From the dark, behind me, comes a gust of wind, and with it just a faint flavour of greasepaint.

“Well,” says Ike Thermite softly, “that is quite a story.”

. . .

RHEINGOLD is fading away behind us and Ike Thermite—who is, despite making his living by painting his face and falling over imaginary roller-skates, very smart—has asked me to drive. I can look in the rear view mirror of the little bus and see, past the bobbled fabric seats and the rounded windows plastered with the traces of tour stickers and smears of greasepaint, the horizon receding behind me. There’s no chatter in the bus. The mimes—obviously—are quiet. Some of them are sleeping, like scary whiteface children; they make little snuffling noises and one of them murmurs “Buster! Put that down!” and rolls over to drool onto his spare beret. The rest just sit and watch the scenery or the middle distance. When we pass anything of note—a truck stop or a lonely house or even a lamp post shining down on a little mountain of rubbish and disregarded newspapers—their heads turn in unison to watch it go by, their wide black eyes and puddingbowl haircuts tracking the patch of light until it slips past the hind edge of their window and fades into the dark. I am driving a colony of owls.

The road ahead of us is straight and clear, and there’s not much in the way of a speed limit out here, nor much of a police force even if there were. My only limitation is the engine of the Matahuxee Mime Combine’s bus, and while the bus was essentially dead when it arrived in Rheingold, it has since been loved-up by K of the sarong, who knows the Blacksmith’s Word (new edition) and speaks fluently the language of the camshaft. He opened the bus’s bonnet and whispered with his hands, was covered in spurting black stuff and hydraulic fluid and miserable, grainy water, and pronounced it sound but grievously abused. He and K—the latter very fetching in a boiler suit, poster girl for gender-bending lust—stripped, lubed and serviced it, an operation requiring many richly erotic rubbings and cleansings and complex tête-à-têtes. They sorted out the ignition sequence, dealt with the plugs and the alternator, and several other matters of high occult wisdom. They then lectured Ike Thermite for a few moments on the right way to take care of a motor vehicle, as exemplified by exactly not what he had obviously done to this point, and scurried off for some post-maintenance coitus. I hadn’t even realised, until that moment, that they were lovers.

Ike Thermite says nothing to me until Rheingold is a faint whisper of sodium orange bravely gleaming on the far side of the horizon line. He lets me get some distance from the place of my awakening so that, although I have not escaped my demons, I have at least left behind the place where last they made themselves felt. And then, in the secure, hypnotic darkness of the road, Ike Thermite suggests that the steering pulls a bit to the left. After a moment I tell him that I think K sorted that out, and he says well, maybe. And we don’t say anything for a bit. And then Ike Thermite says that he’s known K for some time and likes him very much, but has always secretly suspected that he was as mad as a box of frogs.

To this I reply that I have, knowing K only for a short time, reached very much the same conclusion, but that I can’t pin down the precise point at which K’s version of what is departs from everyone else’s, and Ike Thermite suggests that this is because everyone else is also a bit mad, but in more overtly acceptable ways. I feel able to agree. We giggle a bit at the idea that K is just the most cheerily obvious of a planet of loons, and Ike shares with me his small supply of chewy fruit sweets, which he seems to have secured from one of the ladies of Rheingold on a promise of greater delights when next he passes through. I hadn’t really thought of Ike as a babe-magnet up to this point. The notion of a mime having sex is somehow fundamentally wrong. I tell him so, and this sets off another round of helpless giggling, and one of the wakeful mimes lurches over and signs to me firmly, and somehow rather waspishly, that I need to concentrate on the driving.

And finally Ike Thermite says:

“That is quite a story.”

I almost ask “What story?” but don’t, because I realise in time that this would be the single stupidest question ever asked in the history of the world.

“Yes,” I say.

“Seems like you have some things to do.”

“Yes.”

Ike Thermite nods. It’s not the freaky mime nod, it’s a contemplative human nod. “Where are you going first?”

This is a very good question. I want to talk to Leah. I can’t. I don’t know yet what I can tell her. Maybe I can talk to Jim Hepsobah. Maybe Sally Culpepper would broker a meeting. Maybe Sally would talk to Egon and Egon could talk to Leah. Or maybe Gonzo has pronounced me a monster, a slayer of men and a bad egg, and my friends are not friends any more. I put my trust in the solidity of Jim Hepsobah and in Sally Culpepper’s wit. They will know what to do.

“That way, towards the mountains,” I tell Ike. “I know someone.” And please, let it be true.

“We have an itinerary,” he says. “We have engagements.”

I nod.

“It so happens, however, that they are mostly over there in a general sort of way. And none of them is pressing.” He pauses, looks at me.

“What about the others?” By which I mean, what about K and K (the lovers) and K (the Highlander), and the sheep dogs, and the Indian runner ducks, and the assorted other Ks presently taking down the circus tent and due to join us tomorrow or the day after.

Ike shrugs. “They can manage without us for a bit.”

Ike Thermite is offering to go out of his way to help me. Honest faces lie. What do mime faces do? Mime faces are pale and strange. They mock you. I do not answer.

Ike Thermite rubs his eyes. I can hear the grit in them.

“Ask yourself a question,” he says. “Looking around you, do you see anyone who strikes you as a basically joyful person? I mean, is there anyone on this bus who habitually wears red or orange? Yellow? Blue? Any colour other than black?”

There is not. But K and his lot are many-coloured. They are perky even.

“K,” Ike Thermite says, “used to be a medical professional. Then, because he was promoted, he became an administrator, and finally he became an executive. He worked for the System. He lived and breathed it. He was very good at it. He was married, and he had a family. And one morning he woke up and he realised that he hadn’t seen them for two months. He didn’t know, even, which city they were in. They might be in the main house in New Paris, or in the apartment in Constantinopolis, or in the pool house at Tavistock Villas. So he started checking his personal in-tray, which was about four feet high. He found some bills and some junk mail and some cards for his birthday the year before, and finally he found a letter from a lawyer telling him they’d all been killed in a crash. Apparently it was quite a big one—in all the newspapers and so on. But he hadn’t known they were travelling and he hadn’t been watching the news, because it wasn’t part of his professional life, and his job demanded he put his personal stuff in a separate part of his mind and switch it off. Which he did, because that was the right thing for all of them. He was being a professional. Maybe he was doing it in order to be a Dad, but that’s something else, that’s personal motivation, and he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that on the clock. So. Turns out he’d missed the funerals because he was doing what he was supposed to be doing, being professional. Now . . . you might expect me to say that he quit on the spot. He didn’t. And if he had, you might say he’d had some kind of nervous breakdown. Which he didn’t.

“What K did—what Joel Athens Lantern did, because that was K’s name once upon a time, and I can tell you that because no one of that name exists any more—was file a request for some personal time and go back to work. Because that was what he knew was the professional thing to do—and if he wasn’t a father any more, or a husband, the least he could do was be a good professional. He had all these patterns in his head for behaviour. Ways of being, each with its own little set of priorities and responses. But he’d somehow swallowed all of them under his professional hat, and now that was all he had left. So he defined himself by work. And then, a little bit later, he was so appalled by that decision—how cold, how not-human it was, how it was an anti-Dad decision—that he walked out of his office and got onto the first bus which would take him, which was this one, and wandered off into the world and never looked back. He called himself K from then on, and gradually he got a few other people to do the same, so that they would always have to stop and think about the people and the personal relationships and the context in order to understand which of them you were talking about. It’s confusing, so they have to use their heads and examine everything. They can’t be tricked by labels. In other words, K is called K so that he never becomes mechanical again, so that he has to consider his humanity every time he speaks to someone.”

Ike Thermite sits back in his seat and flaps his hand, dispersing the tension as if it were a sweet wrapper stuck to his forefinger.

“What I am telling you,” he says, “is that you are surrounded by people who know what it is like to have a bad day. And we will help you, because we choose to.”

At which I feel very small, and I say “Thank you.”

We drive on. The road feels open now, not closed, and the mime mobile is strong with torque and freshly cleansed spark plugs. The wagon of Dr. Andromas appears in the mirror behind us, and Ike Thermite, unlike his brother mimes, seems to derive some satisfaction from its presence.

“Who is he?” I ask Ike, because K wouldn’t tell.

“Andromas?”

“Yes. And why did he help me? Why is everyone afraid of him?”

Ike Thermite ponders.

“You’ve got the wrong idea about Andromas,” he says at last. But try as I might, I cannot get him to tell me any more.

IT WAS in former days the practice of James V. Hepsobah (Sergeant), during the quiet periods between missions, to remove the hair from his head by means of a sharpened edge. He had seen at first-hand the inutility of flowing locks in the combat zone, when his personal mentor and senior officer, Gumbo Bill Faziel, was sucked head first into the business end of an aircraft engine after leaping from a plane during a mismanaged political assassination, with the consequence that Gumbo Bill came to be spread over fourteen villages and towns in a fine ochrecoloured layer, and the plane itself tumbled from the sky like a swingball cut off from the centre post. Gumbo Bill may or may not have been the greatest covert military operative of the late twentieth century, but no one could have faulted his fine coiffure until the moment when its in-theatre failings became horribly apparent.

The peculiarities of his life being what they were—night boat rides and tropical camps and free-fall insertions—Jim often had to do his depilation in places which were not fully equipped for barbering. As a consequence of this, he established an inflexible method for the task: he would first smear his head with a plant extract which, while possessing many of the nutritive and hypo-allergenic properties of the more expensive commercial products, smelled not of sandalwood or spice, but rather of leaf mulch and wet fur, and thus would not give him away when the wind changed during an operation. Second, while the balsam was working on his scalp—opening the pores and making the fine fuzz of hair stand on end—he would test his crescent-shaped boot knife for sharpness and occasionally stroke the blade with a special stone to achieve a proper razor finish. Next, he would hold the handle of the knife lightly but firmly in the three bottom fingers of his right hand (aikidoka-style), rest his index finger on the spine of the knife and cradle it in the palm of his left. Finally, using his two thumbs as guide rails, he would move the whole stable and predictable parcel across his scalp from front to back, allowing the skin and bone to dictate the movement of the blade. In four long, slow strokes, he would complete his task, and not waves nor clear air turbulence nor minor quakes could make him draw blood. Bone Briskett once saw Jim shave in a typhoon, or so he claims—but Bone is an inveterate teller of tall tales and regards any man who is voluntarily bald as a lunatic.

When Sally Culpepper told Jim that they were dating—Jim not being quick enough on the uptake to suit her in this context—she also took control of his shaving regimen. Sally ordained that—unless they were in the field—Jim would use a soap which did not smell like a muskrat’s armpit, and would allow her to perform the task, as watching him gave her the willies. When they moved in together, and while Sally waited for Jim to read and act on the next set of orders regarding their relationship (i.e., the trip they will shortly be making to some manner of church or civil place of ceremony and pomp), she added a further guideline that she would perform this function twice weekly, in the living room, to whatever music most suited her mood, and that Jim would wear a suit for the occasion. The precise motivation behind this decree was occult. I had not in honesty wished it clarified, in case there was sex involved. It explains, however, what I see as I walk in through the front door of the house they share.

Jim and Sally do not lock their door. In the first place, there’s no one hereabouts to make trouble. In the second, they have little enough to steal. In the third, anyone who could threaten either of them in any serious way would not be deterred by a door. It is a rule among the Haulage & HazMat Civil Freebooting Company that you only pitch up at sociable hours—these being flexible—but also that you damn well do pitch up rather than not. If it’s a bad moment, you’ll know. If it’s not, you’re welcome, the beer’s in the fridge.

Jim Hepsobah is wearing a pinstripe. It’s not a grey pinstripe; it’s a very dark brown, with red. It’s positively Nathan Detroit. It’s the suit Humphrey Bogart is wearing in all those black-and-white movies where it simply doesn’t occur to you to ask. He lies back in a genuine barber’s chair, and one half of his head is covered in foam. A big white napkin or towel (it’s made of untextured cotton; people do make towels from that stuff, but nobody ever actually got dry with one) is draped over the top half of his body to catch the drips, and his eyes are closed in deep, sensuous bliss. It’s disturbing (intimate) but not nearly as disturbing as the next bit.

Sally Culpepper stands behind him. The razor she holds is like a wire or a glass filament, and her strokes are deft and slow. Not one bristle will escape her. She is doing not only Jim’s head, but his chin as well. She is wearing a barber’s coat and has her hair slicked back in fine vintage style. The coat comes down to mid-thigh, and under it she is wearing stockings. I am unable to say what else she may or may not be wearing, because as soon as I realise that I am looking at Sally Culpepper in what might loosely be termed a state of undress (although in fact actual nudity would be considerably less filthy, less fascinatingly and blazingly lewd) I spin round and face the other way, so that, as I address them both, I am in fact backing into the room and blushing—or, I very much fear, flushing.

I stammer for a moment, because my eyes and my mind, by that much-beloved phenomenon of image retention, can still see Sally’s legs—thighs—moving as she stepped around Jim, crossing and uncrossing, whispering past one another in those endless stockings with their purple trim and crosshatched net. Images of shadow and skin, deeper mysteries than mere legs, unresolved in that one glance but now inevitably untangled by the more primitive and unashamed parts of my brain, burn themselves into me. I do not want Sally Culpepper specifically, but her body, glimpsed in this moment of playful desire, is the flag my own has chosen to remind me that I have not ceased to be sexual, or romantic, that my urge to have monster sex has not vanished simply because I have been abandoned and shot. Indeed, perhaps the reverse is true. Until now I have simply sat on that part of myself, or maybe it has been asleep.

Not any more. It’s probably a good thing I am at this moment standing with my back to them.

Ludicrous as my behaviour is, and fabulously uncool, it may well save my life, because it is so plainly not an attack that it apparently tempers Jim’s first reaction upon seeing me, which is to reach beneath the napkin (or towel) on his lap and produce a very real, Al Capone–looking gun. I pray, heartily, that Sally Culpepper is not going to put the knife to my throat. The combination of danger and sex would probably leave me irretrievably perverse. Mercifully, she does not. Instead, I hear some distracting rustlings and swooshings, and when Jim Hepsobah tells me to turn, I find him standing on his feet and her a bit behind him and to the left, wearing a pair of chequered trousers with braces, and a white shirt. This is the rest of her barber’s outfit, I suppose, and the braces do fascinating things which I cannot entirely ignore, but the danger of my—for example—grunting with lust when I open my mouth to speak is gone. Sadly, the danger that Jim Hepsobah will shoot me remains.

Jim glowers at me.

“Who the hell are you?” he demands. He says it flat. There’s no doubt he means it exactly the way it sounds.

It’s not the question I was expecting. It catches me somewhat between the eyes. To begin with, this is Jim talking—after Gonzo, the first man to whom I would give my trust, my buddy—but at the same time, it’s not Jim, or not my Jim. This is the Jim Hepsobah strangers see: a big powerful man with a talent for war. Sergeant Jim: do not mess. This man is asking me, in defiance of a decade-plus of shared history, who the hell I am. It’s a mismatch. He knows who I am. He was there. Although, quite apparently, he does not know. At the same time it is, on a level far beyond the one where Jim is asking it, a bloody good question. If I am not Gonzo Lubitsch’s best friend and trusty wingman; if I am not Leah’s husband; if I am not these two things by which I have defined my life, who am I? “Victim” is not an identity I particularly covet. Vice president, i/c strategy and planning, Haulage & HazMat Civil Freebooting Company, of course—but not if Jim doesn’t know me any more. Reluctant soldier. Former ideological anarchist (with reservations and the understanding that it was only for the sex). Student of the School of the Voiceless Dragon (now defunct). Lonely child in a sandpit. It seems, in fact, that I am not very much of anything any more. I have gone as if I never were.

It occurs to me that I may be in the bull’s-eye of some kind of irony. Perhaps the noxious Stuff at Station 9 (slipping over my suit, into the cracks, touching my matter, infiltrating and co-opting me, yuck) has reacted with my guilt at being George Copsen’s right hand in the operations room long ago. I started all this. Now I am living it. Sort of. Perhaps, by some trick not yet understood and by my own subconscious needs, I have Gone Away. Or half-gone, so that I can (and the taxonomist within is making a note for Grandma Wu of this new and exciting variation) experience the Personal Hell of Living Your Own Life from the Outside. People have forgotten me, and the world has rushed in from all sides to fill the gap I have left. Leah is chaste, Gonzo is innocent. I am my own ghost. The situation is not irretrievable.

It’s a lovely idea.

It’s a comforting lie.

I’m starting to see the truth. The truth is worse.

I look at Sally Culpepper—last hope. Her face is clean and cold. There is not one flicker of recognition in her eyes. If this were anyone else—if it was Samuel P. and Tommy Lapland, say, coming down the steps of some ghastly bordello and pulling iron on me on sight, I might believe that they were scared to talk to me, or guilty, and this was a dodge. Not Jim, who never backs away from the unpleasant, and never in front of Sally. The shame would kill him, to dissemble in the face of responsibility. And not Sally, in front of Jim, who must only ever see her perfect and composed. She cannot realise that it’s her imperfections he loves: the bump in her arm where she broke it as a kid, the moment when she laughs mid-sip and snorts beer from her nose—which is why he doesn’t propose. He is afraid of blemishing her.

“Sorry,” I say. “My mistake. I’m leaving now.”

And I back out, arms in the air. The Al Capone gun follows me to the door.

What the hell.

“James Vortigern Hepsobah,” I say, and it goes right into his face from all the way across the room, “you need to ask that woman to marry you. She’s your beating heart and every drop of blood in your veins, but in the small dark hours before the dawn she worries maybe she’s not enough. So stop being a prick and do the thing.”

And I walk out into the front garden having done at least that much.

. . .

IN MOVIES it’s cool to be the Man With No Name. You get all manner of female attention and you’re somehow more dangerous than everyone around you. You have no past, and a mysterious destiny awaits you. All very exciting. But I’ve never wanted a destiny. I was happy with having a life. And while, in movies, having no identity is a noble grief which brings profundity and romance to the hero, in real life it’s just a cold, sad place with no horizon. Plus also, if my life were a movie, my dog at least would remember me. When all about me were staring at me in blank incomprehension, and some piece of well-chosen Sibelius was emphasising my pain, the simple, loyal canine would trot out of my old house and demand to be a part of my adventures, for good or ill, and no doubt would save my life in the last reel. Of course, I don’t have a dog. Gonzo has a dog.

All of a sudden I think I understand Annie the Ox’s puppet head collection.

I go back to the mime mobile. Ike Thermite doesn’t remember me from the Ace of Thighs, when I ask. He remembers a whole bunch of us, but not me in particular. I don’t tell him that I’m wondering if I’ve Gone Away (revised version) and I don’t speculate on the Other Possibility either. Instead, I ask him if he would mind taking a detour from his itinerary to go see Malevolent Pete. Pete may not remember me either, but this is completely normal. Pete does not acknowledge customers as anything other than annoying people who bring him work which shouldn’t need to be done and pay late. But Pete has my one remaining friend boarding with him, and I want to go see her, touch her (to make sure she’s real) and ask her to come along. Otherwise I will go mad.

The thing which sets Malevolent Pete aside from humanity as a whole is his tininess. It’s not that he’s especially short. There are many short men who are also nice, and many who are not afflicted with what the French call Napoléon’s syndrome and the descendants of the Golden-Eared Bey refer to as Mustafa’s colic. They go about their business and have no urge to dominion or empire, probably because they have been raised successfully to believe that being short is an advantage, predisposes one to be an acrobat, looks better on celluloid, fits into Italian sports cars, and doesn’t bang one’s head when having sex in the lower bunk bed. Malevolent Pete is otherwise. He has made his loathing of height into a definition. He is not so much short as antitall. He stands out in a group of people because he is belligerently, loomingly short. He brings his anti-tallness to everything he does; his lean, agitated face is a map to the town of Bad-Tempered Git. He is obsessed with measurement. Specifically, with measuring his own superiority. There are no errors in Pete’s garage. He has analysed them into extinction. He kept lists and tallies, re-organised and re-examined, performed complex genealogical investigations of failure, and fired two hundred and thirty-one assistant mechanics in four years.

In Pete’s garage there are no compromises and no substitutions. He releases your vehicle when it is ready, or not at all. He warns you not to slip the gears unless you want a new box in a month, and if you bring the thing in stripped, he will take the keys from you in a way which makes you feel like you’re grounded and in disgrace. He tuts better than any other person alive. He does not embellish his bills—they are exacting, and written in perfect unjoined print. Each letter is the image of the others of its own kind, no bigger, no smaller. No deviation is possible, let alone permitted. The workshop is clean, except in those specific areas where oil and grease are tolerated and necessary, and these are marked with yellow and black chevrons. Safety procedures are followed. Hard hats are worn. Pink and blue slips make their way to you inexorably through the system to Purchasing and Tallies respectively, while the goldenrod pages (this is the proper name of the yellow slips, and therefore the name used in Malevolent Pete’s garage) go through Pete’s in-tray to his self-invented filing system, which allows him to backstop, check and recheck everything, and also monitor his employees and their working patterns by checking the time stamps on each one. The last time Pete was audited he sent two suits back to Haviland City holding their slide rules and whimpering, because he caught two errors and a fudge in their calculations in the scant forty-nine minutes they were there.

Pete may or may not be God’s own mechanic. He never swears, and he absolutely will not cheat. He is perfection as viewed through the lens of precision. On the other hand he thinks caritas is a branded cola. God comes in a variety of flavours, but almost all of them would be offended by something about this hatchet-faced little squit with his blunt certainty and his sneering ungenerosity. To Malevolent Pete, there is one hell, and this is it: that he lends us these vehicles we own, and we take them away and do irresponsible things like drive them through muck and dust, and he has to take them back all dinged up and make them work so that we can torture them again. That we pay for this service is not relevant; Pete would have work whatever the circumstances, his fame is ubiquitous in the Livable Zone. The point is that we make unnecessary problems for him, which are measurable on a graph showing Reasonable Wear & Tear vs. Actual Necessary Repairs. We are reckless, one and all, and he is like a triage doctor in a war zone, patching men up so they can get injured again. Except that these are trucks, big dumb lugs, and they are far more important and vulnerable than a man could ever be. Narrow eyes survey me from his narrow face, and a precise amount of speculative disapproval is unwrapped and prepared for use. Disapproval, anticipated, x i from stores.

“What do you want?” Narrow mouth moving just enough to form words, main hand still making notes, because time is, if not money, at least time, and there’s no point wasting it. Indeed, there’s probably paperwork for non-chargeable units. Pete would be an impossible boss. He hires no one who is not utterly subordinate. If ever I am king of the world, I will make sure, absolutely sure, that there is not one single Pete in my government. If Pete cared about anything other than trucks and precision, he’d be a monster. As it is, he’s just an elemental of the internal combustion engine.

“I ride with Gonzo. Shotgun seat.”

“Never seen you.”

“I try not to get in the way.” And this appears to be the right thing to say, because Malevolent Pete nods in a way which suggests I have been degraded from Threat to Nuisance, and Nuisance is a broad category which includes Paying Customer. He parks the pen. I show him my company badge, one of the few things recovered by K from the sad little bundle of bloody rags which were my good shirt and trousers, in the aftermath of Gonzo’s radical reconceptualisation of my outfit and my body. stakeholder, it says, because I am. Stakeholders are permitted access to company equipment. It’s in the charter. Pete knows it. So now I am downgraded still further to Legitimate Nuisance, and we’re all friends, to whatever extent Malevolent Pete accepts that classification. His left hand, which has been idly tapping the bench near a big wrench (hand-to-hand combat, for use in, x i), snaps to his side as he stands up.

“What do I call you?” he demands, not asking my name but what name he’s going to use on the paperwork, because Malevolent Pete does not need superfluous information in his life. The formalities are obeyed. He cannot be reproached. I think about it, and since I’m currently not anyone in particular, and it seems to be in vogue, I tell him “K,” and he writes down Kaye as a surname. I do not correct him, and he does not check. We walk together to the main workshop.

“Number thirty-seven,” I remind him, and he nods without answering.

Our old truck—my truck—is in bay 37. It is big and ugly. Not even Pete’s garage can get the thing entirely clean. The dirt is part of the paintwork. The pipes are not chromed. I found it—“her”—in a burned-out barn when we were still working out of Piper 90, and spent the whole summer taking it apart and putting it back together. The seats are leatherette, and they have holes in them from where someone has driven a ballpoint pen through the fabric. There are little scribbles around the edges, in the shape of flowers and faces and human genital organs. There’s no tape player and no air-con, but there’s a rifle clip over the wheel and the engine absolutely will not quit until you have got where you’re going.

Annabelle, the truck. My last old friend in the world.

I sign Pete’s chitty (press hard; blue and pink and goldenrod must be clear, and Pete has added carbon paper so that he has a white copy for me and a clear copy for his new microfiche system), and he walks away without saying goodbye or thank you. Pete does not do customer relations. I run my fingers over the steering wheel.

Voiceless Dragon gong fu is a soft style. The relaxed muscles and receptive mind allow you to follow your opponent’s movements, react to his tensions before his strikes are executed. You strive to retain contact, learn him, understand him, so that you own him. Experimenting with this doctrine during Ronnie Cheung’s advanced tactical (and strategic) driving course, I established that it is possible to learn an inanimate object too, so that you can—for example—read the road through the wheels of a vehicle, know the surface and the conditions. It’s what I was doing in K’s Airstream. It is infinitely easier if you know the vehicle concerned. At that point the steel and rubber around you is an extension of your body into the world. Feel that? That’s a pebble on the left wing. Wind speed? Twenty to twenty-five, coming from (assuming the battered chrome mandala on the front of the truck is zero degrees) bearing oh three five. Right now, in the garage, there’s a man leaning on the rear fender, and it’s probably Ike Thermite. It’s not Pete, whose touch is angular and invasive; it’s someone quiet and subtle, someone who flexes and listens with his hands. An acrobat or a scholar. Ike Thermite is both, of course. Wu Shenyang would have liked him.

Ike opens the passenger door.

“Where we going, cowboy?” He’s found a mime to drive his bus, a woman named Lianne who specialises in a sort of combination of tightrope and dance; they roll her along poles and ladders as if she were a beach ball, and she emerges at each end looking fuddled and swaying, and then some accident propels her back along another pole, another impossible, gravity-defying tumble. It’s great for slapstick routines. Lianne has fabulous balance and depth perception, and is almost totally impossible to rattle. Exactly the sort of person you want to entrust your driving to. In the meantime, Ike is coming with me. It’s weird, having him sitting there in my seat while I sit in Gonzo’s. I feel a vertiginous, cliff-edge lurch: the strange, inverted desire to do the worst imaginable thing. In the case of a cliff, of course, it’s to jump; here it is to become like Gonzo, to reach for a gun and pepper him with bullets. I shunt it back into the mad and bad section of my subconscious, where it belongs.

I rev the engine. Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist.

“Home,” I tell him. “Cricklewood Cove.”

Ike Thermite looks at me curiously. Once again, he’s got that face going on, the one which says there’s things happening here he ought to know more about. I probably ought to know too.

“You’ve been there?” I ask him.

Ike Thermite shrugs. “Heard of it,” he says.

I take Annabelle off the leash.

. . .

IKE THERMITE and the Matahuxee Mime Combine have some kind of pilgrimage to make. Apparently a very well-considered mime once lived in Cricklewood Cove (to whatever extent mimes are ever wellconsidered), and when he died his dependants established his home as a small museum. Mimish artefacts are cased in glass and revered as relics of the Master. Bunsen burner and retort (for the making of greasepaint); soft shoes; sewing machine (it’s hard to get good baggy pants these days); a wall of photographs of great moments. The Master shaking hands with the King of the UIK. The Master dancing the samba with two princesses. The Master doing “Climb Wall, Step in Something” for the Thai ambassador, who finds this hilarious. The Master in his one and only film, The Quiet Life, in which he plays a sombre assassin who just wants to be funny. Ike Thermite assures me it is fascinating, and a little sad. It is also the only museum in the world where there is no audio tour.

I am amazed that I have never been there. Ma Lubitsch took us to every museum in town when I was a kid. Ike Thermite points out gently that the Master was, at that time, still alive.

Ike walks off, a little bandy-legged (Annabelle’s bench is stout and durable but hardly comfy), followed by a long line of polo necks and berets and respectful nodding. They’re like a little army, very selfpossessed and serious. Their weirdness doesn’t upset them. They are who they are.

Lucky them.

So here now is the corner of Lambic Street, where the old ironmonger’s used to be, and here is Packlehyde Road. On my left, about two hundred yards away, is the Soames School. Off beyond a way is Doyle’s Walk and the house at the end is the Warren, where Elisabeth lived when she wasn’t sleeping at Wu Shenyang’s. (And exactly how that came about would be a mystery to me if I hadn’t met the other Assumption Soames, the real one, to whom the wretched old buzzard we knew as the Evangelist was a mask which allowed her to teach tolerance more effectively and prepare us all for the roads less travelled and the cannibals of life. Assumption must have been delighted to discover Master Wu, a crazed old coot packed with life skills and wisdom, on her doorstep, tutoring her daughter.)

In the other direction is the Lubitsch house. The original donkeys have gone to a better place, without fences or yapping dogs or Lydia Copsen to torment them with her inappropriate style choices. Old Man Lubitsch never said so, but I suspect they met their end during the Reification, when Cricklewood Cove was cut off (literally cut off at the southern end, where the sea poured into the shallow excision and made a new beach alongside the cinema) from the rest of the world. Food was scarce, and donkey eats well when the cupboard’s bare. Gonzo believes that they died naturally, and are buried by the roses. And indeed, in a sense, they did, eaten by an apex predator in hard times.

Before the wedding, I had high tea with Gonzo’s parents for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. Cricklewood Cove had seen some excitement in the long months of the Reification: brigands had come out of the hills, looking for things to eat and things to trade, but above all things to steal and people to kill; fearsome beasts had roamed the highways and mauled the mayor; Assumption Soames had led a small army against rumoured cannibals, but none had been found; and even since the Cove had been back on the map, there was word of vanishings—a place called Heyerdahl Point had apparently disappeared, been—so the breathless would have it—eaten entire by monsters. But everywhere was like that. The Cove was a refuge. It was simple and safe, something I very much needed amid the bustle of everyone getting ready to marry me. Old Man Lubitsch, craggier and spikier, muttering about monsters and brigands and the parlous state of the world, and building a big black bee house for special bees, would not come in from the cold. Ma Lubitsch smiled and took him a scone on a plastic plate.

I can’t go to the Lubitsch house yet. It’s not time. And I can’t face the Evangelist either, still not knowing where Elisabeth may be. Her body was never recovered from Corvid’s Field, but that proves nothing. Four billion people disappeared without trace back then. It’s ludicrous to blame myself for this ignorance. I do, anyway. So the only other place is along Packlehyde Road to the edge of the new sea, to the Aggerdean Bluff and my parents’ house.

. . .

SOME MEMORIES ARE GREYSCALE; paint-by-numbers. If you examine them in your head, your mind hurriedly glosses everything, fills in the spaces with tints and shades. If you turn your head too quickly, you catch yourself daubing the walls to match what you know was there but cannot actually recall. Others are all sensation, all colour and no detail. The living room of my parents’ house—in memory—is a cool airy blue, with a dark oak fireplace and modern oil paintings in driftwood frames. It’s like a living room cut into a glacier. In the same memories my father is a deep voice from an upward direction, a moving wall of woollen trouser and leather brogues. He is a source of unexpected swoops and presents wrapped inexpertly in newspaper. My mother is brown corduroy and a nurturing spoon. Her hands are cool upon my forehead, soothing my fevers, making magic on bruises and knocks. Neither of them, in my infant recollection, has a face, and actually that hardly changes as I get older. I can remember how I feel about their expressions, and what kind of expressions they are wearing, but in none of the images I have of them can I see a still image, a snapshot, of their faces. I am concerned I will not recognise them. And if I don’t, how will they possibly know me, absent these many years?

I climb the hill on foot. My borrowed boots are a bit large, and my left heel is getting a blister on it. When I walk, I push my toe all the way forward into the boot. My heel comes down a half-centimetre or so from the back, and slides across the insole. For some reason a little patch just off-centre catches against the fabric. It is a slide-rub, the skin dragging and making an elongated patch, slowly filling with clear fluid. Tomorrow, I will resent it. Right now the sensation of the disconnected skin, rough and stretchy and no longer a part of me yet still connected, is a bit disgusting and a bit fascinating.

I remember this hill. It is a deceptive bugger. It is rippled, legacy of long-ago terraced agriculture. Just when you think you’ve done the hard bit, the hard bit begins again. The house is very dark up there. Perhaps they are not in. I climb. The blister stretches.

A car winds by. (Is it them? Will they recognise me? Stop and pick me up? No.) Another memory, of two slender shapes in the doorway of the house, graceful arms waving me off. Good luck. I remember thinking (child surly) that they were gladder to see me go than to return, that they enjoyed their unencumbered time. I remember Gonzo drawing me away to the playground or to school, consoling, endlessly creative. I remember unconditional gratitude. I know, from this distance, that he was lonely too. At the time it seemed like compassion.

Go out and play. That, I remember. Cricklewood Cove was a place so safe I could be left alone. There must have been a childminder or a nursery club. I don’t remember them either. I remember my parents as beautiful shapes waving from the porch, arm in arm. I remember them stepping gingerly through Lego. And yet they are the kind of memory you paint in. I have to strain to recall their faces. That happens too. The face of someone you have known all your life clouds as you look at it, and you realise that you remember them, for who they are and what they mean, far more than you remember what they look like. The mind plays tricks to stop us knowing how disconnected we are.

Another car goes by, executive swish. It could be theirs. It is not. Endless, my expectation of rescue.

Top of the hill. On the flat, the blister is surprisingly painful already. I soften my left knee, stiffen the ankle and foot a little, and keep walking.

There is no one on the veranda, no light on in the kitchen. No surprise.

The gate is dry. The catch is rusty. The metal has not been oiled; I can feel roughness in it through the wood. Voiceless Dragon style: keep contact, let your softness tell you where your enemy is going, when he will stop. Resistance is information. The gate resists, a tiny thorn of decaying metal snagging the hinge. I lean into my arm, and the rust breaks. The tiny flecks of my enemy tumble to the ground. The gate swings open.

The front door is painted black, glossy wrought-iron black. The key is where it should be, under the statue of the goddess Diana—a bit racy for Cricklewood Cove, now that I see it as an adult, with one breast bare and a very short toga covering her hips as she runs.

Key turns in the lock; it’s quiet. I always have to shout to attract attention when I come in. Although I also seem to remember them being there, waiting. Well. They could hardly do that this time.

“Hi! I’m home! Just me. Hi.” The words fall flat on timber and paint.

There is no one here. The house is empty. It smells of empty, of old sheets, of resin leaking from wooden heirloom furniture, and dust. I walk down the hall, feeling that the walls are contracting around me, knowing it for a child’s perspective. The hall isn’t shrinking. I am larger. The hall was a grown-up place, where doors were answered and post delivered and exotic guests were welcomed (although I don’t know who, now that I think about it), and where I was relinquished to Gonzo’s care each morning and handed back by him later, or the following day. By the time I went to Jarndice, they were so rarely here. I used the back-door key, lived my own, sovereign life. In the intervening time we have somehow never spoken. There was no rift, just distance and time. I know they survived the war. I heard it somewhere, I think, or perhaps I just realise that I have not grieved, and from that I deduce their continuance.

The glacier room has huge windows and a great, throne-like chair. I remove the sheet and look at it. I remember it another colour, as if seen at dusk, a golden glow upon it. The shoulders and back of the chair are bleached from direct light. The room is filled with ghosts. Ghost legs. Ghost cocktails. Ghost parties. What parties? I remove some more sheets. I do not know the other furniture, just this chair. The one which is visible from the window. Have I sustained a head injury at any time, to forget my own life here? In the far wall there is a door. It leads to my father’s den, mysteries of maleness. Will I find him in there, skin like parchment, dead these many years? Or making love, passionately, to a new wife? Is that why I haven’t heard from them? I open the door with caution onto the panelled snug, balance to go down two steps, because the den was excavated to make it warm in the Cove’s occasional chill, and for privacy besides.

The door opens onto a cupboard, bare and cold. Only the door is familiar—imposing, ornamental and false.

Rebuffed, I walk through the kitchen to the back, open the cellar door, which leads down to my old apartment, where Theresa Hollow made love to me the night of the great cannibal dog slaying. A narrow stair leads not down, but up. The room at the top is a sort of ghastly boudoir, filled with old-lady trophies.

I do not know this house.

It becomes increasingly obvious—painfully obvious—as I wander through it. I know it the way a stranger does, a passer-by or a curious child: I know it from the outside, its public spaces and the rooms in easy reach of the windows. I may have looked in. I have never inhabited it. And yet I remember my house behind this door. And where, in my home with Leah, this was clear evidence of infidelity, of terrible betrayal, here it simply cannot be. Impossible to imagine Gonzo has seduced my parents too, however great his successes. They have not divorced me and taken up with him. They have not remodelled the house to make the point to me. This was never my house to misremember. Points in evidence: the people who lived here had no children. Their home has no pencil marks on the frame of the kitchen door, no torn carpet or scratched paint. There is no room which might have been mine, no bunk bed, no cluttered, dingy bedroom where the young me might have sulked and sweated his way to adulthood. And the pictures of the inhabitants are not pictures of my parents. The names on the old letters in a tin box are not familiar, let alone familial. This house has a history, and I am not in it.

My chest is very tight. My eyes are itchy, sandy in their sockets. I can feel the pulse in them. I wonder if they will rupture. I turn, and turn, and turn, or perhaps the house does, or the world. Did I dream a life? Did I, perhaps, make it all up? Yes. Yes! That must be it. My real life is so drab or grim that I have created a fresh one from scratch. I have lost my grip. I am weeping on the landing, precarious. My mother—if she existed—would tell me to be careful, and when this did not penetrate my awful grief, would sit below me on the third step down, and hold me in her arms and wait to be sure I did not fall. I have no mother. The step is empty. Like the house. Like, in fact, every place I go. Gonzo Lubitsch, I believe I hate you.

I roar without words, until my lungs are empty too. I laugh, and the sound of it is loud and unsettling, which encourages me, and I laugh louder. Then I cry, and the two become one. Quite deranged, sobbing and whooping in the dark of a burglarised manse. Deranged? I ponder. Yes! That would explain everything! My alternative life unfolds before me.

Behold the madman! His name is Crazy Joe Spork, a tinker and Freeman of the Open Road! Crazy Joe once served his country bravely, but went a bit far into the dark and lost his marbles, hence his sobriquet. Now he sees all authority figures with loofahs instead of heads! Crazy Joe was discharged from the army for washing his craggy thighs with an officer’s toupeé (still attached!). Alas, this same disability rendered him quite unfit for civilian life. After some unhappy incidents he became a drunk and a jailbird, and his medals were forgotten—sold, in fact, for lowgrade hooch. More recently, asleep one night against the fence of the pumping station where he makes his home (the breezes from the air-con vents are warm, the soldiers keep him safe from mountain lions), he heard a grand kerfuffle and charged to investigate what he took to be a thief making off with his moonshine. But no! Baser villainy was afoot that night, and some fragment of the decorated veteran resurfaced. Slipping through the blasted gates, he found a crew of heroes boldly struggling to save the world, set upon by a dastardly bandit! No slouch is Joe, for all his bathtime confusions, and taking charge he led them to a hallowed victory. Sadly, even as his broad shoulders laboured to achieve their goal, his traitorous, malfunctioning brain was spontaneously inventing a long and glorious history with his new chums, which fantasy unfortunately brought him into conflict with the man whose wife he had inadvertently appropriated! Shot in self-defence was Crazy Joe Spork, and quite right too, tumbling from a moving vehicle even as he lunged with murderous intent for his rival’s spongy head. Injured but too tough to die, he wandered to and fro, and thus came he to this old house, with which he has no connection beyond the wild visions of his imagined world, but onto which he projected a childhood by turns idyllic and neglected, with parents whose faces were appropriated from a mail-order advertisement. What will he do, confronted with proof of his own madness? Broken on the wheel of truth, his strange fixation lies in pieces in his lap. Will he heal? Perhaps crawl up from his distempered pit and find a proper job, buy nice clothes and settle with some kind lass of lardy middle, who will care for him and bring more Sporks into the world? A colony of bucolic brats and a spreading wife, possibly some contented pigs, would be a fitting end for this good, unchancy man. Or is it Loofahland henceforth for Crazy Joe, and acts of ever-greater violence until at last he stands, picked out in the spotlight of a police helicopter, shaking one enormous fist? “Put your hands in the air, Joe, and give yourself up! Father Dingle’s here, your old headmaster!” But Father Dingle’s pabulums are of no interest to Joe; he roars his King Kong fury at theology’s finest and the consolation of Mother Church. An elemental, downtrodden and misunderstood, he wants only revenge of gruesome stripe. Has he hostages? Perhaps. Or bombs. It hardly matters. “Joe, your mother wants to talk to you!” The negotiator’s trump card is a disaster, fatally misdealt: Crazy Joe Spork hates his mother, consequence of long years spent locked away in the closet for sins against her endless list of fatuous commandments. Bellowing irrelevantly that he will not eat his sprouts, he whips a vast and improbable gun from beneath his tattered coat and blazes away, killing dozens; is, without delay, perforated and transformed for the most part into a red mist by the thousand rifles all around. His head tumbles to the ground and rolls wetly to the feet of Police Captain Malone.

“Garn,” says Captain Malone, “that’s a bad ’un, right enough.” And he heads home, red-headed (though not in the same way as poor Crazy Joe), to eat with his Irish wife and freckly rugrats. Over tea and sausage, he teaches the children to say “eejit” and “Pawdraig” and is well satisfied with his day.

Deep breaths. In halfway. Stop. Fill your lungs, from the diaphragm. Stop. Out halfway, pushing with the belly. Stop. Empty your lungs. Stop. Stop laughing. Yes. Stop crying. Repeat.

I am curled in a ball on the landing, and I have leaked tears into the carpet. And this grief, this immense, inconsolable upset, takes me inevitably to the place I need to go, to the sandpit where I met Gonzo. At first I go there only in my head, recollection triggered by this same horrid sense of alienation and distress. Since that time only this has hurt so much. But shortly I am there in the flesh as well, a tallish, thinnish man with wayward hair, standing in a public sandpit in the middle of the night—the day has moved around me as I screamed and rocked in the empty house. I am observed from a respectful distance by some teenagers who are perplexed to find their trysting ground and occasional drugstore invaded by a tearful nutjob, but who—as I remove my shoes to run my toes through the sand—draw a little closer in the hope that I will do something dreadful or disgusting which will be worth talking about.

The sand is rougher than I remember. Perhaps they have refilled it with a different sand, a cheaper one. They must have done. The old sand was imported. The beach it came from probably does not exist any more. It was white sand. This is yellow. It holds more moisture, for longer. My toes are cold.

Across the sandpit and thirty years distance, near enough, I spy the infant Gonzo. He has taken possession of a rough circle about twice his own height in diameter. He has rolled around on it to make it flat, then carefully and meticulously smoothed the dimples made by his protruding joints with his flat-soled shoes. The arena is ready. Missing, however, is an opponent. In the sand Gonzo can draw his battalions and sculpt the terrain; he can render the world exactly the way he wants it. What he cannot do is replace the missing element. His shoulders droop, and he lets his face fall into shadow. Older brothers are supposed to be immune to accident.

They had The News two weeks ago, and the funeral on Friday: Marcus Lubitsch is dead. Gone for a soldier, killed in a dry country, laid to rest half a mile away with honours and the acrid smell of gun-powder as his friends sent him on his road. The smoke made Gonzo’s eyes water and the bang made him flinch, for which he feels guilty. Marcus did not flinch at anything—not even the shot which killed him. Some part of Gonzo still feels that if he had just been nicer to him, Marcus might have come back alive, instead of dead. He tried to say this to his mother on Wednesday afternoon, and she shouted at him to be quiet and then apologised (something she has never done before) and wrapped him in enormous arms and shuddered all around him. Gonzo’s tears disappeared entirely in his mother’s tidal wave, his hugest howlings dwarfed by hers.

Marcus Maximus Lubitsch: earthbound god, companion, gap in the landscape; Gonzo’s instinct is to re-create him. In his mind he carries Marcus and all the things they have done together. He can still hear his brother’s voice, knows roughly what Marcus would say and do in any given interaction. So he can still play with Marcus, even though he knows he will never play with Marcus again. He can share his bereavement with Marcus, hear his brother’s voice telling him it will all be all right soon, taste the blandishing ice cream of sibling bribery. This is what he wants to do, desperately.

But Gonzo, at the same time, has begun to appreciate that there are things in the world other than himself. He senses that continuing to play with Marcus is somehow wrong. When his brother was put in the ground, certain things became not-right which had always been perfectly okay till then. For example, on the day before The News came, Gonzo had a tea party whose attendees included two aliens, a talking mouse named Clarissa, Marcus in his tank (all soldiers have tanks and drive them everywhere they go) and three former kings of Scotland in various states of decapitation. There was nothing odd or unsuitable about this. His mother provided cake for all of them, but insisted that the mouse, the aliens and the kings have magic, invisible cake, and that Gonzo and Marcus share one tangible slice between two. In the event, Marcus pronounced himself not hungry, so Gonzo ate the whole piece.

After The News, though, this wasn’t possible any more. Marcus was perfectly able to be in several places at once before he died, but it is somehow part of the process of his dying that this is no longer the case. Gonzo—lacking the words to express his understanding—believes this is because Marcus, alive, could be brought up to speed when he came home on what he and Gonzo had been doing while he was away. Marcus, dead, is complete and unalterable. He will never recover these absentee experiences. They are therefore some kind of theft or trick. Pretending to be with him now diminishes his death and as a consequence the preciousness of his life. Refusing temptation, Gonzo is bereaved twice.

However, he knows what to do. After The News had been imparted and everyone cried—which was awful—there was The Conversation. Old Man Lubitsch took Gonzo on a long walk, perhaps the longest walk they have ever been on together, longer even than the time they went to the very top of Aggerdean Bluff to look at the sea and stare into the mansion, through its grimy windows at the ghostly tented furniture and solemn rooms. Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end. Old Man Lubitsch could barely bring himself to say the last word aloud.

Gonzo considered this, and then announced that he had some questions, but that he didn’t want to ask silly questions or bad questions and he didn’t know which ones these might be. Old Man Lubitsch said that there were no questions Gonzo could not ask, here, with his father, at such a time. So Gonzo unburdened himself of the key issues arising from the matter, in no particular order: Why did someone kill Marcus? Would they now kill Gonzo? How would Gonzo, without Marcus, play various games they had played together? Could Gonzo have Marcus’s enormous hat with antlers on? Should Gonzo dedicate himself forthwith to the speedy eradication of those responsible, by deed, accident or omission for Marcus’s death? If he did so, would he still have to hand in homework? Who would walk with Gonzo to school? Would Ma Lubitsch make him a new brother? Please could it not be a sister? Was Ma all right? Did what had happened to Marcus hurt a very great deal? Was it Gonzo’s fault at all? Did Gonzo’s parents still love him, even if it was? Would there be cake at dinner this evening? Was Marcus in heaven, as the Evangelist asserted, or was it possible he was haunting the Lubitsch house and looking after them all for now and evermore? And had Marcus, as he had at one time intimated he might, purchased a puppy for Gonzo, and would the puppy still arrive or was it in some way made moot by the death of its sponsor? Was Gonzo’s father all right too?

And Old Man Lubitsch replied that these were, for the most part, excellent questions. He answered them at some length, with considerable patience and exactness, so that it emerged that Gonzo, much-loved younger son, might well eat cake; was not responsible; must indeed continue to go to school; would not get another brother or alas a puppy, but was on the plus side not in danger of being shot; need not give his life over to the business of horrible revenge; and could indeed have Marcus’s hat. The question “Why?” Old Man Lubitsch deferred to another day (along with the discussion of pain and mortality, to which he professed himself at this moment unequal, saying that he did not know for certain and would therefore be required by the dialogue to speculate on Marcus’s feelings at the instant of his death). And to these good answers he added that none of them would ever be able to replace Marcus, and should never seek to do so—but that Gonzo must, while knowing that, and like all of them, try to make new friends.

Gonzo stares across the sandpit. It is a wasteland. He can see no one he wants to play with. If he cannot find a friend, he will start to cry again. His grief will catch up with him. It stalks him, jumps on him in idle moments. Gonzo already has puffy cheeks and raw, red eyes. Hurriedly, he takes his father’s advice.

He makes a new friend.

A boy (of course) his own age. Smaller. As alone as he is. Someone to share his burdens, racked—as children can be, for no discrete reason—with dreadful sadness. Cautious, as Marcus urged Gonzo to be from time to time, in curious contradiction of his own bold (careless?) fate. Someone to watch Gonzo’s back. We settle down to play, and it emerges that I am not quite as good at this as he is but good enough to keep him on his toes. In fact, this is almost definitive of me: in all the areas where Gonzo wishes to excel, I am just close enough behind to push him harder. In those he chooses to ignore, I am often quite talented. I am his foil. His sidekick. His Jiminy Cricket. Someone who will always take the blame, carry the can, own up, speak the truth, pay attention in class. A repository for dull virtues and a haven in times of trouble. Judicious, clever and sensible where he is headlong, intuitive and rash. Gonzo splits himself down the middle, and knows that he will never be alone again.

This sandpit is not where we met. It is where I was born—or, rather, made. I am Gonzo’s invisible companion, his friend in adversity, coconspirator in mischief, refuge in dismay. Inseparable, complementary, we made our way and fought each other’s battles and offered a shoulder to cry on or a word of advice in difficult times. I am the man he chose, at every turn, not to be, though sometimes he pillaged me for aid and assistance, when sheer bravado and brilliant improvisation were not enough. And it occurs to me: how is this different from how it was a week ago? Everything I remember is true—except for the very edges of Gonzo’s imagined history of me, like the house on Aggerdean Bluff and the parents I never had—and everything is false. And Leah . . . Leah is true too, up to a point. But I won her for Gonzo, it seems—and if I am honest, he saw her first; proposed to her while I was unconscious. A truly headlong moment. And maybe she loved him before she loved me. It must have come as a terrible shock to him to turn and find me there beside him in Station 9, the secret keeper of his dreams made real, his minority opinions given life. You don’t expect to have to compete with yourself quite so directly. And yet that was the first time we had ever been in full agreement. Protect Jim. Do the job. Save the world.

The moment when it happened, that ghastly plink and everything gone awry. Cold, terrible liquid rained down on us, demanding instruction, finding Gonzo’s fractured noosphere, his revisions and indecisions resolved by never making a serious choice—whichever option he did not like, he gave away. On one side the hero, the fearless man of action; on the other . . . me: second fiddle, weedy sidekick, junior scout—and every so often older, wiser head. We were deluged together in the raw, unbalanced Stuff of the universe. Inevitable consequence:

My own little reification.

I was made flesh, and in the process taken from him. I was never supposed to be real. How terrifying to confide your every doubt to an imaginary companion, to bequeath to him every alternative, and then one day to turn and see him standing before you. Gonzo must be feeling so hollow inside, with me spun out and separated from him. It must be quiet and empty in there.

And that, of course, is how I survived being shot. Freshly minted, new, I wasn’t real enough to die.

I HAVE FALLEN to my knees, rather self-consciously, because it seemed appropriate. Now I am wondering why. The sand is giving up its dew to my trousers, and some of it has filtered through the fabric and is making my skin itch. I wonder whether there are sand mites. The teenagers are watching with great interest. In the narrative logic of men collapsing to the ground in transports of horror, I should now throw back my head and scream at the top of my voice, a bellowing of pain and inconsolable rage. They peer at me with hopeful anticipation.

I get up, and something falls or scuttles down my left leg. I shake it. I leave.

There’s a general feeling among my audience that I haven’t delivered on my early promise. Silence and a minor palsy afflicting one lower limb do not constitute a full performance. They would have liked to see some groaning, possibly some violent fitting, and a finale involving invisible demons and shouted profanity culminating in a drug-induced coma. With a sharply critical air, they go back to assessing one another for possible sex.

I walk to Packlehyde Street, and pass through the streetlamp light to the Lubitsch house. And then, before I can think better of it, I bang on the door.