NICOLA BARKER

Wide Open

Dedication

I dreamed I saw you dead in a place by the water.

A ravaged place.

All flat and empty and wide open.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

1

Each day Ronny saw the same man waving. The man…

2

Laura had imagined herself to be in love with Nathan…

3

‘The water’s flat and brown. The sand’s made of shells.

4

No one else would do these jobs. It was like…

5

He drove home later than he’d anticipated and hit the…

6

Nathan told Margery before she’d even had the chance to…

7

‘Now here’s the thing,’ Ronny said, appraising Luke and detecting…

8

As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been…

9

Jim found Ronny on the beach. Ronny was surrounded by…

10

Nathan had received three letters and he hadn’t responded to…

11

Lily couldn’t resist.

12

Remember Big Ron?

13

‘I was very surprised by your bathroom cabinet,’ Ronny said,…

14

Connie pressed her nose to the sheets of paper. They…

15

Sara walked the longest possible route for her own cautious…

16

The doctor was a family friend, naturally. And Connie knew,…

17

Ronny had been weaving around in the prefab’s open doorway,…

18

The longer it took for Sara to arrive home, the…

19

He was sick four times. The first time, up against…

20

Connie was sleeping. But not properly. Intermittently. And she was…

21

‘Ronny was sick four times,’ Lily shouted, like she was…

22

Lily was invincible. She placed one foot in front of…

23

Ronny, darling.

24

Nathan was rota’d on for the Sunday shift with Laura…

25

The car was the only thing Connie wasn’t selling. It…

26

The prison was like a set of dirty teeth, and…

27

Jim intended to subtly alter the pattern of his life.

28

Jim saw her – way off at first – from…

29

Margery noticed the change.

30

Lily got up from the kitchen table half way through…

31

Nathan returned the stolen book on Monday morning, but during…

32

Lily arrived in the kitchen dressed and ready for college…

33

Her armpit, her nose, her knees, her in-grown toenail.

34

‘Tell me again how you found it.’

35

‘I got some blood on the carpet. Sorry.’

36

Luke was pacing. He had a sheet of negatives in…

37

Margery pushed the door open and walked inside.

38

‘So did Luke get what he was after?’

39

‘I never realized before,’ Connie whispered, ‘how terrible the outside…

40

Lily refused to put the box into the boot or…

41

Jim approached the prefabs on numb, heavily sodden feet, wearing…

42

‘This was the spot,’ Lily said, interrupting the kind of…

43

To see Nathan like that, completely out of context. Nathan.

44

They faced each other like two spiteful, glimmering starlings across…

45

Ronny was no longer interested in what was happening outside.

46

They pulled up outside the farmhouse. Nathan killed the engine…

47

Jim awoke to the sound of the fridge door closing.

About the author

Other books by Nicola Barker

Praise

Copyright

About the publisher

1

Each day Ronny saw the same man waving. The man stood in the middle of a bridge, at its very centre point, but always looking outwards, facing away from London, never towards it. Ronny drove under that bridge in a borrowed car, a Volvo (the big bumpers reassured him), and into London along the A2 for three consecutive weeks. Every day, no matter what the time – he was working shifts, and by no means regular ones – the man stood on the bridge, waving.

He didn’t wave randomly. He picked out a car as a smudge on the horizon and then focused on that car alone, until it had passed from sight, until it had driven right under him. Until it had gone. Then he’d choose another car and the whole process would start over.

Ronny noticed that the man preferred white cars and yellow cars, that he never waved at red cars. Ronny’s car was green. He was waved at sometimes, but infrequently. He didn’t wave back.

Some days it rained. It was the tail end of summer. It was the beginning of winter. It was autumn, formally, but Ronny hated gradations. It wasn’t summer. Summer had gone. It wasn’t winter. Winter was frosty, traditionally, and it was nowhere near cold enough for frost yet. It was simply a wet time. The whole earth was sodden and weighted and clotted and terrible. It was raining. Always raining. But the man stood on the bridge and he waved, nonetheless.

On the last day, the final day of his three-week working stint, Ronny looked out for the man but saw that he was not waving. He was there, sure enough, but he was crouched over, hanging, it seemed, across the bar of the bridge. What was he thinking of? What was he doing? Ronny scowled and tried to keep his eyes on the road.

He didn’t want to stare, but his eyes kept shifting from the road to the bridge, from the road to the bridge. He indicated and then swung into the inside lane. He slowed down, inadvertently. A truck honked and jolted him out of his eye-high reverie.

He passed under the bridge and then out the other side. He checked his rear-view mirror. He couldn’t see anything. Why should he? He was on the wrong side now. He slowed down even further. Three cars overtook him. His foot touched the brake.

What was he doing? He didn’t want to stop but he found himself stopping. He pulled into the hard shoulder. He turned off the engine, unfastened his seatbelt, stepped out of the car, slammed the door shut behind him but didn’t pause to lock it. Instead he started off towards the bridge at a lively pace. His keys bumped and jangled against his thigh in his pocket.

He reached the embankment, drew breath for a moment and then began to climb. It was steep. The soil was damp. His shoes – white shoes – were muddied. He cursed.

Eventually he made it to the top. He clambered over the fence, crossed the road, and was finally able to see the waver up close. He felt an unexpected surge of gratification, as though this visual intimacy was something he’d longed for, only he hadn’t quite realized it.

At first glance the waver seemed fairly unexceptional. He had a beard and longish, tangled brown hair. He was pale. His clothes were shabby. He’d been crying.

Ronny drew closer. He stamped the mud off his shoes. ‘Is anything the matter?’

The man was bent double, was curled up like a dirty bandage, but he grew and grew like Jack’s beanstalk when Ronny spoke to him. He seemed to unfold, to unwind to his full height, which was considerable. Tall, Ronny thought, and thin. Ronny was thin too, but he felt much smaller.

‘Is something wrong?’

The man was standing now, and Ronny saw that he had not in fact been squatting before but sitting, on a small battered-looking cardboard box. He had his left hand cupped, and in his curved palm he held something.

‘What is that?’

The man answered, his voice nearly extinguished by the roar of the traffic below, ‘Come and see.’

Ronny drew closer still. He stared into the man’s hand. He inhaled sharply. The man’s fingers were shiny with scar tissue, but only on their tips, where they shone as smooth as wax, as pale as lard. Nestled in the centre of these strange fingers was a dirty palm. In the palm was a wasp.

‘A wasp,’ Ronny said softly. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It was in a puddle. I should have left it but I saw it was still moving so I picked it up. I believed I could save it.’

Ronny stared at the wasp more fixedly. It was still alive. It moved, but only slightly. It seemed to be arching itself, the dainty waist between its black thorax and striped abdomen virtually snapping in two.

‘It’s been writhing,’ the man said, his voice – Ronny felt – ridiculously emotional.

‘It’s been in so much pain.’

Ronny adjusted the blue woollen hat he was wearing. He pulled it low over his eyebrows. He cleared his throat, cautiously. ‘I don’t think wasps feel pain,’ he said, anticipating a strong reaction.

The man glanced up, clearly indignant, his eyes, Ronny noticed, a wild cess-pit green, his cheeks drawn and hollow. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I don’t. I’m just guessing.’

‘Well you’re wrong. Look properly for a second and then try and tell me that it feels nothing.’

Ronny tried his best to look properly. The wasp stirred, only slightly, but it seemed to be shuddering. Its movements were small yet jagged and loose and horrible.

‘It’ll die in a minute,’ Ronny muttered, vaguely disquieted, withdrawing again and wishing he could ask the man why it was that he waved, but he didn’t because he fancied – quite correctly – that his timing might be off-kilter. The man continued to focus on the wasp.

Ronny inspected his watch. It was getting late.

‘I’ll be off then.’

The man was very quiet, seemed barely to breathe he was so intent on his vigil. Eventually he said, ‘I think he’s finally going.’

Ronny nodded and turned to leave. This was a private moment. He had no wish to intrude. He took several steps and then …

‘My God!’

He spun around, his heart racing. ‘What?’

‘The wasp!’

Ronny smiled weakly at his own faint-heartedness, but he stepped up again with no visible signs of resentment.

‘See?’

The man showed Ronny his hand. Ronny looked. The wasp was still. It was dead.

‘It’s dead.’

The man grunted, unimpressed. ‘I know it’s dead. But did you see the sting?’

‘The sting?’

The man pointed. ‘When it died it curled up, incredibly tightly, and then the sting came shooting out from the back there, the whole sting was revealed in that final moment.’

Ronny felt absurd but he bent forward anyway. Sure enough, he saw the sting.

‘I see it.’

‘There’s a wonderful logic to it sliding out like that,’ the man said, almost smiling. Ronny tilted his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s at rest. He’s surrendered. He’s finally given up his weapon.’

Ronny considered this for a while and then said, ‘No. I don’t see it that way at all.’

The man looked up. ‘You don’t? So how do you see it?’

‘Well …’ Ronny scratched his neck. ‘He’s a warrior. His weapon is drawn even in death. Especially in death. That’s the whole point of a wasp. He’s the kamikaze pilot of the insect world.’

The man smiled at this, he stared at Ronny intently, at his neat edges, his apparent cleanliness, his bright, pale face. Eventually he said, ‘That’s very funny.’

Ronny rubbed his nose, modestly.

‘But all the same …’ the man continued, ‘it’s not actually true. Only bees die when they sting. Wasps work differently. They’re tougher. He’s given up his weapon. That’s plainly how it is.’

Ronny didn’t agree but he merely shrugged. He found it hard to commit himself to disagreements.

The man was silent for a while. Ronny studied him. He seemed very young but his face was not a very young face. It was lined, vertically, and not in the places normal faces creased and wrinkled. It was as though he’d only just woken up from a hard sleep but his face hadn’t shaken it, hadn’t hurled off its sheets and its blankets yet to get on with the business of living.

He seemed ludicrously pliant and tractable, but singular. He seemed … Ronny shuddered at the thought … he seemed wide, wide open. But you couldn’t survive that way. Not in this world. Not for long. Ronny knew it.

In fact he prided himself on being shut right up. Like an oyster. Like a tomb. Like a beach-hut in winter; all bolted, all boarded. Like the bright lips of an old wound. Resolutely sealed.

‘Well, I think I’ll be going,’ he said finally, swallowing down his unease and then feeling it bob back up in his throat like a ballcock.

The man glanced at Ronny, but only quickly, as though he could barely stand to drag his eyes away from the dead wasp. ‘Today’s been worthwhile after all,’ he muttered. ‘You know? Just to get to see the wasp and the sting and everything.’

Ronny thought the man must be deranged but he nodded anyway.

‘Do you need another look before I bury him?’

‘Need?’ Ronny smiled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

The man sighed. ‘He feels so hollow and light now that the life has gone. Before he had a kind of weight. Some gravity. But not any more.’

Ronny turned to go.

The man spoke again, a parting shot, it seemed, because as he spoke he also turned. ‘I’m Ronny.’

Ronny froze.

‘Ronny?’

The other Ronny stopped turning.

‘What?’

Ronny pointed to himself.

‘I’m Ronny too.’

They both paused.

‘Uh … actually,’ Ronny said, ‘I’m Ronald. How about you?’

The other Ronny shrugged, ‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re The Two Ronnies.’

The other Ronny didn’t get it. ‘What?’

‘Like in the comedy show.’

‘What comedy show?’

‘You don’t remember The Two Ronnies? The little one with glasses and the bigger, fatter one?’

The other Ronny shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Oh. I thought everybody knew about them.’

The other Ronny pointed at the wasp and said, ‘I think I’d better bury him.’ He started walking towards the edge of the bridge. He walked strangely. Ronny thought that this was because there was something wrong with his legs but then he realized that his shoes were several sizes too large. They were white shoes.

‘Excuse me …’

The other Ronny stopped walking. ‘What?’

‘We’re wearing the same shoes.’

The other Ronny peered down at his shoes. ‘These aren’t my shoes.’

‘Not yours? Then whose are they?’

‘I don’t know. I must’ve picked them up somewhere.’

Ronny drew closer to the other Ronny. ‘You know, it’s a rare thing to see someone in white shoes. And those shoes are special. They’re the kind I wear for work.’

The other Ronny frowned and looked down at his shoes a second time. ‘Maybe they are your shoes.’

Ronny squinted at this, baffled. ‘Pardon?’

‘I got them in Lost Property. Maybe you lost them and I picked them up. I’m called Ronny. So are you. Maybe the person on the desk got us confused.’

‘Lost Property?’

‘On the Underground. The tube. At Baker Street.’

Ronny let this sink in for a few seconds and then he said softly, ‘My brother works there.’

The other Ronny was clearly impressed. ‘Really? In the office?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he look like?’

‘Uh … reddish hair. Blue eyes. Quite short.’

The other Ronny grinned. ‘I know him.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nope. That’s Nathan. I know him. I go in there all the time. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been going in there.’

‘What for?

‘I keep losing stuff.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

The other Ronny bit his lip. ‘Nathan? Uh … a month.’

‘How did he look?’

‘I think he looked fine.’

Ronny was clearly delighted, but he spoke with an element of restraint. ‘Well that’s good then.’

‘So …’ the other Ronny seemed genuinely interested, ‘when was the last time you saw him?’

‘Ten years ago.’

The other Ronny mulled this over for a while and then said, ‘I’ve got a whole family somewhere that I’ve never even met. Brothers and sisters. All lost.’

Ronny didn’t want to appear competitive so he laboriously adjusted his collar in an attempt to distance himself. ‘That’s a great pity,’ he said finally, ‘luckily I have no sisters.’

The other Ronny looked serious. ‘Yes, that is a relief.’

‘It is?’

Ronny was bemused. The other Ronny gazed up at the sky. It had begun to rain again. He turned his attention back to Ronny. ‘There’s this famous story about a man who meets someone purely by accident but the more they find out about each other the more they realize that they have things in common until finally they realize that they are the same person. I don’t know who wrote the story.’

Ronny took a deep breath. ‘It wasn’t a story. It was a play. It’s by Ionesco. And what happens is that the two men realize that they have the same life but that they are in fact different people.’

‘Oh. Right.’

The other Ronny suppressed a grimace. He was clearly dissatisfied with this piece of clarification.

‘Which makes the whole thing even more absurd.’ Ronny added, as an afterthought, ‘anyway …’ He pulled off his hat, ‘we don’t look alike.’

Without his hat Ronny resembled a king prawn, fully processed; legs gone, shell gone, ready for serving, soft and pink and pale and smooth. Pure and unadorned.

His was a gentle face, a complex mixture of blankness and fullness. He was plain as a boiled sweet, but his eyes were deep, complex and dark-ringed, and his lashless lids were swollen. His irises were the mellow, golden brown of raw cane sugar.

‘You’ve got no hair.’

‘No.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘Alopecia.’

It began raining harder. Ronny put his hat back on again. The other Ronny hunched up his shoulders to keep the rain from dripping down his neck. ‘Did you get here by car?’

Ronny nodded. ‘Green Volvo. I parked on the hard shoulder.’

‘That’s illegal.’

‘Yes.’

‘Unless you broke down.’

‘No. The car’s fine. I stopped because I thought you might be intending to jump.’

‘Me?’ The other Ronny looked flabbergasted. ‘From this bridge?’

Ronny felt embarrassed. To hide it he said quickly, ‘I’m on my way to work. I’m in Tottenham for a while.’

The other Ronny didn’t seem to register.

‘So …’ Ronny struggled, ‘uh … what’s in the box then?’

‘The box?’ The other Ronny looked down. ‘This box?’

‘Yes.’

The box was approximately a foot and a half square and firmly sealed with strong brown tape.

The other Ronny paused and then smiled. ‘My soul.’

‘Your soul?’ Ronny didn’t like this kind of talk. He didn’t like talk of souls.

Ronny smiled even wider. ‘I’m kidding.’

Then he added softly, without prompting and without feeling, ‘I used to live on Claremont Road. In a squat. Now it’s gone. They built a link road over it. So I decided to give myself up to the road. To many roads. And now I’m on the motorway. I’m trying to find out what I can get back from it. I’ve been waving from here for three weeks.’

Ronny was pleased to have had his first question answered at last. By way of recompense he said, ‘I live on the Isle of Sheppey. By the sea. Not the sea, really, the channel.’

The other Ronny nodded. ‘Yes, Sheppey.’

‘You know it?’ Ronny strained to think of reasons why a person would go to Sheppey.

‘Did you pass through to catch the ferry?’

‘No.’

‘Are you a keen birdwatcher?’

‘No.’

He paused for a moment. ‘Were you in prison there?’

The other Ronny smiled and said, ‘I know someone who lives there.’

Ronny checked his watch. ‘I’d better be off.’

He proffered the other Ronny his hand to shake. He wanted to seal this interlude, formally. He was pleased with it but he wanted it contained.

The other Ronny couldn’t shake his hand.

‘I can’t shake your hand,’ he said gently, ‘I’m still holding the wasp.’

‘So you’re left-handed,’ Ronny said, ‘like me.’

‘No. I’m right-handed, it’s just that I do everything with my left hand.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s one of my projects.’

Ronny was perplexed. He transformed his attempted shake into a little wave. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’

‘Yes.’

He headed over towards the embankment. He didn’t turn around again. If he had, he would have seen the other Ronny go and bury his wasp in the soil at the edge of the bridge and then construct, one-handed and with considerable difficulty, a small marker out of a lolly stick and a piece of dried grass. Next he would have seen him walk back to the centre of the bridge and wash his hands in a puddle.

When he’d completed his tasks, however, instead of returning to his original post, the other Ronny moved to the opposite side of the bridge, the side facing into London, and stood and gazed down the hard shoulder. He saw Ronny climb into his green Volvo, indicate, pull off.

He felt an impulse to wave but defeated it. Instead he touched the wrist of his right hand with his left hand as if expecting to find something there, but the wrist was bare. He smiled gently, peered over his shoulder towards the cardboard box, cleared his throat and then shoved his cold wet fingers deep into his pockets.

2

Laura had imagined herself to be in love with Nathan for the first three years of her five-year tenure in Lost Property. Truly in love. A dizzy, silly, confusing, confounding love. Love like a wave (foam tipped), a wall (straight up and down, solid, well-built), like a wheel (no beginning, no end), like a whale.

A giant love, in other words. A great big whopper of a love. Love. Secret and hairy and cinnamon-flavoured. A hot, sharp-shooting sherbert love. A mishy-mushy, hishy-hushy, splishy-sploshy kind of love.

But the love had been unreciprocated and now she couldn’t understand how she had felt it or what it had consisted of, how it had looked or tasted or smelled.

It had been lost, her love, it had been pushed into a file, into a drawer, under a table, into an old suitcase. It had fallen between the folds of a badly closed umbrella. Her love had become another piece of lost property, floating around the office, no one seeing it or caring about it, no one to claim it.

They went out for a drink together, twice, after work. Nathan liked her, clearly, but not in that way. Not enough. Then she found out that he was seeing someone else. A social worker called Margery. She thought Margery such an antiquated name. She thought Margery must be sixty years old with blue hair and a beard. But Margery actually looked like Glenda Jackson. Striking, short-haired and with teeth that needed containing, that needed a brace.

Nathan never mentioned Margery at work. Thank God. And so Laura, rejected Laura, stupid Laura, blonde-haired, green-eyed, snub-nosed little Laura had to force herself to be nice to him. And in the moist dankness of that niceness a worm of hatred unravelled itself. It slid about. It sniffed, blindly, in Nathan’s direction. It was soft and vile and slightly, very slightly, ever so, ever so slightly whiffy.

The worm turned. The love withered. And left behind in its stead were only suds and offal and litter and a nasty, dirty bath ring which encircled Laura’s heart and made all her deepest, sweetest sensations of yesteryear seem like something empty and ugly and pathetic.

Her love was a glob of phlegm on life’s high street. It was slippery and slimy and not especially useful. Her love was cancelled. It was all washed out. It was over. Over. Over.

Laura wanted to scorn Nathan, to reject and rebuff, but she was a sensible woman and she knew that he didn’t even have the first idea about all the things she’d been feeling, so what was the point?

Instead she made an effort to be nice. A huge effort. If she offered to make her workmates tea she’d ask Nathan first whether he fancied a cup. She always wrote his name at the beginning of the postcards she sent to the office from holidays abroad. She always remembered the date of his birthday. 12 November. Scorpio. She always did a collection. She always saved the hazelnut whirl for him when someone brought chocolates to work. That was his favourite chocolate. In fact, she made all the silly, goofy gestures she’d never made before, when she’d really, truly loved him.

And Nathan always took the hazelnut whirl with good grace. It was his least favourite chocolate but Laura seemed to get pleasure from giving it to him. So he took it.

Did he know how she’d loved him? He didn’t think about it. His mind was elsewhere. Sometimes he felt a vague sense of unease when she was near him, when she smiled at him – too brightly – or when she came over especially just to say goodnight.

On these occasions he felt like she was overcompensating – which she was – and although he didn’t know what she was overcompensating for, he imagined that it was for something secret and sad and untoward.

He was right. That’s just how it was. Three years of dreams. Three years of watching and waiting, of apprehending and misapprehending. All that time wasted. All that time.

He was a softie. Sometimes he cried over the forgotten things. The special things that he kept in the special places. The bangles with loving inscriptions, the tufts of hair in golden lockets, the small dinners in plastic bags. Meals for one, and the one had forgotten them.

Sometimes he came into work early to walk around and feel the forgotten things, to try and remember them. At night he listed forgotten things in his dreams. He lovingly dwelt on the eight hundred and forty-seven black umbrellas, the fifteen hundred and sixty-two single gloves, the books, the pairs of glasses, the knick-knacks, the scarves, the hats. Unclaimed. Everything. All forgotten.

Laura caught him once, after hours, in the storeroom, huddled in a corner, poring over something. She drew close and then softly spoke his name.

‘Nathan?’

He sprang up, knocking pictures to the floor, a pile of photographs – polaroids mainly, but some others too, black and white photos. She knelt down to help him retrieve them.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ she asked gently, ‘the things people leave behind?’

And in her hands she saw photographs of a little boy with brown eyes and a mop of hair, naked. And there was something wrong with the photos.

‘It is strange,’ Nathan muttered, his face reddening. ‘It is strange.’

And so it was.

‘Hello?’

Laura looked up, trying to make eye-contact with the next customer in a long line. It was Friday, a busy day, usually. She focused on a tall man with a beard and dark hair. He was holding a large cardboard box and a white form that he’d just filled in.

‘Who’s next?’

She waved at him. The man hesitated and then came over. He put the box down on the floor beside him. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I was hoping to speak to …’

He pointed towards Nathan who was in the furthest cubicle, collecting the fee and giving receipts.

‘You have to see me first.’

Laura put out her hand to take the man’s form. He had terrible writing. She stared at it for a while.

‘You’ve lost a watch?’

He nodded.

‘When did you lose it?’

The man felt his right wrist with his left hand. ‘Uh … very recently.’

‘Okay. Fine. Hold on a second.’

Laura stood up and went over to the computer. She keyed in the relevant details. Nothing.

She returned to the counter. ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing on file at the moment. But don’t lose heart. It might be a few days before it’s finally handed in. Can you give me any extra details about the watch?’

The man shook his head.

‘Make?’

He shook his head.

‘How old was it?’

‘Old.’

‘Was it valuable?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well perhaps you could draw an illustration of the face so that if it’s handed in we might have some means of recognizing it.’

The man tried to oblige her. With his left hand he drew a traditional clock face with all the numbers. Laura couldn’t stop herself from smiling.

‘You’ve got a lovely smile,’ the man said.

She floundered. He looked straight into her eyes. ‘I like the way that you said don’t lose heart before. I loved that.’

Then he paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ he scratched his cheek, ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’

‘I’m not embarrassed.’

But she was. There was something about his salad-green eyes that disgusted her. Something not right. An emptiness. He was like an old sandwich with curling edges, left on a plate at a pointless leaving party which nobody wished to attend.

She handed him back his form and spoke rather abruptly. ‘It’s a two pound fee. You pay at the counter.’

‘Thank you.’ The man nodded, took the form, bent down to retrieve his box, then staggered over towards Nathan’s cubicle. He had a funny walk, Laura observed. Her next customer arrived and passed over his slip. She took it, but her eyes were focused, with some disquiet, on Nathan and on the man.

Nathan had been thinking about his lunch. His stomach had been growling. He checked his watch. Someone handed him a slip.

‘That’ll be two pounds, please.’

He looked up. His jaw went slack.

‘It’s me,’ the other Ronny said, ‘like a bad coin. Back again.’

Nathan snapped up his jaw and struggled to contain his surprise. ‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ he said quietly, ‘not so soon. Things are too complicated.’

‘Why?’ the other Ronny looked confounded, ‘Why are things complicated?’

Nathan cleared his throat. ‘I’ll have to tell Margery.’

‘Margery who?’

Nathan passed his hand in front of his eyes. ‘Don’t kid around with me, James.’

‘No. Not James. I’m Ronny. Remember? Call me Ronny.’

Nathan shifted on his stool. ‘Don’t be stupid …’ he was virtually whispering now, ‘we’ve already had this conversation.’

The other Ronny smiled. His teeth were immaculate. ‘I’m Ronny,’ he said softly. ‘You gave me his shoes.’

‘What?’ Nathan looked mortified.

‘His shoes. You gave them to me. Three weeks ago.’

Nathan put his hand to his face. His cheeks were hot. He looked around, vaguely panicked. He caught Laura’s eye. His blush went deeper.

‘They weren’t his shoes. You have no reason to think that they were. Anyway, I told you quite clearly last time you came here that if you returned then I would have to call Margery. I made a promise.’

The other Ronny nodded. He obviously remembered. ‘You did tell me that last time, but then you went straight ahead and gave me his shoes. His white shoes.’

There was no hint of malice in the other Ronny’s voice. Nathan made his hands into fists on his lap. He knew that there was never malice. Not ever. He took a deep breath. ‘I covered up for you before. Not again. And they weren’t his shoes. They’re your shoes.’

‘He told me they were his shoes. He said he wore them for work. He’s shorter than me but his feet are larger than mine. I have very small feet.’

Nathan inspected the other Ronny’s form.

‘You want a watch?’

‘Yes. I believe I lost one.’

‘Here …’

Nathan began to unfasten the strap to his own watch. The other Ronny stared, unblinking. ‘He said he hadn’t seen you in over ten years. He’s got alopecia.’

Nathan unfastened the watch and held it out in the palm of his hand. It was a gold watch, an old watch.

‘He was driving a green Volvo.’

‘Take the watch.’

Nathan proffered the watch. The other Ronny took it.

‘It’s gold.’

‘Yes.’

‘It must be worth a lot.’

‘It’s mine. I want you to have it.’

Nathan glanced up and over towards Laura. She was momentarily occupied.

‘You’d better go.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ The other Ronny was frowning. ‘You don’t believe I actually met him.’

Nathan shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Maybe I dreamed it.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Thanks for the watch.’

The other Ronny smiled again. He took a step backwards. He’d deposited his cardboard box on Nathan’s counter. Nathan scrutinized the box.

‘What is this?’

‘Nothing. Look after it for me. Try not to open it.’

Nathan stood up and touched the box. ‘What’s inside?’

‘Everything.’

Nathan scowled. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

The other Ronny turned to leave. Nathan couldn’t stop himself.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

The other Ronny scratched his nose. ‘Manchester.’

‘Why Manchester?’

He just shrugged.

Nathan took a deep breath, then expelled it nervously. He wished he hadn’t asked. Now he’d be obliged to tell Margery where the other Ronny was, if he was going to be honest. And he wanted to be.

‘Thanks.’

The other Ronny limped out. Nathan snatched up his form, screwed it into a ball and pushed it into his jacket pocket. Then he picked up the box – it was heavy – deserted his post, walked into the men’s toilets, dumped it down next to the latrines, walked a few steps, rested both his palms on the sink, stared at himself in the mirror and retched. He retched again but nothing came out. Just air. Just gas.

A retch, he thought, is like a dry fuck.

Oh Christ. Oh Christ. Where did that come from?

3

‘The water’s flat and brown. The sand’s made of shells. It’s been raped by those whelk farmers. The sea, I mean. Raped by those fucking seafood fishermen.’

Lily pointed towards the sea. The man she spoke to was fat and smelled of fish, but he had a good tan and a big prick. He was on his way to the beach.

Lily sat astride her mountain bike. She was seventeen. She was conducting her own little war, but she didn’t know what she was fighting about, not yet, at least. She had widely spaced eyes. At school they’d called her Miss Piggy, because of her strange eyes and because her parents ran a farm. They kept wild boar. Although, as Lily often observed, wild boar actually had eyes that were quite extraordinarily close together.

Lily had wide eyes and a flat nose and a gap between her front teeth. It was as though her face had hardly bothered fitting together. But the skin had been persistent. It had stretched and stretched until it finally joined up, until it met in the middle. It had touched bases. It was one of those faces.

Lily pointed. ‘That’s the Swale. It’s a nature reserve.’

‘I know.’

The man looked uncomfortable. He made as if to surreptitiously cover over his genitals with his hands. Lily noticed. ‘You’ve nothing there that I haven’t seen countless times before.’

He grimaced.

She rubbed her arms. ‘Fuck, it’s cold. You must be freezing.’

‘I’m just going in for a quick dip.’

‘Like I was saying,’ Lily continued, ignoring his response, ‘that’s the Swale, and that there’s the Blockhouse. Right over there, beyond where you can see is the Ferry Inn and the church. Harty church.’

‘I know.’

Lily scowled. ‘Would you stop saying “I know” all the time?’

‘But I do know. I’m renting one of the prefabs. I’m living in Sheppey now.’

‘Yeah, well, what you don’t know, apparently,’ Lily said, smiling, ‘is that I can report you to the police for walking down this road naked.’

The man, under considerable duress, tried his best to hold his own. ‘That’s my prefab,’ he said bullishly, ‘I mean I’m renting it. So this here is the front of my house. And that …’ he pointed, ‘is the nudist beach.’

‘But this,’ Lily indicated with a flourish, ‘this is the sign that says you must put on clothes to go beyond that point. See?’

‘But there’s no one about.’

‘I’m about. And someone else lives in that prefab. Your neighbour. He’s short and bald and he’s always well covered. He would probably also be disgusted if he saw you this way.’

‘I’m not disgusting, I’m just naked. And this is a nudist beach.’

‘That is a nudist beach. This is the public highway.’

The man said nothing. Lily appraised him, coolly. ‘I’ve lived around here a long while. See those over there?’

She pointed at a cluster of houses; small, purpose-built chalets. He nodded. ‘That’s where you people go.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The Hamlet. It’s fenced off, see? That’s where all the temporary people go. Nobody permanent has anything to do with them. We think they’re weird.’

He glanced over at the chalets as though he hadn’t truly noticed them before. ‘Perhaps they think you’re weird.’

‘What?’

Lily crossed her arms.

‘I’m going to the beach now. It’s too cold to stand around talking.’

‘Fine.’

The man – he was called Luke Hamsun, he was forty-seven and a professional photographer – walked past Lily and on to the beach. Lily turned and watched his retreating torso, then she threw down her bike and went to peer inside his prefab.

Luke had found the idea of a shell beach appealing, initially. It brought to mind the image of Venus rising from her oyster. This whole place is practically deserted, he thought bitterly, and yet fate brings me bang into contact with Prissy Miss Moon Features.

He wondered what Lily’s name was. He wondered whether she’d prove photogenic.

No people. He recited this like a mantra. No people. That’s why I’m here. No drink. No fags. No people. No sex. No stress. No people. Just emptiness. That’s all.

The sea was brown. It wasn’t even the sea, really. It was the channel. This place is truly the back of beyond, Luke thought smugly. It was grey and bleak and very flat. It was like the moon, in fact. But did they have seas on the moon? He remembered hearing something similar in a way-distant geography lesson but he couldn’t decide if the seas in question were wet seas or dry seas.

How could you have a dry sea? And if the sea on the moon was wet, wouldn’t the water float off because there was no gravity on the moon to hold things down?

He walked along the beach. The shells were actually quite hard on his feet. His feet were tender, underneath, and so was he. He held in his paunch. Nothing moved. He supposed that the muscles on his gut had stopped working. He breathed out. No, they had been working after all. He coughed. His belly hurt.

The brown water lapped at his feet. It was icy.

Oooohhhhh! Much colder than he’d imagined. He was naïve like that. This instance was entirely typical. He moved back a step. The sky was massive. Flat land, flat sea, and a great big, dirty, mud-puddle of a sky.

It looked like it was going to rain. He shivered. He peered over his shoulder to see if the girl had gone. It seemed like she had.

As Luke strolled back to his prefab he confidently sidelined any thoughts of his own physical timidity (shouldn’t the sea feel warmer in cold weather? He’d certainly always thought so. He’d been misled, clearly) and instead he bolstered himself by imagining the cosmos; black, enormous, dotted intermittently with diamond-chip stars, and then a sea, floating. A giant sea with waves and foam and everything. Just, kind of, floating.

He imagined himself, Luke Hamsun, on the moon, moon-walking. He’d been sent to the moon to recapture the sea, to tighten it up, to winch it down.

Over his shoulder Luke pictured heavy ropes which were weightless because nothing weighed on the moon, and in his hands a dozen giant tent pegs. He was supernaturally powerful. He was Flash Gordon. He had no back problem. No gut-ache. His sciatica was a phantasm. He would never keel over and die. He was no longer forty-seven.

And in some respects this was actually true. At least it could have been true in a different world. It just so happened that Luke Hamsun was an earthling, and as such, he was obliged to endure the drag of gravity. He was grounded.

But he endured phlegmatically, cheerfully almost. He didn’t complain. He saved his breath. In fact he hoarded it. He held it.

Lily, meanwhile, had made herself comfortable on Luke’s sofa and was inspecting one of his portfolios.

‘Oh good,’ she said calmly, when he strolled back inside, turning a photo around so that he could see it properly, ‘now you’ve returned you can set me straight on this. Is that a pickaxe up her arse or …’

‘How did you get in here?’

Lily lifted the photo and reappraised it. ‘If you’ve got no trousers then you’ve got no pockets. If you’ve got no pockets then you’ve got no keys.’

Luke felt enraged, violated, defiled, but when he finally spoke it was with great softness. ‘Put those down and get out of here.’

Lily, rather surprisingly, responded to the softness. She closed the portfolio.

‘You’re a bit of a pervert then, on the quiet?’

‘You’re a silly little sneak.’

‘A what?’

Lily stood up, smirking. Luke felt embarrassed by his nakedness and picked up a coat from a chair by the door. He put it on. He looked ridiculous now, naked, wearing only a coat. The coat was incriminating.

‘So that’s why you’ve come here,’ she said, pouting deliciously, ‘to take some more of these dirty pictures?’

‘They aren’t dirty pictures.’

She’d struck a nerve. She knew it. She always knew. She laughed. ‘So what’s that then?’

Against the wall, yet to be hung, stood a picture of a naked female cupping her breasts like they were two neat apples, but the breasts had been yanked up high as though she planned to pillow her chin on them. It looked uncomfortable.

‘It’s a nude.’

‘A nude. Oh. I get it.’

Lily continued to eye the picture.

‘Ouch!’ she said.

‘Get out.’

‘Certainly.’

She sauntered towards the door.

‘If you break into my house again I’ll call the police.’

Lily just giggled. ‘I didn’t break into anything. It was wide open.’

‘Get out.’

‘I’m getting out.’

The sea lapped coldly outside the prefab’s door. Three giant steps and she was in it. Fully dressed. Feet, knees, hips, breasts. She waved her arms at him.

‘I’m freeeee!’ she screamed.

He hated her then. She was free.

In fact she had screamed I’m freezing! but a small wave had hit her.

She had no grand scheme. Not yet. Nothing like that.

4

No one else would do these jobs. It was like being a spaceman, but with all of the discomfort and none of the glory. In the trade they called them skins. There was a theatrical side. Ronny did that sometimes but he hated being around children.

Then there was the industrial side. Councils hired him to spray weedkiller, to clean stuff up, to juggle with noxious chemicals. Someone had to do it. So Ronny obliged. He was that someone. A consummate professional.

Others found the precautionary clothing bothersome and claustrophobic. Several people had sued after contracting breathing difficulties and skin infections from handling dangerous substances. Ronny knew that this was because they took off their helmets when it got too hot. They didn’t take precautions. He always took them. That was his trademark, his hallmark. That was his stamp of quality.

Anyway, it was part of the kick. No air. To be enclosed. The chafing, the sweating. The chronic discomfort. That was all part of it.

He wore white shoes. Special shoes. In fact the entire get-up was white, even the helmet. Ronny peered down at his shoes. He thought about the man on the bridge, wide open, and in the same instant he thought of Monica.

Monica.

She had been his confidante. His correspondent. His best friend. His only friend. He’d liked it that way.

Monica had an opinion on everything. She had an interest in biology. Physical things. She was an adventuress. She hated to be enclosed, which was why, finally, she ended up in Sumatra, in the rain forests. She was working out there with a journalist. They were interested in DNA; all that complex genetic stuff which, quite honestly, meant precious little to Ronny.

Monica could never simplify the nature of her work in conversation without becoming impish and flirtatious. If Ronny couldn’t understand what it was that she was doing she’d crystallize it by saying, ‘I’m interested in what it is that makes a man a man, Ronny. I’m interested in apes.’

So they were searching for a missing ape in the forests of Sumatra. A missing link. A great ape. A fantastic ape. A pale giant. He walked on his hind legs and to all intents and purposes he resembled a man but his feet turned inwards. And unlike his human relations he had no big toes.

Monica had never seen him. She’d seen Ronny though, but only fleetingly, a long time ago. He’d made a great impression. He’d become indelible. He’d left his footprint in the mud of Monica’s brain. She couldn’t shake him.

Oran-pendic. That was the ape’s name. Mr Unpronounceable. In his dictionary Ronny saw that orang – or something quite like it – was Malay for man. Like in orang-utan which roughly speaking translated as ‘man of the forest’.

Oranpendic was not in his dictionary. He didn’t exist. Not yet, anyway. When Monica found him he would exist but not before. When Monica found him Ronny too would see him, not physically – nothing nearly so dramatic – but slotted in among all his other words and definitions. On paper. In print. In bold.

But for now the oranpendic was their own special creature. Not a fact or a definition. Nothing absolute. Merely a fragment.

Ronny looked up pendic for the exercise but could find only pend which meant to hang (as in ‘pendant’). He guessed the word had something to do with per-pend-icular. Upright. Vertical. But frankly he found both this description and the original name unsatisfactory.

Oranpendic.

Monica didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter. She was more interested in the hunt. She’d been called a hoaxer. Well, not Monica so much as the journalist, Louis, who was the truly infamous half of the duo.

She’d heard him on the radio and then she’d saved up all her money working as a lab assistant at a school in Swindon to fly out and join him. She was impulsive like that. Some called it gullible. Either way, she was never afraid. Nothing daunted her.

Initially the journalist had been discomfited by Monica’s presence. He’d felt invaded. Monica could have that effect sometimes. But then he grew accustomed to her and they began the hunt proper.

Ronny had seen several articles about the hoax. Naturally people doubted the existence of the oranpendic. But the journalist claimed to have seen him, briefly, and his account of this fantastical discovery was fairly convincing.

Monica had a theory about faces. She said honesty was something you could see in a person’s face. Someone’s sincerity, their integrity, was as apparent to Monica on the first meeting as their hair colour or the shape of their nose. This was her preoccupation. Her instinct.

In fact she had two main instincts. The first was for honesty, and the second told her that the oranpendic was alive but that he was afraid. The threat of discovery terrified him. So he kept hidden.

She wrote to Ronny.

He’s afraid, Ronny. I know that much. He lives and walks in fear. Some days, if I wake early, I go out alone just after dawn. Everything is glazed. The air is full of moisture. It’s as thick, as dense as a woollen scarf pressing down on to my lips and up into my nostrils.

At these times I dream I’ll see him. But he’s pale like the mist and he’s so afraid that it’s as if he’s only a ghost. I always have the camera – not Louis’s big professional thing, I have my own, a cheap one that I’ve never yet used, just in case – but I sometimes imagine that if I tried to photograph him, the fear, the focus, the technology, would obliterate him. And all that would remain – in the camera, in the world – would be vapour. A mist and a smell.

Fear has its own special aroma. Like soil. Like cider vinegar. Did I lose you yet, Ronny? Did I? Could I?

Here’s the truth. If I saw him I would not photograph him. It would be so rude, don’t you think? I’ve never told Louis I feel this way. He’d scoff. I mean that’s why he’s here, after all. He has more to lose than I do. He’s been publicly and uniformly ridiculed and slandered, so that’s fair enough.

But if I saw the oranpendic I would not photograph him. I would kneel and I would hold out my hand. I would not stare. I’d look off sideways, like a friendly cat. That’s what I’d do. I’d adopt a submissive posture.

Oh God Ronny I wish you were here. I’m sorry you lost your hair. I am. Did I ever say that before? I can’t remember. Do you miss me? My own hair is long now. I tie it back. Otherwise it catches on twigs and on branches. It’s stupid and impractical but I’m growing it as a tribute. I’m growing it for you.

You feel very close at this moment. Is that stupid? Are you near me? Are you out there, hiding in the jungle, watching, waiting but I just can’t see you? Is it me who’s dense or is it the forest? Is it me?

Shut your eyes Ronny, and imagine me here. Close your eyes. Close them. Do you see me? My hair is longer. My nails are dirty. Do you see me? I am kneeling. I am holding out my hand.

Take it.

M.

Ronny continued to stare at his shoes. White shoes. Then he stirred himself and picked up his bottle of weedkiller. He had walked five miles that day. He’d sprayed every crack in every bit of pavement. No weeds would come after he’d been. There would be no green after he’d been. No lush diversity in the pavement’s monotony. He’d seen to that.

It was hot inside his helmet. But Ronny walked and he sprayed. Like a tomcat, scenting all those docile miles with the stink of poison. He didn’t think of the poison though, only of Monica. His own breath soaked his face. The forests were hot and airless. Like this, he supposed. He was close to her. She was right. He was very close. And she was certainly a rare bird.

5

He drove home later than he’d anticipated and hit the rush hour. In his keenness to evade it he’d skipped changing, so wore his white skin-suit, in full, but without the helmet. From the neck downwards he resembled an alien. Or an astronaut. He even wore his plastic gloves, which generated a curious friction on the steering wheel as he turned corners.

Pulling up to a roundabout in Lee Green, Ronny noticed something exceptional. A man was standing on the island in the centre of the roundabout. He was tall with a beard, his arm was extended, his left arm, and in his hand he held something that shone in the glare of many headlights. Something gold.

The traffic was heavy. Ronny waited his turn to join the flow. He stared at the man. Someone flashed their lights behind him. He took his chance. He pulled into the traffic. He did one circuit. He did two. On the third circuit he indicated left and slid into a parking space outside the World of Leather showroom. He sat for a while and gazed at the showroom through his windscreen. Then he climbed out of his car and walked back over to the road. He stopped at the kerb, put his hands to his lips and yelled.

‘RONNY!’

The other Ronny gave no indication of having heard him so he whistled and called again.

‘RONNY!’

The other Ronny turned, cocked his head to one side but did not move. Ronny waited for a gap in the traffic and then jogged over. The other Ronny continued to hold out the glittering object. It was a watch.

Ronny raised his voice over the honk of the traffic. ‘What are you doing here?’

The other Ronny showed him the watch.

‘I’m holding out this watch.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m offering myself. I’m offering my time. To this island.’

After a pause he added, ‘I like that suit. You look like the Michelin Man.’

‘It’s protective clothing.’

Ronny stared at the watch. It seemed familiar. The other Ronny caught him looking.

‘Recognize it?’

Ronny swallowed, suddenly unnerved. ‘Should I?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just that I think it might be yours.’

Ronny took a step backwards. ‘I don’t own a watch.’

‘Yes you do. You’re wearing one.’

Ronny blinked. ‘I mean I don’t own that watch.’

‘It has an inscription on the back …’

The other Ronny turned the watch over. Engraved in the gold were the words: ‘To Big Ron, with love, your Elaine.’

Ronny began shaking. His suit quivered and it made a strange synthetic sound, a noise like a gust of wind hitting the canvas jib of a small sailing boat, a sound like the beat of a swan’s wings in flight. It was clearly audible but the other Ronny seemed not to notice.

‘I wish I could whistle like you do,’ the other Ronny said, ‘but I can’t whistle at all. I never learned.’

‘Whistle?’ Ronny scowled, and then recollected. ‘Oh …’ As a kind of strangled appendix he added, ‘In fact it’s my father’s watch,’ and then, with startling synchronicity, his nose began running.

He rubbed at it with the back of his glove, but the glove was plastic and soaked up nothing. Instead it smeared moisture across his cheek for the chill evening air to tip-toe over.

The other Ronny continued to inspect the watch. ‘It looks expensive. Will he be wanting it back?’

‘No.’ Ronny shook his head and then sniffed violently. The other Ronny glanced up. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

He focused in on Ronny’s face. His gaze was like the pure sweep of a bowling green; it was flat and it was plain and it went on and on. Ronny was alarmed. He began blinking rapidly. A nervous tic.

The other Ronny looked crestfallen. ‘I’ve brought back some bad feelings. I’m sorry.’

He curled his hand around the watch so that Ronny was no longer obliged to look at it. Ronny said nothing but he kept on blinking. If he stopped blinking he’d start crying and that wouldn’t do. He’d never cried.

But he remembered the watch. Very clearly. And mixed in with the memory was the scratch of rough hessian and the pungent taint of cider vinegar. Something acrid.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Who?’

‘Big Ron.’

‘Yes.’ Ronny nodded.

‘The way you spoke earlier made it sound like he was still living.’

‘He is living,’ Ronny struggled. ‘I mean, in my head.’

Again he put his gloved hand to his face.

‘Actually,’ the other Ronny intervened, ‘you have a rash. On your cheek. You should stop touching it.’

Ronny took his hand from his cheek and swore softly. ‘My gloves might have chemicals on them.’

‘You should’ve taken them off then.’

‘They’re attached to the suit. I was in a hurry to return the car. It isn’t mine.’

The other Ronny craned his neck to peer over at the car.

‘Green Volvo,’ he mused, unhelpfully.

‘Yes.’ Ronny spun around and jogged to the edge of the island. His nose was still running. His eye began stinging. He’d been clumsy. He hated himself for it.

The other Ronny watched impassively as he jinked through the traffic.

Back at the car, Ronny unzipped his suit and unrolled the top half down to his waist. It was a complex manoeuvre that took several minutes, during which time the pain in his cheek intensified.

He scrabbled around in the side pocket on the driver’s side of the car and located a bottle of water which he unscrewed, sniffed and then poured on to his hand and dabbed over his cheek. He repeated this process several times and then inspected his face in the side mirror. His cheek, nose and left eye were slightly puckered and swollen. He applied some more water.

‘Do you want the watch back?’

The other Ronny had deserted his island and was now standing behind him, holding out the watch.

Ronny prickled, like he was full of static. ‘Not at all. You’re welcome to it.’

‘How’s your cheek?’

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘You must be cold. Here …’

The other Ronny took off the old brown cardigan he was wearing and proffered it.

‘Actually I have a change of clothes in the boot.’

As he spoke Ronny noticed the other Ronny’s arms. They were skeletal. He put his hand to his mouth. He felt an unexpected combination of deep alarm and lurching nausea.

‘What?’

The other Ronny inspected his cardigan with some confusion as though Ronny’s distress had been generated by it and not by him.

‘Your arms,’ Ronny managed, through his fingers.

The other Ronny looked down at his arms, grimaced, and then put his cardigan back on again.

‘I can’t keep the watch,’ he said quietly, ‘I would feel beholden.’

Ronny was shivering. He went and grabbed his clothes from the boot of the car and began dragging them on. He felt sick. His mouth was drowning in a sweet saliva. Was it poison or was it pity? He couldn’t tell.

‘Pawn the watch,’ he said thickly, ‘and get something proper to eat.’

The other Ronny didn’t appreciate this suggestion. ‘I would never consider selling it,’ he said and then turned to go, patently wounded.

Ronny panicked, he didn’t know why. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To my island.’

‘How long will you stay there?’

‘I have no idea.’

He left him.

Ronny bundled his white suit into the back of the Volvo and then sat down in the driving seat. He adjusted the rear-view mirror, initially to inspect his cheek and then to try and catch sight of the other Ronny.

The other Ronny was back on his island. Ronny sat watching him for a while. He wanted to go. But something stopped him. An unfamiliar impulse. He was late. He wanted to go, he wanted to, but he couldn’t.

He dabbed at his eye with the cuff of his sleeve. He felt terrible. His stomach was rollercoastering.

‘Jim!’

Like a voice in his head. Ronny started and glanced up in alarm. As if by sorcery, the other Ronny had rematerialized next to him.

‘Pardon?’

‘A gift. From me. In exchange for the watch.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘A new name. Jim. It came to me in a flash.’

Ronny laughed nervously. ‘I don’t need a new name.’

The other Ronny was visibly galled. ‘Big Ron is dead,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘so why not bury him?’

Ronny was surprised. He was confounded. But above all he had the strong feeling that it was ill-mannered to reject a gift so freely given.

‘Jim’s a nice name,’ he said gently, ‘but I don’t ever hide from things.’

‘You’ve got nothing to hide from,’ the other Ronny insisted, as though he really understood everything. ‘You have an honest face. I have an instinct for honesty. In faces.’

Ronny was taken by surprise. He was quiet for a while. The other Ronny misconstrued his silence. He decided that it might be best to return to his island. He took a few steps back. He never pushed things. He was a piece of chaff. A dandelion seed. He floated and landed, floated and landed.

He took several more steps. The wind was behind him. A gust of it touched him and defined his outline against the streetlights and the headlights.

Ronny took it all in and felt his gullet fracture. This man was a streak of piss, a twig, a little foal. He was one small knot in an endless scrag of string.

‘If you want to do me a favour …’ his mouth said – his eyes showing the shock of it – ‘I mean if you want to repay me for the watch then you could drive me home. My eye’s sore and I feel nauseous. I’m in a hurry to get the car back. You said you knew someone in Sheppey …’

‘You.’

Ronny frowned. ‘What?’

‘You’re the person I know in Sheppey.’

‘But we only just met.’

The other Ronny cleared his throat. ‘Same people,’ he said, ‘different lives.’

Ronny smiled, but thinly. ‘I certainly hope that isn’t true.’

He meant it. He believed that each person could only lead one life. He sensed that nothing in him could be different from how it was. He was a closed book. His pages were permanently meshed together.

‘I live in a beach house,’ he said eventually. ‘I have extra blankets.’

The other Ronny stood and considered his offer.

‘I have no driver’s licence,’ he said finally.

‘Me neither.’ Ronny tried to appear indifferent, but suddenly this mattered to him so badly.

‘It’s a Volvo,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and they have big bumpers.’

The other Ronny still seemed uncertain.

‘There’s the beach,’ Ronny said, scrabbling for incentives, ‘and a natural wildlife reserve with owls and hunting birds …’

Still the other Ronny hesitated.

‘And rabbits … I mean unusual rabbits. Jet black ones. Wild. It’s a strange place, flat and empty like the surface of the moon.’

‘And the sea …?’ the other Ronny said, teetering.

‘Yes.’

The other Ronny scratched his right arm with his left hand. ‘Fine,’ he announced, ‘but here’s the hitch …’

Ronny nodded, ready for any eventuality.

‘You’ll have to change gear. I don’t use my right hand.’

‘OK.’

Ronny never yearned for anything. Not any more. Although at one stage in his life he’d discovered a worrying talent for persuasion. Persuasion had become a weakness with him. A sickness. Once he’d set his sights on something he seemed to yearn for it with an almost obscene fervour. Often things he hadn’t even known he’d wanted. Those were the worst.

He’d convinced himself that those times were pretty much behind him. This was a blip.

‘And the second thing …’ the other Ronny was eerily emphatic, ‘you’re Jim or I don’t come.’

‘Jim.’

‘That’s my gift.’

‘You call me Jim.’

‘No. You call yourself Jim and you mean it.’

‘Jim.’

Ronny felt a wave of euphoria, like he was lodged in a tiny dinghy and he’d just pushed himself adrift. He was floating. He could leave things behind him. Then it cut off. The euphoria. Just like that. He clambered over to the passenger side.

The other Ronny climbed in. He slammed the door shut, he felt for the pedals and then for the knob to adjust the position of his seat. He found it. He pushed himself back, but only slightly. He turned the ignition. The engine whinnied and then rumbled.

‘Get the gears, Jim.’

He carefully adjusted his rear-view mirror.

Jim said nothing. He wiped his eye, sniffed once, and then calmly stuck the gears into reverse.

6

Nathan told Margery before she’d even had the chance to sit down.

‘I saw James this morning.’

Margery hadn’t had an easy day. One of her clients was in court pleading guilty to a charge of fratricide. Another client, a child, had been taken into care after trying to burn down his grandmother’s house. And then she’d spent the remainder of her afternoon unsuccessfully trying to communicate with a young girl who’d become voluntarily mute after witnessing her sister’s death in a road traffic accident. It was grim.

‘James who?’

‘Jim. Jimmy.’

They were in Nathan’s flat in Stamford Hill. Above a bakery. Margery lived in Bethnal Green. Next to Tesco’s.

‘Jim?’ She turned to look at him. ‘So why didn’t you call me?’

Nathan scratched his head. ‘When I threatened to he ran off. There seemed no point once he’d gone.’

Margery had lit a cigarette. Nathan didn’t smoke. She inhaled and then pulled a smidgen of loose tobacco from the tip of her tongue.

‘So you simply didn’t bother ringing at all.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Margery grimaced. ‘To hell with being sorry, Nathan. Did he say where he was going? Did he say where he’d been?’

‘No.’

‘Then what was he after?’

‘He wanted a watch.’

Margery inspected Nathan’s wrist.

‘And you gave him yours.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he didn’t say where he was living?’

Nathan paused. ‘When I asked he said that he was going to Manchester.’

‘Manchester?’ Margery was bemused. ‘Why Manchester?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was just a whim.’

Margery threw herself down on to the sofa next to Nathan. ‘I wish to God you hadn’t given him your watch, Nathan.’

‘I know. I know.’

Nathan felt ashamed but he didn’t want a lecture.

‘I’m not being nasty,’ Margery continued, ‘but it’s a real weakness on your part.’

‘I realize that now. And I’m sorry. I just felt … I felt pity for him. He was very thin. I thought he might sell it in exchange for food or something.’

‘Please.’

Margery stubbed out her cigarette with a ferocious thrust. It hadn’t made her feel any better. Her lips were burning, for some reason.

Quite unexpectedly, Nathan began crying. He didn’t sob or sniff but tears flowed silently down both of his cheeks. Margery scowled. She was unmoved by tears. She’d seen too many over the years. Tears were a part of her job, after all, a part of her life. Tears were an excuse. A mechanism for delay. She felt in her pocket for a tissue. She had none. She felt in Nathan’s pocket. She drew out a ball of paper. She unfolded it.

‘You were going to show me this, I suppose?’

‘What?’ Nathan turned and saw the square of paper. He wiped his eyes. ‘What is it?’

‘He’s signed this request form Ronny. Did you see?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘I didn’t see. I didn’t read it.’

‘And under Address he’s written …’

The handwriting was so poor that she couldn’t decipher it. ‘Shelby … Shel … Well certainly not Manchester.’

Nathan was feeling raw and puny and defensive. ‘He told me Manchester. I have no reason to lie about that.’

Margery rubbed her eyes with her hand. A smear of mascara settled on her forehead above her left eyebrow. Nathan stared at it.

‘You know …’

She was exhausted and demoralized. ‘It’s at moments like this that I begin to wonder … I mean by rights I have an obligation to contact the authorities.’

Nathan took the slip of paper. He could see that the word written under Home Address was ‘Sheppey’. Margery watched him. ‘Can you read it?’

‘Uh …’ he swallowed, ‘uh … no.’

She sighed. ‘I just wish you hadn’t given him your watch. If something happens to him and they find your watch …’

Nathan felt his wrist. ‘I hated that watch,’ he said.

Margery relaxed her head on to the back of the sofa. ‘I’m too tired for this,’ she mumbled.

Nathan nodded. ‘I’m tired too, but I felt I should tell you.’

Margery ignored him.

‘And he did say Manchester,’ Nathan repeated, regretting that he had confided in her now and abandoning all previous ideas about honesty being the best policy. He pushed himself up. ‘I’ll make a start on dinner.’

He went into the kitchen.

Margery pulled her aching legs on to the sofa. She closed her eyes. Her body relaxed but her mind wheeled on in full throttle. She was implicated. She hated that feeling. It was a compromise and she hated compromises. She was hardened. She knew it. And it was a nasty thing to know about yourself.

Her father had been a doctor. Her mother had been a midwife. Two strong service traditions. Caring was just another mechanical gambit she’d learned about in tandem with tying her laces. It was an inconvenience, sometimes. When Daddy had to make a house call on Christmas day. When his dinner went cold. And it was probably only some stupid old woman who was stuck on her own and had no one to talk to. But he took it for granted. They all did.

Margery was disgusted by weakness but equally disgusted by her own disgust. She’d been married, a man she met at university. He’d studied engineering. He was ambitious. It hadn’t lasted. It had lacked something. Compassion? Should a marriage be compassionate? Divorce. Then she’d floundered. And finally she’d met Nathan.

It was on the job. A routine investigation into allegations of misconduct at a children’s home in the London borough of Brent. There she met James, who was Jimmy, who was Ronny. He was a lost boy. Like in Peter Pan. A little lost boy. Nobody loved him. Nobody wanted him. But he was looking for love and in all the wrong places. He was vulnerable.

He’d had this habit of losing things. He didn’t have much, but what he had he lost. On the way to school he’d drop his books. He’d leave his lunch on the Tube. He’d take off his coat and he wouldn’t pick it up. As if he was a snake and just shedding skins.

Then he’d begun making claims. He’d go and make a claim and he’d hope to get something back that wasn’t his. Something interesting that had a life, a meaning, elsewhere. Something distinct. Something whole.

And it was in this place that he met Nathan. And Nathan had once had a brother he’d abandoned who was roughly the same age as James, as Jimmy. So he gave him things. The brother’s things. It was a private deal between them. But it was wrong. It was wrong.

Margery had imagined that James was on the game. What else could she think? His steady accumulation of possessions had to point somewhere. So it was a relief when she’d finally met Nathan. He was as harmless as a newly hatched chick. And she liked him. He was steady and gentle and he cared about minutiae. He was lovable.

They went out for a drink together. It was unprofessional, admittedly, but she didn’t regret it. She merely told Nathan that he shouldn’t see James again. He shouldn’t give him anything. That was all. There was no mystery. He’d said, ‘I hadn’t realized … I mean I didn’t realize there was anything … uh … untoward … I didn’t. God. I didn’t think that for a second.’

‘It’s a real shame,’ Margery said kindly, trying to reassure him, ‘but the world is such a sick place. You do something in all innocence and the world manages to make it cheap in some way. That’s just how it is, I’m afraid.’

Then James went missing. Initially the police expressed a tolerable level of interest. A list of names were fed into a computer. They called on Margery. Flat hat, blue suit, big boots. Did she know about Nathan? Did she know about Nathan’s history? More specifically, did she know about Nathan’s father? He was a convicted paedophile. Did she understand what that meant? Nathan’s dad was sexually deviant. He fucked small children. All the time. Big Ron. Big bad Ron. He huffed and he puffed and he blew their fragile houses down. And his own little piggies? He tucked them up tight at night, so tight that they couldn’t move their tiny arms, and then he peered and he leered and he panted through their weak straw walls. It was all spelled out. Every letter. And every letter spelled a single word. And the word was horrible.

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

She wanted to withdraw. But no. Nathan had red hair and blue eyes and skin so pale it was almost transparent. He was almost transparent. So soft and so gentle. He was see-through.

And by then she was in too deep, dammit.

Nathan had prepared a chicken-in-a-bag meal that you boiled for ten minutes. It tasted like chalk, but fibrous. She never told him that she knew. She simply waited for signs of it. She studied him like you’d study a tomato plant in a greenhouse. Was it getting enough water? Were there greenfly? Was there mildew? She kept on waiting for something to go wrong. Like he was a bomb just a tick-tick-ticking.

Nathan watched Margery eating. She didn’t complain. She munched dutifully.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it tastes awful.’

He was as soft as a strawberry cream.

‘It does taste awful,’ she said quietly, eating on regardless, then picking up the ketchup from a tray resting on top of a brown cardboard box which had been propped, without her noticing, next to the sofa. The box. All close and closed and tightly bound. Nathan gave it the quickest of glances, every so often. Some things, he resolved, no, many things, many, many things were often better just left that way.

7

‘Now here’s the thing,’ Ronny said, appraising Luke and detecting a powerful smell of fish, ‘he’s changed his name and now he’s called Jim.’

Luke turned to Jim, surprised and clearly determined not to believe the testimony of a total stranger. ‘You changed your name since this morning?’

Jim nodded. He already seemed thoroughly reconciled to this superficial alteration. The new name had settled on him during the previous hour as softly and as completely as a thin layer of soot over the rim of a chimney.

Luke frowned, somewhat disgruntled. ‘But what was wrong with Ronny?’

Ronny interjected. ‘It was his dad’s name and he didn’t like his dad.’

‘Anyway,’ Jim said, carefully steering the conversation away from his father, ‘my friend here is called Ronny, and if we’re both Ronnies it makes things too complicated.’

Luke was tickled by this. His broad face broke into a grin. ‘So in fact,’ he said, chuckling, ‘you’re The Two Ronnies.’

Ronny shook his head. ‘No. We’re not the two anythings. That’s the whole point of it. He’s Jim.’

Luke stopped smiling. Jim took his chance and handed him the car keys. ‘I really appreciate you lending me the car. It’s been a real life-saver.’

While he spoke, Luke squinted at Jim’s cheek. ‘You have a slight rash …’ he indicated, ‘just there.’

‘He knows,’ Ronny said. Jim nodded. ‘I think it may even be going down a bit now.’

‘Actually,’ Luke glanced wistfully over Ronny’s shoulder, although all that lay behind him was darkness and the roar of the tide, ‘I met one of our neighbours today. A girl with a flat face. She looked slightly …’

‘Dirty,’ Jim filled in.

Luke laughed, as though this hadn’t previously occurred to him. ‘That’s true. She was dirty. Her neck especially. Do you know her?’

Jim shook his head. ‘I’ve seen her around but we’ve never spoken.’

‘Well she was snooping around my prefab and then she jumped into the sea. With all her clothes on and everything. Crazy, really. I didn’t warm to her at all.’ Luke paused. ‘In fact she actually objected to me walking the short distance from here to the nudist beach with no clothes on. It’s not even as if there was anyone about …’

‘She was about,’ Ronny said, but not provocatively. He was rubbing his ear and seemed uninvolved now that the naming issue had been resolved. Luke just grunted.

‘Anyway …’ Jim said, his voice trailing off into the sound of the waves.

‘Yes …’ Luke responded brightly and jangled the keys in his hand, ‘any time.’

‘Great.’

Jim walked off, expecting Ronny to follow. But Ronny didn’t follow.

‘Did you see the black rabbits yet?’ he asked.

‘Black rabbits?’

Luke was temporarily bewildered.

‘Jim said that there were black rabbits here. Wild ones.’

‘Uh …’ Luke considered this for a moment. ‘I’ve never …’ he frowned, ‘although now you come to mention it …’

He disappeared into his prefab in search of something. Ronny held the door ajar with his foot. He saw the picture of the woman with the chin-high breasts which Luke had now hung squarely, unapologetically, above his sofa. Ronny touched one of his own nipples with his left hand. He had a fantastic capacity for empathy.

‘Ouch.’

‘Pardon?’ Luke reappeared, looking testy.

‘Nothing. It’s just …’ Ronny pointed, ‘her breasts are very high. That isn’t natural, is it?’

‘Natural?’

Luke didn’t understand the implications of this word. He was holding a pamphlet. It was a free handout from the Nature Conservancy Council about the Swale reserve. He cleared his throat. ‘Breasts are fatty tissue. That particular model has quite large ones which means that there’s some …’ he searched for the right word, ‘slack,’ he said, finally, although he couldn’t help thinking that it sounded ungallant. Graceless, even. And it was such a real, no, not real … it was such a resonant image, after all.

Ronny was already inspecting the pamphlet.

‘Take it,’ Luke said, ‘I think it mentions something about rabbits in there although I wouldn’t swear to it.’

‘Thanks.’

Ronny took the pamphlet and turned to go. Luke half-closed the door and then said quickly, ‘It didn’t hurt, you know.’

‘What didn’t?’

Luke thumbed over his shoulder. ‘The breasts. She’s my ex-wife. It didn’t hurt. It was actually her idea in the first place.’

‘Oh,’ Ronny nodded, still clutching his pamphlet, ‘well, that’s good, then.’

‘Yes.’

Luke closed the door. He resolved not to show Ronny his portfolio. He was alone in this wilderness. This moonscape. Although Jim, at least, seemed relatively open-minded. Or was that just … uh … he searched for the word. Then he found it. Reticence. Maybe Jim was just reticent.

Jim. His neighbour. Jim. Bit of a blank spot, really.

Jim’s prefab was bare and functional. One bedroom. Small. A shower, a toilet, a sink. The living room and a tiny kitchen. White walls. Linoleum flooring throughout. Red in colour. A portable TV. Terrible reception. No lampshades. Bare bulbs. Chilly. Ronny was impressed. It was already dark when they arrived but he quickly got the gist of it.

They’d had to wait for ten minutes before entering the island. The Kingferry bridge had been raised for a tanker to pass through. Ronny had clambered out of the car and walked to the river bank to watch. The bridge was a great, concrete, multi-storey car park, but roofless. A monstrosity. A giant. When he climbed back into the car his face was alight. He hadn’t bargained on it being a real island.

‘You could swim it easily,’ Jim said, as they crossed over the river, ‘but it’s pretty deep in the middle.’

And now they were by the sea. Jim pulled his curtains wide. Outside Ronny saw blackness broken by foam-tipped waves. It was fantastic.

He pointed. ‘You’re almost on the beach.’

‘Yes. In fact, we are on the beach.’

‘Just five foot of it and then the sea.’

‘That’s right.’

Jim was making something to eat, heating a tin of beans and mini chipolatas.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Always.’

Jim tipped half of the panful into a bowl. The other half he poured on to a plate for himself. He cut some bread. He passed Ronny a piece.

‘No bread,’ Ronny said, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. ‘I only ever eat enough …’ he paused, choosing his words carefully, ‘to remain active.’

Jim handed Ronny a fork. ‘That’s a strange habit.’

‘Yes,’ Ronny agreed, ‘but it’s these little things that keep me going. These habits.’

He ate with his left hand. He held his fork in his fist with no finesse.

‘And you only use your left hand,’ Jim said, watching Ronny carefully as though he was some kind of scientific experiment.

‘Yes. It slows me down.’

‘You feel the need to slow down?’

‘I did.’ Ronny thought for a moment. ‘What I mean to say is that it helps me concentrate. I used to have a very short attention span. Then I started these little challenges. It all came to me on the spur of the moment. I’d always had a natural instinct to do things right-handed, but I began to stop myself. I controlled that instinct. I curbed it.’

He smiled. ‘At first it makes you irritable, because the body and the brain hate doing things the hard way. But it’s simply a question of working through that initial hostility, and once you’ve worked it through, you feel this intense kind of joy. Really intense.’

Jim tore a piece of bread in half. At length he said, ‘You must have been extremely miserable at some point. I mean before all this.’

‘I was,’ Ronny grinned, ‘but not any more.’

He then ate four mouthfuls of his meal and pushed his plate aside.

Jim focused on the plate. ‘It’s very …’ he considered for a moment, ‘well, frustrating. It’s frustrating to see you push your plate away when you’re obviously still hungry.’

Ronny shook his head. ‘I’m not hungry.’ He rested his elbows on the table. ‘You’re much bossier than you think, Jim,’ he added cheerfully.

Jim was taken aback. He’d been considering Ronny and his unhappiness. He hadn’t considered himself as a part of any equation. ‘Me? Bossy?’

He saw the guiding light in his life as a palpable indifference. A supreme, a superb, a spectacular indifference. Ronny shrugged. ‘If you ate less you might feel better about things. The way I see it, the less you eat, the less energy you have to expend on unnecessary stuff. If you were hungry you probably wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in what I did or didn’t do.’

Jim wasn’t impressed by Ronny’s reasoning, but for the sake of argument he pushed his own plate away for a moment and said, ‘Everyone has a few stupid habits. I’m sure I have plenty, but I try not to dwell on them, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to influence my life any more than they do already.’

‘So what are yours?’

Ronny was smiling as though he imagined Jim’s habits would be nothing to write home about.

‘Well …’ Jim disliked talking about himself but he resolved to do so, just this once, to make his point, ‘when I was a kid my dad used to break things if I formed an attachment to them. To teach me a lesson about dependence. And in a way it set me free, although I really hated him for it at the time. But now …’ Jim twisted his fork in his hand, ‘now, if ever I form an attachment to something, to anything, I feel the need to break it myself.’

Ronny was clearly impressed. He looked around him, at the furniture, at the walls.

‘What kinds of things?’

‘All sorts of stuff. Cups. Clothes. Watches.’

‘And you still do it?’

Jim nodded. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no idea. I don’t bother analysing.’

‘But you should.’

Jim shook his head.

‘No, really, you should. It’s interesting.’ Ronny frowned for a moment and then continued. ‘By rights you should’ve grown up to really treasure things. In fact, by rights you should’ve become a real hoarder. Don’t you think?’

Jim was happy to accept this theory, but he wouldn’t think about it.

‘Look …’ Ronny took something from his pocket and unfolded it, ‘I got this from your neighbour.’

‘What is it?’

‘A pamphlet. It mentions the black rabbits.’

Jim began eating again. ‘And so?’

‘For a second back there I thought you’d gone and made it up.’

Jim stopped chewing. ‘Why would I have done that?’

‘To get me here.’

Jim’s stomach convulsed. ‘But why?’

Ronny shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I felt uneasy. Just for a split second, which was stupid.’

‘You said I had an honest face,’ Jim sounded pathetic, to himself. ‘You said it was an instinct.’

‘It is an instinct. That’s just my point. I was right about your face. This simply confirms it.’

Ronny tossed the pamphlet down on to the table, then stood up and went to the doorway to stare out at the sea. ‘Look, a tanker!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see the lights?’

Jim didn’t respond. He put down his fork. He’d lost his appetite. He felt very strange, all of a sudden, like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Not one bit.

For a second he wished himself inanimate. It was a knack he’d always had; the capacity to disengage himself from any situation, to empty his body and to go elsewhere. And for a fraction of a second he got his wish. He was no longer inside, but outside, and from outside he saw two men in a bare prefab by the brown sea. It should have been a simple image, thoroughly uncontentious. But it suddenly transformed, it was peeled like a banana, and while the outside had been fine, had been firm, the inside was soft and brown and bruised. The inside was marred and scarred and tarnished. Jim felt a profound, jarring sense of unease. Everything was curbed and complicated and twisted and blocked. Could this be right? Even from the outside, from the cold, cold outside, it all seemed so pleasureless.

He blinked and then looked around him, bewildered. He was back, he was back, but who was this man? What was this place? He put up a hand to his cheek, to his nose. He felt his own face. What am I playing at?

For a brief moment Jim questioned his own motivation and then, just as abruptly, he stopped questioning.

‘Ronny’, he said quietly, ‘what happened to all your stuff?’

‘My stuff?’

‘The box. The box you had.’

‘Ah!’ Ronny murmured, ‘I gave it away. I lost it.’

Jim shuddered. He didn’t know why. Suddenly, though, he was wide awake. His nose was tingling. It was getting cold. Cold outside. Cold. Cold inside.

8

As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been in Southampton for eight weeks taking care of her grandmother, who had suffered from a minor stroke three months before and was now fresh out of hospital and finding her feet back at home.

Lily’s mother, Sara, was taking care of the farm in his absence. Luckily, the farm pretty much looked after itself, because Sara was in a state of flux. She was forty-two and had shed over four stone during the previous year. A yeast allergy. When she’d avoided bread and buns and all those other yeasty temptations – the pizzas, the doughnuts, the occasional half pint of stout – the weight quite literally fell away. She’d been prone to extended attacks of thrush before, and now that had cleared up too, which was definitely an added bonus.

She was a new woman.

They had forty boar altogether. Which wasn’t many, actually. But the market for them had become increasingly lucrative over recent years. They were organic. They were shot at the trough. One minute they were gorging, the next they were dead. Quick as anything. The other boars took the shootings phlegmatically, each one just as keen to shove in their shoulder and take another’s place.

And in that respect, Lily felt, they were just like people.

Lily enjoyed the boars. She preferred them to pigs. They were hairier and even less genteel. They were bloody enormous. They were giant bastards. But they could be fastidious. They could smarm and twinkle if the mood took them.

Pigs, though, she’d observed, and with some relish, had very human arses. Like certain breeds of apes. Big, round bottoms. And they tiptoed on their trotters like supermodels in Vivienne Westwood platforms. But oh so natural. Boars were less human and they were less sympathetic, but they were so much more of everything else. They were buzzy and rough and wild.

Sara didn’t like Lily. Lily was not likeable. It was a difficult admission for a parent to make, but Lily was a bad lot. She was rough and she had no soft edges. She’d led a sheltered life. She’d been born premature and had lain helpless and bleating in an incubator for many months before they could even begin to consider taking her home.

And there were several further complications; with her kidneys, parts of her stomach, her womb. Things hadn’t entirely finished forming. Nothing was right. She was incomplete. So fragile.

And the bleeding. Her blood would not clot. Not properly. Even now, mid-conversation, her nose might start running, her teeth might inadvertently nick her lower lip, her nail might catch her cheek, her arm. Blood would trickle and drip, then gush, then flood. It wouldn’t stop. There were never any limits with Lily. There was never any sense of restraint or delicacy.

She was an old tap, a creaky faucet, she was an overflow pipe that persistently overflowed. She would ooze, perpetually. She seemed almost to enjoy it. She was a nuclear-accident baby. She was improperly sealed. She was all loose inside. She was slack. Thin. Pale. Blue-tinged. She was puny.

At first they’d thought they’d lose her. They’d prepared themselves. They’d almost bargained on it. They were on tenterhooks, year after year, just waiting for the life to be extinguished in a flash or a spasm or a jerk or a haemorrhage.

But Lily didn’t die. Her own particular brand of puniness was of the all-elbow variety. All-powerful. It burgeoned. It brayed and it whinnied. It charged and trampled. It essentially ran amok.

Her body remained weak but her mind hardened. She got stronger and stronger and crosser and crosser and wilder and wilder. She needed no one. And yet they’d made so many accommodations! They’d changed from an arable farm to a pig farm and finally to boar. Boar were less trouble. Less time-consuming. They’d stiffened themselves for some kind of terrible impact, but the impact never came. It never came. And so things began to fray. Slowly, imperceptibly. Down on the farm.

Sara, staring but never seeing, looking but never focusing, tried to search out probable justifications for Lily’s obnoxiousness, but she could find none. She searched her own heart. She wished Lily would do the same. But Lily wouldn’t. She didn’t. Not ever. And yet Lily had her own moral set-up, her own fears and beliefs, which were complex, abundant, comprehensive. They were simply well hidden. Like potatoes. Several feet under.

She worshipped a deity. It was her secret. The deity had a special name. It was called The Head. It survived in spirit but had been born and had died on one long, still night in 1982. An August night. So it made perfect sense that August should become the month that Lily set apart to celebrate The Head with some special rituals of her own making. She wasn’t unduly creative, usually, but in August she made an exception. In August she cut a neat incision on her arm with a piece of wire from the boar pens. Special wire. Then she killed one of the hens and blamed it on a fox.

Fox must’ve done it.

With the blood from the hen, and with her own blood, she soaked the earth behind the yew tree where she pretended that The Head had been buried. But The Head had not been buried there. It had been taken away by her father and incinerated, in all probability. Although they’d never discussed it.

The Head. A freak. Lily was five and had witnessed its birth. A reliable sow from the old herd had been mated with a boar. The farm’s first boar. They’d built a special enclosure just for him. It had been an experiment. Her father had wanted the best of both worlds. He’d called it ‘toe-dipping’. And sure enough, the sow had delivered eight healthy young, but then The Head had come, last of all, and it had taken the mother with it. Like Shiva. God of destruction.

Lily didn’t get a good look at it, initially. Her father had tried to hide it. He’d tossed it aside and kicked straw over it, like he did with all the stillborn babies whenever Lily was in attendance. But then he’d been obliged to run into the house to call a vet when the mother began struggling, so Lily had taken her chance to inspect the freak as it lay caked and smothered in its musty tomb of hay and grass.

When she pulled its cover aside, so tentatively, what had she seen? She’d seen a head – extended, elongated – and the remainder of a body; like a tiny, moist mitten. The body of a baby rat. Or a gerbil. No tail though. But it had lived! She knew it lived. Its mouth moved. Its eyes were as round and as trusting as a puppy’s. Its skin was pale and soft and glossy like blancmange. She wanted to touch it but her father returned, yelled at her and then sent her indoors.

The next day she could find no sign of it. The Head had gone. And she knew in her gut that he had done it in. Her own father. But The Head did not go, ultimately, because it infiltrated Lily’s dreams. It inked up her mind like an octopus. And it felt, strangely, as though there had been a space, a special gap in her imagination which was only just big enough to be inhabited by this particular creature. As though the creature had known that she lacked something. As if it had known that she needed it to feel complete. It satiated her. It became a deity. And so Lily celebrated it, and in celebrating it, she celebrated, however lopsidedly, her own sweet self.

Naturally, also, she blamed herself. And her father. She should have saved it. The Head. If only she could have touched it. If only, if only. It had needed understanding but it had received none. While the mother pig lay dying, Lily had watched coldly as the babies all struggled to suckle. They were not pigs and they were not boars. They were little, hairy hybrids. Striped. Distinctive. Cute, certainly, but neither one thing nor the other. Lily despised them. The Head did not consider suckling. He was looking for understanding, not food. He was set apart. The world would have different standards for him. For him things were much more complex. For Lily, also.

Nature was a hard taskmaster, Lily realized. That night she witnessed nature, nurture and then – the final blow – nothing. Lily alone grieved for The Head. She’d learned that nobody loved freaks. Not Dad, not Mum. No one loved freaks. Only she loved them. That was her role. And when The Head told her in a dream that she too was a freak, on the inside, and that the only reason Daddy didn’t kill her was because he hadn’t noticed what a freak she was yet, and that Mummy hadn’t caught on either, Lily saw no reason to disbelieve him.

But what if they did see? What was to stop them from covering her with straw? From getting rid of her? And acting afterwards like none of it had ever happened? What was to stop them?

Lily grew furtive. She grew stealthy.

She’d seen Jim. She’d noticed that he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He always wore a hat. Hiding something, she’d supposed. No hair. She imagined that he was ill, with leukaemia. He looked sick. Too pale. Always alone. Bent over like an old man, his body withered. She watched him. Nothing escaped her. She gathered information because it might come in handy, one day. You could never tell.

Sara was in the kitchen leaning against the Aga drinking hot Vimto when Lily arrived home, soaking wet. She demanded to know what was up. Her daughter should have been at college all afternoon, not dawdling on the beach. Lily couldn’t face a confrontation.

‘Here’s what happened,’ she said, licking the salt from her fingers. ‘I met this man down by Shellness Hamlet. Totally naked. He’s renting one of the prefabs.’

‘You mean the bald one?’

‘No. The bald one doesn’t use the beach. He keeps to himself. This guy was fat and smelled of fish. Anyhow, I told him he shouldn’t be allowed to walk on a public highway totally starkers.’

Sara frowned. ‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t get my point. He was heading down to the sea for a dip. But then I noticed that he’d gone and left his prefab door wide open. I was cycling past, so I couldn’t help seeing that all over the floor were these pictures of naked ladies. And I don’t mean just naked, I mean weird. Things stuck up their arses and everything. Animals.’

‘My God.’

‘Exactly. So I confronted him about it and he said it was none of my business. I didn’t like the look of him. I mean, he was naked. I thought he might turn nasty so I jumped into the sea to avoid him.’

Even Sara found this last bit difficult to comprehend.

‘You jumped into the sea? Why didn’t you just ride home?’

‘I dunno. I was angry, I suppose. He’s a sicko. This is a small place. There’s the nudist beach, which attracts the worst kind of people anyway. And now there’s this man. Attracted by the nudity. You know? Like this is a sewer. Our home.’

Sara shook her head. ‘It’s not good, certainly.’

‘It’s terrible.’

‘I don’t want you going down there again.’

‘Oh no,’ Lily smiled at this, her eyes icy, ‘no one stops me from going where I want to go and doing what I want to do. No bloody pervert, anyway.’

Sara felt vexed by Lily’s moral certainty. ‘Go and get changed. You’ll catch your death.’

Lily had dripped a puddle on to the kitchen flags. She held up her hands. Her knuckles were purple with cold.

‘I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,’ she said piously. ‘I’m not suggesting that for a moment. But what I am saying, though, is that one thing leads to another.’

She sounded just like her father.

‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,’ Sara said staunchly, ‘but what I am saying is that enough’s enough. My daughter is seventeen. She has a right to travel on a public highway without encountering this kind of thing.’

Luke was fully dressed. It was hard to believe that he would even consider walking a public highway stark naked.

‘Maybe you should step inside for a moment.’

He pulled the prefab’s door wide. Sara saw the picture of the woman with the high breasts. The woman, she noted, was not particularly attractive, which was good, somehow. Even so, she stood her ground. ‘No. I can’t stay.’

Lily was right. He did smell of fish.

Luke scratched his head. What should he do? Trouble was the last thing he’d expected here. He’d come for the emptiness. He’d come for an end to people and their associated burdens and stresses.

‘Lily arrived home soaking wet,’ Sara continued.

Luke nodded. ‘She jumped into the sea. I was very surprised.’

Sara shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Luke seemed harmless. But it was the harmless ones, she told herself, who were the real danger. Was that logical?

‘The thing is …’ she cleared her throat, ‘most of the people who live around here were upset about the nudist beach. It was a concession to the Hamlet.’ Sara pointed, uselessly, because it was pitch dark now. ‘I mean, the fenced-off chalets. And in general the rest of us don’t have that much to do with them. They tend to come and go. Summer weekends mainly. They aren’t what I’d call the community proper.’

‘And the prefabs?’

‘Pardon?’

‘This handful of prefabs. Are we the community proper?’

Sara frowned. Luke was thinking how gorgeous she was. If Sara had suspected, a feather could have felled her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly, ‘for some reason we tend to see them as separate.’

She thought for a moment. ‘I suppose that’s illogical, really.’

‘It is illogical.’

‘There’s the boatmaker at the end of the line. Two along. He’s permanent. And then there’s the artists down to the left. But they winter in Ibiza.’

Sara felt like she wanted to sneeze. Powerfully. But her nose was clear.

‘And next to me,’ Luke added, ‘is Jim.’

Jim.

‘You mean the sick one?’

‘He isn’t sick. It’s alopecia. It’s a condition. You lose all your body hair.’

‘Oh.’

‘He’s a nice guy. He keeps my cigarettes for me.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I gave up smoking, but I’ve entrusted him with a packet just in case. I’m actually purifying. That’s why I’m here. I’m downloading.’

Purifying? Downloading?

Sara stared at the picture again. Luke smiled. ‘My ex-wife.’

‘Really?’

She blushed. Luke noticed. He found it rather touching.

‘The only thing I don’t understand,’ Sara said, after a short pause, ‘is why her sandals are unfastened.’

Luke gazed at Sara with a sense of real wonder. And then he said, so softly that she could hardly hear him, in a whisper, ‘Is it you?’

Sara blinked rapidly. ‘Is who me?’

He continued to gaze at her, like his face was illuminated from the inside by a high-watt bulb. The glow of it made her step backwards, although she felt in no way intimidated.

‘We’ve never met before,’ she murmured. ‘I’m me. I’m Sara.’

And then, as if to contradict everything, a wild laugh flew out of her, so quickly, so unexpectedly, that it had filled each and every corner of the room before her own slow hand could move to mask her lips.

9

Jim found Ronny on the beach. Ronny was surrounded by several large piles of shells. It was six a.m.

‘What are you doing?’

Ronny was engrossed. He spoke slowly. ‘You know, one minute I was just sitting here, watching the sea, and the next I was sorting out these shells.’

‘Sorting them? What for?’

‘Into families. Into colours.’

Jim sat down. He took one shell from one of the piles and one from another. He held them next to each other. ‘I see no difference.’

Ronny inspected Jim’s two shells. ‘Then you aren’t looking.’

Jim put the shells back down. ‘So what will you do with them once they’re all sorted?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps you could create something.’

‘Like what?’

‘People cover wine bottles in them. Or they make shell frogs or shell dolls in shell dresses.’

Jim watched as Ronny picked up the two shells he had just put down.

Ronny displayed them to him. ‘You put these back on the wrong piles. Couldn’t you tell?’

Jim focused on the shells again. Ronny held them in his left palm. Jim noted, once more, that Ronny’s fingers were strangely waxy at their tips, but also that his wrist had been lacerated. Scars as thick as pale maggots, long scars, nosed out from the dark shelter of his cardigan.

‘Maybe there is a difference,’ he said, in a spirit of compromise, although if there was then it was so slight that he could hardly detect it. Ronny nodded, gratified.

The squeal of seagulls alerted Jim to the arrival of a woman and a man on a distant section of the beach. They were disrobing. Jim observed them, unobtrusively, from the corner of his eye. Ronny continued to sort the shells, oblivious. The couple undressed completely and then ran into the sea. The cold made the woman yell and the man laugh. Ronny looked up.

‘Are they naked?’

‘That’s the nudist beach. There’s a sign over there to say exactly where the nudist zone begins and ends.’

‘Ah,’ Ronny peered over. ‘I was wondering what that said.’

‘Why?’ Jim picked up a random shell and placed it gently on to one of Ronny’s piles. ‘Can’t you read?’

‘I can read,’ Ronny said, carefully removing the shell and placing it on to another pile. ‘It’s just that I prefer to read only certain types of lettering.’

‘Certain types?’

‘I met someone once who worked in printing and graphics. She told me how there were certain kinds of letters that made you feel happy.’ He looked into Jim’s face. ‘You think that’s reasonable?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on lettering.’

‘Well, there’s a particular kind of lettering that’s apparently very friendly. And because of the shape of the letters – their roundness, their whole design – they can’t help but make you feel cheerful when you read them. They use them a lot in adverts to make people feel good about certain products.’

‘I never knew that.’

Jim was fanning at the beach with his hand, shifting shells aside and revealing the sand below.

‘How about,’ Ronny said, ‘you clear a space about as big as a table and then I lay out my shells on it.’

‘Like a picture?’

‘No,’ Ronny spoke gently, but very seriously, ‘not like a picture, like a table.’

Jim sensed something contract. His face. His mouth. His chest. He felt a dart of panic. Was it a sickness? Then he realized that he was not in pain. It was not uncomfortable. It was simply a smile. A smile. He was smiling. It was nothing to worry about.

It was a real smile and it had started off from somewhere deep down inside him, somewhere numb next to his breast-bone. He tentatively touched the spot where the smile came from with his index finger as he shifted forward, clumsily, to clear a patch on the beach. It was all very sudden and rather peculiar. He looked around him, squinting, like he was all at sea in familiar territory.

10

Nathan had received three letters and he hadn’t responded to any of them. The first came from the authorities, the second from a lawyer, and the third was from a young woman whose name he did not recognize. Connie. An old-fashioned name. It made him think of lavender and starch and thimbles. But her writing was bold, and her demands – which she clearly thought reasonable – struck Nathan as entirely unfeasible. So that was that.

Each time Nathan received one of these letters, he took it to work and secreted it into a special file, a private file that nobody else ever accessed. He didn’t stop and think about why he had done this. Why did he take something so personal from his own private arena and carry it, so brazenly, into such a public one?

Possibly he did it to avoid a confrontation with Margery. In some respects, where information was concerned, where the past was concerned, she was his enemy, she was his inquisitor, his conscience. He had allowed her to enter his home, his life, his bed. But he would not offer her a window into his past. His past was a graveyard that he did not visit. His past was a cemetery full of dirt. Nothing lived there.

The letters found a home in Nathan’s Lost Property Kingdom. In his quiet folder they found an appropriate, a gentle and unobtrusive resting place. They snuggled comfortably up against pictures and scraps and other fragments. They had been opened, digested, closed again. They had offered up their information. They had made requests – unfulfilled – but that was not their responsibility. Like butterflies, they had spread their wings – all gaudy glory – and then they had softly closed them. That had to be enough.

The letters referred to a lost friend, a lost soul. They concerned a stranger whom Nathan had once known. But they had no bearing, now, on anything. That part of his life was gone, was lost. It was so private that it was not even private any more. And that should have been an end to it. But like a child with a scab Nathan felt compelled to pick, to poke, to ponder. He nudged at the scab but he refused to contemplate the wound just under. He came back to the file; once, twice, many times. He couldn’t drop it.

And then he did drop it. He was discovered, one night, after hours, paging through this private document. It had slipped, it had fallen. Its contents were exhumed. They looked curious in bright light. The letters, the photographs; polaroids, mainly.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Laura had said, squatting down to help Nathan gather up his past, scooping up his secrets, his life, ‘the things people leave behind?’

Nathan had nodded. He’d muttered something. But he’d been flustered. He had given himself away. He sensed it. And he simply hadn’t felt right with Laura after that. In fact he felt wide open. A moth with its wings pinned, under the microscope. A girl with her legs spread, no knickers.

And Margery would have said, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might actually have wanted to be discovered? Have you even considered that possibility, Nathan?’

Margery would have said that. So he didn’t mention it to Margery. He didn’t mention the letters. And when the girl arrived, out of the blue, he didn’t mention her either. She called herself Connie.

‘You know what Connie’s short for?’ she’d asked, following him upstairs, and then not waiting for his reply. ‘It’s short for Constance. But I’m not in the slightest bit constant by nature.’

‘Except in this matter, it seems,’ Nathan said, prickling with resentment.

‘Yes,’ she took a deep breath and then looked around her at Nathan’s living room, ‘but I didn’t really feel like I had much choice.’

Nathan was relieved that Margery had gone after breakfast. Sometimes, on Saturdays, they spent the morning in bed together.

‘Have a seat.’

He pointed at the sofa.

‘Thank you.’

She sat down. He saw her eyes take in every detail. She looked like an angel, literally, with short, strawberry blonde, kinky hair and a child’s face. Skin like a macaroon. She was tiny. Barely five foot. Little hands, little feet. Breasts you could fit into an egg-cup.

But Nathan had no interest in angels. And he mistrusted small people. Especially women. They were usually aggressive, like terriers, yapping for attention. Yet when Connie spoke she did not yap. She leaned forward and slipped her two hands between her knees. ‘So you got my letter after all?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t answer it.’

‘I had nothing to answer for.’

Connie frowned at this. ‘Answer for? Why do you say that?’

Nathan sat down, stiffly.

‘Look,’ he said, after an edgy silence, ‘Ronny was my brother. But I haven’t spoken to him in a long while. Ten years or more. I just can’t help you.’

Connie didn’t blink. In a flash she said, ‘Well, I suppose if you did know where he was then you’d be breaking the law. You’d be concealing a felon.’

‘Exactly.’

Nathan paused. ‘And the only reason I knew he’d run away from prison was because the police contacted me. Just after. But it’s not even as if I could conceal him. He’s dead to me. It’s as though he’s dead,’ Nathan smiled grimly, ‘and how could I conceal a dead person?’

Connie’s head jilted. ‘People have managed it. In the past.’

Nathan thought this comment throwaway – which it was – but also morbid and inappropriate. He grimaced. Connie digested his expression. She was feeding off him, he could tell. He hated that sensation. He resented it, sorely. Without thinking, he covered his mouth with his fingers so that she could not see it. Then he realized what he was doing and uncovered it again. He had nothing to hide.

Connie wanted to get to grips with Nathan. She needed a handle. There was something so tender about him, something gentle, and yet he behaved so abrasively. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know what Ronny did. I only have his letters.’

Nathan cleared his throat. ‘I have no interest in any letters. I have no interest in Ronny. Or in this.’

Connie sighed, then said softly, ‘He must have done something so terrible …’

Nathan scratched his neck. Connie noticed a heat rash near his collar.

‘Water under the bridge,’ he said.

After an interval Connie said brightly, ‘I’m an optician, incidentally.’

Nathan stopped scratching. ‘What was that?’

‘I said I’m an optician.’

Nathan smiled thinly. ‘How does that relate to anything?’

She was a crazy angel. A crazy angel-optician.

Connie laughed. ‘You don’t know anything about me. Why the fuck should you want to help a complete stranger?’

Nathan stared at her intently. He hadn’t expected her to swear. She’d surprised him.

‘But you think I might consider helping an optician?’

In a flash he was flirting. It was out of character.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. It’s been hell for me, too,’ she said, apropos of nothing, not smiling any more, but suddenly tragic. Nathan was taken aback. Tragedy, at this juncture, was the last thing he’d expected. His spine straightened. She was slick.

And because she was slick she saw how her change in tone had affected him. Nathan withdrew again, into himself. She felt a deep frustration. She didn’t want to manipulate. She simply wanted to come clean. ‘The way I see it, Nathan,’ she said curtly, ‘we’re in pretty much the same position. You don’t want to encounter your brother again and I have no particular desire to see him. I simply have an obligation to fulfil.’

Nathan nodded, but his voice was tight. ‘You said in your letter that your father had died.’

Connie winced. She was still raw.

‘Five months ago.’

‘And he had some kind of a relationship with my brother?’

‘He was involved in a committee, a government committee that was drawing up a report on prison reform. He was a barrister, originally. He did all this charitable stuff after he retired. Anyhow, he met a wide selection of prisoners during the enquiry and he must have met your brother at some point, because they became acquainted. They became friends.’

‘Why did he do that?’

Nathan was talking to himself. Connie didn’t understand. ‘Why did he do what?’

‘Why did he befriend Ronny? Ronny doesn’t understand …’ Nathan corrected himself. ‘I mean he didn’t understand. About friendship. I still get hate letters. From total strangers. I’ve not seen him for almost ten years. I’ve moved house twice. But still they find me.’

‘That’s scary.’

‘Yes it is.’

Connie had stopped glowing. When she’d come in she’d been glowing. But not now. She looked tired. Washed out.

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘my father saw fit to leave Ronny a bequest in his will. Money, basically. A nice amount.’

‘A nice amount.’ Nathan parroted, aimlessly.

Connie’s eyes tightened. ‘Do you want to know how he died?’

She was suddenly vengeful, like she needed to prove something. Her tragedic legitimacy, her righteousness. Nathan said nothing.

‘He was waiting on the platform at Gravesend station for my mother. She’d been to Cheltenham races for the day with her lover. He was standing too close to the edge. Someone opened their carriage door before the train had slowed down. It hit him like a hammer. It killed him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We were very close.’

Connie rubbed her hands together, like her fingers were cold or her knuckles stiff.

‘But not close enough …’ she faltered. ‘I wasn’t close enough to know anything about Ronny. Nor did my mother for that matter. And it actually felt kind of creepy. Especially when we found out that he was in prison, and then, shortly after, that he’d absconded. It felt sort of …’

Her eyes scanned the carpet near her feet, as though she might see the word she sought enmeshed in its fibres. Instead she saw only an empty wine glass, an ashtray, a tea stain and, poking out from under the sofa, a slip of paper. She focused on this as she completed her sentence. ‘It felt almost threatening.’

For the first time during the interview Nathan felt pity for the girl. He imagined that before this trouble her life had been smooth and shiny as new Tupperware. It was no wonder she was shaken. He cleared his throat. ‘If I were you I’d forget about the money. Ronny was never particularly materialistic.’

Connie remained unmollified. ‘Unfortunately it’s a legal matter, not a private one. A large portion of the money Dad bequeathed was tied up in my practice, which has left me in a slightly tricky position …’

Nathan could see how this might be the case. ‘As a kid Ronny always broke things,’ he said, appearing to marvel in the memory of it. ‘I mean, he never grew attached to anything. He had no interest in money.’

‘He broke things?’ Connie’s voice was an echo, she wasn’t listening, she was trying to figure out what the slip of paper said. She saw an R and an O, an N and an N.

For some reason Nathan felt a touch of anxiety. ‘Not aggressively. It was never an aggressive act. Nothing like that.’

‘Actually, I’d really like you to see something.’

Connie put her hand into a leather satchel she’d been carrying and withdrew a bundle of letters. She removed a ribbon that tied them together. She offered them to Nathan.

‘What are they?’ He stared at them fearfully, as if they might spit or bite or combust. As though they stank.

‘Ronny’s letters.’

‘I already said that I have no interest in Ronny’s letters.’

Yet for an instant Connie appeared not to understand him and leaned forward further, proffering the letters until, as seemed inevitable, they slipped from her grasp and cascaded down on to the carpet, forming a small paper puddle at her feet. She swore and knelt down to gather them up again.

Nathan felt a curious sensation of déjà vu. He didn’t move. He remained seated. He wanted nothing to do with these papers. They contained more secrets, more facts, and he’d had enough of secrets and facts in the past. A gutful. Connie picked up the letters and then surreptitiously included among their number the tantalizing slip of paper. She glanced over at him as she did so. Nathan seemed in another world. He was unfocused. He didn’t appear to notice. She stuffed the letters back into her bag and then smiled, the very image of angel-innocence.

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