Somewhere East of Life

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.

Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

Brian Aldiss
Somewhere East of Life

Dedication

with love

to Felicity and Alex

bearers of fruits

from

Kidlington and Osh

Contents

Cover

Somewhere East of Life

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1 Friends in Sly Places

2 Murder in a Cathedral

3 Bishops Linctus

4 FOAM

5 Some Expensive Bullets

6 Soss City

7 ‘The Dead One’

8 Looking for a Postcard

9 A Head Among the Throng

10 ‘Time Had Run Out’

11 ‘The Madonna of Futurity’

12 A Crowded Stage

13 Richard and Blanche

14 In the Korean Fast Foot

15 Makhtumkuli Day

16 Burnell Speaks!

17 Glimpse of Airing Cupboard

18 The Friendship Bridge

19 A Toe and a Tow

20 PRICC Strikes

21 Subterfuge

22 A Brief Discourse on Justice

23 To the Krasnovodsk Station

24 Singing in the Train

25 Snow in the Desert

26 The Executioner

27 Squire Ad Libs

28 Open to the Public

29 ‘Newcastle’

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

When you reach the point of no return there’s nothing for it but to go back.

Old Goklan saying

Introduction

In this, the final novel of the Squire Quartet, time has moved on slightly.

We meet Roy Burnell beside his friend’s hospital bed. Burnell is employed by WACH, the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which looks after precious things liable to be lost or lost already.

But soon among those lost things is Burnell’s memory. A thief has criminally but adroitly stolen a year of it through an illegal e-mnemonicvision operation.

Burnell has lost twelve vital months of his past. He summons his wife, Stephanie, though memory of her, including all scenes of their love-making, has gone. She comes, and Burnell learns they have been divorced.

E-mnemonicvision is one among the many ‘visions’ generated by technology in this novel. Memories can now be stored electronically and re-used; thieves sell them as pornography.

Partly to escape imprisonment in the present, Burnell accepts a WACH consignment to document an ancient church in Georgia. The church reputedly contains an old and valuable ikon – the Madonna of Futurity.

So Burnell goes to Georgia. Much of it has become a battlefield – ‘Moral emptiness. That’s what the world’s suffering from,’ one character claims.

Burnell eventually finds the ikon. It has been broken into three pieces, all carefully preserved.

For reward, Burnell is sent on a new assignment to Turkmenistan, a place I had never visited. I hired a researcher, who turned up such interesting facts about this little-known country that I determined to go there. It happened that I had a learned friend, Dr Youssef Azimun, who at one time had served as Cultural Director for the new Turkmenistan government, but he had proved so popular that the President – more about him in a moment – had dismissed him. I flew with Youssef and a lady from the BBC called Sue to Ashkhabad, the capital city, almost the only city, since much of Turkmenistan is occupied by the Black Sand – the Kara-kum Desert.

The Soviets had ruled the five trans-Caspian states for nearly seventy years. Now they had gone, leaving behind a strange legacy. After an earthquake in 1948, the Soviets had repaired much of the city of Ashkhabad. Some streets were rather pretty, with rows of small trees and little gutters of water running to cool the temperature. Curiously, the air was full of nostalgic cuckoo calls. Though the Turks were Muslim, after the long Russian stay they downed their vodka like true Moscovites.

Unfortunately – or so I was told – the head of the KGB had stayed on, dubbing himself President, while the KGB rechristened themselves the People’s Popular Party. Plus ça change, etc …

President Niyazov had a gold-plated statue built of himself, which rotated slowly so that it always faced the sun. Though he was clearly dotty, he seemed well-enough liked. He gave the citizens free salt; later free electricity. Yet, there seemed to be no attempt to build up any infrastructure – no hospital, I was told. Instead, a row of five or six hotels, all very similar and all without telephones – vital instruments in the days before mobile phones.

In my hotel room, I had an armour-plated radio. You could tune to two stations, Moscow 1 or Moscow 2.

You had to be eccentric to not grow fond of Ashkhabad.

It was an ideal place for Burnell to operate in.

When Burnell eventually returns to Europe he meets Sir Thomas Squire – now British head of the WACH – in Frankfurt and Squire gives him some good advice – it is his métier: there is something to be said for losing a year of your memory.

We end the Squire Quartet on a note of uncertainty, as we began, with people on the move or disappearing. Just like real life.

One little item happened in Ashkhabad that I found no place for in the quartet, but I have never forgotten it.

The morning was so beautiful and I so young that I got dressed and came downstairs early. At the turn of the stair I met a cleaning woman brushing the steps.

She was withered but she gave me a lovely smile and then uttered the few English nouns she had finally found a use for. Swinging the broom as indicator, she said, ‘The green. The Sky. The sun. The street. The music!’

And that was it. A spirited attempt to communicate.

As is the Squire Quartet.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012

1
Friends in Sly Places

It seemed right to take flowers. A gesture had to be made. A nurse accepted them from Burnell and stuck them in a glass vase. Burnell went and sat by his friend’s bedside.

Peter Remenyi was still in a coma. He lay propped on pillows, looking the picture of health, his skin tanned, his jaw firm. So he had lain for two weeks, fed by drip, completely unaware of the outside world. Yesterday’s flowers dropped on a side table.

Burnell had escaped from the car crash with nothing more than a bruised arm. He visited the hospital every day. He had taken to reading aloud to Remenyi, from Montaigne or the poets, hoping that something might penetrate that deep silence into which his friend had fallen.

He stayed for half an hour. Rising to leave, he patted the patient’s cheek.

‘You always were a mad bugger at the wheel, Peter,’ he said, with some tenderness. ‘Stay put, old pal. Never give up the struggle. I’ll be back tomorrow. I have to go now. I have a date this evening with a beautiful lady, a star in the firmament of her sex.’

It was the evening of all evenings. The sun went down in glory, the lights came up in competition. Budapest’s Hilton Hotel, installed in the ruins of a sacred site, piled on extra floodlighting. A reception was being held by World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which several important functionaries from several important countries were attending.

Everything was on a lavish scale, slightly tatty only round the edges. Gipsy orchestras raced through their notes in every available space. Their violins swooped through czardas after czardas, just as drink poured down throat after throat. A Ukrainian dance group threw themselves about with abandon in the centre of the main ballroom.

Undeterred by wars in the Caucasus, the East, the Far East, and several points West, the guests paraded in finest array, embracing or snubbing one another. Powdered shoulders, jewels, and luxuriant moustaches were on display. Many smiled, some meant it. Suave waiters, Hungarian and Vietnamese, moved among the crowds, delivering messages, pouring Crimean champagne into ever ready glasses. Conversations surged and popped like the bubbles in the champagne. Some who talked looked over the shoulders of their partners, in search of escape; others moved in closer. Loving, lingering glances were exchanged. Formality increasingly gave way to something more physical. The most recent jokes circulated, political or scabrous in content. Gossip chased itself among the international guests, the potted palms.

The air-conditioned atmosphere, as time wore on, became charged with alcoholic fumes, excitement, innuendo, enzymes, exaggeration, assignations, assassinations of character, and the most fragrant of sweats. Couples started to slip away. And Burnell looked deep into the green eyes of Blanche Bretesche, breathing faster while trying to keep his usual cool.

He, she, and some of her friends, left the reception and went together into the warm night. Music came faintly to them. They climbed into taxis, to be whisked downhill and across the great glittering city of Budapest. Streets, shops, restaurants sped by. The extravagant elephantine Danubian city prospered, fat on arms sales and many wickednesses, as befitted the over-ripe heart of Europe.

Burnell never quite learned the names of all his noisy new friends. His senses were alert to Blanche Bretesche, to her eyes, her lips, her breasts. Blanche was Director of the Spanish Section of WACH. One of her friends – the one in full evening dress – directed them to a restaurant he knew in Maijakovszki Street, near the opera house. Here were more crowds, more musics.

The restaurant was neo-baroque, ornate inside and out. Though it was late, the place was crowded with a confusion of people, laughing, eating, drinking. Two inner courtyards were filled with tables. Burnell’s party found a free table in the second courtyard. Above them, along flower-draped balconies, a woman sang passionate Hungarian love songs. The man in evening dress, summoning a waiter, ordered wild game specialities, which were not available. Without argument, they settled for lecso all round, accompanied by mineral water and a red wine from Eger. Although the main point of the gathering was to enjoy each other’s company, the food was also excellent. The warm evening held its breath in the courtyard.

Saying little as usual, Burnell allowed his gaze to alight on the flower of Blanche’s face as she talked. The quick wit of her replies always pleased him. Her contributions to subjects under discussion were shrewd, often dismissive. He liked that. She was as much a citizen of the talk as any of the men, though they did not defer to her. While the conversation grew wild and ribald, it remained magically on course, contributing, like all friendly talk, to a general understanding.

When the question turned to a scientific paper of Blanche’s, he saw her quick look, sheltered under long dark lashes, turning more frequently to him, as if questioning. A signal flashed unspoken between them. Round the convivial table, between spates of talk, they applauded every song the resin-voiced woman sang, calling up to the balcony in acclamation, though they had scarcely listened to a note. And at two-thirty in the morning, Burnell summoned a taxi. The taxi carried him back through the scurrying town, with his right arm about Blanche Bretesche, to his hotel.

Even before he woke next morning, he was conscious of her warmth. He found himself lying on his stomach. Her arm was across his back. Turning his head cautiously, he was able to watch her sleeping. Happiness flooded him.

He had always admired the look of her, from the alert walk – much like a stalk, he thought – to the well-shaped intellectual head. With those closed green eyes went a dark colouring particularly to his taste, though her hair was now cut fashionably shorter than when they had first met, some six years ago. She had been Stephanie’s friend, and was about Stephanie’s age, thirty-four or so. Now she was his friend – truly a friend, trusting and direct.

Raising himself gently, he surveyed her sprawling body. Nothing was one quarter as beautiful as the female body, no sky, no landscape.

Blanche was calm about her lovemaking, not stormy. The affirmatives she had uttered still sounded in his ears. There was another sound now, in their shared room. Not merely the distant hum of traffic as it crossed the bridge from Buda to Pest. A fly buzzed against one of the window panes.

Cautiously, Burnell manoeuvred himself out from under that arm with its lashes of dark hair chasing themselves from mid-forearm to elbow. Padding over to the window, he opened it. The bluebottle, after raging against the pane a minute longer, was caught by the breeze and made its escape into the open air.

Perhaps it said to itself, ‘Ha, I figured my way out of that …’ But flies had no hold on truth. For all their countless generations born since glass was invented, they had never comprehended its nature, and so remained continually trapped by it.

When he turned back into the room, Blanche’s eyes were open.

‘All the time I was asleep, one of that woman’s songs was going through my brain. What do you think she was singing about? Did you understand a word of it?’

‘It would be the usual things,’ he said, closing the window. ‘Love betrayed, a starry night, a white glove dropped in a garden …’

She smiled. ‘I wonder what Neanderthals sang about, if they sang at all.’

‘Oh, I’d guess love betrayed, a starry night, and a white mammoth tusk dumped in the cave. Why?’

‘Some Catalan archaeologists have found an undisturbed cave in the mountains near Burgos, the home of early man. I’m interested in the way primates turned into men and women. When did speech develop, when did simple simian games of tig become elaborate human games with rules, and aggression codified. That kind of thing.’

He went towards the bed. ‘Who sang the first love song. Who invented the wheel. Why did the English invent marmalade from Seville oranges.’

She reached out and took his hand. ‘Talking of the English, Roy, come and screw me again, please, just a little, will you?’

‘There’s no breakfast for you until you let me.’

The breakfast was good too. They ate in the room, talking mainly of their work. WACH both brought them together and generally kept them apart. Burnell had recently been in Milan, documenting the restoration of the Duomo. He was due to report to his superior in Frankfurt, where WACH had its headquarters, in two days. Blanche was now mostly at her desk in Madrid, able to get out on field work infrequently. She had to catch a flight back to Spain the following day.

‘I speak German and Spanish – in fact, Castilian – more frequently than I do French. I don’t regard myself as particularly French any more. I belong to the Community.’

‘You’re an enlightened woman.’

‘Don’t be silly. I know you speak half a dozen languages, you footloose creature. Why didn’t you go back to England for your leave, instead of pottering about Europe? Do you like the German domination of the EU?’

‘I don’t mind it. It was inevitable. One reason I’m here and not in England is there’s something I want to check in the anthropological museum. No, whenever I go back to England … well, everything seems to come in quotes nowadays. It all seems old fashioned. You know, things maintained for tourists, like “The Changing of the Guard”. People still have, insist on, “toast and marmalade” for breakfast. They “drive down to the coast”. They go to “the RA private view” and in “the season” they attend what they still call “Royal Ascot”, despite all that’s happened to the royal family. My father still likes his “cup of tea”, and talks of Europe as “the Continent”. That kind of thing.’

She laughed over her second croissant. ‘They only do that kind of thing in exalted Burnell circles. Oh, I remember you dislike those circles, but they’re bred in you. That’s why you’re so self-contained. I like that, really. It’s quaint …’

He put a hand over hers and laughed with her. ‘Quaint! Yes. The French also have their traditions, if I remember correctly. Listen, my boss has a bungalow on Lake Balaton. I’ve got a hire-car. Let’s drive down to Balaton for the day. We can swim and sail. You can tell me about your latest paper. Come on.’

She smiled at him, with slight mockery. ‘You look a little more boyish than you did yesterday. And I feel a little more girlish. Is that a word? Girlish? There are several things I am supposed to do today. I could cancel them. Let me make a few phone calls …’ Setting down her coffee cup, she gave a sudden exclamation. ‘Oh, Roy, come to Madrid and live with me. I’m sure we’d be so happy, truly.’

He lowered his gaze. ‘You know I don’t speak Spanish.’

They drove through hectares of sunflowers to Lake Balaton. They had chosen a perfect day for the jaunt. At one point they passed a refugee camp, protected by razor wire. Hungarian and Croatian flags hung limply from flagpoles. They were past it immediately.

At a minor crossroads, Burnell slowed the car. This was where the crash had occurred which left Peter Remenyi in a coma. Both cars involved had been wrecked. No sign remained of the collision. He reminded Blanche that the previous summer, he, Remenyi, and another friend had gone horse-riding in the Alps, bivouacking most nights.

‘What did you read him today, when you were sitting with him?’

‘Oh, whatever’s to hand – just in case it gets through to him, wherever he is. Shelley. “Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators?”’

Blanche gave an appalled laugh. ‘Oh, that’s awful. Isn’t that a lament for someone dead?’

He speeded up again. ‘In this case, the nearly dead.’

The bungalow was situated in the diplomatic strip, away from the crowds. It proved to be a mansion built in ornate mock-art-nouveau style. Its verandah overlooked the blue waters of Balaton. They admired the frightful taste of its decor, joked about the garish nude paintings, sailed, swam, sunned themselves, and made love on the reindeer rug in the living-room to the music of Smetana. Although the forests and rivers the composer had celebrated were destroyed by pollution, his music remained pristine. The hairs of the rug came off on their damp bodies.

Sometimes she looked up at the mock-Mucha ceiling, sometimes he did.

At sunset, they strolled arm in arm to the nearest restaurant. Foal was on the menu, so they ordered foal.

As if an earlier conversation was in Blanche’s mind, she said, ‘Spain’s the most successful part of the Community, except maybe Sweden. Outside of Germany, that is. It’s a wonderful noble country. At least you might come and visit me, meet some of my friends. Drive down to Cordoba, meet the statue of Averroës.’

‘I hear Spain is rather autocratic, nowadays.’

‘Oh, that! They’ve banned this e-mnemonicvision craze, if that’s what you mean. EMV is treated as if it was – were, do you say? – the subjunctive? – a drug. I am inclined to agree. Violent videos were bad enough, but to experience other people’s actual memories – isn’t it a kind of rape? – it’s regarded as obscene in a Catholic state.’

‘You’ve never tried EMV? Properly used, it can be a good learning tool. I ran a bullet of Umberto Benjamin’s memories of cathedral building. It’s in the WACH library in Frankfurt. The insights were startling. It was as if for half an hour I really was Benjamin. EMV is mind talking to mind. There’s nothing like it.’

‘I would have guessed e-mnemonicvision would be too invasive for you.’

The waiter was pouring wine into their glasses, red and randy. As they toasted each other, Blanche said, ‘Mainly EMV is used for second-hand sex and misery and violence, not learning. I’m inclined to think it is demeaning to human nature.’ She laughed. ‘“If God had meant us to pry into other people’s minds, He’d have given us telepathy”…’

‘It may prove in the end to allow us better insights into others. God knows, we could use that. While you’re experiencing the false memory, you do seem to be the other person. You know the old Indian saying, “Don’t criticize your neighbour till you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins”.’

‘Well, I still prefer reading. Old fashioned of me, I know. I also think it’s an abuse that people – poor people – are forced to sell their memories. It’s selling your past, a new form of prostitution, worse than selling a kidney … Where’s that hunk of foal? I’m hungry.’

‘But lovers, exchanging memories …’

‘And becoming confused and neurotic. EMV is not a decade old and already it’s causing all kinds of psychoses. But not in Spain, happily.’

He saw it was time to change the subject. Besides, a violinist was sawing his way towards their table, eyes levelled at them along his instrument, a marksman aligning his sights on a target. A burst of ‘Elegaila’ was due. ‘Tell me more about your work. I’m so ignorant, spending my time in decaying places of worship. I’ve lost touch with the modern world.’

‘Lucky Roy! Well, my work is more interesting to me than its description would be. Let’s talk about you. I know you’ve got problems. We all have. You’ve heard about my mother’s lawsuit before. It goes on … It’s your quality of remoteness I like, do you understand? Everyone is so bloody engagé these days. To take a position, a stance. You don’t have a stance, do you?’

‘I’m ruled by circumstance. Blanche, I don’t know how you put up with me.’

‘I’m an idiot, that’s the reason.’ They laughed.

As the waiters began to load their table with plates, she began to talk about Spain, its recent past, its distant past. The full-bodied wine, the tender foal steak, the cry of the violin, robbed what Blanche was saying of its nuances.

Next morning, he drove her to Ferihagy airport. As they embraced and kissed each other goodbye, she said, ‘I’ll think of you – and remember we shall need more of one another very soon. Just bear my invitation in mind.’

‘Blanche – of course. Of course I will. It’s just …’

‘It’s still Stephanie, isn’t it?’ Lines of gathering frown appeared on her forehead. ‘I thought you might have stopped that foolishness.’

He shook his head, not in denial but in impatience with his own nature. The green eyes were suddenly luminous with anger.

‘Why don’t you bloody well forget Stephanie? She’s bloody well forgotten you.’

Then she was off, raising her boarding card above her head as she swept past the official at the entrance to the departures lounge. Elegant, in full control, moderately famous, one of the modern ladies of a united Europe.

He made his way up to the observation deck. Tall tails of planes like sails of yachts moved their insignia past his vision: Malev, Lufthansa, KLM, United British, EuroUnion, Singapore Airlines, SAS, Aeroflot, EuroBerlin, Alitalia, Bulgair, and her airline, her flight, Iberia, about to carry her back through Europe’s skies to the place where she lived and moved and spoke Castilian.

At last Burnell turned away. He jingled his keys abstractedly as he made his way to the short-term car park. Nothing for it now but the museum and old things, relics connected with death. His milieu.

He let self-hatred gnaw within him as he eased himself into the hired BMW.

Under genuine regret at Blanche’s departure, he tried to stifle some relief. Supposing he went to live with her, what then? What would he do? Find to do? Shouldn’t Castles in Spain – Châteaux en Asie, as the French called them – remain splendidly imaginary? What would it feel like to love, to have continuous intercourse with, another woman, while Stephanie remained as much part of his interior monologue as a separating language? He could ask himself the question even with Blanche’s physical presence still aromatically close. As he drove to the museum, he attempted a macrocosmic analogy. How could England ever become genuinely part of the European Community while its language kept the USA ever in mind?

By such linguistic artifice, he tried to distract himself from that ignoble sense of relief at Blanche’s departure. But self-knowledge is generally a traitor.

The dead were driving the living to the grave. The dead were represented by skeletons, frisky and grinning, unaware they were anatomically incorrect. The line of the living began with prelates in grand robes, the Pope in the lead. Following the prelates came a procession of merchants, hands on purses, then ordinary men and women, a soldier, then a prostitute in a low-cut, tight-laced dress; lastly, a crippled beggar bringing up the rear. Thus most ranks of medieval society were represented, together with inescapable gradations of decay.

This danse macabre had once formed an integral part of the stonework of the cathedral at Nogykanizsa. The slab on which it was carved had been saved when the cathedral was partially destroyed, to repose in the grandly named National Museum of Hungarian Anthropology and Religion.

‘Sorry, to do photographs is strickly forbidden,’ said the guide, seeing Burnell unzip his camera bag. ‘Better give it me your camera.’

She was a narrow bent woman in her fifties. A dewdrop pended at the end of her narrow nose. Her attitude suggested that nobody knew the trouble she’d seen, or that she was preparing to see in the near future. Her clothes – the nearest thing possible to a uniform – indicated that she neither shared nor approved the prosperity the new order of things had brought to her city.

She jangled her keys in best gaoler fashion. This part of the museum was officially closed for alterations, on the principle all museums adhere to, that some sections should always remain inaccessible. Only when Burnell had shown his World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage pass had he been reluctantly allowed entry.

He took a few measurements. In his black notebook he made notes and sketches. Could it conceivably be that the Pope was a representation of one of the sixteenth-century Clements whose portrait hung in the Uffizi in Florence? He made a more careful drawing of the papal figure. The frieze, severed and displayed on a bench, had suffered from weathering. Yet it was possible that the emblem carved on the Pope’s pocket represented the Castle of St Angelo, in which the pontiff Clement had been incarcerated. If so, Burnell had established an important connection hitherto overlooked.

Steering herself in her heavy shoes, the guide came to stare over Burnell’s shoulder. ‘It’s a disgust, der Todten Tantz. These skeleton, pah!’ She gestured towards the stone with an open hand.

‘Mortality – Christian stock-in-trade. But elegant rather than repulsive, to my mind.’

‘Repulsive, you say? Yes.’

He admired the way the leading Death gestured with some gallantry towards the open grave, its skull bizarrely decked with flags. The gesture could have been copied from a painting of skeletons disrupting a rural scene in a painting in the Campo Santo in Pisa. The helpful guidebook to the museum, published in Hungarian and German, attributed to the sportive Death the saying, ‘In this doleful jeste of Life, I shew the state of Manne, and how he is called at uncertayne tymes by Me to forget all that he hath and lose All.’

For a while, as Burnell measured and sketched, silence prevailed. The only sound was the footsteps of the guide, as she walked to the end of the gallery and back. She sighed in her progress, jangling her keys like a gaoler in a novel by Zola. The two were alone in the gallery, confined within the museum’s stone walls. The woman paused to stare from a narrow window at the city below. Then she called to her visitor from a distance, her voice echoing in the empty space.

‘Theme of Todten Tantz is much popular in Mittel Ages. In the stadt of Nogykanizsa, half of the population is wipe out by the Plague only one year after building of the cathedral. Only one year!’ She gave a harsh laugh, her larynx rattling in her throat. ‘Now we know better than this, praise be.’

Approaching Burnell step by step to punctuate her sentences, she launched into a discourse regarding the horrors of the Middle Ages. She concluded by saying, ‘Why you draw bad dead things? In those times was much misery here in Budapest. In these times now, everyone makes many money. Christianity and Communism, both is finish, forgotten. God and Marx – gone away! So the world is better place. People have more enlightenment than previous times.’ She sighed so that her breath reached Burnell. ‘I am old woman, of course – too late to benefit.’

It is always unwise to argue with guides. Burnell rejected both her assumption and her breath. ‘Can you really suppose people have become more enlightened? On what ground do you suppose that, madam? Have you forgotten all the fratricidal wars at present in progress on the fringes of Europe?’

The guide gave a wicked smile, pointing a large key at Burnell as if it were a gun. ‘We kill off all the Russians. Then the world is a better place. Forget about every bad things.’

Burnell closed the black notebook with a snap. ‘It’s the living who distress me, not the dead. Kindly let me out of here.’

Burnell took a light lunch in his hotel room. He ordered a small honeycomb, which he ate with butter and brown bread rolls, and goat’s cheese.

He could not but contrast the day with the happiness of the previous day with Blanche. Nevertheless, as he was never continuously happy – and did not expect to be – he was rarely continuously sad.

He enjoyed good health. Burnell in his mid-thirties was a muscular man of above average height who spent a good part of life outdoors. As a boy he had enjoyed riding, mainly on the family estate in Norfolk, while at school he had excelled at sport, cricket in particular. He had lost interest in such competitive activities after his mother’s death.

His expression was generally set, but he smiled readily. When he did so, he became almost handsome. There were women, including Blanche, who waited on that smile, so honest, so conceding of the world’s frailties. Burnell’s view of himself was harsh: he saw himself as a wanderer, without vision. In that, he seemed a typical man of his time, ‘The Era of the Question Mark’, as one political commentator had dubbed it. The dreadful inheritance of the twentieth century rumbled about everyone’s heads.

A major interest in Burnell’s life, perhaps strangely for such a passive nature, was travel. The sort of travel he engaged in on behalf of WACH hardly involved the idea of escape. His consignments involved him in the usual discomforts travellers experience, particularly those who travel alone: delay, disappointment, indifferent rooms, poor food, the insolence of petty officials, and sometimes even danger. Although Burnell gave no indication that he willingly embraced such discomforts, his friends observed how he volunteered for work in those parts of the world where such discomforts were most readily available. Italy, and Milan, had been for him, as he said, ‘an easy number’.

He scarcely realized that to his English and foreign friends he was already something of a legend. They saw him as the cool Englishman of tradition. Those who knew him in the field discovered his preoccupation with trivia: airline timetables, various states of the prints of Piranesi’s Carceri, the alcoholic strengths of various Hungarian raki, the perfumes used by whores, details of brickwork, barrel vaulting and buttresses, and the flavour of a samsa eaten in an ex-Soviet republic.

He was cool under fire and in love. He was kind in a weak way, though certainly never intentionally cruel to women. Being well born, he had a mistrust of others well born.

He had no vision. He regretted his divorce. He was cynical. But he ate his honeycomb with slow pleasure. Sitting in the sun by his window, he drank coffee and read the newspaper.

The main headline of the paper ran: ‘STAVROPOL AIRPORT BATTLE. First Use of Tactical Nukes: Crimea “Ablaze”.’ The accompanying photo consisted mainly of smoke and men running, like the cover of a lowbrow thriller.

There was as yet no admission by the EU that war had broken out in the Crimea. It was represented merely as a disagreement between Russia and the Ukraine. The disruptions would cease after various threats and admonitions from the EU Security Council. It was the form of words that that admonition would take which was currently being discussed in Brussels and Berlin.

He set the newspaper aside to gaze vacantly at the window. He admitted to himself he was feeling lonely. Blanche would be back in Madrid by now. Perhaps one of her many friends would have met her. She moved in cultivated circles. He looked at the photograph of his ex-wife on his bedside table, without seeing it. He just moved in circles.

In the afternoon, he visited Remenyi, still silent in his coma, and read to him as usual.

The grand steam baths under the Gellert Hotel were choked with bodies, male and female. Many of the bathers exhibited the bulk and the posture of wallowing hippopotami. Encompassing steam provided some kind of cloak for the torpid anatomies, while reinforcing a general impression of a bacchanalia or, more accurately, a post-bacchanalia.

The baths had been in use since Roman times; occupying Turks had enlarged them. Allowing himself his usual afternoon soak, Burnell reflected that little had changed since then. Everyone was taking it easy. The hairy stomachs surrounding him, the monumental buttocks, belonged to affluent members of Hungarian and European society. Next to him, Swedish was being languidly spoken. What with wars and trouble in the old Soviet Union republics, in the Caucasus and beyond the Caspian Sea, Swedes were prospering. Hungary was neutral, the Switzerland, the crooked casino, of Central Europe. It sold Swedish-made armaments to all sides with business-like impartiality.

Surveying hirsute figures wantonly reclining, Burnell thought, ‘That one could have made Pope; he has the nose for it. And there’s Messalina, with the cruel and creamy thighs, and that one could be Theodora, her blue rinse beginning to run a little in the heat. That little rat is Iago to the life … Blanche would be amused.’ It was Blake, it was Doré, it was also super-heating. He thought of Blanche’s nakedness, and was embarrassed to find an erection developing. He climbed from the sulphurous waters, wrapping himself with English discretion in a white towelling bathrobe.

On the way back to his room, Burnell encountered a lean bearded man clad only in a towel and hotel slippers. He was moving towards the baths, head forward in something between a slouch and a run, one eyebrow raised as if it were the proprioceptor by which he navigated. He and Burnell looked at each other. Burnell recognized the haggard lineaments, the eroded temples, the eyebrows. They belonged to a distant acquaintance from university days, Monty Broadwell-Smith.

Monty, eyebrow swivelling, locked on to Burnell at once.

‘Roy, old chap! How jolly to see you.’

‘Hello, Monty.’ Burnell knotted the bathrobe more tightly. Monty had been sacked from his post at the University of East Anglia some while ago. There had been a small scandal. Finances had gone missing. Burnell, not caring about the matter, had forgotten the details. ‘What are you doing in Budapest?’

‘Little private matter, old chum.’ He had a dated way of addressing people, smiling and nodding as he did so, as if agreeing with something off-stage. ‘Helping out a bit at what they call the “Korszinhaz”, the round theatre in the park. Scenery, you know. Well, scene-shifting. To tell the truth, only been here four days. Wandered round in a daze at first. Didn’t know where I was …’ He paused and then, seeing Burnell was about to speak, went on hastily, leaning a little nearer. ‘Between you and me, old boy, I’m here consulting a very clever chap, sort of a … well … a specialist. You see, something rather strange has happened to me. To say the least. I’d like to tell you about it, as an old friend. You still with WACH, I presume? Perhaps you’d care to buy us a drink? Fellow countryman and all that kind of stuff, compatriot … Excuse the towel.’

They went up to Burnell’s room. After opening the mini-bar, Burnell slipped into a shell-suit. He handed Monty a sweater to wear.

‘Fits me to a T,’ said his visitor. ‘You wouldn’t mind if I hung on to it, would you? Bit short of clothing, to tell the truth – here in Budapest, I mean. Some crook nicked all my luggage at the airport. You know what it’s like … They’re a dodgy lot.’

Burnell poured two generous Smirnoffs on the rocks. They raised their glasses to each other.

‘That’s better.’ Monty Broadwell-Smith sighed. He licked his lips. ‘I’ll come straight to the point, old pal. “Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory …” So says the poet. I expect you remember the quotation. But let’s suppose there’s no memory in which those soft voices can vibrate …’

Burnell stood by the window, saying nothing, contemplating Monty with distrust.

‘I’m forty, or so I believe. Four days ago, I found myself in an unknown place. You’ll never credit this. I found myself in an unknown place – not a clue how I got there. Absolutely at a loss, mind blank. Turned out that I was here, in Budapest. Budapest! Never been here before in my natural.’

He was already contradicting himself, Burnell thought. If he were lost, how had he known his luggage was stolen at the airport?

‘So now you’re staying in the Gellert?’ Burnell spoke challengingly, determined not to be touched for Monty’s air fare to England. Knowing something of the man’s background, he felt no particular inclination to help.

Monty leaned back in his chair so as to look as much the invalid as possible. ‘Terrible state poor old England’s in. Read the papers. To what do you ascribe it, Roy?’

‘Neglect of education, lack of statesmen. What’s your problem?’

‘Couldn’t agree more. I suppose that’s why someone like you has to scout round for a job abroad?’

‘No doubt. What’s your problem?’

‘It’s very serious. I know you’re a sympathetic chap. I’m attending the Antonescu Clinic. Mircea Antonescu is a foremost specialist, right at the cutting edge of psycho-technology. Well, he’s Romanian. They’re a clever race …’ He gave Burnell a sidelong glance under the eyebrow before hurrying on. ‘I’m not staying at the Gellert. Couldn’t afford it. Too expensive for someone like me. I’m renting a cheap room in Pest – view of the gasworks, ha ha … You see, Roy, old pal, this is the bottom line: I’ve lost ten years of my memory. Just lost them. Wiped clean. Can’t remember a thing.’

Burnell uttered a word of condolence. Monty looked slightly annoyed.

‘Perhaps you don’t understand. The last thing I can really remember is, I was thirty. Ten and a bit years have passed since then and I’ve absolutely no notion what I was doing all that time. No notion at all.’

‘How terrible.’ Burnell suspected a catch was coming, and was loath to commit himself.

‘FOAM. That’s Antonescu’s term. FOAM – Free Of All Memory. He sees it as a kind of, well, liberty. There I beg to differ. You know what it feels like to lose your memory?’

Despite himself, Burnell was interested.

‘It’s like an ocean, old chum. A wide wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have disappeared, sunk without trace. I suppose I couldn’t have a top-up of vodka, could I?’ He held out his glass.

As he poured, Burnell admitted he had seen Monty once or twice during the previous ten years, before his sacking; perhaps he could help to fill the gaps in his memory. Monty Broadwell-Smith made moderately grateful noises. There was no one else he could turn to in Budapest.

When asked if his memory-loss was caused by a virus, Monty professed ignorance. ‘No one knows – as yet at least. Could have been a car crash, causing amnesia. No bones broken if so. Lucky to be alive, I suppose you might say. But what’s going to happen to me, I’ve no idea.’

‘Your wife isn’t with you?’

Monty slapped his forehead with his free hand. A look of amazement crossed his face. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Don’t say I was married!’

He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater, he shook Burnell’s hand. The next morning, Burnell went round to the Antonescu Clinic as he had promised. Monty wanted one of the specialists at the clinic to question Burnell, in order to construct a few points of identification. Monty suggested that this would help towards a restoration of his memory.

Burnell had agreed. He felt ashamed that he had so grudgingly given his old sweater to a friend in distress.

2
Murder in a Cathedral

‘Nothing to worry about, old chum,’ Monty Broadwell-Smith had said. ‘They’re masters of the healing art.’

The Antonescu Clinic was not as Burnell had imagined it. Cumbersome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, built of stone expressly quarried to grind the faces of the poor, lined a section of Fo Street. Secretive Hungarian lives were lived among heavy furniture in these blocks. They parted at one point to permit entrance to a small nameless square.

The buildings in the square huddled against each other, like teeth in a too-crowded mouth. Instead of dentistry, they had suffered the exhalations from lignite still burnt in the city. A nicotiney taint gave the façades an ancient aspect, as if they had been retrieved from a period long before the Dual Monarchy.

The exception to this antiquity was a leprous concrete structure, a contribution from the Communist era which announced itself as the Ministry of Light Industry. Next to it was wedged a small shop hoping to sell used computers. Above the shop, when Burnell ascended a narrow stair, he found a huddle of rooms partitioned out of a loft. A dated modernity had been achieved with track-lighting and interior glass. Tinkling Muzak proved the Age of the Foxtrot was not entirely dead.

Burnell sat in a windowless waiting-room, looking at a post-Rothko poster which displayed a large black cross with wavery edges on a dark grey background.

A man with a thin cigar in his mouth looked round the door, sketched a salute in greeting and said, ‘Antonescu not here. Business elsewhere. Meet Dr Maté. Maté Joszef, Joszef Maté.’

He then entered the cubicle and proffered a long wiry hand.

In jerky English, Dr Maté explained that he was Mircea Antonescu’s second-in-command. They could get to work immediately. The best procedure would be for Burnell to ascend to a room where a series of questions concerning the forgotten years of Monty Broadwell-Smith could be put to him and the answers recorded electronically.

‘You understand me, Dr Burnell? Here using most modern proprietary methods. Dealing extensively with brain-injury cases. Exclusive. Special to our clinic. To produce best results in Europe, satisfied customers …’ Maté’s thick furry voice was as chewed as his cigar. As he bustled Burnell from the room, his haste almost precluded the use of finite verbs.

Burnell was shown up a spiral stair to a room with a skylight and technical equipment. Here stood a uniformed nurse with grey hair and eyes. She came forward, shaking Burnell’s hand in a friendly manner, requesting him in good German to remove his anorak.

As he did so, and handed the garment to the woman, he caught her expression. She was still smiling, but the smile had become fixed; he read something between pity and contempt in her cold eye.

At once, he felt premonitions of danger. They came on him like a stab of sorrow. He saw, seating himself as directed in an enveloping black chair, what clear-sighted men sometimes see. His life, until now modestly successful, was about to dip into a darkness beyond his control. In that moment there came to him a fear not for but of his own existence. He knew little about medical practice, but the operating table and anaesthetïc apparatus were familiar enough, with black tubes of gas waiting like torpedoes for launch. On the other side of the crowded room, e-mnemonicvision equipment stood like glum secretary birds, their crenellated helmets ready to be swung down and fixed to the cranium. These birds were tethered to computerized controls, already humming, showing their pimples of red light.

Maté bustled about, muttering to the nurse, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray.

‘If you’re busy, I will come back tomorrow,’ Burnell said. The nurse pushed him gently into the depths of the chair, telling him soothingly to relax.

‘Like wartime,’ said Maté. ‘Still too many difficulties. Too many problems. Is not good, nicht gut. Many problems unknown.’ Switching on a VDU, he biffed it with the heel of his left hand.

‘Large inflation rate problems, too high taxes … Too many gipsy in town. All time … The Germans of course … The Poles … Vietnamese minority … How we get all work done …’

He swung abruptly into another mode, suddenly looming over Burnell. ‘Just some questions, Dr Burnell. You are nervous, no?’

As his long stained fingers chased themselves through Burnell’s hair, he attempted reassurance. The clinic had developed a method of inserting memories into regions of the brain, to restore amnesiacs to health. The method was a development of e-mnemonicvision. First, those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on microchip, and then projected into the brain. While he gave a somewhat technical explanation, the nurse gave Burnell an injection in his arm. He felt it as little more than a bee sting.

‘But I don’t know Monty Broadwell-Smith well …’

‘Good, good, Dr Burnell. Now we must append electrodes to the head … Obtain full data in response to my questioning … No dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading on sharp nights …’

Burnell tried to struggle, as the words became confused with the heat.

He could still hear Dr Maté, but the man’s words had become mixed with a colourful ball, which bounced erratically away into the distance. Burnell tried to get out the word ‘discomfort’, but it was too mountainous.

He was walking with Maté in a cathedral, huge and unlit. Their steps were ponderous, as if they waded up to their thighs in water. To confuse the issue further, Maté was smoking a cigar he referred to as ‘The Trial’.

Offended, Burnell attempted a defence of Franz Kafka, distinguished Czech author of a novel of the same name.

‘As a psychologist, you must understand that there are men like Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, while for others – why, they sail through life like your torpedoes.’

‘These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more truthful than the other. For some people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.’

‘You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call “this doleful jeste of life”.’

‘I’ve just got to get a millimetre further in.’

They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.

‘Anyhow, you’re good company,’ Maté said, affectionately. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’

‘More oxygen,’ Burnell said. ‘It’s hot in this …’ Uncertain between the words ‘chair’ and ‘cathedral’, he came out with ‘chairch’. ‘As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe – Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims …’

He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.’

‘I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call neural pathwise. Your friend Kafka – personally I’d have lobotomized him – he said that “all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology”. Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.’

Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, ‘In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.’

Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.

Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Saviour’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.

‘I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?’ said Maté. ‘You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.’

It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.

The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns like fossil vertebrae reared up on every side, humming with the extreme messages they carried. In defiance of the laws of physics, they writhed like the vital parts of the chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.

Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.

‘The devil’s about to appear,’ he said. ‘Hold tight.’

‘The devil? But you hadn’t heard of the—’

‘Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends …’

‘But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?’

At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.

Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.

For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.

That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!

It was unmistakable even to a layman.

‘The devil you know!’ Burnell exclaimed.

‘I’d better shove off now,’ said Maté.

‘Hey, what about those playing cods?’ But the man had gone.

Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.

The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell – even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark – weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by? – it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.

He advanced slowly up the ramp towards Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.

Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.

‘Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!’

To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Towards the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.

‘Help! My hour is almost come!’

The devil still singing was approaching still.

Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages – as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.

Nor did he.

Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.

If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.

Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.

‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.

But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …

… and bit off his head.

Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.

‘Oh, one more damned passionate wail!’ – suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.

‘Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?’

‘The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering – that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice …’ Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.

‘Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?’ Blanche asked. ‘My bloody discontents? Wail them from – oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios …’ She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.

‘But your whole life – that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.’

‘Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl – she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked – with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.

‘There was a woman – a fearsome woman – who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love – no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—’

‘Oh, calm down, we’ve all got problems,’ said Teresa. She got up and walked unsteadily to the balcony, trying to cool her cheek against a stone pillar. ‘Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?’

‘Not a Hungarian,’ said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say ‘English’ in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.

A pompous-looking man had accompanied them to the performance. He sat in a cane lounger with a lager on the table by his side, giving every appearance of lassitude. When he could be sure of being heard, he said, in his carefully enunciated tone, ‘What we’re talking about here in a secular age is a hunger for God. God or the Breast. You can have enough sex, Blanche, believe it or believe it not. You can never have enough of God. God’s the giant breast in the sky.’

Only Teresa felt qualified to comment on these remarks. From her vantage point on the balcony, overlooking the square, she said, ‘It’s a divine dissatisfaction.’

The man stretched his legs. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, dear. More gross, quite honestly, than divine. Do you realize how much of every day is taken up with food, with the belly? The pursuit of food, the eating of food, the recovering from its after-effects? The stomach’s as much a tyrant as the genitals.’

‘Not in my case,’ said Teresa, who was dieting.

Taking a rein on herself, Blanche said in a low desperate voice, ‘I was a friend of his wife’s. I loved him then … Was it just a case of “can’t have”? He looks so lovely. And he thinks I look lovely. And he’s good and pleasant to be with in bed. Isn’t pleasant better than good? The number of men I know who’re good in bed and nothing else. Good – and shits. Roy … Roy’s a decent man, and when I saw him again—’

‘Did that woman really eat her daughter or are you just tipsy and making it all up?’

‘If only he wasn’t so caught up with the past …’ Blanche half rose. She set her glass down unsteadily on the marble top of the table.

‘Christ!’ she said. She sat down again, suddenly sober, suddenly bereft of words. Somewhere, a long way away, an evil thing had befallen her lover.

3
Bishops Linctus

You don’t find it odd to discover gradually that you’re sort of running. Or more a jog-trot. You can see the legs going, and they’re yours. And the scrubby grass below your shoes, resilient, springing up again when you’ve passed. That’s not odd. But something’s odd.

Imagine yourself in an art cinema. The movie begins without titles or proem. The opening shot is of some character walking or jogging across a featureless landscape. Photography: grainy, bleached. Camera: perhaps hand-held in an old-fashioned twentieth-century way.

The sequence immediately holds your interest, although there’s little enough to see. Perhaps some kind of tribal memory comes back, if anyone believes in tribal memory – or anything else – any more. Our ancestors were great walkers, right back to the Ice Age and beyond. If you can walk along a glacier with bare feet, you deserve to succeed.

Now imagine you’re not in a comfortable seat watching the movie. You are that jogging character. Only you’re not in a movie. You’re real, or what we label real for convenience, according to our limited sensory equipment. (Anyone who walks on a glacier with bare feet needs his head looking at …)

Head … Yes, that’s still there …

You’re not surprised even at that.

Your life appears to have begun anew, and you’re progressing across what will turn out to be … a rather unappetizing stretch of England … Salisbury Plain. Salisbury Plain is a) flat, b) plain, c) cold, and d) preparing to receive sweeping gusts of rain. You register these facts one by one.

But walking is no trouble. It’s everything else that’s trouble.

Like how you got where you are. Like what happened. Like who you are. Even minor details like – where do you think you’re going?

Night is closing in. It comes in early, rising out of the ground to meet the lowering cloud.

So what do you do? You go on walking.

There’s a landmark distantly to your right. Half-concealed by a fold in the ground stands a broken circle of stone monoliths. You imagine it’s the ruin of some bizarre Stone Age cathedral which was taken out in the war against the Neanderthals. It stands cobalt and unintelligible against the outlines of the over-praised English countryside.

Cathedrals … Something stirs in the mind.

Now wait … but you continue, limping as you walk, while darkness filters into the saucer of land like a neap tide. You continue, more slowly now, whispering words to yourself under your breath. You feel gradually more in command of yourself. As if in confirmation, a line appears along the featureless wastes ahead. When you reach it, you find a fence, with a road on the far side of it. Darkness now gathers about you like an illness.

When you have climbed the fence, you flounder through a ditch, to stand by the roadside. Almost no traffic passes along the road. You wait.

You? You?

Me. I.

The dissociation of personality closes. A blurry zoom lens shrinks back into focus. He realizes he is one Roy Burnell.

Or used to be. Something is missing.

With these slow realizations comes the first angry drop of rain. He realizes that he needs shelter before anything.

He knows he has a father, but cannot remember his name, or where he lives. As he stands there shivering, he recalls the loss of his mother. And was there someone else?

He tries to thumb a lift from cars as they approach from either direction. Their headlights sweep over him. Past they swish in the increasing downpour, never pausing.

Bastards.

He remembers that word.

A long while later, in hospital, Burnell is to remember the dream of the devil who bit his head off. It really happened. Someone stole part of his memory.

At last, when the rain is dwindling, a car stops. A woman is driving. A man sits beside her in the passenger seat. It is an old car. She puts a big blunt face out of the window and asks him where he wants to go. Burnell says anywhere. They laugh and say that is where they are going. He climbs into the back of the car.

All he can see is that the woman is heavy, middle-aged, and has a head of frizzy hair. The man might be her father. He is old, sharp-nosed, stoop-shouldered, wearing a cap. As the car roars on its way, the man turns stiffly and asks Burnell a few questions in a friendly way.

Burnell wishes to be silent. He is cold and frightened, being reduced to near anonymity. He cannot frame any answers. He remembers he can’t remember a car crash.

The couple fear he is a loony, and kick him out in the nearest village. He is inclined to agree with their judgement. Why can’t he remember how he came to be on Salisbury Plain?

The rain has stopped. He stands where they dropped him, outside a row of cottages showing no signs of life. Prodding himself into action – he is tired now – he walks along the road, out of the village. It is pitch-dark. A wood fringes the road. The wood drips. He thinks he hears mysterious footsteps. He turns round and goes back to the village.

A sign tells him he is in Bishops Linctus. A few widely spaced lights burn here and there. No one is about. He passes a Shell filling station, a builder’s yard, an EMV and video shop. Still it might be the Middle Ages.

He reaches a pub called the Gun Dog. Its sign depicts a ferocious hound showing its teeth at a partridge. Burnell has no money in his pocket, and consequently is afraid to enter the pub. There are countries whose names he does not for the moment recall where one might enter a hostelry when down on one’s luck, and be treated in a considerate manner; he is not confident this would happen in England.

He stands indecisively in the middle of the road.

Unexpectedly, someone is standing close by. Burnell starts, and gives an exclamation of surprise. The silent newcomer is a young man in leather gear and high boots, with a shotgun of some kind tucked under his arm. Hearing Burnell exclaim, he backs away. He steps briskly past Burnell, to walk away along the road.

After going no more than ten paces, he halts. Burnell stands where he is. The young man comes back, not too close, to inspect Burnell.

‘You OK, mate?’

By the glow from the pub, Burnell sees a strange round head, on which sits a thin young face, twisted into seriousness, with fair eyebrows and stubble on the jaw. Also a bad case of acne.

‘Not too good. I may have been in a car crash.’

The young man is guarded, his manner hardly friendly. He characterizes Burnell’s claim to have lost his memory as ‘all balls’. Nevertheless, after a few questions, he opines that his old ma will help.

With that, he walks on, adopting a kind of swagger, looking back once to see that Burnell is following.

Burnell follows. Little option but to follow. Head hanging, shoulders slumped. No idea what’s going on.

Bishops Linctus street lighting stops where the road begins to curve upwards. Somewhere beyond the lighting stands a line of council houses, back from the road, with cars and lorries parked in front of them. The young man heads for the nearest house, where a light burns in the uncurtained front room.

They push in through a recalcitrant back door, into a passage obstructed by a mountain bike. A sound of firing fills the house. The TV is on in the front room, from which emerges a woman shrieking, ‘Larry, Larry, you back?’

‘What’s it look like?’ he replies.

In close-up – she bringing a plump face close to Burnell’s – Larry’s mother is a well-cushioned little person in her early fifties, her lower quarters stuffed into jeans. The shriek was a protective device; the voice sinks back to a lower key when her son brushes past her and switches off the TV programme.

The woman immediately takes charge of Burnell, giving him the kitchen towel to dry himself on, and a pair of worker’s cords and shirt to wear. While he removes his wet clothes and dries himself as in a trance, she prepares him a cup of instant coffee, chattering all the while. As he drinks the coffee, she prepares him a slice of white bread, buttered and spread with thick honey. He eats it with gratitude, and is so choked with emotion he can only squeeze her hand.

‘Don’t worry, love. We know all about the bloody police in this house. Knock you about, did they?’

The picture keeps going out of focus.

Perhaps he has passed out from fatigue. Rousing, he finds he is sitting on the grubby kitchen floor. He looks up at a poster advertising a can of something called ‘Vectan Poudres de Tir, Highly Flammable’. He looks down at ten red-painted toenails protruding from gold sandals. A hand comes within his line of sight. A voice says, ‘Oops, dear, you OK? It’s the drink, is it? Terrible stuff. I don’t know what God was thinking of.’

‘Leave him alone, Ma!’ roars Larry from the passage.

As he is helped up, Burnell thinks he hears a bird singing.

‘Take no notice,’ says Ma, almost whispering. ‘It’s just his manner. He’s a very nice quiet boy really.’

Shock shot. Larry appears suddenly into the kitchen doorway, in a gunman’s crouch, both hands together in a shootist position, clasping an imaginary gun. ‘Bang, bang. Got you both.’

Ma laughs, says to Burnell, ‘He’s daft.’ Burnell wonders if events are registering on him, or whether he might still be running across an endless plain. A bird twitters in his head.

He steadies himself against the sink, which is crammed with the remains of Indian take-aways. He cannot speak.

Larry unlocks the door of the room at the rear of the house. A large notice on the door, painted in red paint, says ‘My Room. Keep Out. DANGER.’ On it is a poster of Marilyn Monroe with a pencilled-in moustache and teeth blackened, and a large photograph of howitzers firing in World War I.

‘You need a good night’s sleep, that’s what you need,’ Ma tells him, looking concerned. She gives him a toffee. As Burnell chews the toffee, Larry sticks his head round the door of His Room and calls Burnell in. He locks the door from the inside.

‘Sleep here. It’s OK. Don’t listen to her. She’s nuts.’

Burnell says nothing, chewing on the toffee. The sporting gun previously tucked under Larry’s arm keeps company with a large six-shooter on a box by the window. However, when Larry pulls a rug and cushion off his bed, throwing them on the floor, a semi-automatic rifle is revealed, snuggled among the blankets.

A slow panning shot reveals the narrow room to be full of magazines about guns. They are piled up in corners and spill out of a half-closed cupboard. They are stacked under the bed among cartridge boxes. Used targets are wedged behind a strip of mirror: black outlines of men in bowler hats, their hearts shot out, macabre Magrittes.

‘Are you a gamekeeper?’ Jaws automatically munching as he forms the question.

‘Work on Thorne’s farm. Sometimes I’m a brickie, aren’t I? Out of work. You can doss down there, right?’

Doubtfully, Burnell settles on the floor. He knows nothing and feels miserable. He cannot remember if he met Larry before. He hopes that if so they are not related. Cousins. Anything.

Something hard he recognizes as the muzzle of a gun is thrust into his ear. He laughs nervously. Looks up.

‘Any monkey business in the night and you get it, right?’ Larry withdraws the weapon and shows the pistol to his guest, innocent in his grimy hand. ‘Look at this little beauty. You know what this is?’

Larry kneels on the edge of his bed, glaring down at Burnell, who makes a feeble reply. Larry is not a great listener. He goes on without pausing for answers. ‘It’s a sweet little performer. I bet you never saw one like it. It’s a Makarov PSM. A Makarov PSM, illegal in this country, a KGB pistol, a Makarov PSM.’ He pronounces the name like a lamb voicing its mother tongue. He removes the magazine from the gun to demonstrate eight rounds of a gleaming bottle-neck appearance. He makes a curious noise in the back of his throat. ‘See them rounds? Under an inch long. Know what they can do? Bust through body armour, OK? Good as .44 Magnum bullets. Blow a man’s guts out through his arse. Old KGB knew what it was doing. No kidding.’

Suddenly the pistol is gone from his hand. ‘Concealment weapon, see. That’s why it’s so little. KGB knew what it was about, right?’

Smiling weakly, Burnell says, ‘I have to sleep now, Larry.’ The toffee has gone.

A second later he is staring down the barrel of Larry’s semi-automatic, which Larry, kneeling up, cradles in a professional way under his right arm. It is a cold steely piece of goods he is aiming.

‘You try anything funny in the night, you get a dose of this. Get it?’ His little face withers. ‘This is my big baby.’

Reaction shot of Burnell, sitting up, alarmed. ‘No, no, I just want to sleep.’

Larry asks him challengingly if he’s a bloody lunatic, and Burnell says he thinks he must have banged his head.

Loud banging on the door. Larry swings the semi-automatic in that direction. Ma yells from the passage, ‘Go to sleep. You got to go to Swindon tomorrer.’ He makes shooting noises in his throat, raking her with imaginary gunfire before turning back to Burnell.

‘You try anything funny, you get a dose of this, right?’ Relenting slightly, he explains that this impressive weapon, his big baby, is an American .50 calibre Barrett M90, weighing only twenty-two pounds. He assures Burnell he could hold off an army with it.

‘I hope you aren’t expecting an army.’

‘Muslims, Blacks, Police – let ’em all come. See what they get.’ There is a tense silence. Burnell feels unwell.

‘What Muslims do you mean?’

‘My dad comes back here, he’s going to be in trouble.’ As he settles down, Larry says with a sob, ‘That bastard.’ He cradles the Barrett in his arms. He reaches out and switches off the light.

Sitting huddled nervously on the floor, Burnell hears an intermittent sob. Or perhaps Larry is just sniffing.

Longing to go to sleep but afraid to lie down, Burnell says in a small voice that he appreciates Larry’s kindness.

He half expects to have the muzzle of the Barrett back in his ear. Larry merely says, ‘I like helping people, Roy.’ Gentle as a dove.

Burnell is comforted. He murmurs those decent words to himself like a mantra; ‘I like helping people …’

He falls back in a troubled cataleptic sleep. Rats gnaw in the depths of the cathedral. He wakes to find it is the sound of Larry scratching his acned cheeks in his sleep. So the movie ends. But Burnell is for real and his troubles are becoming more real as dawn sneaks in to dozy Bishops Linctus.

Morning was hardly a spectacular affair: old and grey and broken, like an overworked carthorse out to grass, to find its way by accident into the back yards of the council houses.

Larry had left the room when Burnell emerged from the entanglements of his rug. What roused him from limbo was the sound of Ma shouting at her son. Encouragement and admonition, carrot and stick. He sat up, aching all over. His predicament rushed back and took him by the throat. But he was undeniably feeling a little better.

Leaning back against a distempered wall, he fished about in his brain for an identity.

Larry entered the room, carrying a mug with no handle. ‘Thought you’d like some char, mate, OK?’

The unrivalled powers of hot sweet tea served to clear Burnell’s head. He rose and sat on the side of the bed. From there, he stood up and went into the kitchen, where he sluiced his face under the cold tap. The debris of the take-away had gone. Instead, pairs of socks were soaking sludgily in the sink. He no longer felt so dissociated from himself, and smiled at Ma as he wiped his face on a grimy towel.

‘You’re a bit more perky this morning, I see,’ Ma said. ‘The washing machine’s gone on the blink again. Of course he’s not much use round the house. The black bloke next door will fix it for me. Have you said hello to Kevin?’

A yellow canary sat in a cage on top of the fridge. It cocked its head on one side, looking at Burnell while trying out a few notes.

Ma went over to the cage. She stuck a finger through the bars. The canary lifted one wing in a defensive gesture. ‘There’s a good boy. He likes you, don’t you, Kev? I think it’s a girl actually. One of the family, aren’t you, love? Keeps me company, any rate. Say hello to Kevin, Roy. I wash her under the hot tap every Saturday morning, don’t I, Kev? It likes that – sings her little heart out, bless her. You like a nice wash under the tap, don’t you? It’s one of the family, aren’t you? I’ll find her a bit of groundsel in a while. Who’s a good boy then?’

While this monologue was in progress, Burnell was keeping an eye on Larry. Larry was dressed in a padded military jacket without sleeves. He had wedged the front door open and was marching back and forth between his room and an old Land Rover standing in front of the house, loading boxes of ammunition into the back of the vehicle.

Seeing Burnell’s glance, Ma said, ‘He’s got to go into Swindon. There’s a job prospect. You better stay here with me – I don’t like the way he drives. Much too fast on them country roads. You and me’ll go down and see Dr Ramakrishna in the village. She’s – you know, what I call discreet. She was trained in London, she was telling me. She’ll help you. She told me once she liked helping lame dogs over stiles, she said.’

‘That’s me.’ He spoke vaguely. Something about Larry’s movements disturbed him. Larry had left the house by the front door, which remained open. He put up the tailgate of the Land Rover, locking it into place. His movements were performed in slow motion. Once he looked back into the house with abstracted gaze, as if he were inwardly composing a poem. Burnell raised a hand in greeting. He received no response.

Walking ponderously, head down, Larry went round to the cab of the Land Rover and climbed in. He sat in the driver’s seat. Nothing happened.

More curious than alarmed, Burnell, still nursing his tea mug, went forward into the small front room, from the window of which he had a clear view.

He could see the back of Larry’s head. It did not stir. It resembled a cannonball which had succumbed to a parasitic yellow grass. Larry was making no attempt to start his vehicle. He merely sat in the driver’s seat. Burnell was about to turn away when a movement up the road caught his eye.

The highway leading from this side of the village was an anonymous semi-rural stretch of road. A field opposite the houses awaited building permission. The curve of the road wound up a slight incline. The road surface remained damp from overnight mists. Behind and beyond the houses lay open agricultural land, at present looking pale and inert. The houses followed the curve of the road. Most of the vehicles which Burnell remembered to have been parked there last night were gone about their owners’ business, leaving the houses and front doors in plain view.

From the door of the furthest council house, two hundred yards distant, a man had emerged. He came out, went inside again, to re-emerge pulling a push-chair. He steered this object through the front gate and started down the slight hill towards the village.

In the push-chair sat a small child dressed in a blue overall. Burnell saw its arms waving, possibly in excitement. Perhaps it was two years old. The man could have been the child’s grandfather. He had grey hair and wore an old nondescript raincoat. It looked as if he was talking to the child. Possibly he was going to the village to shop. Possibly, thought Burnell, idly, his daughter, the child’s mother, was unwell.

Larry stirred in the driving-seat as the push-chair drew nearer. His window wound slowly down. A gun barrel protruded, pointing up the road. Burnell could see enough of the chevron-style muzzle brake to recognize the Barrett semi-automatic which Larry had shown him the previous evening. He took a deep breath to call out. As he did so, a shot sounded.

The man in the nondescript raincoat sank down on his knees in the road, still holding on to the handle of the push-chair.

Three more shots rang out. The push-chair blew apart. The man’s head and shoulders were covered in shreds of baby as he fell over on his side, to roll against the grass verge.

Larry’s Ma had seen at least something of this, or had heard the shots. She was drying a plate. This she dropped as she ran from the kitchen into the front hall.

‘No, no, Larry. Stop that at once, you idiot! What do you think you’re doing? Come in immediately.’

After firing the shots, Larry kicked open the Land Rover’s door and planted his boots on the gravel with a crunch, left then right. He was moving slowly with a sleepwalker’s lethargy. He carried his semi-automatic at the port, its muzzle at his left shoulder. As he turned to face the house, he brought the weapon expertly to his hip and fired a rapid burst.

His mother was blown from the porch back into the passage. Still moving, he fired more shots into the house. The back door splintered.

Burnell was also in motion, rushing from the front room as soon as the firing stopped. To his relief, he saw that Larry in his abstraction had left the key in the lock of his door. He turned the key and rushed into the room. Desperate as he was, he saw a blue metal gun barrel protruding from under a cushion on the bed. He flung himself under the bed, taking the Makarov with him. Fighting to thrust the bundles of magazines and cartridge boxes out of his way, he turned about so that he was concealed, facing the door. He was convinced that Larry was about to finish him off too.

He could hear Larry in the front hall, and the business-like click of a fresh magazine locking into place on his weapon.

Steadying the pistol with both hands, Burnell levelled it at the door.

‘You come in here, I’ll blow your guts out through your arse,’ he muttered.

4
FOAM

In Ward One on the third floor of Swindon Hospital lay Roy Burnell. Of the four beds in the ward, only his was occupied. He felt no great inclination to get up.

Nevertheless, even the horizontal position could not stem a swirl of events around him. There were, first and foremost, the visits from the police, and in particular from an Inspector Chan, an Asian member of the Wiltshire anti-terrorist squad.

The police had discovered Burnell in a house with a dead woman. He had been armed, and surrounded by boxes of bullets and much literature of an incendiary nature, as the official phrase went. He had been disarmed, handcuffed, and taken none too gently to the police station in Swindon. There he had been interrogated for some hours. It was then that Inspector Chan had been called in. Burnell’s plea that he had somehow lost his memory had been taken as additional reason to suspect his motives.

Only slowly had Burnell, dazed by events, realized that the police had initially been frightened men. The presence of a psychotic killer in Bishops Linctus had been alarming enough; the possibility that there might be two of them, the second armed with an illegal KGB murder weapon, had driven them mad.

Forensic evidence supported Burnell’s statement. The bullets which had killed the dead woman, Mrs Beryl Foot, were fired from the Barrett. 50 calibre semi-automatic now in their possession. Not only did the Makarov PSM use 5.45mm rounds, but examination showed it had not been fired recently.

Released and installed in hospital, suffering from exposure, Burnell discovered that what was now known as the Bishops Linctus Massacre had attracted world-wide attention. The specialist in charge of his ward, a friendly Dr Rosemary Kepepwe, brought him newspapers, where he was able to see what had happened that terrible morning.

After shooting the old man, Stanley Burrows, 58, and his step-grandson, Charles Dilwara, 1½ and his own mother in rapid succession, Lawrence ‘Mad Dog’ Foot had walked armed into the village. There he shot dead the first three people he saw outside the Spar supermarket. Several other people had been wounded and a plate-glass window valued at £2,000 had been broken. ‘BISHOPS BLOODBATH’ screamed the tabloids.

Mrs Renée Ash, blonde, 22, had witnessed the events from the window of her hairdressing establishment. She had her photograph in the paper, sitting coyly on a low wall, legs crossed. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘There was blood all over the pavement. And on a Saturday morning, too.’

The shooting aroused more excitement than the war in the Crimea, in which British troops, the Cheshires, were involved. Everyone expected trouble in the Crimea, but in a quiet little spot like Bishops Linctus, in the peaceful British countryside … The Prime Minister himself was driven down to the scene of the crime to shake a few hands.

As for Larry ‘Mad Dog’ Foot – as his friends reportedly called him – armed police from Bishops Magnum and Salisbury had shot him down behind the Shell garage. Some papers carried photographs of his body covered by a blanket being taken away on a stretcher. Burnell thought of Larry saying gently, ‘I like helping people’. Perhaps his help had been refused once too often.

Burnell’s melancholy was deepened by a sense of having fallen off a wall. He felt no power on earth could put him together again. Pieces of the past floated in his mind like fish in a bowl, without destination.

He was sedated and slept for long periods. At one point he woke to find a doctor with a maternal bust encased in a white apron at his bedside. This was the comforting Dr Rosemary Kepepwe. She sat by his side and talked soothingly.

‘I’ve been in a coma, haven’t I?’

‘We think you have fallen victim to memory-thieves. It’s one of the mushroom industries of the modern world … Anything’s stealable nowadays,’ she said, smiling down at him. ‘Don’t worry. Did you hear of e-mnemonicvision?’

‘Was there some kind of crash?’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll do a few tests on you and soon you will feel better.’

He trailed about the hospital from room to room, comparing diagrams, playing with bricks, having blood samples and brain scans taken, helpless in expert hands. A neurosurgeon jokingly offered to lend him a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Dr Kepepwe came back to see him shortly after an orderly had delivered Burnell’s tea. ‘Now, don’t worry about anything. The Neurology Department is piecing together a map of your brain with indications of lesions there. They know that a section of your memory has been stolen from you.’

He grappled feebly with the idea. Visions of scalpels and silver handsaws rose to his mind.

The doctor said firmly, ‘Memory has no one location in the brain. It’s not a department. The thieves in your case have covered the hippocampus and regions of the cortex. We’ll know more precisely soon. It’s a delicate operation.’

He groaned. ‘You mean they’ve cut me up, destroyed my brain?’

She wagged a finger, smiling. ‘It’s an electronic method, well established these last five years. I don’t want to hear too many complaints from you, sir! You’re lucky that your period of memory was evidently stolen by an expert, not just some cowboy. First look at your brain suggests that you are pretty OK otherwise. You might easily be in PVS.’

For some reason he could not make out, he longed to hold her hand. Gazing up at her, he said, ‘I’d be less inclined to complain if I knew what PVS was.’

‘When they started doing e-mnemonicvision operations on the human brain, accidents occurred. That’s where EMV has got its bad name, why it’s still limited. Some volunteers became cases of PVS – which stands for Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Of course you are experiencing a terrible loss, but you seem otherwise fully functional. You talk OK, for instance.’

‘Hope so,’ he muttered.

‘What about sexual functions, then? Do you still have erections?’

‘Hadn’t you better research that area yourself, Doctor?’

When she laughed, most of her body shook. ‘You’re a naughty boy, that I can see. We shall return to that subject later. Drink your tea and don’t worry about things.’

‘Do you want a raspberry jam sandwich, Doctor? I’ve lost my appetite as well as my memory. Will my memory return? You’re sure I wasn’t in an accident – a car crash or something?’

She shook her head. ‘Everything’s as I tell you. We’ll soon find out more about you. That will help. You’re going to counselling every morning, starting tomorrow, and that will help too. We can find out how many years of memory you’ve lost.’

‘Years? Shit!’ He said he could recall that there was an opera he had seen in which a man had his reflection stolen. This was worse, like a kind of evil magic.

‘You see, you remember some things, like the opera. Now don’t worry. Rest today. You’re still in shock. Eat up that sandwich.’

He obliged the doctor by taking a bite before asking her what EMV was.

‘You don’t even recall that? It’s a scourge of modern life, like video shockers only a few years back. You know that tumours can be removed from the brain without old-fashioned surgery, and now it’s possible to remove selected memories. Those memories can be stored electronically and so reproduced any number of times.

‘Oh, it’s a huge industry.’ While he munched at the limp sandwich, she explained how EMV was a sport for amateurs, just as television had been invaded by amateur videos. Anyone with a striking memory or experience could sell it to the EMV companies, ‘the way poor people used to sell a kidney for a bit of money’. Of course they would lose that memory for ever but, if it was valuable to them, it could be reinserted once it was recorded.

‘So I could get my memory back if I could find the thieves?’

‘You can’t catch these people.’ She went on to say that for EMV-viewers, the memories projected into their heads were as transient as dreams although, projected at greater power, they could become as permanent and ‘real’ as genuine memories. A vogue for the permanent insertion of seemingly life-enhancing memory implants was yielding up a new generation of mental cases whose assumed memories did not fit their own personality patterns.

Burnell was sunk in introspection. His gaze fixed itself on a malevolent square of cherry fruit cake lying on the white plate before him. He became convinced that he could read its mind: and somewhere in the warped mental processes of the fruit was an ambition to eat him, rather than vice versa. Only with an effort did he manage to look away and stare into the friendly black face by the bedside.

‘I can’t remember where I was before I found myself running on Salisbury Plain.’

This time, she put her hand reassuringly over his. ‘We shall find out all about you. Don’t worry. Tomorrow, our psychotherapist, Rebecca Rosebottom, will see you. And she is an absolute guru.’

Smiling, she rose to go.

‘Would you take this piece of fruit cake away with you?’ he bleated.

Searching about in his head proved to be a strange process. He could recall his early life easily. The death of his mother was vivid. It was possible to trace the chain of events until he was in his mid-twenties, when he had grown a small moustache to impress a girlfriend. That would mean the memory was probably ten years old. After that, nothing.

The last thing he could remember clearly was standing in a building in a foreign city waiting for a lift. He was in the foyer of an ornate hotel, all white and gilt and potted cheese plants. The lift cage descended from an upper floor. He walked into it and pressed a button to go up. After that – nothing. The dreaded white-out, the feared abyss. The thieves had got the rest.

The following morning, Dr Kepepwe entered Ward One with a broad smile on her face and her hands behind her broad back.

Burnell was propped up in bed, having just finished breakfast. She came and contemplated him for a moment before speaking.

‘You are Dr Roy Edward Burnell, AIBA. Those are letters after your name. You have been a university lecturer. You are a specialist in the architecture of religious structures such as cathedrals. You are currently an Area Supervisor for the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage organization in Frankfurt in Germany. You have responsibility for threatened buildings of architectural and religious merit over a wide area.

‘And how do I know all this? Because you have also published a learned book, in which you contrast human aspirations with human-designed structures. The book is called Architrave and Archetype and –’ she brought her hands from behind her – ‘here’s a copy, just tracked down!’

He took the book from her. It carried his photograph on the inner flap of the dust-jacket. He stared at it as if the title were written in letters of fire. In the photograph he had no moustache, praise be.

‘We’re getting somewhere,’ Dr Kepepwe said proudly. ‘We hope to contact your wife next.’

He smote his forehead. ‘My God, don’t say I’m married.’

She laughed. ‘Well, you certainly were. Current marital status unknown.’

He closed his eyes, trying to think. No memory came through, only the tears under the eyelids. Whoever his wife might be, she constituted a vital part of the vault the memory-thieves had robbed. It was lonely, knowing nothing about her. Leafing through the copy of the book Dr Kepepwe had brought, he found her name. There it stood, alone on the printed page, the dedication page:

For

STEPHANIE

‘Nothing is superlative that has its like’

Michel de Montaigne

Tears came again. He had a wife. Stephanie Burnell. The line from Montaigne, if it was more than mere courtesy, suggested love and admiration. How was it he was unable, with his memory of her gone, to feel no love and admiration?

‘We can’t have you moping,’ said Dr Kepepwe, bustling in, to find him staring into space. ‘Are you well enough for a game of tennis? There’s a good indoor court on the top floor. I’m a demon. I’ll play you when I’m off duty at five-thirty.’

To kill the afternoon, he wandered about the great white memorial to human sickness. The few staff he encountered were Asiatics. He found his way into what the hospital called its library, where ping pong was played. The room was deserted; but the whole hospital was strangely deserted, as if the world’s sick had miraculously healed themselves. The library shelves, like the shelves of a derelict pantry, held nothing by way of sustenance. Almost no non-fiction, books on dieting excluded, no travel worth a second look. Fiction of the poorest quality, all formula stuff – romances chiefly, thrillers, also fantasy: The Dragon at Rainbow Bridge and similar titles, featuring pictures of brave men, women, and gnomes in funny armour.

In a neglected corner where ping pong balls could not reach lay a clutch of Penguin Classics. Zola, Carpentier, Balzac, Ibsen, Dostoevsky. He remembered the names. Also the Essays of Montaigne.

Burnell picked up the volume almost with a sense of destiny, having so recently come across Montaigne’s name in his own book. Carrying it over to a bench, he read undisturbed while the best part of an hour stole away, drowsy and silent. He believed he had heard the cadences of Montaigne’s prose before. Nostalgia rose in him, to think he might once have read it in the company of the unknown Stephanie. They must have enjoyed the way the sixteenth-century Frenchman spoke directly to his reader:

I admire the assurance and confidence that everyone has in himself, while there is hardly anything that I am sure of knowing, or that I dare answer to myself that I can do. I never have my means marshalled and at my service, and am aware of them only after the event … For in my studies, the subject of which is man, I find an extreme variety of opinions, an intricate labyrinth of difficulties, one on top of another, and a very great uncertainty and diversity in the school of wisdom itself …

Perhaps that is how I was, Burnell thought. Uncertain. Perhaps it was my nature – and not despicable in Montaigne’s eyes. In which case, my dilemma at present is but a special instance of a more general one. He turned the word ‘certain’ over in his mind, as if it were a curious stone found on a seashore. The great conquerors of history had all been certain. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China. He wasn’t sure but he thought he had never been built in that mould. His father’s tyranny had been enough.

One sign of his lack of the tyrannical gene was that he could not beat Dr Kepepwe at tennis.

After they had played in the echoing court, they drank lemonade together in a deserted canteen. She said she must get along home, but seemed in no hurry to go. On the contrary, she tried to discover how much he knew of recent history, exclaiming with a mixture of delight and dismay when he did not know who was Britain’s Prime Minister, or what had happened recently to the royal family.

Her view of England was that it had now become like Ireland, a country with so much unemployment and such a lack of manufacturing base that many people were forced to go abroad for a living. Blacks and Asiatics, in consequence, claimed a greater role in running the country; it was they, by and large, who were fighting a Muslim insurrection in the Midlands. Dr Kepepwe portrayed the Midlands as an alien land; she was, she explained, a Southerner.

When she asked Burnell what he could remember, he told her of a boyhood trekking holiday in Iceland on which his father had taken him and his brother. It remained as a landmark in misery and humiliation.

She asked him how he enjoyed working in Germany. She had a fear of Germany. Did he not think continually of Hitler’s Final Solution and the terrible crime of murdering six million Jews, gipsies, blacks, and other harmless people?

‘I used to think about it, I suppose,’ Burnell told her. ‘But your question is part of a wider question. Watch the TV news. Terrible slaughter is taking place today in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Bosnia, and elsewhere. The wider question is why humanity is so appallingly cruel – man against man, man against woman, individually and en masse. If there were a God, he would have thrown up his hands in despair by now.’

‘No, no,’ said Dr Kepepwe, shaking her head and much of her body. ‘God never gives up.’

As she was leaving, the doctor said, ‘I’m alone at present while my husband David is away. How I miss him.’ She represented him as the best husband a woman could have, saying proudly that he had won the Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy two years in succession. He was a brain surgeon and everyone respected him.

David Kepepwe had volunteered to serve under General Stalinbrass in Russia, where surgeons and doctors were badly needed; he was in the Crimea at present. She hoped he was still alive.

‘Well, maybe I’ve talked too much to my prize patient. Tell me honestly how you feel in yourself.’

Without thinking, he said, ‘An ocean, Doctor. A wide ocean with only a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have sunk into the depths …’

That quizzical regard again. ‘FOAM, that’s what they call it. “Free Of All Memory”. You were lucky the villains didn’t steal everything. And there are advantages. I have bad things I’d like to forget. Think of the foam on that private ocean of yours. Remember, “oceanic” has good connotations, so don’t worry. I’ll see you in the morning.’

In her office, Dr Kepepwe kept a well-behaved dog which waited patiently for her throughout her spells of duty. It was at least in part a long-haired terrier. Burnell learnt later its name was Barker. He saw the doctor collect Barker as she picked up her things to go home. The dog needed no lead. It was a dignified little animal, and gave Burnell a hard sidelong look to indicate that any patting would be regarded as condescending: also somewhat animalist.

As Dr Kepepwe left with a wave of the hand, Barker followed at unhurried pace, walking stiffly, looking terribly English. Burnell could imagine it with a copy of The Times tucked under one arm. It and its mistress vanished into the dark to her car and a little unknown nook somewhere.

‘Whatever crimes and errors I committed over the past ten years, they’ve been wiped cleaner than if I’d been in a confessional. The Catholics should rig up EMV in all their confessionals. The forgiveness of sins could then be followed by the forgetfulness of sins … Which might make human life easier …’

Once the doctor and her dog had left, loneliness overcame him. He knew no one, not even himself.

Switching on his TV set, he found the movie channel was about to show a fantasy film of ancient vintage. Obispo Artists presented Brute of Kerinth, which he began indolently to watch. The film had immediate appeal in his anomic condition since the action was set on a planet and its moon far from Earth. The special effects pleased him, but the happenings, centring on a lost heir and a throne, were those of an historic costume drama. He lost interest, switched off, and gazed at the ceiling instead.

When a half-hour had dragged by, he got himself on the move.

Walking about the echoing hospital in his white gown, calm, savouring his own ghostliness, he imagined himself in an empty fishtank. Active steps were being taken to trace anyone who had known him during those ten lost years. Colleagues, parents. The confusions of war, the tight security now covering Britain, made ordinary communication difficult. But all would be well. He would be reunited with Stephanie in due course.

In the long antiseptic corridors, green LCDs winked, often accompanied by hums and growls. The entrails of a glacier received him.

Under cover of his ghostliness, he invaded Rosemary Kepepwe’s office. All there was neat and anonymous, conventional down to the stained coffee mug on the filing cabinet. On the desk beside a monitor screen stood a framed photograph of husband David. Shining black, he smiled into the camera, standing beside a large fish on a weighing-scale. Burnell recognized an Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy when he saw one. Another photograph showed two smiling boys in their early teens, with Barker standing meditatively beside them. He wondered about their lives. There was small ground on which to speculate. Dr Kepepwe was little more than an embodiment of kindness and a fast backhand.

Burnell’s steps were solitary on the antiseptic tiled stairs. No use to question who had lived, survived, faded away under pain-killers, within these walls. The quota of patients had been cleared out. He was almost alone.

The news was bad. The hospital awaited a new intake: dying and wounded from a fatal engagement in the Crimea. Military men from all the armies involved were being flown here for treatment. Together with the soldiers heading for the Radioactivity Unit would be sick scientists – scientists, Burnell had been told, who had flown out to Bulgaria to deal with a nuclear plant going critical, and had suffered high doses of radiation. The emergency militarization of the hospital was being carried out under a cloak of secrecy, as all Swindon knew.

Taking a service lift up to the roof, he reflected that at any day now the wards would be filled with men harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of final white-out. What of the dead Larry? Had something in his cannonball head been moved to imitate the wider carnage taking place across the Crimea, Georgia and elsewhere? Had poor Larry mistaken Bishops Linctus for Stavropol, and died believing in his own gallantry?

On the roof of the hospital stood air-conditioning plants, breathing out their stale breath. The grimy air of Swindon had painted them black. Burnell went to the parapet and looked over. In the darkness, evidence for the town was mainly electric; lines of street lights, glows from houses, beams of car headlights. By such tokens, the presence of humanity could be hypothesized.

A cat approached him, daintily balancing along the parapet. It came without fear, to manoeuvre under one of his arms. As soon as he stroked it, the cat began to purr. Burnell put a cheek against the neat little head and addressed it affectionately.

Overhead the stars shone, remotely promising something better than the brief rush of biological existence. Engines sounded somewhere below them. Three heavy transport planes passed over Swindon, heading from the West towards the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.

When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent that night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.

In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.

And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.

5
Some Expensive Bullets

By the time Stephanie arrived, Burnell was acclimatized to hospital routine. He exercised early in the morning before visiting the psychotherapist and underwent tests in the afternoon. In the evenings he read. To awaken and find the stray cat had gone was the least of Burnell’s worries. Yet the animal’s absence reinforced a sense of emptiness. The humble creature, unable to bear his company, he supposed, had disappeared into the warren of the building.

After much hesitation, he phoned his father in Norfolk. It was Laura, his stepmother, who answered the call.

‘Your father is somewhere in the garden, dear, talking to the gardener, showing him what’s what. He had to sack the last man. They’re so unreliable. The new man seems rather promising. He comes with wide experience, although he’s lame. I suppose that doesn’t matter. I’ve spoken to his wife.

‘The garden’s not at its best, though the iris bed looks splendid. Irises don’t mind the drought so much. We need rain badly.’

He listened to that precise theatrical voice. It conjured up the distant world of Diddisham Abbey, and the life lived by his father and Laura. When he had the chance, he explained to Laura what had happened to him.

‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘What pickles people do get into. To have one’s memory stolen. Well, you’ll just have to try and get it back, dear. Do you want me to come over and visit you? I suppose I could do that. I suppose I should. You know your father isn’t able to come.’

‘That’s all right, Laura, thanks. I’ll manage.’

‘You do sound terribly depressed. I don’t wonder. Poor soul. Look, ring me again soon, is that a promise?’

The visits to Dr Rebecca Rosebottom were no more comforting. To maintain his morale, Burnell woke early and exercised in the empty gym for an hour. He showered, shaved, and breakfasted, to present himself in the Rosebottom clinic on the second floor at nine-thirty.

Burnell sat on one side of her cold hearth, Rosebottom on the other, in not particularly uncomfortable chairs.

Rebecca Rosebottom reeked of ancient wisdom and more recent things. She dressed, she mentioned in an aside, in astrological fashion. Old portions of embroidered curtain material were draped across her body in contradictory directions, presumably to indicate this in the ascendant and that in the descendant, and the other undecided over the bosom. She could have been in her fifties or sixties, her head being spare of flesh and of an apple-and-thyme jelly colour, above which rose a wreath of matted grey hair. Her disinclination for movement reinforced a mummified appearance.

She told Burnell on the second morning that she knew he was a Buddhist.

‘I don’t think so, Rebecca.’

She encouraged him to talk. Burnell had always regarded himself as a listener. His architectural pursuits had not been an encouragement to conversation. After his mother had died, he had never been able to get close to his father. He had thought his father always involved with international business affairs. Unexpectedly, he now found himself pouring out the troubles of those adolescent years: how his brother had been classified as schizophrenic, how his father had married again, how confused he was about the new wife.

‘You felt it was natural that you should feel antagonistic to Laura.’

He plunged into his complicated feeling for the beautiful actress his father had brought home unannounced. Laura was kind and amusing; yet to accept a replacement for his mother was disloyal. Then came his father’s accident in Rome, when he had broken his spine in a car crash and lost the use of both legs.

He had considered himself haunted by bad luck. He had tried to commit suicide. In some strange way, he felt an identification with Larry Foot, the killer of Bishops Linctus. He could only wonder if he had committed any crimes during the years for which memory was missing. He was sure Stephanie would know.

‘You’re dependent on her and what she says.’

‘How should I know?’

Through questioning, they established that it was an entire ten years which had been stolen. Rosebottom ventured the thought that the theft had taken place abroad, since EMV was strictly regulated in Britain.

‘From what you say, I gather you are sorry that your marriage has been wiped from memory.’

He became impatient. It was not the marriage alone. He did not know what kind of man he had been, how his professional reputation stood, or how much money he earned. Her mummified presence and occasional comments served merely to make him more aware of his predicament, while resolving nothing. It was bad enough facing life; facing Rebecca Rosebottom was worse.

Before going to the second floor for his third session, he found the little black cat again. He cradled it in his arms and took it into the clinic with him.

Once more, Larry Foot forced his way into the confessions. Rosebottom remarked on it.

‘I’ve suffered two traumatic shocks, Rebecca. Unconnected, but one after the other. I probably need proper counselling on both. Though counselling is not going to get my memory back.’ He looked hopelessly out of the window as silence fell between them. A convoy of three military vehicles was entering the car park, billowing out a blue haze of pollution as they lined themselves up.

Turning his attention back to the fine immobile Egyptian head, he said that he was troubled by a contradiction he could not resolve. Of course he understood the terrible nature of Larry’s crime, for which he had paid with his life; but there was also the factor of Larry’s innocence. Larry had said he liked to help people. He seemed not to have understood that even his mother was real. Burnell elaborated on this for some while without making himself clearer, only half aware that what had puzzled him was the nature of cruelty and of pain, the titbit that followed cruelty.

When Rosebottom indicated that Larry was just an incidental misfortune, with nothing to do with Burnell’s personal predicament, Burnell disagreed. Privately, he thought that whoever had stolen part of his memory was also no better than a murderer; the cruelty factor had operated.

All he brought himself to say was, ‘I was threatened with death, Rebecca. I was shit-scared.’

‘I sympathize, believe me. You can keep on telling me if it makes you happier. I’m no ordinary shrink. EMV cases always have attitudes.’

As often happened, silence fell between them. He felt he had never known such a conversation stopper as this lady who was supposed to promote the flow of talk.

And, as so often happened, he then began talking in an unpremeditated way, telling her that, as he had said, he had suffered two traumatic shocks. He woke in the middle of the night after a nightmare, wondering if he had become schizophrenic.

Rosebottom invited him to tell her what he meant by schizophrenic.

He said, ‘That’s what my brother’s got. I have a brother called Adrian. At present he’s under medication in Leeds.’

After a protracted silence, in which Rosebottom maintained an attitude almost beyond stillness, Burnell said he did not want to talk about it.

Her smile stretched her lips sideways to a great extent.

‘Time’s up, I’m afraid. Perhaps you will feel more like saying something tomorrow.’

‘Just tell me whether I am schizophrenic or not.’

She shook her head, slightly. ‘You have a long way to go yet.’

As he rose to leave, Rebecca Rosebottom said, ‘There’s just one thing.’

‘What?’

‘I am allergic. Also my star sign is against black animals of any kind. So just don’t bring that frigging creature in here next session. OK? You don’t need any kind of baby surrogate. OK?’

Burnell turned and stared at her. ‘Do you think there’s going to be a next session?’

Hurrying from the clinic, letting the little cat free in the corridor, he made his way back to the ward, taking a route that led him past Dr Kepepwe’s office.

He looked through her glass door. Rosemary Kepepwe was sprawled at the desk with her face buried in her arms. For an instant, he thought she was crying. Barker sat by her on the desk, regarding his mistress thoughtfully, wondering what action to take. Burnell went in.

‘Oh, these people!’ the doctor exclaimed, without being more specific. She ranted about them for some while before stating exactly what it was that had upset her. The military administration who would be taking over the hospital had just visited and left their orders. The first instalment of wounded from the Crimea was expected to arrive at first light on the following day. But before that – in just an hour or two – a squad of men from the RASC were going to arrive to repaint the interior of the hospital.

‘Does it need repainting?’

‘I always liked it blue and white. So fresh, you know.’ Dr Kepepwe mopped her eyes. ‘I like this hospital. I like working here. Barker likes it here, don’t you, Barker, my love? Blue and white create a cheerful healing atmosphere. These horrible army men are going to paint it all green today.’

‘Green! Why on earth?’

‘Dark green. Khaki green.’ She looked piteously at Burnell. ‘They say it’s for camouflage purposes.’

Barker looked extremely serious.

The corridors were already beginning to smell of paint when one of the small Asians showed Stephanie into Ward One.

He heard her footsteps before he saw her. She entered with the air of someone determined to perform a duty not to her taste, with a firm jut to her jaw. Stephanie was tall, fair-haired, walking with ease inside a fawn linen suit, with a handbag slung over one shoulder. She held out a hand to Burnell, stepping back when he had shaken it. The hand was slender and cool. He liked the feel of it. Stephanie was fine-boned, delicate of countenance and strikingly attractive, he saw, only a slightly heavy jaw detracting from full beauty.

He invited her to take the one chair in the room. Sitting on the end of the bed, he scrutinized her, trying to see behind the cautious smile.

Keeping the pain from his voice, he explained that sections of his memory had been stolen by persons unknown. He had no idea where this had happened. It felt as if his head had been bitten off.

‘So I was told when Laura called me,’ Stephanie said. ‘By chance I was in Britain, so I came along. That’s what Laura said to do …’ She chattered for a while, possibly to cover nervousness. Suddenly she said, ‘Do you remember that my home is in California?’

Burnell frowned. ‘We live in California? What for? Whereabouts? My work’s in Europe.’

She rose from her chair to walk about the room. She complained of the smell of paint. He stood up politely, half-afraid she was about to leave.

‘This is terribly embarrassing for me, Roy. If Laura called you, she should have explained.’ She looked at him, then down at the floor, then towards the door.

‘Well? Explained what?’

‘Our divorce came through over four years ago.’ With a burst of impatience, ‘You mean you’ve even forgotten that?’

Burnell sat down on the bed. ‘What are you telling me? You want to sit down or you want to walk about like a caged tiger?’

She began to walk about like a caged tiger. ‘We got married. We got unmarried. Surely to God you must remember that! I live in Santa Barbara now, with Humbert Stuckmann. It just so happened I was over here in the Orkneys and I called Laura. Laura’s remained a friend. She told me you were here.’

‘So you came to see me.’

‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? I called the hospital and spoke to someone or other. They suggested I might trigger off a missing memory.’

‘If it’s missing, how can it be triggered off?’ He spoke abstractedly. The ocean was stormy indeed; indeed there was not a continent in sight. The Atlantis of his marriage was gone. Somehow he had loved this lady, won her, and lost her. By what fatal flaws of character?

Stephanie had settled again in the chair and was talking in a formal way of crofters and dyes and looms far away. He was not hearing her. All he could find to say was ‘Humbert Stickmann? What kind of name is that?’

‘Don’t be superior. I hated it when you were superior. You used to treat me as if I was a child.’ She said he must have heard of Stuckmann Fabrics. Stuckmann fabrics and ceramics were famous world-wide. People worked for him in Scotland and even in Central Asia. Humbert, she did not mind saying it, was a genius. OK, so he was a bit older than her but he was a magical personality. Real genius. Loved colour. Always surrounded by admirers. Full to overflowing with occult knowledge which he beamed into his creations.

When her outpourings had ceased, he spoke again.

‘This guy’s rich, Steff? Is that what you’re saying?’

Stephanie brushed the envious question aside. She spoke of how a certain phase of the moon had led Humbert to design the pattern which crofters were now weaving for him in the Orkney islands.

He interrupted to pose the question which could no longer be postponed: as to whether he and Stephanie had children.

‘Of course not.’ Her tone was cold. ‘I have a son by Humbert. And you may recall I have fought all my life to be called by my proper name of Stephanie. Not “Steff”. No one calls my man “Humb”. He’d kill them if they did. And by the way I have reverted to my maiden name of Hillington. I’m Stephanie Hillington.’

And I don’t know you, Burnell thought. Nor do you wish to know me any more. He remarked on something else that must have changed: she had picked up an American accent. She gave him no answer.

Looking defiantly at him, she made him drop his gaze. With a mixture of compassion and spite, she said, ‘Poor old Roy! So much for the past. Maybe you’ll find you’re better without it, as I am. I never think of it. Life’s rewarding and I live right smack in the present day.’

She stood up as if to leave. In his confusion, he could think of no way to try to bridge the gulf between them.

‘This must be difficult for you, Stephanie. You must find this strange. Me, I mean. A crime has been committed against me. Apparently it happens. It’s a new sort of crime – people can always think up new ways to offend against decency … Tell me, when did we first meet?’

‘What a vile smell of paint. In the States, paint has no smell. What are they doing?’

‘When did we first meet?’

She spoke gently enough and gave him a kindly glance which transformed her face. ‘We met in your father’s offices, one day in April, nine years ago. I was being interviewed for a job I didn’t get. You took me out to lunch.’ She smiled. ‘You ordered champagne.’

‘And we were in love? We must have been. Please …’

The smile went. She was on her guard again. ‘Look, Roy, you’ve had other women since we split up. Laura tells me. You were a great chaser of women. But yes, if it satisfies your male pride, yes, we were in love. Quite a bit. It was fun while it lasted.’ Her laugh was uncertain. ‘I’ve got a car waiting outside.’

Keeping very still, he asked her how it had ended and what spoilt it. Even, more daringly, if the break had been his fault. She evaded the question, giving every impression of a woman about to take to her heels, saying it was foolish of her to have come. Perhaps she had been driven by … But she withheld the word ‘curiosity’. She should have mailed Burnell a photocopy of the divorce certificate. Her flight back to Los Angeles had been delayed. As he had probably heard, someone had put a bomb aboard one of the 777s flying on the LA–New York–London route and blown it clean out of the skies. No one had yet claimed responsibility, though a terrorist group in the Middle East was suspected. She regarded Europe as an unsafe place nowadays. It was terrible what was happening in the world.

She ran out of things to say, to stand there looking downcast, half turned away from him. A silence ensued in which Burnell felt he could have crossed the Gobi Desert.

He managed to make himself say, ‘But I’ve not remarried – I mean, as far as you know?’

Stephanie attempted to laugh at the idiocy of the question, then sighed. ‘You’re always travelling the globe on your World Heritage errands … You never wanted to go any place glamorous. You liked the tacky dumps where no one had heard of American Express. Well, you were always the self-contained type, didn’t like shopping. Life’s just fine for me in Santa Barbara. Lots of friends, lots of fun …’

‘Do you realize how self-centred you sound? Is that what spoilt things between us?’

‘You’re being superior again. I must go. I have to protect myself, don’t you understand that? The divorce …’ A shake of the head hardly disturbed her elegantly styled hair. ‘Of course I’m sorry about – you know, what’s happened to you, or I’d not be here, would I? I don’t mean to sound unkind but I don’t wish to know about you any more. What’s past is past.’

‘Oh, no, never!’

‘Yes, and for you especially. Start again, Roy.’ Now she was half laughing. ‘You keep sending me postcards from some of these dumps you go to, you know that?’

‘Postcards? What postcards?’

‘Sure. Draughty old churches some place or other. Town squares. I don’t need them. The kind of dumps you used to drag me into.’

‘You can’t beat a draughty old church.’ He forced a smile, which was not returned.

‘It happens I’ve a couple of your cards along in my purse.’ She placed her handbag on the window sill and began to rummage through it. As she did so, he thought, ‘She must care something for me if she takes these cards up to the Orkneys with her …’ He said nothing, conscious of his own heartbeat.

She produced a card, glancing at it before handing it over between two outstretched fingers, as if she suspected amnesia was catching.

She caught his eye as he took it. ‘Too bad. Just the one card. Arrived the morning I left home. The others got torn up, I guess.’

Steff didn’t have to say that, he told himself. Either she was protecting herself or being deliberately cruel – to hold me off? What if I grabbed her and kissed the bitch? No – I’m afraid to do so …

The postcard carried a colour picture of a church labelled as St Stephen’s Basilica. Something informed him that architecturally it was not a basilica.

He turned it over as she watched him intently. ‘You don’t recall mailing that?’

He recognized his own handwriting. The card was addressed to Stephanie Hillington in Santa Barbara. He had known. The memory had been stolen.

The postcard bore a Hungarian stamp. His message had been written only sixteen days before. It was brief. ‘Budapest. Brief visit here before returning to Frankfurt. Making notes for a lecture. As usual. Need some florid Hungarian architecture. Trust you’re well. Have met ghastly old friend here. Just going round to Antonescu’s clinic to do him a favour. Weather fine. Love, Roy.’

He jumped up and kissed Stephanie.

Stephanie found her way back to the car park and climbed into the Protean she had hired, startled to find how upset she felt. She sat grasping the steering wheel, unable to do anything. To her disgust, tears welled up in her and poured forth.

Why am I crying? What could have provoked it? My life has changed. I’ve grown away from him. I feel nothing for him any more. I live in an entirely different climate.

Of course he looked awful.

EMV must be a new thing in this country – we’re freer in LA. We’ve got everything. Everything. Humbert goes for it, says he’s lived a hundred lives, shooting EMV.

Yet she was angry and could not understand her own mood. While the divorce was pending, she had flown out to California, hired a camper, lived in Palm Beach with a stud of whom she soon tired. She hated the memory; perhaps it meant she had hated herself at the time. Sex may be the cure for many things but it is no cure for misery; not in my case. Oh, no, Steff – cease this soul-searching. You know it’s sick.

But her recent freer past – her past since the divorce – rose up against her as if in accusation. There seemed no way of stopping it.

In a seafood restaurant in Santa Barbara one day, she had come across an older woman called Ann Summerfield, tanned like everyone else at the white tables. They drank margaritas together and talked. Ann had divorced and not remarried. She had a lover who was on the fringe of the film world, Sam de Souto. Ann too was English, despite her American accent. She and Stephanie became friends. Initiating her into West Coast ways, Ann taught her to sail.

Only a block away from Ann and Sam’s apartment lived Ann’s younger sister, Jane Barrieros. Jane was undergoing a divorce of unusual bitterness, and fighting for the custody of her son.

When Stephanie was introduced to Jane, the latter was a pale worried creature dependent on a then fashionable shrink, plus every known drug. She was, however, well established in a software company, Micromanser. Neuroticism fuelled her drive to excel. When at last she won her battle in the courts on grounds of cruelty, and collected several million dollars, Jane bought into Micromanser and married the boss.

Stephanie and Ann looked on in admiration – and cared for Page, the disputed son – as Jane’s fortunes spiralled upwards in truly Californian fashion.

Jane bought a small computer company, building it up rapidly with the latest technical advances, slanting it towards the greying end of the population, and producing a revolutionary new game series, Loveranger, laced with plenty of VR sex. Loveranger soon became the leading trade name across the nation. The ladies lived a life of sun, fun, and success.

Loveranger computers came in tough ceramic cases. It was during a party at Ann’s new place that Stephanie met the ceramics designer, blue-jowled Humbert Stuckmann. And fell for his line of talk … Humbert, too, with a name practically synonymous with quality fabrics, was also a part of the good life of sun and success. That he had already run through three wives seemed to Stephanie, at the time, to be a part of Humbert’s charm.

They were married in Hawaii the next New Year’s Day.

Humbert flew in his favourite group, Ceren Aid, to sing at the wedding.

And poor scholarly Roy has nothing to do with all that. I’ve just left him behind, as I’ve left England behind. Everything over here seems so small and drab. I ask myself how I ever …

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, staring out into the deserted car park.

Why am I going on at myself like this? I need to get back to the sun and the beaches. I must lose a pound or two – I’m getting too hefty for those glittering shores. Roy – I don’t know him any more. It’s a different life …

Then a traitorous thought, unexpected. And do I know myself any more?

But she swiftly negotiated that thought, not wishing to remind herself how she had once been a tidy little English housewife, doting on her husband and her house … She had even enjoyed ‘doing the ironing’. The old-fashioned phrase came back to her with emetic force.

Shit… She started the car engine. All that was a different lifetime. Could it have been an EMV experience – what they called ‘lietime’? Her Now was real, with the sun blazing above their air-cond beach hut. And Humbert standing naked on the bed with a great erection, one of his scuzzies coming on. Ceren Aid playing over the 8D. Humbert’s fave disk.

Dance and screw, get the bug so fine.

Screw and dance, yee-hew, surf the style

Surf then dance, shed it, shed your mind

He shouting at her, roaring, kindalaughing. ‘Kid, you and I we are the future, know that? The future in flames, all experience open to us. We’ve inherited the globe, it’s our fruit to squeeze and drink right up, down the throat, right down your gullet like champagne.’

She lapped up this stuff from him and his friends. Gleeing, it was called. It turned her on, drove her crazy, made her wet between the thighs, gleed her right up, all the way.

‘We’re the high, the privileged, every day’s one long sunfuck. One long motherfucking sunfuck. What’s our duty? What’s our duty? What is it? To rejoice, kid, that’s what. You realize America grows enough food to feed the whole planet twice over? Well, let me tell you, kid – that goes for semen too!’

Why had she then said – except to prompt him on – that if there was so much abundance, how come thirty million Americans were on the bread line?

Of course Humbert had an answer. He said there were always winners and losers. That was just good old Nature’s way. Starvation was just a way of telling someone they had better get lost and make way for good men. If the losers didn’t like it – why, they could go and live on Mars! He roared with laughter. Was still laughing when they played his game of Animal on the bed.

She was at a loss to understand why she now recollected those days of merriment with so little joy. Damn Roy Burnell! She should never have come to see him. She popped another upper from her purse, put a foot on the accelerator, and rapidly left the hospital behind, on the start of her journey back to California and happiness.

But she remembered a quiet rabbi friend in New York, who had said to her, ‘Have a little happiness while you are young – but never forget how trivial happiness is.’ Or had he been a part of someone’s lietime?

Burnell ran Monty Broadwell-Smith to ground in a bar in Pest. Monty was drinking with a few cronies and did not see Burnell. Which was hardly surprising: every line of sight ran up against gilded statuary or supernumerary columns. This nest of rooms, given over to most of the pleasures of the flesh, had been somewhere wicked under an earlier regime, and in consequence was well – indeed floridly – furnished. The posturing plaster Venuses consorted oddly with the group of tousled heads nodding over their glasses of Beck. Burnell stood in an inner room and told a waiter to fetch Monty, saying a friend wished to see him.

Monty was still wearing Burnell’s sweater. When he saw who was awaiting him, he raised his hands in mock-surrender. Burnell put a clenched fist under his nose.

‘Pax, old man. No offence meant. Honest Injun.’ He put a hand up and lowered Burnell’s fist. Barely ruffled, he explained that since he had lost his job in England he had had to find work in Europe – like thousands of other chaps down on their luck. Eventually, he had found a job acting as decoy for Antonescu and his illegal EMV enterprise. His role as an Anglophone was to lure in innocent foreigners who arrived in Budapest to take advantage of low Hungarian prices. It was economic necessity that drove him to it. His eyebrows signalled sincerity.

He knew, he said, it was a bit of a shady enterprise. ‘Rather like wreckers luring ships on the rocks in the old days.’

‘So you’ve fallen so low you’d even prey on your friends.’

‘Be fair, Roy, old man.’ He breathed alcohol over Burnell. ‘I have to pick and choose my clients. You’ve no idea, no idea, how uninteresting some people’s memories are, all through life. Mine wouldn’t be worth a sausage. But yours – well, perhaps you don’t remember, but I met you and your wife at university. She was a real stunner, so I knew your memories would be worth having.’

‘You little bastard! You had your paws in the till at university. Now you’ve had them in my mind. Stealing memory is a form of murder.’

Wincing slightly, Monty agreed. ‘Wreckers again, you see. Poor old mariners … Look, come and have a drink with my friends. No doubt there will be tighter legislation in Hungary when e-mnemonicvision becomes less than a seven days’ wonder. Until that time, Antonescu earns a modest dollar from his bootleg memory bullets and tosses me the occasional crust. Now then, let me stand you an aperitif. It’s almost lunchtime.’

‘It’s three in the afternoon, you boozy git!’

Monty put a persuasive hand on Burnell’s arm. Burnell wrenched his arm away. ‘You’ve poisoned my life, you bastard. You’d probably poison my drink. Now I’ve got you, I’m going to turn you in – you and your precious Antonescu.’ There was canned music in the room. Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ was playing, dripping away like a tap.

Monty drew himself up and smoothed the sweater down. ‘Don’t threaten me. You have a contempt for me. Fair enough – you always were a supercilious bastard. But just think how I might feel about you! I’ve had to edit ten years of your stupid life down to make a presentable bullet. It wasn’t too edifying, old sport, let me tell you. A ten-year plod down the recesses of your memory! A bit like looking down into a sewer at times – no offence meant.’ He elaborated on this in some detail, concluding by saying, ‘You ought to be glad to be rid of stuff like that. You’re free of it – Free Of All Memory!’

‘Oh, I see, Broadwell-Smith. The FOAM theory of history: never learn anything … Just bloody forget, is that it? Have you ever heard that saying about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it? Why do you think the world’s in such a fucking mess?’ With a quick move, he twisted Monty’s arm and had him in a half-Nelson. ‘It’s retribution time, Monty, and a stinking Hungarian cell for you.’ He gave Broadwell-Smith’s arm an extra wrench, till the man howled. A waiter came to watch, without interfering.

‘God, that’s no way to treat … Listen Roy, Roy, look, stop this. Do you really want unpleasant publicity? This is what I’ll do. I’ll make a deal. A generous deal.’

‘No deals, you sod. You caught me once – you aren’t going to catch me again. Out of that door.’

‘Wait, wait. Ouch! Listen, you sadist, here’s the deal. Just let me go, savvy?’

‘Don’t let him go,’ advised the waiter from the sidelines.

‘Let me go and I will nip straight round to the clinic. It’s locked but I’ve got a key. I’ll nip straight round to the clinic and I’ll steal the master-bullet and bring it back to you. Where are you staying? The Gellert again, I suppose? You plutocrats … I’ll bring you back the memory bullet we made.’

Burnell twisted the arm again. The waiter said, appreciatively, ‘This man, he never pays a round.’

Another twist, more details. ‘There are two bullets, to be honest. I’m being honest, Roy. Ow! I’ll bring them both back to you. And you can then go somewhere – England, Germany, France – and get those squalid years of yours reinserted back in your noddle, if that’s what you want. What do you say?’

Burnell relaxed his hold. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Straightening, Monty regained confidence.

‘No, you won’t. There’s a guard on the clinic door these days. He’d kill you. I’ll get the bullets. Promise. Bring them to the Gellert without fail at –’ he looked at his watch ‘– give me two hours. Say six o’clock, OK. I think I can swing it.’

With some reluctance, Burnell agreed to this plan. He let go of Monty entirely. Recent sessions with Rebecca Rosebottom had made him, he felt, unusually alert to fraudulence. Accordingly, he watched to see what Monty might do when he left the bar.

Monty performed somewhat as expected. The moment he was in the street, he started to run. Burnell ran after him. Monty dodged along a side alley, down some steps, and into a main thoroughfare. A tram car was approaching. As Monty rushed to get on, Burnell’s hand fell on his shoulder.

Only for a moment did a look of anger cross Monty’s face.

‘Oh, Roy, dear old feller – how glad I am you’re here. Thanks so much.’ The tram sliced by within a few inches of them. He fell into Burnell’s arms. The latter fended him off but, before he could speak, Monty was babbling on, eyebrows shooting up and down.

‘Roy, I have such trouble. As I left that rotten drinking establishment, the ghost of Charles de Gaulle was waiting outside for me. You know, the French chappie with the big conk who made it to President? Charles de Gaulle – an airport named after him outside Paris. There he was again! Right in the street, in broad daylight. Did you see him? I ran like billy-oh. Thank God you saved me! Sometimes he follows me into the old W. Never knew a case like it.’

Burnell hailed a cab and bundled Monty in.

At the Gellert, Burnell paid off the cab and heaved Monty, now in a collapsible state, into the ornate foyer.

‘All right, Broadwell-Smith, now let’s have the truth. No bloody ghost stories. I have every reason to beat you up, so vex me no further. How do I get my memory back? How do you get it back for me?’

Pulling himself upright and tugging his little beard, Monty said, ‘Please don’t threaten me in a place I’m well respected. Besides, I’m feeling unwell after all the exertion. Let me be honest with you, Roy, your last ten years were crap. Full of crap … There, I don’t want to be too hard on you. Everyone’s last ten years were probably full of crap. I ought to know – I’ve edited enough of Antonescu’s silly symphonies in the last few weeks. What utter shits men are … Now I think of it, I feel sorry for you.’

Burnell stuck his knuckles between the other’s thin ribs.

‘Stop bullshitting me, you little cheat. You robbed me. You buggered up my life and then had me dumped on Salisbury Plain.’

Shaking his head, Monty looked out miserably across the Danube to Pest with its dense Magyar thoroughfares where fat profiteers of many nations were sweating over their calculators. ‘You were lucky. Believe me. As a compatriot, as an old friend far from home, I interceded for you. Generally our victims – well, patients, let’s say – get dumped outside the city, still drugged, on a refuse-tip twenty kilometres away from here. And what happens to them then? Peasants rob ’em or kill ’em.

‘You’ve had an easy time of it. You should be grateful. Your pater was always well heeled, not to mention being a bit of a crook, eh?

‘In your case – Roy, old chap, I shouldn’t be telling you this. It puts my very life in hazard. In your case, I interceded. “Cedo, cedere, cessi, cessum”, to beg or something. A flight was being planned to deliver arms to the UK, to the BRI. British Revolutionary Islam, savvy? Totally secret of course. A secret arms drop on Salisbury Plain, paid for by Muslims over here. I pulled a few strings and got you flown over too. Drugged. You were dropped along with the weaponry. Better than the refuse-tip, admit it. You owe me a big favour.’

‘I owe you nothing. You’re going to give me back those memory bullets right now.’ Knuckle in deeper. A passing sheikh, wafting perfume, looked surprised, but not extremely surprised.

‘You’re hurting me, Roy. I don’t feel well. The drink in that place was poisoned. I need to go to the Gents. I am about to be sick.’ He writhed realistically, and made appropriate noises in his throat.

Burnell got him up to his room. He bound Monty’s hands behind his back with a tie.

‘This talk about a master-bullet in Antonescu’s clinic. Are you lying? You’d better tell me, Broadwell-Smith, or I’ll lock you in the wardrobe and leave you there to die.’

By this time, Monty was the same shade of trampled grey as the carpet. ‘Really, old boy, you can work that one out for yourself. Antonescu runs an illegal operation. Is he going to leave evidence lying about? He might be raided any day – not by the police, of course, but by a rival gang. From the master-bullets we make about five hundred copies. Not much profit in it, really. As soon as these are sold to a dealer, they’re off our hands and the masters are destroyed.’

‘Five hundred copies? You made five hundred copies of my precious memories?’ He was almost bereft of speech. While he knew nothing of his recent past, the whole world could be laughing over it.

‘You weren’t exactly in the Casanova league, old chum, let’s face it. We had a Pole in the clinic a couple of months ago … He was in the two-thousand-copy bracket, because—’

‘Never mind the Poles. You said you made two bullets. Was that also a lie?’

Presenting an expression of blameless honesty, Monty explained that Mircea Antonescu dealt in more than one market. He extracted all Burnell’s professional knowledge, editing it from the ten-year period. That knowledge was reproduced in an edition of maybe a hundred copies. A limited scholarly audience existed for such things, and paid well. Lazy students of architecture, teachers needing a short cut – such people formed a ready market. Pausing to gather courage, Monty added that Burnell’s store of learning made up one bullet; his love life made up the other. All skilfully edited, of course – by himself.

‘Oh God!’ Burnell sat down and hid his face in his hands. ‘You swear this is truth, you little chiseller?’

‘Would I lie? Read my lips.’ He started to go into details of what he referred to as ‘the choice bits’, but Burnell interrupted him.

‘So where have all these copies of my memory – my life – gone?’

Monty declared that that was up to the dealer to whom Antonescu sold. Antonescu was naturally secretive about such matters, but he had heard that the dealer traded the bullets on promptly to Eastern Europe and beyond, where they could not be traced. ‘Buchuresti is one market. Bootleg EMVs move from there further East. All the old nations and raggle-taggle once coerced into the Soviet Union are avid to feed on porn.’

‘Porn! You call my sacred memories porn, you little skunk?’

‘It’s a matter of terminology, Roy, old boy. They want to know how the West performs in bed. Insatiable. Untie me, please. A drink wouldn’t come amiss after all the excitement.’

Privately, Burnell agreed. He untied Monty and took some slap, inhaling the designer drug through a short plastic tube. Monty helped himself to a generous neat gin from the mini-bar.

‘So where is this dealer?’

‘Ahh … I’ve always liked gin. Reminds me of my childhood. I’d end up on the aforesaid rubbish-tip if I gave away his whereabouts. Honour among thieves, old pal. Generally enforced at gun-point. Besides, he’ll have shifted all the copies by now. Incidentally – this’ll amuse you – I heard over the grapevine that President Diyanizov has a fabulous collection of Western EMV “love” bullets. He may be plugging in to you this very moment.’

Monty’s laughter involved coughing circumspectly. Seeing Burnell’s expression, he added, ‘Diyanizov. The current boss of Turkmenistan. Far enough from here.’

‘Never heard of him. I suppose he’s a ghost, like Charles de Gaulle!’

Monty looked pained. ‘That was just a joke, dear boy. Tell you what I’ll do. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll contact this dealer and see if he’s kept a couple of your bullets for himself. Stephanie’s a pretty sight in the altogether when she’s worked up … He might have hung on to them for his own entertainment.’

‘Phone him from here.’

Another idea occurred to Monty. Antonescu had just put together an anthology bullet he called ‘European Peasants’. Monty knew from what he had seen that Burnell was a sport. He could have a copy for a thousand. It featured country men and women who had done disgusting acts with every animal on the farm.

‘Phone,’ ordered Burnell, pointing to the instrument.

Burnell stood listening as Monty dialled and made an oblique and muttered call. He replaced the receiver and smiled. Burnell was in luck. The dealer had the spare bullets, and would send a minion round with them on a BMW bike. Instructions were that Monty had to be by the memorial in the park behind the Gellert Hotel in half an hour, when the package would be dropped off.

The arrangement sounded genuine. Burnell paced the room while his Dapertutto was away. Like Hoffmann, whose shadow was stolen from him in Offenbach’s opera, he was living a half-life and would do so until his memory was restored.

At least the Gellert management had been helpful. When Burnell disappeared, the hotel had collected his belongings from his room and handed them over to the police. After he had settled his outstanding bill, the manager had retrieved his belongings. His electronic diary yielded useful information. The address of his apartment in Frankfurt-am-Main, near the offices of World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, was no longer a mystery. He could resume his job immediately, provided Monty Broadwell-Smith returned as promised.

Monty did return, looking flushed and – as far as habit allowed – triumphant. He had two EMV bullets, lying snugly side by side in a plastic box of standard design.

‘Here you are, old boy. Your bullets, the last in Budapest. Ready to be inserted into the projector. There’s one on the ground floor, as you may have noticed.’

When Burnell stretched out his hand, Monty produced only one of his coughing laughs.

‘No, no, my friend. Hold the line a tick. I didn’t obtain these treasures for nothing. I had to stump up to the despatch rider. Honest Injun. The dealer is no pushover. He rushed me twelve hundred and fifty Deutschmarks the pair – five hundred for the academic bullet, seven hundred and fifty for the amorous one. Sorry, but you’ll have to reimburse me. These babies contain your last ten years, remember! I’m just a poor exile, as you are aware …’ Raising an impoverished eyebrow, he gave Burnell a look of innocent appeal.

Trembling, Burnell paid up. Monty Broadwell-Smith touched his forelock, drained his gin glass, and disappeared. Burnell went immediately down to the EMV cubicle on the ground floor, clutching the little plastic box. It was vacant. He could regain his past time – and possibly his past wife. He fed the bullets into the apparatus, sat back in the chair, pulled the projector over his head, and switched on. Nothing happened. He turned up the intensity. Still nothing happened. The bullets were blank and Monty had escaped.

6
Soss City

Fragments of various post-Soviet wars were continuing. A truce was arranged in the Crimea between Russia and Ukraine. It was the sixth such truce. Heavy fighting was reported in the Caucasus region, where Alliance troops were involved. What had been a peace force was now engaged in counter-offensive operations. The UN met every day.

Radio reports from Tbilisi claimed that the Alliance was using chemical and bacteriological weapons in the Kutasi area. There, Azeri irregulars stiffened by units of the Turkish army were fighting Armenians. Questioned, American General ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass said, ‘What in hell else do we do? These assholes don’t give up that easy.’

On the previous night, four Georgian soldiers had found their way through a minefield to give themselves up to a British journalist, Dicky Bowden, 20. One of the soldiers was a boy of fourteen.

Bowden said, ‘Starved and disaffected troops such as these are all that stand between the Alliance and the Caspian Sea.’

He said he was confident that the war would be over in a week or two. Say a month. Maximum two months. Certainly by year’s end.

Burnell switched off the television news. He settled down to read his own book in order to regain some of the professional knowledge stolen from him. He had reinstated himself in his apartment in the Schäfer Building. It was evening in Greater FAM, as Frankfurt-am-Main was known among the travelling classes. Frankfurt, in becoming FAM, had taken its rightful place beside LA, HK, and KL, to be known by its initials like an American president of yester-year, when American presidents had power.

At twenty minutes to three, he rose, closing his book. His appointment with his superior at the WACH offices was at three o’clock. He took a lift to the ground floor and left the Schäfer, passing under the marble bust of Amanda Schäfer, where two lines of her poetry were incised in Carrera marble:

Lass das Tal der Finsternesse,

tritt in meinen Lichtkreis ein

It was no more than a brief stroll along a grass-fringed sidewalk to the building which housed the WACH offices. The block was situated behind the brown mass of the Xerox block, built to resemble a child’s interpretation of Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of Carcassonne. All the blocks here, because they had no real context, were architectural abnormalities – to Burnell’s mind, the degenerate opposite of the structures that it was his duty to protect.

Walking here once with Burnell, a visiting friend had looked about him in dismay and exclaimed, ‘God had his reasons.’ But God remained unobtrusive in Sossenheim, unwilling to intrude on an elaborate organization.

Sossenheim City, its civic designation, was an aggregation within an all-embracing FAM, a grave accent stretching north-west from what remained of the Niederwald. Sossenheim was too big to be called a business park. It consisted of offices, shopping malls, urbstaks, hotels, apartment blocks, Bienenhäuser, parklets, autostaks, conference centres. These units might be expressed as three million square metres of offices, two million square metres of living accommodation, point nine million square metres of retailing, and point six million square metres of automobile parking. The population of Soss City was two point two million by day and point nine eight by night. Potted plants, point four million, static. Many official bodies – such as WACH, to name one of the poorest of them – had offices in Soss City.

Soss City possessed no centre, no spot where citizens might gather, should they be seized by such an aberrant desire. Of the old village, a community where once men gathered in the bars of the crooked streets, to discuss the relative merits of Eintracht Frankfurt versus Bayern München, and beat up their wives discreetly on returning home, nothing remained: the exception being a row of two-storey brick houses in Mombacher Platz. These had somehow escaped bombs in World War II and later the demolition gangs, and now formed part of a History Theme Park. The new city was divided, though in no systematic way, into national sectors. Giant Bienenhäuser or ‘beehives’ contained citizens of the member nations of the EU. In other hives lived Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Californian, American, Arab, South African populations, and so on. All these hives, although basically engaged on international business, cleaved to their national idiosyncrasies, their national cooking – diversified in many cases by integral Indonesian and Chinese restaurants.

National diversity compensated slightly for ethnographic oddity. Everyone in Soss City was middle-class, aged between about sixteen and fifty-five. Retiring drones had to take themselves off elsewhere. Children were herded and not seen.

On his brief walk, Burnell passed not a single advertisement, such as enlivened the centre of cities everywhere. Nor did he pass another human being. Only armoured security vans prowled by.

The daily tidal flow of habitation was serviced by monorails, high-speed coaches, U-bahns and S-bahns. Most early traffic surged into the various centres of FAM, fish into a crocodile’s maw. The attraction of Sossenheim was that it offered safety without the necessity of neighbourliness. Burnell had always liked that; it mattered to no one whether or not he was around; he could come and go as he pleased. Also, none of the crime rampant throughtout much of the Western world affected Soss City. High-income residents invested in the best security systems.

Soss City needed no central meeting-place; the traditional square had disappeared beneath the power of indoor electronics. But in the gaudy Ginza Mall – where you showed an ID to enter – clowns and high-wire acts entertained punters every day, fountains splashed, bands played (strong on Mozart and Miles Davis), and two live white tigers were fed one live black pig every day prompt at noon, inside the Adventure Cathedral.

Organic cities of an older order are never completed, always in process, like the individuals who work and play in them. Sossenheim City was complete. A package deal.

It was no secret to Burnell that Soss City was a dull place, and that the Amanda Schäfer was a dull building. He did not mind. Dullness was good plain fare, like bread. For much of his time he was elsewhere. On the roof of the hive were various gymnasia and a large enclosed swimming pool, fringed with palms and the Copacabana Snackeria, where you could drink coconut milk or the Düsseldorf beer with the nostalgic name, Belsenbräu. A few expensive shops graced the mezzanine floor, a Pâtisserie, a jeweller, an Apotheke. On the lower ground floor was a theatre which showed films every day and staged a live show once a week, when lean lightly clad transvestites cavorted for fat men in business suits. Entry to ‘The Pink Pussycat’ was free to those who showed their Schäfer ID.

A higher culture was preserved, if only as an echo of the past. The Amanda Schäfer was itself named after a German writer of the region, whose slender book of poems, Zeichen am Wege, had acquired cult status. On every floor were EMV cubicles; the system was due to invade individual apartments shortly, as its popularity grew. TV was increasingly given over to amateurism; anyone with a camcorder could secure a viewing. That was democracy. TV’s feeblest jokes were greeted with rapturous applause by studio audiences. But nothing by way of a living art form actually took place in, or was inspired by, the Amanda Schäfer.

The fragmentation afflicting Western society from the 1980s onwards found its embodiment in edge cities like Sossenheim. Among a vast crowd of demographically separate people, it was easy to be alone.

Even within the WACH offices, a sense of isolation prevailed. Burnell was aware of it as a secretary showed him into a small conference room. The air-conditioning reduced voices to a whisper. The very word ‘culture’, so vague and threatening, had a deadening effect.

Burnell’s superior, Karl Leberecht, rose from his desk, rushed round it, and embraced Burnell, clapping him on the back. As usual, Leberecht was immaculately dressed, sporting a carnation in the buttonhole of his pinstripe suit. Rumour had it that he beat his large Scandinavian wife.

He sat Burnell down, ordered coffee, sent his equally immaculate secretary out of the room, and insisted on hearing all Burnell’s troubles. Putting his feet up, leaning back, and gazing at a bust of Eugene Ionesco was Leberecht’s way of concentrating. He did not speak until Burnell had finished.

In his sympathetic fashion, Leberecht brushed to one side the whole business of Stephanie and any other affairs of the heart (as he phrased it) which might be contained in the erotic EMV bullet. Burnell was still a young man and would have plenty of time to accumulate more memories of beautiful women. Having said which, he laughed heartily; Burnell joined in in doleful fashion. The two men had often gone out on the town together.

What worried Leberecht – and at this point he struggled up and put his feet in their polished shoes firmly on the carpet – was that all Burnell’s professional knowledge should be so easily available on the second bullet. He felt strongly that knowledge should be accessible only to those who were prepared to work for it – ‘like good fortune’, he said. Knowledge should not be purchased in the street, like ice cream or the services of a prostitute. He promised he would do all he could through WACH channels to track down the offending bullets and have them destroyed. Meanwhile, he offered Burnell indefinite leave.

Burnell said he was rootless and restless. He would rather work. Work at least gave him some sense of identity. Any assignment would be welcome.

Peering into the VDU on his desk, Leberecht pressed a few keys.

‘The Caucasus, Roy. Georgia, Armenia, Abkhazia … Lots of obscure people with obscure names: Chechens, Ossetians, Ingush, Adygs, in that general area. Mainly the states are run by terrible men – ex-bomber pilots, mass murderers. Fighting goes on all the time. Just the sort of place you would love. Not a toilet that flushes from the Black Sea to the Caspian, I’d guess – but, some little treasures from a WACH point of view, here and there. Those treasures need to be documented – well, frankly, before someone or other blows them up. Do you like the sound of all this?’

‘Suits me,’ Burnell said. ‘If I don’t have some action, I’ll be in a coma.’

Leberecht gave him a hard look. ‘You’re not insane or anything? Frankly, I’d prefer my desk in Soss City.’ They both laughed.

The immaculate secretary brought in a map of the Caucasus. Leberecht indicated an area near the Black Sea coast which had recently proclaimed itself to be West Georgia, under a leader by the name of Lazar Kaginovich.

‘Kaginovich is one of the maggots who have risen to the surface since the body of the Soviet Union decayed. Don’t worry, you won’t meet him.’ Leberecht put a well-manicured finger on the map. ‘In this mountainous area somewhere here is a place called Ghvtism. It’s not marked. It’s very remote, which may mean it’s peaceful. We’re interested in documenting a church called – it’s a bit of a mouthful – Ghvtismshobeli. Say “Gutism” and “Show belly” and you’ll remember it.’ He chuckled. ‘The Georgians have long prided themselves on being the southernmost outpost of Christianity. Just a few miles south of Ghvtismshobeli, it’s Islam. So this little church is something of an outpost.’

‘When was the church last inspected?’

‘It’s been listed for years, never inspected. A Italian traveller called in there in the eighties of last century, reporting a legend of a valuable ikon. Go and see if it’s still standing, document it before they blow it to hell in some petty war or other. You sure you like the sound of it?’

Nodding, Burnell said he would go. Leberecht told him that as usual he would be given a pack with cameras, camcorders, survey instruments, and so on. Also, some American protection might be forthcoming.

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Well, Roy, a) the area’s dangerous, and b) the Americans are interested in oil and anything else they can get their hands on. Georgia is on the way to the resource-rich nations of Central Asia. I should add that there’s also a hush-hush c). A big-noise American general is taking a personal interest. I can say nothing more.’

‘And that’s very little, Karl.’

‘Everything connects, my friend. A flight leaves FAM for Tbilisi on Saturday afternoon. I’ll come and see you off.’

Back in his apartment, he began slowly to make arrangements to pack. To unpack, to repack. He opened a window. That hole in his life moved in to occupy the centre of his being. In Georgia new difficulties would fill the hole.

He took some slap. A bumblebee flew in the window, landed on him, and clung to his shirt, seeming to fondle the fabric with its forelegs. It was a matter of wonder what this industrious creature might be doing in flowerless Soss.

The bee, seen through Burnell’s temporary glow, was an angelic creation. Its lovely body, covered in yellow and black fur, seemed to blaze. By contrast, an armorial lustre slid along the chitinous combs of the insect’s legs. Its wings lay glistening along its body. He regarded it with veneration.

As he looked, he saw a small brown dot move in the region of the bumblebee’s neck. A parasite was crawling about its furry host.

The bee flew to the window and began an angry buzz against the pane. He shooshed it into the open with a shirt.

Beginning slowly to contemplate the shape of his journey, he noticed a blank business card tucked into the noticeboard in his kitchenette. Written on the card in red ink was a local phone number. No name. It meant nothing to him, although he was certain it was not the number of his dealer.

He stood with the card in his hand, admiring its sharp edges, so precisely cut. Going over to the phone he dialled the red figures. A recorded voice said in German, ‘Who is it? You’ve probably dialled the wrong number.’

‘Oh …’ He stuttered a little. His responses were slow. Before he could hang up, a woman’s voice said in German, ‘That’s you, Roy? Sorry, I’m here.’ Not recognizing the voice, he did not know what to say.

‘Is anything wrong? Are you alone? I cancelled all our appointments since you didn’t call. You want me to come round? I can still fit you in tonight.’ It was a quiet voice, with an unusual accent.

‘I – look, I’ve been away … Yes, come round. What time?’

A slight surprise entered her voice. ‘Seven-thirty, I guess, as usual, OK? You sound funny.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll explain when I see you. Wiederschön.’

He put the phone down. He should have asked her who she was; but these things would be easier face to face. It was so wimpish to have to admit you had had your memory stolen; no one liked admitting loss of memory. Whoever she was, she must be a girlfriend. She might be able to fill in some of his past. They could eat in the Schäfer’s Chinese restaurant, and maybe they would make love. It sounded like a good way to pass an evening in the Federal Republic.

Wandering about the apartment, he found himself unable to think. In the top drawer of his dresser was the photograph of a pretty woman in a large straw hat, smiling, as people felt compelled to do when they saw a camera about. Was it a photograph of the girl he had just phoned? But this one was standing in front of what looked like a Spanish building. He was baffled. He thought, ‘It’ll be better after Saturday afternoon. That’s the future. In the future all men are equal – nobody has memories of the future …’

He began to look out a book to take on the journey. Gibbon, of course. Montaigne. From his travel shelf he pulled down Freshfield’s Travels in the Central Caucasus.

As darkness was falling, Burnell’s phone rang.

‘Burnell?’ A neutral voice.

‘Yes. Who’s that?’

‘Tartary. Listen to this message. Georgia, in the Caucasus. A missing ikon, known as “The Madonna of Futurity”. Could be it’s at Ghvtismshobeli. Number One wants it back here. Do your best …’

‘Who’s that? Who’s Number One?’

‘Just get that ikon.’

The phone went dead. On several previous trips Burnell had carried out seemingly unimportant missions for Codename Tartary he believed: in this way he earned money to support his habit. He could not identify the voice; its owner probably spoke through a masker. Possibly it was a German voice speaking an American English. Many mysterious things went on in FAM.

For a while he worked on his personal computer, summoning up data he had forgotten.

Number One might refer to ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass himself, the crazed American general in charge of the EU peace corps who had somehow turned his troops into an invading force, apparently with the intention of carving out an empire of his own … Strange things happened these days.

Another theory was that WACH was part-funded by Stalinbrass monies. He had listed possible evidence of this. The Director of WACH might be involved – mainly in the theft of art works from the emergent nations with which WACH was principally concerned. Someone in WACH was using Burnell. He stared into the illusory depths of his screen.

Burnell believed evolutionary pressures determined that people exploited each other. Consequently, he tolerated being exploited unless he felt himself squeezed. In retrospect, even the trick Broadwell-Smith had played on him was amusing.

He looked again into his electronic diary for further details on Tartary which might have been lost with the extracted memories. There was nothing. Not even a phone number. They got in touch with him, not vice versa.

How deeply he was involved he did not know. However, if someone wanted an ikon which he might come across in Georgia, he was complaisant enough to oblige.

Flicking through the electronic index, he saw the name Remenyi. It was another unknown. He turned up the entry.

Peter Remenyi was thirty-two years old, a celebrated Hungarian ski-jumper. It appeared he was a close friend, and that he and Burnell had been in the Alps the previous summer, travelling on horseback. A home address in Budapest was given. Vexed to think he had been in Budapest and not called his friend, Burnell immediately phoned Remenyi’s number.

For a while, he listened to the phone ringing in Hungary. Nobody answered.

He switched off the processor, sitting back, trying to sort through the struggle of non-memory in his head. Whatever had happened in the recent past was a puzzle. The sections of the brain involved with memory retention contained many amacrine cells or microneurones. Yet non-localized storage of data also occurred; in consequence, ghost images rose up. Faceless men and women came and went. And was there not someone he knew, possibly this Peter Remenyi, lying somewhere in a coma?

The nightmare thought occurred to him that he might himself be Remenyi. But that was absurd. His colleagues in WACH had identified him as Roy Burnell.

As he was throwing some clothes into a pack, his doorbell buzzed. It was seven-thirty on the dot. Burnell went and opened the door.

A young woman entered his domain, self-possessed on her high heels. A man of unprepossessing aspect had accompanied her. He remained in the corridor, giving Burnell a hard look, not speaking. The woman was in her late twenties, well built, not quite plump. Her dyed blonde hair was cut short, bristly at the back of the head up to the occipital bone. Her eyes, fringed by long false lashes, were curiously masked by the application of shining scarlet make-up which curved to a point on the temples. Her lips were painted black. She wore a tight green plastic skin dress, buttoning up the front, which emphasized her generous bosom. The dress ceased just below the swell of her mons veneris.

He understood immediately.

‘You’ll have to tell me your name.’

She was looking about the apartment, very business-like. ‘That’s silly. You sounded strange on the phone. Not yourself.’

‘Maybe. I’ve been robbed. It’s the EMV craze. Someone has stolen my memory. The immediate past is a blank. I hoped perhaps you might help me.’

‘I don’t offer that kind of therapy. Sorry. You’re got ninety minutes of my time. You can still have erections? I guarantee I will leave you relaxed and happy. As always.’

‘It’s clear we’ve met before. Because of the theft – I just don’t remember you.’

‘Let me remind you.’ She was wearing nothing under the dress. It fell open like a chest of drawers spilling out its goodies.

‘Does this look familiar?’

Her pubic hair had been shaved off.

She insisted on checking his anti-AIDS status. The indicator on his watch showed green. She showed her indicator, also reading Safe. It was OK. They went briskly through into the bedroom. She led the way. Burnell followed, admiring the jaunty buttocks, smooth as machine parts.

He had always liked the Germans, not least because his father hated them. The neatness of German towns, where modernity sat comfortably with antiquity, had been achieved nowhere else in Europe. In the same way, a Teutonic drive towards success – success in all things – was moderated by an everyday courtesy. Earnestness was similarly moderated by a sense of humour. He found the Germans honest; or at least they retained a respect for honesty. They were good on respect. Wholeheartedness attracted him, perhaps because he had never possessed the quality: it formed an element in the life here which excited him, an intense secret eroticism buried under the surface of daily existence which foreigners rarely saw: an eroticism which differed from the flashiness of Italian, the polish of French, the bounciness of Scandinavian, and the salaciousness of English eroticism, in that particular culinary quality, Teutonic wholeheartedness. He understood well that national wholeheartedness had led Germany into disastrous follies in the past, just as it had led to leadership in Europe in the present; still he found that wholeheartedness admirable: not only in economic life, but in bed. He paid her before undressing.

German women brought to lovemaking the same kind of homely expertise they once brought to breadmaking, the sleeves of their blouses metaphorically rolled up, their hair piled out of the way, the smells of a warm hearth in the air, flour spreading up to their armpits, the dough kneaded into required shape under those dimpled practised hands.

After ninety minutes and three orgasms, Burnell was relaxed and happy.

As the woman was leaving, he said, perhaps trying to restore his reputation in her fringed eyes, ‘I won’t be here next week. I’m going to Georgia.’

‘I too shall visit the USA one day.’

The bruiser was waiting for her in the corridor.

7
‘The Dead One’

The high-wing Yak 40 laboured towards the landing-strip like an aged pterosaur, fighting against a headwind which poured through the mountains. Below the snowline, the landscape was a faded green, patched here and there with livelier colour. It rose up to embrace the light aircraft. A river glinted, hastening down a valley, and was lost to view.

The airstrip was laid out on a plateau. The plateau was dominated by cliffs above and below, set in an extreme landscape, shiftless, unthriving, lying under puffs of cloud. This was a territory of religion, ideology, blood-letting, a land forever fought over, passionately disputed.

The Yak circled, coming in again, lower, still rocking, then into calmer air under the great slopes. Now buildings could be made out below, in particular a circular structure of some kind, with a cluster of vehicles round it like ticks round a wart. The plane burst through another puff of cloud, unexpectedly low, and tore it to shreds. Someone was firing at the craft. A way of saying Welcome to Transcaucasia.

The pilot shouted something to his two passengers which Colonel Irving interpreted. ‘We’re going down. As if we hadn’t guessed. He says to hold on. As if we weren’t.’

Then the twin-engine was no longer the aerial creature which had swanned over mountains, but a kind of mad car, bumping over grit. Burnell and Irving fought against the deceleration. The plane rolled to a halt.

A vehicle was jolting towards them as Burnell and Irving climbed down. Behind the Jeep came a truck. Two men jumped from the truck. They ran towards the plane, which carried supplies from Tbilisi, medical supplies, an intensive-care unit, flour, and sugar. All these items were more important to the fighters on the ground than Burnell or Irving.

Everyone moved at the double. Burnell and his companion, packs shouldered, were bundled into the Jeep, which made off at full speed. Above the roar of its engine, the crump of mortar shells could be heard.

The Jeep banged its way towards the building Burnell had seen from the air. It stood ruddy against a smear of shattered limestone hills in the distance. It was, or had been, a mosque, the minaret of which had been destroyed: only a stump remained. The mosque itself was a simple cube, capped by a dome resting on pendentives. Its open-arched porch supported three minor domes. Tiles on the main dome were missing.

Burnell knew from his WACH briefing that Ossetian occupation of this Georgian territory had endured for some while, until the hostility of their Christian neighbours, together with climatic changes, had forced the Muslim Ossetians to seek more hospitable territory to the north. Like the Balkans, Transcaucasia was a patchwork of conflicting ways of life.

A cluster of men, wearing a variety of uniforms, stood under the domed porch. All were armed. They watched alertly as Burnell and James Irving climbed from the Jeep and approached. One of the men took a step forward in order to detach himself from the others.

Burnell’s senses were so roused, by the drinking the previous night in Tbilisi, by the flight over the Caucasus, and by the exhilaration of finding himself in this divided land, that he took in the leader at a gulp. This man, right down to his swagger, was as picturesque as anyone could have wished, his khaki greatcoat being draped about with pistols, magazines, and the traditional Kalashnikov. With his boots and sheepskin hat he made a familiar figure, who appeared regularly on TV news bulletins. This was the rebel, taking advantage of the upheavals in Nagorny-Karabakh, who fought to establish his own breakaway state. He was all the more real to Burnell because the latter had seen him on television.

The leader looked mountainous. It was only later, seeing him less showily equipped, that Burnell realized he was no taller than average.

He gave his visitors a nod and a cold eye.

‘You’re Lazar Kaginovich?’ Irving enquired in his deep voice.

The other drew himself up. ‘I am Captain Lazar Kaginovich. Commander of Armies of the West Georgian Republican Forces.’ His English was accented but fluent. ‘You are of course the brave American Commander Irving, once an astronaut to the Moon. You are welcome in West Georgia.’

‘It’s just James Irving now.’

Kaginovich smiled by the sly expedient of raising his moustached upper lip. His expression did not change as Irving introduced Burnell.

‘Dr Roy Burnell, eh? We received a signal regarding you. But you are not a doctor of medicine.’

‘That’s correct. My subject is ecclesiastical architecture.’

‘There is a war going on and you come to regard a church …’ Kaginovich shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, that’s understood. We make concessions in time of war. To receive EU aid – to have Commander Irving – we must accept also ecclesiastical architects. Come with me.’ The words provoked his sneer.

A frozen look about Kaginovich made him a century older than his real years. He had yet to reach thirty. Already experience had etched itself on his brow and under his eyes.

The men in the porch gave way for the newcomers, while scrutinizing them mistrustfully. These were Kaginovich’s officers. One, a large man with sandy hair, gave an affable nod in Burnell’s direction. After a suspicious glance, the others returned to gazing across the airstrip, where the Yak’s cargo was being unloaded into the lorry. A distant mortar was still pounding, apparently to little effect.

Kaginovich walked with a slight limp, clapping his right hand to his thigh. Irving followed, with Burnell close behind, humping his gear over one shoulder. The old mosque had been wrenched from its original sacred purpose; it now housed soldiers, animals, and ammunition. A racket of lowbrow music issued from a radio.

The air was greasy with the stink of men, their cooking, their piss, and their mules. A number of West Georgian soldiers lay about on blankets, smoking, indolently watching smoke rise from a fire to cobwebby beams far above their heads. Their weapons and boots lay beside them. In one corner, mules and donkeys were tethered. The mules, black and long-eared, mutiny always in mind, shook their long heads over the backs of the donkeys.

An armoury of weapons, including a small field gun, bombs, and ammunition boxes, was piled carelessly near the fire, on which a cook was stirring a dixie.

Sunlight slanted in from above, rendered cold and fishy-looking by dirty windows. It was a scene more from the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. The end of the Cold War, signalling an uprising of nationalisms and ethnic quarrels, had set the map back to an 1899 disposition.

Tokens of war – of the continuing fragmentation of what had been until little more than fifteen years ago the Soviet Union – were everywhere. A shell hole through the front wall of the mosque had been plugged with sacking. Much of the interior was blackened by fire. Mural quotations from the Koran had been defaced. Wounded men lay on stretchers, tended by a male nurse. The desk to which Lazar Kaginovich strode was piled with papers held down by a clip of grenades.

Burnell thought of an analysis of the woes of the world, heard from a woman’s lips. Had those lips been Stephanie’s? He could not remember. But he remembered the terms. Women had risen up to assert themselves after centuries of oppression. Pride injured by this challenge, men had turned to an ancient proof of manhood, war. An alluring analysis but incorrect: the regions where women remained oppressed, without security or suffrage, were among those most ready to take up arms.

But to accept the aggressive nature of men, and the destructive nature of their creeds, was hardly a diagnosis, Burnell reflected, looking about him with excitement.

Kaginovich threw himself down behind his desk. He gestured to his two visitors to draw up stools. He shouted for the radio to be switched off.

‘I welcome you, Commander Irving. We of course know of your heroic past. We are honoured you have joined the West Georgian Republic’s struggle for independence, and freedom against its oppressors.’ His English contained rich aspirates in the Russian manner. He ignored Burnell.

Irving’s relaxed attitude to life had been demonstrated on the flight from Tbilisi.

Speaking in his easy way, he said, ‘Captain Kaginovich, as you are aware, I am merely on a peace-keeping mission instigated by the EU Security Council. I have nothing to do with the forces of General Stalinbrass, or with the UN blue berets, who were drawn into this struggle when their convoy was ambushed by Azeri forces near Signakhi.’

‘Those Azeris – they’re rebels, murderers, ethnic cleansers!’ Kaginovich said.

‘I’m a fact-finder, Captain. My presence here is designed to work toward a truce between you and your present enemies, so that proper discussions can take place and –’

‘None of discussions! Not until we have regained our stolen territories from here to the sea.’

Irving continued unperturbed. ‘– in Borzhomi, or elsewhere to be agreed. To this end, the EU Security Council will deliver at least a percentage of the aid requested. Dr Burnell and I have flown in with the first instalment.’ From inside his military parka he drew a list of the supplies and handed it across the desk. ‘No arms there, of course.’

‘We can secure arms from Hungary. We have friends, you know.’ Kaginovich grabbed the paper and read hastily down the list. ‘Yes. Not bad. Good. Excellent. We need everything. When can we receive more?’

Jim Irving was a neat wiry man in his sixties, athletic, without a gram of spare fat. His tanned good-natured face with its blue-grey eyes was mid-Western in origin, his white hair cut short. He spoke in a deceptively casual way. ‘You may receive more aid when my mission and Dr Burnell’s are satisfactorily completed. Also when proper courtesy is shown to Dr Burnell. You have our papers and know Dr Burnell to be one of the trustees of World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage. His directive is a simple one, requiring your cooperation: to make a survey of the ancient church of Ghvtismshobeli on Lake Tskavani.’

Burnell said, ‘We understand that the Tskavani region is at present under your jurisdiction. Or have United Georgian forces reclaimed it?’

Kaginovich slapped his thigh under the table and said, ‘We undergo a war for our survival. I regard this directive as an imposition. We have no time to worry about old churches.’ He launched into a lecture in which the word ‘liberty’ figured largely.

Burnell broke in. ‘I shall leave at once if you are unable to cooperate. Let me remind you that if WACH means little to you, Captain Kaginovich, I come under the command of General Augustus Stalinbrass of the EU Security Forces, who takes a personal interest in my mission.’

Irving did not so much as blink an eye at this claim. Kaginovich stood up. He summoned a nearby guard, who came hastily forward. ‘Dr Burnell, maybe you are a stranger to war. I will show you the reality of war in our region. You shall see how hostilities are conducted.’

He marched off with the guard, to leave the building by a side door.

As Burnell well knew, ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass cared little more for religion and culture than did the ambitious Kaginovich. Nevertheless, the Church of Ghvtismshobeli had notched up notably longer staying power than the General; indeed, it had outlasted what had been until recent years the Socialist Republic of Georgia. For all its inefficiency, WACH had exerted pressure through Washington. As Burnell waited to board his flight at FAM airport, he had received a letter of authorization and support from Stalinbrass’s command. Of the hidden agenda regarding the ikon, nothing was said, but Burnell did not doubt that ‘Number One’ was involved.

Burnell had flown from FAM to Israel by Lufthansa, and from Israel to Tbilisi by a military jet. Irving had met him in Tbilisi. From Tbilisi to Kaginovich’s temporary headquarters had been a hundred-and-fifty-kilometre hop. In truth, Kaginovich’s so-called revolution was little but a guerrilla movement. A dozen small cities, of which Bogdanakhi was the largest, had fallen to Kaginovich. The supplies they had brought him in the Yak were deflected from Ethiopia.

Impatient with Kaginovich’s abrupt departure, Burnell rose and walked about. Jim Irving sat tight. ‘Looks like we’re going to have a floor show to test our nerves,’ he said.

Abstract patterns formed from Arabic scripts had once adorned the walls of the old mosque. They had been largely obliterated by fire and graffiti. Kicking about in some ashes near the mihrab, the niche on the mosque’s Mecca-facing wall, Burnell came on fragments of unburnt polished wood. The mimbar, the high pulpit, had evidently been used to warm Kaginovich’s troops on cold nights. The captain had put religion to practical use.

Harsh shouts sounded, screams, curses. A number of guards entered the mosque, bringing with them two prisoners at gunpoint. The prisoners were mere lads, dirty, ragged, wild. Both looked sick with terror. They stumbled as they came.

Kaginovich followed, looking grimly pleased. Directed by a sergeant, the West Georgian guards thrust their captives against a wall of the mosque. Kaginovich issued an order. The soldiery all round sat up and took notice, or stood silently.

The sergeant produced a bowie knife, severing the belt of the older of the prisoners. The man’s cord breeches were dragged down, to reveal to all that he had shat himself with fright.

Irving calmly surveyed the scene. He strolled round the desk and sat down in Kaginovich’s chair, hitching a leg up on the desk. Taking his cue, Burnell sat down too, folding his arms tightly together to put himself in an imaginary straitjacket.

Another order from Kaginovich. The sergeant now threw himself at the other prisoner, the younger of the two. The guards held the lad, dragging his arms behind his back. Terrible cries rang out as the lad’s face was carved into. Burnell could bear neither to watch nor turn away. One of the lad’s eyes was gouged out. It fell to the floor.

The sergeant wiped his bloodied hands on the prisoner’s shirt. The prisoner collapsed in the straw and dirt, trapping his mutilated face between hands and knees. His companion, unwilling witness to this cruelty, had turned a frightful colour. Sweat poured down his unshaven face. He began to babble. Possibly he was praying. His body shook so badly it needed four men to hold him still. The severed eye was picked up and rammed into his mouth. He was beaten about his head until he swallowed it.

Both prisoners were then shot from behind. As their bodies were dragged away, hounds sprang forward and quizzed at the trails of blood and slime.

Kaginovich rubbed his hands with a washing movement. He said to Burnell, ‘Warfare is serious business. All that and more we shall do to their wives and sisters when we get them.’

The whole contingent was due to move towards the town of Bogdanakhi at dawn. Burnell and Irving were given rope beds to sleep on in a barrack near the mosque. Each carried space blankets to protect them from the cold of night.

Greatly though he longed for sleep, Burnell remained on a rocky shore of wakefulness. The scene in the mosque kept returning like a malignant bluebottle. It would not leave him. The pain of the young prisoners seemed drawn on his retina in white lines. Sickly, he crept at last into the open, to stand under the stars and gulp in the night air like a man diseased.

After a while, he saw Irving was standing nearby, a dark thin figure with hunched shoulders. The aroma of his cigarette reached Burnell.

‘It’ll be a long way to Ghvtismshobeli at this rate,’ said Burnell. ‘And with this company.’

Irving spoke in a nonchalant morning voice. ‘We may come up against worse sights yet. Those executions were not designed to impress us two alone. They were aimed also at Kaginovich’s officers. Loyalty here is reinforced by cruelty.’

‘Hard to see why anyone should be loyal to that monster.’

‘Kaginovich is a renegade from the Georgian National Guard, where he was cordially hated. His men probably hate him too, but they fight for a land they love. Kaginovich’s nickname, incidentally, is “The Dead One”.’

‘Not very apt, I’d have thought.’

‘Nope? Believe me, Roy, it’s bang on target. I’ll tell you the tale one day. We’d better sleep now. Dawn’s not far off and it’ll be a tough day ahead.’

They returned to their beds. Irving faced the wall. A slight mutter came from him as he said a prayer. Burnell knew Irving carried a revolver, although he himself was unarmed. He said no prayers. But listening to that whisper in the dark, taking comfort from it, he fell asleep.

Since the fatal day in Budapest, Burnell had suffered from nightmares.

The fan vaulting of Gloucester Cathedral, and the beauties of that carved fourteenth-century stone, faded into being. For a while he was transfixed by an angel eye, unwinking. But the stonework began to steam. He traversed again cartoon-cavernous cathedrals, followed the twist of cloister, transept, choir and nave, complex as a mesenchyme brain, flowing and changing like the undifferentiated tissue of which he had been composed in primal foetal life. He was drawn under elaborate lierne vaulting, rib intersecting rib intersecting ribbons of romanesque – grandiose, glutinous, ludicrous, lugubrious, the very intestines of dream. Ages passed in unholy umber illumination until caryatids came closer and their eyelids opened, to stream blood and tears as once more the frightened prisoner choked down an unclaimed eyeball. And Jim Irving was waking him.

A drab light, thick as mutton gravy, was filtering into the barracks. As they pulled on their boots, Burnell was shivering. He felt he would never unsee what he had seen.

Parading in a thin mist, the forces of West Georgia were a bedraggled lot. They mustered in the open, well wrapped and ill armed, saying little. The mules, protesting still, were led out from their stalls to be loaded with mortars and boxes of ammunition. Supervised by officers, cooks doled out a meat stew fortified by garlic, peppers, and tomatoes.

There followed one of those mysterious delays which afflict all armies. A radio signal had not arrived. Kaginovich, the Dead One, remained in the mosque. Everyone stood about in the open, smoking or sparring with a friend. The clouds crumbled, the mist cleared, and a yellow light flooded the scene, as if to spill forgiveness over the wicked ways of men. The quality of brightness enabled Burnell to put his dream behind him.

Illogically, he regretted they were leaving a spot he at least would never see again. The sensation was strong enough to prompt him to unhitch his pack and take out a camera. He walked about, photographing the battered mosque and its setting.

The Georgian officers began to take an interest. The big man with dull fair hair, whom Burnell had noticed the previous day, came forward. He wore a black SAS combat jacket. In tolerable English, he invited Burnell to photograph the officers. They all smiled ferociously and struck heroic poses for the camera, like a group of boys on an outing.

The vehicles started up with dramatic outbursts of smoke and noise. They left the camp in file, chugging off along a winding road that led eventually to Bogdanakhi. The infantry was to take a shorter, more precipitous route.

Kaginovich emerged at last. He shouted orders. The troops moved off, leaving a small detachment to guard the rear. Burnell and Irving went with the main body.

A copse of stunted trees had grown up round the mosque. As the file of men passed by, Burnell noticed field mortars among the trees, idly guarded by two soldiers from the rear detachment. The copse was terminated abruptly by a steep cliff, on the edge of which stood the mosque. Its mihrab wall faced due south over the precipice towards far-distant Mecca.

The force passed by the ruinous building, to pick its way over the lip of the cliff and down, on the first leg of a descent into the valley of the River Tskavani. That valley was as yet parcelled up in mist and shadow; there seemed no limit to its gloomy extent. The sound of running water filtered up, and the chipped song of a bird. So dramatic was the view, Burnell ran off several photographs, until he needed both hands for the descent, and put the camera away.

To some extent, Burnell was prepared for the rigours of the territory. After his phone call from ‘Tartary’ – a communication of which ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass no doubt had some knowledge – he had read up on the region. His oldest informant was Douglas W. Freshfield, whose book, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan: Including Visits to Ararat and Tabreeze and Ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz, had been published by Longmans Green of London in 1869. The stalwart Victorian described the hardships of travel in the unlucky isthmus between Black and Caspian seas. But neither the hachures of Freshfield’s maps, nor the elegance of Kronheim’s illustrations, fortified Burnell sufficiently for the way in which the crumbling goat path they were now following threatened to pitch them down into the valley below.

Low scrub, often aromatic, grew underfoot. No flowering azaleas, which Freshfield had led Burnell to expect, flourished on these precipitous slopes. They had to progress at times on their bums, clutching at the scrub.

After half an hour of perilous progress, a dramatic change in the light altered the scene. Across the gulf of valley to the west, piled cumulus revealed themselves, their grey-blue mushrooms burgeoning from the compost of the Black Sea. No sooner had they materialized than they warmed from neutral colours into faded rose and then into bright pink. As the strengthening sun brought about this transformation, thunder sounded in the bellies of the clouds and they were lit from within by lightning – Japanese lanterns of a terrible beauty. They were in the world of the romantic artist, John Martin.

As progress improved, Burnell allowed his thoughts to wander. He recalled the boyhood trip to Iceland on which his father had taken him. It had been disastrous. As they scrambled up the slopes of Vatna Jokul, his father had said, ‘You’ve always been afraid of getting your hands dirty, Roy.’ They were filthy enough now to satisfy the old man.

His father belonged to ‘the old school’ – a school Burnell at once admired and resented. Earlier generations of Englishmen had regarded Transcaucasia as a legitimate part of the great globe with which the British were involved, to ruin or rule. Throughout the last century, British power had dwindled away. The British Isles were now a remote appendage of central EU power. So he found himself scrambling along under a petty warlord. Enjoying it, of course, he told himself.

Old Freshfield – a distant relation on Burnell’s mother’s side of the family – had travelled where he would in his day. He moved through Central Caucasus, grandly summoning up Russian colonels to mail his letters home, or post-chaising into the wilds at will. Among various travelling companions, Freshfield had numbered young Englishmen going to help build the Poti–Tiflis railway, then under construction. Now here was Burnell, with half his head missing, under the orders of an ambitious sadist known as the Dead One. A century and a half saw a change in everyone’s fate.

All day long, the West Georgian army worked its way down the slopes, men and animals, mainly in single file. Flies buzzed about them as the heat increased. It was known that the Tskavani valley harboured belts of radioactivity seeping from a local water-cooled nuclear power station which had been forced to close down. Nothing could be done about that hazard. Birds of prey wheeled overhead. Their numbers had increased recently.

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