The Gone-Away World

Chapter Two

IT’S time to eat,” Ma Lubitsch says, a broad expanse of apron topped by a summit of greasy peanut-coloured hair. Old Man Lubitsch doesn’t hear over the buzzing of his hives, or he doesn’t care to join us, because his baggy white figure remains out in the yard, tottering from one prefab bee house to another with a can of wispy smoke. Ma Lubitsch makes a noise like a whale clearing its blowhole and sets out knives and forks, the delaminating edge of the table pushing into her belly. Gonzo’s mother is big enough that she takes up two seats in church and once near-killed a burglar with a rolled-up colour supplement. Gonzo himself, still able to count his years without resorting to two hands, has his father’s more sparing construction.

One of my first memories, in all the world: Gonzo, only a few months before, staring into my face with a stranger’s concern. He has been playing a game of indescribable complexity, by himself, in the corner of the playground. He has walked from one end of the sandpit to the other and rendered it flat in a particular place, and he has marked borders and bridges and areas of diffusion and lines of demarcation and now he needs another player and cannot find one. And so he turns to look about him and sees a small, lost child: alone in a moment of unfathomable grief. With presence of mind he directs his mother’s attention to the crisis, and she trundles over and asks immediately what is the matter and am I hurt and where are my parents and where is my home? And to these questions I have no answer. All I know is that I am crying.

Gonzo answers the disaster by approaching the white ice-cream truck at the far gate, purchasing there a red, rocket-shaped ice with a sticky centre, and this he hands me with great solemnity. Ten minutes later, by the alchemy of sugar and artificial flavours and the security they represent, I have joined Gonzo’s incomprehensible game and am winning—though perhaps he is going easy on me—and my tears are dry and crusty on my smock. During a momentary ceasefire, Gonzo informs me that this afternoon I may come to his house and meet his father, who is wise beyond measure, and partake of his mother’s cooking, which is unequalled among mortal men, and even feed biscuits to the Lubitsch donkeys, whose coats are more glossy and whose eyes are more lambent than any other donkeys in all the wide world of donkey-kind. Ma Lubitsch, watching from a small distance, recognises by the instinctual knowledges of an expat Polish mother that her family has grown by one, and is not perturbed.

In her oven gloves and enveloping apron, Ma Lubitsch gazes through the French windows a bit longer, but Gonzo’s father is now chasing a single errant bee around the hives with the smoke gun. Political dissent among the bee houses is not permitted. Ma Lubitsch makes a seesaw turn, stepping from one foot to the other once, twice, three times to bring herself back to the table to dish up, swearing the while in muttered Polish. The infant Gonzo, mighty with filial affront, dashes out to rebuke and retrieve the Old Man; I follow more slowly, five years of age and cautious with brief experience; appearances deceive. Honest faces lie and big boats sink where small ones ride out the gale. But ask me how I know, and I will not be able to tell you.

“Ma says lunch,” Kid Gonzo says firmly. Old Man Lubitsch holds up a single gloved hand, a sinner lost to apiarism, requesting indulgence. The bee is on the flagstone in front of him, presumably coughing. It appears for a moment that Gonzo will stamp on it, rid himself of this impediment to family harmony, but his father is fast for all that his face looks like faded wool, or maybe it is just that Old Man Lubitsch understands the value of strategic positioning: he swoops, his body blocking Gonzo’s line of attack, and, lifting the bee in gentle fingers, he pops it into hive number three.

“Lunch,” Old Man Lubitsch agrees, and for a moment I believe he smiles at me.

We return to the house, but Gonzo’s mother is not mollified. Things are strained. They have been strained since before I arrived, since Gonzo’s older brother Marcus went to soldier, and neglected to duck on some forgotten corner of a foreign field that is forever Cricklewood Cove. Lunch is Ma Lubitsch’s small white witchery, her article of faith—if she can provide Gonzo with hearty nutrition and a solid, dependable centre, he will be well-fitted to the world. He will conquer, he will survive, he will feel no need to seek adventure. He will not leave her. For Ma Lubitsch, lunch defies death. Old Man Lubitsch, however, knows that sometimes, for reasons which are obscure even to bees, the hive must disgorge its children and see them set upon the wind. And so he prepares for the moment when this son either finds a queen and starts a family, or flies and flies until he cannot continue and falls to the dirt to become once again a part of the mossy meadow carpet all around.

Ma Lubitsch doesn’t speak to her husband during the meal. She doesn’t speak from the first potato to the last flake of chocolate icing, and she doesn’t speak over coffee, and she doesn’t speak as Gonzo removes himself to the creek to fish. It seems that she will never speak to him again, but when I return unannounced for a forgotten tackle box, I glimpse her, the enormous body racked with sobs, cradled in the arms of her tiny mate. Old Man Lubitsch is singing to her in the language of the old country, and his shadowed, sharp little eyes lay omertà upon me, dark and deep; these are secrets between men, boy, between the true men of the heart. I know it. I understand.

It is this image which comes to mind later whenever Gonzo is about to embark on some act of unconsidered heroism: a bird-like man in white overalls lending his strength to a shattered mountain.

Gonzo fishes. He catches two tiddlers of uncertain species, and throws them back when they appear unhappy. I never tell him what I have seen, and when I turn around, five years have passed.

GONZO LUBITSCH at ten: a ringmaster and a daredevil, he leads with the chin, gets back on the horse, hates rules and is the object of a thousand crushes. Lydia Copsen holds hands with him in public, making Gonzo the most envied boy in the region, though none of us is able to source our bitter disappointment, and collectively we put it down to the fact that Lydia’s mother is free with her sweet jar. Lydia is a tiny, imperious girl, proud owner of a selection of dresses with fruit patterns on them. She is also, it is clear to me from this distance, the daughter of Satan and the Wife of Bath. By turns haughty and adoring, Lydia dishes out featherlight kisses with an instinctive political acumen, and she deploys her ready access to confectionery to create a powerful and loyal clique of girls who yield secrets and obeisance to their mistress of the watermelon frock. At nine years of age, Lydia Copsen is somewhere between a tabloid editor and a Beverly Hills madam. Her admiration for Gonzo is matched only by her scorn for me, but Gonzo, loyal friend, will not ditch me, and thus I am gooseberry on their daily walks around the playground, and chaperone as he escorts her home. At Lydia’s insistence, I walk ten paces behind them, but here she scores her own goal, because my only wish is to be as far from the loving couple as possible.

It is around this time that I lose, absolutely, my faith in a merciful deity, through the agency of the headmistress of our school. Her real name is the Evangelist, and it is thus that God and his angels and Yahweh and his angels and Allah and his angels and all the other gods of the world and their angels, demons, avatars, servitors, minions and mugwumps know her, and it is thus that she is inscribed in the hundred lists of the living and the dead that they all carry around like so many celestial bookkeepers. She masquerades, however, as Mrs. Assumption Soames, of the Warren, Cricklewood Cove, where she is headmistress of the eponymous Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk. She is small and slim at an age which has never been disclosed, but any child with access to a Bible (and all children at the Soames School have plentiful, even overwhelming, access to Bibles) would confidently date her from the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis as coming somewhere between Aram and Lud. It is rumoured among the brave and foolish who speculate on such matters that she may be as old as fifty. Mr. Soames, whose father’s father’s father founded the school, died sometime back of a marsh fever, and the tacit consensus among the parents is that it was with a considerable sense of relief. Mr. Brabasen even suggested that Mr. Soames’s sole intention in his frequent and prolonged fishing trips to the darkest and most pungent area of the Cricklewood Fens was to infect himself with said disease, a virulent virus which in 80 per cent of cases claimed either the victim’s hearing or his life, either sad outcome being, in Mr. Brabasen’s opinion, reason enough for Mr. Soames to seek it out.

If Assumption Soames’s nickname sounds sophisticated for our infant wit, the reason is that it originates among the teachers, a flea-bitten and secular motley of brilliant minds culled from institutions too prissy to put up with their foibles. To the Evangelist, these weaknesses are burdens given by Providence along with their gifts to test their metal. In accordance with the perfect wisdom of the divine plan, failure in these trials serves only to bring them into her healing and censorious arms so that they can teach her charges and atone and learn restraint. More than one of them has a nervous collapse during my time at school, and at least one of those surviving is heavily medicated purely as a result of Gonzo’s inventive deployment of a thirty-foot spool of number seven line, a plastic skull and a ragged horse blanket. For all this, they’re a solid lot, and despite the Evangelist they push the educational boat out further than they otherwise might. Mr. Clisp the gambler teaches us not only mathematics but also materialist ethics, setting logic puzzles on the board which appear to be value-neutral but which, when resolved, condemn the vituperative harridan in ringing tones. He also explains the rudiments of poker and the business of making book. Ms. Poynter (whose precise sin is whispered to involve negotiated services of a physical nature) includes in her biology classes a smattering of first aid and natural history, and also sexual education of increasing sophistication as the years pass, so that by the age of ten we can recite a list of erogenous zones and appreciate the difference between primary and secondary sexual characteristics in humans, and by the onset of puberty no one is in fear about the inevitable swellings and expulsions. Later, Ms. Poynter is temporarily relieved of duty by the Evangelist before the Board of Governors can object to her decision to teach a class on sexual technique to the girls and impart a stern lecture on mores and self-restraint to the boys (spiced with a brief but memorable digression on the theory and practice of cunnilingus). Mary Jane Poynter takes two weeks in Hawaii with Addison McTiegh, the PE teacher, and both of them return quieter and less twitchy and when the exam results come in with a near-perfect pass rate, the Evangelist elects not to fire her on the condition that no more parents are given cause to complain. The Board, who would for the most part have liked to see Ms. Poynter burned at some form of wooden upright, are too busy battling the Evangelist’s blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year. Gulliver’s Travels survives the scissors, as does A Christmas Carol, but Modern Short Stories in English is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.

My loss of faith is sudden, and it’s not so much a conversion as a reappraisal. Children are still modelling the world, still understanding how it works; their convictions are malleable, like their bones. Thus, I experience no sudden horrible wrench as my belief is uprooted, but rather a feeling like the right pair of glasses being put in front of my face after some time wearing someone else’s. The Evangelist brings me to her study to tell me off for one of Gonzo’s outrages, and I sit waiting for a higher power to intervene and tell her that it isn’t my fault. I look upward, naturally, to the place above my hairline where adults come from, the place where, broadly speaking, heads can be found and persons in authority exert their will in the name of justice. There is no one there. It is unclear in my mind whether I am looking for God in person or a more earthly parent as his instrument, but neither appears. The Evangelist adds a charge of “rolling your eyes at me” to the sheet, and I spend a week in detention after school. Gonzo is mysteriously unwell for the period, with a vile sore throat which is probably infectious but doesn’t stifle his ability to loaf, and which Lydia Copsen also develops. They convalesce a great deal together, feet touching under the blanket as they sit at opposite ends of the sofa and choke abominably.

Spring becomes summer, summer becomes autumn, and Gonzo and his beloved part company over her inability to comprehend the importance of muddy walks and frantic leaf-kicking. She takes the opportunity to inform him that she went with him only to gain access to his parents’ donkeys, to which Gonzo responds that the donkeys loathe her, despise her silly hair and stupid upturned nose, and they have asked him, by means of sign language, to convey to her their deepest and most unalterable disdain for her opinions in all matters of consequence. Thus avenged, the wretched girl departing in a frozen fury, Gonzo retires to the riverbank and we fish in silence, and this time Gonzo catches a decent-sized trout with his new rod, although it is left to me to kill the creature and present it to Ma Lubitsch, who dutifully guts and cooks it for dinner. Though fortunately it is served alongside a more enjoyable dish of meatloaf.

Gonzo is not the only person with relationship issues. At Old Man Lubitsch’s insistence, we sit in Ma Lubitsch’s parlour one night in lone-some October, watching the world have something of a tizzy. Ma Lubitsch’s television is very much a curiosity—a wood-panelled thing with chunky buttons which whines and gutters alarmingly and occasionally overheats and has to have a rest. But on the screen, all the same, are more people than I have ever seen in one place, and half of them appear to be very pleased about something and the other half extremely cross, and neither side has a great deal of patience about it. Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called politics, which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map.

What has happened today is therefore something of a shocker. An actual decision has been taken, in the face of all the odds, and it is one which absolutely no one saw coming. It is also, to use a technical term deployed by a chortling analyst, something of a corker. The island of Cuba, which is a long way away, has thrown off its communist rulers (who were in fact not communists but totalitarians—and here Old Man Lubitsch looks as if he may spit, but Ma Lubitsch gives him a totalitarian look of her own and he subsides) and has chosen a somewhat improbable route to enter the modern world. The people of Cuba have petitioned the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (which is not really a kingdom—that would be another form of totalitarianism) for admittance, and been accepted. The resulting entity is the United Island Kingdoms of Britain, Northern Ireland & Cuba Libré, and is already being referred to by the wits as Cubritannia.

As an introduction to politics, this is pretty much in at the deep end, but Old Man Lubitsch is well-informed and patient, and by the end of the night I understand that I have seen a historic thing and that the people of Cuba have opted to join a nation of shopkeepers because they want infrastructure (roads and sewers), freedom (not being beaten up for pulling faces at politicians) and a decent injection of cash and junk food (this is called standard of living). The people of Britain have accepted them because they relish the notion of an influx of well-trained, educated people of pleasing physical appearance who have rhythm, and because their national psyche needs somewhere to replace another island called Hong Kong which they apparently lost somehow and are still sulking about. Mostly, however, it seems they have accepted this arrangement because it has put the wind up the rest of the world, and that pleases them greatly. The people who seem most upset are elements of the global business community based in distant places like Johannesburg and New York and Toronto and Paris, who basically assumed that Cuba belonged to them, and was on lease to the communist totalitarians all this time.

This intelligence means very little to me, but Old Man Lubitsch insists that the time will come when I am glad to have seen it, and proud to remember it. And while Gonzo finds this unlikely, and sees in his mother’s eyes a deep patience with her husband’s folly, I believe it. The silent bristling heat of conviction is in Gonzo’s father, and it passes in some small measure to me. I carefully store Cubritannia away in my mind’s attic, and throw a blanket over it for good measure, and the next day is a Wednesday and our first lesson is history and the Evangelist puts her head around the door to tell Mr. Cremmel specifically not to talk about it, and she sits in to make sure. Mr. Cremmel dutifully teaches us about the Industrial Revolution instead, but he makes some kind of innocent error when it comes to homework, and the page references he gives us are for Cuba after all.

SNOW comes to Cricklewood Cove that winter. It is early December, and the temperature rises from below zero to a comfy one or two. There is a strange, crisp smell of pine and woodsmoke and something clear and different. A wide, low cloud settles over the cove and over the Lubitsch house and (thanks be to the God I no longer believe in) over the school. The cloud does not loom, nor does it threaten. It is warmer and deeper than a rain cloud and has a definitely benign feeling, and when it is finally ready it unburdens itself of a vast quantity of white flakes, which fall straight down. They are not the thick wet flakes of spring snow, which are sort of misplaced, like confused geese. They fall in an endless flow, small and dry and floating evenly and covering everything, and when they go down the back of your neck and chill your spine, they are still solid when they reach the waistband of your trousers. This is real, bona fide snow, come down from the high mountains and stabling the sheep and visiting the saloons, and raising a ruckus over a girl in little frilly trousers (the blizzards strand me inside and I discover the Western, and John Wayne is my hero for evermore, although a hero of admiration rather than emulation because he always ends up dead—Gonzo plays at being the Duke and lies dramatically and probably auto-erotically splayed upon the hall carpet, gasping out his last).

When the clouds clear, it does not get warmer. It gets much, much colder—cold to cause glaciation and kill mammoths and drive migrations in the Neanderthal men whose existence the Evangelist denies, thus inspiring a brief but frantic exploration of the library for malprinted or heretical Bibles and fierce debate about the nature of Esau. Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

The alcohol thermometer in Gonzo’s garden cracks, and Old Man Lubitsch has to arrange a curious external heating system to preserve his bees, which he does using piles of compost which are in the grip of an exothermic reaction (although Gonzo’s father calls it an eczozermic ree-ekchon), which means that the process of decomposition is generating heat. Old Man Lubitsch carefully creates piles of warm rotting garden goo around his bee houses, and the smell is curiously pleasant and grassy rather than rotting and deliquescent, but Ma Lubitsch does not approve and mutters darkly about dratted bugs and how much honey can one eat in a lifetime anyway? But Old Man Lubitsch takes this in good part and hugs her—he actually gets his arms around her and lifts her off her feet—and she swats at him and demands to be put down before he does himself a harm. The Lubitsch house retains its unorthodox external heating arrangements (although Ma Lubitsch extracts a promise that they will be gone when the spring comes, so as to avoid any possibility of explosions). On the following Sunday, and for the first time ever, Megg Lake freezes over.

Megg Lake is an oxbow, a hoop of water named for the Greek letter , one of the few Greek letters of which the Evangelist approves, the others being in some mystical way gateways to licentiousness. It is constantly refilled by an underground river which flows down from the Mendicant Hills, and when there is a great deal of rain, the lake bubbles over the rocks at the western end and finds its own floodways to the sea. At any time, Megg Lake is a choppy and turbulent body, ripples sprinting out from the centre where the water boils up, and reflecting off the craggy shores to make (according to our geography textbooks) a pattern of constructive interference where the splashes collide and produce waves, and destructive interference where their interaction yields little patches of calm. But now it is frozen, a broad grey-blue crescent of bowed ice, thick and growling.

Ma Lubitsch parks the car. It is a 4 × 4, and it is completely forbidden to Old Man Lubitsch, who (on the occasions when life’s exigencies place him, against his spouse’s better judgement, behind the wheel) drives it like a racing car, in a pair of nasty shades, and draws admiring glances from women younger than his suit. Ma Lubitsch brings the beast to a halt by the lake, and Gonzo scrambles over me or possibly through me in his urgency, and then we are all unloading the car. Tackle box, check. Rugs, check. Charcoal burner, check. Ice saw, check. This family—extended family—is going Eskimo fishing, something Old Man Lubitsch and Ma Lubitsch used to do back when she was a sylph-like thing with no hips and he was a bull of a man, short and powerful as a tropical storm, and my, how she adored him. And from the immodest twinkle in her eyes, at least as much of them as I can see through folds of skin and squint and woollen comforter, she still does, and shall do evermore. It is only the ghost of one soldier that stands between them, and even this is not a separation, but a strange sad bridge and a deep mutual knowing like nothing else. Marcus Maximus Lubitsch, tennis player and able cook, laid to rest now, and visited sporadically in a well-kept corner of the churchyard at the edge of town. At this moment, Marcus is present. Even Gonzo, thigh-deep in snow, and flailing gleefully at the powder, quiets his voice and shares the solemn smile which passes between his parents.

Ma Lubitsch lights the burner, but she uses somewhat too much fluid and the thing fairly erupts, singeing her muffler. She gives a great shout of Polish obscenity and then looks guiltily around, but there are no linguists within thirty miles, and she giggles (more constructive and destructive interference, no doubt, in the pattern of her wobbling fat, but this is concealed), and Old Man Lubitsch goes to get the ice saw.

Megg Lake’s ice is not lightly to be cut. It is oddly clear and hard, more like glacial ice (which is pressurised and squeezed over thousands of years) than lake ice (which is fraught with cracks and rivulets). Gonzo’s father assails the ice with the saw—initially near the shoreline, but latterly further out when it becomes apparent that there’s no earthly danger of it breaking—but to little effect. Old Man Lubitsch hacks away, but this is serious frozen stuff, ice like Arctic ice, with a bad attitude and a stubborn mien. It is ice, in fact, a lot like Old Man Lubitsch himself, who was hounded from his home town for being cheeky to the communists, and then refused return when he was cheeky to the new fellas in much the same way. Perpetual exile, letter-writing malcontent, “Furious and disappointed of Cricklewood Cove,” Gonzo’s father will not concede. He will get through this ice if he must declare an eternal feud upon it. And so it is that Gonzo comes to his aid with a plan.

In the normal run of things, I am Gonzo’s plan-confidant. It is to me he brings his worst ideas, and it is my job to squash them and propose, as an alternative to connecting an electric torch directly to the mains power so as to make a lightsabre, some activity less mortally perilous. Today, however, Gonzo’s plans receive an audience less jaded and, perhaps, less sensible. Parents dote. Fathers, in particular, indulge their sons in matters of manly comportment and tasks which approach the sacred duties of the heteropatriarch, such as shooting enemies, blowing things up and hauling mighty armfuls of dead animal across the white wastes to feed the tribe. This situation—the possible defeat of the clan hunters by an inanimate icecap—falls broadly into these categories, and thus it is that when Gonzo proposes a simple solution, swift and sure, Old Man Lubitsch gets a look in his eye. It is a look which says that, when he was Gonzo’s age, he had some idea of similar magnificence, and this jewel was crushed beneath a weighty grown-up heel. But here he, Gonzo’s father, is in a position to carry through the deed, and in one stroke to avenge himself and demonstrate a more enlightened understanding of his son’s unbridled genius than was shown to him. Grizzled and rugged, red flannel shirt and preposterous fur hat upon his head, Old Man Lubitsch looks down benignly on his child.

“Say it again!” says Gonzo’s father proudly.

“We should use the lighter fluid,” says the infant anarchist, “and burn a hole in the ice!”

Ma Lubitsch sighs a little sigh, but trapped within the matriarch it seems there is still a breathless groupie falling for her husband’s wild eyes and floating hair (such as remains) because there’s a sparkle about her which says loudly she does not approve, does not think this is wise, will not be held accountable, but is absolutely dying to see it happen and will reward most richly whatever prince of men can carry off this splendid boast.

This tacit complicity established, my formless worries are brushed aside, and an order of service is drawn up as follows:

1) a spot will be appointed, no less than thirty metres out, where this conflagration may safely be begun, and where fishing may latterly occur;

2) Old Man Lubitsch, and he alone, will walk out to the spot thus designated and deploy the matériel, in quantity. He shall do this by:

i. hollowing out a small basin

ii. pouring thereinto a large quantity of flammable stuff, leavened with such kindling and fuel as may be garnered from the rear of the car and the ground nearby

iii. making, by means of more stuff, a fuse or trail back to the lakeside, where

3) we shall await him and when he is safe,

4) jointly ignite the furnace.

This all duly done, a strange and beautiful thing happens, which is absolutely not what we had in mind.

The thing begins as advertised, with a bright flame licking smartly across the ice to Old Man Lubitsch’s reservoir. That reservoir, lighter fuel with an admixture of dry wood and charcoal, and a couple of rags from the back of the 4 × 4, catches and burns well, a five-foot-high column with its feet in the ice. A certain amount of smoke goes up, which may also be steam. The whole thing seems to be doing very little in the way of melting the ice, but perhaps it’s early days. And indeed, it is early days; the next stage is somewhat more dramatic than we had envisaged. There is a noise as of incoming mortars or a train crash or the steeple of the church falling into the vestry. It is a vast, tectonic, tearing noise which seems to come from everywhere. In truth, it is probably none of these things, but it is very loud, and I am a small boy.

The ice has split, as it does when you put an ice cube in your drink on a hot day. The fissure is narrow, but it is lengthening at speed, and other cracks are forming, and something vast is shrugging underneath. Ma Lubitsch, with a mother’s sense of threat and consequence, perceives the shape of things to come. As dinosaurs battle beneath the icecap, she throws her beloved, idiot family into the car and takes off at a clip Old Man Lubitsch himself finds somewhat startling. Gonzo and I stare back at Megg Lake, fascinated, through the rear window. Thus we alone in all the world are positioned to see what happens when the run-off of an entire range of hills is pent up for several days beneath a plug of ice and air, and then released by a rebellious sexagenarian with a yen to relive his glory days in front of his family.

The icecap gives a final wriggle, and goes “shhOOOMF!” and a frothing eruption boils up and out. The plume of water reaches higher than the high trees by the lakeside, and lumps of ice like Sunday roasts fall ahead of us on the road. The full weight of water from the Mendicant Hills, thwarted these many days in its passage to the sea and gathered underground in a column of pressure two hundred feet high, is at last released.

A duck, knocked unconscious by a bit of ballistic slush, tumbles to the ground in a field to our right. And then, extremely locally, it rains. It rains sleet and snow and ice, and a small number of unhappy frogs.

Old Man Lubitsch looks back down the road at the devastation, and he starts to laugh. It is not a hysterical laugh, but a genuine, delighted, belly laugh at the view, the madness, the gorgeousness of the cock-up. Ma Lubitsch calls him a string of names, but her face is flushed and she, too, is laughing, and it seems likely that if ever Gonzo is to get a younger brother, it will be tonight.

The Cove Cold Snap ends a few days later, as if by sympathetic magic we have broken the grip of winter on the land. The snow melts overnight, and there are little green things eagerly yammering for attention shortly after. The Lubitsch donkeys, cause of great and now-forgotten turmoil, are led reluctantly from their winter accommodations and told to start thinking of themselves as outdoor beasts again. Their mournful and utterly mendacious cries of distress are responsible for some sleepless nights in the Lubitsch house, but Ma Lubitsch keeps to her iron rule and the donkeys get the message, and are content.

THUS GONZO, incendiarist and leader of men. And Gonzo’s inescapable hanger-on—the kid no one notices? He also grows up. Not even last-picked for football teams and athletic tryouts, the perpetually benched; he is Gonzo’s shadow and occasional conscience when the Plan—be it raiding the kitchen for food or escaping this borstal to live with Gypsies in Mongolia (described by the Evangelist as “a festerance of Sin and Capitulation,” on what evidence I cannot guess)—calls for excesses in excess of what the authorities will accept as demonstrating that boys will be boys. Outwitting the librarian and purloining banned books is almost expected; releasing the inmates of the ant farm along a trail of purloined sugar leading to the staff showers is ingenious enough to merit wry applause from the science master along with a string of punishment duties; making and testing explosives with cheap domestic ingredients I veto, not out of any dislike for the splendidness of the concept, but from a natural awareness that there are borders everywhere, and sending the football pavilion—even empty—four hundred feet into the air using homebrew nitroglycerine is on the far side of both what would be tolerated and our own alchemical competence. I remember, where Gonzo does not, the safety film featuring scarred and rueful victims of their own hubris urging us against such ventures. We settle instead on a concoction intended to induce percussive internal combustion in the rumina of cows, but the test subjects are unaffected by the stuff, save for a minor increase in distraught mooing.

At fourteen, Gonzo discovers martial arts movies: the oeuvre of Messrs. B. Lee and J. Chan, along with assorted other players of greater and lesser talent. The martial arts film is a curiously sentimental thing, fraught with high promises and melodrama. Those of the Hong Kong variety are frequently filled with untranslatable Chinese puns delivered in a bout of sing-song badinage. The plots are moral, Shakespearean, and have a tendency to charge off in some unexpected direction for twenty minutes before returning to the main drama as if nothing has happened.

Inspired by these, Gonzo commences to study karate. He is the ideal candidate: fearless, physical and delighted by the changes wrought in his body by multiple press-ups, his only disadvantage that he comes late to the party. Had Gonzo begun his training younger, he might one day be a true master. As it is, he must content himself with being merely an excellent student. For the weedy sidekick (whose yokogeri kekomi is indeed the weediest in the school’s catchment area), karate is another arena in which life’s beatings are legitimately delivered, but he struggles on. He has—I have—despite a long-nurtured understanding that he cannot equal his friend’s achievements—never learned to quit, one virtue he possesses which is utterly alien to Gonzo, whose effortless rampage through life has never required him to consider it.

And then one day the universe decides that I am fledged, and accordingly demands of me my first solo flight; Mary Sensei leads me from the tatami to examine my now-familiar bloody nose. It has never broken, but—unlike my hands, which remain fragile despite hours of training at the bag—it must by now have developed a mighty sheath of calcium. I wonder if I can shatter boards with it. Mary Sensei replies that this is unlikely, and she would prefer that I delay the experiment indefinitely. Five foot three and fifty-four kilos, Mary Sensei tells me I’m not cut out for karate. But my dedication is sufficiently impressive that she can suggest an alternative: another school.

I object that Gonzo won’t want to change schools.

“No,” Mary Sensei explains. “Not Gonzo. Gonzo will do fine here. Just you. Without Gonzo.”

This is a new concept, but not—oddly—an unpleasant one.

“Another karate school?”

“No. Another style. Maybe a soft form.”

“What’s a soft form?”

She tells me.

The upshot is a tour of the local schools of soft-form pugilism, and the first thing which becomes apparent is that the term “soft” is misleading because it is relative, the comparison being with men and women so desperate to turn themselves into machines of empty-handed demolition that they have spent hours and days and months striking wooden boards and sandpapered target dummies to condition their fists, and who consider an hour ill-spent if they have not driven one foot through a pile of bricks. It is not a question of whether the style is violent, but of whether that violence is direct and forceful or subtle and convoluted. To the eye of a novice, soft forms appear delicate, baroque and artistic, while the hard forms are brutish and merciless. The truth is that the soft forms are more considered in their application of pain and damage to the body. Which is more unpleasant to the object of their attentions is an open question—and which variety attracts more dangerous lunatics in the suburban setting is also unclear. I rapidly reject the smiling, flinty aikidoka, whose expressionless perfection informs the opponent that his life or death is irrelevant, and whose motions include a sword-cut twist at the end to provide the coup de grâce. Their modern, street-fighting cousins of European and Brazilian ju-jitsu are also unsatisfactory; the former are cheery, laddish men tending to be under five foot six and almost the same across the shoulder, the latter are chuckling lunatics with a fondness for submission holds and women in impractical swimwear. Puritanical and sovereign, I stalk from their classroom without a second look—but this leaves me with a problem. Judo is as much sport as self-defence. T’ai chi is fluid and elegant but requires an entire lifetime to be usable in combat. More esoteric—and, to be honest, no softer than karate—escrima and silat are not taught anywhere within an hour of Cricklewood Cove. I look in desperation at Mary Sensei, and perhaps, this once, my need is enough.

“Yes,” Mary Sensei says, “there’s one more thing we can try.”

Which is how, for the first time without Gonzo Lubitsch, I come to be standing on the doorstep of Wu Shenyang, seeking admittance to the House of the Voiceless Dragon.

“Wu like woo, ” Mary Sensei said two minutes ago, strangely breathless in her aged VW Rabbit as we sat waiting for the precise appointed hour, “and then Shen and Yang as if they were separate, but they’re not. And you don’t call him Wu Shenyang, anyway, you call him Mister Wu. Or Master Wu. Or . . .” But she could not think of anything else I might call him and anyway it’s time. The door opens. An excited voice says “Come, come!” and I watch my feet take me across the threshold.

Mister (Master) Wu is the first teacher of whatever sort to ask me to his home, and he is the first martial arts instructor who has wanted to know me off the mat before seeing me perform on it. According to Mary Sensei, if he does not find what he is looking for in my heart, there will be no point in testing the rest of me. I inspect my heart, and it seems an impoverished organ for such a big task. It is the right sort of size and located not as moviegoers believe in the high left side of the chest (that is in fact a lung) but just off centre and further down. It beats approximately seventy times a minute and pumps vital nutrients and oxygen carried by haemoglobin around my body in the approved fashion, but it conceals as far as I can tell no mysteries, and is devoid of secret heritage or supernatural skills. Having thus ascertained by introspection that I lack whatever it is this gentleman is seeking, I feel able to observe his living room, which is itself remarkable. It is, as well as being a place to sit and read and eat cake, a treasure house of oddments and curiosities—a gold statue of a warlike pig in one corner, a pair of Foo Dogs on the mantle, standing lamps from various periods of design, weapons and china ducks on all the walls. Wu Shenyang is still assessing me—I can feel the stress of his regard—and so I begin to catalogue the contents of this place with an eye to returning perhaps as a cleaner or a general dogsbody.

Item: two armchairs, split in various places and of considerable antiquity, but also to all appearances monstrously comfortable. These are positioned loosely on either side of an open fire at one end of the room, along with a coffee table whose clever construction allows books to be stashed willy-nilly beneath the tabletop.

Item: with its back to us, a leather sofa of similarly advanced age, showing signs (to wit, a pillow and a blanket) of having recently been used as a camp bed. Indeed, there appears to be a person camping on it still, because a pair of white-socked feet, slender and almost certainly feminine (by the pattern of the weave) and perhaps my own age or a little younger, protrude from the western side.

Item: a grandfather clock, running smoothly if somewhat previous, in dark and gold-leafed wood with a fine, painted face. The panel door is open and the pendulum is visible as it makes its long, slow strokes from left to right and back again, producing a steady and undeniable tock tick noise in defiance of convention. This tock tick also reassures me that the person on the sofa is alive and not dead, because her northernmost foot tock ticks along with it from time to time, and then returns to a state of rest.

Item: one desk and chair, both liberally covered in cake crumbs and paper. The desk is functional rather than impressive, and surmounting the piles and stacks of letters and drawings is a single sheet of blank paper and a pencil. Mister (Master) Wu does not use a pen for casual work, because where—or maybe when—he comes from, ink is expensive. Thus, the softest of soft leads, because Mister (Master) Wu is writing in Chinese.

Item: an ancient gramophone, literally; not a stereo or a turntable, not a CD player, but a scratched and whistling construction with a chrome arm and a huge flower-shaped horn and a thick, blunt needle making music from brittle black discs which turn at 78 rpm. The entire trick is accomplished mechanically, without electricity or transistors or silicon.

To me, a child of the digital age, this is a great white magic, so awe-inspiring that I forget for a moment to be nervous of Wu Shenyang. It is in any case hard to remember that he is a person of dread solemnity and pomp, because he seems to approach everything as a kind of game. He is even now leaping over to the gramophone to display it in full glory: winding it, picking out an old record by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and grinning widely as he waits for my reaction to his fabulous trick. I am too lost in the crackling perfection to smile, until the record comes to an end and his deft fingers lift the needle away. He drags out from beneath the machine a bag of yet more impossible records and presses them upon me. I leaf through them with aching concern that I will shatter one, and finally play the adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, listening until the very end. Mister (Master) Wu’s gaze lights on my fingers as I lift the needle just as he did, because this thing is too perfect, too carefully preserved and lovingly made, to allow it to be injured by carelessness. And then finally I am looking at the man before me.

Wu Shenyang is tall and thin. He does not look like Buddha, he looks like a ladder in a dressing gown. Time has polished him, abraded him and passed on, leaving him nearly eighty and stronger than a brace of college athletes, though he favours his right leg just a little. His wide, umber-coloured face is not impassive like that of Takagi Sensei, who once visited Mary’s dojo and grunted meaningfully as I launched weak and indicated attacks at a girl from Hosely; despite the bristling brows in shock-silver above his eyes, he is not stern. Wu Shenyang laughs loudly—alarmingly—at inappropriate moments, and seems to take joy in inconsequential things, like the colour of the window putty and the slipperiness of the carpet in front of his desk. The latter he demonstrates to me by standing square in the slick patch and gyrating wildly, waggling his whole body, sliding his slippers on the spot as he shifts his weight rapidly from one to the other and twisting his hips. When he has finished, nothing will do but that I take a turn. I am immediately concerned that he will think I am mocking his game leg, but again I copy his method exactly and he registers his approval by laughing and shouting “Elvis Presley! Graceland!” When he tries to say “rock and roll” he gets into a terrible tangle because his English is, even after many years speaking it, gently accented with his mother tongue—but this also doesn’t worry him in the slightest, and so it doesn’t worry me either. We pass on to further matters of consequence: he likes my trousers, but he thinks my watch is too young for me, because it features a smiling cat whose whiskers indicate the hour and minute. He also thinks I need a new barber, and though loyalty prompts me to defend Ma Lubitsch’s kitchen table cut, I do so in the knowledge that he is right. Wu Shenyang apologises—to me and to Ma Lubitsch. There is a snort from behind the sofa, but I am immune. An elder stranger, without irony, treats me as a being of equal worth—if of lesser experience and discernment in the matter of timepieces. In the course of the watch discussion we compare forearms, and it is established that mine is actually as thin as his, which for some reason is hugely pleasing to him. Only when I explain why I am here—though of course he must know—does he recover his composure. He peers at me gravely and ponders, and I prepare myself for the inevitable, the impossible testing and the sorrowful rejection. He turns to the wall and selects from amid the ducks a short fat sword with a single edge and a sharp point. Holding it carefully in one hand, he removes the sheath and turns to me.

“Tool of war. Very respectable. Man’s work.” He grimaces. “Or you could say, a butcher’s knife! It is very sharp,” says Wu Shenyang, “and very old. Take it and tell me what you feel.” He steps towards me, extending the hilt, and somehow his bad leg slips as he moves across the slick patch of carpet. The Tool of War is launched into the air, slowly rotating around the point where his hand released it, until (I am relieved to notice, though I have not yet had time to move) it points away from me. Wu Shenyang’s body hurtles forward, almost a dive, and I realise that the hilt of the weapon, striking my chest, will propel the blade into him. It is therefore incumbent upon me to move, and I do. The sword’s top edge is blunt, so I stroke it with my right palm, pushing the point outside our circle, and step forward and bend both knees, back straight, to support the old man as he tumbles.

He does not tumble. His bad leg stretches out and takes the weight easily, and the blade, recaptured without fuss, swooshes through the air in a fluid, whirring spiral and returns to the sheath. Instead of his weight falling across my arms and being absorbed—somewhat—by my legs, the barest of contacts bespeaks his passing, and he emerges from the swirl standing by the door. I look down. My feet are spread in what is called a horseriding stance, my arms are extended above them, palms up and bent at the elbow.

“It is called Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain,” Master Wu says after a moment. “Practice.” But it is only when the girl emerges from behind the sofa and with enormous gravity shakes my hand that I realise I have been accepted as a student, and that somewhere, somehow, it all went right.

“Elisabeth is my secretary,” Master Wu says, without a hint of laughter. “She is quite stern, but as long as you are well behaved, you will get along fine.”

And so it proves. Elisabeth is a small blonde person who rarely speaks, but she orders the arrangements of the House of the Voiceless Dragon with the absolute certainty which is the preserve of ladies of that age, and she studies the forms with the other students and lives on the couch because her mother is too busy to take care of her. Master Wu is utterly obedient to her tyranny and she, in turn, takes care to exercise her power with great subtlety and discretion and even—amazingly—mercy. And sometimes, when Master Wu is lonely or homesick or simply tired, she makes spiced apple cake or Char Siu Bao, and we all eat them together, which helps. Together, because somehow or other I have been adopted again, and now I must split my time between Gonzo and Master Wu.

Voiceless Dragon is taught every morning and evening at seven, and at weekends all day, and students come when they can and stay for at least an hour. During the week, Master Wu composes calligraphy and reads a great many books, so that he knows a great many higgledy-piggledy things about a great many subjects, and some of these things are useless and some are not, but almost all of them find their way into the lessons. Thus along with the Elvis Walk, we have Lorenz Palace Step (mathematical gong fu) and Vetruvian Fist (da Vinci gong fu), and—until Elisabeth intervenes—Fallopian Tube Arm (the name culled from a diagram in my biology textbook, chosen for the shape of the elbow in the final posture, but rather alarming). I study whenever I can, and for some reason however much time I waste when I should be doing homework, my school grades go up rather than down through my association with Master Wu. I worry at first that Gonzo will be resentful of my absences, but he is busy with other matters, and certain of his activities require personal space.

In March, Master Wu has an unwelcome visitor, a man called Lasserly who travels all the way from Newport. Lasserly is a forceful person with a big, florid head. His arms are very thick, and he smells of old canvas. He wants to learn the Secrets. Every student of any martial form knows about the Secrets. They are rumoured and scorned across the world. Students are encouraged by some teachers to believe that knowledge of the Secrets will allow a practitioner to defeat age and death, hold his breath for hours on end, and project his spirit out of his body to smite his opponents like a Flash Gordon ray gun. Other masters, more down-to-earth or more honest, aver that the Secrets are symbolic, representing way stations on the journey of the self, or particularly important stylistic elements for the advanced student. Master Wu tells Lasserly that there are no Secrets.

“Come on,” Lasserly says. “Of course there are.”

No, Master Wu says gently, really, there aren’t.

“You know things,” Lasserly says.

That is undoubtedly true. And almost certainly, Master Wu allows, he knows things—even gong fu things—which Lasserly does not. But he doesn’t feel inclined to talk about these things with Lasserly, because Lasserly is somewhat abrasive and even rude, and Master Wu has nicer people to spend time with.

“Well, okay then. Let’s fight instead.”

This is preposterous, on the face of it. Lasserly outweighs Master Wu by a hundred pounds, and his hands are thick with calluses from long practice.

No, Master Wu says after a minute or so of silence. No point.

Lasserly walks out. On his way, he puts his immense finger on my chest. I feel the solidity of him, his body lined up behind the touch. He could channel his whole weight through that finger, probably punch it right through me. I shouldn’t have let him get that close.

“You’re wasting your time,” Lasserly snarls. “This guy doesn’t know any Secrets.” And he walks out, slamming the door so that the china ducks wobble against the plaster.

We practise in silence. Master Wu looks very sad.

On the night of this dark day, when Master Wu has finished wrapping himself around his third slice of apple cake, and is contemplating the advisability of wrapping himself around a fourth, Elisabeth is moved to ask him about Lasserly. The question starts as a curiosity, but by the time she has finished asking it her voice has risen because she cannot hold in her fury any longer, or her shame.

“Why didn’t you fight him?” And then she hears her own question and is abashed.

Master Wu shrugs. “Mr. Lasserly wanted to know if I knew Secrets,” he says. “He wanted to fight me so that he could find out. And now he thinks he knows the answer. He knows that I was so absolutely sure of which way it would go that I didn’t want to fight him.”

“But he thinks he would have won!” And this, in the end, is the heart of the matter, because in Lasserly’s certainty our own is eroded.

“Oh, goodness me,” says Master Wu, with vast sincerity, “I didn’t mean for him to have that impression at all!” He opens his eyes very wide, as if realising for the first time how it must have looked. “Oh dear! I am so clumsy! Do you think I should call him and tell him that I would have beaten him because he has stiff legs, moves like a cow and tenses his shoulders? But,” says Master Wu happily, “he didn’t leave a number. Well, never mind.” And he laughs. “There are no Secrets,” he says, “but there are lots of things I don’t feel like telling someone like Mr. Lasserly. That’s not how you keep Secrets at all—not,” Master Wu says, with great delight, “that there are any.”

“Are there? Secrets?”

“Secrets?” Master Wu says, as if he’s never heard of any such thing. Elisabeth looks at him sternly.

“Yes,” she says. “Inside-the-door. Inner Teachings.”

“Oh,” says Master Wu, “those Secrets.” And he smiles.

“Those Secrets,” Elisabeth repeats a moment later, when Wu Shenyang’s eyes once again roam in the direction of the apple cake, and she realises that the expression of deep division on his face relates to it, and not to the arcana of the chi.

“You mean like the Internal Alchemies? The Iron Skin Meditation and the Ghost Palm Strike?”

The Iron Skin makes a warrior immune to physical weapons; the Ghost Palm passes through solid matter—it cannot be avoided or deflected. I have seen them in movies. I did not know that girls watched those sorts of movies.

“Yes,” says Elisabeth.

“Well, no,” says Master Wu, “there aren’t really any of those.”

This is what he tells everyone who asks, and everyone asks sooner or later. Master Wu has few students, but some of them have students of their own, and one or two of those also have students, spread out across the globe in a great tree of tuition and discovery and experimentation and instruction, but the root is here in Cricklewood Cove, and here it is that every student of whatever level eventually comes to meet Master Wu. Each generation of student is supposed to acknowledge a kind of family relationship with the ones around—we have Voiceless Dragon elder uncles and aunts from Eastbourne to Westhaven, and countless brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. Some are brash and some are deferential and almost all of them, when they come here, are looking for a saint or a warrior, or a demi-god wrapped in mysteries, and Master Wu takes care to relieve them of that illusion in the most painless way.

“No magic,” he tells them stoutly. “No Secrets! No ‘inside the door.’ The truth is not hidden. It is simple. Just very difficult—but I am stubborn!” The laugh, too big for him, and then a little grin, just for you: “And I am lucky! I started early,” by which he means that his father whispered the training songs over his crib in Yenan.

“No,” Master Wu says now, “there are no Secrets. None at all. Would you like me to teach you one?”

“One what?”

“A Secret.”

“You said there weren’t any.”

“I will make one up for you. Then the next time someone asks, we can tell them we do know Secrets after all. Although it might make Mr. Lasserly very cross if he ever found out.” This fearful drawback clearly does not alarm Master Wu at all. He ponders. “Okay,” says Master Wu, after a moment, “a story and a Secret. Are you ready?”

We nod.

“Once upon a time,” Master Wu says, “in the days when your mothers’ mothers were young and attractive and before the wireless carried the voice of England to the corners of the world, there was a boy who could hear the sea from a thousand miles away. He could stand in the dry mountains and hear the sound of breakers on the beach. He could sit with his eyes on the mountains and listen to the storms crashing against high cliffs he had never seen. The salt water was in his veins, and in his heart.

“It made him very bad at many things. He was a bad farmer, a bad hunter, a bad cobbler and a very bad musician, because the noise distracted him and made him play the notes at the wrong time, and in the wrong place—and worse, when he played false, everyone else got drawn into the great ebb and flow of the sea and even the cheeriest music slowed down and sounded like a funeral song: deep, long breaths trailing away into nothing and then rising up again like tears.

“You might think he’d be unpopular, but he was a good-natured boy and his people were good-natured too, and as long as he worked hard and didn’t break things very often, they were happy with him. He moved in a graceful, liquid way, stepping from one foot to the other and back, in and out, back and forth, but of course not every shape in the world lends itself to someone who walks like a rocking horse, so even though his touch was light and his grip was strong, he snapped the ends of things or jostled people from time to time. It balanced out, maybe. In the morning, he worked with his father making things out of leather—his father had set aside a place in the workshop where he could sway without knocking anything over—and in the afternoon he worked with his uncle making bread, which doesn’t care if you roll it and twist it like seaweed on the beach. In the evening he sat and he closed his eyes until he could feel the spray washing over him and he breathed in time to the waves hitting the rocky cliffs he had never seen. And always, always, at dawn, he and his father and his uncle and all their family—even the women, which was most unusual—practised their gong fu together, because they knew they would have to fight one day, somehow. And of all of them, the young man trained the hardest and studied most deeply, because his patience was like the sea which whispered in his head.

“One day, a great master of gong fu came to the town. He was a fat man, and a mercenary. A soldier for hire, without an employer, and that is a dangerous thing. There were many great masters then, and some of them were very great and some of them were only a little bit great and some perhaps were only great as a courtesy. This one was of the middle ground: he was quick like a cat, but not like lightning; he was strong like a river ox, but not like a mountain bear or a giant; he was clever, but not wise, and he enjoyed his strength and his speed and his power over other people. And so this great master, who was really not a nice man, grew very drunk in the village saloon and laid about him with a broken spar of wood, and he struck the owner of the saloon between the eyes and cracked his skull so that he died, and then he set about the customers and the saloon owner’s family too.

“So the leatherworker and his brother—our young man’s father and uncle, you remember—went in to meet him and tell him to behave himself like a master and not a thug, and he cast his eyes downwards and acted most contrite, then when they relaxed, he knocked them head over heels out through the door with his broken spar. The young man’s father had a bruise on his head and his uncle had crossed eyes and was bleeding from one ear. And so the young man, who had never been in a real fight before, walked into the saloon and told this old, accomplished master of gong fu that he was a small man, a miserable creature, a weak, drunken oaf with no conversation and no chance with any lady he did not pay for. And while the master was still staring at him, he added many other things less polite which were perhaps unfair, but still most efficacious in attracting the master’s attention. And so, they fought.”

Master Wu smiles, and he stretches his narrow shoulders and they pop, and there is a little shine in his eye as recollection takes away his years.

“It was a great fight. Many buffets. Perhaps a hundred. They leaped and they struck and the young man broke the spar with his foot and the great master hurled him back and the young man rolled to his feet and attacked him again, and so on and so on, until the saloon funiture was all matchwood and they were both shaking and bruised, but the great master was still on his feet and his opponent could not prevail. The young man was covered in cuts and bruises, and his mouth was swollen. And the great master said:

“ ‘You have done very well, young man, but now I see that you are tired, and I am older and stronger than you are. Retire, and I will not hurt you any more, but if you remain, I will break you as you broke my spar, and your mother will weep for her wasted years.’ But the young man did not reply. He smiled as if he were just now understanding something, and he shut his eyes, and he listened to the sound of the waves. And he began to move. He moved in step with the slow, inevitable rhythm in his head, and the storm lent strength to his tired limbs and the ebb and the flow of the sea washed away his hurts and doubts, and soon the whole room was filled with the rush of the tide. The great master fell into that same rhythm and their footsteps moved as one, until the young man heard a great wave come roaring in from the deep, and it bore down over the great master with the weight which shatters stone, and the great master fell to his knees with a shout, and the fight was over. The master lay gasping on the floor of the saloon and spent many weeks in a cot recovering from his wounds. And then he left, after paying for the damage, with great humility. It is rumoured that thereafter he became a baker, and married, and had many children, and was a better man.

“And the young man was nicknamed Ocean thereafter, and he was still a terrible farmer and very bad dancer, but his father and uncle and his mother and all his family were very proud, and he was content. And the Secret is this . . .”

Master Wu screws up one eye and opens the other very wide. He crooks his hands and lisps. This is presumably an appropriate face for imparting Secrets.

“In unifying your chi with that of your opponent—in aligning the breath of your life and theirs—you will storm the strongest fortress. There! Is that a good Secret?”

I have no idea. It sounds as if it might be really profound. It also sounds like baloney. It is, therefore, the highest-quality bullshido, or martial arts hogwash. I don’t know whether to commit it to memory and study it or consider it an object lesson in the ease with which you can counterfeit ancient proverbs. Old Man Lubitsch once worked in an auction house in far off New York City, and is very fond of a saying he heard there regarding the provenance of religious iconography from eastern Europe: “Seventeeth century, but the artist is still alive.”

“What does it mean?” Elisabeth says.

“No idea. It’s a Secret. Means what you need it to mean. But now we have one, we can refuse to tell anyone about it!” He laughs. Wu Shenyang of the Voiceless Dragon, making up fairy tales like Lydia Copsen.

And then he puts another record on the gramophone (this one is Ella Fitzgerald, who—according to Master Wu—knew a great deal about chi), and Elisabeth and I are the first of his students ever to know the Inner Teaching of the Voiceless Dragon School.

THE SUMMER of that year is abnormally hot, and it is dry. The soil of Ma Lubitsch’s garden turns to dust by degrees, and the lawn cracks and fades. It doesn’t seem to matter how much water she sprays on it, the earth is so thirsty it can’t absorb moisture any more, and the sun slurps it all up into the air before the plants can drink it. In the end, she takes to hosing the whole place down at night, and Old Man Lubitsch makes a huge white tent from spare bedsheets to shade the entire garden during the day. Gonzo, aside from occasional trips to Angela Gosby’s house to use the pool (and fall in frantic lust with his young hostess), remains in the shade and pronounces himself unable to move. When the temperature goes up another degree, only the bees are happy, and even they must make allowances. The central chamber of the beehive cannot be allowed to rise above thirty-six degrees. A humming flight path reaches from the Lubitsch house to Cricklewood Creek, the inbound traffic carrying individual drops of water in gentle bee-fingers. Air-conditioning by slave labour, if you believe that a hive is run by an autocrat, but Old Man Lubitsch has long ago explained that the Queen is an asset, cherished and nurtured but not obeyed, and that the hives are a functioning biological machine. He cannot decide if they represent an eerie social harmony or a grim nightmare of mechanistic sub-servience to a purposeless and endlessly repeating pattern. In the heat, he muses on this imponderable aloud, until Ma Lubitsch pronounces it unsuitable conversation to go with lemonade, and her husband gratefully abandons political philosophy for citrusy relief.

Then September comes, and torrential rain. There are dry days after, of course, even barbecue days, but the flat-iron summer has been lifted and set aside. We go back to school and I find, briefly, a fresh tormentor among the new inmates who have arrived to receive the Evangelist’s curious wisdom.

Donnie Finch is a Big Bad Kid. This is to say he is strong, sporty, delinquent (in a very minor way) and antipathetic to anyone who pays more attention in class than he does. He is instantly well-liked, instantly obnoxious, instantly aware of his social inferiors. He backs me against the wall between French and biology and announces that I will henceforth call him “sir.”

This is the thing that I hate above all others. Donnie Finch does not know me. He has no reason for his animosity. He just knows that it is the Done Thing. He is Donnie Finch. I am not. He is a football hero, a smoker and a joker. I am not. Therefore, in the only mathematics which interest him, I am to be despised and picked on. He presses his thick damp hand in the middle of my chest and sneers. (I think of Mr. Lasserly.) This is habit. It is literally mindless: Old Man Lubitsch’s horrible determinist bee society writ large and sticky-fingered. There can be no discussion, no nuance, because either of these asserts a world which Donnie Finch’s picture of life denies. He eschews these things and chooses instead an off-the-shelf alternative.

In my mind, there is a calculus of risk and reward playing out. I am not helpless. I could kill Donnie Finch. I would quite like to, at this moment. His body is fragile. There are four targets in reach of my hand which would end this discussion in no small way, although three of them (temple, larynx, nose bone) require for a deadly blow more strength than I can easily bring to bear, and would most likely only incapacitate and terrify him. The other one (carotid artery) is something of a lottery. A smart tap will probably knock him out, but might dislodge a clot or cholesterol smear and cause an embolism in his brain. Killing him by mistake is not the point.

But satisfying as mayhem and (short) combat might be, these are not solutions. They are just reactions—as idiotic as Donnie himself. Thus I am paralysed, and upset. I want to unleash my anger. I do not believe that I should. At sixteen, it is a terrible thing to be hog-tied by conscience. I gaze at Donnie Finch’s pink face and his nasty freckled mouth and wonder what to do, and what he will grow into when he’s older. Maybe he will always be a thug. He shunts me against the wall, and I breathe out and am preparing to test my less lethal options, which are by definition more difficult because fending off an opponent without seriously damaging him requires a level of skill vastly greater than his, when Donnie Finch is mercifully eclipsed. Planet Gonzo’s orbit has brought him to the east corridor, and the gravity of my situation has pulled him in. He doesn’t say anything. He just steps firmly between us and closes his hand over Donnie Finch’s, and squeezes. Donnie Finch lets go. I am not sure whether to be relieved or not.

Christmas brings ribbons and pine trees and Ma Lubitsch’s memorable cake. The Evangelist, driven by a wretched fear of hormonal wrongdoing in the Season of the Lord’s Birth, pronounces that dating is forbidden by scripture. This is so remarkable that there is a queue at the library to read the Bible for anything we may have missed. A theological debate is set in motion which lasts into February and beyond.

Master Wu’s daughter moves to Lindery, which is just along the coast. She is Ma Lubitsch’s age but looks mine, and she is very tiny and very beautiful. Her name is Yumei, and her daughter—who is two—is called Ophelia. Ophelia watches me gravely as I practise my Embrace Tiger, and her little hands bat insistently at my hip. It is sticking out. I try harder. Ophelia consults with Master Wu, and approves the change—and Master Wu smiles hugely as his assistant moves to her next student.

One of the donkeys develops a case of halitosis beyond what can be tolerated even in a donkey. The others ignore him, giving rise to great mournful honks of loneliness and betrayal until the vet arrives and performs some abcess-related miracle and all is well again.

In April, I walk along Cricklewood Creek with Penny Greene, who does geography with Gonzo and wears a plastic butterfly in her hair. It is cold and very beautiful. We are looking at the water and talking about ducks, and she sort of lunges. I think for a moment that she has fallen, but her arms are slim and strong around my back and she eels up over my chest and plants a smacker on my mouth. She is very soft in some places and very bony in others, and the difference between her body and mine is like switching a light on in my head. We kiss for a very long time. She is pleased. She goes home. I sort of expect this to lead to an official date, but it doesn’t. We remain friends. I find that this does not bother me. Penny Greene falls in love with a boy called Castor, and the whole business looks—from the outside, at least—utterly desolate. I go on a date with Alexandra Frink instead, but she is monumentally boring, or perhaps I am, and we part chastely and with a measure of relief.

And then there comes the day when Master Wu and I are mixed in a blur of limbs and actions and reactions (“Newton! Very good gong fu!”) and I see an opening and I strike sharply into it and even as I do so I am thinking that I have made a mistake, and of the gramophone and my horror at the notion of harming it, and at how ghastly and impossible it would be if I struck my teacher and damaged him, even to the extent of a bruised head, and God forbid I should break his skin. At which point his left hand gently but firmly captures my fist, and his right, driven by the same motion turning around the fulcrum at the base of his spine, borrowing my force for his purpose, propels me through the air and into the ornamental fish pond, which causes Master Wu and half a dozen senior students to laugh so hard they nearly rupture, and my relief and my delight at the cheeky old sod are so great that I have to be helped out before I drown. But Master Wu is more delighted because he is also proud.

“Excellent! You won!”

“I fell in the pond!” I object, but he shakes his head.

“You made me misjudge! You were fast! I had to do something I did not intend!” He grins. “Do you think you found out what the Secret means? Maybe you very nearly merged your chi with mine! Then you’d have to teach me!” He laughs, and he is glowing, and so am I. From the sun deck, Elisabeth is watching, her face completely still, and she fetches a towel for me, which I know is a high honour indeed.

“Does anyone ever really win? Do they even get close?” I ask Master Wu that evening, as he swings his legs over the edge of the little bridge at the bottom of his garden and cools his feet in the water.

“Oh, they get close all the time,” he says, “but they never know that they are close and I never tell.”

“You told me!”

“Once! Not again. Now you must work it out like the others! Yes? Yes! For everyone the instruction they need, all of it, but no more.” He smiles. “I have one student who might beat me. But he doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe he thinks that’s what I need—and what the other students need: for me to go to my grave as the teacher who couldn’t lose.” He grins. “But more likely he is too scared to try in case he is wrong.” He laughs, loudly, and splashes me with his foot.

A week later, Alan Lasserly’s teacher knocks very politely on the door of the House of the Voiceless Dragon, and watches Master Wu teach Ophelia for half an hour. He watches Master Wu’s feet and his hands and the way he steps, and he watches Master Wu’s index finger touch Ophelia behind the knee so that her whole body falls into line and she looks like a little fighting woman and not a small girl playing at gong fu. When Yumei reclaims her daughter and takes her off for milk, Mr. Hampton bows very low to Master Wu and thanks him for the lesson. Master Wu says Mr. Hampton is very welcome, and Mr. Hampton says that he wishes he had known Master Wu when he was Ophelia’s age, to which Master Wu responds that when Mr. Hampton was Ophelia’s age, Master Wu was a wild and intemperate youth much given to drinking and taking off his trousers in public places. Mr. Hampton smiles and says that he supposes this is not impossible, and Master Wu avers that there are photographs to prove it, although no one will ever see them. Mr. Hampton says that is probably for the best. They drink tea. After enquiring as to the good health of Mr. Hampton’s family and friends, Master Wu asks after Mr. Lasserly. Mr. Hampton says that Mr. Lasserly is sadly still an idiot, and they both find this lamentable and extremely amusing.

IT IS on the evening after Mr. Hampton’s visit that I notice the bells for the first time. Seeing them, I realise they have always been there, that they are as much a part of the room as the china ducks—but they are different from the ducks because they are very deliberate. Amid the clutter of Master Wu’s life, the bells stand out because they are structured.

Elisabeth and Master Wu and I are loafing. We have eaten a muddled sort of meal, cake and cheese and fruit, and slices of salami, and Elisabeth and Master Wu are discussing the matter of China’s space programme. The discussion is quite animated. They have co-opted the butter dish (the Moon), the cake plate (the Earth) and a mango (the Sun, acknowledged to be much further away and not to scale, but equally a necessary component in their orrery), and currently Master Wu is waving a spoon, which symbolises the Apollo rockets. The gist of his argument is that the Moon is upin the sky, and America (as evidenced by European and American maps) is on the top half of the world. The journey from the United States to the Moon is therefore considerably shorter than the journey from China, which is (as evidenced by European and American maps) on the bottom half of the world. It is therefore absolutely consonant with his contention that China, despite her flaws, is the most advanced nation on Earth, that the Americans should reach the Moon before the Chinese. They simply did not have to work as hard.

Elisabeth is stumped by this contention on two fronts. In the first place, it is balderdash, of a sort which is so fundamentally wrong-headed as to be hard to argue. In the second, she cannot shake the nagging suspicion that her revered teacher knows full well the measure of this wrong-headedness, and is gently stringing her along to stretch her cultural preconceptions, is in fact taking the piss. She sputters for a moment.

Initially, this whole thing was grand sport. I tuned back in for a while and even suggested that the American rocketeers were at a disadvantage because the Earth was spinning, and they had to build a ship which could go really quickly so as to reach the Moon before it passed by overhead, whereas the Chinese had longer to make course corrections, owing to the greater distance. Master Wu brushed this aside as a minor consideration and Elisabeth seemed to regard it as treachery, and back and forth they went, Master Wu twinkling and vexatious, and Elisabeth in one of her moments of doubt. These are fun to watch, because they are extremely rare. Elisabeth’s fundamental attribute is certainty. However, after the debate over the positioning of the mango and whether it should affect the arrangement of the cake plate and whether in fact the mango should be replaced with an object several miles away and about the size of a house, I sort of drifted off again and I am now viewing the room with new eyes, or at least, with eyes which are paying attention to the detail.

Everything is familiar, of course. I have sat here countless times since I first saw the overstuffed furniture and the weapons on the walls, and fell in love with the gramophone. At this moment, I am looking at the window frames. I have not, until now, spent a lot of time doing this, but a long day and a lot of gong fu followed by cake (planet Earth) and tea (either a non-relevant experimental error or a terrifying cosmological event even now threatening to upset the gravitational balance of the solar system) have produced in me a state of contemplative calm and watchfulness. I have studied Master Wu’s mouth, and concluded that the occasional twitch of his upper lip is in fact a quirk, and evidence in favour of the supposition that he is winding us up. I have studied Elisabeth’s upper lip and concluded that it is a fine specimen of the kind, slender and pale pink and slightly masked by a wisp of icing sugar. And so now I have turned my attention upward and outward.

The window frames are made of a darkened wood, which has a fine sheen of varnish over it, and the edges are crusty with yellow, resiny stuff. This is probably where the treated wood has sweated over the years. If I were to touch it, it would feel smooth and shiny and slightly flexible, and then it would snap like crystal sugar. The glass is old and ever so slightly distorted. Glass is mysterious. I once heard Mr. Carmigan, the chemistry teacher, discussing it with Ms. Folderoi, the art mistress. Mr. Carmigan asserted that glass is still technically a liquid, slowly but inevitably obeying gravity as the years pass, while Ms. Folderoi said it isn’t and it doesn’t. Mr. Carmigan replied that neither of them would live long enough to make a personal empirical observation. Ms. Folderoi hit him with an oil sponge. The debate—like the one unfolding in front of me now—was irascible but good-natured. Also like the one in front of me now, it was one in which I took scant interest. I ponder the window again.

Master Wu has eclectic taste in curtains. The window immediately beyond Elisabeth’s blonde head has drapes of white cotton with cherries on them. They are not lined, so the Moon (the actual one, not the butter dish) is visible in the sky beyond. The window behind Master Wu possesses thick, green velour things, winterish and warm, with a pattern of gold coins woven in. I turn my head. The window over by the desk has brown curtains. They are made of rough silk, and probably were at one time quite expensive, although they are strikingly dull.

Something else, however, has now attracted my attention. On each window, there is a run of bells. They are small, but not so small as to produce a little tinkling noise. These bells would make a shrill, sharp clanging. Each bell hangs suspended on a separate length of thread, and each thread is fastened at the top to a thicker line, which in turn falls from a slender shelf tacked to the frame. Knocking one bell would cause it to ring, but might not disturb the others. Removing one bell, conversely, would almost certainly set off the whole lot. Opening the window even a little bit would sound like the percussion section’s after-show party. I turn round and look at the door. The bells there are set up slightly differently. There is also a cat’s cradle arrangement on the fire guard. In fact, when Master Wu goes to bed, putting the guard in front of the coals, he will be surrounded by a low-tech burglar alarm. I realise that I have looked at the bells and the windows any number of times without actually seeing them. How odd.

Master Wu and Elisabeth are still discussing the planetary question, but Master Wu, at least, has lost interest—or rather, he has found something more interesting. My discovery has woken me up. I was sort of cow-like, placid and digesting (or, in fact, ruminating). At some point during my examination of the bells, as I became more intent and focused, the impact of my presence in the room changed. Master Wu clocked this immediately, and is now watching me while he explains that even if the Moon were low in the sky, the Chinese would still have to go up to it, while the Americans could simply drop on it, and Elisabeth has noticed her teacher’s divided attention and followed it back to me, and so they both put cosmology on the back burner on hold, and Master Wu asks me what is wrong.

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong. I just noticed the bells. On the windows.”

“Oh, yes!” Master Wu nods. “Very important. I am the Master of the Voiceless Dragon, you see. Many enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“Oh, yes.” He smiles genially. “Of course.”

“What kind?”

“Oh,” says Master Wu, matter-of-factly, “you know. Ninjas.”

And he shrugs. He takes a bite of his cake, and waits for one of us to say “But.” He knows that sooner or later, one of us has to. Elisabeth and I know it, too. Just hearing Master Wu say “ninja” is like hearing a concert cellist play “Mama Mia” on the ukulele. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate. They can jump higher than a house, and burrow through the ground. They know how to turn invisible. They have mastered those elusive Secret Teachings (like the one we now know and no one else does) and can do things which are like magic. And that, surely, is Master Wu’s point. He is making with the funny.

Before I can feel the wash of embarrassment which is rising up my spine, Elisabeth says “But.” I love her for ever.

“But . . .”

“Ninjas are silly?” asks Master Wu.

We nod.

“Yes,” he says. “Very silly. Black pyjamas and dodging bullets. I know. But the word is not the thing. And the word is wrong, anyway.” He stops and leans back. His voice deepens, losing the cheery crackle and the old man’s roughness, and he looks bleaker and much older.

“The night I was born, my mother hid in a well, under the stone cap. I was born in lamplight. The first thing I smelled was mud and soot and blood. My father and a cattle man attended my birth, because we had no doctor. My uncles beat a pig to death in the square of the village we were resting in. They made it scream for seven hours, until the morning came, so that no one would know a woman was giving birth, so that my mother did not have to stifle her cries. For four days, my uncles carried her on a stretcher, and told everyone their friend Feihong was sick. They’d been pretending she was a man, a fat man, for three months. She carried a sack of stones on her belly, and as I grew, she threw them away, one by one, so that people who looked at her would just see Fat Feihong, with his funny arms and bandy legs, and his small feet. My mother had unfashionable feet. Too large for a woman. Still tiny for a man. But after four days, they couldn’t carry her any more, or people would notice, would ask whether maybe Feihong had something serious, whether maybe they should leave him behind. Then she got out of the stretcher and she walked, and she carried me in her sling, the way she’d carried the rocks. I learned to be a quiet baby. I hardly ever cried. When I did, she sang, very loud, very squeaky, like a man trying to sing like a lady, and they called her Squeaky Feihong, and my uncles and my father sang along with her. Catscream Wu and Monkey Wu and Goatbleat Wu, you could hear them coming for miles, and the farmers claimed we turned milk. We were hiding, always. Last of the Voiceless Dragon, running and hiding, by being as loud as possible.

“Why? Because of ninjas. Not ninjas like in Hong Kong movies. Couldn’t fly. Dodge bullets hardly at all. But . . . strike from the shadows? Kill in the darkness. These things they did very well indeed. And sometime, long time ago, someone paid them or ordered them to kill everyone in my family, and make my father’s father’s father’s gong fu disappear. They never quit. They just keep trying. It’s what they are. War—for ever. My father’s oldest brother. His children. Their mother. All gone before I was born.”

Master Wu sighs.

“Lots of people were at war in China then. Chiang Kai-shek was chasing Mao all over the country. We hid with Mao’s people on the Long March. Thousands of miles, mountains and lakes. Our war just disappeared into theirs. And when they died—when maybe ninjas killed them instead of us—that just disappeared too. Everybody was dying then.” He shrugs at the wall, the weapons in their racks. I had assumed he was proud of them. Now I think maybe they are there to remind him. I think he is prouder of the extremely ugly ducks.

“Their war,” Master Wu goes on, “was about who was in control. Ours was about staying alive, of course, but it was also about choice. Very much the same thing. We teach gong fu so that you have a choice. Otherwise . . . the man in charge has all the power. Yes? And . . . what if he is not a man? A hundred people all bowing down to a child who does anything he pleases. No responsibility. Just power. No wisdom. Just actions. As if the throne were empty. China had too many child-emperors already.

“Whoever paid the ninjas believed we are wrong. Power belongs in one place. Nothing should disturb the way things work. No alternatives. Or maybe it was just them: the Clockwork Hand Society, ninjas, call them what you like. And us: Voiceless Dragon. Them and Us. For ever. So my mother carried me to Yenan on a bed of rocks. My father taught me my gong fu when I was three. I learned in Yenan, which is a hard place. But I learned about silence before then. My first teachers were ninjas.”

If Master Wu were a grizzled, elderly trucker, or a veteran of more familiar wars, he would light up a cigarette or grab our hands and tell us we were lucky kids. He does not. He just sighs again, and somehow when he does this, the regret which ripples out from him is a physical thing. I have heard of people who fought with their anger, who made rage into a physical force. I have never heard of anyone doing it with sorrow.

I look around. The night has drawn in while he was talking. The window onto the veranda is open, and I am listening for stealthy feet on the boards outside. In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu’s garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateurish.

I try to relax my shoulders so as not to be caught tense by the attack which might be coming. This is extremely difficult in a big soft chair, and I feel like an idiot for choosing the lounger. Elisabeth is sitting on a more upright thing with hard cushions, and consequently need only roll forward or leap up to be ready for anything. Master Wu’s chair is a rocker, although he has stopped the motion with his cane. The opportunities for fast deployment from a rocking chair are many. Only I will be caught double-weighted (stolidly caught between one foot and another, and therefore immobile), or worse, on my fat arse. I have not been mindful. On the other hand, if I am honest, the two better fighters in the room are well-placed by virtue of my choice. Perhaps I am subconsciously a master tactician.

“When I was five,” Master Wu goes on, “I built a ninja trap.” The sorrow recedes and something warm fills him: a weathered pride held close across the years.

“I had been out in the forest collecting game from snares. Rabbits. In the mud, there were footprints. The ninjas came out of the forest and watched us in the night. They liked us to know they were watching, all the time, so that anything you did after dark, you were afraid. It was daytime now. And I thought if I made a big snare, a strong one, and laid it on the path, I might catch a ninja, and make my mother less afraid. I might see approval in my father’s face, like when I worked well in his tannery, or when I practised my forms one more time after he had told me I could stop. He might grunt. My father laughed when he thought something was funny, and he smiled when he was happy, but he only grunted when he was impressed. I made him grunt very seldom. So I borrowed some tools, and I made a big, wide snare out of wet leather, and covered it in mud leaves and attached it to a big old log so that when the snare was touched the log would haul the ninja up in the air, and left it there.”

He shrugs.

“It was a very bad ninja trap. Possibly an old, fat, stupid ninja might have tripped over and fallen on his stomach because he was laughing so much at this trap, and injured himself. If he fell in the right direction, he might have put one foot in the snare at the same time and been caught in it. But when he had finally caught his breath and finished laughing, he would just have cut himself down and gone away. Ninjas are not like rabbits.

“But that night, I woke up, and there was a ninja in my room. He was staring down at me. And he said:

“ ‘My name is Hong. You may call me Master Hong. What is your name?’

“So I told him my name. And he said:

“ ‘Do you know who I am?’

“And I told him he was xiong shou, an assassin, because I had never heard of ninjas, then. And he laughed.

“ ‘I am Sifu Hong of the Clockwork Hand Society. We are the sons of tigers. We are the hope of China—of the world. We are order. And you—you are the little boy who sets traps for us.’

“I didn’t say anything, because I was afraid. And he said: ‘Children don’t hunt tigers, boy. Tigers hunt children.’ Which is actually not fair to tigers. It’s only ninjas which hunt children. I didn’t say anything. I was too scared to move, or cry out, or even to pee, which was something I very much wanted to do. He said:

“ ‘So now we have come for you, because of your pride. Because we always come, in the end. You are lucky. We have not made you wait. Because we always come, in the end.’

“And he drew out a knife, suitable for hiding under clothes at a very expensive banquet, or for opening the veins of a small boy. I prepared myself to feel the grating of that blade against my bones, the swift warm rush of my life, and then to find out what was the fate of children in the world beyond. And then—you understand, I was very surprised, and I thought for a moment this was part of his preparation to kill me—his left foot flew up in the air and he flew out into the hall, and the knife fell on the floor in my bedroom. There was a terrible cry, and silence. And my father came into my room, and carried me out into the hall, and there was my ninja, hanging by his foot, with a huge leather-working awl buried in his chest. He was hanging by the twine from a ninja trap just like mine. And my father held me by the shoulders and he made me look, and he said: ‘What did you do wrong?’

“I thought about it, and I thought about saying I had been foolish to involve myself in grown-up things, that I should have asked him before trying to catch a ninja, or that I had not considered the nature of my prey and should have made the trap to kill rather than to capture, or maybe just weeping because I was so relieved. My father asked again. And finally I said I had made a functional trap, but I had put it in the wrong place. And my father thought about this, and he thought long and hard, for he said nothing while we cut the ninja down and dragged his body into the main square. And then we walked home, and finally he looked back at the square and down at me. And he grunted.”

Master Wu smiles, and raises his hands like Bruce Lee, and says “Heeyayayay-HAI!” and throws his paper napkin at Elisabeth. She deflects it with the flat of her hand, and says “Pffft!” which is the noise hands-like-lethal-weapons make in movies, and she rolls off her chair and throws a pillow at me. I decide to let it hit me, and fling my arms wide to indicate that I have expired. Master Wu grins.

“He is faking! His dead-appearing gong fu skill is weak!”

And after that, it’s a merry evening, and much fun is had by all before we must wash up the teapot and go on our way. And by then we have just about persuaded ourselves that, like the mango sun and the Chinese space effort, Master Wu’s ninjas are one of his goofy jokes.

I AM so engrossed in my small world that I entirely neglect the bigger one, with the consequence that, when it comes time to look for a job or a place to continue my studies, I am utterly unprepared. The rest of the world is facing graduation and university. I am, again, tail-end Charlie. I do not know the language and I seem to have missed the deadlines and there’s no space for me on the forms. Elisabeth is going to a place upcountry called Alembic, having quite naturally sorted everything out last year, and it is she who galvanises me, sets me on course again, stamps her foot until I pay attention.

“No!” she says.

“I’ll—”

“No, you won’t!”

“But—”

“No!”

She stares at me. At eighteen she is not pale or albino or that weird Scandinavian superblonde, but close on translucent, like something living in the dark of the sea. Almost, she is drawn in black and white, and this colouration is so strange that it distracts you from her face, which is strong, perhaps a little too broad, with features which lack the perfect symmetry of the beautiful or the mediocrity of pretty, so that she is striking, maybe attractive, but definitely unique. Until this moment, we have never had a conversation about anything which wasn’t part of life in the Voiceless Dragon, and we are both confused and a little alarmed by this sudden shift. She frowns.

“Right. Go and see my mother.”

“I—”

She holds up one finger like a dagger.

“Don’t make me stamp!”

At which point I have to confess that I have no idea who her mother is. Elisabeth looks at me as if I have grown an extra head.

“I’m Elisabeth Soames. I’m Assumption Soames’s daughter.”

And now I know who she looks like, although it’s too weird to think about it because Elisabeth is my own age and not a lunatic, and her mother is my headmistress, the Evangelist. I gargle at her.

She stares at me fiercely until I concede that I will talk to Gonzo’s parents and ask them for advice, and if that fails go and talk to “Assumption,” and then she kisses me once, on the right cheek, and flees, to say her au revoir to Master Wu. I feel a curious lurch as she closes the door, and set myself firmly on track for the Lubitsch residence to talk about Embarkation.

Students at the Soames School do not merely graduate; the school’s founders were secular men of rationalist bent, and they considered that the young persons entrusted to them for broadening and preparation were not going on to some higher realm of adulthood or finishing their studies, but merely changing venues in their search for truth. For this reason, and also because the Evangelist holds anything old as a natural good, as if a practice could acquire holiness with repetition—in which case certain sins she has forbidden in strident tones must surely by now qualify as redeemed and even redemptive—those leaving the school each year are said to be Embarking, and they are referred to not as Embarkees, which carries some stain of steerage class about it, but as Embarkands, which is both suitably academic and ineffably superior.

I do not feel like an Embarkand. I feel more like a castaway. Around me, young men and women are preparing for places at exalted colleges and working part-time or sponging to pay for them. They buy new clothes and pack suitcases and talk in a strange code about bunking and halls, freshers, gyps, mats and frats, about Noughth Week and courts and moots. When questioned, they fall silent and look embarrassed, which I take to mean that if you don’t know already, there’s no hope you’ll be going. It is like a midnight feast to which only the cake-bearing elite will be invited, and I have no cake, no cake tin, and no book of recipes. Even if I did I lack means to purchase flour. Gonzo has naturally secured a scholarship to study Land Management and Agricultural Economics at a university called Jarndice; “naturally” because while it is absolutely forbidden to offer scholarships on grounds of sporting prowess alone, fortuitously LMAE seems to require a certain cast of mind whose academic virtues are not readily subject to conventional testing, but which is strangely and happily consonant with that required to grasp instinctively the tactics and strategy of a number of competitive field enterprises. Some students of LMAE, regrettably, become so immersed in this alternative use for their talents that they never, in fact, obtain a degree at all, choosing instead to enter the arena of professional sports. Jarndice University’s horror at this waste of young minds is somewhat offset by the fact that these same sad failures often provide the best captains and star players for the university, and honour the Dear Old Place with small thanks such as libraries, pavilions, and (in one case) a painting by Van Gogh. Gonzo was interviewed for the scholarship in the LMAE admissions office, just off the rugby pitch, and after they’d talked about cows (Gonzo displayed a detailed knowledge of their digestive processes and expressed a hope that he might, working with a particularly comely member of the vet school, be able to discover a cure for the plague of flatulence and burping which had afflicted the university herd since his arrival on Thursday) and loams (Gonzo averred that he had no outstanding debts) and crop rotation (“My mother told me never to play with my food,” at which Professor Dollan nearly swallowed his pen lid and had to be carried out), the interviewees were invited to pop out onto the field for a friendly, informal, entirely optional Interviewees vs 1st XV match, in which the interviewees were thrashed 73–14, the visitors’ points coming exclusively through the efforts of G. William Lubitsch. A post-match tally of incidents and accidents also revealed that Gonzo had legally but savagely incapacitated two members of the home team and taken significant hurts to his person without noticeable diminution of his ability, viz. a minor concussion, a briefly dislocated shoulder, three stitches over the left eye, two cracked ribs, and assorted bruises and impact marks which, on removal of his shirt, caused the physiotherapist to insist that he accompany her instantly to her office, where she could tend to his hurts more thoroughly.

It is not that Gonzo could not have found a place to study using his brain. He is more than capable. It is that this would have involved more effort than he cares to expend, or has ever needed to. Sport is just plain less taxing to him than chemistry or geography—two subjects he enjoys and excels in when he can be bothered—so sport he chose. I have somehow missed learning what questions I should be asking. And so, to my own surprise, I visit my headmistress in her study.

I am surprised at how small the room is, and indeed at how little is the Evangelist herself. I stare across her neat, filed, indexed, labelled and categorised possessions, past the pens in colour-coded groups and the little roll of paper stars used to indicate good work and the thick black-on-yellow toxic stickers for very bad work, at the staunch opponent of evolution who runs the school. It occurs to me that she looks a lot like a macaque monkey, which—on so many levels—is such a disastrous line of thought that I shut it down immediately. Instead, I wish her good morning, and she smiles thinly.

“I want to go to university,” I blurt, because with the Evangelist I have discovered that it is best to get the awful truth out in the open as quickly as possible and give her less time to pour out her acid wit. “Elisabeth said I should come and talk to you. At Master Wu’s.” Because I wouldn’t wish her to think, at this moment above all, that I was trifling—in a physical way, beyond the physical contact necessary to be thrown on the floor and immobilised in a leg bar, and considering the intimacy of physical intertwining implied in that position, which is suddenly sexualised beyond measure, I am bewildered at how I have survived it without either blushing or exhibiting other autonomous physical responses less ambiguous, and push this entire chain of thought from my mind lest I say it out loud—with her beloved (neglected) daughter.

The Evangelist doesn’t answer directly. Instead, she leans back in her chair and steeples her hands. She purses her lips and touches each narrow line to the tips of her index fingers and closes her eyes. She inhales deeply and sighs, no doubt directing a prayer in the direction of her vengeful, arbitrary, prohibitive, humourless deity. Then she scowls at me from beneath lowered eyelids, reaches into her desk and produces a packet of cigarettes (“cancerous, blasphemous, steeped in the blood of slaves and mired in the culture of sin and sensuality which pervades this modern world”) and fires up a chunky Zippo lighter one-handed. She cocks the gasper at a jaunty angle in the side of her mouth and draws sharply through it.

“Alllll right, then,” says Assumption Soames finally. “I can fix that.” She sucks more carcinogenic sin into her mouth and expels it, dragon-style, from her nostrils. “Close your mouth, man, you look like a letter box.”

This is entirely likely. Until this moment I have assumed that Assumption Soames sets an extra place at table every night for God, sings hymns in the bath (which she takes dressed so as to avoid arousing anyone’s erotic lusts, unfeasible as that seems on the face of it) and eats only gravel and oatmeal in order to avoid inflaming the senses. More recently, on realising that her daughter is the slender, elegant child/woman with whom I have been practising lethal and exacting modes of pugilism, and who seems like me to have no home to go to, I have envisaged a silent, crypt-like dwelling place of grey stone and burlap. Meals in my version of Warren are announced by a tolling of heavy bells, and the floors are made of bare pine which Elisabeth must sandpaper each morning so that they do not attain the voluptuous sheen of trodden wood. I have totally bought into Assumption Soames’s public persona. This, it now appears, was naive.

I close my mouth, but don’t know how to address this rather significant discrepancy, and the thought has occurred to me that this is some warped Evangelical testing process to determine whether I am worthy to receive the help and succour of her Church in my educational hour of need. The Evangelist I know is utterly straightforward in the most devious possible way, a subtle bludgeon like those computers which play chess by going through every consequence of every move there is. The Evangelist, when manipulating, plays across a broad field, takes advantage from every setback and emerges victorious in the micro by pursuing the macro at every turn. I dare not trust this new face. Assumption Soames glowers at me for a moment, then sighs more abruptly, and knocks her ash into an ashtray in the shape of a cherub. She wriggles, as if this is something she has been impatient for. It dawns on me that she is prepared for this moment.

“You want to hear a story?”

I nod, cautious. The chair I am sitting in is the chair in which I lost my faith in God; it reeks of lonely realisation. Only now I seem to be finding a friendly face where I least expected it. The chair and I are reassessing our relationship. This is far safer than reassessing my relationship with the Evangelist, who has clearly lost the plot and may at any moment begin frothing at the lips or singing bawdy show tunes. She wriggles again, down into what must be a cushion (it looks like a luxurious cushion, rather than one full of rocks or razor blades, as I might have expected). Content with the position of her backside, Assumption Soames begins. The story is by way of being a parable.

“A traveller on the road one night misses his turning and finds himself lost in a forest. He has a dog, but the dog is doing the dog thing, can’t seem to decide which way is home. Perhaps he’s in a car, and the dog doesn’t know. Anyway, when he’s totally and irredeemably lost amid the trees, he comes to a fork in the road. He has his faithful hound, so he isn’t afraid, but he does want to get home”—she waves the cigarette in a narrow circle—“so he’s pleased when he sees that there’s an inn at the fork where he can ask directions. A hotel, maybe, with a bar. No one really has inns any more, right? So he comes to a hotel. A nasty, sawdust-on-the-floor kind of place. The kind of place where you should not go. Okay?”

I nod.

“So, sitting at the bar are three scary old hags so ancient he can’t see their eyes. Their faces are that wrinkled. Hmm?”

I nod again. This is the first time ever in conversation with the Evangelist that I have had a sense that my consent and even participation were a necessary part of her game plan, and the discrepancy is making me tense. Assumption Soames, on the other hand, is shedding tension from muscle groups as if she’s been unplugged from the current. She waves her arms, taps her feet, and stabs the cigarette through the air to make little glowing full stops when she gets to the bits which are important.

“So the traveller goes up to these ladies and asks them, polite as can be, how best to get home. And the oldest one—in the middle—she grabs her forehead and parts the curtains and glowers at him and she says she don’t answer questions no more!” Assumption Soames hits the desk with her hand and her voice for a moment is scratchy and back-country and alarming. “And she points at her sisters on either side of her and she says one of these ladies always tells the truth and the other always lies, and they only answers one question between ’em!

“So if he wants directions from these ladies, he’s got to ask a pretty sophisticated question. But fortunately, our traveller—Evander John Soames of Cricklewood Cove—is a teacher. He knows just what question to ask. Right, says Dr. Soames, looking at the hag nearest to the gin, then my question to you is this: which of the two roads would the other of you tell me is the way home? Because Dr. Soames is no slouch with the logic, and he knows if he’s talking to the truthful sister, she’ll tell him truly which the wrong road is, because that’s the road her sister would choose, and if he’s talking to the liar, she’ll tell him that the right road (which her sister would tell him to take) is the wrong road—so whichever answer he gets, he knows to take the other road. So the hag tells him to take the southern road, and off he goes, north.”

Assumption Soames takes another draw on her gasper and frowns across the desk. It would be unsatisfying if that was the end of her narrative, but this pause has the feel of an audience participation moment. I cast around and ask a question.

“Does he make it home?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. He does not make it home to his wife and baby. Nor does the dog. Dr. Soames goes along the north road where he is waylaid by the many sons and daughters of the three hags, who are all anthropophagi.”

“Um.”

“Cannibals. With man-eating, and sadly also dog-eating, dogs.” She leans forward. “They make Soames pie, and they all live happily ever after until they are wiped out by an outbreak of kuru, or possibly by the marines. And the moral of this story?”

“Don’t leave the path.”

“No. The moral of this story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in a public place. ‘One of my sisters lies and the other tells the truth!’ What a load of crap. For God’s sake, why doesn’t he ask the barman? Or just retrace his steps? The man’s an idiot.” She sighs. I adjust the angle of my jaw again, bringing my lips at least near enough to one another that I will not be mistaken for a tea chest. It must be moderately obvious to the Evangelist that I have no earthly idea why she is telling me this, or what is happening in this room if it is not the case that I have gone totally batshit or she has, or the Devil has come and stolen away her soul and left in its place that of a New Orleans brothel madame. She makes a circular gesture with her hands, an inviting twitch which I recognise from her occasional interventions in my education as meaning “Think, boy, the Lord gave you grey matter between your ears for something other than ballast.” I answer as I generally do—with a sort of hopeful hiccough. There is a resigned pause.

“Your pal Gonzo,” says Assumption Soames, “does not leave the path. Not ever. He does everything from the shelter of the path, and the path kind of takes him where he wants to go because he’s cute. You’re sitting in my office now and you can’t figure out how you never saw I wasn’t just a crazy Bible lady or why I was so goddam mean to you for fourteen years, and the answer is that I’m a very good liar and that is the only way I can make sure to be allowed to teach you the stuff you need to know. People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they’re old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don’t actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch. Well, hell. In this town, the evil old lady who tells everyone what they can and can’t read because it isn’t decent is me. So I can hire whoever I damn well like to subvert my iron rule and they can teach evolution and free speech and the cultural bias of history and all the rest. And I do this because you, you are going to leave the path, however much you want to stay on it. And if that’s going to happen, you better damn well be prepared!” She slumps. “Man’s an idiot,” she mutters. “I’ll take care of Jarndice for you. It is Jarndice you want, I take it?”

Yes, it is. She makes a note, and we sit there, exhausted, and she’s wondering whether she’s gotten through to me and I’m wondering whether I can trust her and we’re both wondering in shy, weird little ways whether we’ve made a friend today or whether, if we offer the hand, it’s going to mean laughter and a bit of hurt before we can slam the shutters down again. And then, because I have never learned to quit, most especially while I am ahead, I ask if it’s a true story. Assumption Soames does not immediately say anything. She puts her hands back in their church steeple position and she draws a breath of clear air and thinks about it. And she puts out her gasper a bit solidly and draws herself in sharply as if she’s getting ready to jump off the top diving board.

“No,” says Assumption Soames. “The true story is that Dr. Soames managed to persuade the cannibals to let him go, under certain conditions. And then he used their phone and called a bunch of breakdown services and taxi companies and had them send drivers out to the little cannibal town where they were killed and dressed and served up with apples, and the cannibals and Dr. Soames all had a big meal together and Dr. Soames fed bits of some telecoms engineers to the big evil cannibal dogs under the table and to his own dog and then the stupid sonuvabitch came home and died of kuru in my house. Even the dog died, because one of the big, evil cannibal hounds took a fancy to dessert.” She shrugs. “Get out of here. I have calls to make. And take care of my kid.” Which I would, but she doesn’t need me to. Assumption Soames waves me away.

I go tell Gonzo the good news, at which he roars skyward like a great ape and beats his chest with delight, because Tarzan is showing at the drive-through and Belinda Appleby has developed a burning desire for Johnny Weissmuller and Gonzo desires to be the nearest available approximation by the time he happens to meet her in the Crichton’s Arms this evening.

“But,” Gonzo says, with one index finger loosely held to his lips. I know this “but.” It is the precursive “but,” the “but” of truly terrible plans and splendid coups. The “but” of boy/boy dare-making and the finish-my-sentence double act which is our friendship. “But,” says Gonzo, “we should entirely go out there and see.”

And I know what he means, without asking. He means that we—and possibly Belinda Appleby and any of her slender, be-cleavaged, feminine, supple friends who happen to be around when we later have this brilliant notion out loud—should pile into some form of car or truck, most likely Ma Lubitsch’s moody 4 ×4 with its ancient green metal flanks and dinted grill and boxy workhorse shape, and go out to the inn and see whether there are really cannibals at the crossroads in Cricklewood Marsh. And when there are not, but we have startled a few screech owls and seen a badger and the ladies have imbibed all the safe scariness they can, we should proceed in an orderly fashion to our mutual place of reclinings and partake of lusty private delights and serious physical celebration with one of those fine examples of enthusiastic early womanhood.

Which is how I come to be riding shotgun with Gonzo Lubitsch, with Theresa Hollow’s face next to my ear and her fingernails lightly scratching my neck with each jounce of the jeep, almost by accident—except that every time I move to point the heavy torch at some suspect shadow and Gonzo yowls and the girls shudder and laugh and hit him, Theresa’s hand resettles in the exact same place and commences to raise all the hairs on my body, in a ripple which spreads out evenly from that single point of contact and collects hotly somewhere between my knees and my heart in a kind of writhing, pleasurable knot.

THE NIGHT is not actually spooky. It’s summer and there’s no mist and there are animals grunting and gurgling all around, and off away to the south there are lights and a murmur of traffic. Somewhere out to sea there’s an ocean liner having what is most likely a shuffleboard competition, lines of elderly orgiasts tossing their car keys into the hat in the hope of spending a night of Zimmer-frame lovin’ with the winner of the round (they won’t be disappointed because the cruise companies always make discreetly sure everyone’s sexuality lines up nicely; I spent a month balancing the applications one spring, and it was hellish tough allowing for seasickness and cancellation and catalepsy, but they had a formula and we got the job done). There’s a disappointing lack of mist and sadly no howls, though a dog at one of the farms on the other side of the delta is barking at something, fit to burst. Gonzo has the windows open to push some cool air into the back of the jeep and induce the ladies to a little close contact with the manly radiators in the front seats, and they’re nothing loath.

Theresa’s fingernails have just slipped under the double-stitched neck of my T-shirt when we round the corner and there actually is an inn, burned out and broken down and covered in vines. It isn’t marked on the map; there’s no signage. If you weren’t looking, you’d just see trees and a few boards, but since we are looking, my torch picks out a doorway still standing and a flight of two or three steps and Belinda Appleby, damn her unto a thousand hells, murmurs “We can’t go in there” and Theresa’s fingers stiffen on my skin and her breath catches. Everyone knows there’s only one possible response to that.

“Of course we can,” I say, because Gonzo is already slowing the jeep. Theresa exhales softly, in admiration or alarm, I cannot tell.

Silence should not frighten you. In silence, even the slightest sound can be heard. The beating of your heart and the sound of your breathing become audible because you strain to hear what is not there. When Gonzo stops the truck, it is not silence which claims the crossroads, but a humming sound of presence. There are a hundred other things going about their business in the night around us: tiny rodents and the flapping nightbirds that hunt them; shrubs whispering and rustling as the wind stirs them; wild pigs grating their tusks against the trees and shaking loose their fruit, which drop like stealthy footsteps on the ground. Somewhere, a small mammal has just been caught and eaten by a larger one. The barking dog across the delta is still going, and the sound of pensioners getting jiggy with one another filters over the sand and through the woods and bounces around so that voices call softly all around, words just on the edge of hearing. In the darkness, things go crack and tssssht. Theresa’s high heels sink into the turf. Belinda leans on Gonzo. I draw the torch in a slow circle around us, scrutinising every metre of the darkness for watching eyes and predatory smiles. There cannot possibly be cannibals here. There never were, and if there were, they died. Even their pets died. I have no doubt about this at all. None. At all.

Gonzo leads us in.

Dust and dirt, rags and cracked mirrors, bottles broken and bottles filled with off-colour booze. A small space, maybe a snug or saloon, bare walls gone to cracks and shadows. A ripe, musky smell of animals. Someone has made a fire in the middle of the room, and smoked, and gotten drunk, but not on what was behind the counter. They brought their own: some previous expedition, come and gone. Perhaps Marcus came here, before he went to war.

We look around. Wood. Linoleum. Cheap chairs. Gonzo writes his initials in the dust on the bar, grins a veni vidi vici and turns to go—and stops as a deep growl vibrates in the dark. It is not a human noise. It is a predator noise of another variety, a feral, challenging, no-messing rumble which hits your brainstem and says fight or flight. We all look towards it.

There is a monster in the doorway: a big, fat, ugly canine with a head like a basketball and too many teeth. It is ludicrous to imagine that this might be an actual cannibal dog. Even a descendant of cannibal dogs. Clearly, it is a pit-fighting dog or a bear-hunting dog or the kind of dog an idiot thinks would be really cool, which then eats his hand and runs away to live in the forest or hunt wild horses on the moors. The kind of dog which gets very territorial and would choose to live in an abandoned bar. I push Theresa behind me, and at the movement the dog swings its heavy head in my direction and I have time to think “Oh, bugger” and it leaps.

I have some idea about dodging but I can’t dodge with Theresa behind me and the thing is like a huge black torpedo. My right hand rises anyway, palm up, and I hope to God this is something Master Wu has taught me coming to the fore and not just a lousy bite-my-head-off-I’m-prey reflex. And then there is Gonzo’s broad back and his leg is braced on the floor and he catches the dog as it falls on me. It scrabbles at his chest with its hind paws and snaps at him, but Gonzo holds it by both front legs and wrenches them apart. I see his trapezius muscles labour, and release, and I hear the crack of the dog’s ribs and I hear it scream and then hit the ground, broken.

Gonzo’s face, when he turns, is filled with revulsion which only I am allowed to see. And then he grins lightly, like he does this every day. It would be callous except that if he did anything else it’s possible Belinda would actually pass out from horror.

“Reckon it’s time to go,” he says. He ambles out. Belinda follows. So does Theresa. I look down at the monster, and I wonder whether my hand was coming up to slap it over me, or whether I was just going to get savaged. And then I realise the dog is not dead. It’s not going anywhere; it’s not about to rear up and assail me. It will die soon. It just hasn’t yet. Gonzo’s dog-destruction technique, culled from survival manuals and rumours of burglary, is unpractised and imperfect. Wrenching open the forelimbs should burst the heart, but it hasn’t. The job is unfinished.

Black, reproachful eyes accuse me as I walk to the door. And then it whimpers. The sound is small and desperate and it ought to come from a dog you’d trust with your kids and which would bring you your slippers and carry cats around in its mouth without ever even contemplating a feline snack. It has no business coming from this thing which just now tried to rip a new orifice in my chest. From which Gonzo saved me. I turn and look at the dog again. There is pain obvious in its posture, and helplessness. It jerks, sniffles and hauls itself over to expose a patch of white fur at the neck. If there is a language shared by mammals, it is the language of pain. Dominance is clear. Only the question of relief is open to discussion. I am asked to finish what Gonzo has begun.

I step closer, half-expecting vengeful snapping. There is none. The dog just waits. I give the only help I can. It does not take long. And then I emerge into the dark, and try to smile and be relieved.

Gonzo does not, in fact, sleep with Belinda Appleby that night. She is too distraught, and he is gashed in a way which exceeds manly and becomes messy. She tends his wounds, but insists on a suspension of familiarities. I take Theresa to my room and make up a bed for myself on the floor with some extra cushions while she is in the bathroom. She emerges, and I take her place, washing for longer than is strictly necessary because I cannot quite get the smell of dying dog from my nose. When I return, she has folded my makeshift bed into a neat pile, and the single sheet which covers her in no way conceals the fact that she is naked. We give Ms. Poynter’s lessons a thorough testing. It is not, technically, a first for either of us, but it is the first time the results have been so utterly, back-archingly, desperately enjoyable. Fear and danger, perhaps, but also maybe just a kinship of sorts; I am Gonzo’s shadow as she is Belinda’s. There is no suggestion of consequence to our encounter. We go our separate ways in the morning.

Gonzo picks me up the following morning, and we do not talk about cannibal dogs until breakfast is nearly over, and then all my nervousness pours out and I confess I have no idea what I would have done had he not been there. Gonzo shrugs. Without me, he says, he never would have gone in. I stare at him.

“You were stopping,” I point out.

“I was turning the bloody car around,” he answers, and then stares at me right back. “No way,” he begins, but I am already howling with laughter because neither one of us wanted to go into that bloody place and both of us went because the other one was determined. The death rattle of the monster is fading in my memory. I tell Gonzo he saved my life, and he grins and says maybe yes, maybe no. And so we dawdle our way home.

After lunch, I receive a call—the gong fu of the Evangelist is strong—from Dr. Fortismeer at Jarndice University, who is delighted to tell me (he sounds genuinely delighted, and before I can stop myself I have arrived at the theory that he and the Evangelist are lovers, and that my entry to the place has been bought on a promise of physical delights untold, a prospect which appalls me because it entails a brief and hastily suppressed vision of their coupling) that I have been selected for a new programme called the Quadrille Bursary, which seeks to ameliorate the relationship between the arts and the sciences by creating a Generalism Degree. Dr. Fortismeer sounds like one of those bluff, turbulently fat individuals who take the virtues of manhood to be found in hunting and fishing and a collection of activities falling under the general heading of “roistering,” and his explanation of the programme is punctuated with guffaws and snortings to indicate that he too was young once, and that indeed his heart and other parts still are. The Quadrille will comprise four segments (hence the name), these being I. Art and Literature; II. History, Anthropology and History of Science; III. Mathematics and Physics; and IV. Chemistry, Basic Medicine and Biology, in the style of a Renaissance autodidact, save that there will be no “auto” about it. I will be expected to show up for four years of my life and I would do better to avoid (snort snuffle) too much in the way of partying, entertainment and, above all (ho ho, my boy, I think we all know how much notice you’ll take of this), girlish distractions, which are (fatal to the mind, delectable to the juices) apparently a frequent cause of lower grades and personal heartbreak. Dr. Fortismeer pauses at this point and apparently expects me to say something, so I say thank you, and he laughs so loudly that the phone cannot convey the signal and distorts it, then tells me to remember to pack warm clothes as Jarndice can be damned chilly at night if you haven’t got company (hufflehufflesnort!). I assure him that I will, reflecting that I am delivered by one bizarre character into the hands of another and that this should not surprise me.

I’m a-goin’ to college.