Fiction by China Miéville

King Rat

Perdido Street Station

The Scar

Iron Council

Looking for Jake: Stories

Un Lun Dun

The City & The City

Kraken

Embassytown

Railsea

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

This Census-Taker

The Last Days of New Paris

The Book of Elsewhere (co-written with Keanu Reeves)

The Rouse

Del Rey

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Copyright © 2026 by China Miéville

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Hardcover ISBN 9780399181092

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ep_prh_7.5a_157638587_c0_r0

To Season

A worm slipped under the arch of her neck, a red tube for the excretion of earth, tolerable as a machine. But it was not a machine, and further distressed her.

Mary Butts, Ashe of Rings

A
Story
of Life

[i]

The light is bright enough, white enough, to make you think of dying. Close your eyes, you still see it.

Stay out of the dead’s business, your father said. Beyond the glass a leafless tree strains into the daylight. Stay out of the dead’s business, they don’t care what you do.

Someone wrote to you, I’m so sorry he’s passed, and, furious as if because you were supposed to be, you said, Passed? What does he pass for? Did he pass a test? Did he do well?

These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city. Things go missing. You could upend your bag and tally what’s gone. A lighter with a picture on it of the sea. Notes to yourself. That clasp for your hair your sister’s child once called a bear trap and mimicked with crooked fingers. Your son had no such name for it.

In the dank first evening of this year, far from here, alone by the coast, you brought your car to a halt where the road widened between fields. In the dimming world your headlamps caught a sign: Passing Place. That letter came back to you. He’s passed: not he has but he is passed. Object at last. Everyone passes him.

Only you were on that road. The sign was permission for something you would not and will not yet articulate.

Bring forth figures of memory. He, your boy, more exact than any other. Among the shades beyond the halo shine amid thorns unseen waiting for you. For anyone, to pass them by. To pass.

Now open your eyes again. Now in this room don’t weep, as you wept in the passing place. Look up. Stare up again at the striplight glare, as you must not at the sun.

[ii]

Maur returned to her father’s house.

Late spring ’73. She cadged a lift from a friend’s friend going to London. The month had opened grim, and when they wound down the windows the boxy Vauxhall filled with wind and noise and they laughed. The horizon receded. At a sign for Greenfield Town, Maur said, Oh god actually let’s not, can you just take me with you?

Fitful rain, concrete offices in a sprawl foul-smelling with chemicals. The driver glanced at her watch and asked Maur if she wanted to be taken to her door.

Maur said it was fine.

Sure? Here okay?

A roundabout on the crowded ring road. Maur stood with a suitcase in each hand where light waned grey beyond an industrial estate. When the car was out of sight she let her shoulders come down. She regretted her shoes.

Two young men leaned on the fencing of the railway bridge and eyed her with sullen interest. One said, That’s too much for you to carry darling let me give you a hand. She did not speed up and they did not follow her. She heard one of them spit onto the tracks before an incoming train.

It was as if the main street had been replaced with a set painted not quite right. Pedestrians all had their backs to her. From the façade of what had been an umbrella store—No, seriously! she would say when she described it—jutted an empty frame. Her clothes were too bright for all this. Days-old Daily Mirror headlines frayed in displays. Army says sorry, Anything goes. For the duration of a cigarette she stood illuminated by signs, unsure if this was stalling.

In a bin-filled alley where once she’d played hiding games, her finger to her own lips to shush herself, she opened her father’s door.

She would be anew. This is where a remembrance begins. Maur you will remember.

Hello?

Movement within.

Hi, she said.

Her father descended. Stopped with steps still to go so her eyes were level with his midriff.

You’re in Lancaster, he said.

Am I? She examined her arms and legs. Wow.

Ah, ha.

He looked away, then sharply back at her. Everything’s fine, she said, so he nodded.

Good, he said. He clasped his arms and did a smile. Well, welcome home, this is unexpected.

Her school friends always said he was good-looking and even middle age’s slide became him. He finished coming down and leaned to kiss her cheek. She smelt Burley and dust. She hung up her coat, hitched her jeans and pushed her shoes off with her toes and turned to face him, and her father was quicker than she had thought he would be. She barely showed but he was staring without expression at her belly.

Maur Towns retraced old routes again, this time with her shoulders back. Many people her father’s age and older. She kept her eyes on some imagined vanishing point. For once she did not linger at the old books in Goodson’s window. At the door to Hill’s Café a young man with the beat-up face of a fighter brazenly stared. Outside the ironmonger’s, school-uniformed girls made sure to laugh at her shaggy afghan and eyeliner sweep but they were fascinated, and remembering herself five years younger, Maur felt nearly weepy.

Ducks went dignified past loosestrife and bobbing trash and the remnant of a rowboat’s prow that for her whole life had twitched in the water tethered to something sunken. It was the tip of a root, she had told her mother, of an inverted tree that grew downward through black water to a secret place. It was as if some other girl had imagined that. In the little park her mother had sat on the playground benches where Maur sat now. It was cold and no children came to the swings or the seesaw or the witch’s hat.

Maur’s remembered self was pigtailed, a girl from an ice cream sign, dancing in a circle. Bygone companions, snowball fights, snogs, cider bought for them by a friendly derelict, exam results, two brief horrid physical fights. In her mind she full-named each child who’d been there but herself: Sally Morgan Katherine Cregg Tommy Bishop John Ian Tremaine, Maur.

From the bath she watched the light-pull sway with the weight of a holed stone her mother had taken from a beach. Here came again an intimation that since her mother died Maur had made no choices. That everything had been decided, not by her nor her father, nor any overwatching maternal trace, but by some opaque authority. Until weeks ago.

Her sister called as arranged. Well? Rhona said. A poor connection. Did you talk to him?

Talk? To him?

Alright alright. You know what I mean.

Maur lay on her old bed, the phone on her stomach, between wan blue walls, no longer the vitelline pattern she’d chosen as a child. He guessed, Maur said. Can you believe that? What a time to get insightful.

Come on, that’s not exactly—

Anyway, Maur said. I still don’t think he’d have said anything even then, but I made him sit down and I went through it.

Everything?

More or less.

How’d he take it?

Guess.

Ah sure God, Rho said. You’ve never gone and upset your father. The Irish riff had predated Rhona’s emigration and neither sister remembered which of them had started it. What’s he up to now?

Silent treatment, Maur said.

That’s how they spoke about their father’s sour patience, as if his taciturnity was a disappointment that Maur might overcome.

Maur lit a cigarette. How’s the Liffey?

Come on. How are you feeling?

So Maur said it turned out that she wasn’t scared and she did not know why. That she was excited of course but had expected trepidation or worse because how could you not? What fears she did feel, she did not say, were less of the biological event (all those commonplace grotesqueries, a thing this size, a hole that size) than of the world itself, which felt now very close. But whatever made her heart hammer was not second thoughts.

She ran her fingers over her left forearm, it was sore. She wanted the smell of her smoke to reach her father and to anger him. When she was afraid, she said to Rho—because sometimes, okay, she was afraid, she didn’t know of what. And anyway she said what happened then was that excitement overtook it. If that wasn’t all of the truth it was a good part of it.

I’m really glad, Rho said. I still don’t know why you wanted to tell him alone.

Yes, he can be a bit of a cunt, Maur said. Rhona laughed after a moment.

He’s a man of qualities, she said.

Maur’s line was, What qualities are they?, but instead she said, Maybe this’ll soften him up. I feel a touch of the fuckits. It’s crazy I know, but what I keep thinking is, Oh it’ll be fine.

You’re right, Rho said. I mean it will, of course. It’s quick but all manner of things shall be well.

Maur did not knock on her father’s study door but opened it—the catch long broken—with a bump of her hip. She held two tumblers of wine. Her father sat facing her with the window and its terrace-gardens view behind him. Half-done translations on his desk. He held his pen in his right hand and the lid in his left. (Once she heard him say to her mother, I don’t post a Waterman, I’m not a Yank, and her mother had laughed at him hard enough that he had joined in.) She watched him swallow irritation and smile again. He took the glass Maur offered, touched its rim to hers.

Everyone said Rho looked like her mother. Maur’s face was more like his, lean, and she softened its unbidden sneer with makeup.

He sipped. Oof, he said. Am I assailed by the Black Tower?

Where’s my tatalatta? Maur said, and good, that startled him.

Your what?

Come on, you’re not that old. Mum’s word, remember? Bits and pieces. She said tat was too ugly.

So she did. Some’s in the attic. A few bits I threw out. She blinked and he said, Only the most…I hope that’s…

The tattiest, she said. Sure. Not the books?

Would I throw away books?

Not even kids’ books?

Again, would I—

Okay. She nodded at the reports in German and French. What’s this?

He seemed surprised she could see them. He put the cap back on his pen. Briefings, he said. For The Economist. Nixon Shock, et cetera. I’m sure you’re aware we’re floating now.

She said, I have been feeling a bit untethered. She waved her arms like wrack in the sea. Aren’t we all? Can you come down, please? We’re not done.

The kitchen was no dustier than when she had left. The same posters in plastic frames (Matisse, Monet). A photograph of her young self and her sister and mother and father on a Parisian street. As if taken a moment too late or too early, but her mother smiled in it and her father wore a startling look of pleasure. In the picture Maur was looking at him, in a guarded way that either spoiled or made the picture depending who you asked.

So, he said. London. Is there a why?

In London, she said. Well.

She could carry on drawing. Really get back into it. Start something. She might look into importing that Indian cloth she’d seen on her tutor’s wall. At a party. You like bookshops? she did not say. Let me tell you about the London bookshops. She thought, I’m not a fool, I don’t think everything will be easy. And with that came urgency again. Now she might know London, after a decade of now-and-again trips. Of course if you’re not just visiting, if you actually live in the Land of Green Ginger or wherever is at the top of the Faraway Tree, then you bring your life with you, wherever you go there you still are, blah blah, and bills on the mat change things, I know, but now, why not let it feel like this? So. Maur’s child would be a Londoner.

She could make friends in London, is what she thought. When had she had the friends she wanted to deserve? To her father she said, Why not London?

When a man is tired of et cetera, he said. But not tempted to finish your degree first?

We’ve been over this, she said. Hammily she put her hand to her belly and said, In my condition?

People do it, so I believe.

Relax, Dad, she said as if he were agitated. I can defer for a year or two. “Medical reasons” I think they’d call it. I can go back later.

Will you, though? he said. Then, thoughtful, he said, Not that it matters, I suppose.

Right, she said. Well there you are.

He set his glass down and rubbed his eyes. Come on, he said. What I mean, he said without looking at her, what I am saying—

She said, No you’re right. Another false start. Anyway me and the History of Ideas never saw eye to eye.

I.

She thought he was repeating her last word like a riddle, until he looked embarrassed and she understood that he had corrected her.

Where will you go? he said.

I told you, one of Rhona’s friends says I can crash with her. I met her with Rho—

What I’m getting at, he said with determination, is that you can always stay here a bit. If it’ll help. Sort things out.

Oh, she said. Look, I think—

Yes of course.

Rho’s mate’s been there awhile and she knows a bunch of people.

Of course, he said. They shared relief.

She said, London’s where it’s at.

He enjoyed her self-mockery. How very groovy, he said. Well then, what it is is a bloody mess. Because I do know London’s a bloody mess. Decline and bloody fall. Bombs, bin bags, and…He considered.

And buggers? Maur said. And blacks? And bimbos? Why do you do this Colonel Blimp shit? You’re not fooling anyone.

Not that you could disbelieve in decline. But then, what culpa might not be felix? Is there no temptation to live in a falling state? Not every thought that went through her felt like Maur’s.

I was never exactly in love with this place, she said.

No indeed, he said. Certainly not since, well, you turned teenager. He cleared his throat. Do you actually stay in touch with anyone from school? Not that I’m one to crow about the rich friendships I’ve maintained. You don’t think this—He gestured at her body—might put a dent in the party lifestyle?

You’d be surprised, Maur said, vampy. Then quickly, Look, of course. I’m just…This has happened, and no I didn’t plan it, and trust me, you can’t say anything I haven’t thought already. The truth is I can’t even really say why, but, it turns out this is what I want. I need…But she could find no object for that verb, so her sentence was complete.

Her father nodded. She caught her breath at how he looked at her.

Gently he said, You are very young.

After a moment she said, Daddy! Another silly voice. I didn’t know you cared! I’ll be twenty. That’s not so young.

Only just twenty. And it bloody is, Maur. It bloody is.

She watched her father from below her brows and felt dizzy again in that It’ll be fine way, that interloper certainty that had got her here, not unaccompanied by something starker. Think of the mirror: sometimes she looked wonderful to herself, sometimes her reflection appalled her all over again, and she struggled to meet its eye as now she met her father’s.

Who, still gentle, said, And the man?

He’s a man, yes.

Very good. Tell me about him.

Nothing to tell.

What an endorsement. He doesn’t know?

He does not.

And shouldn’t he?

I don’t know where he is, she said. It wasn’t that sort of…

She saw in her father Do you know who he is? with neither disapproval nor shock, and she wanted at least one.

Maur said, Of course you’re worried, you’re my dad. She had said to Rho, I won’t feed him lines, and she was angry with herself.

While she had sat mumchance in the tired contempt of the doctor telling her that she had various decisions to make, thinking of her father and then intensely of her mother and her own young self, her body had spasmed with the cunning of agency. As Maur had thought, How can I decide?, it had come to her that to not decide was to chart a course.

He’s just a guy.

Just a guy, her father said. Well. If you’re sure, darling. If you’re…If you’re happy.

His distant sincerity made her heart speed up. She said something about him being a grandfather. His regard was not quite fully on her, and she felt that old impulse to seek out wherever her father was truly focused and stand right there, and at that, risen from some soil within, felt, too, a certain disgust.

A last tea at Marino’s. Mmm that rainbow slick as if the milk were oily. A last wrinkling of the nose by the park’s undercleaned toilets. We go back to sites of revulsion. Simon Halberstam and Ricki Rees had practiced penalty kicks at this telegraph pole while Maur watched. The bitumened wood rose from a fringe of weeds and dog shit. What did all this strain to mean? To chuck a cigarette wrapper into the familiar bin by Stubbins News might be for Maur to make a last offering. Add to a piling-up of her discards, ice-lolly-stick struts and Sellotape bundled into meteorites, plastic in all colours, crumpled cans, a glacier of cellophane. Plasters stained with blood. One stria traces from her mother’s illness. Compacted tissues. Henceforth Maur’s rubbish would be London rubbish.

The rangy blond man, Guy, loud, clever, charmingly ugly. Maur was hesitant to consider him. Specificities remained tenacious—that elbow lean, the grin, the voices he put on—but she wanted details to hurry and grow vague. A department social. They’d had no friends in common. She would come to wonder if that was why he’d drawn her. He a recent graduate. Oh God, she had said, you’re still here, you’re a hanger-on who can’t leave. He had nodded and grinned.

More? Your name’s More?

Maur, she said. Maureen, Maur.

He had sung to her, something about no boy ever wanting more. Said, Though I can’t believe that’s accurate. He’d waggled his eyebrows and she had been willing to laugh.

Ravening maw, she’d said. There’s another one for you. I spelt my name that way for a while, emm ayy doubleyew. So cool. Or are you a Wilde fan? Something-something true progress is to know more, and be more. She did not say that the line concluded and to do more but she hoped he knew. She still thrilled herself with new capacity to hold attention, indulge a want to be seen as well as its obverse.

He was soon to go to Vienna. Postgrad stuff on the Horea revolt. She said she was not enjoying her course and didn’t know why she had applied for it except that it was general enough to keep her options open. That what she’d most like to do was actually illustration maybe. They got high and spent two nights and one and a half days together in her room. He was the sixth man she’d fucked if you counted the brief and the grim. He laughed after he came and that made her laugh too, she was trembling, she finished herself the first time when he dozed, went still, smiled at her prim immobility. Mostly thereafter he got her off, once wonderfully. They marvelled at the sight of the sheets. He had made impressed noises at the two of her drawings propped on her desk: her version of Alice, ink stipples; a grey-wash winter tree. No not tempted by art school, she said, can you imagine? (She said nothing of her doubts about her portfolio.) She kept saying, Maybe we should go out or something, and he would say, Do you really want to? and would stand and point down and waggle his hips so his prick flapped about and made her snort. What will you do without me? he said.

Soon after he left, a postcard reached her halls. Schönbrunn Palace with an X drawn in the gardens and I was Ere written beneath it. On the back:

Here’s an Eff Yoo and a half. The night before his execution Crisan only goes and does himself in first. Well played, sir! Yours from Darkest Mitteleuropa, where your correspondent still hunts for decent digs. (Having seen the last place I know how Crisan feels.) Gx

Thirteen days after she read that Maur was sat before a glowering doctor. I thought I was safe, Maur said. I’d counted the days.

The woman said, Oh well if you counted days…

And whatever else it was that Maur had felt then, it was less unsafe than usual. Beyond the shock there was an Of course, and a girding. A pleasure.

It will be fine.

What had come to Maur, to fascinate her, in her solitude, was relief that what she had now was, would be, whatever else, hers.

Her father said he would take her down.

Who are you? she said. And what have you done with Daddy?

He did not laugh. She packed and he read the spines of those books she had kept from her course. De Beauvoir, Hermann Hesse. Maur said, That was one reason to quit, I mean even absent, you know…Patting her stomach. It was turning into a drag. We specialise too early in this country. I want to be, you know, a magpie. Not just reading one kind of thing.

He said, A medley.

I want to keep options open.

Wasn’t that the thinking behind this particular course?

She said, Even so.

The silence after that was as companionable as any she remembered between them. Later she would think of that as a last day.

Let’s be sure where we’re going before we get lost, he said. He checked a map. Neasden Neasden Neasden. He took a route that was not the shortest possible.

In London the pavements thronged; loose-limbed figures slouched and stumbled from pubs. People talked together outside greengrocers’, gesticulating, telling stories, as Maur had imagined. A day growing warm, full of flat light and colours unlike those beyond the city, like paint on stamped tin. Stunted startled pigeons, telephone wires, smudges, lines eager to be drawn. A haze between your eyes and everything. Bright and muted at once, how did it do that? A cat prodded at refuse. Her father took backstreets.

Which way, which way? he said. He turned at a sari shop and said, Goodness, it’s the United Nations down here.

Unkempt men arguing by a takeaway. The car passed through distorted guitar Maur thought she recognised—Lotti Golden?—out of a beat-up speaker wedged in a window above, turned out to the street. Her father said, That’s a little inconsiderate. Or considerate I suppose according to taste. A terrace of bright and dirty shops, flourishes on roofs, hand-sized Victorian clay dragons. Men her age, boys if you like, smoking by a launderette, heads bowed as if their long hair weighed them down. Two girls in polka dots picking through something spilt outside a chippie. Yes. A Rasta shop. A big pub, the Royal Oak. The yowl of dogs fighting somewhere. Was this ugly place a library, a community hall? A supermarket, Briteway, tired vegetables and cheap brands.

How very bohème, her father said.

Beyond Harlesden a quieter zone. Slow walkers who would be her neighbours.

Maur said her father should come in and see the flat and meet Sara and he hesitated, he really did, looked along the curve of erstwhile workers’ cottages and at the grey door with all its doorbells as if for orders.

It’s getting on, he said. You get settled in. I’ll come and see it when you’ve unpacked. Go and take the load off.

They embraced uneasily while two chatting teenagers walked by. Her father waited for them to go then took out his wallet. Maur made some uncomfortable noise. He counted out £300.

Please just bloody take it, he said, as if she were hesitating. I can’t, I wish I could, I mean you know I can’t just hand out cash whenever.

Jesus, Dad.

But to get you started, please take it.

She took it. She took her bags from the Peugeot’s boot and her father hesitated again at the size of them but she pressed the buzzer. Stood still in the car’s wake of dust and turning papers.

Maur do you remember?

Excited, she went to the centre. I mean she had a bit of money in her pocket, and she asked Sara how to sign on. Maur mocked the Eros. New seekers wanted to teach her. She felt visible and only sometimes did not want that and she watched no less than she was watched. She took buses. Always climb the stairs for a new point of view: the tops of low roofs, of telephone boxes, bald pates under combovers, rubbish wedged by wind in crevices hidden from the ground. Into first-floor bedrooms. The top-deck gaze was a class secret. The rich would not know the city from this angle. It made Maur want to draw.

How long have you been here? she said to Sara, unpacking food in the kitchen. It’s great.

It’s okay, Sara said. Before they build the big road it was better. At least we are south here, if you are north of it, now…She shook her head.

Sara was from Lisbon, heavy featured and dark and curtly attentive. She was seven years older than Maur and making her second film. It is this story we call Estantiga, she said, only the way I do it, it happens among the exiles.

Below unframed posters, piled-up books traced routes from room to room. Towards the Iberian Revolution, Maur read. A stylised picture of a sun. When she spoke of the legacy of Salazar, Sara pleased Maur and flustered her by assuming she did not need explanations. They walked to Gladstone Park and Kilburn High Road. In HMV, Maur flipped through albums and was eyed, eyed back again. Off main stretches, more trash, dog turds turning to white ash. Maur wore high-heeled sandals and unlikely gabardine, pregnant and young and right there. On a bright night in July she went with Sara to Cricklewood to where rake-and-scrape and rock sounded from a top-flat window, a smoke-dense party for Bahamian independence where they were two of four white people in the room. Maur was thrilled.

Who do you know here? Maur shouted, dancing.

This guy, a VNSP comrade, Sara said. I mean, okay, but…Her shrug was political criticism.

Her father called her. Rho called her. Maur waited in the long queues at the benefits office, watched by dirty beige walls and the tired staff. She took the deep breaths she needed. In her tiny room she pinned up music flyers and two of her own line drawings: the bridge in Greenfield; a caricature of Wilson that was not right but that had something to the eyes. Evenings, music and a polyglot clamour often filled the house, Sara’s actor and activist friends. Wafts of the dope Maur shared. The tidal heft of a London sunny-day throng dizzied her. The press at the odd gig mostly more collegial than threatening. Streets webbed out from the flat like something left by the sea, ill favoured, seeming always almost empty, a pre-suburban de Chirico. Harlesden high roads made her feel as if she were in a photograph.

Consider the companion within.

Because they were free or pay-what-you-could, she enrolled in classes at the library and in rooms over a health food shop and a tobacconist. Guitar, for two sessions. Meditation. Life drawing in a large dusty room with high windows. She picked her way between easels. Charcoal on fingers and the rough paper. Maur was the youngest of the twelve students, and one of the better. Pen-and-ink was her medium really but this could perhaps be the complement to that precision, this sweepy mess of edgeless edges and shades and feeling out planes and vectors of this skinny young white model’s belly and bum, the angles of her shoulders. Trying to get how the light went through her blond hair. Sketching her pubis, Maur thought again, Is it really nothing to do with sex though? Putting her robe on, the woman caught Maur’s eye and raised an eyebrow in the solidarity of youth.

In Paperchase Maur fingered cold-pressed and watercolour paper, not sure which would better serve to loosen her drawing wrist, buying none. In any case it was not cheap.

She brought Chrissie and Diana from her drawing class to a gathering at the flat and Sara welcomed them with brusque courtesy. Chrissie was twenty-seven, heavy and tired looking, a loud laugher. Diana looked and sounded a bit like Diana Rigg and everyone smiled at that because of her name. Towards the evening’s end Sebastião who was acting in Sara’s film beckoned Chrissie to join him in a loose-limbed dance to King Crimson. Maur stared at him and he at her, and, aware that she was one of very many young women on whom the gaze of those days fell hard, still she was glad to be looked at.

You, Sara said. What will you do?

I have some ideas, Maur said. But…She gestured around her at everything in the world, then her belly. Priorities, she said. She rubbed thumb and forefinger together.

Okay, Sara said.

Sebastião knew someone and Maur got work cash-in-hand—A few weeks, let’s see how it goes—at a Marylebone restaurant. Now every day every expense was a tine pulled across skin, though without complicated relief. Maur kept up a constant double whisper within: what money was in her bank account and what in her pocket, decreasing with each expenditure. When she checked she always had these numbers wrong, always too optimistic, which elicited an urgent sense that she must stop now, stop even these free things, because their costlessness for whatever reason no longer stopped them feeling like indulgences or distractions. Something about time or attention. She thought of moments she had considered dropping out of her degree before, pregnant, she had rushingly concluded that she had no choice. She felt similar in these classes now, talking to other students, Dave or Tildy or Bri, not because they were older but maybe because their London accents made her self-conscious of her own off-RP and guilty as if it were a lie. As if she were not real, exactly, and certainly not received.

No puking. There was that. She liked the growing mass of her breasts. Maur put henna in her hair. Chrissie cut it in a shag. The angles of Maur’s face might have been getting softer and that, too, pleased her.

Among the restaurant’s clientele was a band who’d toured with Steeleye Span. They invited Maur to their gig at the Roundhouse then to some Camden club for shouted conversation about Colette and Josephine Baker with the singer, a dark-skinned American woman ten years older than she, who delighted Maur by calling her “honey” and saying she “mostly” lived in Paris. Another time Maur was waitress to an older nervy white man her colleagues told her was an artist. He invited her home. A flat off Westbourne Grove. A good-sized room doubled as his studio. Amber from the street uplit his paintings, big outlined bodies on dense messes. He did not turn the lights on and she was not sure of the pictures’ colours. She was nervous and turned on and very envious of his flat. She smelt the lovely smell of paint and said his work reminded her of Schiele and Picabia. On a side table was a portfolio. She glanced at him for permission, opened it. He had drawn a young nude woman with the kind of thick ink strokes Maur could never make work. Barely more than blots but he was good enough you could see her in them, this woman, it was as if you remembered her. Though he did not crosshatch here, Maur said, What I can’t get about crosshatching is just using black lines for dark colour and for actual darkness. I know how to shade a black coat, say, or a shadow, but how am I supposed to do a dark colour in the dark?

He asked her if she knew Gwen John.

No.

Oh, she’s amazing, he said. The man was agitated. Everyone she paints is dead, he said. I don’t mean she lurked in mortuaries, I’m saying that’s what she does with her painting. I’ll show you.

He went to look through his books. Hey, Maur said. So he turned, and at the sight of her stare smiled and undid his shirt. He looked good topless and she undid her blouse. Of course there was no disguising her pregnancy these days but at the sight of her belly he hesitated. She said some self-deprecating thing. He stood in dim light seminude, erect, uneasy, and finally she said, Maybe we shouldn’t, and he surprised her by saying, Ah maybe you’re right, and picking up his shirt. She could not breathe for loneliness. She managed to smile and say, You’re chicken. He looked ashamed. She said, This is a kick for some guys. He laughed. She said, You could at least draw me. He laughed again, looked at the door. Sometimes a part of her wanted to feel not quite safe. Although she had not always felt safe of course. She did not want to return to those situations, but some new unsafety. His hesitation made her want to stay.

The man said, It’s all about your glow, babe, and I can’t capture that.

On the night bus she cried because she did not have a mother.

And if ending such classes was a loss, it did undo the death of infinite potentialities occasioned by any choice, and though that was a bad relief relief it was. Having ceased to do those things, now she might do anything, including nothing.

Warm days, nights still light. Her skin stretched and she imagined her mother’s belly over her baby self. Isn’t that a connection? Maur’s heart often went fast now. She prodded and pulled at her vagina’s lips, stretched them. Previously she had mocked the idea to herself but she sought an antenatal class. Practiced breathing among other young women in a shabby room in the sports centre full of underused equipment. At the second session she chose a woman a few years older than her, who rolled her eyes at some instructions.

Maur said to her, I’m a bit frightened sometimes.

Nothing to worry about, the woman said. My sister’s just had one. She even liked the actual business…. Said it was the best fuck backwards she ever had.

Her laugh was dirty and it made Maur happy, but the woman did not come to the next session and Maur never saw her again.

Maur strained against dizziness. I chose this. She meant the thought as celebration but sometimes it left her as if with any motion she’d be overcome. Her body changed like a shoreline. Implacable. Spread your hands on that belly as if on a crystal ball. Scry, count angels, one at least, Maur and it alone together amid a multitude.

She had to stop working sooner than she had wanted because her back ached and she was gassy and it hurt her to hold it in until she could take a toilet break and giggle unhappily at her tremendous farts. She worried that her vagina smelt strongly, too. Mannu who ran the kitchen said she could come back whenever. No money incoming and no savings. Her fear had just been waiting.

University friends. Their names don’t matter any more. She was so glad at their arrival. They went to a bad concert and came back stoned and cooed over Maur’s tummy. She kept saying, Shhh, looking at Sara’s door. When their van pulled away she put her hands over her face.

Sara said, It’s good to have fun. Maur looked at the mess. Sara said, It’s okay, but did not help her clean. Maur filled the kitchen bowl and sank her forearms into water hot enough to really hurt and kept them there, looking over the street listening to some angry unseen child. She raised her dripping hands, fascinated at their redness. She bought The Economist with her father’s translations within. Yes Maur felt floating. She kept her birthday to herself and her father sent ten pounds. Bombs detonated in city stations and he called and said he was checking all was tickety-boo, Micks notwithstanding. Autumn was not cold but it closed on her. In the living room Sara held a meeting about Chile.

Can you please leave the rent, Sara said. You are a bit late, no?

Maur did not say a fucking thing. Got out of the city for the first time since arriving. Hitched to Norwich where the skies loomed and filled up awhile with nothing. Good. Walked to Bridewell Alley for a poetry reading in a bookshop her uni friends had eulogised. The police raided, one had said. They stock Oz and Frendz and some dyke stuff. A man in a dress read aloud with rhythms like Burroughs. Norfolk is a flat land / within easy reach / of the Himalayas. The black and white lines of a cover caught Maur’s attention and she picked up a thin volume from a pile. The back of a woman or a long-haired man staring into undergrowth. The hatching on the body and of the darkness beyond was not without charm. The title was Amadán. Maur opened it and every one of its few pages was blank.

You like that? said the man behind the counter. Rough-haired and smiling lopsided. He looked a bit like Jagger. I wrote that. Amadán means “The Fool.”

She smiled back. Abruptly she wanted it, whoever the fool was, maybe to use as a sketchbook, fill the whiteness, but at the idea of parting with money she put it back and the man tried to give her a copy for free but she would not accept it and she was disappointed. Good luck, she said. I hear the pigs fucked you over. The man looked at her and she saw judgement in him, the judgement of the age.

—

Sara found Maur drinking white wine and staring at nothing amid astonishing disorganisation. Sara frowned. After a time she put her arms around Maur.

What is it? Rhona said from across the sea. Is it money?

Among other things, of fucking course.

What about What’s-His-Name? Baker of buns in ovens?

I don’t know where he is, Maur said. It was a tenderness she extended to him, not to seek. And a power. Anyway, she said, he’s not doing the baking.

Look, Rho said. I’ve left you alone about not contacting him, but maybe, I mean if nothing else, what about money? Couldn’t he help?

Maur could articulate her new fear no more than she could what had preceded it, enthusiasm, in that old sense. Why would Guy have money? And she’d be intentionally or not asking him to feel guilt or to change his life or both. That scruple wasn’t really what held her back though; it was rather that this was hers alone. There was in her something close to avarice for that, afraid as she was. She will return repeatedly to this memory.

Rhona said, You must be thinking about Mum a lot. Maur said nothing. Dad…, Rho said. I mean, Dad’ll help.

Will he? And you know how he’ll make me feel.

Well that’s just Dad, isn’t it?

Depends which of us he’s talking to, Maur said. Then, Do you think he has a fancy woman? Do you think he ever has had? Since Mum?

No idea.

I mean, what does he do for you know sex?

Do you ever think about what he went through? Rho said in slow response. In the army?

Come on. He didn’t even leave the country.

He saw his friend kick the bucket. Because it’s an accident, it doesn’t count?

I didn’t say that. Why, what’s he been saying?

Nothing. You know he wouldn’t. Remember when Mum got sick? Maybe you don’t. The first time, he had to know everything. He was an oncologist within the fortnight.

Arguing with the specialists.

Well, badgering them, yes. Mum got tired of it, honestly. But when it came back he was totally different. Just let them get on with it. Barely asked a thing. Not that it would have helped to understand it, but, you know. I think he was just…He had nothing left.

Did it bother her? Maur said. Rho said nothing.

Later Maur took out her suitcases and the papers stuffed in the backs of her textbooks and she found Guy’s postcard and she crumpled it and threw it away.

Maur swayed, full of new discomforts, alone in a tense city. Warships waited out there in the freezing sea. Cold here too, very, damply so, the storage heaters notwithstanding. Maur held herself in place. Coil and uncoil within. An eel in a goldfish bowl. If there was a name for the emotion that rose in her she did not know it, or no, it had too many names. Biscuit packets and cups and cup rings on the floor and ash and cigarette stubs testified that the body kept on with its business. Maur did not feel refreshed when she noted it, or how long had passed. She could see the sky and took no comfort, drew no energy from it, nor from her companion within.

She was laughing or crying when she read Sara’s note. Listen I am sorry you are having a difficult time but I NEED your rent I can’t keep on paying it all OK so PLEASE can we talk? X

Maur called her a cold bitch.

Sara said, You think because you’re unhappy it’s okay you do this?

Maur phoned Chrissie. It was not far but Maur took a taxi, carefully counted out change, Chrissie watching from the doorway of the mansion block shaking her head. I’ve nothing for a tip, Maur told the driver. He looked at her with no room for compassion.

Listen, Chrissie said, Maur, you can’t just, it’s the third floor, there are no lifts, it’s a sofa. What happened?

Can we go up?

How long are you…Chrissie folded her arms. I mean can you? Can you?

At the Housing Department Maur was swiftly beyond strategy. She showed her bank book to the woman. She stood, raising her voice through tears, pointed at her midriff. People looked. The clerk told her to get herself together and she shouted again and a small doleful man came out and steered her quite gently towards his own office and listened, he said to Maur that he had her details and that they weren’t monsters, and he’d see what he could do. She cried again.

What she knew of her mother’s life mostly came from what others had said. She did not know if what felt to her like memories were stories overheard, the moments of amused teasing, snappy impatience with a postscript grin in mitigation. When she was seventeen Maur had tried a last time to talk to her father about her mother and coldly he had interrupted her to say, I’ll tell you one thing, and that is that cancer is fucking boring.

Well, Rho said. The thing is he was quoting her. It was Mum said that. I was there. She said it was the boredom that would kill her.

Still, Maur said. He shouldn’t have said it to me.

She thought that what would loom now would be her early childhood, that maternal kindliness she longed to give. In fact what came to her most often was the hospital in which her mother had slipped out of life. And the room was vivid but like a remembered dream, and her mother’s face was vague.

Days before her date she wrenched awake in darkness. Oh terrible. A clench, innard motion. This can’t be right. She cried out, child herself. Stumbled naked to Chrissie’s room. Maur in a puddle clutching a bedpost. In the hospital she wept on a gurney and a nurse said that it was all a bit late for second thoughts but the doctor said she was doing great, patting her hand. Lines of stains upon the walls. Pain astonished her, violence within, flitting awful thoughts of the abattoir. Christ. Maur stared at the streaks as if decoding cuneiform. Tried to focus on dirt higher than she could reach. Wire-strengthened window. The doctor, a thickset woman, was nothing like her mother, but her offhand warmth made Maur sob, so the nurse tutted and the doctor herself muttered, Blimey O’Reilly, ladies and gents.

Vast muscular events. Jagged new continents. How could this be commonplace? An unfolding. She pleaded for relief. Blubbering, her father would have said, she said, I’m scared. Something’s wrong. They put on her a hissing mask and selfness receded down a tunnel to look out. She heard herself. Wordless, so only she knew that what she wanted was her mummy. Was begging for her, then for anyone, then for her father. Above the doctor’s back, the rise of her own knees, dawn lightened in the window where the fingers of a tree swayed as if to touch her. For her to climb. Reaching for her and the coming child. Maur was animal, was a hole in the ground. Pain was total—then sudden inside-out release, hot, loose, and hollow.

She was light. She heard herself, lowing. The doctor was smiling, a child crying.

Someone put upon her a little wet bloody boy. He snuffled.

Maur gasped and shuddered and breathed and giggled and sobbed and muttered and cradled and itemised the elements of this moist new twitching clucking murmuring body in white cloth and she looked at him to meet him and she cried like he began hesitantly to cry again and she said, she said, Hello you.

[iii]

Maur says: “I know everyone says this but I smoked all the way through. We’d be arrested if you saw it today. We didn’t know. You saw him though, it doesn’t look like it did him any harm.” She speaks rapidly. She takes a long drink of water.

She says: “Of course it was the biggest thing going on in my life, of course it was. But it wasn’t the only thing. He wasn’t. Does that sound bad? I don’t think it should,” she says. “I think that’s how it should be,” she says. “I’m not saying I got it all right, I’m saying I needed other things, too, I mean you do. I made lists, about my life, and don’t get me wrong, he was at the top, always. He wasn’t the only thing on them is all. Being a mum was the main thing but not the only thing. Even then, when I think about that time now it’s hard to bring anything else to mind.” She says: “I expect it’s like that for a lot of people. A lot of mothers.”

She says: “There was a dream. Yes, I mean I had a dream.”

A hillside, hot and very dry. A slope unrecognised. Dead grass. To reach a house, isolated, quite a grand house like one where some old family saw out summers once, now in decay, scabbed with ochre paint. Sun bleached, empty.

“I arrive at its rear even though I climbed up the hill with the house above me facing down. That’s dreams I suppose,” she says.

There were no doors.

“This was later. For the first few months after he arrived I didn’t dream. I used to tell people I didn’t have time to. They say you do dream, you just don’t always remember them. I don’t even really remember ever being asleep, then.”

This house. Looking through great windows into high rooms harder to make out than they should have been even with all the dust. Rooms empty but for shapes motionless under white cloth.

She says: “I remember it was quiet except for the sound of that kind of day. Like it was I don’t know Italy or something. You know.” Cicadas, sunlit stones expanding. “I keep going. Around the building.”

Overlooked by three windowed walls and the draped shadows inside, in a space open on the fourth to the hilltop above, a courtyard. An immense and naked figure therein.

The giant unclothed, of uncertain gender, writhed slowly without a sound. It eddied, suspended horizontal above those terrazzo stones, waist-high to the watcher, to her dream self. Its mouth closed, eyes closed or open and unseeing, it grimaced as if it too from within that dream was dreaming, a worse dream.

[iv]

Wake in a room full of other washed-out new young mothers and their fitful infants. Maur hurt. Her bedside crib was empty.

Where’s my baby?

A nurse told her to hold on. Maur pulled back her covers and stood swaying and screamed, Where’s my baby? so all the newborn cried out too.

They brought her tiny son to her. Stop being a bloody child, the nurse said. We were weighing him. Maybe you should be a bit more bloody grateful, we have other people to look after, you know.

Dreamily, without looking at her, Maur said, Fuck off. Later she was proud of this.

Astounded by the boy she held. You and me. This then was the plan. Looking right at her, eyes nose hands, the exactness of him, mouth working, countable fingers, green eyes. Was that the man’s shade? It was not hers. Look at him!

Rhona came. Chrissie came. Sara came; Maur pretended to be asleep. Her father came. He smiled wide. He picked the boy up with a new expression. Alone Maur watched her baby clutch and unclutch, grasp exceeding reach. When she remembered that she drew, she tried to imagine drawing him. Maur mouthed at him, You and me.

Her rips healed. Weeks. Maur would start into consciousness in her corner of Chrissie’s damp flat. Aware that the world waited. That what she heard were her son’s wet breaths. She held him. Look at him! She lifted him, shifting shitting chirping in his throat, his little kicks, she lifted him as if he were a relic. Exhaustion was her carapace. She was flotsam of a new kind. She held him to her body and need went through her; there should be a sign in warning, as of deadly current, a baby boy and a lightning strike. His stare of absolute attention. Oh you and me. You wouldn’t call it calm or calming, that steady look of his, but it was something.

She said, I can’t even tell you how weird breastfeeding is. Hurts. Little vampire ow huh ha ha ow. I know how that sounds. These days I never even know what time it is.

Chrissie said nothing. The baby latched to Maur was the one abiding thing, the one thing native to this discontinuity. Timelessness quite utter, udder, ho ho. His animal rooting might make her laugh, too, his champing, make her moue, moo. Sometimes she was numb, sometimes the little lips brought a pleasure, we’ve all read Freud, still, wry as you like, it did discomfit, milk, so yucky, that word might make you gag, the velar stop of it like holding back bile, he might gag at the milk itself because he was so hungry. And she unloosed, all leakage. Maur made herself stop weeping—when had that started? Grandma-less boy, it was unbearable. Motherless girl. Sunlight hit the camp bed. Her baby’s head wobbled; his eyes seemed to meet hers.

She might burrow down for a moment into her sheets. When had she spoken to any but him?

—

The council moved them to a B & B. It was nasty and Maur got drunk and watched her boy. The second rooming house was bearable, not good. He was so comic with his focus, then so breakable sometimes she couldn’t touch him. Then she had no doubt he would die. Because of her. She would cover her mouth. Oh Jesus, it would come to her, get it over with then, die, so she could grieve, could feel everything terrible waiting to be felt. Wouldn’t it be better than this breath-held shame and certainty that she would fail?

Down the shared line Rhona said, Chrissie called. I’m worried.

At Christmas a charity brought her a cardboard box of secondhand toys and baby clothes. Election time and she had not sent off the forms for all her mum had told her about suffragettes. An easterly shook the hoardings. Every street-shout she heard was some deranged performance and no one had given Maur her lines. They moved her and her child to a Harlesden terrace, this top floor chilly too but newly painted with cream walls. This time Maur cried in gladness.

Below lived Saoirse Dooley and her husband. He was a lean and silent man. Looking at him and his big wife, Maur thought, Jack Sprat. The Dooley boys played on the pavements with plastic spaceships and hollow-cast figures. It’s good to have another kid in the place, Saoirse said. What’s his name now?

Ewan.

Ah, that’s wonderful. It’s good you’re both here, you and little Ewan, look at him. Maur and Saoirse smoked on the doorstep. So the coloured lady at twenty-seven there is Doreen. She’s a Jamaican lady and she’s a lovely lady. That with the short hair, that’s Abby. Mr. Addison there on the corner, he’s a funny one, and that dog of his is a menace if you ask me.

Girls and boys ran races past the pebbledash. They propped planks on bricks to make ramps for their bikes. Some were no more than six years younger than Maur. No wonder their parents eyed her. The children played near the flecking paint at the road’s eastern end where it met a wider avenue. The windows of the last house were dirty and the curtains drawn. In the walled-off front yard weeds grew amid trash exiled from within.

Saoirse said, Poor old fellow.

An aged man. You’d see him on obscure errands in a greying blazer grubby as his house. He looked at no one. He always had a plastic bag in each hand. The Chorus have decided he’s Boo Radley, Maur wrote to Rhona. Honestly the poor sod’s barely messier than me. Her mother had called herself messy, exasperated Maur’s father with breakfast remains, damp towels like mushroom patches. He had gone from impatient with to disgusted at such after she died. Now sometimes Maur let roads of dirt grow. Let coffee ring the Formica. Leave crumbs in the bread bin. Clean? The fridge? And when that switched and she saw the muck as a child’s spoor, well, you could clean it then as if you believed in adulthood, and some days that’s what she did, for solace from the sting of hot water and cheap cleaners. Old toothbrush at the stalk of the toilet scouring antique piss, satisfaction at the hating and the scrubbing it away, at the drag of the heavy hoover over the carpet (stained) (thin). Pleasure at her own sweat. Give it some welly, she thought. Give it some elbow grease. What lubricant was that? She imagined translucent grey goo not applied to the elbow but exuded by it, as she had when young thought pounding pistons self-generated oil. So do the work of scrubbing and mothering, and from her joints she’d drip with slip.

Maur heard her child’s voice and of course checked in. Back to matter, the matter in hand.

—

What despair when, on her knees after hours of all that, all she had achieved was a damp gleam atop deeper dirt, grouting still grey.

—

Only sometimes the crap and snot and spew of her son were terrible to her but you had to keep cleaning him until you didn’t care again. Sometimes he seemed to shine. Sometimes—he wasn’t a cry-y baby but in a way it made it worse, to come in and see him lying or rocking in his crib rancid sick all down him, or with the thoughtfulness that meant he was shitting, so unwrap him and he’d wrinkle up his face at the cold and you’d marvel at the smears in the folds of his skin, the stench. Sometimes she didn’t care about it at all and sometimes she did. Looking across a puddled flat roof, the surface of the water shimmering. Narcotic boredom. Ewan made her common property. The children of the street cooed at him but they might have been going through motions.

—

Months into this. Ewan on bundled blankets on the kitchen table even his weak movements rocked. He watched the light in its paper globe. Maur smoked and wrote a list.

Draw. Write. Body.

She prodded the skin on her hips. It pretended to be tight but she felt mass beneath. She was too fat and too thin.

Money. Work.

There was a noticeboard with opportunities up in the library.

Letters: Rho. Dad? Dan. Jane. Morgan. Adi.

The last were the names of Lancaster friends.

Study.

When was it time for that?

From somewhere music played. She heard it through the plaster. She went to the window to look into the garden she coveted, brick-strewn scrub through which the Dooley boys would pass to climb the back wall to lockups and garages beyond. She saw a bright plastic figure left out. When had the record ended? Maur was mouthing words from the song but could not have told you what they were. She felt blurred out. As featureless as light.

—

Alone?

—

She jerked back into herself and Ewan was mid-sob, mid. How long had he been crying?

In the silence he had broken she had not thought of the fact she was a mother. She shook.

Ew rarely quavered a full watery-mouthed howl. Maur listened to the cluck and whisper of his distress. To the in-out of cars and far-off shouts and barks and the whispers of leaves. Mostly when he whimpered Ewan’s eyes were open. Mostly Maur could not find a way to make him stop so when he did it seemed his decision alone.

Maur, a mother with a child, went to him. He had filled his nappy, and the smell of it, to her shock, put her in mind of when she was a child and had gone into the bathroom straight after her father.

In the launderette a long-haired woman in a vivid knitted jacket asked Ewan’s name. She had a toddler on her hip and two babies in a double pushchair. Aren’t they little buggers? she said. Her face was thin and with her hooded eyes she had a look of friendly mockery.

Maur said, Do you do life modelling?

The woman cocked her head and said, That’s it, you were in that class in the library. So, you’ve seen all my business. You still going?

No, Maur said. I was going to ask you the same.

The woman shook her head. This lot’s dad fucked off so now I’ve got my hands full with them.

Shit.

I mean, him and me were long past it. She shrugged.

Sonya described her own accent as posh cockney. She said, I’m proper Bow Bells me, and Mum was haspiryeshonal. The last word in a music-hall style. She was eight years older than Maur. They sneered together at the term “single mother.” Anyway, Sonya said, not for long, cross fingers.

Ruby was a chattering thing of three, Annie and Sal a year older than Ewan. Sonya took Maur to a mother-and-baby group in a community hall. Awful people, free biscuits, she said. Maur dyed her hair in Sonya’s bathroom. They laid their children down together to play in the sunlight in Sonya’s garden flat. The women smoked and drank strong tea.

How are you doing? Sonya said. Fucking hated the first time.

I’m skint, Maur said carefully. I feel like I’m just always panicking.

And your fanny’s never been the same.

Maur said, How would I know?

From her spot of sun Ruby ordered them to stop laughing with a toddler’s majesty.

—

Sonya had been to film school for a bit. By the kitchen sink in her flat, from a jam jar brushes protruded like reeds.

Can I see your stuff? Maur said.

Oh, I’ve just been mucking around, Sonya said. You’re the artist.

You could bring kids to Sonya’s parties. They were so exactly the kind of event her father would expect that Maur had to smile. The colours of the brightest clothes there felt naïve now. Dope and wine lent a sense as of fingertips dragged across paint. Sometimes she took men home from these gatherings. Afterwards she would lie and listen to her son in his cot beyond the door.

When you going to set me up, Sonn? she said.

You must’ve clocked Des was after you.

He was too nice for me, Maur said.

Oh please don’t with that bullshit, Sonya said. I only like bastards, blah blah blah, so fucking boring.

Takes one to know one, Maur said.

Recall the children between them. Annie, Sal, full of nervy curiosity. Ewan paddling his limbs. Ruby bossing her sisters around and putting her hands on her hips when they, languageless, ignored her.

Better give it a couple of years, babe, Sonya said to her daughter.

They’re so lazy! Ruby said.

Everyone’s lazy according to this one, Sonya said. Hard taskmistress, aren’t you, Ruby Dooby?

I bet she does get overwhelmed, Maur thought. When I’m not here I bet she washes their faces too hard and has a cry.

—

Ewan took on shape. He pulled a wheeled telephone with a mad-eyed face behind him, with seriousness that, inflecting his tiny nudity and wobbling steps, could bring on in Maur laughter strong enough to hurt.

From where within her came sudden rages? Other times her son, still luminous, or luminous again, clucked, and she’d cluck back and strain as if her very ribs reached for him, love strong enough to disregard flesh’s rules. All this has been said before. Maur found gladness. She remembers. But the world’s wires tightened too. In Ewan’s look, his intense and guarded attention, she made out worry.

—

Abby from the street, Maur’s own age, mooched outside her block, in a jacket on which was what Maur thought might be an NF badge. Her father sent Maur a cut-out headline reading Good-bye, Great Britain. In his own hand he had added, Auf Wiedersehen, au revoir, im Cabaret, et cetera. Maur read the papers in the library on their anti-theft wooden poles. She knew her father would not expect that.

Sonya took Maur to the Whitechapel Gallery. Maur read. More books than she had at university. Or at least she opened their pages before her eyes. She was still glad to be a Londoner but every bus ticket, every tin of tuna and baby food, made her more scared. She fingered the paper in Paperchase again. She said, Sonn, I just don’t know.

—

Nineteen seventy-six. Ewan, yellow haired, squatting on Parliament Hill with an inventor’s concentration. Hilarious again. Watching his mother. Grass and dirt on his hands.

Ewan, Ew, Yew, Maur said. The heat thudded against her. Even the mean little spaces of Greenfield had teemed for her once. Yew you little terror, she said. Here, water. He breathed out snot. The sun gave him a corona. Maur took him to the shadow of a tree.

Hot, he said. He looked up into the branches and raised his arms.

She said, You want to climb? You want to climb all the trees?

Too-vivid days. A last rag-and-bone man came to their street. Ewan listened to the call with complete attention. Maur knew the man said, Any old iron?, but to her it sounded wordless. Steptoe and Son Ride Again. So many have gone to the great rag-and-bone man in the sky. Maur took her son down and he went to the poor hot horse, which watched him with its lovely patience. When the water tanker came Ewan wanted to carry the buckets. It was some other blistering summer, Rhona reminded her, when Maur had dropped an ice cream and their mother first said what had become a family phrase—Oh Maur, at least the ants are happy.

Maur wrote: Have you seen the temperatures in Portugal??? At the bottom of each letter back she filled a couple of inches with sketches for her sister. A bright fat-faced sun beaming like a happy drunk. That fallen ice cream cone. Ewan, from behind (faces were difficult). These were to have been marginalia with that looseness of stroke she yearned for but as ever she could not resist filling the space with ever-finer lines, horror vacui, so she made shade with a filigree crosshatch and the whole was okay, fine, but ay, they lacked that quality for which she’d hoped, and bee, they looked to her just like the few other drawings she’d done in the last several years.

Anyway, eff Portugal, she wrote. I can’t bear it here. It’s literally hell.

Talking of, Rho wrote, have you spoken to Sara? She’s crushed. Like her rev.

I do feel for her, Maur said to Sonya. Did you ever meet her? She was okay really.

Me too, Sonya said. Got to say, though, you get what your politics ask for. Maur did not ask for the details of what Sonya said was her “anarcho-tankie critique.” To Rho, Maur wrote, Poor Sara, but you get what your politics ask for.

She braced herself. Ewan came crying. Bitten by a ladybird. No they don’t bite do they? Clouds of bright bodies that summer. The insect still walked on her son’s palm. She opened the window and Ewan said, No, and tried to close his fingers, and with a parent’s abrupt anger she pulled him harder than she’d intended and he looked at her with grave surprise and she blinked and said, Come here, honey. Ladybird ladybird, she said. She held his hand into the void and the red casing split for wings. Ewan’s face at that miracle made a lot worth it.

Children clustered on Brent corners. ’76 kids forever. They fascinated her. She wanted to tell the universe that her unease at these tough girls and boys was not that of some square but was about something else.

Fuck’s sake, you need to get out, Sonya said. Mary Kelly at the ICA: on the walls soiled cloth, hand casts and typed meditations. I’m really enjoying my relationship with K, one read; another, He’s less convinced by my ploys. Maur and Sonya walked through with their own children. Maur made noises to show she was unimpressed. Sonya gestured at a shit-smeared nappy in its frame. A child could do this, she said, and laughed.

Seriously though, Maur said. Let’s get out of here.

Blimey, we just got here.

Are we all bad mothers? Maur wrote to Rhona. Do me a favour and complain? I mean I know you’ve got Phil but throw me a bone.

Phil and Rhona’s child was one year old. Her name was Philippa. Was that Phil’s idea, do you reckon? Maur said to her father. I could never decide if it was worse if it was his or hers. He laughed and Maur enjoyed the rare bonding. She called her niece Pip.

Maur wrote to Rhona, I don’t want to entertain the idea that the bastards are right. I’m not saying I won’t fuck the poor kid up, that’s my job as we all know, but why should an absent father mess you up more than some of the present ones? Is it worse to have a father or not? Yes it’s worse, boom boom. And a mother too? Doesn’t it kill you doing this without Mum? Can you look at Pip and not just howl? I’m not lonely lonely but I don’t want to be a nun and it would be easier with a guy. Yes ha ha. With a kid this age though good luck.

That summer how could you not fray?

In stretched-out evenings you heard arguments over the roofs, and those furious dogs. Maur sweated in bed under a single sheet and cigarette smoke, Ewan whining with the heat, babbling in his idiolect, amid sliding toys, plastic, foam, cloth, that horrid-faced telephone, caterpillars, men with swords, monsters of impossible genealogy. I did not buy him all these. I barely remember half of them. As if they had eructated from some seam of pre-empted trash, risen from a hole. Ewan murmured. Maur watched his discussion with himself. She would not buy him war toys but would not take away those others gave him. He had a cartoonish too-bright knight in one hand. He hammered it against some other figure and chanted. Tock tock tock.

It’s too hot, Ewan, quieter please.

Tock tock. Television sound through one wall and oaths through another. She said, In fact, bedtime; he paid no attention. She told him again and saw him hear something in her voice and look up at her and she saw calculation and experiment and he recited nonsense words as loud as he had before. He parted his two toys and watched her. Yew, she said, a warning in her voice.

Everything was very still. The look he gave Maur was curious, or was it sly or strange or knowing?, and Maur needed very much for everything to be not as it was.

He hit the figures together hard.

And her yell was loud enough and full enough of anger to shock her, and Ewan went still.

—

What she shouted she cannot say. It was only a few words.

It seemed to her then that time should fuck itself. Facing down more and more of it was impossible.

What had she said? Said to him to stop, that she was going to bed, as if she were not there already, that hadn’t she pled?, that Ewan had done it and now she saw red, that she was fed, up, that he’d led, her to this, that the noise went through her head.

Maur ached, shook, who could bear a child’s stare?, and closed her eyes or burrowed or turned or went in or down or something, this was the end of it, the last of it, this was it, thank God for that, back she lay, or something, certainly a sightlessness came, that was for sure, an obscuring, and here, what she had yearned for, was quiet.

The quietest quiet. The most silent silence.

Out she breathed. All the way

and

after an age or an instant from beyond the bright whiteness Maur heard her son again.

He was

On the bed with her, wailing, tugging the sheet, she could see him again, he was pulling at her, saying sorry saying sorry sorry please sorry saying Mummy Mummy and she not remembering what she’d said or what he had howled in the moments before that she would not revisit, she had shown him a loss beyond which he now lived and there was the room again and she emerged from wherever and hugged him against her surging heart and blood rushing she said, Hush, hush, and she was whispering that here she was, that it would all be okay, hush.

—

Maur, come back here when you’re ready.

I’m going nuts, Sonn, she said.

Sonya watched her.

I’m sure it’s fine, Maur said. I’m just tired.

When you’ve got a kid there’s no “just tired.”

Maur laughed. I am though, she said. Going bonkers. I scare myself sometimes.

Ewan drew a sun with a featureless face. He drew men in tanks and men with guns. A cat picked past outside. Maur too drew. Nothing to see here. She threw the next attempt away as well.

There’s great kids’ books around at the moment, she said to Sonya.

Yeah, Ruby loved the Ant and Bee you got her.

Maur took down The Thumbtown Toad. Ewan couldn’t give a toss about this, little philistine, but I can hardly get through it, it’s fucking terrifying. Give it to a kid you don’t like. Look at the art!

Jesus, Sonya said.

A sort of witch. She rages and swears from the devil’s book / for the world to end in fire.

When Maur had drawn, when she drew, it was details that froze her. She’d always added another dot or difference, wanted a thinner and thinner nib, straining as if for a one-to-one line drawing of reality itself which is obviously nuts and leaves you with nothing to see because with no spaces in between it would be all ink, pure dark. It was the confidence and talent to stop drawing, to leave out lines, that she didn’t have.

When she was fourteen, she had shown her father the picture of which she was then most proud, denuded trees with birds. Even then she’d seen the too-muchness of it and tried to say so to him.

Mmm, he had said, well done, well done you. It’s really rather good. But I can see what you’re getting at. There’s a lot going on. She’d reached out to take the picture back. Alright, alright, wait, he’d said, and looked more. Yes, well done. I don’t quite know why but what you’re saying about the way you draw, the thing in yourself I suppose, feels to me as if it might more typically be a boy’s problem than a girl’s. Does that make any sense?

It still felt wrong to her, for him to have said that. Can you be kind and unkind at once? Maur would find out.

She did not like that he was right, that since he’d said that she could not strike the sense that her fret and foolish hunch that with a 0.1 or a springy hairline dip-pen nib you might make a line as fine as reality itself were somehow male failings, even though she did not know what that meant. When she took her pens out now, the ink was often dried in their reservoirs. When she read to Ewan, Maur told him the name of every illustrator as well as of the writers. She found him a book about a mother and a son together alone. Meal One.

Look, she said to him. They’re thick as thieves, aren’t they?

He looked up at her with his care.

Ivor Cutler, she said, showed him the words, and Helen Oxenbury did the pictures. Meal one is served, she read. She managed to say it aloud. Two lit-up windows the only colour in a drawing of a shadowed street. The boy asleep, his mother waiting. They planted a plum stone under his bed. A tree grew from it, filling his room, he climbing it, the roots plunged into the kitchen below. The mother saving everything by putting back the clock. He let her turn the pages. She wished books snared him. She felt him waiting through them for her.

—

I’m going to read every one of the seven novels on the kitchen shelf in alphabetical order by title, she thought. I’m going to spend an hour in every park on every one of the following ten pages of the A to Z.

Yew, we’re going to go on an adventure every weekend. He was ready on Saturday mornings with his boots on. Gladstone, King Edward VII, Welsh Harp, Kilburn Grange, Queen’s Park. He ran to the horrible aviary and drinking fountains in Roundwood and it was as if it was the only time she saw him move all gladly, his clumsy strong stamping, sweeping a stick like a sword against nettle enemies, hanging from his knees on a branch, regarding her with upside-down eyes. She smoked and gestured permission to climb higher. Ecstasies of alarm at his quick ascent.

Saoirse said Doreen’s daughter Diana was a good girl and Maur paid her to babysit while she did some shifts back at the restaurant. The original clientele enjoyed sneering at the loud-suited men who ate there now. The newcomers tipped her either generously or barely at all. There were times Ewan came into the kitchen and saw her shoulders shaking, her streaked face. Staring, say, at bills unopened. She was a little surprised he did not cry too to see her like that. He’d stare, he would not move, and she would stroke his hair, say, Hey, Yew, you and me, we’re okay, you and me.

At Ruby’s eighth birthday, Des found her.

Hi! How are you? How’s Ewan? Is that him? He was this high last time I saw him. How’s the art?

Oh Lord, Maur said. Not for a while.

I wanted to be a drummer, Des said, but I accidentally became a surveyor.

She said there was almost a kind of beauty to London with the strike on. Des said, I’m not sure I understand. Not beautiful then, Maur said, but something. A city of rubbish. Awesome maybe.

The sublime and revolution don’t half pong, Sonya said. Up the workers.

Is this what you meant by “Stay out of the dead’s business”? Maur asked her father. A gravediggers’ strike?

I did not say that, he said. She wondered if his voice down the line had self-doubt to it. I’m not quite the reactionary you seem to think, he said. Things need shaking up but even I can see that woman is bloody nasty.

As if any instant everything might tilt and the world plunge. Her son was a boy not a baby. He woke not crying but in distress that made him wheeze, she held him, he tried to tell her what he had dreamt, something of baleful shapes, no more interesting to her than any adult’s dream.

I miss Mum, she said.

Her father said, I dare say.

There never came pleasure in cookery, though Maur achieved wine-sipping competence in leftovers-stroke-odds-and-sods olla podrida. Alone she’d just have put cheese between Mother’s Pride. She touched her midriff flesh again. She must not think about how many years Ewan’s meals would take up, how many forkfuls he would struggle with that she must provide or he would die. She waited as if something would happen, drew sigils inside her left arm with the point of a toothpick. Ewan was unblinking in the doorway. She started to see him and dropped the little spine.

What are you doing up? she said.

He stared with the strange seriousness of the sleepwalker. She was as afraid then as she had been when he was newborn. It was Ewan’s own gravely fascinated stare across the city’s causeways of filth and slipping black plastic that Maur had tried to put to Des. She could see her son did not have words for what that sight raised in him.

Once she said to Des, I know it’s hard. God knows I know it’s hard with kids, you don’t need to explain to me why you don’t see much of yours.

She was ashamed of herself to see how that hurt him. It was complicated, Sonya had told her, and yes his ex sounded awful and he did get to visit them sometimes. Quickly Maur had continued. What was the scariest thing that happened when they were young? You know how tired you get. How the time goes. I’ve had moments when I felt like it was all sort of inevitable, do you know what I mean?

Not sure, he said.

Like a stone falling, she said.

That sounds bad.

She gave a laugh. Other moments—this she did not say—she was held in place by a sound, a shoe on the floor, rubber against a kerb.

Sounds like you were in a bad way, Des said.

His gentleness, the fact that he did not withdraw, did not raise in Maur the gladness she’d have thought it would.

I don’t want Ewan to be a do-over, she said to Sonya.

Christ, that’s a bit unfair.

On who? Maur said. Then: Whom?

She did not say that for all her loneliness Des bored her. She knew Sonya knew, and that Maur felt guilt for that. After a while she broke up with him as nicely as she could. He groaned as if joking, not as sad as he was. He said, Are you seriously It’s Not You It’s Me–ing me? and she said something like, No, but really, Des.

Alone but for Yew. Shall we have friends from playgroup over? He would not answer that. She knew no names to suggest.

When she felt a certain amount of dread she invited her own acquaintances; they stayed up late and she hushed them when they were loud, for the Dooleys’ sake, and for Ewan’s. She knew if she looked in on him she would see him lying with his eyes open or too tight shut to be asleep. After one such night some man, some friend of a friend, drank white wine with her in the clutter of the kitchen. He said, You’re near Grunwick here, ain’t you? Then: Alright, little man!

Ewan in the doorway, dreaming on his feet again. The first time in a long time, and the last time. Staring at his mother as if from far behind his own eyes. She picked him up as tender as she had ever felt.

After sex, when the man slept, she gasped at the sound of another’s breath, a face beside her own.

—

Ewan watched cartoons. From the library she brought him books of mythology. Hey, she said. You like to climb. She turned to the spread of Yggdrasil. He looked politely. What he sought for himself, if he did, were books with pictures of weapons. He drew swords and elaborate halberds and guns.

Occasionally he played with the Dooley boys, kicking their plastic football, throwing tennis balls at chalk targets on the garage door near where the big dog was chained. Violent games near the old man’s dark house. Ewan not saying much. Even when he stood aside from the others and watched, he seemed to gather himself into his own body enough not to be teased or despised that she could see. Look, she thought, at the sight of her little boy’s shoulders. He could give anyone who gave him shit what for. That raised surprising pride.

His teachers said he was shy. She did not like it, and listed for them the Dooley boys and others she said he liked. One woman described him as methodical and careful, and was perplexed by Maur’s agitation, as Maur was too. She watched him watch his boisterous children’s shows and the news with her with the same quiet attention. A Harrier crashed at Wisbech fascinated him. She came into the living room one evening in May and he was sat in front of the wrong-end-of-a-telescope drama of Operation Nimrod at the Iranian embassy, moon-eyed at explosions and the black-clad men descending. The sight of the grip of his fists as he mimicked the men’s motions elicited in Maur astonishment at his alien boyness. Guy had not possessed it. Nor had her father. Des a little, but nothing like this. None of her men friends at uni had had it, so how did it count as boyness at all? But you know what I mean, she thought. What was she to make of that physicality? This distance?

At the frosty end of the year she got work on the phones and filing in the little offices of two solicitors on Kilburn High Road. An actual fucking paycheque, she said to Sonya. I could have cried when the first one came.

You should frame it, Sonya said.

Bit late, Maur said, and lifted a glass. Two new books, too, actual hardbacks, fuck it, Offshore, Darkness Visible.

They’re not bad, she said. Sandrine and Raj. They do local campaign stuff alongside bread and butter. And it’s walking distance from Yew’s judo class. He’ll get back before me sometimes but that’s what telly’s for, isn’t it?

They toasted bad mothers. It was not so often now that Maur would stare into a mirror until she no longer recognised what she saw.

Spreadsheets and diaries and files, oh my, she said. Turns out I’m not bad at it.

And you a slattern, too, Sonya said.

Fuck off.

We’re all slatterns, babe. It’s our feminist duty.

—

Doggedly Ewan repeated to Maur jokes other children had told him. She battened down a desire to make him understand that this was not how they worked, jokes, such careful repetition, because she did not like the urge in her. That’s a good one, she’d say, to his wonder as if at something unveiled.

Sonya called the Woodcraft Folk hippie scouts. Shyly Ewan loved the physical activities. He swam. Not quickly but for a long time. He camped and told Maur how to build a wigwam. He recited fireside songs. Beside the battered elm tree / the owl’s cry we hear. Picking up clothes, she found in his pocket pebbles, one holed like the bathroom light-pull weight her mother had made, and Maur held it to her eye to see with a stone’s gaze.

Maur’s father leaned on his stick and watched Ewan aim a knotted branch into trees and make a percussion sound and from within the dark rose a massive crow as if the shot were real. She was envious of the kind of silence there was between the boy and the man. Maur followed them up the drumlin at the town’s west flank to snags, lifeless barkless oak and beech remains white amid mottled living trunks.

Ewan, those branches won’t hold you.

Why did they die? he said.

Old age, her father said. Disease. Bad soil. They’ll be teeming. It’s a habitat for various things. Circle of life and so on.

A woodpecker ceased percussion. Ewan stood amid the rawboned shafts.

She said, No. They won’t hold you.

—

Ewan dropped a glass of squash in her father’s kitchen and Maur shouted and he froze above the wet jags. He did not move as she pulled him by the arm and got on her knees to attend to the mess and said, Anything else to make ants happy?

We’re all human, Sonya would tell her later. We’ve all got a bully in us. If I told you some of my idle thoughts…

Doesn’t it freak you out? Maur would say. That urge to be a bit cruel?

She picked up the shards. Her fingers shook. Go on, she said to her son. Careful. She went into the living room, where her father was looking through a book he had found for Ewan, on woodlands, on trees’ life cycles. Diagrams of decay, stages of arboreal collapse.

He broke a bloody glass, she said.

No matter.

He’s just a child, she said.

Well, quite, he said. She heard his confusion.

Watch him please, she said. I’ll be a minute.

Stubbins was permanently closed years ago so Maur went to the co-op. She bought two chocolate hearts wreathed in rabbits and cartoon wildflowers. One she ate on the way home. She gave Ewan the second when she drew the quilt over him on her own old bed. He regarded it cautiously.

I’m sorry we argued, she said, then, I’m sorry I snapped. Her pulse rushed. She hugged him. She said, This is a heart to say sorry because you’re my heart and I didn’t mean to be a meanie. Yes, you can have a bit now. I know you’ve brushed your teeth but I won’t tell.

I’m not the only boy who doesn’t have a dad, he said.

No?

Garry Denton and Simon Goldman don’t have one either. Christian Nyambura doesn’t have a mum.

Well there you are.

She watched him watch the curtains. The last time they had visited she had gleaned from him that in half-sleep he saw the divide between the two panes and the curtain rod as a looming cloth-draped man and could not recall another moment of such imagery from him, any other such fabulation.

Shall I read you one of my old books? she said. She fetched down two boxes. He looked inside. Marianne and Mark, two Rupert Bear annuals, The Borrowers, Johnny Longfoot, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Warrior Scarlet. He found beneath them a copy of The Enchanted Wood. Wisher wisher, he said. Remember that’s what the trees say.

Yes, you’ve read those books before. I think they’re a bit young for you now. You remember I used to ask you if you heard that when you climb?

He said it again, the leafy sibilant.

She did not love them but these were the only fanciful stories he had ever paused for and she felt she owed them a sort of gratitude. They looked at the pictures together. That crowded Faraway Tree, its canopy reaching through realities. Sometimes its top branches may be in Witchland, sometimes in lovely countries, sometimes in peculiar places that no one has ever heard of. Maur hated Wheeler’s art. When Ewan slept she sought other volumes, work she admired. Warren Chappell, Tenniel, Charles Keeping, George Adamson for Garner. She should pick up her pens again. All this wonderful linework, she’d nearly thought lifework. Catherine Storr, Mary Norton.

The mystery of what your children like and what they don’t. The fact that you don’t get to choose their taste. She kept all Ewan’s pictures of course. All bang-bangs and explosions and stick men dangling from parachutes. He didn’t care for such images as these, the precisions of Marjorie-Ann Watts or Pauline Baynes, too odd to be sentimental, too spare to be twee. Look at them, that’s why Maur had stopped. How could she come close?

—

She said, I think Mum would have loved being a grandmother.

He said, How’s London?

Good. Do you miss her?

Slowly he said, Certainly. But don’t get…Be careful. Let the dead bury the dead et cetera. They don’t care what you do. It’s not nice but there it is.

Yes, keep out of their business. You told me before.

I’m thinking of you.

Bullshit. She shocked herself. Since when are you?

Why then did she turn to him, incapable of speech? Something began in her chest: what? Was it only rage? Please wipe that long-suffering look off your face, she intended to say, but staring at him her heartbeat slammed her and her breath caught and she was amazed because in her every exhalation she heard wheedling, something almost, God, like flirtation.

Her father turned in his chair, deliberately, to look at her straight on as it were to show that he would hide nothing. He said to her, Stay out of it, Maur. Then he stood, right in front of her, walked out leaving her humiliated and alone.

With her small regular income, terrors, when they came, were at least a certain amount less utter and abstract. While she placed an order, Yew stood in the doorway of the Peking Dragon with his hands in his pockets looking both never more little and almost like a man. The warmth that raised in her went when they walked away with their supper and he said as if to no one, Ching Chong Ping Pong, testing something out, so sharply she said, What? and he said, That’s what Billy calls that takeaway, and she said, Well we don’t talk like that.

Maur thought she saw in him, and she did not mind, a seam of something hard. Maybe you could culvert it? The judo might channel it but it didn’t do as much about his maladroitness as she had hoped. She did not like the irritation (let’s call it) his clumsiness provoked in her. He was strong though, and dogged. She watched from the edge of the dojo with other parents while he did one of those grips the Japanese name of which he reported to her and that she made no effort to remember. On the street Saoirse said of him, Bless the little bruiser, and Maur did like that.

The children ran to and from the end house with its gusting paper surrounds.

Now you leave that man alone, Saoirse said. You too now, Ewan Towns. I see you thinking you’ll ring that bell and run away.

We didn’t do nothing, Ewan said.

Anything, Maur said, cigarette in her lips.

Good, Saoirse said. Keep on not doing nothing. Jesus Mary and Joseph. You’re a tough one, Ewan. You going to look after your ma?

Maur liked his cautious smile.

—

New Year’s Eve, a Stoke Newington party. Maur laughed with relief. And from grass. The colours and smoke brought back Lancaster days. A young woman talking loudly about her children reminded Maur of herself, sort of, not better nor worse but smoking with more style. How old are yours? Maur asked. The woman put her hands down to indicate two toddlers.

Sonya had told Maur that a couple of her friends who’d be present were dubious. She’d said the adjective voluptuously. Criminal elements, she had said, and smiled. You know me, I know all sorts. Smugglers, dealers. Nothing major. Couple of Dublin guys, bit of gear.

Maur had performed being scandalised. She found Sonn now and said to her of the other mother, Is she one of those dodgy mates?

Nell? I don’t know her really but Brian said you and she might get on. You’re not the only one whose dad doesn’t approve of her life choices.

You mean children.

Come on, Sonya said. Whatever else, your dad is a fan of Ewan.

Maur coveted the furniture in this flat. When she peed she looked for and found no mildew in the grout. At midnight she was on the tiny balcony looking for the Post Office Tower amid the fireworks with a weathered white man called Shaun. Ring in another shitty year, she said gaily enough.

Not going so good?

I mean the world.

He was older, wore hard living well. She amused herself with disappointment that no more than Nell was he one of Sonya’s villains.

Nothing so glamorous, he said, when she told him why she smiled. I met Sonn through politics.

So what do you do in TV?

Production. I recently did something with Jan Morris, he said. You know her? Obviously you want to get a proper social message into stuff, especially now, God knows we need it. I’ve been doing kids’ programs. He made a face.

Which ones? she said. What’s the one with the jester? And a Scottish witch? Ewan loves that, little weirdo, and that is not at all his usual taste. Not enough shooting. Except that it’s funny; he does like jokes, sort of.

Ewan would stop signal-hunting with the dial for anything supposed to be comic, at canned laughter or the rumpty-tump up-down of jocular delivery. He did not laugh but was fascinated. You’re not supposed to sit there studying it, she might have shouted. It’s supposed to crack you up. She did not want to be thinking about Ewan now.

Kids’ shows and comedies, there’s more always going on with them than you think, Shaun said. Ewan?

I have a son, she said. What else has your fingerprints on it?

I used to do some work on Angels, he said.

Maur sung the show’s frenetic theme. They kissed, he tasted of smoke.

Soldiers poured onto the islands. On the screen warplanes overflew. A man counted them out and counted them back on sorties onto Atlantic rocks. Ewan watched.

Maur’s father said he couldn’t endorse enthusiasm about being British the way things were going, that these days it amounted to self-bloody-harm, but if that’s what the sheep farmers wanted, so be it, and wasn’t that what Maur’s beloved Foot said? Maur saw Ewan weave and yaw his head with the helicopters at the edges of the shots, hunch in mimicry of paras. He didn’t look to her like a child playing. It was not the same, coming up to double digits. Even his clumsiness was new, now.

Ewan? she said. He was highlighted by the fighting. Honey? Turn around, please. Ewan, this is Shaun.

With the decade’s end had come pastel light and a new cruelty.

You know Don? Ewan said. He’s off judo. He’s away. He’s sick. Don said…he said, then nothing.

Maur said, Come on, Yew. What was it he said? She was angry with herself because that brightness she’d put in her voice was so tinny, so what would Ewan do but close down?

That night she pulled Shaun into her with great urgency. He laughed in a cheerful dirty way and she knew he thought it desire itself that made her shy, and yes she had wanted very much to fuck him but what kept her quiet was another need, a fear of solitude in such close company.

Shaun took them to see Woza Albert! at the Riverside. It’s really important, he said. Do you know about South Africa, Ewan? The play made Maur cry, and Ewan watched her and looked at Shaun and said nothing.

Well fuck, Shaun said later. That went well.

Shaun? Sonya said to her. Fucking hell, have at it.

What’s wrong with him? Maur said.

Oh no, babe, I get it.

Why? Have you…?

Leave off. A drunken overnight maybe. You could do worse for the how’s-your-father, Sonya said.

Maur said, So why the rolled eyes?

Please, Sonya said. Gestured at herself. As if my opinion’s worth anything.

Maur frowned. At least as exciting as the sex, she said, he’s changed the lightbulb in the hallway. I thought I was going to have to wait for Ewan to turn eighteen.

I’m telling Germaine Greer you said that, Sonya said. Well, you can give as good as you get.

Eh?

Oh, you’ll be fine. How’s Ewan with it? And how’s Shaun with him?

Maur made an exaggerated tut and Sonya did not laugh as she expected. Not that that’s on Shaun if you ask me, Maur said. He’s been in a funny mood, Ewan. Even for him. Quiet, even for him.

—

Greeting Shaun on the front doorstep Maur saw her boy, the only child out at that moment despite the warmth, kicking a threadbare tennis ball by the old man’s house. Maur asked Shaun to go to Ewan and tell him not to play there. He went, and watching him she decided she’d asked because she wanted to normalise the interactions of son and man. She could not hear what Shaun said, but watching Ewan squint up at him in mute confrontation did not surprise nor displease her.

Driving north of Kilburn, Shaun broke the silence.

Hey, Ewan, you know what that street’s called, mate? He took the railway bridge above a green cut. It’s called Shoot-Up Hill.

Ewan glowered in the back seat but in the mirror Maur saw him aim through the window with an imagined rifle.

Maur had her twenty-ninth at the Hog’s Grunt. Busman’s holiday, Shaun said, but it’s the weirdest place in North London so I love it. The pub was part of the Production Village, a commercial folly, faux hamlet, rural idyll behind the gates of an old aeroplane factory on Cricklewood Lane. A TV set with duck pond, village green. Drunk in the fading light, Maur implored Ewan to dance with her. Held out her hands. He shook his head and tried to smile and climbed a little tree. Shaun gave Maur a silk scarf. Liberty’s, Sonya said, veddy veddy nice. Not long to go, believe me, babe, the thirties are the best decade. Des did not come. Through Sonya he gave her a book of Ardizzone prints.

In the morning, over Alka-Seltzer, Shaun picked up one of Ewan’s comic books.

Zap! he said. Pow! God, is he really into this stuff?

She said, Actually not really.

What drew Ewan were tanks and commandos, armed plastic figures, not dreamscapes like this, future rockets, vampires, this crab-octopus thing harassing men on the cover of, well now, Star Lord.

If you’re my friend, follow me round the bend. Maur had found that in a book in the library for-sale shelves and bought it for Ewan because of that epigraph. She doubted he had read it because the tough-faced kid on the cover had elf’s ears and faced down a giant rat-thing, fantasy that would likely repel him back to, what, Richard Allen, Sven Hassel, God help her. If he wasn’t on that yet he probably would be soon. If anything. At least it would be reading? Fine, I suppose we all have our nonsense, but here came to Maur again yearning for Ewan to be, to find something in the thought of being, as the rear cover of that book put it, skinny scruffy quick-witted bright-eyed, full of London élan, self-sufficient and proficient and forever a boy.

No, he doesn’t generally go for monsters, she said to Shaun. Des must have given him this.

Is his lordship still sleep-sulking? Shaun said.

Oh give it a rest will you? She opened Star Lord to an image of a lumpen shadowed shape. Read Had he glanced back he would have seen one of the rocks open a baleful eye. Silent cyclopean menhir. Déjà vu, a book from her own childhood, a dreamt house surrounded by such watching boulders. Cold observers the dreamer had invoked.

Maur said again she couldn’t believe Ruby was at secondary school, and Sonya said they must be very old. Sonya tapped a history textbook on the table. All kings and queens of course, she said. I’ve told her not to believe a word.

Should Maur be ashamed of the solace of Shaun’s company? Sonn, doesn’t it bother you? Being alone? But Sonya’s not alone, she’s in a succession of lesser (she says) things, and is it just a front that she seems to go from one to another if not untouched then never holed? Is it true that Maur wants what she feels she wants, something constant, so male a presence? How could that not be shameful?

Do you ever feel that you want a man around full-time? she said. Not even for the beast with two backs I mean.

Sure, Sonya said. But it makes me nervous too. Hence giving them all the boot. And missing it isn’t necessarily worse than having it along with the inevitable other stuff.

You’re wise.

I am wise.

Touch does matter and maybe he, whoever he is, doesn’t even deserve a speaking role, even better when not ha ha, just sit there and look ornamental, no not ornamental but potential. Potentially of use.

Touch is a drug alright, Sonya said. That’s what gets you three of the little buggers.

Not just a drug, Maur said. Food and drink. It’s air. They did experiments—do you know about this? Without touch you get stunted. They gave some baby monkeys soft-toy mothers and some these metal and wood versions, wire ones, and even when they put food only on the metal ones, they’d rather have cuddles than eat.

And how do the cloth figures feel about that? Maur did not speak her thoughts. And how do the wire mothers feel about it?

I know it’s odd and a bit hard sometimes, Maur said to Ewan. Having Shaun around. Can you listen, please? I’m trying to talk to you like a civilised person.

Can I go outside? he said.

Scuffs on the skin of his face.

What happened? Is someone bullying you? I’m talking to your teacher.

No!

Excuse me? She tried to sound angry but his resistance delighted her.

The school called her, in fact. Ewan’s head of year was a subdued man who inclined his head at her slight smile.

Fighting’s not something to be proud of, Mrs. Towns.

Miss. Yes, I’m not an imbecile.

She told him she did not believe Ewan was starting any trouble.

Well, be that as it may.

It’s relevant, isn’t it? she said. If he’s defending himself?

Of course, the man said. Took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. But it’s rarely as simple as all that.

What if it is?

Look, for now, can we just…I just want to bring this to your attention and ask you to keep it in mind.

New energy rose in Ewan. From the window she watched him in the front yard, padding with exaggerated sinuous motion, shoulders up, skulk skulk like a pantomime burglar. Out later with the street kids, still not saying much but infected now with something of their giddiness in the nightly tide of shadows. The children kicked that football, or hit with sticks in madly random hockey a smaller ball too uneven to predict its lurches into the dark, in saturated air, gusting dustlike droplets that made all shapes sharp, every edge the absolute edge. Gunpowder reek, remember, remember. Shouting beyond the bricks. Lovely silence in the flat.

Why did you freeze when you did take out your pens, Maur? How long that time did you stare at whiteness and not draw? Each line would be the foreclosure of all the lines not-drawn.

—

Boys! A voice from somewhere. Boys, for goodness’ sake! Maur! Saoirse calling up the stairs. Maur, are the lads with you?

The women could not hear their children.

—

Maur went out and called Ewan’s name. Saoirse did not hide her alarm. They and the other mothers shouted under the hazed coronas. It’ll be fine, Maur carefully thought. She did not know how long since she had heard the voice of any child. She walked halfway to the road’s end. All the women were yelling. Maur called, Yew.

She wondered if every other mother there understood better than she the parameters of necessary fear, whether her own growing terror was still inadequate. How many catastrophes have been inaugurated by I must have misunderstood this situation, by Some mistake surely?

Call the police, someone said.

Ah come on now, Saoirse said uncertainly.

I’ll…, Maur said. What was it she would do?

One of those slips in time as if the universe or Maur were too drained to go through every moment. Now it was seconds on and Saoirse and Maur were in conclave and others called from corners, threatened punishment from fathers returning soon, used the secret endearments by which they knew their children.

Maur held her breath in the childless street. And a part of her was impatient again, for the worst, just to get it done and over with.

—

Four little figures came.

Women cried out. The terror of motherhood continued. The children came pell-mell crying from the black of the street’s end as if from Ultima Thule unlit.

Ewan! Yew! Ewan! Maur shouted.

Mammy we didn’t do nothing! We was just playing.

Billy Dooley, when I tell your father. Saoirse grabbed and shook him and held him and he howled. It’s that old fellow you’ve been bothering again, she shouted.

We’ve done nothing, Mam.

Maur called, Yew?

This was Billy and Michael Dooley, Ian Robson, Matty Something, their eyes all wide, none of them were earthed, somehow. Where was hers?

It was the house, Ma.

I’ve got a better idea. The sentence was not Maur’s but it came up in her and frightened her. She waited for collapse. For ruin, for rubble to swallow her invisible son. For the fall of a house.

Ewan, the knowledge came out of the void, is gone.

Not enticed, gone of his own need to tear something down. That is that. Maur stood amid bonfire smell and believed her son would not return.

Part of her still lives there and always will. Destroyed, dreadfully released, the dread of dreaded outcome no longer dreaded, done.

Until. A thump. A dark little sphere rolled jouncing out of nothing into streetlamp light. After it, a figure. From the formlessness by the house the shape came forth. Her boy, delivered from shadows.

Maur heard her own voice.

Alone of the come-back children Ewan did not run. Approached with almost ritual gait. That dark ball heralded him on its uneven path.

So she ran to him. Shouted his name.

The ball went past her wildly and she reached him and took him up, and she asked him what the bloody hell he was doing, and Ewan looked at her with a fixity that recalled the old sleepwalks but was not the same.

He was not hurt. He murmured too quietly to make out much. Saoirse put her hand on Maur’s arm and whispered that he was tired and to let him be.

Come in, boys, Saoirse said. Get your ball, Billy.

That ain’t mine.

Maur sought and could not find it.

They put the boys to bed and smoked in the Dooleys’ kitchen.

Little devils, Saoirse said. They’ve gone and scared themselves. That’ll teach the little devils.

Maur called Shaun and he said it sounded really stressful. She left her flat and went to the old man’s. No lights within. She was put in mind of that time, years back, that time that hot summer when she had told Ewan off while she was in bed. A strong obscure shame. She was going to ring the bell, to apologise to her neighbour to whom she had never spoken for whatever bother the children had given. But the world was so quiet. Maur left him to his sleep or darkness.

[v]

The air is very cold.

She says, “I was still young. That dream of the house on the hill is the first dream I remember from after Yew was born. And that was quite a while later. I’m not saying it was the first but it’s the first I can think of.

“I don’t know what it means,” Maur says. “A house on a hill. But I’m not a fool, all dreams mean something.”

[vi]

Afterward he was quieter still, not sullen but misaligned like a door that won’t shut true. She said nothing but the weather thickened without cause. Ewan’s careful concentration intensified or focused. Maur was more deeply than ever grateful for television’s oversight. She told Ewan again that Shaun made TV programs. He did, quietly, try out words the tube gave him. Freaks fools geeks ghouls.

You couldn’t always say how it happened but sometimes there you were before that telly, late, too late really, no question, because there was Ewan too, your boy trying his luck, or Shaun and Ewan, even, and on-screen Marathon Man oh dear or The Wicker Man or something he shouldn’t see and you bad again.

Or not so late or bad or not in the same way, anyway, those gagmen he couldn’t get enough of affecting shrill cheer. One soft-voiced comedian mocking other black men in a northern voice, he called the audience Me old flower. The rhythms of setup and payoff. Bob Monkhouse made an introduction. Maur heard a new voice singing, then speaking in faux American. The quality of Ewan’s silence changed. Come in from the kitchen she saw on-screen a man dance in parody convict’s clothes, white gloves white trousers, shirt with black arrows pointing up. Slither hither, he said. White, pale skin, black makeup lines around his eyes. He said, This place is weird, huh? Puns and gags and punch lines over faint louche music (he crossed a Rhode Island Red with a crystal ball now he’s got a chicken which gets in touch with the other side of the road). The man’s constant tiptoe creeping, arms and legs sinuous, walking inaccurately recalled by something graceful and uncanny. She recognised it: she had seen Ewan perform his child’s version of this.

Spook! the man said. Slither! You’ll all be doing it tomorrow.

How he moved! Familiar, unfamiliar, silly and sinister, human, other, as-if-remembered. She saw in Ewan’s face a new attention. Spook, he said. Slither.

Maur considers her past with what gentleness she can. Her twenty-somethingness is alien now, her thirty-something self barely less so. All that try-hard toil. She chose new rugs, colours for the wall. Was she desperate? She feels now that she was. Time had been in a hurry certainly. She and Shaun with their stop-start did not move in together but it was always as if they might. She knew she wanted to take him, Shaun, take the two of them, Ewan too, the three, for granted. In a good way. Could not.

Ewan did recede. Into his changing liminal body.

Maur heard the rhythmic thump of a ball against a wall below but when she came down he was standing by the house as if he had been just waiting and he had nothing to kick or hit with the stick he held. She saw him take in everything as if he would be tested. The chip shop run by the glum man Doreen told her had been stabbed twice. The electrical repair shop. He watched the old man’s house.

Though he spoke even less now, he asked her one more time about his father.

She said she was sorry but she did not know his name or anything. Ewan said nothing more about that. Perhaps he spared her.

Your granny? Yes, she was lovely. I’ve got a photo, you saw it. Yes, like your auntie Rhona. Yes, I was about your age. A bit younger, now. I promise I’m not going anywhere. I promise.

—

The first time he returned quite late from school she was sat smoking in the kitchen, telephone receiver in her hand, when she heard his key. He entered without haste.

Where’ve you been? Ewan, you can’t do that. Where’ve you been? Yew?

She did not hear it but saw his mouth make an S shape, the pursed lips of shock Boo, a kiss finish. He whispered and those sibilants she heard as if a snake was dangerous upon the stairs. He stood in something of a fight pose.

Ewan, she said. She put her hands to his cheeks and felt afraid of how he looked out at her from a long way back. Where have you been?

I was seeing something.

She recalled what that teacher had said about fighting. When he was asleep she looked in his school bag and found only his books.

—

In a tent at Greenham Maur had huddled envious of and scorning the collegiality. In the firelight she had drawn lines in her notebook. Charcoal now. That was the new old idea, to loosen her wrist as a way back in. She showed the sketchbook to Sonya, who turned the pages and said, Mmmm mmmm, and embarrassed Maur, the images seeming valueless and childish, and if it weren’t melodramatic she would have snatched the pad away.

When did Annie get into the CND stuff? she said.

Don’t know, Sonya said. I think it was watching Edge of Darkness.

Blimey, you let her watch that? Maur said.

You know my lot, I can’t stop them doing anything. Sonya surprised Maur then, saying, Ewan told me he thought Des was a bit wet. I said, That’s not very nice. Where’s he getting that from? Des may be a bit of a drip but he’s a doll to that boy. Never misses a birthday. He doesn’t have to invite him to things. It’s been years since you two.

Who’s talking about Des? Maur said. We’re not even talking about Des.

He told me off once for being a conspiracy theorist, Des, Sonya said. By which he means a lefty. No one likes making decisions, Maur. We’re all scared of it. And, alright, forget Des, I don’t think Shaun’s helping. I don’t mean the on-off thing, I mean the Shaun thing. I know I’m hardly anyone to lecture and I’ve always liked him but you’re not helping each other. Nor Ewan.

Maur took a drag and waited a long while.

She said, It was a bit too weird for me, Edge of Darkness. When he goes through his dead daughter’s stuff and finds her vibrator? She thought of the creaks she heard, now Ewan had learnt to masturbate, that brought forth in her troubled affection and unease.

Annie had nightmares, Sonya said. That’s what got her into it.

Visions of the bomb come down. Annie told her mother she was not dreaming, that she was denied an escape into night. As if, Maur could have responded, sleep was an exit, as if there weren’t watchers there. Annie lying amid animal toys and books and listening for what came across the sky, knowing herself the object of objects’ attention. The missile pointing at a certain street, flat, room, sleek enough barely to disturb the slates, to slip right through the cracks between them, down to pierce Annie between her eyes. So that little girl would know herself to be the first death.

Christ, Maur said. She felt something almost like envy. Not for terror but that capacity for vision.

I know, Sonya said. I imagine your Action Man’s not so bothered by that sort of thing.

Oh, is that right? Yeah yeah, he’s a right little bruiser, blah blah.

Hey. It was you called him that, not me.

He wouldn’t tell me if he worried like that anyway, Maur said. He doesn’t tell me anything.

Babe, your problem is what you want is for him to tell you everything.

Oh, come on, Sonya. You going to pretend he’s not too, what, reticent?

What the fuck does too mean?

He’s not interested, Maur said. He doesn’t care. Including about me.

Sonya made a noise. His problem’s the opposite, she said. He can’t take his eyes off you.

Maur was shaking. Motherhood astonished her still, the seesaw between helplessness and too-absolute authority.

So, Sonya said. So he’s a bit of an oddball, who cares?

Well, Maur said. Obviously I couldn’t turn my kid into my bestest mate in the whole wide world unlike some.

She wanted to apologise but she sat in Sonya’s silence.

With the miners’ strike Sandrine and Raj worked long hours. They discussed Hilda Murrell and the riots. After the bomb in Brighton, Raj shook his head and held his thumb and forefinger up to say, So close, and he and Maur laughed. Maur and Shaun and Ewan and Pip and Rho and Rho’s new man Michael went to France. Maur told Ewan that he could not climb trees because this was hunting season and he might be shot. He did not complain but he stared into the canopies. When she finished the books Maur had brought she sat in the garden of the place they’d rented with a pile of Pip’s and Rho’s.

Wow, Shaun said. Take a breath. Have you read Dracula?

She said, Don’t insult me.

Remember Renfield? You’re getting through those books like he eats flies.

Don’t be nasty, she said.

What? He held up his hands.

Maur said to Rho that it was too late now to have another child, as if she were much older than she was, and did not say that sometimes she was afraid if she did it might feel like trying again.

Saoirse told her that someone had found the old man dead. They’ll be cleaning up that mess now, Saoirse said. Poor old thing. Ewan still eyed the house or did again.

On the morning after the great storm quite formally he said he wanted to go out and climb the ruined branches of the dead and dying trees, and Maur could not understand why he’d said anything because then she had to say, No, it’s too dangerous, and part of her hoped he’d try anyway, she still valued his physical bravery. Mr. Dooley died, he was sixty-two, his heart. Maur brought Saoirse flowers and heard her and the boys howling through the ceiling. Raj showed Maur The New Statesman: a secret satellite, a Zircon scandal. He said, Do you know Lobster? Shaun might like it. In fact he probably reads it. Black Monday. Maur swapped books with Sonya, read Swift, Carter, Mantel. She read Brookner, troubled by the hankering she found within, for adequate contentment. She still remembers that epoch as stretches in TV interference, flatly rendered. Sonya said, I’m worried about you, babe. Now Maur recalls Ewan silent in the light of the war films he watched, of a sped-up flight around Britain’s shoreline.

He’d come to hold himself not with confidence, exactly, but a sort of tough readiness that pleased Maur and made her nervous. On Saturdays he worked now in a junk shop in Willesden for a woman called Rumer—There’s no joke you can make, Rumer said with a startling gentry accent, that I haven’t heard. Ewan tended to the tat. He brought home discards. A broken figurine; a not-too-ugly vase; some rust-flecked shaft of metal. The vase he gave Maur. He brought home nunchucks from a Soho martial arts shop. He saved his pay to go paintballing.

What? Who do you go with? Maur said.

Robert, he said. And whoever.

From judo?

That was Don.

He cut his hair short. It was as if she’d glanced away when he was little, a moment and now look. Standing in the kitchen doorway he looked at her as she washed up and she gasped at the new little gold ring in his lobe. And, too, she thought, Gold?, smiled at her own snobbery.

She recognised no one in Ewan but himself.

—

I’ve got a better idea. Those words that had come to her were from a story, she remembered, in which a boy pulls down an old man’s house. Ewan was nearly not a boy any more, thank God. The shape of him!

When Shaun was not at the flat, Ewan sometimes murmured songs. Some she recognised from the radio and TV or his cassettes, others she knew only from his renditions. “The Final Countdown.” “Spirits in the Material World.” “La Di Da Di.” She thought, don’t think about time.

Yes, she told Rho, Ewan was more of a loner than she’d been, yes, he did his own thing, yes, he was out all the time these days. Now of an evening the doorbell might ring and she would open the door for young men she didn’t know. The first time Maur could not speak a moment for surprise. Ewan never kept good time, she managed, had he said he’d meet them here? She invited them in to wait for him and they declined.

What are you up to tonight? she’d ask as they walked away.

This and that.

Can I tell him your names?

Nothing.

Twice it was young women, a different one each time. They would not enter either, nor introduce themselves. One, brusque, surly, bomber-jacketed, perhaps fifteen, was South Asian, and Maur’s relief surprised her, and that was how she realised that all the boys who’d been by for him were white and how she learnt that she’d been growing uneasy about the opinions of her tense terse crop-headed son. What few political declarations he had started making she tried to decide were provocations directed at her and, mostly, at Shaun. Tried out like his new body. But then Don and Robert, his best friends once, were black, and she hadn’t seen either for how long?, so this girl was a relief.

So she said to Raj. Who told her that might not mean anything. We’ve all been the Exceptions, he said.

In any case, Maur steeled herself to overhear teenage ardour, but no. (Sonya said, Count your luck, that Ruby was on boyfriend three and that Sonya had walked in on them and was now scarred for life.) Sometimes Ewan stayed out all night and that adventure pleased Maur. Once when they were sat together the Don’t Die of Ignorance advert came on and she said to him, Please be careful? and he breathed out in a way she chose to read as exasperated affection, which made her want to perform more silly-old-mumness.

We should go to some exhibitions again, Sonya said. It’s been forever. I’ve been grooving on Francesca Woodman recently. But fuck, it’s like Plath. I’m annoyed with the women geniuses who let the side down, she said, taking Maur’s breath from her for a moment, by killing themselves.

A summer night. Ewan returned to the flat. Drunk, Maur suspected she was being manic. She offered Ewan wine—The Black Tower! she said, too loud—and he surprised her by not stalking to his room but taking a glass. In fact he seemed already somewhat gone himself. He smelt of cigarettes. Her gladness embarrassed her. But the thought of him, with others, a party, the relief.

She said, Where’ve you been?

Hampstead Heath. She waited. He said, I like it there. At night.

I bet, she said. She recalled night walks to Greenfield’s park. Drunken outdoor fumbling, fucking. You can’t teach me about this stuff, treasure. She saw him make an effort to focus.

There’s…, he began. She waited again, drunkenly careful.

Ewan described for her a nocturnal passage. There was a ceremony to his disquisition. She received it as the gift it was. His anxiety seemed suspended.

There were, he told her, codes, and nighttime territories. Certain groups hung out in certain places. She looked at his broadening body and felt astonished by her own age as well as his and glad of his maleness. He said there were routes between stations. Each station a tree, named for its qualities. She imagined him climbing. Scuffling, in more than one way. She saw him decide to tell a secret and love made her pat his cheek. He did not acknowledge the touch. He said he would list them.

The Pipe.

The Pipe?

I don’t know what kind of tree it is but if you climb it there’s a hole on a branch and it goes all the way through and one end’s sort of like a mouthpiece.

A wood nub like a shisha. Stuff tobacco and dope into a blackened hole you could smoke from the living tree.

Wow, man, she said in the voice of a cartoon hippie. It delighted her, kids in the canopy, sleek as tomcats, toking, making the tree glow.

The Wall, he said.

The bark of that tree was overwritten with scratched graffiti going back years, changing shape as the tree grew. Watching him that night Maur felt a certain diminution of a fear she could only then outline, that what afflicted her son was not the standard dread-and-wonder suspicion that no one else was real, but that he alone was not.

Snake and Ladder were two trees next to each other rewarding very distinct climbing styles. He shared these mysteries and she was happier than she had been for a long time. Between two forked branches of the Catapult, he told her, some hero had affixed dense rubber and a pouch and piled up stones in a natural hollow. Fire that ammo into the dark.

Maur could not but consider what other functions boughs and wooden bodies might fulfil. The old narratives of lonely men and trees, lumberjacks and knotholes, bit of tallow, grease, was there then, she wondered, oh don’t, a tree called the Cunt, oh stop it, and did they line up unzipped? You can’t teach me, treasure. And what about on the other side of the trunk where a smoothed nub might protrude from a saddle-sized branch that would support a girl’s weight a thigh to either side, or a boy’s, don’t be presumptuous. Called then not the Cunt or Quim nor Schlong but, what, to be equal opportunity? The Slippery-Slip!

Maur snort-laughed. Imagined her son treefucker and winced. He paid her no mind. Before he said the last tree’s name she already thought of him as pilgrim.

God’s Tree, he said.

He told her God’s Tree wasn’t tall but you had to work to climb it because above head-height it was so dense with tiny branches and leaves all you could do was force your way through that snarl but carefully enough not to ruin things, all the way up and out, to where, from above, the foliage and twigs were so tightly interwoven they would take your weight. You could stand. He said, If you do it right you can walk across the canopy.

Not everyone had the nerve or balance to walk atop God’s Tree.

Unfix her eyes. Maur brought to inner vision her son, arms out, on a stumbling leaf-held passage, a walker above darkness. Wisha wisha, she said. The trees are whispering secrets.

What I wish, she said after a silence, is that you’d turn up to school sometimes, honey. They call me, you know.

Slowly the awfulness of that spread through her. She wanted so much to unspeak.

Ewan stood. The fuck of it was Maur didn’t care and she didn’t know why she’d said it, except that it was something to say, a line expected. Please let her take it back and let him keep telling her about the trees.

But he departed.

Sandrine and Raj offered to pay for the courses to qualify as a paralegal. Rho called her M’Learned Friend.

I should really do it, Maur said to Sonya.

Fuck yes! Why wouldn’t you?

I don’t know. I will. I will.

You should do something, Sonya said.

Do you just get through each day until they all end? Maur in the mirror was thin but she gripped the skin at the sides of her belly. She made another list of plans. She told Ewan to show some respect, please, to call if he was staying out. Sometimes he did.

—

Some night, she got in late, the news was on, there he was on the sofa and there, sat across from him, Shaun. In the same room. Shaun traced a greeting in smoke. Maur made tea for everyone. It went all right. Mirabile dictu. She heated up a frozen curry. They ate quietly. Well, this was nice. Say nothing. Shaun wanted to see about the BAFTAs on the news. Among the winners was a documentary about the IRA people shot dead on Gibraltar.

Extrafuckingjudicial murder, Shaun said.

Maur did not look up. She absolutely would not look at him. Would not show her fury, her incredulity. She hoped for silence.

But Ewan spoke, his voice flat.

Who were the murderers then? he said.

Maur said, Alright, okay. Can we please—

Shaun said, Oh I don’t know, how about the people who did the murdering, Ewan? The SA bloody S?

Alright, Maur said.

Remind me why they shot them? Ewan said.

Enough, Maur said, but Shaun said, Because that’s what they’re paid to do. To follow orders. It wouldn’t hurt you to read a book once in a while, Ewan.

Maur stood. Why did you do this? she did not say, but For fuck’s sake. Shaun did not meet her gaze.

Ewan pointed at Shaun. There was about him an intense dreaminess and his own rage made his voice shake. He said, One day you and Mum’ll realise reading doesn’t make you special. Just means you can keep listing names. He looked at Maur when he said that. To Shaun he said, Just because something reminds you of something else, something you read, doesn’t make you special, you coward.

Then both of them were standing, Shaun gesturing Ewan glowering, then time did that thing and someone had shoved someone or pushed or something and it was Ewan shouting now. When had Maur last or ever heard him raise his voice?

He said, Fuck you, fuck you.

Shaun was staring not at him but at Maur, mouth wide. Did you fucking see that? he said. His face was pale. See what I mean?

Maur was too afraid to move, in that moment, seeing Ewan as a man. Until, slam slam, he left the room.

What the fuck? she said to Shaun then. You started that. For Christ’s sake, he’s just a boy.

He’s almost old enough to get married! He’s old enough to take responsibility for the fascist crap he’s spouting. Did you see what he did?

You’re supposed to be the man….

But Ewan must have heard her because before he slammed the front door he shouted up from the bottom of the stairs, Mum, he is not the fucking problem.

Maur went home after a work do with a colleague of Raj and Sandrine’s. To punish Shaun, not that she told Shaun. She told Sonya. As well as what had happened between Shaun and Ewan. Now, Maur knows that she had sought what she got, Sonya telling her that Shaun was out of order and that so was she. At the time she told Sonya to fuck off.

Sitting alone again watching the street from her window one night Maur saw a shade before the empty old house and knew it was her son. When he came in she said nothing about his strange energy.

She had to think of him out there in it. Lights and windows shedding shadows on the pavements, that laughing edge everything had now these days, mean and grinning. If he’d said it thrilled him she’d have believed him but that would have been a different son. Boys didn’t know how close they walked to the teeth of things. She wanted to trust the world to return him but it had hardly earned that.

Yew have you been getting in trouble?

As if he would say anything.

Another time the young man waiting for her son on the doorstep was Robert.

Oh my god! she said. It never is. It is!

Hello Mrs. Towns, how’ve you been?

Robert, you little terror. How are you? How long’s it been? Ewan’s not here. She stood aside and gestured him in. He won’t be long, I’m sure. Get in here. Come in, come in. Want some plonk?

He eyed the glass of wine. He sipped it and made a face.

So what have you been doing? she said. Where did you go?

Yeah, I’m all good.

He would not take off his jacket. She coaxed from him a few words about his exams.

You look well, she said. Robert shrugged. She enjoyed how ill at ease he was and said to herself that it was sweet, that she was being playful. Do you still do the paintballing?

Nah, not really, it’s expensive, you know. He made a little shooting motion and smiled. After a while he cleared his throat and said, Well, looks like you-know-who’s not coming, I best be off.

He’s terrible, isn’t he? she said. I never know when he’ll be back.

He eyed her cigarette. She considered offering him one.

How is he? she said.

Ewan?

He doesn’t tell me anything! Give me a hint.

Nah, Ewan, you know. He’s alright.

What do you think you might do? she said. After school?

My uncle’s a policeman. I was thinking maybe.

He never is. She tried to hide a moment of shock.

Nah, he’s cool though, Robert said. I thought maybe.

They heard the click of keys. An impulse, she moved her chair towards Robert. You have to be fit for something like that, she said, but then you are. You and Ewan both, I don’t know where he gets it, I was always lazy. Maur was fascinating herself with all this. She prodded Robert’s arm with her forefinger. Her son was ascending. I bet you’d have no problem, she said. Look at you. Ewan in the doorway. Looked at her close to his friend. Her touching hand. His face shut. Disgust beneath his patience. Her flare of satisfaction appalled her. She sat back. Robert stood. Maur felt shrouded again, draped with cloth. Her son turned and without a word descended, his friend stumbling after him.

Ewan left her to her trembling, to bite her mouth inside. Good, Maur tasted that she bled.

In Berlin the wall came down in its angling slabs, a pivot, seen like streets beyond the window when Maur was a child turning to wrap herself in net curtains and listen through the wall to her mother coughing. She remembered the foul aridity of air breathed through the gauze. That memory came again of herself in her bed, Ewan crying. The wall did not fall like a tarot tower but splayed like the teeth of a fairy-tale broken comb. Ewan passed some exams, not well. Another heat wave. The police brought Ewan home bloody from fighting. He was silent while Maur babbled, staring at her boy and seeing his body, its hunched and ready habitus as if with new clarity, as if he had made himself right to wait ready for violence under railway bridges, suited to this time. One officer, a stern young woman, kept saying they could have arrested him.

Now is not the fucking time for your posturing, Maur said to Shaun. Please, just go. I don’t have time for it tonight.

She screamed at Ewan. He said nothing. She pleaded with him. In the small hours she woke and went to check and as she had thought it would be his bed was empty.

Sometimes she did not know where he went for days at a time. He would not go back to school. British planes ran bombing runs in the desert.

She came home one evening and Shaun was there and he looked at her with true consternation such as Maur had never before seen on him. He said to her, I don’t know, I don’t…It was like this when I got here.

Ewan’s room empty but for his bedclothes. Maur pressed the back of the wardrobe where his jackets did not sway. She sat on his bed and cried.

Look, Shaun said. He just needs to sort himself out. He’ll be okay, come on, calm down. Maybe this is good.

Maur did not have a number for Robert. Sonya said not to panic. Rumer told her that he had stopped working at the shop months back, did he not tell you, dearie?

After two days, Des called her. They had not spoken for months.

Maur, I’ve got him.

You! she said. You!

—

Ewan would not speak to her. She met Des in a cramped café.

Look, he said. He’s okay. He’s just a teenager. Who isn’t a lost soul at his age?

He came to you, she said.

Don’t sound so appalled, he said. He asked could he come and stay. Said he’d been fighting with you. And Shaun.

What’s he doing?

Sitting on the sofa. Watching videos. Eating toast.

I’m coming right now.

No. You’re not.

I am.

Maur, he’ll flip his lid. What he needs is to calm down. Give him a couple of days. He’s just having a mardy. Plenty of kids full-on leave home at his age! What are you going to do? Put him over your knee?

To Sonya Maur said, I don’t know what to do. What does he want?

Ewan? Sonya blew a raspberry. He’s a kid. How the fuck would he know? That’s what he has to figure out. Him and you both.

Spare me, Sonya. Don’t, just don’t.

When Des called again she could hear he was afraid before he told her that Ewan had gone and that he did not know where. Maur screamed at him.

Listen! he said. Listen listen listen. He left a note saying everything’s fine, and he called me this morning. He says he’s crashing on friends’ sofas. Getting his head together.

Why the fuck am I hearing this from you? she said. Her words crashed into each other. What friends, Des? He hasn’t got—

Well clearly he has.

What’s he doing for money?

I gave him a little bit.

How much? I’ll pay you back.

Jesus, Maur. Forget it. Look, you were only two years older when you had him. I mean, he’s legally an adult and even if he’s a kid to us, he’s got the nous to keep body and soul together.

That’s what I’m scared of.

—

Ewan gave the hospital her number. Sonya came with her. At least he didn’t call Des this time, Maur sobbed. His status was bad enough for monitoring and stitches and the chirrup of machines and an overnight stay. He let her hug him. She raged at him and he turned his split face away and she pleaded. He spoke barely at all and she felt such shame and did not know if it was his or hers or both of theirs. His face was autumnal with bruises.

On their way out, Maur stopped still as if the white hospital corridor were the Damascene road. Her son would not accompany her, no one would come with her, Maur would go unfollowed round the bend.

Sonya, she said. He’ll kill someone.

Maur, Sonya said.

I can’t do it, I love him, he’s going to kill himself. Or someone else. Tell me I’m wrong, Sonn.

She went back to the room where Yew sat with the nurse fussing over this and that. Again he did not look at her. She took hold of his hand. He neither gripped her back nor shook her off.

Ewan, she said. I can’t watch this. I can’t bear it. She meant everything. You have to stop, she said.

Then—

I’ll come and get you, she managed to say. Not what she had thought she would say. It brought such relief, though not relief only. In the morning, she said. I’ll come for you.

What did Maur see in his face? She felt the mass of what she had not done. Yew. Churchyard tree.

Shaun was waiting for her at the flat and he was smart enough to say nothing on the first day of a new thinking. The next morning the nurses met her at the entrance to the ward. They did not know where Ewan was. Ewan had walked out in the night, they said, and among all the things Maur felt, surprise was not strong.

[vii]

Maur says, “There’s an image I could never get out of my head.

“After my mum died. Like I told you, I think growing up there was part of me that used to feel like, Well, at least that heartbreak’s done. I can cross that off. As if, if she’d been around, it would be too much to know that one day she wouldn’t be.

“I saw a program with Ewan once. You must think all we did was watch TV together. Honestly we hardly even did that. I don’t know what it was called, I only remember the beginning. He was too young for it. There was a close-up of a statue of a soldier. Really weird music. A man’s running through a city. He stops on a bridge over a river and there’s a little boy up on the railings, chucking stones down. About Ewan’s age when we saw it. The guy says something to him and the kid smiles.”

Maur looks away.

“I do wonder sometimes,” she says. “When I think about the hospital. He decided to leave, that was his decision. Still, I knew at least part of him didn’t want to talk to me. And when I think back on it, I wonder sometimes: yes, I was begging him to come back home. I wonder if I was also inviting him to go.”

She smokes.

“This thing,” she says. “This scene on telly. He’s talking to this kid leaning over the railings. Another man comes walking towards them. And as he comes past them, he reaches out—” She reaches out. “And he just shoves the boy off the bridge. And then he winks.”

She waits.

“The first guy doesn’t do anything. He just stands there like he’s hypnotised. And the man who killed the kid’s just walking on. The other guy follows him. But more like he’s a disciple than he’s trying to hunt him. I can’t find anyone else who saw it. I swear it was real. It feels like a dream but it was on TV.”

[viii]

Her fortieth, underground in a Soho bar, spinning club lights too young for her, just what Maur wanted. Sonya organised it and paid for it with Shaun.

Woohoo, Maur said in a flat voice. Life begins. She blew a streamer to unroll it sluggishly. A joke because it was a good night and she was drunk and loving her new red dress and felt, admit it, better in her skin than she had for a while. And because of how she had worked, for how long, on the way to this, after so long, to bridge something, and because that shy and urgent effort had not been worthless.

Maur danced and kissed amid congratulations and felt the bodily twinges no half-hour sessions in a pool could banish, ageing an accretion of small injuries, not at all what she’d been told. She danced to the heartbeat thump of new music she did not know interspersed with songs from her youth.

Robert had been politely blank as ever. I ain’t spoken to Ewan a long time, he’d said.

She’d said, Robert, do you understand how hard I had to work to find your number? She had followed a chain of old school connections. I’m asking you please to tell me anything.

Mrs. Towns, if I had anything to tell you I would, I don’t know where he is.

Well if he does call tell him I love him and to call me and that I just want to know he’s alright.

She had taken time off. Raj and Sandrine were kind.

Oh Maur, Rho had said.

I could get on my knees and beg him to come back, Maur had said. And sometimes I could strangle him. And sometimes I just want to think about anything else.

Oh Maur.

I’m sorry to hear all this, Maur’s father said. What did you, what happened? I mean, he’s a capable lad, I’m sure it’ll…Well, families bicker, don’t they?

The year had turned. The police would not help, Ewan counted as a grown-up.

With days, weeks, after everything else had come disbelief, and at last a faint fugitive respect for her son, that he did not break his silence. For the fact that he chose this, that he chose something. A sort of envy even, at such agency.

Here were Annie and Sal, here was Ruby, lovely boisterous women now, moving across the dance floor. Ah here was Shaun again; Maur touched his glass with hers. Rho had come over, stood with G & T by the wall in shouted conversation with Des, bless him for being here, not his thing but. Someone muttered to her that someone had brought coke. Ridiculous. A friend of a friend. Maur found them. For the first time in a decade she snorted, just enough.

If you’ve never been a young single mum keep your judgements to yourself.

There had come war, a column of burnt-out dead in the desert. From Ewan, no word. Maur had told Shaun to leave. Hard sunlight through the office window. Raj had gone on about BCCI and had thanked her for working so hard, not saying under the circumstances. There Maur had been. Plans for paralegal training drifting. How could this have happened? Whose kids just disappear never to speak to them?

More, Sonya had said, than you’d think. And listen. That’s not going to happen, babe. That’s not what this is. Give him time.

Slow as dew, there had settled on Maur something approaching, not acceptance, but, what? Compliance? Ewan was a son among others who chose silence. She was a mother who had to a degree done whatever had been done. And it had seemed that all that was left to her was to be patient.

Whoops and wolf whistles from Maur’s oldest friends, those who’d been apprised of everything that had gone on to get us here, and of what would happen tonight, who would come, and so were primed not to show shock.

Maur turned.

Des had called.

I’ve heard from him.

He had played her a message.

It’s me, Des, hi. I hope you’re doing alright, mate, it’s me, just wanted you to know I’m okay. Bit of this, bit of that. You can, would you tell Mum I’m good if you want? In case she was worrying and that, it’s all fine. Alright, mate, you take care, see you in a bit.

I told you, Shaun had said. I mean thank fuck he’s had the grace to call you, but Jesus wept.

Ewan had left another such the following month, irregularly thereafter. Maybe he puts the phone down if I pick up, maybe he’s psychic and he knows when I’m out, Des had said.

Relief at every muttered recording. New resentment, too, that Maur had done her best to quiet. Her life had not only been this. There had been days of other foci. But she had envisioned her son at distressing illicit work. Yeah, he sounds okay though, Des had said. Doesn’t he?

Tyneside riots. The R v R case and Maur’s not-so-numbed shock, Sonya saying, We were right never to get married. Shaun had come back, it was okay, really, I just had to tell him to get over himself, Maur had told Sonya.

At the right time of the year she had asked of Des a favour. He’d laughed and the next day said to her, Give it a try. She’d dialled his number and he’d let it go to his answerphone. Hi, this is Des, please leave a message, and if that’s Ewan, happy birthday from your mum and from me too.

Did he call? she had said, two days later. Did he hear it?

If he did he didn’t leave a message. I’m sorry.

She had become head of office. To Sonya she’d said, Two decades déclassé and I think I’ve made it back to the lower rungs of the lower middle. Sonya said that speaking for the lower-upper working they were sorry to see her go. The Soviet Union ended. Nineteen ninety-two. Maur had received a postcard. Happy New Year, Mum. Postmarked Edinburgh.

Fucking Scotland? she’d said.

Och aye, Sonya had said, and hugged her.

He’s probably in Peckham, Maur had said. Got a mate to post it.

Every little while thereafter a new card—All good with me hope all good with you; Having a lovely time ha ha; Hope you’re not worried getting my head together. Then in the summer: Des has a message for you.

Maur turned in the club, because everyone was cheering.

I talked to him, Des had said. He called when I was actually in.

She had reached across the table and grabbed his hands.

Oh my God, how was it? What did he say?

You know Yew, he’s never exactly voluble, some things don’t change. But honestly, he was more talkative than I remember. He sounds good.

Where is he?

I said he had to talk to you and I think he really wants to. But he asked me to tell you something.

He wants you to tell me something?

Come on. Families, you know? It’s easier with help sometimes. Anyway, he, well.

What?

You’ll never…Des had smiled. Ewan’s joined the army.

Here came her son. Shouldering through the bustle in the club. Through disco lights and bass. Scowling at her friends’ attention but she could see pleasure on him. She would say pride. Maur’s heart pushed out at the sight of him as it had when he was a boy.

As it had when, not so long back, she’d gone to Glasgow to meet him after his silence. At last. He a man in jeans and hoodie by the glass and iron palace of the botanical gardens. Maur had heard her own wordless call at first sight of him for what, a year and a half; she had run, sobbing before she reached him, and Ewan had let her embrace him and held on back, even, while she shook, until shyness overtook him.

Alright Mum?

Now, under a speaker, at her party, Ewan saw her again. Smiled as his mother came towards him. He let her hold him again. Look at him.

Hair very short. This tough young man. Long tender awkward day. Café food. Walking in a city she did not know. Tentative stories.

You’re in charge of the office? Cool.

What is it you do all day, Ew?

This and that.

Oh come on! I deserve a smidge more.

He’d nodded. I will, I will, he’d said. Just, you know. Had held up his hands to say, No rush.

Not in uniform? Maur shouted into his ear above the music. You know all the girls love it.

He still had that shyness about him but he smiled.

Can you tell me why? she had said.

I was all over the place. Turns out this really works for me.

Yes.

He had travelled the country, he had said (I’d been nowhere, I was rubbish). He had delivered stuff (she had said, I won’t ask what, he had said, Don’t). Building sites, day-labouring, a bit of bouncing (he had shifted briefly into boxing guard). He had described the landscape beyond the cities with a pleasure at which she marvelled.

Is there a girl? she’d said. Or a boy? I mean, sorry. Ewan had said nothing and had not looked angry. Swinging on ropes and assault courses? she’d said.

Stuff like that yeah.

And guns! She’d raised an imaginary rifle.

Yeah.

Tell me! I don’t know, your room, your friends. Everything. She’d laughed to show him that he needn’t tell her anything if he didn’t want to. These were like points of light, these interactions.

Had it been paradox or its opposite that now, with this new work, she had discerned in him a waning of the violence within of which she had been fearful, she could now admit? You could not take on the blame for everything, for all they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

I know you’ve been worried, he’d said. How’s Rho and Grandad? How’s Sonya?

He had joined the reserve forces. Maur had gasped with empathy that her son had worked to not quite make an irrevocable decision, had combined the effort of training with keeping potential open.

My son the soldier, she had said. And me a hippie really.

Sonya had said, Well, I’m a Red but that’ll hardly stop me loving the little bugger.

Me too, me too, Maur had said.

Des had got the details wrong. Before her visit, on their first call after the silence, Ewan had told her, It’s not the fucking army. I’m in a flight.

She had not heard of the RAF Regiment. Ewan had sent her a photograph. Himself in camouflage with a look of serene and utter confidence, gripping a rifle.

It had astounded her. Aircraftman, Gunner Towns. He had called himself a Rock Ape and Maur had pictured him gripping harsh landscape between his toes. The images within her, of his manoeuvres, had been fleeting and televisual.

An officer at the RAF careers place near Kings Cross had given her a pamphlet. Hardened young men in winged flashes performing soldier tasks.

Why not just the army? she had said.

This is infantry work but specialist, he’d said. Airfield defence. Control parties, search and rescue. You should be very proud.

Air force infantry? But then, marines were soldiers of the navy and Maur had heard of them. So she’d read up on the RAF Regiment and then the Army Air Corps and the Fleet Air Arm. She’d puzzled at the riddle of such groups, the pride in such counterintuitive exactitude, deep expertise in a province associated with another service.

What acronyms she learnt. TACPs, NBC, CSAR. Skills deployed with unique focus, protective range, human tools of hardware. Squaddies mocked the Rock Apes, she’d come to understand, as toy-town. Of course her son would choose such underdog specificity.

And what else are you doing? she’d said to him, in Glasgow. Because this is part-time, yes? Reserves?

Bit of this, he’d said. Bit of that.

Maur had looked in estate-agent windows. Shaun went to Welling for the march against the BNP and came back shaken saying he was too old. Maur had wished she’d seen Ewan’s passing-out ceremony. She had sent him money for his birthday and had had a good cry. She felt afraid for him in this role, and, still, surprising her, an anger she wouldn’t give a voice.

—

Ewan had come to London. It had been close to three years since he and Shaun had last seen each other. They’d been courteous. (Afterwards Shaun said, Christ, he looks fucking fantastic. Doesn’t he? Maur had said. She’d done a muscle-man pose.) With Shaun gone Maur and her son had smoked together, at the kitchen table again. The gold in his ear kept catching her attention.

You do a lot of stuff with people in the other branches, Ewan had said. I’m working with a bunch of them. To be honest you meet a right bunch of oddballs. Her adult son ruminating on his for-fuck’s-sake military career. He’d spoken without the hesitation familiar to her but with what sounded like carefulness of a new and occult kind. Would anyone else have discerned it?

You end up doing a weird mix, he’d said. There’s a bloke I know. He’s army, loves giving it this. He had moved his hand in a talking-mouth way. They’ve had me training with him. He’d looked at her, shyly. I shouldn’t say too much. Listen to you! she’d said. He’d smiled, the sun shining behind him. Just the way he talks, he had said, people like him, I don’t always know how seriously to take them. He’s been around forever and he knows his onions. It is proper amazing, some of the stuff, some of what we’re doing.

It seemed to Maur he wanted to be an old soldier.

The music was anthemic then and Maur held Ewan’s hands and made him dance, and for a moment all she could do was laugh like a child herself because he did, on her birthday, he did, playing up his own discomfort, raising an eyebrow and his shoulders, padding. Ewan danced with her.

[ix]

Maur says, “Ardizzone is on the list. Of the pantheon. Back when I was still hoping to draw, I literally made a list. And he was on it but some of his stuff made me uneasy. I don’t mean the subject matter exactly, it’s not as if I object to war art, but with Ardizzone there’s nothing different between his war pictures and the children’s-book stuff. Cities fucked, starving animals, death, ruins. There’s one of gravediggers beside the graves they’ve just dug and one of them’s holding a mug looking right at us as if we’re a camera. And it’s the same light-touch ink lines and watercolour wash like in Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain but of a corpse in its hole. And the dead man’s hand’s up like he’s trying to stave something off. There’s one after an attack. Body parts all across the road. Dead men piled up. You know what he said? It was ‘not too pleasant a battle.’ And it looks like a children’s story.

“It’s not that I think he’s soft-pedalling,” Maur says. “Maybe what’s worse is he isn’t. It is a children’s book. A game. Not too pleasant.”

[x]

So yes, in the end of it in her life again, Ewan came to her fortieth. At which Maur sniffled and said to him, I know I could be awful, I do, I’m sorry for—

He interrupted her with a hug, did not meet her gaze.

—

Now Maur took in news that once would not have registered. Ops Deny Flight and Deliberate Force. The merging of the WRAF into the RAF. Withdrawal of the free-fall nuke. Dramas, too, backroom jostlings. Sometimes, all such game-theoretical megatonnage death and the selling-off of MOD housing notwithstanding, for brief days Maur could believe they were not all on the rim of the abyss, that she and Ewan at least were finding a new way to be. The decade accelerated.

We’ll deploy, Ewan told her. To the Balkans.

She plunged within herself. What? she said. What? But you’re, you’re auxiliary, right?

I was, yeah, but I’ve been getting a bit sick of all the inside-outside shit, he said. He told her he had spoken to his officers and it was a bit of a palaver but you could join all-in. She could not believe any of this. That he had done this, decided this.

Don’t fuss, Mum, he said.

He would be in 1 Squadron. Down the line she mouthed, No. Good news is, Ewan was saying, I’ll be in Suffolk when I’m back. Closer.

Standing by the telephone, hand on the wall, Maur strained to breathe.

Can he even do that?

What do I know about the army? Sonya said.

RA fucking F.

Jesus Christ, alright. Sorry. I mean I guess he can. Hey. Hey, babe.

Maur was daunted at her duty to understand this massive intricate violence. Fear exhausted her. Perhaps it might be good? For him? her father said. She bought The Economist. Sat before the television, she sought and did not want to see sleek presentations, wobbling handheld footage, helmeted journalists shouting to camera below the songs of bullets.

I can’t fucking watch, Sonya.

Airfield defence. Soldiering for the airborne. Ewan’s terse blueys arrived. A long time since she had seen his handwriting.

All fine don’t worry. Working with various people oops better not say. Call me a helicopter-sitter eh?

Marianne escaped the stones to await a helicopter she had invoked. By the end of Marianne Dreams it had not come. That was not resolved in the sequel for which Maur’s child-self had begged, in which there was no dreaming, the boy changed from needer to potential giver of care. But what was Maur even thinking about? What did her son find in what he did?

It’s not what you’d think out here, he wrote. These people are nutters all trying to kill each other. She believed she felt him yearning to say more. She wrote letters back, peppering blather with jokes. On the news Serb men, Croat men, Muslim men, raised their rifles. Doubtless there were women but she was not shown them. What other footage was kept from her? How did soldiers behave? Her son, his comrades? It must have happened that some mother, some father or mother, had witnessed filmed combat never knowing what they saw was the end of their own child or of another’s at their child’s hand.

She did not remember dreams but woke sour. Keep him safe, she asked whatever listened. Keep them all safe. Let no bullets hit him. Let his bullets miss too. Jesus, is he firing?

I’ve seen stuff, Ewan wrote after too long. Maur’s eyes widened even to see those three words evade the censor and her son’s uncertainty. Mostly sitting around still, he wrote, fetching carrying we are glorified gophers really. Working with lads from other branches again when we go out it’s on the hunt for stuff. Hard to explain. Don’t worry it’s always after the fighting like I say it’s stuff we are after you would be surprised what people leave behind, there’s so much rubbish. I just sniff out junk and carry it around.

As if he could tell her what he really did. She’d never prayed.

She went with Sandrine and Raj and Sonya and Shaun to the Willesden library, to a meeting on The Truth About the Serbian War. People stood to speak. Said the press simplified and lied, that the Ustashe no more than the Chetniks deserved their designated role in this melodrama, that Britain, one woman said, pointing into the sky, was hardly motivated by virtue. Was that supposed to be a fucking insight?

Maur stood, mid-meeting, and picked her way out of the line of chairs, Sonya coming after her. At the stall by the door Maur pointed at a book’s misprinted spine. Yugoslavia Dismebered. You’ve left the M out, she said. Good luck with the revolution.

Yeah, well it’s a really important book actually, the man said to her back.

They just pissed me off, those people, Maur said to Rho down the whispering line. He’s my son. Doing god knows what.

I’m sure he’ll be okay.

Rho, I’m sorry, but why would you say that? You don’t know if he’ll be okay or what he’ll do.

—

Late, with rain fretful against the windows, Maur’s bell sounded. Her son was at the threshold.

He was a little back, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, and standing askance as if it would not take much to turn away. But he held her too when she cried out and grabbed him.

Oh my god, she said. Oh my god! Oh you little bastard, are you trying to give me a heart attack? When did you get back? Why didn’t you tell me?

He went into every part of the flat. He stood in the centre of what had been his bedroom, hands raised as if he would touch the walls. He turned in a circle. He surprised Maur by walking past her then to the bathroom, thence to her bedroom—she did not complain when he opened the door and stood by the unmade bed—and the living room, in each place turning again to see it all while she watched. He did it in the kitchen too. Only then did a cautious and cryptic satisfaction take him and he relaxed enough to sit.

Their smoke drew shapes in the kitchen air. She defined the silence as companionable, a comfort. Action, they called it: this was her son after action. Was he breathing more shallowly than sounded healthy? She gave him tea. Saw he was on the edge of speech.

What he said at last was, Are you okay, Mum?

A laugh took her and became a sob. Am I okay? she said.

He put his palm flat down upon the table near hers. He said, Seriously, is everything okay?

Well, she said, it is now. She wondered if he had known she was alone. It had been days since she had spoken to Shaun. Where are your keys? she said. Why didn’t you just—? He shrugged.

It seemed impossible that she had been part of making this young man with his body filling his shirt, his gaze at nothing in particular, his dangerous expertise, the flits of his attention. She would have said she discerned—she realised—grief in his distraction. That she saw him try to focus, to smile when she told a joke, as if she teased him or as if they shared a catchphrase. Oh she was wretched for him. To revisit that time now is like turning over cards one by one and laying them upon a tabletop.

He said, You know what people always ask? Beyond him the lights of the city were going out. No one likes that question. Sure sign of a Mitty’s someone who wants to tell you yes. Honestly most of the time you don’t know. You shoot into the dark.

It astounded her that these were his experiences.

Or at the horizon, he said. You never know what you’ve hit. If anything.

Maur thought, You do not know what walks with you. She was trembling again and she considered saying something like Just hunting for junk, eh?, as if for laughs, and did not.

(How do I talk to him? she would say to Sonya. He’s even quieter. I don’t know what he’s done. That’s the point.)

She said to Ewan, Are you back for good?

I’ll probably end up doing more with the army, he said. Here. Most of the time out there you’re just kicking your heels doing fuck-all. Magazines. Playing football or whatever. Keepie-uppies.

Are you any good?

He smiled. No you know I never was.

She did not know that. She imagined him kicking a dark leather ball, it escaping him, bouncing for miles down a foreign mountainside.

Magazines? she said. She kept scepticism from her voice. What are you reading?

He smiled again and hesitated. That guy I work with finds these weird Serbian mags. Treće Oko. He said the words laboriously and watched her thoughtfully, pointed to the middle of his forehead. About all kinds of mad shit, he said.

You read Serbian?

Course not. The pictures are a laugh. Were you ever into that stuff?

Third eye? I had my moments, I’m that generation.

He seemed about to speak but did not.

You know your grandad was in the army? she said after a time.

Yeah course.

I don’t know much about it. He doesn’t talk about it.

As if he talks about anything, Ewan said.

Her laugh was real. Pot, kettle, she said, and flinched, but he smiled too.

Well, he said. Anyway. So nothing bad going on, you doing okay, Mum? The concern in it struck her.

Me? she said. Why wouldn’t I be?

Everything alright then? He looked about the room as if he might find counterevidence. If you ever feel like something’s…He did not reach whatever words he sought.

What are you doing in London? Other than seeing your old mum.

Bits and bobs. Might look up Robert.

Oh, how is he? He shrugged.

He didn’t look happy. She would have done anything.

Quickly she said, Are you alright?

He smiled at her; she could not see him at the bottom of his eyes.

There’s always papers to file, he said. Floors to sweep. Balls to kick around. He looked away again. Remember spook and slither?

Maur blinked. Blimey, she said.

I think he’s in Europe now, he said, slowly again. That bloke. I was thinking I might go see his show.

Maur properly gaped at that.

Why? she said. Are you serious? He can’t still be at it. Why go? I don’t remember him being much cop, was he? Again she remembered her son not laughing so much as fascinated.

Just curious, he said. The guys I work with…You’d be surprised what comes up in conversation, what you get reminded of. I’m not the only one who likes what I liked. He smiles to show her it’s not a rebuke. I’d say you’d be surprised but it wasn’t even. A surprise. What turns out to be part of what.

I don’t understand.

Again he looked as if there was more to come. He whistled, a slow four-note refrain, a sequence of two, once quickly once slow. Everything’s always hush-hush, he said.

Quickly Maur said, You’re never sweeping floors.

Is that an order?

As if I could order you around, she said. I mean I don’t believe you. He cough-laughed into his cigarette and did the whistle again.

Will you tell me what’s up? she said.

He kept his eyes on the table and said, Just, you know. Oh say it, whatever it is, she thought. Yew said, There’s a lot going on. I know you want to ask what I’m doing but I can’t tell you.

So exciting! she said.

Honestly, he said, like I told you all we do is just look for stuff. All I do anyway.

What sort of stuff? she said.

Special stuff.

Oh, I’m sure.

What you’re really after is where it all comes from, he said. Stuff, I mean. This he said in a rush. You’d think it was people you were after but…He shrugged. Sometimes stuff comes first. Things like jewels. Heard anything about any jewels? Have you?

He didn’t look at her and she waited as if his question would eventually make sense.

I don’t understand, she said when she had to. Her heart sped. I’ve been worried, she said. Obviously. I am worried. What do you mean? He watched her. I’ve been worried sick, she said, but I’m okay.

Okay, sorry, he said. Please be careful, he said. Keep your eyes open. Look after yourself.

What are you talking about? she said. You know that’s my line?

I will, he said. But you too, yeah?

He would not stay, though she pleaded with him as long as she dared, and he would not answer her when she asked where he was going. I’ll see you soon, he said, and she said, Will you? Promise?

From the doorway she watched him turn into the dark beyond that old house.

This is Maur’s story it is not her life. It is one of her stories. Most of her life, its truths and lies and details, of work, of trips away, legal conferences, bars, thoughtfulness, friends, clothes, food liked and not liked, of bickering and impatience, of bad sex and good, of yearning, of masturbation and reading and picking up pens and wishing she still drew or that she could draw or to draw again, and seeing films sometimes at the cinema, and art, and of any of the other stories in this life and of going away and coming back, of what she sometimes found in Shaun and he in her and more than once in others too, and of what he or they raised in her and which she did not know why she chose to bear, of wondering what possibilities to end by granting life to which others, of not doing so and making choices thereby, of attempts to plan out this life, of hers, to decide, and, too, yes, of her son and her love and her worries for him, will not be discussed. No matter what she wishes, no matter how it was.

There’s something new to him, she said.

Sonya said, How could there not be?

No, more than that though, I think he’s in trouble.

You’ve always thought he was in trouble, Maur.

Yeah, he fucking was.

He’s going again, Rho, she said.

I don’t believe it, Rho said. You said he was in good form.

Had she? When?

The man from the Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Society was brusquely compassionate. There’s not much we can do for your lad unless he comes to us.

What am I supposed to do in the meantime?

Just what you have been. Be his mum.

He’s not angry, not this time, Maur told Sonya. But he’s…I know, I know, Yew’s never been talkative. But it’s like he’s down the far end of a telescope.

Nineteen ninety-five. He called her. Said to her, Maybe I’m done with it. It’s everyday stuff that gets you sometimes. After everything.

Everything? She did not say it. What have you done and seen?

I mean, he said, picking cereal and bin bags. After all that. I might go travelling.

Where? she said. That sounds like a good idea. When he phoned her she always made sure to keep her voice from breaking. You could go see that show after all.

Maybe, he said. Are you okay, Mum? he said again. Is everything alright with you?

She came home to silent messages on her answerphone. She made tea and waited and when the phone went again and she picked it up, again what came down the line was nothing. Maur called the number her son had given her but did not get through.

—

And later, as if it could have been no other way, as if you travelled a curve, as if Of course, when the doorbell rang, some days after those empty messages, a policeman at her door, face set, so young, just as they say you come to find them, with him a man only a little older, his face blank. Maur did not recognise his blue-grey uniform until she saw wings upon his shoulder. Oh then you must have known. The memory of those soundless messages came to her. Then

she was in the living room with such unwelcome guests and the military man said what he said.

He said it again and there it was.

Deep in the walls a trembling as if an engine started. And Maur was sat down staring out at the sky and the whispering leaves and her limbs were weak. She wished, what did she wish? When had she sat? What had been said?

Her hand shook and there was dark at the edges of everything. She said, No, or something, no, she must have said, that’s wrong. No, he hasn’t been in Bosnia for ages, you’ve got it wrong.

The policeman holding his helmet and the other with his cap beneath his arm, the policeman was very sorry, there was no mistake, and Ewan Towns, Maur, you know.

—

Maur you remember.

She was looking out across the canopies. So he was gone, he was gone then. Maur saw her hand shake. Heard the sound she made. She could not breathe. Because. She heard herself, that little sound she made did not ebb, what shook foundations?, she might be sick, outside the trees gave their counsel, she could not hear it but she knew what they said, it was not that dumb and urgent yearning. Maur made her sound in the company of these strangers, in the deadness of her dead.

[xi]

“That’s it,” she says.

“That’s it, that’s the end, that’s everything, that’s it. That’s the whole story start to finish.”

Maur stands.

There was a person and she had a baby and she grew up and the baby grew up and he died. It is not the end of her nor of her stories. But this is the last page of a story of, from, a life. A story of life.

Maur says, “This is the end.”

Now everything is codas.

The End

Epilogue

One of the things that death teaches you is that you are not an individual.

Lisa Appignanesi

I

Messageways

Prodrome

How long amid boles and their percussion, contours giving gently as if to lower a man to the earth? Rot and root exuberance. The cacophony is a cousin to silence. It is half a century since this man walked alone. Let others leave him behind.

“Obscured by cloud.” Those charts were right. Rivers rise, wend not seaward but into seasonless zones of unknowing. The path is born behind him. Trees will be bled. The darkness from the canopy is luminous enough. Vegetal serpents observe their pool-selves. The traveller sways like the trees. He lays out what he carries. He eats a pellet of salt. He does not make fire. Death is in his wake. Three from his lines sprawl for the haruspex. A chitin halo makes a head-shot comrade ragged saint in negative. These men are watched by that awesome prior for which obscurity is code, master key and plan. In such plan, kill and counterkill.

The traveller hears cordite and knows what terrible attention has been upon those he let leave him. He takes off his wet shirt. The vines drop their shadows, he doesn’t shelter in this twilight tohu bohu, life mimicking industries it doesn’t know, drills, bells, and regimental bugles, calls to wake you, frenzy, liturgy.

He finds hantu logic. Bestows upon the bedlam human, fiery, amber forms, celebrates its ears and hair, faces feathers and parts. Around it a crown. It’s a long time since he had to close his eyes to dream.

Rapt as a pupil, he goes east. The thorny growth seems closed but no webs drape his eyes, so this is a path.

Those who broke that silk before him turn and find him now. Men, all but clothesless, come into his sight.

They give him small dry fish to eat. They laugh. There’s no speech to be had with them but in his own tongue he says how he admires them. He touches his chest and says, —O’Leary, and they laugh again, he laughs.

Watched, and even in the light of the sun, the traveller sleeps at last, a good sleep.

The others regard him. His weapon is doglike at his feet. In his left lobe he wears a gold ring. He hears low language in his rest. Dispute, the debating, of him. He means to be pilgrim but he is a test those he’s come to find cannot pass. So they decide.

His gun will travel south. The pieces in his pack disperse. Someone will come to hang, like a dangling gourd, in his name. The man unmoves at the confluence of rivers. He alters with the undergrowth. The water works on him and he recedes. He keeps sightless watch with changing eyes. Infinitely patient. Without vain rhapsodies. Become forest. He clamours noiseless to be found.

[1]

Maur fell.

When was this? She was wet and loud. Grief tethered her, tore her out of time as nothing had since her son’s birth.

Who did this who did this who Ewan? Ewan, Ewan you, who, Ewan, Yew, tell me, look at me.

Behind the RAF doctor at Halton. A door into a windowless room. The big man stepped aside. Maur felt not as if she held her breath but as if she had never breathed. A boxlike cube machine burring in a corner no wires visible. The room had darkness at its edges. Watercolour of a calm sea and a little chair to sit on. Under that sheet that could be anyone.

Someone else had to, Maur could not pull it back.

There, his expression beyond the winding cloth. The face she knew. Under gauze, the wound a cold hole. Around his closed eyes bruises.

—

Trapped in her body by the new emptiness of his. Yes it should have been her there. It seemed as if it were, as if she were after her own enshrouding. She touched what was left, felt the absolute zero underlying all, of which her son’s skin had become the skin.

Terrible accident, the visitors had said. Maur’s legs might give, she might double up, might piss with grief. They’d said he was found this way at Shackingham army barracks an investigation was ongoing they were so sorry was there anyone they could call? Ewan was found in the woods of the base an accident they couldn’t say more.

What? What?

She sat on the floor in the hotel room numb as a mannequin. Whispered sounds as if her mouth had a secret for her boy that she must not know. You can be in and out of yourself at once. Maur begged the void. Nothing is still like the dead are still. She’d seen no other. He was no longer her son only, she must share him with death. She screamed into a pillow until she retched. She pulled the covers over her and went back in time in the close cloth dark.

We’re getting to the bottom of everything and I assure you we will leave no stone unturned. Some air force interlocutor. He said, And how would you say Ewan’s spirits were?

His spirits?

Scuff marks on the bricks of Maur’s house where a ball had hit. Sometimes her weeping was of a child for her own mum, then back again to as it should be.

After a long time she came to believe what she knew, which was that this would never unhappen. So she did the bargaining. Just for a moment. I understand he won’t come back but I just need everything to stop just for a second. I’m not asking for him to be here again I understand that’s not allowed but I just need a minute. I know I can’t see him again I’m not asking to see him, I know I don’t get to hold him or know where he is or what he’s doing, I know I can’t talk to him not even on the phone, I understand that, I won’t even try, I promise, I’ll just sit right here alone, I’ll keep my eyes closed, I’ll hold my breath for as long as I can. What I need is I just need a moment when this isn’t all there is. That’s all I’m asking. To have anything else, or nothing, in my head. All I’m asking is just let me have one single minute ever again when he isn’t dead.

Sonya said she’d track down his Glasgow mates. Des or Sonn or Shaun helped with the bureaucracy. They held Maur and gave her food and books about loss. C. S. Lewis said grief felt like fear. As if books ever helped anything. She’d read plenty and look. As if they staved this off. She should feel this guilt.

Maur’s father came. There was a whole new pain in him and he was kinder than he had ever been but still she felt reproached.

How were his spirits? They said there’d been an accident and I was thinking about Dad’s friend, but now you know what they’re asking me, you know what that means. But it wasn’t, he can’t.

Sonya said, Hush.

He was different when he came back, how could he not be, but.

Shhhh.

I haven’t dreamt of him yet.

—

Get on with this. Maur woke her heart already galloping and already itemising everything she had to do on any particular day, and the list read, Remember that he’s dead, Remember that he’s dead, all the way down.

—

Guy. Was it really the first time in years he’d come into her mind? He must have been there underneath like everything is, that was how the world worked, no? She knew it wasn’t just, her anger with him, he who was also sonless now and didn’t even know. Or had some blood logic woken him to loss he couldn’t understand? She wouldn’t seek him out. Maur couldn’t say to whom that would be cruel.

The coroner—I’m mindful of how difficult this must be, he said—released the body. The air was wet and cold. The sun came brighter than she had ever seen.

Two shots. The second bullet was lost. That’s how they work, those weapons, they told her. On automatic. I know it sounds strange that there’d be two but that’s how they work.

Like animals, Maur’s thoughts scurried. A single bullet forcing through, bone’s pulverising dispersal, the slop and runoff of everything her son had ever thought or felt. When he had been a baby she’d thought, What if he is not very clever what if he is not very nice what if he is not like me what if it is hard to love him?

Shackingham’s an army base, Maur said. I don’t even know what he was doing there. They said he was on some course. I’m in fight-or-flight mode. Every morning there he is, gone. Fight and flight, it came to her, were the substrates of her son’s regiment, what they called his service. To Maur grief felt like rage.

At the crematorium she held no one’s hand. Rho and Pip and Michael and Maur’s father in his black tie were there. Sonya was there. As many faces Maur did not know as those she did. Ruby hugged her hard. Saoirse Dooley, bless her. Friends of Ewan’s youth. Des had done wonders. My god, Robert. A wracked round young face. He would not meet her eye and could not speak, she loved him for coming up to her anyway. Young men and women grouped together, a military contingent at whom she would not look. Thank you for coming, she practiced in her head. The officiant was a humanist who simpered or maybe that was unfair and anyone would have made Maur feel curdled. Sonya read out what she and Maur had written. Yew’d been in a war zone maybe a soldier should have spoken but who were these people? How absurd: his funeral?

Faint notes somewhere. As if from a horn. She had not asked for anything like that. Oh let whoever it was have their stupid fucking farewell. That drawn-out call at which Maur alone turned her head.

She was drunk at the wake and if any soldiers spoke to her she did not remember afterwards. Sometimes the thought of the cremation made her legs go. She was afraid to sleep. What if she dreamt herself lying in her bed, turning her head with the dragged-out calm of the dreamer to see Ewan standing beside her, watching, mouthing words, asking could she not see he was burning?

It’s usually a lot longer till an inquest, Shaun said. Someone’s expediting this. Amid suits and army and RAF uniforms Maur tried to follow the coroner’s monologue. Ewan was seconded? Was at Shackingham to talk about the UNPROFOR experience? He had visited the base before. War games about dismembered Yugoslavia. He was found in the woods. Discipline was not good. It might have been one of many things that got him there. An illicit liaison? We are not here to speculate.

Well, Maur thought, he did love trees. In her mind he was climbing.

How had he got the SA80? Inadequate protections, easier there than at Lossiemouth or Honington, beyond our remit, questions will be asked. The weapon a way away as if thrown at the moment of the shot.

Where was the sense in this? Officers’ testimonial, Ewan’s gradual withdrawal after his deployment. They saw it too. That came to her with a tug as if of black water. Kept to himself, was a good gunner, since Bosnia had his demons, more than one comrade said, shifts in mood, drinking, belligerent, needed solitude. Don’t we all? Who the fuck were these people?

A young man, someone said of her son, who sometimes had a grimness and an anger about him.

Yew? Yew look at me. The grip on the weapon would be awkward but, the coroner said, not impossible. He said, There are lacunae I cannot fill. The conclusions of police and army investigations in collaboration with the RAF that these injuries are consistent with a self-inflicted injury at close range are acknowledged.

An open verdict. As if anything was open. The coroner said, I note descriptions of a fine young man sometimes bedevilled by dark thoughts.

Maur might pull a fork or toothpick along her skin again. Late at night someone phoned her and would not speak. She held her breath, heard a man crying down the line before the connection broke.

Ewan, she thought, I am having a hard time with this.

Do you know those you know? Can you be both right and wrong about them?

Shaun said he was worried about her drinking. She said she agreed, she was not drinking enough. She called the Welfare Society again. Whoever she spoke to listened to her faltering words.

I’m so sorry, he said.

The names he gave her she imagined were from a list ready by his phone. She went to Waterstones and asked for Judith Herman, and the assistant looked her up and read out titles and the first, about fathers and daughters, made Maur start, but the second was Trauma and Recovery and the second noun made her close her eyes but she ordered it.

None of us knew, Sonya said.

The scale of Ewan’s unseen country.

Sonn, you can’t, Maur said. You can’t be saying that.

I’m just saying I didn’t know how blue he was.

There’s no way, Maur said, none, he didn’t, but whatever it was I can’t bear it. What am I, Sonn? I kicked him out.

No you didn’t. You loved him and he loved you. You’d sorted it all out, hadn’t you? The two of you were doing good. Weren’t you?

—

Maur went past the old dark house. The front yard was cleared and clean of weeds and the building still empty. Walk too slowly in Maur’s path now, take up too much pavement or stairway or shop aisle, speak to her with any but the most careful tone, wow though, then rage took her. It’s good I don’t really drive, she said. I scare myself. I’d kill someone. I swear I would be happy to fucking kill someone. If I was religious I’d be happy to kill God.

I get it, babe.

Ewan…Yew, I would be, I’ll be so angry if you— Oh honey I’m so sorry forgive me I am so angry where are you?

—

Shaun said, Maur, come on. That’s enough.

Where’s my pen? she said. Where are my keys?

Maur, what did you do to yourself? Sonya said. Let me see.

Please fuck off. I can’t find my lighter, I can’t find anything.

Turning those bowls and tins of bitten pencils and bottle openers and buttons onto the table, sifting through kipple, never finding what she’d lost. Room by room, on her knees, hot suds. Felt slick, put her in mind of grease she might exude. She did not want Ewan’s ashes in the house. I don’t remember Mum being this heavy, she said.

She and Sonya went to the heath. They stayed after dark. They were wrapped up in their coats, hearing traffic but deep among the undergrowth.

I don’t know where God’s Tree is, Maur said.

They felt so like teenagers they laughed on their way between copses. Sonya would say, Here?, and Maur would say, No, not here. Here? Not here. Then, I don’t know, oh, here. Here.

Maur reached up. Into the head-height hollow she found in the tree she’d picked, that she decreed was part of her son’s arboreal circuit, she emptied him. She watched the pale stream from the urn and felt with awe the diminution of mass.

Sometimes the motions through which she went could be decent enough imitations of life. As if, as her father said, she was getting on with things. Once she lurched up clammy in the cold small hours, absolutely certain that someone had hammered at her door. She opened it and there on her front step was nothing and no one.

There’s an old song, “Hello Central! Give Me No Man’s Land.” Apparently a lot of people dream they’re on the phone with them.

But no dreams for you?

The grief counsellor was a severe white-haired woman ten years older than Maur. (Grief counsellor, Maur said to Sonya. Like she gives advice to grief. All she does is nod. I can nod for myself. Oh don’t look at me like that.)

Not of him, Maur said. I wish. I went to the base. I don’t know what I expected.

Low blocks, wide roads, guards with weapons. Past young soldiers in their uniforms and overalls glancing at her and her courteous officer guide. She wondered if any thought, She’s the mum of that guy.

She said to the counsellor, Yes I’m fucking angry. With everything. Yes of course with me. Yes with him too of course. Missing isn’t what I thought it would be. I’ll tell you a dream I did have. I was in a bar, I was talking to a woman, I don’t remember what she looked like but she sipped her drink and there was all wet all on her like she’d dribbled, and it was grey down her chin, and I knew she’d put ashes in her drink. A person’s ashes. When I was at Shackingham I would’ve talked to Ewan’s friends but I don’t know if he had any there. She thought of those soldiers at his funeral then.

—

Maur wrote to the MOD. She called the army numbers she had been given and those for the RAF. Yeah, Shaun said. Let’s find out what these bastards aren’t telling us. She said who she was down the line, that not everything was clear to her. I have some questions. A patient-sounding flight sergeant said he would call back and did not. Maur had written his name down but afterwards she could not find it and she sobbed.

—

Des said, I asked him why he didn’t try for officer. You can imagine what he said, bunch of Ruperts, posh twats, all that. He was going through the motions and I told him so. You have to stop punishing yourself, Maur.

Ah, but do I though? Maur said. Do I?

After a long enough time it slips your mind, for an instant, you don’t know why you’re anxious until you remember. To her counsellor she said, You keep saying guilt’s normal. But some of us deserve to feel guilty more than others. What’s really exhausting is the being angry.

Do you think those are different things?

Oh yeah well done clap clap I get it. What’s exhausting is suspicion. Shaun keeps saying there’s something going on we’re not being told.

Do you agree?

Oh, probably. I don’t know. How can I stay out of this business?

Alone, she might stand naked and make terrible faces in the mirror or raise her hands before her and hold poses like those of supplication in an imagined church. As if she might find the right ritual, invoke something and change it all.

The doctor said, Don’t take more than one or even a half of these every couple of nights, if you’re really struggling to get to sleep. I’m giving you fourteen and I’d like it to be a long time before I see you in here again.

Thank you, Maur said. She thought, I hope your kid dies you sanctimonious cunt.

The board of inquiry said Gunner Ewan Towns ended his own life.

No, Maur said. He did not. Maybe he did. She thought, Wasn’t his life his own? He didn’t, she said, but if he did, maybe he did and I might even be, my God, listen, I’m not fucking saying relieved for Christ’s sake but I might be fucking something, if I was sure, if it answered questions.

Too late now to do anything but solve a mystery. That would be care of a kind, that was all the motherhood still available. Sleuth it, Nancy Drew. Maur Towns, Woman Detective. Secret Seven, Famous Five. He had once said, her father, I never understood your fondness for Blyton, isn’t she too reactionary? This could not be a case for a Terrific or Terrible Two but only for a One, the Wondering One, the Waning One, the Woeful One. The Wan One and the Case of the Dead Son.

—

Cover your face, Maur, try to sleep. Maur you remember—she found The Dice Man because there was a line in it she wanted to get exactly right, here it is. “And I, with that irrational surge of fury known to every parent, suddenly shouted ‘Get OUT of here!’ ” How bad a failure must you be if your child dies? One reason anger’s so tiring is you realise it’s been there forever. If you could just be sure that he’d, let alone if you knew why, then it might be something he’d chosen. A decision.

Late-morning sun at a skew-whiff angle as if desperate to touch her, uncomfortably persistently interfering where she lay across the bed while Sonya shook her shoulder so she Maur lolled in and out of needy light. Sonya shouted bah bah bah, Maur’s head hurt, she did not feel groggy but strange. Bah bah bah, Sonya said, and Maur tried to answer and heard a goatish lowing, not like people at all. Her chin was crusted and her hair was lank and smelt. Maur

was in the bathroom vomiting again with Sonya holding her

it wasn’t a return, not like the old days of excess, the almost-comfort, rueful pride of the thumping head, even the flecks of spew, she could hear herself striving to answer Sonya, distantly hearing her own non sequiturs. She could taste wine on her sicky breath.

No no, is what she said, was saying, in her head, but, Sonya, listen, hear it?, and there’s dogs, Sonya, it must be fucking summer with all the flies, I don’t know what’s got into the dogs, they’ve got worms maybe, remember when you’d see them in your kids’ shit?

Seeking pinworms in the toilet, telling Ewan to bend over when he said his bum itched, that stoic revulsion at the little coiling lines. Making her think (God knows why) of his anxious eating and his inarticulate attempts to explain that it was how the food felt, not how it tasted, that distressed. Making her think of his nightmares, when he was very young, which he tried to tell her, of the shapes which terrified, and she had comforted him and kept to herself that the tellings frustrated and frightened her. This was explanation for what, Maur? For your own near-frenzy and the abortive (thanks v. much, Sonya) attempt to still it? Which she sort of remembered, in its reasonableness, taking the simmer-down pills and the pills to sleep because of what had been a Bremen-musician din behind the walls, a lonely dog voice somewhere and the burr of wings invoked by the telly static from a dead channel and your own gasps, and the voice of you. Yew.

There’s too much noise, Maur heard Maur say, and

she calmed because she absolutely understood | what she said | frightened her because it made no sense at all

Don’t cry, Maur said.

I will cry if I fucking want to, Sonya said.

Three tablets left. Maur wiped the pack clean. She’d taken one a night over four nights. So with the swill of white wine she’d taken seven.

Seven? Sonya said.

Well might she use that voice. What the fuck is seven? Maur thought. That’s not a —ide attempt. I just wanted to sleep for a week, she said.

That’s not funny, Sonya said. What were you talking about? What was all that gabbling?

I was just drunk. I was just stoned.

Robert’s mother told her he worked at Moran’s on the high road. Maur stood among the builders’ oddments and watched him measure bits of wood and plastic. He had put on weight. When he clocked her she could see his shock but with the doggedness with which he had hugged her outside the chapel he nodded and ducked under the counter and came to her. They passed behind the Black Lion into the little lozenge of Kilburn Grange Park and sat on a bench beneath a tree and watched the dogs.

I think something’s going on, she said, and I need to find out what it is. It was you, wasn’t it? Who called me. That night a few months back. You were—

I didn’t know what to say anyway. I was just freaking out, okay? You know.

Yeah. I do. Why did you call? What was going on?

She could not make sense of the fear she saw in him.

Just leave it, please, he said. I don’t know nothing. I only saw him like once the last few years. You should talk to his army friends.

RAF. I don’t know if he had any.

He had one at least.

What do you mean?

Some mate. With some stupid army nickname…

RAF.

Whatever. I dunno if they were friends proper, he sounded funny about him.

How did he seem? she said. He said he was going to see you, she said. How did he seem?

Depressed.

Yeah. He’d been in a war.

Yeah but for real, not only. I dunno what happened but I think he was kind of alright, mostly, you know, when he first come back. It was later…. He was telling me about when he done travelling. Went to Spain. Looking for something, he said. America to see a tree in a lake.

She stared at him and he made a face to show how little sense this made to him either. Maur, who had not known of these travels, stayed expressionless.

Couldn’t keep him out of trees, she said. A lake?

He said he seen pictures. Said he was looking for something and maybe that might help him find it. He sounded a bit…

What? And what was he looking for?

I’m sorry, I’m sorry but he didn’t sound all there. Robert looked away to say, I think he was in a real way.

Maur put her hand to her mouth.

We was at the pub. He wasn’t happy. That’s all I know. One minute he said he wouldn’t go back even if they begged, the next he was so sad-looking.

Go back?

He was just ranting, I remember thinking I could’ve been anyone. He just wanted to say stuff to someone.

That’s silly, Maur said.

You know Ewan didn’t like me, yeah?

Robert, what are you talking about?

He didn’t hate me or nothing but by the end, he was barely even looking at me.

Oh, you know Ewan.

He wanted Don. You remember Don? Ewan thought maybe I stayed in touch with him. But I never did. My mum and Don’s mum was at church together was all. When he saw me, the last time, Ewan was asking me about him. I hadn’t seen Don for years. Not since we was like ten. My mum told me he was sick and I didn’t want to ask nothing more.

He was your friend.

He was my mum’s friend’s kid is all. Like I told Ewan. And he knew anyway from back then. Why’s he want to come talk to me about it? I’m sorry, but he wasn’t in a good way. He said he hated some of the people he worked with.

Who?

I don’t know, he wasn’t really talking to me, like I said. I’m sorry.

Robert, I’m really grateful. Can you tell me—

I’m sorry, he said. He stood. Look, him and me was youths together, and I know it must be hard for you. To think he done it. He held her gaze, brave boy. He said, But how he was, when I saw him, I don’t know. He was in a bad way again.

Just ask Shaun, Maur said, something’s not right.

This isn’t about Shaun, Sonya said. No one’s saying there’s anything right about any of this. And I’m not saying Shaun doesn’t care but what he really wants is to take someone on. Which is fine if you’ve actually got something but…It’s a year, and you’re making yourself sick, Maur.

Maur said, I need to know.

It takes the regiment weeks to write back every time, Sonya said. They don’t tell you shit and they’re never going to. If there’s anything to tell. We’ve both read the PTSD stuff. We aren’t going to find out some secret. I’m sorry but…Maur, they’re bastards, all of them, what else is there to say? You have to look after yourself. I’m sorry, but is this what Ewan would want?

They deserve—

So does Union Carbide. None of it’s fair. Maur, I know you. I know we all love a bit of punishment, but, Maur. You’re trying to prove something to yourself. You’re doing this because it’s making you sick. I’m begging you.

How thin Maur was in the mirror. Her skin and her eyes like water. To have chosen this city, seen it change, given it a new Londoner, watched that Londoner life from its beginning to its end. After dark she walked. Fantastic figures watched the entrance to Paddington Old Cemetery. Things could only get better. She thought of God looking down from behind spandrels of sacred architecture. Cautiously she looked Godward, wanted to believe for someone to shout at. So she might smash an altar. Past midnight, it was as if she might hear some child’s voice rising from beyond the mustard-coloured bricks.

Unlikely music. Shaun rose. Through a leeringly cheerful song came the sound of Maur’s exertions. Maur sat on the floor in Ewan’s room amid tatalatta, a record turning on Ewan’s cheap turntable, someone calling himself a vehicle. Crooning over brass so sumptuous it sounded self-mocking. Maur, legs splayed like a child, sorting Ewan’s toys, baby clothes, few books. Boxes and files about her. A small plastic football. Records spread out, Doug E. Fresh, Europe, Blondie, Dire Straits, the Police, Now That’s What I Call. You’d not have thought it the collection of one boy, let alone that it would contain this absurd lounge music. The LP propped on the player showed a man before a red background in a white black-arrowed suit, one leg bent in unnatural prance.

What the fuck is this? Shaun said.

I don’t know, Maur said. I didn’t know he’d bought it.

No, what is this? He gestured at everything.

Maur stood and stacked papers she had amassed about Ewan’s death. She lifted them into cardboard which she sealed with parcel tape. She put her hands to her back and huffed and did not look at Shaun, bent and hefted one of the boxes and Shaun did not move to help her and she went to the wardrobe that had contained Ewan’s clothes once and lifted part of the catalogue of bereavement to its top. She picked up a second and did the same.

Shaun said, I can’t believe you’re running away from this.

She picked up a third.

Come on, he said. God, I know it’s draining, I do. But come on.

Maur said, You can keep telling yourself it’s for my sake you’re so insistent. It’s not true. I think you know that.

What are you saying? he said. He put his hands on his hips and took them off again.

Enough high horse, she said.

You don’t really want them to get away with this, he said.

It’s time for you to go, Maur said. Long past, that’s on me. But there we are.

For fuck’s sake, Shaun said.

Go, she said. Go. Let a little bit of that anger out. Just go. Go. Go.

He called me, Sonya said. Asked my advice about you. Asked me!

Maur let the machine pick up so she would not speak to him. She deleted his messages and changed her lock.

No, I don’t hate him, she said, I’m just done. He should be glad. We both should.

She feared coming home and finding him in the front yard, smoking with Saoirse maybe, waiting. She never did. Give him his due, she said to Sonya.

Live after potential. Maur took out pens, made marks. Cleaned them and kept them empty, it was better for them. On the second anniversary of Ewan’s death Maur said, I want to go to the seaside, and Sonya said, Let’s go to the seaside.

Every year thereafter on that day they would take the train to Margate or Brighton or Hastings or wherever. Book a B & B, have supper, wander around, stay overnight. He’d have loved it here, they said, the joke being that he would not.

Maur met Shaun one night by chance in Camden Town and though he asked her to and though to her disgust she was tempted she did not go home with him and after one angry and one apologetic message he left her alone.

Labour won and Maur celebrated because of the cruel lassitude of their opponents. Sonya said the new lot made her feel like she was being bullied by puppets without puppeteers. Des married a woman called Therese whom Maur did not like. Raj and Sandrine and Maur relocated to larger premises. Maur received a letter from a stranger printed in ugly font that asserted godly concern for her son and for the soul of England. She threw it away.

Another year. Sonya told her Shaun was sick.

Should I see him? Maur said. Her sympathy might have been for someone she had never met.

Do you want to? Sonya said.

It’s been a long time. Want? What do I want? Who the fuck knows?

You don’t have to, babe. You don’t owe him. He’s got someone. No one needs Hollywood closure.

Maur loved Sonya then, as many times before.

—

She cried because Ewan would not see the new century. To which she was indifferent. Time learns how to contain you again.

Once the mother of a soldier, it turned out. Forces news still caught her attention. Operation Decisive Edge. She noticed and was unable not to care, not to disapprove of outsourced forces catering or the Brit-US conference on military installations with Halliburton et al. at Ditchley Park or the ministers’ plans for Sponsored Reserves, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review and the collaborative research approach and Defence Technology Centres and the outsourcing Towers of Excellence “Innovation Strategy” or Whitehall privatising the arms research of DERA to make it QinetiQ. Sonn mocked that invented word with her and the politics behind it. That’s neoliberalism, babe, she said. She read a news story to Maur, lingering scornfully over management-speak. The American towers came down. Maur received a courteous query from a PhD student working on Norman Dixon’s military theories. She threw it away. The MOD released a statement on PTSD, she raged. At her father’s funeral she did not cry. She felt like a model of herself stamped out of tin. Rho cried for both of them, and her daughter for Ewan. Maur inherited just about enough to move to a larger flat. She imagined Ewan in the space. She went on three she-supposed dates with a glum man she met through Sandrine. He worked at a gallery in Chiswick and as much as anything else, she mocked herself, she agreed to the latter meetings because at the first he said he liked Gwen John and you might as well remind yourself of what’s been and gone. There was a moment when, staring at his face while he slept, she wanted to shake him awake and say, I find myself speaking about my son’s death everywhere I go in this world. As if that would prove something to her.

Maur lost things. A book she knew she had put down on the table, the key to a cabinet. She thought, My mind’s going. It didn’t concern her much. She went on. Considered the sheer attention she’d had in her youth, for Greenfield town, for padding animals, the nights, the friends, the places she lived, the sex, that which delighted, that of urgent satisfying roughness, that which disgusted or provoked what she now knew had been fear, the grooves an inkless biro makes when you continue trying to draw with it. Up until the last moment, you might still say, I shall do this. Each day though the mass of things she would not be or do grew. She would not say how often she wanted to hurry to the concluding stillness. She read. Worked at her work, long days. She lived. It was not the only thing for her but the mystery of her son did obtain. She dyed her hair less natural colours. Not old, she watched herself, as if curious as to how close she might get to a brink, feeling the drift and the ceaseless stare of a null not to be forgotten. There came good days and there, beneath her, it lay. She went out and came home again. She was forty-eight years old and in the city.

Shaun’s gone, Sonya said.

Jesus, Maur said.

Poor Shaun, poor those who’d loved him.

You alright? Sonya said.

I don’t know.

It was the strangest thing, this abstract sorrow. She sent flowers. Shaun. From M. Go well. Sara had told her about that phrase a literal lifetime ago. Maur thought of it right there in the florist’s. A better send-off than whatever she’d written for Ewan, which she didn’t remember if you could believe that. It was an ANC funeral thing, go well, Sara had said. Shaun hardly deserved it, he talked the talk but Mandela he was not, still she meant it kindly and actually maybe everyone deserved it.

A cloudless-morning frost held the world. Leafless trees each end of Mill Lane railway bridge rising from boscage on slopes beyond the fencing. A whisper, a voice she knew. She looked up at a moving shadow. A man waved at her from boughs above. Was it a man? A boy? It was black plastic sheeting shredded by the wind, it moved as if it were climbing, wanted her attention.

So her heartbeat slowed and she looked about. Like an explorer in a fabled place, she was in a forest. The bridge’s metal walls were taller than she. On every panel and on the brick segments of the pillars where bridge met earth were murals by the very young. Seventy uncouth children’s trees, thick trunked, rosy appled, spindly, colours beyond nature, lightning-jagged or broccoli outlines, palm trees out of place, drooping willow. A solitary Christmas tree. Maur stood in a salmagundi forest overshone by more than one sun.

She had passed through this community project before and not marked it. These artists must have been born about when her son died. In the world there are bridges grown from living trees. The most south-easterly image here was backlit by gaudy pigment, dawn or dusk, and it was without leaves, autumnal or dead, and Ewan would never see it. Maur was alone in the painted wood and trash moved as if it were a child.

A new January. More than ten years after that Soho birthday party. The telephone rang.

Maureen Towns?

An unfamiliar man’s voice. Earth slows again. She held her breath. Here: the Of course, the placing into place. Maur had no view from any window there, there were no treetop canopies for her to see.

I have some information, the man said. About your son.

Running Dogs

Trooper Allardyce is standing still.

It took them years to clear the rubble. They sank blitz trash in the Hackney flatlands. The city poised in sentiment. Couldn’t go on forever.

The boy took buses, ducked around conductors when they came for him. He mocked their shouts. —Get off it you little swine. He never tortured any animal, though once in Ealing and once on what seemed a limitless concrete flatland beyond the docks he watched without opinion as other children did terrible things to a cat. At the edge of that buckled stretch the remains of huts outskirted a new zone.

His aunt said of his mother, —Don’t mind her.

She gave him cigarettes and showed him how to light them.

—I know she can be a right one, she said.

At fifteen he went to his brother and said that they should go away together. He argued his points with a stilted rigour that elicited in the older boy a great fear and set him to rise midway through the disquisition and walk out of the pub too quickly even to be called coward. When the younger son left the house behind he did so alone.

In Primrose Hill he apprenticed to a printer. Then he became a messenger for a criminal, a man who called himself by the name of the knife he said he used. Then he was a deliverer of meat in brown paper. That villain whose employ he quit found him and shoved him off his bicycle. —You leave him alone, an old woman shouted. The man told him to come back to work and the boy said no.

The thin young widow from whom Steven Allardyce rented a room said he would have to leave the area with old you-know-who after him and that was a shame.

—Best watch yourself, she said. —I know you’re a tough one. Wouldn’t know it to hear your voice. How old did you say you was? Actually I don’t want to know, eh? She laughed and gave him the eye.

He went south of the river. He got work hauling scrap, separating it into kinds and moving it from fiefdom to fiefdom of the dump. A taxonomiser. He was not tall but he was thickset and grew strong. The boy went by his middle name awhile but it was not enough to hide him and on a dark March evening in rain that left his face dirty at the dump gate his erstwhile boss stepped from the lee of a windowless house bearing the blade of which he was namesake. The boy ran into the runnels of his workplace past strata of car parts and corrugated iron. He fell. The man got his weapon into the boy’s side, not deep. The boy screamed. He found a half-brick with his right hand and brought it across the man’s expression of surprise. He broke all the wet fingers of the hand that held the steel and kept on at the man’s head awhile.

When he had put three streets between them he squatted trembling in an empty yard at the edge of the streetlamp light and disguised by that rain wept without sound and pissed himself. With the scab coming off his side he went into an army office and said he was eighteen which was only a year off the truth. He had nothing to say when the bloke at the desk said, Why exactly? and Which regiment? He had nothing to say but he said something.

He wrote and told his aunt he was a soldier and not to tell his mother anything and he did not say he was a fusilier or where he was based so without a return address his letters must emerge for her as if from no place. The boy came to shoot tolerably well. He could march, it seemed, forever. He could follow orders except sometimes when it came to him how pointless or strange this or that command was, what an odd figure it would make him to obey it, then he might pause long enough to be shouted at, once to be struck by a sergeant.

—Do not look at me like that ever again, you cunt.

The young man did not change his gaze and the sergeant avoided him thereafter even when he was slovenly in drills.

In the mess a man showed his comrades a cheap magazine of irregular war, on the subject of the Forces of the Queen of Justice and Turk Westerling and Chindits.

—Come here, Choirboy, he said to Allardyce. —I bet you’ll like this.

The Ferrets and 136 and Stirling’s desert forces.

—How about that then, eh? There you fucking go.

Allardyce did not tell his aunt of Brecon, of the test he demanded to attend, the sleet, repeating over-under-over circuits of the course with bergens of increasing mass, the diminishing number of this intake trying for the re-formed Special Air Service, yomping in frigid darkness, hills made enemy, Painscastle, yes, the loom of the mountain. Alone on the Fan at night and he in cold ecstasy of solitude, exhaustion and pain sought, and of a boundless kind of consciousness that seemed not to stem from but to apprehend him. He more thought than thinker.

In Aldershot Allardyce avoided the parachute men as he might the last page of an unfinished book and minded his own training. Another letter to Aunt Irene; it took him many days, stooped over his knees. He wrote it in the sky above the ocean, in hostel beds. Properly he was not yet Trooper Allardyce but it was as such that he signed.

From Singapore a train to Kuala Lumpur. This was not like heat but some terminal enfeebling power. Light transformed. A new brightness amid the prehistoric-seeming trees and a medley of forces, sweat-patched uniforms and skins. Gurkhas and British riflemen, King’s Own, Seaforth Highlanders, Special Constables, Kampong Guards ambling from hut to squat hut as if it were a weekend in Wardieburn Camp. With his newly come companions in 22 SAS, Allardyce was blue bereted awhile, as the Manchesters, as if anyone believed that, here where the Malayan Scouts were born. They speculated on the origins of those there who were not as were Allardyce and all his crew white men.

—Nah, mate, he ain’t local, he’s a Fiji.

—A Feel-Me? said Allardyce.

—Har har. Look at your eyes, mate.

Christ it was loud, a loudness of harsh animals and a babel of languages. The sun felt loud, whatever that meant.

—Your eyes. Saucers. Where you from?

—The Smoke, said Allardyce. —Where you from? Used to this up in Brum, yeah?

—Keep your hair on, Choirboy. Ooh, don’t he get sulky?

—Little feller’s just shy is all, give him a biscuit.

In Singapore again the SAS men visited a school for the handicapped. The pupils smiled and those who could chanted, Good morning. The men took them swimming and cleaned up their mess and played restrained versions of British Bulldog. The children wound their playmates a doll out of sticks and rags and glue. A foot and a half high and ugly. Twig hair, its body the green-grey of a uniform. One of the soldiers said its name was Jenglot for a local goblin. The troopers made it a little parachute from a pillowcase. Now it was a tiny mimic of those mannequins of which Allardyce had heard, dropped amid the living in the fag-end days of the war, to fill the sky and scare the enemy at the numbers descending.

The troopers chucked Jenglot out before them on a training jump. To test the air they said. Allardyce leaped after it from the soaring Valetta. He could not hear his own hysterical halloos. He spun, his chute spread and he lost his breath, thrawing below the mantle, under his boots the married quarters and whitewashed walls. An animal would not have known to dread this rising vista. Allardyce did what he had been told. Descended with god’s-eye view.

The troopers went into the long grass calling, —Jenglot! Jenglot! Allardyce looked in the trees for the whiteness of cloth. They could not find the figurine.

Turning dials on New Range radios. Listening through headphones to the reels of local tongues, which came to him as if eagerly. Good job, Allardyce. Languages are about as important as it gets to the likes of you, don’t forget it. Signals, demolition, medicine and chitchat. Learning to move as slowly as he must. A certain history of this place, intricacies of allegiance, MPAJA from when everyone was best of friends against the Rising Sun, MRLA, MCP (Commies). Beyond rubber estates the horrisonant forest.

Trooper Liddell whispered, —I don’t know how to say it, it’s fucking horrible. Anxiety was strange on his boxer’s face. He gestured at the plant life. Bladed leaves and rattan and the bracken of the once-cleared. —You’re alright though, Choirboy. Eh? You like it, don’t you?

Allardyce mouthed new words. Mengkuang, belukar, parang. Weeks in the noisy growth. The men stank. Cavitty, a thin Scotsman, said he never should have signed up. He bullied a Jakun porter. At some hour not marked, Allardyce and those like him who saw out this training stumbled back to camp, become troopers.

Patrols to Senoi longhuts in Perak. —The Communists are not your friends, Allardyce said in time to the tape in slow Malay. —We are your friends.

For no reason that made sense he was assigned to Big-Time Bravo, B Squadron with its swagger and old-timers. He was not yet twenty and they called him their mascot. They inducted him into ostentatious suspicion of 6 Troop’s commander, a softly spoken man only just older than Allardyce whose French surname they refused to learn. They called him Boss to speak to him, and Eddie Smith and Rupert in his earshot. Allardyce felt weak and strong at once.

In an abandoned enemy base, troopers stood in the shade of raised huts. Picking their way on ground none could trust. Three men descended a bukit, Allardyce tail-end Charlie. He heard the slowing of his comrades’ footsteps, turned, and the point man was indicating to stop. From the mutter of the undergrowth came percussion. Urgent shoving. Allardyce faced the darkness. Raised his FN. Controlled his body against his careering heart. Something came. Straight for him, an enormity hurry-scurry smashing through thickets raising what might have been a CT army’s or a devils’ war cry. Allardyce shot into the shade. His arms were steady somehow. The ropelike attap rent and he fired again and out of the dark a screaming thing bore down.

A glinting gaze, back-curved tusks and a hot red roar. A great hog.

He fired and fired. The hillock-shouldered beast galloped into his bullets and did not shy. He saw no blood.

But scant feet from him the mighty pig spasmed and reared side-on, stood on hind hooves and hacked at the sky, looked down at him from the height of its body with its knowing eye and with a child’s shriek keeled into muck.

Allardyce stood still. The beast kicked as it died, as if it were eager to reach a further destination.

Actually yes of course that boar could hardly ever have been the enemy, Chin Peng’s forces would not make such noise. (Chin Peng, OBE, excuse me, would you believe, from back in the best-chum anti-Jap days, you couldn’t make it up. It might be old British bullets did you in.) The death made men boisterous. They dragged the animal back to base to butcher it inexpertly. That night they cooked it. They affixed its head to a tree to overwatch them. They conversed with it as they ate it. Evening squire, cheerio, aye-aye. The pig looked approbation.

—There’s a fairy tale, Welshie the signaller said. —A king’s dog chasing a pig like that and leaving a footprint right in a stone. A hole in it.

The men ascended ladders to the empty longhuts of their enemies. CT meant “Communist terrorist.” In one room scattered with rubbish they made out on a blackboard Chinese traces of Mao’s catechism. In the midden below, Welshie uncovered with other rejectamenta a plastic comb and a broken half-pair of scissors. On their return he drove them into the hog’s forehead. It seemed to Allardyce like an emissary from a deeper place now he met its dead eyes and the metal and plastic dangled like antennae, like the wires of the troopers’ radios.

Resupply to the DZ. Among the boots and OG shirts and food, some got letters and parcels. The WVS sent books and magazines. Currency for barter. Allardyce waited, did not hear his name called for post. Instead, at last, in pity, by Bowler. Trooper Bowler, an abstracted and thin and angular man, with three years in age and service on Allardyce and who sometimes put on airs, sometimes acted the ingénu. They called him Stumpsy or Cricket or Owzat. He beckoned and gave Allardyce a copy of The Quiet American and Bath Tangle.

—Don’t knock Heyer, Bowler said. —Don’t knock anything here.

With the hours of stillness everyone was a reader in the jungle.

—Don’t it fucking all get to you? Bowler said, more than once, of the forest’s parameters, the aboriginals, the leadership of the regiment, the politics of crown truculence and this newly sovereign land. Some nights he would declare that he was off to his basha to wank to the thought of Bev at home. —Wish me luck, boys, he’d say. —Got a girl? he said to Allardyce.

—No.

—Cherry boy?

—Fuck off.

—How come you’re so very wise beyond your years? Bowler said.

As if the question were meant, Allardyce said, —London, ain’t it?

—What’s your story, Choirboy?

—No story. Wanted to do proper soldiering, not drill bullshit.

—I was always going to do this, Bowler said.

—Well don’t fall over yourself happy about it.

—I’m happy enough.

—Leeches and all?

—Love a leechy smoko, Bowler said. Allardyce gave the required grimace. Squad wisdom was salt was the better choice, that to draw on a cigarette that had scorched off a leech was foul. Bowler did go on. You never knew if he was telling the truth or what. Half the time you’d think he was the bolshiest bloke there, half the time you might call him nervy. And half the time, yeah, a third half, no clue. Maybe we’re all like that.

Bowler said, —My dad was at Arnhem and my grandad was a Jock, a Lovat Scout. Trogging around the woods in camo, rags and twigs all over. Not these ones obviously but woods is woods ain’t they? Ploo sa chonj. You wouldn’t have known he was there, they were that good.

That image, forest stalking through the forest!, recalled to Allardyce something from sick leave, flipping through the ruddy Beano Book, for which he was too old, Uncle Windbag (that Tall-Story Teller Feller) blathering of his own Malaya plantation, where rubber ran thick enough to bounce elephants along, and that he smeared it on himself then rolled in leaves, so tigers would think him windblown plant stuff.

—Before I come here, Bowler was saying, —my mum told me Gramps’ll be keeping a lookout for me. Soppy tart. He gave a quick laugh. —Anyway I was always going to go for all this, weren’t I? Keep it in the family?

In the ulu they trod across their own sides’s airdropped exhortations to surrender. Half a million fucking leaflets for fourteen guerillas. Allardyce could still make out English details of the Merdeka terms. Even this late in what they called a war you might hear pronouncements from the sky. Loudspeakers from a voice plane blaring imperial mercy like the hollers of a spirit. Come out and start a new life, in Chinese, Malay, Tamil.

—Is it not all Chinks? Allardyce said.

—Most, not all, Trooper Chris said. Since he passed a one-month course and carried the first-aid pack, he was Doc. —Commie 10th is all Malay, if it’s still out there.

—Brass used to have us put on plays in the kampongs and New Villages, taking the piss out of the CTs, said Trooper Deakin. Old man at thirty-two.

—How were they? someone said.

—The plays? Deakin said. Fucking shit, mate.

An atap-thatched raised longhouse. They approached, ever so friendly. Abang, village head, an older rotund man, waved them in. He told them in his own language peppered with English that he had fought the Japanese. He showed them scars.

—We are happy to visit you, Allardyce said. His own Sakai pleased him. —Are there Chinese near? They are not your friends.

Villagers in sarongs, hair tied back and some with soot or paint on their faces. The old men’s teeth were betel stained. Troopers drank samsu and made the children laugh. They said if there was anyone sick they might help with their medicine.

Bowler asked about the hantu jarang gigi. The villagers regarded him without recognition. —It’s like the abominable snowman, he said at Allardyce’s interest. —Only for the jungle. Tinggi I think’s a sort of magic tree. Pocong, that’s, I think, spirits in grave clothes. They’ve got all sorts.

—If you hear of any Chinese near, will you tell us? Allardyce said to Abang. —We are your friends and we will help you.

Abang smiled again. His air was of untroubled and amiable scepticism. The lines Allardyce had been given sounded even to him abruptly stupid. We’re a better bet than them is all, he felt like saying. How d’you say that in Sakai?

Everything creeps. Twitches and deliquesces. Brushwood prongs make him bleed and green cladodes tap Allardyce’s shoulder as if the jungle would have a word. Bowler, what was it your grandad was saying?

In dreadful secondary growth Tankie Meadows came half a pace from a wire that would have sent a log studded with shit-smeared spikes into his chest. He gestured, his owlish face urgent. Allardyce stepped out of the path with cartoon slowness. You’d have said the undergrowth itself pointed into itself, to where, within its darkness, Allardyce saw a man watching. A haggard Chinese man of forty or fifty or sixty, in tatters. He crouched as if he had waited there for years. He held a Bren gun gingerly. His face was anxious and absolutely tired and Allardyce did not move and he looked at the man and the man at him.

A stillness as on the Fan. All the clamour of the greenwood waned and in its place there was static in Allardyce’s skull.

It might have been the CT lifted his gun but whether he moved first or not Allardyce brought his weapon up faster and he fired.

The world gushed back with the crack and recoil, a thousand birds screamed, and windmilling his arms the guerrilla arced back into the forest.

Allardyce gripped his smoking weapon and shook. Until he was quite, stock, still.

His bullet had gone into the man’s left cheek. A puckered, almost bloodless maggot hole. It had taken much matter with it on the exit and the dead man’s jaw would not align and mouth open and lopsided his expression was incredulous. Allardyce stared at what he had done.

They must take fallen enemies. That hated task. They wrapped and dragged the corpse and called him names and Allardyce met the quizzical eyes of this strange compeer. The man had nothing in his pockets. Allardyce would never know the name or history of his first mark. Breathe in breathe out. He would have been sweating whether he had killed or not.

That night the men mocked him, not without rough kindness. Choirboy, baby boy. In his basha under a poncho on which the rain tapped, Allardyce closed and opened his hands. His innards clutched but then you got that with the shits, with bad food, didn’t you?

—You alright then? Bowler said.

—Yeah, you know.

—Did well.

—Bowler.

—What’s that?

—I dunno, Allardyce said. Do you think…?

Bowler was full of shrewd sympathy but could not wait forever.

How do you feel? That knife-named man in London was alive. This was an inaugural event. The man today would always be as he was now. Allardyce watched himself as if from a receding point.

In Kota Tinggi an Iban tracker from Borneo who said his name was Tun came to Bowler and Allardyce as they crossed the dusty heat between temporary buildings. His body was a wrestler’s. He squinted as if suspicious. He spoke to them insistently about something of which the Englishmen could not make sense, no matter that they had words and tongues in common. The tattooed man said something about a boar maybe, and asked Bowler something and spoke his own language too fast for the troopers.

—Mate, I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re on about, Bowler said. He walked away and Allardyce went with him and the man continued to call.

Allardyce walked between the rubber trees of an estate beyond Sungai Kemadak. No hostiles. The men were unclear on what brought them to wander between Malay women tapping the trees’ glutinous sap. It seemed as if the cups strapped to the bark held aliquots of a single protoplasmic thing of near-infinite worth and its own calculations. A Temiar headsman took them past what seemed a boulder until Allardyce saw its grey folds were the corpse of an elephant, gajah, by some quirk of corruption a mound of wrinkled skin with bones fallen anyhow within. Yes a man might siphon the rubber into it through the rag-hole eyes, ooze the skeleton into contingent configuration, give the remnant new bulk, more plastic essence. To stamp and rebound in the jungle again, mindless and animate.

He had to consider the man he’d shot. What had passed between them. When the moments came there was no not thinking on it. Allardyce’s heart did not speed up. He didn’t know if his crew thought of those they’d done away with. People holding old weapons gasping as their bodies bent, whispering goodbye to the blood gouting, falling from trees into water. Now time to think on those of his comrades deaded themselves. Yes, he’d seen a couple by now. One minute Deakin had stood talking, the next, there he was, gone, and blood on Allardyce’s boots. Gloom too, called so for his demeanour. A short, quiet Geordie. He’d shot the wire-trailing arrows into trees for signals, could tap Morse as fast as Allardyce could drum his fingers. His leech bites had gone bad, the lepto took him.

Their bones too might give integument to the rubber elemental. Might stumble up and bounce with horrid mindless elasticity.

—It’s a fucking mess, Bowler said. —Always has been always will be, what can you do? Heard about Batang Kali?

—Who’s that when he’s at home?

—Ho ho. ’48. It’s a place. Scots Guards did a number there and it weren’t pretty. They done two dozen in, he reckoned.

—Who?

—One of the guards, but you didn’t hear it from me. That’s what happens when you don’t find what you’re looking for. He drew a finger across his throat. Bowler raised an eyebrow in warning to the dead, eleven years too late. —You heard of Harry Miller?

—Batang Kali’s best mate?

—You’re hilarious. It’s his fault I’m here. He wrote a book. If I’d brung it I’d lend it. He tells you what the troops and rozzers really get up to. Smacking Chinks all around the town.

—And that’s why you came, is it? Allardyce said.

—No, not for that. Well. Bowler picked his teeth. —It’s funny though, isn’t it? It’s complicated. I mean it’s bad and that but it did get me thinking. And then you get here and it’s hearts and minds, isn’t it, at least for us? And if I’m honest I was a bit pissed off because that’s not what you sign up for, is it? I was a silly sod really. They’ve got medicine now and all sorts in the New Villages, and you seen what we do for the Sakai. Honestly I like them, the Sakai. Look at me like that all you want, I do.

Allardyce had not looked at him.

—I like their stories, Bowler said. —You know me, I’m a reader, and that’s their version of books, I suppose. I like their hantu stories, ghost stories.

That brought to Allardyce’s mind something the tracker Tun had said, a similar word.

—No, Bowler said, I mean it’s not right, the other stuff, the roughhousing, the Chinks and that, even the Sakai and whatnot sometimes. But that’s war isn’t it? And the thing is…When he spoke again his voice was intrigued. —The thing is that even when you think about the nasty stuff, even if you’re not too pleased about the fact that it happens, you can get sort of excited—I shouldn’t say that, what I mean is you can still really want to hear the stories of it, can’t you? I can’t always tell where despite ends and because begins. We’re a funny lot.

In roustabout Penang, Allardyce and Bowler and Tankie went to brothels and bars. Thence to KL where they fled the Coliseum when a drunken game with Army Air Corps became a brawl.

—Let’s do Singapore, Allardyce said.

—It’s twice the price, Tankie said.

But they hitched in the back of a logging truck driven by a sardonic Chinese and for hours dodged timber lurching at the limits of its chains. Through villages where agitated dogs watched to alight in Singapore’s throng as night came down and insects hurled themselves at neon and bicycle-and-sidecar trishaws. It was close enough to Christmas. On the day itself, Bowler said, they’d go to the Union Jack Club but now it was the Happy Word. Push through made-up taxi dancers and the forces men jostling in time. Allardyce leaned on the bar, mimicking others’ confidence.

Bowler said, —At home I met a bloke Briggs, crying into his beer over some tart called Juicy Lucy who got killed. Kicked in by our lot. Given them clap or something.

When he heard who they were, a King’s Own Yorkshire Light offered them cigarettes and said they were bum-boys like their blessed Mad Mike. He said it between play and challenge and Bowler took him aside and threatened him, then bought him a drink and shook his hand. A woman there looked to Allardyce like Myrna Loy her race notwithstanding. He wanted her to speak to him but she only met his eyes across the room and shook her head in a way that seemed a question. He sought what he had seen in her in the look of the whore he paid to suck him off that night but did not find it. He said they all looked alike but this woman was nothing like the last.

The men walked to clear their headaches. The Chinese quarters were slow, roadside food-stall fires smouldering. On larger streets, Bowler sotto voce taxonomised everyone they passed.

—Sikh. Tamil. Java, maybe? Chink. Obviously.

—Give it a rest, mate, Tankie said. Bowler’s face glowed.

That night Allardyce wrote to his aunt for the first time in a long time.

Im in Malaya. I seen a cockfight. The birds was beautiful. There feathers was black and multicoloured at the same time the one of them was darker. The men held them back at the start and was all goading them and them birds was raring to go they had straps on them so they couldnt move their legs though. Music started scrapy instruments I don’t know what there called a right racket. They let them cocks go they have spurs on there claws they jump up and have at it. Blimey you never seen anything like it there was blood all across the ground quick as you like but you couldn’t see it on there feathers even though they must of been coated because there dark the feathers. I never told you I saw nasty stuff with animals in London when I was a lad you know how kids are and this put me in mind. This one bird was quicker it was a right nasty fighter it went at it fast and had the other birds eye out so thats that youd think but it kept on. The other one I mean. It was fighting I don’t know how but there you are even though it couldnt of seen anything with all that blood and its eye gone. It might of been already dead for all I know and not known it and kept on fighting anyway you know how they are. Tankie didnt like it. Thats one of the lads. He didnt like it and to be honest I didnt much either. I shot a man in the forest Aunt Rene done him in. Thats the job. Don’t tell Mum I wrote to you.

Chest out, Skinhead Thompson addressed them. Big-Time Bravo’s seventy fidgeted because stood in the corner, all Don’t Mind Me, was Deane-Drummond himself. The Cupboard! They called him that since after Arnhem when he’d hid in one.

—You’ve done the Lord’s work and the CTs are well and truly buggered but Tunku’s concerned and I’ll tell you why, Thompson said. —Telok Anson. KL and surrounds are a white zone but smack-dab centre of this bloody swamp a delightful little gang are holed up. Infantry piddled about a while back but didn’t want to get their feet wet. We’ll be tree-jumping to flush ’em out.

He ignored the disquiet.

—I must tell you about our enemy.

An extorter of the planters, a ranking Commie not afraid of much, Ah Hoi. Someone said, —Ahoy, matey.

Thompson said, —You might hear him called another name. He heard some chap was chatting to the constables. Came to the village and shot the towkay. Well, you might say, that’s love and war. But. He rounds up the villagers. Points out the informer. But who do his boys pull out but the chap’s wife? Lovely lass, up the duff. Ready to drop. Out comes a parang. Ah Hoi makes an example.

A murderous extraction, a second murder, a birthgrave. Thompson left a silence.

—That’s why they call him Baby-Killer. If that helps stiffen your sinews against a pretty diabolical character.

No one would want the cave of that woman’s body to come to mind but how could Trooper Allardyce keep it away? Or keep Deakin away come to that, who had lain while the darkness slopped out of him after he was shot. Allardyce was spared no remembrance.

The night before the assault, they partied. Allardyce’s birthday was just passed, he told none. They shaved drunk Mulcahy’s head and on the way to the drop zone he looked neophyte. Standing in the Beverleys’ howling doorways. Allardyce at the brink, his heartbeat bad horses. Into the great empty. His chute bellied and swung him like a man beneath a gibbet. Alone again, air roaring like silence. Beneath his bergen and his feet, birds and the canopy. Down he stared as if he might find Jenglot. He steered. Foliage reached for him. He took a breath as if he plunged into a sea not the hammering of sticks. Crashed through, harness on a bough swinging him, and he slipped upside down like a figure on a tarot card. Cut himself free and left the silk for the wind.

On the jungle floor they listened to comrades overhead and watched them jerk. Heard a noise like an animal in fear. Allardyce and Strickland hauled the A510 radio and sought the sound. At the base of a tremendous trunk Boss and Doc knelt and Tankie looked on with his face in his hands, eyes wider than ever.

—Holy fucking Christ, someone said.

Atop hard roots Mulcahy lay belly up very like a sacrifice. He looked from side to side with fevered thoughtfulness and breathed out bloody snot. Above him two hundred feet of empty air and the stub-end of the branch that had not held. Doc fussed with ampules.

—Holy Jesus.

—He’s broke his back, Bowler whispered to Allardyce. —How the fuck is he alive? What kind of fucking idiot orders tree-jumping? That glory-hunting cunt Thompson’s killed him.

But Mulcahy would not die. Clammy, he lolled and whispered what the morphine told him. Doc gestured and Rawnsley, a big dumb Kent lad, staring with endless disbelief at Mulcahy’s injuries, cut at the stuff around them and lashed out of it a stretcher.

Evac? In this fankle? But a hundred yards thence, Allardyce, slashing and going through motions of hunting a landing zone, good fucking luck, found it. Stumbled blinking into treelessness where no clearing had any bloody business being. A near-circular stretch of knee-high growth, char and splinters.

—Well how the fucking hell did you arrange this miracle, Trooper?

—Maybe it was lightning, Boss.

—Hallebloodylujah say I.

They hacked to enlarge it. Welshie centred in the sunlight, unspooled the antenna from its reel, held his hands over switches like a dowser. Strickland let go an orange balloon marker and chemicals met within it and up it went to the limits of its tether.

—Not long now, mate.

Mulcahy watched through eyes fixed far beyond.

—Soon have you off. Allardyce licked his lips. —Want a smoko?

—Everyone around here, Mulcahy whispered. —Hush, he said. Slow and careful as if it were a key to a prison door he put a finger to his lips. Wet words like distant signals.

—Say again, mate? Allardyce said.

—Orang jahat.

—It ain’t them who got you, Allardyce said. —No CTs. Just a ruddy great tree.

Mulcahy repeated the words in the language of the villages, bad men bad men. Allardyce felt as if animals were calling to Mulcahy from the outlands of the dead.

Later from a distant quadrant of the sky came a noise like beating. The men cheered.

—There we go, mate, Allardyce said. —Told you.

Someone said, —There’s the element of fucking surprise up the swanny.

Quick-repeated phonemes that started quietly enough you could have thought they rose within you, closing to shake the treetops. Two-syllable rotor words in an infinity of languages only one of which Allardyce knew. The helicopter hove into view above the forest hole and trembled there.

—Utter, the helicopter said to Allardyce. It looked down, cyclops. —Utter utter utter.

Hardly Allardyce’s first time seeing a chopper, so what was this feeling?

Bowler said, —Fuck me sideways.

The craft’s struts dipped below the tree line. B Squadron men backed into thickets.

—Jesus wept that’s much too tight.

Propellor-ends close enough to branches to rip off leaves. The men scattered. Mulcahy lay alone below the Sycamore, an offering again. Against all protocols of safety the helicopter descended without a yard of leeway around it. It filled the shaft with noise, the onlookers in awe at the virtuoso drop, to wobble precarious in the hollow, understruts and wheels at head height.

A man jumped from it to his knees, tended Mulcahy, attached straps to the stretcher. That hand on the collective. A flinch and this thing would settle on the patient and them all.

Bowler stood.

He went forwards. Towards the evacuation. Half-fell, pulled himself up amid a maelstrom of glints, beetle wings and leaves. Close by his head was a shine of metal, a gleam for which he reached.

Allardyce, inaudible, begged to know what the fuck he was doing.

Bowler stared, not at Mulcahy, whose new stillness might have been of the grave as he went hoisted gentle as you like into the helicopter. Bowler still moved. Allardyce went after him towards the bullroaring blades. No one stopped them. Where Bowler was looking Allardyce saw a darkness. Like a shadow of smoke in the aircraft’s updraft. The Sycamore turned as if to regard them. It ascended. They stood in the pillar of its turbulence, a storm not formless but of infinite configuration, a helix of dead matter and those rotor words.

At the limits of the trees the chopper veered, and while the others applauded as it pulled away for the city, Bowler and Allardyce looked into the whirlwind, the gusting dead centre of the hole in the forest, at debris still turning. On Bowler’s face, a look almost of recognition. What gyred was darkness like a standing rock or old animal skin, like something emptied and refilled, an outline, cyclone visitant, eyeless, watching.

Recalcitrant country. Nante sikkit wait-a-minute thorn clung like the damned to keep their company. The men built squad base. Brown water submerged their boots. Into the country’s deeps. Hammocks between trees. For days they only spoke low and right up into each other’s ears.

—Can’t see Baby-Killer making a go of it here.

But under shallow clearer water were footprints. Routes cut the sword grass.

—When that copter came down, whispered Allardyce. He sought an interlocutor. —It was like there was something there.

—Couldn’t see a thing mate, Doc said. —I was a bit busy.

—Everything’s weird out there, Welshie said.

—Fuck off now, you little prick, Cavitty said.

—When that copter came down, Allardyce said to Bowler. —It was like there was something.

Bowler and he shared silence.

Why did the CTs still bother? The troopers stalked after weeks back to main camp, emaciated and with animal expressions, peeled off rotten rags and resupplied, ate. Boss watched Allardyce closely and so did Bowler now you mention it. There were always eyes on him. What was a bloke supposed to make of that?

They listened to stories of other sorties. Sandilands creeping with flotsam across the river behind a rotting log, his weapon up. In the shallows, he’d shot a CT at scout work, who stiffened and bled out right there, staying standing in the current. I didn’t see it myself, Allardyce would come to say, in part to remind himself, so vivid was his vision of the dead man at watch in the water.

Back in the jungle Allardyce inched to a tree line to look upon a raised hut and slopping ziggurat of food trash. The troopers came on silently. A shit trench still stank. Allardyce kept his FN up. He made for the ladder beneath the listing room and he put his hand on the rung and from above a knocking and a dragging came and a long exhalation and Allardyce gagged on putrefaction and stepped back and brought his rifle ready for someone to drop through but he froze, stopped breathing, because though there had been neither motion nor sound to him it was as if there had been.

Amid a gust of that rot Allardyce felt that there had been

both

a coming down

and an ascension

that it

had been

too fast

and too

imprecise

From somewhere he heard Bowler give a cry and now Boss pushed Allardyce aside and Rawnsley muscled past him, then Bowler was looking at him with a question in his eyes. Allardyce heard two shots above. So finally he ascended.

Boss had his weapon at his hip. By the wall lay a young Chinese woman in neat fatigues. In her lap a 303. She was quite still, holes in her chest.

—I just shot the dead, Boss said.

What little blood there was was thick, very dark and slow. The woman’s skin was like a candle. Her right foot was bound and twisted, an old injury. Between it and her left, smoking ash, a clay jar broken and in pieces. Boss kicked her rifle away. He was breathing fast. He put his fingers to the side of her neck and frowned. —Yes, long cold. Just as bloody well I had no…Sepsis maybe, I don’t know. I thought…In any case it doesn’t matter. What the bloody hell was that? What were you doing down there, Choirboy? Standing still, having a little think? What happened?

Allardyce had nothing to say. He rubbed the clothes the dead woman wore as if their texture might disclose something, it did not. Boss said more; Allardyce was on his knees by fire remnants still warm days after her own life went out, by the chill of her skin. Red stub filigree of a $10 Malay note, red thread in the wax that had sealed the jar.

That night a pain overcame him so he had to bite down on his belt not to cry out. The men watched without sympathy. Boss said he must be invalided out, must have been stung by a scorpion, though they found no mark.

Thompson’s camp was at the jungle periphery by a village with police post and paddy fields. Lofty and Hawtrey found him there, mocked Allardyce for failing the full mission.

He awakened from delirium, aware from nurses’ glances that he had made quite the racket. Word reached him that Davison and Bowler had found, sprawled in mengkuang, another CT, a woman close to death. The Brits put up barbed wire by the quag-side canal in fields from which she told them Ah Hoi’s fighters took food. A plane came over howling surrender terms. Rumours were that Baby-Killer would comply. Allardyce waited one evening to watch where there were breaks in the wire. When it was fully dark, lights swayed out of the blackest parts of the swamp like ignis fatuus. Later Allardyce heard that Ah Hoi himself had emerged wearing a woman’s blue jacket.

Wardieburn Camp received the men of B. Atomies reeking of the swamp. Some Army Air Corps man gave them a little cheer. An Ndebele warrant officer of the African Rifles regarded them as they took what were still wading steps, for debrief, ablutions, food. They lined up, scrubbed in their underwear by the infirmary.

—Fuck me, Trooper Carrick said of a nurse. Carrick looked more like a child than ever. —She can feel me cough anytime. The woman looked bored and she ignored him. She directed Allardyce away from the others into a room with a single window. A harried doctor took his temperature and had him describe the fever he had fought. He took a cup of Allardyce’s urine. Took his blood pressure and told him to take sugar in his tea. Referred to his notes and said, —Wait a bit. He left him sat like a boy on the edge of the examination table for many minutes until another man came in.

—Trooper Allardyce.

This newcomer was very tall and he stood to the full extent of it in a dark blue uniform. He was almost as thin as Allardyce after his jungle rations, and twice his age perhaps, his hair greying yellow, his skin pale. How he managed that in this country who knew?

—Let’s take a look at you.

—Sir, said Allardyce. The man put on him a blood-pressure cuff. —The other doctor already done this.

—Tell me about your sting, the man said.

—Sir, we couldn’t find it, but I was in a bit of a way.

—Not a good show to leave your chaps waiting in the swamp, was it? Pop your clothes off. The naval doctor put on tiny glasses. —Lie down. A tourniquet upon Allardyce’s arm. —Your CO was rather concerned about you.

—I’m alright. Allardyce’s veins came up and he watched his blood fill a vial.

—You say you’re feeling better.

—Yes. Sir.

—Sleeping alright? Allardyce blinked. —Eating alright? The man took up a razor and lifted one of Allardyce’s arms, shaved under it.

—Oh, what’s…Sir?

From a boxy radio-like thing upon the table the doctor pulled gauges on wires and gauzed their ends to Allardyce’s neck and newly smooth underarm, the sides of his groin and feet and hands, the centre of his forehead.

—What is this, sir?

—Stand up. Walk over there. Facing away from me.

Naked and sweating, tethered, Allardyce went to where two walls met.

—In the corner as if you were a naughty boy, that’s it.

No humour in that voice. On the walls were impurities, insect stains. Allardyce heard the fan, weak echo of the helicopter. He heard a click and tensed for current but felt nothing.

—Now I want you to tell me about Operation Sweep.

—We was deep in Telok Anson and I got bit—

—You did not, the man behind him said. —A scorpion has a stinger, not a mouth. I mean it has a mouth, of course, but you understand. A mouth is not with what it expresses its nature. If indeed it was a scorpion that got you, about which as you must know various of your comrades have expressed doubts. Tell me what happened.

—Starting when?

—You decide.

Allardyce was quiet awhile. —In the Beverley, he said. —No. In the air just outside the Beverley.

—Good. Carry on.

Allardyce described the descent. Mulcahy’s injury and spread-out self. He asked if it was true that Mulcahy would recover and the unseen man did not answer. Allardyce described the clearing.

—A helicopter came.

He said that again. He spoke of the coming and descent of the Sycamore between trees. The visitation in its wind. He told the corner inches from his eyes of swamp foulness. Empty CT camps. The rhythm of his own words lulled him and below it all he heard a crackling, a hiss? Allardyce told of that last camp, of the finding of the dead, where he was bitten or something.

Blinds closed behind him. A click and his shadow appeared on the wall from a photographic flash.

—What the fuck’s all this about? he said.

—Trooper, I’m going to put some shades on your eyes.

A mask of black cloth came down.

—Now I’m going to turn you around. Palms to me, arms up a bit. Please leave that mask in place. Two more shots. Very still now. Hold your breath. There. I’m going to put some headphones on you. No, let’s leave that blindfold. I’m going to play you some sounds. What I want you to do is put your right hand up for me in a fist—raise your index finger if you hear a voice.

Cups swallowed his ears and he heard the echo of his own blood that children with shells say is the sea. Under static a long whistling. It ushered in a chime, a bell, that struck three times. Allardyce’s forefinger twitched, but what if that voice he heard was not on the recording but the officer speaking softly, did that count? His finger stayed in a hook. Now radio whines sounded canine. Now emerged notes. Long slow faint sounds up down up down, not random.

Long after the sound was gone Allardyce waited in the darkness, hearing only the rotations of the fan. When he took off the headset and the blind he was alone.

Allardyce thumbed to KL with an air corpsman. The driver was older and the trooper’s questions about the Sycamore seemed to please him. —They’re ruddy miracles, he said. He waved his hands to illustrate rotor orientation and ground resonance and such.

In the chattering city rising every which way Allardyce found a bar he had not visited before wherein to sit with his paper buckling in humidity. Dear Irene, he wrote. Below that he wrote I and threw that sheet away and wrote You and This and The and If and When and Can and Its, and every time whatever word it was appalled him, not only failing to open into what he intended but foreclosing it, the The ruining the jungle, the You insulting her, I aggrandising his useless self, each word the death of what he would and could not communicate. He wrote Dear Irene again, and though even that was an injustice too it was as close as he could get to what he meant.

He woke after noon in a guesthouse he did not recall finding and with less money in his wallet than he expected.

Twice with urgency opaque to him he sought out fights. Once over what he said was inadequate change from waiters, once with a Royal Engineer over nothing he could subsequently bring to mind. The expertise with which he beat the man interested him. Approaching a cinema he saw a group from Big-Time Bravo still in the city, turned away from them for the temporary society of men of other regiments, commercial travellers, gamblers in the din of halls, planters slumming it, a woman he suspected was the daughter of some officer. She showed him photos she had taken of façades in the shop-house style and of aboriginals she called Sakai who looked to him more likely Semang. She strode into Brickfields and Pudu with her camera up.

—For Malays it’s a bad word, you know, Sakai, he said. They drank whiskey. Urgency again, give this a go. Before whatever was going to happen happened. She was seven years older. She paid for a hotel he could not afford. They murmured into each other’s mouths. He—Yes, yes. She—Come on then, come on. They groped drunkenly enough. She laughed when she discovered the stubble of his armpit. He woke in the morning and she was gone and Cheerio Chin Chin X was on a note affixed by safety pin to the crotch of his trousers. He felt himself and he was wet and ripe with heat- and drink-sweat and the aftermath of fucking.

He came back to base two days before he had to.

—Allardyce, you’ve been cross-posted.

—Eh?

—That’s exactly right, old son. A Squadron, ha ha.

So under Johnny Cooper, one of Stirling’s exalted originals, Allardyce patrolled a saddle between ridges east of KL. The tracker Raja found tiger marks. In the darkest hours came three thundering drawn-out declarations of the great cat’s curiosity. Whatever pall had marked him did not follow Allardyce out of B and though his new comrades called him Gabby for his quiet, they did not avoid him.

Every man had stories of intercessions—bootlaces that needed tying so a chap kneeled just as a sniper fired, streams of drinkable water on the last day of reserves. Conversely, Thomas, whom they called Egg, told of a bloke he’d met, a policeman, chasing the CT 9th Independent at Pengerang beach after days in the swamp, stumbling with thirst, finding above the tideline a still-capped Guinness bottle that renewed his faith in Jesus until within he found a letter from the company thanking him for help with this research into ocean currents. The squadron fell about.

Midsummer. Six weeks in. Deane-Drummond and a curious admiral visited. They left by Sycamore that hung and hesitated beneath its clattering. Lowered its nose. Allardyce closed his eyes at the memory of the last helicopter wake he’d witnessed, so he did not see but heard the receding two-sound spit of other or utter and a sudden grind and wretched pitch as the machine went up too fast and fell.

The men hacked downslope to where the chopper lay split on its side, deep in leaf-mould, trees shoved apart. They sought bloody bodies. But here, another of those miracles: the admiral stumbled, Deane-Drummond was cross-legged on the ground. The pilot crawled. The crash denied its sacrifice. When they were evacuated, Allardyce found that he was holding a twist of wire clenched and dredged up from the destruction. It was not gold but it glinted like gold. He heard what had happened had been a vortex ring state. That the helicopter had settled with power.

The dead were there somewhere, seemed like. They watched from behind Allardyce’s eyes, which it turned out was not so bad.

In what elsewhere would have been autumn, some of A Squadron flew to Kota Tinggi. Wood-and-thatch barracks for marines and RAF, Kampong Guards, Gurkhas, the Army REME. In growth beyond, the Jungle Warfare School.

Allardyce did not interrogate in himself why he sought who he sought. He only asked around.

—Sea Dayak chap? he said. —Called himself Tun. Tough lad. Talked quite a lot. About hantus and that.

—They all look alike to me, mate. Never heard of him. Does he owe you money?

On his second day someone called to him.

—Hallo, Allardyce. ’Allo!

—Bowler! I was just thinking about you.

—Heard you lot had got here, Bowler said. —Heard someone was asking after a chatty Iban.

Allardyce said, —So you lot’ve decided you’re talking to me now? They eyed each other. —How’s the old Bravo?

—Can’t complain, Bowler said.

—And they say nothing changes.

—Arf arf. Welcome back to KT. I think he’s gone, by the way. Tun. Maybe I can tell you about the antu gerasi and the like instead.

—I don’t give a toss about wogs’ fairy stories.

—So you say, Bowler said. —Me, I’ll follow the Mandai, which is a real river, mind. In Ulu Ai it pours into a pothole with no bottom and it’ll take you to Sebayan. The Happy Hunting Grounds.

As Deane-Drummond welcomed the troopers to Operation Poetic, Allardyce told Bowler how the man had cheated death. —I saw it, he whispered. —I saw it come down.

The men did not look at each other during such helicopter talk.

Deane-Drummond said, —Six years ago one Sakai named Tanah was hanged for the murder of Trooper J. O’Leary of the Malayan Scouts as was, eighty miles north-east off Bertangga. Headman Batin Bujang would have had his neck stretched alongside Tanah for that too if he hadn’t already departed. O’Leary, truth be told, was a bit of an odd duck, away with the fairies, alright that’ll do, fell behind his troop, made contact with the tribesmen, which it seems might always have been his intention. Had long been rather taken with them, though they not so much with him as it turned out. It was CTs pushed them to do him in, we’re given to understand. So case closed. Only over the years one hears a bit of scuttlebutt that there’s someone still out there who’s avoided Their Majestys’ Pleasure in all this, looks as if he might have been the real éminence grise. Protected, including by said Tanah taking the literal fall. Now, you men have been chosen for your skills, this is small group, handpicked, need-to-know. Sensitive because this time we’re not cozying up to the locals to sour them on the Commies but to chivvy them to give up one of their own. And there are, though I stress at this point these are unverified, rumours also of some sort of collaboration or at least cooperation with international groups, too. Africans among them. Yes, quite. You’re all aware of the various ruckuses going on and how the Reds are capitalising on them. And just in case all that sounds a bit too easy, we don’t even know the name of the chap supposedly really responsible for O’Leary’s demise. That’s right, we’re looking for someone in a jungle. What we have reason to believe is that whoever ordered O’Leary done in, for reasons which our boffins are keen to verify, is a bomoh, a witch doctor. Which means he should be somewhat easier to find than a random Johnny. Downside being that our little forest friends are a superstitious lot when it comes to the juju and may take some persuasion to hand him over. So. Softly softly and so forth. Questions?

No hand went up.

—Look. We want this man alive if indeed alive he still is. I’m told you lot, you lot in particular, I mean, rather than the rest of 21, God love them, are for a variety of reasons the chaps to find him. Alright? Shipping out in ten days. For now, time for a little extra special training. Ah, such a sweet chorus of groans I hear.

Close-quarters battle practice through trenches and pits where painted targets swung into view and sandbag enemies skulked for bayonetting. —I’ve just spent months shooting actual CTs in actual fucking swamps, Bowler said. —I’m insulted.

A lecture from a thin and balding civilian about locals’ beliefs and behaviours taught Allardyce how much he knew already. At twilight on the third day a young corporal of the WRAC approached Allardyce.

—Trooper? she said. She was brisk while the men made ribald noises at the sight of her. —Trooper Allardyce? You’re wanted.

Allardyce asked what this was all about and she only led him past yammering fruit bats to the landing field where an MP waited at a Sycamore, its blades sagging in repose. The corporal took her seat by the pilot and indicated Allardyce into the back.

—Evening, Allardyce, the pilot said. The man did not turn around and Allardyce could not see him clearly.

It was all but fully night when they lifted off. First time in a quaking thing like this. The horizon was a startling line at the edge of things. The instruments glimmered. What flares or signs guided them, Allardyce could not discern.

A half-hour in the benthic sky and the Sycamore banked and descended.

From what Allardyce could see in the hot dark, it was a lower, smaller camp than that he’d left. He heard animal sounds and the drone of power. Sepia light shed from lamps and windows. Beyond the landing place the silhouettes of huts. Deep jungle.

—Welcome to Awfulness.

—Beg pardon?

—Camp Awfulness, the pilot said. Put his finger to the side of his nose for hush-hush.

Allardyce followed the corporal’s torch between clots of attar to a windowless longhouse cast in concrete. He sensed the motion of snakes. Viper cobra coral krait. He followed into a small unlit entrance hall, two chairs by its walls.

—There. The woman pointed to another door. Dim light came through the glass window therein. —Left, she said. —Along the hall. Knock on the door at the end. The last door. Without a window. At the end, yes?

The corridor was eight yards long and low, lit by one fitful bulb. Allardyce came into it through one of the furthermost of three pairs of doors facing each other on the way to the windowless seventh, where he must make himself known. Through the porthole in the door facing him he saw shadow lines of a room twin to that he’d come through, chairs and all. Through the next the same. Allardyce wiped sweat from his face.

He knocked at the last room. A man called, —Come.

A larger chamber. Allardyce faced a lamplit desk, maps papers a typewriter pens, an ashtray full of stubs, books. An oscilloscope whose wavering on-screen line set the room faintly green. On a tableside a battered reel-to-reel machine like those in the language labs he loved. Upon these items Allardyce saw stones, through each of them a natural hole.

Behind it all stood the navy doctor who had examined him at Wardieburn. His uniform jacket was on his chair-back. He had rolled up his sleeves. A woman stood by him, arms folded. Cream civilian blouse and skirt, her hair pinned up. Mid-thirties perhaps but the lamp was faint enough that he could not make out her face well, only a cast to its lines as if she was braced for disappointment.

—Trooper Allardyce, the pale man said. Shall we call him Milkman? —We were impressed with your results.

—Sir?

—We have a few more tests.

—Sir, where are we? What’s—

—Intriguing circumstances about that CT in Telok Anson, no? What your CO reported was that you definitely heard something moving, then you froze. And then of course there was something, someone up there, but she had long shuffled off this mortal coil. I needn’t tell you you’re to speak of this conversation and facility to no one, Trooper. In any case, there were aspects to that encounter, and various other factors, that provoke our interest in you. Some perhaps you may have noted in yourself. Others certainly have. It’s no easy thing to encourage the reporting of having the willies, as it were, in any service. Particularly not in the army, if I may say so.

From his desk he picked up an envelope.

—Of course most of what does get through to us is codswallop but every so often one hears something potentially important. You’ve not written to your family for a while, Trooper. Glum little letters to your aunt but to your ma not once. No criticism intended. Indeed, ties that bind do rather bind, after all. And you’ve had contact. How did you find it?

—Sir?

—Killing. How did you find killing?

Allardyce said, —I don’t know. When he saw that was not enough he said, —Well it’s the job, isn’t it?

The officer considered. —Now, this operation that you’re on, he said.

—Poetic, sir?

—I’m sure you’ve got wind that this is likely your regiment’s swan song. There are only so many jungles. But it’s hardly going to be the end of counterinsurgency or special ops. Far from it. Very far. And I can’t see you happily trudging about a parade ground.

The woman leaned in. It made the shadows of her face horrid. She whispered to Milkman.

—I ain’t going to join the navy, sir, Allardyce said.

The man smiled. —No indeed.

—I think I might’ve bloody had it with this, sir. Why don’t you fly me to Kota Tinggi and I’ll take it from there and do my job and you can go to…well, you can go to sea. Sir.

—Trooper Allardyce, what would you like to do? Would you like to know? What’s behind Poetic? The real work going on? Does knowledge intrigue you? Are you interested in a transfer? In new kinds of operations? Why do you think the O’Leary file’s being reopened? Intel suggests Malaya has visitors with very little business here. Do you know what the African National Congress is? Jolly good.

Milkman went to the tape machine and pressed play. Two voices mid-exchange. Allardyce was not confident in the up-down of Kuoyii Chinese. An Englishman, he thought, though not this one before him. And a Chinese woman. Speaking of a gate? Was that it?

Where is the gate? the man said on the tape.

I don’t know.

The man said, Why did you leave—then something obscure, and the woman said something about dying perhaps and something else.

—What’s Choo Koo Gooey? Allardyce said.

—Shhh, the Milkman said.

The man on the tape said, Who was the visitor? What the woman said Allardyce did not understand. The man said the question again and this time Allardyce made out that she said, No visitor.

—You’re listening, the Milkman said, —to the interrogation of one of the CTs Davison and Bowler captured.

We know there was a visitor and we have the pamphlets, said the man on the tape. Talk to me or I will turn off the tape recorder again. Who was the visitor?

A comrade! Even on the popping tape you could hear her fear. He calls them. From far.

The Milkman turned the machine off. —Lot of dead air after that, he said. —Did you know there are splits in the movement?

The woman said, —Do let’s get on. Her voice was austerely posh and older-sounding than she looked. She lifted three small valises onto the desk.

The Milkman said, —Very well. I want you to open one of these, Trooper Allardyce. You choose which. Take out what’s inside and have a look at it. Then I want you to tell us something about it.

—Sir?

The woman said, —Tell us a story.

—Could I have a glass of water, sir?

—You may not. Begin.

Allardyce folded his arms. Unfolded them and put his hands out and ran his fingertips along the cases, one two three. Touched that on the right again and made as if to spring its clasps then switched abruptly to open the one in the middle. He took out what was nestled on dark velvet. A straw-wrapped, cracked, broken earthenware base, of a bowl or lamp or some antique such. Marked with dark decorations. He held it in one hand and hefted it and looked at it close. —What do you want me to— he said, then stopped. The man and woman watched.

Allardyce regarded the mottles in its surface. He shook his head and put the broken thing back in its housing and closed the lid.

The doctor blinked. —Alright, he said.

—Well, the woman said. —Well well.

Allardyce opened the carrier on the left. From velvet he unpinned and took out a tiny hoop of gold. An earring. He held it to his eye to look through it at the room and his inquisitors. It was as if he had held this thing before.

He said, —This is more like it. He kept talking, at a clip, no notion why he said what he said and striving to be unbothered by that. —There was someone. A woman. No, a man. Asleep like what’s that story? Like a baby in the wood? In the forest. They was lost.

From where had that come? There arose in him a sense of watchers, of being watched, of a terrible injunction. Of a thing with no business being here, not in his hand nor this room nor anywhere.

He blinked.

Gasped and something grim went through him and he dropped the earring into its container and stepped back.

—Fuck that, he said. —I’m fucking done with that.

The man and woman watched him. The woman leaned and whispered again and the man nodded several times.

—Good, the doctor said. He stowed the three carriers away. —Calm down, Allardyce. That’s very good. That was O’Leary’s if you can believe it. Hardly standard uniform. There’s only one more thing.

He clasped his hands behind his back and stood up straight. The woman took up the same position.

—All you have to do now, Milkman said, —is leave.

—Sir?

—We’re almost done. Overall I’d say fairly flying colours. One more step, so listen: I want you to leave this room and go back the way you came. He pointed to the door. —If you really are happy as you were, keep this jaunt to yourself, leave by the same door through which you came in. Third on the right as you go back. And we’ll say no more about it. Tomorrow you go on Poetic, then you’ll be back to A, and so forth. But. If you’d like to learn more about some other very important work, especially important at this particular moment in history, if you’d like to be considered for a new role, there’s one last interview. In which case, enter the second door on your left. Wherein you will find someone. Someone will find you. Answer his questions and there you are. If you’ve any questions of your own, I’m afraid that I can’t or won’t answer them. Are you ready, Trooper Allardyce? Then go.

Allardyce turned and opened the door. In the hall the bulb still glowed. He looked back and his interrogators said nothing and did not move. He stepped out and the door closed behind him.

He walked the stifling hall past the first inner windows. Perhaps light had reduced, an ebb in the generator, or perhaps something had got to him, to quicken his heartbeat, something from these small hours and from the officer’s nonsense and the claustrophobic mildew smell of poor-quality cement. He looked back and there was no floor-line glow beneath the door of the room he had left, and he heard no sound. There came to him the image of the man and woman still standing motionless in windowless blackness, unmoving since he had gone, and he could not banish it and he went quicker.

A turning over in his stomach, an emotion to which he could not put a name.

Allardyce stopped. The second door to his left, to which he had been directed, was no longer closed. It was ajar onto perfect black.

Well that was the point. So he took another step or two without knowing why he should tremble, and he really was thirsty, it would not have killed them to let him drink. The threshold. For a last questioning.

He pushed at the door.

Within in the cut of illumination from the underlit hall he saw a chair ready for him. And there, he made out the edge of another, facing it.

And Allardyce stopped.

The air clogged in his throat. He tried to make a noise. To breathe. He could not. He backed away.

Something had come. In the dark part of that room something waited.

Allardyce made a new sound.

He veered back from the dark doorway and his head hit the bulb and it burned and swung on its cord and began blinking off and on and all the shadows seesawed and Allardyce now gripped for purchase on the walls and floor, pushing himself away from that opening, beyond which in the shade he made out neither motion nor presence yet there possessed him an aghast countercertainty that he would see when the light fell on that second chair that it was occupied, and his throat stopped up at what might turn to him in welcome.

Trooper Allardyce sped up backwards staring into the opening doorway and the dark beyond and took his desperate retrograde way not breathing still with his eyes widening and what drew near? And he pushed without looking back down the route he had taken, staring fixedly at the blackness, shaking as he did, gasping, pushing through the final the other door and turning in the end to stumble-run and crying out because all the light went then, because dark engulfed him as he came, and wet heat and silence and the smell of old forest.

[2]

The caller had told her his name was Jock Crooke. Maur searched the internet. He wrote often for magazines with names like Socialist Clarion.

I wouldn’t go for that though, he said when they met in Rose’s Cafe. He held his cup of milky tea as if uneasy with his own heavyset strength: Crooke seemed to her a man expecting a fight. Under that, a hesitancy in him put Maur in mind of Des. He was younger than she, though not by much. Fifteen years in London, he told her, but he still sounded broad Liverpool. I’d go for something bigger, he said. I’ve done stuff for The Mirror and a few others. Schoolkids came past beyond the windows, hooting, showing off. I get you being careful, Jock said. I’m trying to talk to all the families. I won’t lie, some are more up for it than others. I don’t want to upset anyone. Well, any of you I mean. Okay, so here it is. He leaned in. Does the name Julia McCamber mean anything to you?

The previous year, Private Julia McCamber had died at Shackingham. She was eighteen, in secondary training. She had been on guard duty. Another two shots.

How had Maur not heard this? She sat still and watched Jock sketch out a scene with his hands.

People called Shackingham the Shack, he said. It’s always had a bad rep, even before the pattern.

Pattern? Were you a soldier?

No, but I’ve got friends who are.

November 2000, he told her. Private Joe Philipose was nineteen. A bullet from his rifle, just one, passed up through his chin and out of the top of his head. A few years before that, Private Lee Farrier took enough sleeping pills that he didn’t wake. He wasn’t on prescription. No one knew where he got them. It hurt Maur to learn that Ewan was not the first there to die.

Obviously it’s not exact matches, Jock said. I didn’t make the connection. Ewan was older, he’d seen service, he wasn’t army, not the same. His paperwork wasn’t in with the rest of them. Different CO: Jervis was in charge when Jules was there. It was Jules’s mum got in touch with me to begin with. I’m not pretending to know what’s going on. I’m saying something needs looking at.

Maur said, What do you want from me?

For now I just have a couple of questions.

Maur told Jock what Robert had told her. When she came home, she took down the cardboard box from the wardrobe and split the seal.

Jock’s article came out in Private Eye. Have you read it? she said to Des. If I’d known any of this. The police had not established primacy: she read that what that meant was anyone might have interfered with evidence.

As if she’d just been waiting. Her angry energy was back. She recalled the flatness of her early efforts. It had been all blank and blah, as if she’d reached the end of everything, not her son, as if every task of every day had been as weighty as that of doing right by him, all carried out with the slow motions of the drowned. Was Maur wrong? Unfair to her earlier self? She wouldn’t ever be sure. It had been a long time since she had read so quickly as she did Jock’s piece.

Maur received an email. You don’t know us we are Cybill and Mark. We have been talking to Jock Crooke. We are the parents of Julia McCamber. I don’t know about your lad but theres no way our Jules did what they say.

The Observer and The Mirror picked up Jock’s threads. The police defended their investigations. Jock interviewed ballistics experts. In Balham, at the Philipose house, Maur sat below a vivid metal crucifix while Maryam and Daniel brought coffee. They shuffled like people older than they were. They and their daughter Di, and Cybill and Mark McCamber, and Lee Farrier’s sister Bella, sat on chairs brought in from the kitchen. Jock mooted enquiries and public meetings. By the icon on the walls were pictures of the Philipose children. Joe in his soldiering uniform, Joe playing rugby. Have a think, Jock said. I’m sure you want to talk about this together and I’m going to get out of your hair so you can.

When he did, Di said, What’s his agenda? She radiated sulky energy. Why’s he doing this?

I mean…, Maur said. You don’t have to agree with his politics to—

Of course we want to know, Maryam Philipose said. Her husband nodded with his eyes closed. But perhaps he is a troublemaker, I think?

I fucking want to make trouble though, Maur thought, to her own surprise. Later, when she told Jock of that discussion, he shrugged and said, I’ve had worse, I mean Di’s Di, isn’t she? She comes around but she wants to be convinced. And Maryam and Daniel are from Syria, they probably had to get used to keeping their heads down.

The thing about me, Maur heard Cybill McCamber say, is that’s why I got in touch with Jock in the first place. I want to make          trouble. A white woman, hair up, pursing her lips and lined before her time, she inserted that pause before the last word to mouth a curse in it.

—

The MOD had escorted the families’ investigators through the base. They know how it’ll look if they say no, Jock said. Details reached them, he disclosed, from some mole or other. He intimated a sense of the camp’s disarray.

At their first press conference, he reported that Joe’s rifle had been set to automatic. With no matter what gentleness he had pulled that trigger it should have fired twice at least. As had Jules’s. And Ewan’s. Compared to their double taps, Joe’s one-shot death was a deeper mystery.

—

I can’t keep hold of my things, Maur said. Literally I don’t know where anything is.

Age comes for us all, Sonya said. Of course you’re scattered.

Brass are saying the weapon was faulty, Maur said. Joe’s. She can still label the diagram: STANAG, bullpup, flash suppressor. Mechanism, automatic, repetition.

Fuckers, Sonya said.

You thought we’d never get them, Maur thought. Did not look at her. So did I. I let you persuade me.

Who the fuck knows how Ewan fits into it? Maur said. The RAF’s being even more hush-hush than the army. He must’ve known people there. To be honest I think some of the families don’t think I should be part of it, Sonn.

Fuck them. What about Jock? What does he think’s happened?

Something I like about him, Maur said. If he has theories he won’t say, even to me. He says for now it should all be about questions, not answers.

—

Had Ewan been desolate beyond all words? Targeted by some vendetta?

You know how this goes, Jock said to Maur. I get a whiff of interesting stuff, I promise I’ll tell you as soon as I can.

What does that mean?

Look, when you start tugging at stuff like this in any organisation, you always turn up rumours. That’s where you get conspiracy theories. Not because conspiracies don’t exist but because they do, loads of them. And because we’re mystical monkeys and we see shapes in everything. So I have to be extra cautious. Does that makes sense?

Please just tell me what you’re fucking hearing.

Do a bit of digging, Jock had said, you turn up unpleasant characters. I’ve got mates were in the services for years. I’ve got nothing against soldiers, just what they’re used for. I’m no fan of brass. But even then. He shrugged. They’re not all idiots or thugs. Even I can be shocked by the real sods in the services. Shocked, not surprised, mind. Not everyone at that place is a peach, let’s put it that way. Please don’t put me in this position, Maur. Do you think I haven’t had people mess things up before by talking out of turn?

Out of turn?

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I promise I will tell you if there’s something there.

—

Raj had rummaged for her. He brought Maur documents. 15 Psyops, he said. Does that mean anything to you? It’s a tri-service unit, army RAF navy. Secret as fuck. You think Ewan was with them?

Maur said, What? I don’t know.

What you told me he said to you. Got me wondering.

Di started a web page. The internet’ll drive you mad, Jock said. Maur dipped into fora dedicated to secrets and parapolitics. The toxic intricacy of the discussions pulled at and repelled her at once.

The Shackingham Barracks Campaign put out its own report. The police apologised for failures in the investigations into the deaths of Lee Farrier and of Ewan Towns.

Maur received anonymous letters.

Wishing all best and sorry for your loss.

STOP UNDERMINING BRITAIN you make me sick.

You son was a paid killer I’m sorry but chickens come home to roost.

I was there it was diabolical I got out as soon as I could didn’t look back that camp is a shithole.

She sent Jock a photocopy of that last. Interesting, he said. I’m juggling some investigations, have to be discreet. Might have to go off-grid a bit, bear with me.

Where’s off-grid?

If I told you that would be on-grid, wouldn’t it? I know people with places where I can hole up, very useful sometimes.

That Joe was a winer, the message read, and I am not proud of the stick we give him but just the usual stuff. Nothing worse but he couldn’t take it if you told me he done himself in I would believe it. Except for the rifle like that. I didn’t know the others except Jules was all right and I don’t think she done this.

—

The Philiposes gave a radio interview. Their muttering sorrow. They said Joe was unhappy, they believed the barracks culture was ill disciplined, with designated scapegoats. The producers interviewed Maur but did not use it.

Jules didn’t want to worry me, Cybill said, but a mother knows, don’t you? Eh, Maur? I knew she weren’t happy. There was people there making her life a misery. She was nervous. She was scared and that wasn’t her.

Ewan being bullied? Des said when Maur raised the idea. He made a sceptical noise. Why? He wasn’t even one of theirs.

Maybe that’s why, Maur said.

Hazing gone wrong. She did not trust her stab of eagerness to believe it. Would that be better? Good and bad at games? Whipping boys, whipping girls, pecking orders. Young men running from a visitor accidentally dead in the woods, some brutal joke to mock the Rock Ape gone oh blimey Charlie a bit too far.

Of course nothing’s more important than pursuing this truth. You wouldn’t be human though, would you?, not in some instants to miss having grieved and having let it alone.

—

What is my part in Ewan’s despair? Maur made herself think that because she wanted not to. It hurt enough to stop her breath and then she was angry with him again, if that’s what he did. But even if so, had he taken a weapon and ammunition from the store as he should not have been able to and with that awful intent raised it in the woods in strange hidden reverse and with, what, abandon, experiment, grief, a curiosity to which she could not imagine anyone would be immune on meeting the dark gaze of a gun, the weighing of the worth of that epiphany while its metal vector undid you, even if all that, Maur had still been lied to, hadn’t she?

Alone in the living room Ewan had never seen she whispered his name. She said, You little terror.

Good news or bad news? Jock said.

Good.

No, always start with bad. They won’t hold a public inquiry. But something more’s rumbling than I expected. Sir James Duggan QC, if you please, is putting together a report. He paused grandly. But I don’t think we should cooperate.

Why? Mark McCamber said.

Because it’s not an inquiry. What we want is everything in the open.

They’ve sort of got us, though, haven’t they? Di said. I agree with you, Jock, but something’s better than nothing, isn’t it? And if we say no it’s us who’ll look obstructive.

I mean it’s a start, isn’t it? Cybill said. It’s a          start. Her curse-pause. But we keep the pressure on them.

Maur walked to the Tube with Jock. Quickly she said, What if it turns out that, I mean—

How do you say it? What kind of a person, already a bad, the worst, mother, can’t countenance—it sounds terrible, sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is no that’s the other way about isn’t it well that’s no less sharp; how could it be better to have him—she wasn’t saying she wanted him to have been caught up in the abyss of some scheme, some predatory secret, only wouldn’t there be a certain way it was easier had this been done to him than if he really had, you know—

Maur said, I mean if Ewan did actually do this I mean— She sounded to herself as if her vocal cords were wire under strain.

Jock said, Whatever we find out, whatever any of them did, things weren’t right there. Those kids didn’t let anyone down.

I’m not so worried about them being the letdowns, she thought. Yes, she said. Robert, you remember he said Ewan was different. But now Maur was considering when and how her son had changed. When he was little? The night by the end house. Before that, also, though. When he was born—he was changed then from what she’d thought he’d be. Then yes in the service, too, of course. It might have been easier to bear what he’d done to himself, if he had, if that was the only change, the great change, if he’d been scoured by some secret and left raw. With that image—her son flayed—intruded another, from the year of his birth, the girl, you know, that napalm girl, that was war though that girl was not a soldier. (Phan Thị Kim Phúc.) Raw like that. When she’d first seen that picture and whenever since and now in her mind, Maur’s aghast attention had passed from the girl to a boy in the foreground, still clothed, his eyes full of not only terror but sorrow too, for which the girl had in that moment no space, his pain not of fire but vastation. Also excoriated. (He was Phan Thanh Tam, Maur did not know these names.) There is rawness and rawness. The boy’s expression, Maur would have sworn on a pile of Bibles, she’d seen in echo in the playgrounds of London, in a thousand young faces, in bewilderment at the sharp end of even small cruelties. In her own house. God no how could she that wasn’t fair, on her or anyone let alone on that girl, to equate them. Flaying by fire with witnessing it let alone with call them ordinary childhood agonies and tests. Napalm was napalm. Maur, you must not flatten distinctions or degrees of agony or circumstance, to believe, still, in the napalm of experience.

Cybill, Jules’s mother, worked at a supermarket in Hove. For all her days off campaigning she kept her job. Imagine the headlines, she said. Heartless Bosses Sack Bereaved Army Mum. She came down for a public meeting at a Maida Vale school hall and was quickly the main event. Afterwards Maur smoked outside the gym scuffing her feet on painted marks for basketball as Cybill went person to person, a brisk figure handing out photocopied leaflets with her own number upon them. One man who took one and read it slowly nodded and looked directly at Maur. He was in his thirties, public-school good-looking, wearing a baseball cap with a doggish eagerness and the air of someone younger.

Mrs. Towns? I’m Tom Strude. I’m— he said. Then, Well, what it is, I’m a padre. What it is, I’ve been at Shackingham in fact. I’m a priest.

Maur kept her face still. You knew Ewan? she said.

Sadly no, before my time. But I’ve heard…People who met him say he was a fine young man.

I’m an atheist.

Jolly sensible. I’m Tom. Sorry, I said. I was wondering if we might talk.

But in a Starbucks on the Edgware Road he struggled for words. Said he couldn’t promise anything but. Said the thing was. He glanced around.

Should you not be here? Maur said.

It’s not quite that.

Said he was so sorry for everything. There are plenty of us, he said, who think this has all been shabby. The barracks is a very different place now than it was.

When? Julia died about a fucking minute ago.

You can’t build a decent future if you don’t engage with what goes wrong, he said. I love the army. I understand how that must sound to you but I mean it. I want us—the army—to be at our best. I’m sure I’m not saying anything you don’t know but to be frank some of my colleagues don’t like what you lot are up to. It’s the hammer-nail problem maybe. When what you’re about is facing enemies, everything looks like an enemy.

How dare you assume I’m not, she did not say.

But there are also those of us who have your back, he said. And if you have questions, please…If I can help. For example, I might say, I am saying, that if you were keen, or Jock was, to, I don’t know, look into something, I might advise bypassing such-and-such a person and having a word with so-and-so instead.

Why are you telling me this? Maur said.

Part of my job, he said, and I know it sounds incredibly self-important, but of my calling…He let the silence be an apology…. is being there for the lads. And the girls, all of them. They know they can come to me in confidence, and they do. I’m sure Jock’s excellent at what he does but there’s something…It wouldn’t be fair to say I don’t trust him but he and I wouldn’t see eye to eye.

So what? And we would?

He didn’t answer that. He gave her his number and she gave him hers, though when she told Sonya the story she said, He can go fuck himself. That night for the first time in a long time Maur wept for her mother.

Lee Farrier’s father told the Telegraph it was a tragedy. I won’t pass comment on how other people deal with their loss, he said. We know Lee was a troubled young man and we miss him every day. We’re proud of him and grateful for the army’s support.

Maur emailed Lee’s sister Bella. My dad once told me to stay out of the dead’s business. If you want to keep in touch about what we’re doing in the campaign just drop me a word. Otherwise hoping you’re okay. M.

She doesn’t answer me any more either, Jock said.

Was this envy? That Bella could love her brother without that love demanding such persistent suspicion, such pestering at what might not be decodable? To prove itself?

The coroner ruled out fresh inquests. Jock showed Maur and Cybill the transcript of his interview with an anonymous retired major. Everything since 1992’s basically treachery as far as he’s concerned, Jock said.

I left after Options for Change, I wasn’t going to be part of that. How many men per officer at Shackingham then? Fifty? Bloody bureaucrats. I still hear things, mind you. Parties, lads in with the girls, rubber johnnies on the parade ground, boys will be boys but where there’s no control you will get bullying. Hell in a handbasket. I’m not sorry to be out of it.

So, what, we’re nostalgic for Good Old Army Discipline now? Maur said. Her voice a parade-ground parody.

No one’s saying that, Jock said.

I think he is a bit though, Maur told Sonya. Sentimental.

Well it does sound like this snitch knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t it? Sonya said. Things changing with outsourcing and that? Thing about being a lefty is that all kinds of capitalism are equally bad but some are more equally bad than others.

Tom Strude, the posh young priest, texted Maur. His message read: Sangster. Might be worth a poke around. Please protect your source.

Jock’s office was in an exhausted part of Highgate where buildings leaned into each other. He shared a floor of a converted house with two other journalists, Jane and Simone. They called their agency Dig and Scribble. There was a little plaque. A communal corridor full of bikes, mail on uneven tables. Pull Closed, a note inside the door. Thank You So Much for This Kind Suggestion, someone had written beneath.

In the cramped antechamber-cum-library, once a living room, a tall young man with his hair in cornrows nodded at Maur. A younger boy hunched on a dirty sofa patched with parcel tape did not look up.

You’re Nick, aren’t you? Maur said to the older. I’m sorry, I forget your name, she said to his brother, who did not respond.

Mum and Dad are in there, Nick said.

Thanks for coming, Maur love, Cybill said. I wanted us to check in.

Mark McCamber did not speak.

Cybill went over their last meeting, their plans, what faced them, the different attitudes she discerned among the bereaved. I said to Mark, there’s us, she said, in this room, and there’s some of the others, no disrespect meant, who aren’t as committed, you might say.

Jock showed no impatience. Sat overlooked by political posters. Maur made out names and shorthand in his cacography on cork noticeboards. MIKE; HOLBORN; V IMP; MOD; HOU-PARL. She looked at a whiteboard on the back of his door, saw her own address, above it MFLAT.

Do you know the name Sangster? she said. You’re not the only one who gets tips, Jock.

Jock and Cybill wrote it down. Maur did not give them Strude’s name. Said it had been anonymous.

It was nice to see your lads, she said to Cybill on the phone. How are they? It’s got to be hard. It’s hard sometimes, isn’t it, trying to juggle everything, make time for everyone.

I better go, Cybill said after a silence, and hung up.

She’s fucking terrifying, Sonn, Maur said. Fair enough it isn’t my business. Just broke my heart, the sight of them, just sitting there quietly. You have to admire her I suppose. She’ll just stick at it. Whatever the impact. On anyone. It was her started all this, got in touch with Jock. Whatever you think of her.

And you didn’t, you mean? Sonya said. I see you getting at yourself.

Well she did and I didn’t. Look at what she’s doing. For Jules. But then you see those boys….

Maur thought, Someone let Jules down, but not Cybill.

Sangster left a while back, Jock said. He used to do PT at Shackingham. Civvy street now, no one seems to know where. I’m on it. From what I hear he left just before things would’ve got tricky for him. Bullying. Sexual assault.

Fuck, Maur said.

Yeah. He had a reputation.

How long was he there?

Quite a while. Even back when Ewan visited. Yes, he said. Exactly.

And his name hadn’t come up?

Not until you mentioned it.

How could that be?

Well, Jock said. Quite.

Maur had called Strude.

What do you think of Duggan? she said.

He’s an honourable man. You’re in good hands. Entre nous some of my colleagues are in a bit of a conniption about it. Which I’m pleased about.

Who’s Sangster?

I barely knew him.

Why was Ewan there? she said. Was this a purple thing?

Strude laughed that she knew the tri-service nickname. Very good, he said. I have no idea.

Would you speak at one of our meetings?

Finally he said, Don’t you think it’s more helpful to have an inside man?

—

Duggan received them. Maur looked out from his chambers to a square where legal clerks drank coffee under sunshades. Duggan was gaunt and balding and expensively dressed and his voice was soft. He said that he wanted to explain his remit and to ask what, if possible, they would ask of him.

Mark McCamber said, No one respects us. Everyone looked at him. Maur had rarely heard him speak. Cybill stared at her husband.

How dare they? Mark said. That’s what I want to know. They want us to shut up and to go away. Our children died. And they say what we should do is shut up.

Mark was a nurse. A big man with gentle movements suited to his work. His skin was ashy now, his hair Maur would swear whiter than when she had met him bare months before. Cybill’s lips thinned as he spoke and Maur saw her pride.

Duggan said, I see. I see. He said, I must tell you I understand your anger, Mr. McCamber.

Later in his researches Maur returned at Duggan’s invitation. Two men were with him in the room. One in uniform, an RAF observer. The other a haggard and brittle man around Maur’s age, in an indifferent suit.

I’m Nicholas Teller, he said. I was CO of Shackingham when your son visited us.

I know who you are, she said.

I’m glad to be here, Teller said. He raised his right hand, then lowered it before he could bite his nails. I welcome this process. I’m not just an ex–army officer, I’m a father, Mrs. Towns. I want to extend my sympathy to you again for what happened under my command.

Again?

I’m sorry?

It’s years since Ewan died and this is the first time you’ve said that. Or that we’ve met.

He nodded. Well, he said. I’m sorry to correct you but you’re mistaken. Of course it was an extremely distressing time. For all of us. For you most of all of course. Perhaps you recall the inquest? We spoke afterwards?

Maur hated her own uncertainty.

Well we did in fact meet and I was able to say to you, though I don’t of course expect that you should remember…

What, had they had tea and biscuits in some room overlooking a car park? Maur kept her face cold.

Where’s Sangster? she said.

That changed the room. Teller and whoever this fucking RAF guy was glanced at each other.

In the photographs Jock had sourced Sangster was a small tough man of vulpine cast. Maur could not imagine a confrontation between him and her son; they seemed from different stories.

I assure you, Ms. Towns, Duggan said, we will summon everyone relevant and leave no stone unturned.

Are you going to get him back from wherever he is?

You have my word, Duggan said.

Get him to tell you what he did to those kids? she said. She felt Teller’s hatred.

—

Duggan? She shrugged. I think we might…Well. I won’t jinx it.

What did Teller actually say? Des said.

You’ll never guess, Maur said. Mistakes were made. And, you know, lessons?

He said, They’ve been learned?

They have. At least he showed up.

I should think so.

Well, it was another bloke, Jervis, in charge when Jules and Joe died, and he won’t even do that. “Declines Duggan’s invitation.” Prick.

She didn’t say, because she did not care, that Jock had heard Jervis was bricking it. Had accused the campaign of encouraging harassment and intimidation, reported loiterers outside his house at night.

Di called Maur. It’s over, she said. Maybe you heard. Between Cybill and Mark.

What? No, I didn’t hear anything.

I wondered if she’d told you.

We’re not close, Di, Maur said. How do you know?

He told me. I called to ask her something about the campaign…anyway. It was him who answered. He said he might move back to St. Vincent.

Oh no, Maur said. Poor Cybill. Poor all of them. Those boys. Christ. It’s common, isn’t it, for families to break up after…But now, with everything about to hit phase two? How’s Cybill going to manage with the boys?

I think they’re going with him.

When she came to London on campaign business Cybill asked if she could stay with Maur. Every penny saved.

How are you doing? Maur said.

Me? Cybill said. I’m fine, Maur darling, I’m doing alright.

None of my business, Maur said, I just, I wanted to see if—

You know what it’s like. It puts a strain on things, doesn’t it? It’s been on the cards a while.

They stayed up and drank wine.

I miss my lads though, Cybill said. I’ll see them as soon as I can. I just…After silence she continued. Jules was my special girl. You know I went to Shackingham?

I was there.

No, before the campaign. Just after. After she passed.

She had approached soldiers in the pubs of that blank town, she said. She would not let them ignore her. ’Scuse me, love, sorry to bother you. Do you recognise this photo, love? Teenage girl throwing back her shoulders, proud of her uniform. Maur thought of Ewan in those pubs. Sitting in corners into which Cybill, years later, would lean.

Me and Jules, we was always…Cybill crossed her fingers. It wasn’t easy for her, not for any of my lot, there’s idiots everywhere and them being mixed-race and that, I mean. I stormed down to the school one time when I heard there was this one girl giving her trouble. Cybill laughed. Jules was livid with me. She was more sensitive than her brothers, girls are, aren’t they? Sometimes when she was really little she’d get so scared and she was too little to tell me why. Are you…Cybill was not usually shy. Are you getting messages on your phone? Silent ones?

Nuisance calls? Maur said.

Well depends, doesn’t it, what you mean? Might be people building up a nerve to say something important. Jock says brass are nervous. Someone told him Duggan’s ripped up his whole report and he’s starting it again.

We’re barely a week away! Maur said.

Why would he do that if something weren’t coming out? Cybill said. What if we’ve got them running scared?

—

Yew were you blue? Maur asked without speech. Not sure what she hoped for.

They approached the tower of Westminster and Maur said, Oh I get it, how, not hoo. Jock looked at her.

Hou-Parl, she said. She spoke too fast, like her heart. I saw it on your desk, and I’ve been wondering for months what it meant. She gestured at the clock tower. Houses of Parliament. I get it. I’ve been saying it wrong in my head. I should’ve been saying How Parl. I’ve been saying Hoo like Sutton Hoo. Hoo parl, like who parlays, who speaks.

A guard told them only family members could go in, shied under Cybill’s fury, but Jock said, Go on, this won’t get us anywhere, I’ll meet you after. They left him at the gate and followed a uniformed woman to a wood-panelled room where they all stood watched by portraits of men from the last century but one. Duggan came in. He shook everyone’s hands. Invited them to sit, sat himself at the table’s head. First of all, thank you very much for the trust you’ve put in me and for coming here, he said. His gaze went tick, tick, tick from Daniel’s to Maryam’s to Cybill’s to Di’s. When it reached Maur for her turn something fell within her and she knew what he would say.

I will not be recommending a public inquiry.

He waited out the gasps. Maur receded within herself. She knew that she was done.

Cybill was shouting. To Maur it did not sound like language.

Duggan said, I understand of course that this will be a disappointment.

He said he hoped they would find some comfort something, he said something reasoning, something there were a number of recommendations and something, he said paramount, justice something. The press were next door, it was time, but when Duggan rose there was confusion and the families were gathered by guards. They could not go in with him, why had they agreed to that? They watched and listened to Duggan on the screen and heard him through the wall. They heard him say, I want to welcome you to the publication of this report into the tragic deaths at Shackingham Barracks.

No evidence these wounds were not self-inflicted.

I hope these soldiers’ families recognise how much they have achieved with their quiet dignity.

Cybill said, I won’t be part of this.

Maur followed her out. The others did not. As Maur went she texted Strude. Good hands? she wrote. Fuck you.

Jock was outside on his phone.

I should have sorted this, he said. Christ, I should have seen this coming. I honestly…I’ve been trying to find out what the fuck happened and I don’t know if this is anything to do with…Listen. I just literally now heard, they found him.

Who? Maur said.

Sangster. They found him a couple of days ago.

Well then—

He’s dead.

Beyond a village in the south of Spain. The surly Englishman in his little house. His body had swung in the barn for weeks in the heat.

It’s another stab in the back, Cybill told the journalists. We won’t put up with it. We carry on. Well you do, don’t you?

Jock said, Let’s not rush to conclusions.

Yes, Maur considered that authorities might have had Duggan start over not because they were on the defensive but because they found and had ahem a word with Sangster. Knew they needn’t worry any more about revelations.

—

Yes there would come more meetings. The campaign would denounce a whitewash. Yes Maur would be there and she would speak. She never said that on the day of Duggan’s report, she knew she had lost.

People think Sangster did it, she said, then did himself in out of guilt.

People get scandal fatigue, Jock said.

This isn’t the end of it, Maur has said many times in many rooms. Today she said it in this hall, under these bright lights. Everyone has a role. Jock, the older Philiposes with diminishing enthusiasm. Cybill does what she does. And Maur, with her bright scarf and her bright dyed hair, will continue with her role, to be unlikely, the brave unlikely mother to this son.

Cybill goes to the journalists. At the back of the hall Sonya and Des stand. Sonya indicates that she will call and Des blows Maur a kiss as they go.

Jock says, “We got a couple of emails.”

“More ‘leads’?” Maur says. Some people there smile as they go by and say something, so she murmurs, Thank you.

“A letter this morning,” Jock says. “Another actual anonymous gibberish letter.”

“Will you obey orders?” Cybill has told Jock to disclose all such to her. I don’t care how crazy or stupid, I want to see them all, she said.

“Would I dare not?” He hasn’t shaved.

It is cold outside, and very bright. The garden struggles. A little square, a sapling, and beyond railings Euston Road is loud. Men and women hand out leaflets for political groups in the campaign’s periphery. Maur can’t tell which tree it was she saw from within. She stands with her back to Friends Meeting House, smokes in the wind that tugs her coat like a child. Finds no relief in the city.

“May I?”

Tom Strude. You can see his coat is expensive.

“In mufti?” she says.

“Bum a cigarette? You prefer the collar?”

She has never decided whether his handsomeness is bland or inscrutable. She offers a Silk Cut, he takes it and taps it against hers.

“Cheers.” Strude lights it and sighs out smoke. “Maur, listen,” he says. She shakes her head.

“There are photographers,” she says. “Careful. You might get snapped with me.”

“I’m trying to do what’s best. Some of us are still pushing.”

“Oh, you’re pushing?”

“I’ve always said the army’s handled this badly. Both of us know—” A windblown crisp bag comes by as if sniffing them. “We let you down.” Strude seeks words. “We had a duty of care.”

His inside-outside shit, Maur once called it. She’d read about the forces’ chaplaincy. She wants to say to him, In this sign conquer.

“This isn’t the end of this,” Strude says.

“No it is not.” Cybill arrives. “Give us one, Maur.”

When they say nothing more to him Strude leaves them by the green. They haven’t heard the last of me, Maur thinks in his voice.

“Rrrrr,” she says. Her fingers cartoon claws.

Maur returns home, it is empty.

She sits on the sill of her kitchen window looking into the little yard where plants wither between walls. Cloudless early dark. Here comes music, she can see her neighbour through fence slats. He examines ivy. Should he be too old to shuffle-dance to the radio, muttering to the dead leaves in Punjabi? Ewan is dissipated, and colder than the garden. Maur drinks tea, then wine. Her phone trembles face down; she leaves it. Ewan’s birthdays have gone by. Maur has continued. Films depicting war, suicide, articles about dead children, they might not get her. Sometimes what makes you close your eyes, hold your breath, is when a baby sees a cat, or you hear hung-up clothes snapping like a sail, which is rare these days, or see an old man dancing.

She descended that hospital corridor. How could you be in your son’s dead company? He did not look peaceful but as if he would say something. His stillness was not that of a boy trying to stay still.

To Des she says, “I can’t talk long. Cybill’s at mine.”

“She takes the piss, Maur. You said you were tired of being a hotel. Of her acting like she’s the only one sad enough.”

“You know what’s been going on with her,” she says into her phone. By the river a dog plays with a girl who is wonderful in a ladybird coat.

“The boys?” Des says. “That’s not on you. She could get them. Or join them.”

“Could she? You up on the law? You know she won’t while there’s rocks to turn over here.”

Cybill tracks down celebrities’ management. She telephones to tell them when she will be arriving and calls that an appointment. Sometimes people hear her out politely, take leaflets. Promise to relay to their clients her request for support.

“Hang on.” Maur looks at her phone. “One sec.” Pauses him.

“Maur,” she hears Strude say. “I need to talk to Jock. Where is he?”

“Are you serious?” Maur says. “Why would I tell you anything?”

Jock is somewhere doing something on Iraq now, is what he said. He didn’t answer her own last message, the post-meeting postmortem, and Jane, his Dig and Scribble comrade, said, You know what he’s like, and Give it a bit.

“I really need to speak to him,” Strude says. “Direct. I think I can help.”

“Again,” she says. “We know all about that.” She cuts him off and reconnects with Des. The girl is tugging at the dog’s lead and the wind throws leaves onto the water. Everything is as important as everything else. That’s the scandal when someone dies. That day the texture of a wall should be about their death, birds’ flight paths should be elegies, but it’s a landscape of indifference.

“You need a holiday,” Des says. Maur laughs.

“Where shall I go?”

“Greece?”

Timbuktu. The Land of Dreams. The Land of Magic Medicines. Dame Slap might be waiting. Climb the storied tree but what if it’s dead? Of disease, of age, of saline soil. A thousand things might set a living tree on the journey to snag. Who could better continue climbing such dead matter than the dead, bones on wooden bones?

“Maur.”

Dead, the tree still juts into visiting lands, like the fingers of something unquiet. Into what dead places do climbers rise now?

“Maur, if Ewan was still here,” Des says, “do you think he’d support all this? Go to Iraq?”

“I have no idea.”

You for the war? When Maur asks her son that in her head it becomes broad, a music-hall routine. Yew, yew fowuh the wawuh? Pause for laughter.

She says, “I got invited to something by some veterans’ peace group.”

“You going to go?” Des says.

“No.”

At work she sifts information and greets new clients. Sangster’s memories turned to mulch circling above the barn’s dirt. Now they must be ash. Did someone take a photo of his eye? You’d see no last thoughts, nothing but formless gel. That night Maur wakes with a hard and rapid heartbeat, just as she did another night years before, as if a noise interrupted her sleep.

“It’s Cybill, darling. I hope you’re alright—I don’t really know what’s going on with me today, I had a meet with someone from that band Blue, but anyway the buggers didn’t turn up, did they? What are you up to tonight? I was going to see about if you wanted to meet but I’m on the train home now, it doesn’t matter. Are you jumpy? I am, I know it’s silly. I got another missed call, no message. Was that you? Anyway. Alright, love, thanks again for having me, talk soon.”

Lit by high-road neon. Maur has smoked too much. It isn’t bad though. She feels all neat in black stockings. Her hair’s up. There is no light left in the sky and the moon is barely there. In a St John’s Wood bar she meets Sandrine and they get only a little drunk. Back at the threshold of her house, Maur sees that Cybill has called three more times. Maur closes her eyes but calls her back.

Cybill answers immediately.

“Maur. Where’ve you been?”

“Hey.” She enters. Sits on the chair by the key table. “What’s going on?

“I need to talk to you. I need to show you something.”

“Okay, well—”

“Tonight. I need to show you.”

“What? What do you…I thought you’d gone home.”

“I’m on my way back.”

“Cybill, please. It’s late.”

“I got another phone call,” Cybill says. Outside Maur sees rain begin. “I need you to see.”

What is this quality to her voice? It brings something upon Maur. Who turns on the light, but the bulb is not strong enough for the winter.

“Please,” Cybill says. “Please.”

Behind the glass of a first-floor window is a poster of an island palm tree. From the top deck it is level with Maur’s eyes. The bus takes her back through streets like tunnels of black water. The rain makes every lamp a hazy insect eye.

Cybill stands outside the chain café by Victoria. Maur sees her, is not seen. Cybill smokes. She’s watching rushing puddles like some prospector, bag in hand, not stepping back from sprays. Her coat is sodden and too thin. When she goes back in Maur follows her. Cybill sits among vague and familiar music and a smell of muffins and wet clothes and ochre prints and the enthusiasms of young office workers. As Maur approaches, Cybill does not look up from the tabletop, but she says, “Sorry, thanks, thanks for coming, love. Had a bit of a scare.”

Maur sits. “Cyb. Why wouldn’t you come straight to mine?”

“I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want the two of us to be alone together. I got something in the post today.”

From her handbag she takes a folded plastic bag and from that a large brown envelope with her name and address on it in looping blue-black ink. It is slit open. She sweeps sugar from the tabletop and with a napkin blots away wetness and puts the letter down.

No Maur doesn’t think she’s ever seen Cybill like this. Maur’s flustered to feel protective even as her own heart speeds up.

“Are your hands clean?” Cybill says.

Maur’s nose is running and the change in temperature is making her sweat. She feels abruptly as if she has to piss. She does not get up.

“Everything’s, I don’t know, love,” Cybill says. “I mean go on, pick it up, I need you to, just tell me. Tell me what you think’s going on. With that.”

Maur touches the envelope as if it might be hot. She pinches it open and draws out cream paper on which in that same hand is written, Truly sorry. I implore you to end this. NT.

“There’s more,” Cybill says.

Maur does not want to reach inside again but she does, fingertip, touches softer paper, brings out a smaller envelope, thinner, pearled grey. It too is open, more raggedly. Written on it in a different smaller script, in pale blue, is Private Julia McCamber. The Shackingham Barracks address. This inner letter is stamped and the postmark is too smudged to be read.

Maur puts it down. She wipes her fingers on her trousers.

“Someone sent Jules something?” Maur says. “And they only just got it on to you? Did they not send you all her stuff already?” She looks again and the room recedes. “This is your handwriting,” she says.

“We talked about it,” Cybill says. “Ages ago. Them sending effects back.” They had all received them. “One big box, then—they’re so badly organised—bits and pieces for weeks after. You said the same. Remember?”

I mean Ewan did not have much. “They must have found this somewhere,” Maur says. “This is from you, isn’t it? To her.”

“I emailed her too,” Cybill says. “I don’t like computers but I did use one. Sometimes a letter’s nice though, isn’t it? She wouldn’t have kept them if she didn’t like getting them.”

“Oh, it must’ve been a shock to get this,” Maur says.

“Read it.”

Maur’s hand does not want to touch it. “It’s not my place…,” she says.

“Read it.”

Maur takes out three sheets. Each is written on only one side. She unfolds them. Cybill’s hand, blue ballpoint.

19 June 2001.

She looks up. Cybill nods.

“She probably got it the day before she passed.”

Dear Jules. Maur does not want to keep on.

Dear Jules,

Or Deario Julio as your dad would say. You are bad you shouldn’t tell me things like that I don’t want to know! I’m talking about what you said about your cousin as well you know!! I don’t know about her either DON’T TELL HIM I SAID ANYTHING but we have to make our own decisions don’t we and he’s only a young lad he’s allowed to make his own mistakes we all are.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been in a bit of a way. I suppose we’ve all had difficult times at work haven’t we but you’re a trooper ha ha and we are so proud of you. I know you don’t want to go into what’s been going on but if there’s anything I can do, you need to tell me who’s making you feel bad darling. What’s going on. Is it a bloke? It is isn’t it. There are things I want

Maur turns to the second page.

to tell you. We went to your auntie’s o nthe wee kend to see herr and they alll sen thei lo. serh in wehllb utyo no hoyflay yorhn eshan

Maur puts the paper down. She has to try twice to speak.

She says, “I don’t understand.”

an awrd bugra dlma slmamen, ni. qoos nitlrak rylle you huyoidlr cahet horjhing brothers spu chot,

Cybill watches Maur read on.

mac k a q t l—a; u a p la n al c ukd e n d r ut s a p w n v, y a d,.

The paper trembles in Maur’s breath.

rek xamlo slbaa eghu miv bhaniov fng an byh fhor brozh gyroxh tolpra, sandtsram vol maklouw ak ghaf ui bom pp m a, tw amda am jy,

awq dkaas, urtehep, in Cybill’s pointed script. dun no wha tth. Maur shapes the gibberish out with her lips. She wants to crumple that paper up and throw it away.

Cybill says, “Keep going.”

awq dkaas, urtehep yamsstrtcl pkdgi vulmrpapado, albaa fng an byh dun no wha tth eydidwi them money dont want to know! Your dad sends his love of course. He’s working hard like we all are. I won’t say I’m not worried I’m your Mum. Please promise me you’ll be

Maur turns to the last page.

careful. I know I know but you have to promise. There are things happening here. We are all looking forwards to seeing you and look after yourself and e-mail me or call me when you get a chance. I can’t wait for you to come home and everyone is asking after you.

We are all very proud of you.

Lots of love,

Mum xx

Maur sits back from the thing. It feels ill. The letter feels sick. She thinks, dkaas, urtehep.

an byh fhor

She says, “What does it mean?”

Cybill taps the slip with which the letter arrived. The apology. “You never got anything like that, did you?” She sounds faraway. “It was always printed out. ‘Dear Mr. and Mrs. McCamber, we are enclosing blah blah blah.’ ”

Truly sorry. Implore you to end this.

Cybill holds up the larger envelope. “The others were all army logos. They weren’t by hand. ‘Truly sorry’? You recognise that writing? From stuff Jock got hold of? Remember?”

“NT,” Maur says.

“It’s Teller,” Cybill says. “It’s Nicholas Teller.”

“Why would he send you this?” Maur says when she can. “Why would he even have this? He’s not been in the army for years. He was CO when Ewan came down, he was gone before Jules even—”

“I know.”

“He never even met her.”

“I know.”

They look at each other.

“What is this horrible fucking shit, Cybill? Why are you showing me this?” She raises her voice. “What the fuck does it even mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wrote it—”

“I never. It is my writing. But, Maur, I did not write that.”

Between them the paper lies.

“I did write a letter that started like that,” Cybill says. “And it did end like that and I did write it in that pen and I did write it on that paper and I did send it to her. It was the last letter I wrote her. But it didn’t have none of that stuff in the middle. That made-up stuff.” She whispers. “That nasty stuff. Why would I write that?”

Maur makes out the noise of the room across an infinite distance.

“They sent everything back to me already,” Cybill says. “Ages ago. Maur, I already got this letter back.” Cold comes in. “A year ago at least. I got it back only it weren’t like this. It was what I wrote. Without that middle. It made sense. Then today. This. I was so upset. I read it a hundred times. I went to Jules’s room. Got everything they sent me back off the shelf. First time in a long time. I went through it. And this one’s gone, Maur. The one this is a copy of I mean. It was normal before but now it isn’t there.” Cybill’s voice catches. “Now all I’ve got is this.”

Maur does not want to but she touches the sheets. She says, “You can feel where the pen’s pressed down. It’s not a photocopy.”

“I know.”

“Why would Teller have this? Why would he have made something like this? How? Why’s he sending this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

Maur looks out through the glass to red and amber lights and night colours. Back again and the women lean towards each other over the pages and read Cybill’s words again and that antilanguage.

eghu miv bhaniov. We are very proud of you.

“I don’t know what this is,” Cybill whispers. “I don’t know I do not know I don’t know I do not know I don’t know I don’t know.”

This is the route for the oldest things: Declining; Dead; Loose Bark; Clean; Broken; Decomposed; Down Material; Stump. Death is the third stage.

game […] is a phenomenon of edges

Edge occurs wherever two different environmental conditions meet

A snag is a standing dead tree.

Consider salvage harvest

From root to sky, in the first stage of snag decline, here are the signs of use. Base cavity; storage granary; internal cavity; foraging marks; external platform; broken top nest platform; the lookout post, for hunting.

Snags may be created from living trees

Managing Snags Through Time and Space

II

To Encounter

The Mountain

The runways of Masirah made a skew-whiff crucifix. Breezy RAF men greeted A Squadron off their Beverleys into the baking light and raised their eyebrows at the flight plan.

—Khartoum, eh? Tell me no lies.

Up again in windowless holds. The impact of another landing, and out came Allardyce and his comrades blinking in a new kind of heat. Trucks rocked them on bleached trails. In Bait al-Falaj’s basin small planes and whitewashed buildings wavered as if amid fumes. Allardyce fingered his earlobe.

—What is all this, Boss? he said.

—Save it for briefing, Cooper said.

Men from the Muscat Regiment, the Balochs, the marines, conferred in the lecture hall. Deane-Drummond himself yet again. A big room with shadows in its corners despite the brightness, and in its whitewash smears.

—Sit. Settle down. Welcome to Bait.

With his stick DD pointed at the map.

—Muscat. Oman. Nizwa Fort. Sayyid Tarik’s there. The sultan’s half brother. All around it’s friendlier. Over here, though? Jebel Akhdar—the Green Mountain. Not so much. Impregnable they say, which is why we’re here. This is the mission. Shake off the rebels and the sultan’ll be ever so grateful.

Twelves miles north to south, twenty across, walled in by cliffs. The enemy mined the wadis in its shadow. Shackletons had pounded high ground but there was no being strategic with such ordnance and all you’d got was bangs hammering villages, dramatic enough. Nor could drops for advance men be any more pinpoint, so crates split and ammunition and food and bits and boots and bobs scattered all the way down stone flanks. The rebels holed up.

—The oppo’s leaders, the brothers bin Ali al-Hinai. Talib and Imam Ghalib. The big man here’s Suleiman bin Himyar. All three are cozy with the Saudis. If we’d indulged the sultan back in ’52 and given them the heave-ho, then perhaps we’d not be here now, but there you are.

—Sir. Doesn’t Saudis mean Yanks? Have they got Yank weapons?

—Indeed. Yank weapons and the queen’s too, snaffled after Suez. Well might you roll your eyes. Just set to. We’re here to pacify some truculent Omanis and bring this trio of reprobates out, walking or dragged, bin Taimur’s not particular.

Causeway, Vincent, Pyramid: geography the army renamed. Hawkins’s Hump, where the SAS had taken first blood. That double peak—Sabrina’s Tits. Eight thousand men and women of the tribes and hilltop villagers but sorry Abdul, no time now for hearts and minds.

—In the last six weeks D Squadron have killed more than forty and wounded who knows how many more, but do not underestimate the rebels. Their minor tactics and use of ground are decent. They’ve got mortars, machine guns, and the hard-core have .303s. I’m sorry to tell you we lost Corporal Swindells.

That settled the room. Duke had been liked. Men did die, didn’t they? Allardyce saw the dead in his head. He studied the plans. On the north side 18 and 19 Troops, on the south 16 and 17 consolidated by ancient stairs cut into near-vertical black stone. There they prepared, where invading Persians once hacked those features into landscape, treading on the backs of their own dead.

They trained until men fell down. The mountain was darker than their desert khakis so they smeared them with bootblack. Allardyce fingerpainted overlapping shapes he alone knew were unclear figures, shades, hantus.

At the range he trained for distance shooting, his reports echoing in Old Testament terrain. He drilled his Arabic, easy enough. Read whatever he found lying about. South by Java Head, the Quran, Our Man in Havana. Into his bag he tucked Venetia (bloody right about her, Bowler) and a Nevil Shute. Life Guards warned them their boots would be gone in days. —Might as well hike up knives.

In the foothills, villages of shallow angles. This low the soldiers did not hide but watched and were watched, sometimes raising a hand, and children gazed and light glinted on the silver the women wore and the men in dishdashas might nod in careful response.

—Surly cunts, someone said.

At Nizwa and Rustaq fort walls rose like great mud drums, at Tanuf as if landforms. Storms made wadis rush with water. A Squadron got about its business. The donkey-wallopers were asked in all secrecy about routes north for an assault when the full moon came, that being certain to get to the enemy on his mountaintop. Cloud enveloped high ground.

On the morning before A were to fight, Allardyce’s erstwhile boss with the snooty voice and French name found him.

—I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear you’re reassigned to me. You’re with D, up the Jebel.

—Boss?

—I’ve never got the measure of you, Allardyce. You’re not even a bad soldier. I’m not delighted to welcome a Jonah back to my fold but orders are orders and brass wants you up the Green Mountain.

—Boss, I only just got here. Been training for Sabrina.

—Let’s hope you have the skills whoever it is thinks you do. I gather you were slated for a hunt back in Johor. And that you were removed from that mission after visiting Camp Awfulness. Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know how leaky this ship is.

—Awfulness, Boss?

—Look at him! Butter wouldn’t melt. Don’t worry, I’m hardly about to ask for info. I know and want to know absolutely fanny fucking all.

They missed the chosen night because of weather. They listened to A’s far-off assault and zero-fired weapons. A lanky man, a trooper they called Lofty, told a story.

—We went to visit Duke’s grave. One Christian cemetery in this shithole and that’s only by sea, so we hired a boat and bought some beers. All the other graves are ancient so we found him easy even though it ain’t marked. Made a cairn. There was this old stone cup and we decided its one previous owner had had it long enough and stuck it in the sand on Duke’s grave and poured him one out. After five minutes I hear George, you remember, mate, don’t you, he’s shouting, Who’s drunk Duke’s beer? That cup was empty. None of us been near it. It’s a fuck of a sun but it ain’t that hot.

Allardyce listened. Felt as if leaves grew on him.

—So that was bloody weird, Lofty said. —We poured him another. All I can say is I hope he enjoyed it. Here’s to Duke.

Here’s to Duke, drinking in the sun and the earth.

The Jebel watched their dusty convoy set off from Tanuf with all possible visibility. Allardyce jounced between sandbags in a truck back. To stop with the dark. Feint done, lightless and at great speed, they volte-faced, returned to the base of the mountain a sliver-missing moon illuminated, and began the secret ascent.

A rhythm of pain. Allardyce shook under his load. This was no path. As quiet as you could but there was no silence on that scree. His palms bloodied. He heard his heart’s percussion. A man above kicked stone upon him and Allardyce sent stone on those below. Hours in he passed the body of a man unconscious with exhaustion whose comrades had braced him in a wedge to stop him falling. Another. You might envy them for lying down. Allardyce told himself stories.

Dear Auntie R. It’s been a while since I wrote.

He was born out of bomb arcs, a London child. Malaya was his reminding. A message in Sycamores. Ascend. Swaying like a camel under his bergen, an enticing gait, was it?, the suras said, of certain women. Allardyce thought himself more like that sort in Muhammad’s hell with a whip like a cow’s tail: striking as ordered. Aramco’s war. God made all and those who squabble for it. Under the dirt, the oil from which he could create those of fire. A sump of unborn. Flick a lighter: boom, congrats, it’s a million djinn.

Gasping on a false summit. He turned frowning at a moment’s different heat then as if damp wind from under trees blew upon him from behind. They found human shit among the rocks and an anti-aircraft gun. Where they would descend, there were caves, and in them the sleeping adoo it was their job to send on to a deeper silence.

They reached the true peak with the sun and here came shots from 16 Troop below them and came down from the enemy above too. Allardyce squatted and laid down his own bit of fire for the merry hell of it. Watched from back behind the eyes by among others his old Chinese feller. You might spend years and never know how many you’ve sent on their way, might be there’ll only ever be that one bloke in the forest. To whom thoughts turned with curiosity more than with any other sense. Had he asked mercy twixt the stirrup and the ground, as they said? Twixt, what, branch and muck?

Allardyce took the radio. He was no Welshie with the magic fingers, not even poor old Trooper Gloom—remember him?—but he kept the dash-dot coming through bullets’ strange harmonics. The sky howled, the hot bronze air filled with drifting shapes, supplies to shore them up and announce to Abdul, This is ours now, fuck off. The troopers cheered. The air complained again, this time with a burr as of an insect-winged god. The desert hid such dry animals. Venoms, in from Bahrain in formation, split-bodied mutants twin-tailed and roaring.

An enemy sniper got lucky. Hit a grenade in Carter’s pack. That was a thing you couldn’t describe or hold in your head or believe even when you saw it a moment ago. Part of you could just laugh, there’s something silly about it, like a smoke bomb on a stage. You’d seen an explosion with legs. Plume and hot blast going for a walk.

Then of course those legs on fire rolled off a slope and Carter was slop all over Hamer and Bembridge.

They poured libation on the slopes for the lost men. Allardyce attended to the evacuation. A chopper, banking brilliantly between mortars.

In D’s wake came Life Guards and others and the rebels were all but done. In Habib soldiers let out a miserable locked-up bull to forage. Sharaijah and Saiq, erstwhile adoo HQ, were empty but for chickens until locals began carefully to return. Patrol exchanged fire with holdout snipers across a village square while between them mothers huddled with children, until, waving weapons over makeshift parapets, both sides ceased, and the women held the hands of their girls and boys and ran from the dusty space, the men waiting, pre-emptively sentimental at this story, and when every kid was gone, together in time polite as you like, the soldiers of the SAS and the rebels recommenced fire. Don’t rely on any such rough honour.

Allardyce felt as if he kept seeing motion. A boulder looked like something hunched, hirsute, a companion-to-be, watching, in those far-off days, waiting, as if to clear beasts from a tree. It seemed to him it might have been not dun but shaggy with a green not of this place.

—Orders. Flag marches on the plateau.

—What the fuck, Boss? Sultan’s bods can do that.

—Ours not to reason why, Trooper.

They set up to sleep and have a smoko and brew in the storehouse of For-Fuck’s-Saiq. Boss beckoned Allardyce out of the circle of chatter.

—You’re exempt, he said. —Babysitting duty. Someone’s coming up via Tanuf in a day or two on some hush-hush shite. Needs an escort. Off you go again, Jonah. Congratulations.

—I don’t want it, Boss.

—My sincere apologies, pardon me. Do you imagine I or Cooper or the CO give a tuppenny fuck what you want? You’ve been requested.

Now he was the only soldier in the village Allardyce tried to muck about with the young boys. Shouted after them in Arabic. He fascinated them but they left him alone. He ate flatbread brought to him by a kind old man. On the first night Allardyce masturbated to the thought of the posh woman with her camera in KL, but he got his rhythm wrong and when he came it was with no sensation. He turned pages of The Rainbow and the Rose. Its rush through viewpoints brought a vertigo of whereverness. He read quickly to get to the unprinted pages after the last full stop. There in the rearmost typeless sheets, in tiny careful hand, he began a letter. He did not start it with his aunt’s or anyone’s name. He did not think he would send it. He wrote to an unknown interlocutor. Again he rued how every word he wrote ruined what he wrote.

He wrote of Telok Anson.

The trees

“The”? “Trees”?

After the Sycamore came down it was like something was watching

the and Sycamore and came down were as distant from the declaration of the rotored metal pulling itself apart as were The sun came up or My name is Allardyce or bus pluck junkyard fiddle. Allardyce tore the pages out and tore them into nothing and scattered them.

What happened at the hidden camp in the Johor forest? Of which he could not write. Repeat, repeat this question.

[3]

Maur wakes to a wail. She stumbles in her dressing gown into the living room where Cybill is sitting upright amid sheets on the sofa, her face glowing in the pearly light of her phone.

“Jesus Christ,” Maur says. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I got a call.” Cybill holds up her phone. One unknown number but Maur sees it’s from the previous evening. “They didn’t say nothing.” Cybill’s shaking.

“Look.” Maur turns the screen. “No one called.”

“Some numbers might not show.”

“You’re alright, Cyb.”

“I know I am, thank you.” How fast her voice can change.

“Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“What are you going to say tomorrow?”

When they come into the bright kitchen in the morning the women stare at the letter on the table where they left it. The pages are half-open, like a new insect unfurling sticky wings.

“I was worried about her,” Cybill says. “Well, you read it.”

“What’s in the bit where it goes weird?” Maur says. “In the real one?”

“I don’t remember. Nothing. I was worried and she wasn’t telling me something and that wasn’t like her and I was letting her know she could talk to me is all.”

“Do you remember last night?” Maur says.

“I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Okay. What now?”

“I don’t bloody know,” Cybill says.

“I wish Jock would answer his fucking phone.”

“Yeah. I tried too.”

Maur looks out. The day has not brought whatever she wished it might. “You know where everything is,” she says eventually. “The spare keys. I’ll see you later.”

“What?”

“I have work, Cybill.”

Cybill stands. “Wait. We have to…”

Maur doesn’t look at the letter. “We’ll talk later.”

“What are we going to do?” Cybill says. “Why’s he sent it?” Cybill fingers the pages and Maur will not watch her hands at that work. “It’s a nasty trick,” Cybill says. “Someone’s playing a nasty trick.”

Sandrine and Raj remark on how fast Maur’s getting through her tasks, her fierce expression, but she can’t lose herself in them. Cybill calls her twice; Maur won’t answer. Every piece of paper in the office is precious because it is not the paper in the envelope at her house. But this is now a world with that letter in it. Why wouldn’t it infect? One day reaching up for a memo, a cover sheet, a photocopied deed, Maur might see sheaf after sheaf reading Dear Jules.

A nasty trick yes, that bad language, what a phrase, that Teller sent, if it was him.

She stands with her phone to her ear by Kilburn Market, where religious groups and Trotskyists hand out leaflets Fridays or Saturdays, where wooden benches are built into brick surrounds of thigh-high flower beds by bins and birdlime. She listens to Cybill’s message.

“I don’t feel good, Maur, I’m wondering what we should do.”

Maur brings up Tom Strude’s number. Sends it away. Jock’s. Sonya’s. She calls Des.

“Cybill showed me something. She came down. They sent her something of Jules’s.”

Des says, “She takes the piss. I’m sorry, but you know that.”

Maur auditions descriptions of the letter and they appal her. A pigeon watches. Its claw is clublike and it would not survive but for the city. When she rings off, Cybill has left another message.

“There was a new call. I could hear someone, it comes up Unknown Number. I heard a laugh. He’s trying to scare me, Maur, I’m not having it.”

—

Maur tells Sandrine she’s taking a half day. Past the squat angles of the tower blocks on Mill Lane she stands above the tracks. She’s still but everything else is rushing. It’s four years, five, since the painting of the mural. Now the trees are scabrous. Unsanctioned later artists have added to them names. She who painted the Christmas tree was a young girl, she died after the bridge was done: Maur read of it. On one stump has been added a slit-pupiled eye.

Maur calls Jane Bay at Dig and Scribble.

“Where the fuck is Jock?”

“You’re not the only one,” Jane says.

“Can you help me? I’ve got a name and I need an address.”

“What do you mean? There are ways. Electoral rolls. Why?”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Many times. Look, I don’t know….”

“Please.”

“What’s it about? How do I know you’re not doing something career-endingly stupid? And I don’t mean yours.”

“Just let me tell you a name.”

Jane quickly calls her back. “I’m only giving you this because we already had it,” she says. “And you didn’t get it from me. It’s in Jock’s Rolodex.”

“He already had it? Christ. Go on, I’ve got a pen.”

“Promise you aren’t about to get into trouble?”

Cross my heart.

That done, Maur can continue without words again. She takes a raised train from Brondesbury. It is like a ship sailing across the roofs. In Hampstead she finds Ewan’s tree and stands in its shade. She could have climbed it once. Never as fast nor high as her son, still once she could have looked down on the hollow where she’d poured his ashes.

She weaves between passengers at Stratford and at a newsagent’s buys a road atlas. Leafs through the pages. What’s happening? she wonders, pushes that away.

Maur puts her phone on silent. She just goes. The train hauls her through streets cut ready for reconfiguring, over tangles to be overwritten. Leaving the city is always a shock. Damp lowland and light industry. When Maur dressed that morning it was not for these dormitory zones.

This town could be anywhere. It’s like Greenfield stretched out. Travel agents, confectioners, bus stops, congregations of young men to whom she is nothing. Far from home. By an Edwardian forecourt she checks her map. Underpass, south over the A2. She walks between red and grey terraces, then blocky isolated builds and parking zones. The clouded sky still glows when she reaches where no one is supposed to walk, a landscape for cars, crows and pylons. She recalls the journey to her father’s house with her child inside. Cannot remember the name of the woman who drove. Beside the hard shoulder is a thinning strip of not-quite pavement and crabgrass.

She takes a side road by a house such as a child might draw. A dog is barking. By gardens and large cars. A phone box. A bus stop for services back to town. She hears television and can see its greying light in windows as that of the sky diminishes.

And now there’s no more not thinking about it, no more just going. Simply by not turning back, her body, she, has made a decision. Maur finds what she is seeking.

One of a short curve of modern dwellings. Three lower windows and four above. It and the BMW outside are not well kept. Maur finds a place to stand where the road curves and there are trees.

After a long while she takes out her phone. She has missed many messages.

“Cybill.”

“Maur! Where’ve you been? I been sick with worry!”

“Are you at the flat?”

“I been going out of my mind—”

“Listen—”

“Where are you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Maur shakes with cold and hunger. As the very last of day departs she watches glow behind grey curtains.

If someone emerges? If they walk into the fields?

Then she’ll follow.

She won’t look at her phone now. Maur strains to be invisible. Not to think for another while. Headlamp light briefly makes her a roadside cutout and she retreats inside herself. Net curtain again. Child-Maur thought the dust that made her wheeze was the air itself changed by its press and passage through the gauze. How late it is. A grey cat steps into and out of her regard.

Behind Maur comes illumination, the first for a stretch. An engine turning over. A man says, “What, here?”

A woman: “Thanks very much.”

The car goes. Maur turns. Cybill. Maur puts her finger to her lips.

“Is that all you got to say to me?” Cybill says. Maur can just hear her above a windblown aerial. “I been so worried. It’s after ten. What are you doing?”

“You brought the letter?” Maur whispers too.

“Wasn’t going to leave it in the house was I?”

“He’s there.”

“What? Teller? That’s Teller’s house?” Eventually Cybill says, “How did you know he’d be here?”

“I didn’t. But you told me you got that call and I thought…I don’t know. If you were right about who it was, he wouldn’t make a call like that unless he was at home, I thought.”

“A call like what?”

“Like you said. Maybe he was trying to speak.” Look, Cybill has the letter in its envelope in her right hand. “I’m sorry,” Maur says, in a rush again. “I didn’t stop to think, didn’t let myself, I was just— It was only when I was here I really realised. What I’d done and what we should do. You’re right. We need to know.” To hear that surprises her, even now.

“You sound mad,” Cybill whispers. She follows though. Maur leads them by the overgrowing yard, the dirty car, to the front door. “Wait,” Cybill whispers. But she does nothing to stop Maur. Who presses the bell.

They hear it. Footfall. Maur steps back.

Teller opens the door.

His jowls have fallen since last time. His skin is grey. His sweatshirt is not clean and he needs to shave. At the sight of the two women he jerks.

He says, “You.”

What, the question comes to Maur, are they there to say?

Cybill says, “You’ve got a bloody nerve.”

He looks at her with anguish, and not, Maur thinks, recognition. It’s to Maur that his stare returns.

“Leave me alone,” he says. “What do you fucking want? Haven’t you done enough?” He goes to close the door.

“No,” Maur says. Astonishes herself by pushing back.

Teller’s weak. He says “Leave me alone” as if he has no strength to be loud. Retreats, stares, and as Cybill steps into the house and Maur follows, Maur sees he is afraid.

In the dark hallway is an old dresser, the top scattered with bits, paper, a vase. Beyond it a chair, photos on the walls, Teller in his uniform, his ex-wife it must be, kids. Behind him are stairs down from the unlit upper floor and there are untidy piles on several of the steps: books, an unwashed plate and crockery, gym shoes one lace dangling. Old clothes half-folded. Near the top, battered, dirty army boots.

Teller says, “I never said I did a flawless job, did I?”

Wind pushes the women. Maur closes the door against it.

“One does one’s bloody best,” Teller says. “If I say to you that I’m sorry, will that do? My god, I never claimed to have done everything perfectly, but hand on heart I never did wrong by her. I didn’t know her.”

This house looks like a set, like something out of time.

Teller whispers, “What is this supposed to achieve?”

Cybill raises the letter. “What’s this about?” she says. She shakes the paper, he flinches.

Teller braces himself and Maur sees emotions go through him, the last despair. He covers his face. He might be sobbing or laughing. He shuffles back so his heels touch the stairs. From behind his fingers his voice scrapes out, “Oh fuck. Well this is just wonderful. This is all just perfect, isn’t it?” He takes two steps up, backwards. As he’s going up the stair—

“You’ve no idea,” Teller says. The wind shakes the windows. “I’ve been praying this would do it. Just hoping. I thought you sent this, I thought you might want it back. That you could…Listen, I am truly sorry for whatever my part was in whatever happened.” He meets each woman’s eyes. “You have to believe me….” He sits upon the staircase and his face collapses. “But then you don’t have to believe anything. You’ve no bloody idea, have you? About any of this.”

A dragged-out silence.

Teller says, “You came here.” There’s something vile in his voice and for the first time it comes to Maur that they might not be safe in his company.

“What can we do now?” he says. “What now? I rendered unto Caesar. I gave you what’s yours.” His hands twitch and to Maur it is as if she can hear his tendons, the current in the house’s wires.

“Why did you call her?” Maur says. The light is inadequate, nothing’s convincing. Above and behind Teller is shadow.

“To say we were done,” he says. “To beg you to just please leave me alone. To call it off.”

Maur shies at the sight of him. A faint grind like teeth. Like a touching of objects, as if they slide on the sideboard, old glass, keys, a calculator. But they are motionless. Maur sees the two dirty boots together near the top of the stairs.

“You thought it was me behind it, I thought it was you,” Teller says. “But it wasn’t either of us. So we’re both fucked.”

“What about Ewan?” Maur says to him, there on the stair. A shifting. A whisper. The stairs are dark. Maur’s heartbeat seems to slow. Boots on the stairs in the dark. Darkness comes down. She doesn’t breathe. There are boots on the stairs. They are not placed together. They are not still.

Someone was standing in the boots on the stairs.

—

Teller sees Maur’s face change. He gives a thin and dreadful moan. He arcs his body and tries to rise. He twists and falls sprawling at the staircase base. Maur’s ears are stopped up. Something was on the stairs and down it came. The house trembles a picture slips a case shudders and the boots drummed soundlessly so fast they blurred and everything else every other object on the stairs skitters and strains and scatters as something descended. A thing came down something came in those boots in the shade,

Two boots stepped down and Maur tries to scream.

—

Legs in dark cloth. Glass cracks. The descender folded unfolded.

Motion, stuttering / still. Silhouette head the cccccolourof dust / smears like grease. A ruin / features from a picture. A forehead and throat wrong with blood. Blinked scabs from hidden eyes. Maur feels her nails break where she claws the wall to get away Cybill sobs Teller whimpers and that shape strobed like imperfect signal through configurations, limbs outheld as they should never be. Boots descended. It opened its mouth to drool darkness. Objects flinch as the thing licked lips.

sir

Maur chokes at that voiceless voice.

old souls

The figure rearranged. Head snapped back a crown of dark wet and dust, bowed again. Spilt shadowfrom the mouthout from beneatha face effaced. In its gaze there is no air.

sir

Cybill on her knees. Raises her arms, and what approached raised hers and knuckling at the hollowed parts at a pall’s mazard it

she

rubbed her eyes

—

Cybill screams her daughter’s name. And uh said the descender uh

looking

asitwere

mmm

she said

um

Cybill sobs Maur chokes Teller strains

the downcomer whispered mum

Outlines

Two men came, driving two donkeys. Cummins was an axe-faced private of the Life Guards a little older than Allardyce but regarding the clearer of the Green Mountain with fretful awe. He occupied himself with the animals. His companion ambled forwards.

—Hullo. The man was sunburnt and lined and his thin hair was almost white. He had perhaps ten years on Allardyce. His uniform was dusty with jebel dirt. He wore no sigil of rank or regiment. He carried a battered brown leather satchel and around his neck wore a camera.

—Louis Hook, he said. —You must be Allardyce. The chap delegated to look after Muggins here. I’m terribly grateful. Allardyce shook his hand. —Splendid, Hook said. He put his hands on his hips. —So. Saiq. He smiled at three children watching where a thornbush hid the path. —Tatty kallum Araby? Hook said.

—Yeah. Allardyce said. —Do you? Sir?

—My goodness, I can’t say I speak it, no, Hook said. —I have a smattering. Kitchen Arabic.

He shouted some of it and the children ran away. Cummins patted the neck of a donkey.

—I don’t know what it is we’re doing, Allardyce said. —Sir. The orders.

—Private Cummins has been doing sterling work. We followed you chaps up but we’re both new to this place—

—So am I.

—Relative to whom? Hook said. —Don’t do yourself down, Trooper Allardyce. Command rather want me to have an escort.

—It’s over. Sir. Adoo’s packed up. You don’t need no one.

Cummins had his rifle but Hook wore no weapon.

—One hears of argy-bargy, Hook said.

—You might get unlucky but you might get unlucky at Piccadilly Circus, Allardyce said.

Hook laughed. —You might at that. That’s very good. I daresay you’re right and this is all silly but you know how brass are and everyone is awfully impressed with you chaps and I could rather do with some help.

—Can’t read a map?

Hook smiled no less.

—Not awfully well, no.

In fact on his chart Hook had crosshatched several miles in red pen and above the sprawl written ???.

The men and their beasts set forth as heat rose, leaning on sticks they found and stripped and broke to size, taking goat-walked runnels through the dust for that effaced zone. The trees held themselves as if pained. The men chewed biscuits and dates and swigged from their canteens.

Two hours of scuffing stones surely so how was the sun so low? And Allardyce walking after so long a shadow self? He did not ask to see the map again but according to some pull veered from the direction they walked and the others followed him without a word. The sun did not take its gaze from them in this remorseless stretch of snagging bushes and waist-high stones. Hours into where Hook’s red lines overlapped.

—Oh. Christ.

Overwatched by hard geography, a buckled mass protruded from the scrub. The day shifted over vivid earthworks piled around ruined metal. As if pushed up from under, expelled. A remnant of wing, the twist of once-wheels. Shikras circled and foxes ran. A bird folded and dropped and found prey. Hook said, —Well done that man.

Dust rasped at flaking paint and reflections. This Venom was becoming mountaintop. Once a cross silhouette, now it was scattered.

They walked the crash site, the gouge of impact and the crumple zone. Allardyce climbed a segment of tail while Cummins watched him. Hook moved towards the concertinaed wedge of nose.

—De Havilland Ghost engine, one careful owner. Not careful enough. Mostly still there, though I daresay some local nabob has a cane with a gearstick handle.

Allardyce hauled himself up to look through saw-toothed windshield remains. In Malaya controls would have been tugged by vine scavengers; here grit took the pilot’s place. Allardyce lowered himself into a dead man’s chair. When he came out again Hook was leaned back against rock. He had on wire-rimmed spectacles. He held a large notebook and at first looked as if he was writing therein but the sweeping motions and his up-down glances clarified that what he did was draw. Late light, at last, made him glow.

Allardyce went to Cummins.

—What the bloody hell’s this?

—Oh yeah, Cummins said. —They not tell you? He’ll have his fucking watercolours out in a minute. War artists are on ministry payroll, we pay his salary. I know, mate, I know.

Hook drew rapidly with thick pencil. He brought out a sharpening knife, a pen and a brush. Another, smaller sketchbook. Dusk came and Allardyce stood between the man and the Venom ruins. Hook turned a page and started anew.

—What’s going on? Allardyce said.

What investigations had Allardyce thought Hook was there to undertake? A checklist of experimental payload? Intel-derived flight plans? Some SOE enigma?

—The thing is, Allardyce, you’re rather in the way.

Allardyce walked directly in his line of sight towards the remnants. Hook said nothing and Allardyce touched a flank that had been above the clouds. He touched a tear and let the metal cut him. He touched the rust of a half-out screw.

Cummins shouted. Allardyce wiped his hands on his trousers and jogged to where Cummins stood by flat stones. The jebel people had buried the pilot.

—Poor old Watkinson, Hook said. He spoke between strokes of illustration. —Fresh from Sharjah. Last August. Seems he decided to give an expensive and severe bollocking to some goats. One doesn’t imagine this went down too well with Ahmed. Not that it was rebels who bagged the poor sod. Official word is he left pulling up a little late.

Allardyce went to him and looked over Hook’s shoulder at streaks of coloured chalk.

—I’m not honestly certain that’s what it was, Hook said. —I’m not sure something didn’t give him a tug. In any case here we are.

He offered his book to Allardyce, who said, —My hands ain’t clean.

Hook said, —It’s hardly the bloody notebook of Leonardo, though I’m certain he’d not have given two hoots either. I can’t abide priggishness about that sort of thing.

Allardyce took it. Watkinson’s cairn in toothy lines. The sky a vorticist configuration. Rocks, clenched tree witnesses. Deft twitches rendered Cummins where he stood. The de Havilland engine a toppled chimney. Hook took it back and packed it with his materials into the panniers on a donkey.

—Righto, he said. —Head on back to town and I’ll be along shortly. I’ve a few things I want to try.

—I thought the whole point of me being here…, Allardyce said. —You don’t know—

—Weren’t you the very chap who told me it was all quiet on the Green Mountain? Who said there was nothing to concern myself with? He walked towards the darkening plane and he carried now another notebook, a pen, a spanner and a hacksaw.

—I don’t mean ambushes, although you never know, Allardyce said. Cummins was edging away and Allardyce could see he’d been dismissed before in such fashion. —It gets dark out here. We’ll wait for you.

—You’re very kind but you will not. I’m sure it sounds ridiculous and I daresay it is but I need a bit of peace and quiet and solitude. Quick, before I lose this sky! Isn’t it remarkable?

—Sir…

—Cummins, reassure this poor fellow, will you? Off you go.

A night walk. Allardyce and Cummins smoked.

—That cunt’s going to get himself killed, Allardyce said. —Fucking prick.

— Yeah, Cummins said. —Who’s even going to see his fucking pictures?

—This ain’t that bad a job, mate, Cummins said. —I mean. Bit different for you, granted. We heard about you lot making it up the hill. That must’ve been…

Allardyce looked up into the vault. He heard goat calls and wind, but in that moment it was as if some other sound had just then ended. As if the air vibrated with echoes of a threnody, long slow notes.

They did not feel unknown. An instruction to rise.

—And now, said Allardyce, —I get to babysit fucking Picasso.

Even to him it sounded less like anger than like motions being gone through. Sounded, perhaps, somehow, like shame.

On the second day of their descent it was Hook who directed them off the route. They cajoled the donkeys across the jebel flank to where beyond rock spikes the ground opened out and there were signs of passage. Hook unfolded an easel and clipped a tin box of colour to it and a tiny cup into which he poured water. He propped up heavy board. Cummins made a brew. Allardyce sat in Hook’s view again, as close as he could to the edge where despairing rebels had fallen or leapt. This was that place.

In the foothills they approached sentries at the army waystation. A garrulous technician drove them to Tanuf, where they ate and changed their stinking clothes. In the evening the CO summoned Allardyce to his office and, uneasy, showed him signed orders, from Cooper himself, verifying that his assignment was now to replace Cummins as Hook’s assistant and to escort him wherever he said he would go.

—Cheerio, mate, Cummins said. —Good luck and all that.

Allardyce didn’t answer.

Nine hours to Salalah in a fussy jeep. Mostly Allardyce took the wheel. The road was not good. Buzzards and RAF planes overflew, and they passed fields and unplanted zones of dry grass and rock.

—There’s nowhere I’d rather be, Hook shouted over the engine.

Allardyce said, —Why do you need me in the capital?

—There are no colours like desert colours, Hook said. —Unless I’m somewhere else, in which case ten to one I’ll tell you there are no colours like the ones there. Nor anywhere I’d rather be. I’ve been called a flibbertigibbet, Allardyce, I admit it.

A fertile belt. Behind the crops spindled towers and a haze like a chalk line. Allardyce smelt, then saw, the ocean. They came to a zone of small markets, minarets, administration. Salalah thronged. Mostly Arabs, mostly men in the street, some in light suits as well as those in robes. Europeans, well-dressed civilians and military men under hawkers’ awnings, smoking, waving away flies.

—Base is the other way, Allardyce said.

—Indeed, Hook said.

He took them to where walls grew too close for the car and in a courtyard of which he had foreknowledge he paid a small boy to watch the vehicle. He led Allardyce on foot to an establishment in view of the seawall and they sat at wicker chairs and Hook ordered them mint tea.

—A loverly study in perspective. Hook gestured at the shoreline buildings’ curve. —One for the textbooks.

The dark was coming and the gulls screamed and it had been a while since Allardyce had heard such lamentation.

—I expect you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here, Hook said.

—Eh?

—Everyone’s a suspect. But out of everyone here only one of you had motive, means and opportunity…. You not a mysteries man, Allardyce?

—I read some.

—Ngaio Marsh. Word to the wise. It’s the Hotel Mansour for us tonight, Allardyce. Base be buggered.

Once during his training Allardyce had entered a storeroom and between the prefab shelves two recruits had stepped rapidly apart and shouted at him For fuck’s sake and that he’d given them a shock and that he was a poof. Perhaps sex was what this man wanted of him. Allardyce considered what he would do if so.

—I do think I understand where you’re coming from, Hook said. —For a young man of your training and abilities and experience it’s a bit of a comedown, this. Me, that is. All I can say is that one is assigned, the theory goes, to the sort of thing that particularly suits. We’re all on the same side. I wonder if I might persuade you that what I do is not entirely pointless. Carr, Dring, Ravilious. Nash! I’m uncomfortably aware of how unedifying is an artist’s special pleading. It won’t help if I tell you there are things the trained eye can bring to phenomena that nothing else can.

The sun went down.

—Sir, Allardyce said.

Hook looked at him awhile.

—Let me be clear, Hook said. He smiled still but not beyond his mouth. —We both know that orders are orders. And that for all the indulged leave-you-in-no-doubt sneer of the SAS— He shook in theatrical fear, —you’ll probably do more or less what I require even if with bad grace. I’ve no interest, however, in being accompanied by a grumpy child. It’s beneath both of us. Now. He put his head on one side. —What I might welcome is an open- and a broad-minded soldier. And more to the point, Trooper, I think that such a soldier might genuinely benefit from working with me. Might rather find their horizons expanded. I’m neither impressed nor intimidated by disdain, Trooper Allardyce. Just a little bored. So. He stood. —I’m going for a pee.

Allardyce watched him go. Without looking down, Allardyce felt for the bags on the chair beside him, then within them.

When Hook returned he did not sit but stood with his arms folded.

—The Mansour, Hook said. —Remember? Because I have work to do tomorrow. Important work, however much you might pooh-pooh that.

Hook picked up his bag and took out his wallet and laid dollars down.

—Why don’t you have a drink on me? he said. —Have a think. About what it is you want to do and the attitude with which you want to arrive at the hotel.

Allardyce did not speak.

—As is not infrequently the case, Hook said, —one finds oneself caught between admiration and irritation. Tough-mindedness and stupidity are not a thousand miles apart. You’re certainly tough, Allardyce. What else you are I’m not sure.

Hook walked into the city and Allardyce looked into the darkness of the sea. After a time he opened his own bag and took out one of Hook’s sketchbooks and laid it on the table. It was a little too large for a pocket, bound in thick black scuffed canvas-coated card and tied closed with a leather cord. The edges of its pages were buckled from use.

He tucked it under his arm, finished his drink, put Hook’s money into his pocket and stood, swayed almost as if drunk, walked as if drunk, as if such faint light as there was in those byways from oil lamps and candles and sodium glow by the sputter of a motor made him reel. As if noises were overwhelming in what was in fact a quiet town. He pushed his way through groups of men and some stopped and glared in surprise and anger but when Allardyce turned eagerly back they saw his face and no one would fight him.

He sat on the seawall. He dangled his legs over little waves. Boys came close to call him Johnny, Johnny, as if he were his brother. A man about his age muttered to him in Arabic and Allardyce said, —Piss off, Abdul.

Push me. I dare you. Into the water.

He opened the pad. In the starlight and illumination of Salalah Allardyce saw drawings of a stretch of desert of no particularity. In conté crayon, a chasm. The same feature in a watercolour smear. Pages of hillside, charcoal, ink, pen scribble, a minaret in stylised parameters.

—Fuck you very much, sir.

He took a long slow time tearing out an image of a wadi. Balled up the thick paper and let it fall into the surf.

Allardyce said, —Collaboration? He pulled out another. Tore it into flakes and let them fall. —How about you collaborate with fish piss?

He ripped out, scrunched up and threw another picture. He turned to an ink image of Cummins—well done, had to give Hook that—gloomy and uncertain, on a beach overlooked by cliffs. He turned it every way. He tore it out and discarded it.

—Cheerio chin chin.

A graveyard on a cliff in ochre. A headstoneless grave among headstones. A chalice tucked into sandy soil. Allardyce stared. Roughly, quickly rendered. A pastel study of the cup. There seemed no logic to how Hook filled this book, blank pages were interspersed with full and monochrome and vividly coloured, without order. A few sheets on from the cup was a tall and spreading tree of a kind that looked like nothing Allardyce had seen in this dry land. Turning again, watercolour sweeps showed a man with marks upon his face who looked not like an Arab but a Malay, in familiar vestments of a particular office, which Allardyce recognised, who was drawn with fear in his eyes.

Allardyce stared for a stretch without count, then, as if decisively, threw the portrait of the shaman, the bomoh, into the ocean.

The ruins of the Venom. The cockpit a black chalk hole. Pen picked out Watkinson’s markers. In this image of the scene Allardyce himself alongside. And this other smudge—not Cummins, that was him there, but this other set of lines, this shade alongside or behind Allardyce himself, an intimation of another figure, jaggeder gestures of ink, a darker colour, as if a watcher with a shade face, a quasimourner. Where no one had been. Which brought up in Allardyce, though, a bite of recognition.

Allardyce held his breath.

He went through the book again. There had never been such markings overhead as these with which Hook rendered was it old Sol? Its beams? Whirling. Nor, here behind him, on this his own face again on another page, had he felt even anything so faint as what Hook had drawn there, at his back. He had sensed no such dimness as this, no insinuations of a sacklike man-shape walking with him, some hantu column, a green-ink-and-pencil storm like leaves.

Hook’s room was on the topmost floor of the Mansour’s stunted opulence. Allardyce waited outside it to slow his breathing. He knocked. Hook opened and smiled tightly.

—Allardyce. He folded his arms. —Well, I won’t say I don’t admire your neck. I believe you have something of mine.

He held out his hand. Allardyce did not pass the sketchbook over but he stepped back and held it open.

—That flat bit on the way down, where you stopped us, he said. —That was where Carter and Hamer and Bembridge got casevaced, weren’t it? That’s what you drew in the sky. A helicopter. You drew it as if it was there.

—Trooper, give me—

Allardyce turned the pages.

—What’s this behind me?

Hook’s snatch was too fast and he had the book and Allardyce stepped forwards to come inside but Hook stayed in his way and breathed in sharply on seeing the rag-edges. You could see him settle down his anger as he fingered the stubs.

—Critics. All the bloody same.

—What is it behind me? Allardyce said.

—Keep your bloody voice down, Hook said.

From the room came another voice.

—Allardyce. You didn’t stay for your interview.

Behind Hook, the naval doctor, still in his dark uniform, came to the door. The Milkman, as white as Allardyce remembered, as he had been in Malaya in the camp they called Awfulness. The man held some machine offcut.

—I’ll do it now, Allardyce said. —Sir. I’m sorry about before, I’m ready.

—The interview? the Milkman said. —Oh you’re ready now, are you? You were to go into the room. Now you say you’re ready?

—Sir, Allardyce said. It was from the cockpit of the Venom, what the Milkman turned in his hands. Allardyce did not question that knowledge. —I am, sir. I will.

—I must say you left the best ones alone, Hook said, leafing through the pictures. —I suppose you could argue that you’ve an eye. Really though.

—Go downstairs, the Milkman said to Allardyce. —I’ll send for a vehicle to take you to base. I believe in giving every man a fair chance. And by my count you’ve had two. So that’s that. You’re being RTUed.

—Back to the regiment, sir? But, sir—

—Are you deaf, Allardyce? Returned to unit. Not squadron. Not troop. Certainly not the bloody Jebel. You’re not needed. How many goes do you think you deserve? We could’ve sent you home after you funked the interview but we sent you back to A, no questions asked. Well, your SAS days are done now.

—Sir, wait—

—Allardyce, be a bloody man. You had every opportunity. It’s infantry for you.

—Sir, please—

Now Hook tore out a page of his own book. An image of Allardyce, under the disturbed sky in which Hook had invoked a memory of a chopper, where Allardyce’s comrades had died. Hook folded it and tucked it into Allardyce’s top pocket.

—Memento for you, he said. —Oh don’t look like that! One reaps what one sows. Look at it this way, Allardyce: you’re on your way home.

[4]

You.

And Maur. Maur turns. Turns fast. Fast falling. Go on get out. Silence. Everything is done. Teller reaches from the floor his feet on the stairs higher than his head as the whisperer descended. Maur whines like a dog, is that a dog in the distance? Maur pulls, wind fails to keep the door closed Maur lurches out straining for the streetlight hearing Cybill at her heels a bumping of body sliding on stairs, a man’s cry receding, and she looks back as she runs to see Teller’s fingers lose their grip on the bottommost step and slide up and out of sight and a nothing behind him, and did a nothing woman slip out too before the door slams shut on his plea? as up the steps he goes and his cry truncates, his body hauled away from light.

[Reverse]

Dieu et mon droit

Field Service Post Card

The address

only to be writ-

ten on this side.

If anything else

is added, the

post card will

be destroyed.

[Face]

NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.

I am quite well.

I have been admitted into hospital

sick        and am going on well.

wounded        and hope to be discharged soon.

I am being sent down to the base.

I have received your        letter dated

telegram

parcel

Letter follows at first opportunity

I have received no letter from you

lately.

for a long time.

III

There Shall Be
No Return

Promise

The night bus went by the triangle of Shepherd’s Bush Green. Three passengers on the upper deck where cigarette smoke convoluted. A pale white man asleep at the back rocking against his own folded arms. A woman in her middle years sullen with exhaustion, scarf bright against her skin. The smoker at the front looking into upper windows. Old, empty rooms.

A four-floor brick and plaster house like its neighbours, paint scabbed into a map of unknown country. A cat eyed a tree as wary as if up there with the half-moon in the branches were others of its kind. Irene Slocombe woke herself gasping. What glow from the streets came in did not reach the far side of the wardrobe into which pitch she stared.

She said, —I see you.

—Auntie Rene.

—Oh!

Allardyce came into lighter dark.

The woman gasped and stared and threw back the covers and stood in her nightie and held out her arms. —Steve-o! Oh my lord. What are you—? I thought you was a robber or I don’t know what. I thought you was in the jungle. How did you get in? When did you—

She stopped still. Whispered, —Oh Lord. Took a step back and her mouth opened. The man opened his mouth, too dark to see inside. She swayed on her legs and retreated. —Oh no, she said.

And Allardyce stepped forwards with his hands up and shook his head. —Nah, nah, he said, and the floorboards sounded under him. —Real as you like, here I am.

—Oh! Steve-o, it’s you, as I live and breathe. You little terror. You perisher! She pulled him tight. —You’re a sight for sore eyes, boy, you really are. Scaring me like that!

He let her disengage. She went to her bedside and turned on the lamp to surround them with old furniture and new shadows, faded wallpaper of plant life.

—That new? he said.

—What? That old chair? Got that up Portobello. New to me.

She sat on the bed. He came to the foot of it and sat too.

—I don’t think I ever seen you without lipstick before, he said finally. She pouted. —Still here then?

—Yeah. New neighbours. Remember Bert downstairs? Died, poor bugger. Still, he was getting on. Some Eyetie now. Nice enough I suppose, but blimey. She made her hand a talkative mouth. —Want a fag?

—Go on then.

They smoked. She folded her left arm under her breasts and held her cigarette in her right hand and watched ash grow and smoke rise. She looked into each corner of the room as if from them might come insight into this visitation.

—How’s, Pete, is it? Allardyce said.

—Oh, he’s alright, I think, Pete is. He ain’t around any more though.

—Sorry.

—No, it was me give him the heave-ho. I’m trying to decide between Jack, who you don’t know, and Michael, Michael Brewer, you probably don’t remember. Or if I ought to decide at all. She winked, he smiled. She saw her laugh remind him of when he was a boy. A witchy laugh, he had said. He was old enough now to see something of how she filled this role.

—You still working at Blitheroe’s? he said.

—Yeah, you know, bit of this bit of that. I’m at the Lamb & Flag some nights too. Was I doing that when you left?

That made them shy.

—How’d you get in, Steve-o? You best not’ve buggered up my door.

—Didn’t come through your door.

—Teach you that in the army, do they? What else they teach you?

He said nothing.

—How are you, darling? she said. —You seem different. I mean. You seem good.

—Ta very much.

—Don’t be like that. Look at you. All that meat on your bones. I bet no one gives you any lip now. You seem the same but different. You can tell your old auntie, you know you can. You wouldn’t have come here if you couldn’t, would you? I’ve missed you, darling.

—Surprised you’re still here actually. I sent them letters.

—Oh Steve-o. It took her a while to say it.

—You got ’em then?

She said, —I’m sorry, love.

His edges lit in his cigarette glow. Irene ran her hands through her hair.

—Where are they?

—I don’t know, she said.

—You didn’t keep them?

—I would’ve, of course I would’ve done, Steve-o, only they made me feel rotten, didn’t they?

—Well sorry I’m sure, done my best with them.

—Don’t be a silly sod, you know what I mean. They was lovely. That’s why they made me feel bad. Because I never…She hugged herself. —Listen, love. Go into the lounge. Desk by the wireless. Top drawer.

He went. She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray by the lamp and stood and over her nightdress pulled a dark green gown with an image of repeated parrots and put on slippers and when Allardyce returned she was stood smoking again leaning against the wall in a pose he recalled from when she was young and he a boy not understanding what the angles of her wrought in him. Middle age had not altered how she held her body. He looked at her from the threshold. He held two onionskin sheets of airmail paper.

—Why didn’t you send it? he said.

She took a drag. —I don’t really know is the truth. No I tell a lie, darling. Did you read it?

—Read it? I started to. He waved it gently in the air as if to dry wet ink upon it. —What there is. There ain’t exactly a lot.

—Don’t think I didn’t try. Take it. Read it later if you want. Not now, it ain’t Shakespeare. Mostly blank, I never know what to say. That’s what I’m getting at.

—I’ll read it. All of it, including the blank.

—Best bit. It ain’t that I never sent it, it was that I hadn’t sent it yet.

—Been months.

—I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say, love. Every time I started there was too much to get down. You taking off like that. Not a word for ages. That horrible piece of work coming around asking where you was—

—He’s nothing to worry about any more.

—Oh I know, love. Believe me, there’s plenty round here grateful to you for that. But taking off. Not a word to your brother. Or to your mum.

—How is he?

—John? John’s alright. Done his exams. Accountant. He’s still with your mum.

—Oh yeah?

—She’s going spare about you.

—Come on.

—It’s true.

—Alright.

—She loves you, Steve-o. You know she does, darling. She just, she’s always, well, she’s a worrier is what it is.

—Oh yeah? A worrier?

—Things ain’t always been easy for her. He said nothing. —I know she can be a bit, you know. She don’t always make it easy. When we was girls she used to drive me round the bend, don’t think I don’t know.

—Yeah well.

—It weren’t easy for her. Dealing with you and John on her own like that.

—Don’t tell her you seen me, he said. —Promise me. Don’t tell her or John neither. I mean it, Rene.

—She’s your mum.

—Rene I mean it, you got to promise me. It ain’t her business if I’m back, alright?

—Just tell her you’re on leave, Steve-o.

—Leave. Yeah. For as long as I want.

—What d’you mean? You ain’t packed it in?

—If anyone asks, you ain’t seen me. All right? Especially anyone from the army.

—Oh my Lord. You never done a runner?

He lifted the heavy curtain a handspan and Irene saw the aura of the night city.

—Darling, tell your old auntie. She made herself do the laugh of his childhood again. He smiled into the summer gloom.

—Rene, I seen some things. Done them too. There’s stuff you wouldn’t understand.

—You always come to me when you was a kid, darling.

—You wouldn’t understand and it ain’t as if I do either. It’s been doing my head in. I just had to pack it in. You start to feel like you’re losing it, don’t you?

She did not interrupt his long quiet.

—But you know, he said. —Being back here. In the end what really done for me was getting back to drill and bullshit. I could take the worst and even the weird of it but it was the marching up and down got me. I ain’t that kind of soldier. But once they’ve got you they’ve got you is how they see it.

—Oh, Steve-o.

—So if the MPs come, you ain’t seen bollock-all. Righto?

He let the curtain fall back.

—You need money, darling? she said. —I’ll get my purse.

—Give over, you’re alright.

—How? What you doing?

—You don’t want to know.

He took her in a quick embrace and she could feel his strength and how far away he was inside. Still though he kissed her crown through the tousled smoky hair.

—Look in on your mum, she said. —Please. And don’t you dare disappear again.

—Hush, you’ll wake downstairs.

—You promise me.

He would not promise.

If he walked past any lot wherein lay rubble it put Allardyce in mind of his childhood investigations. Climbing destruction, ferreting in blast zones. Those might have been stories he’d been told. There was a space now behind the Harrow Road, cleared by demolition, not war, and the girls he saw there engrossed in a hand-clap game took him back thirteen years to the last such he’d witnessed, other pat-a-cake rhythms, he alongside playing trash cricket in the smashed-up east.

He took a room in Colville Terrace, an attic with the lino half-unstuck, old sheets for curtains, tea chest for a table. He paid cash to a taciturn Trinidadian gent and without a by-your-leave attached a lock inside the door. Allardyce sat on the bed and held his aunt’s letter. Curlicues and scratchings out.

Dear Steve-o I hope you know we’re all thinking of you here

You can want to hug a person and give them what for all at once. She was always quick off the mark and better in person, Rene.

In the warmth of Westbourne Grove white men in outsized jackets with their hair quiffed eyed their black neighbours, and if not with such freighted expressions Allardyce, too, in his no-particular style, strange for so young a man, and he not the least intimidated. In a small café he read the letter again, such as it was.

I know you were angry and your mum’s trouble sometimes I know

I’m glad you’re doing well out there are you?

Long unwritten sections over which he passed his gaze.

We miss you.

He ordered tea and toast. Held the letter to his lips not in a kiss but rumination.

The big light sky over Farringdon Road washed out tables at pavements’ edges, many mean, some without awnings, crowded with shoppers all the same. Come here and as many times as not Allardyce would be mumbled at in conspiracy by the wretches rummaging for salvage, told the market was on its way out, a shade of itself. Still they rooted, with a ruthless intuition such as he’d observed in his mother on Petticoat Lane, in Paddington, over food and old clothes and the arcana of cleared houses, china not too broken, gewgaws, about which she’d had brief fantasies of repair when they joined counterparts on her shelves, to make her smile was the idea, broken or not, it’s only a chip. There’s ruin and ruin. He abjured such stuff here though it did rouse something in him. What would you call this feeling? He did not pause at the specs man with his stand and grinder, his intermingled frames like some insect hecatomb.

Book dealers behind their wares watched their customers’ avarice with contempt. Some browsers smart, hatted even in this heat, some young, some foreign or foreign born, mostly blokes ten or twenty years older than Allardyce and fierce in their devotions, unkempt as the volumes they coveted. At certain stations categories in ordered lines; at other tables page scree, dust jacketless hardbacks fading and ornamented with marginalia.

He jostled a thin man with a beard like black straw who clung to an ex-library history of Lincolnshire. Allardyce sifting through political excurses, histories, obscurities. He felt as if metal tugged at his earlobe. If he squatted, peered beneath the table, what might he see? Pieces of engine torn from a plane? He sought esoterica. One pitch was just a suitcase on the kerb. The white and blue of Pelican editions. Comparative something, Bouquet, Rudolf Otto. Allardyce put his hand out and on it fell the hand too of that man again. There came up in Allardyce abrupt dread. Until the gutter scholar squared up and quaveringly insisted that he had touched the book first and so proved himself only a man.

Allardyce would wish to see how this chap looked when punched. How his nose would blossom red into that fucking beard. Stamp on his face. Allardyce made his free hand a fist. Careful, though, careful. He released his grip on Uncanny Stories by, no, edited by, Someone Sprigg.

Perhaps he should have said, Mate, if you tell me what you’ve got there you can have it, if you’re not just grabbing what I’m grabbing.

But he stepped back.

He woke, if he slept, certain of a secret sharer in his room. Something closing in to send him out.

Hours in wastelands and fathoming the mud of the riverbank. Hours in libraries, copying, all over London (you never know), Militaria and History, Fiction because once you’ve got a taste, Mythology, The New Larousse Encyclopedia thereof eye-caught because of misprision, glimpsing the attribution, scout’s honour, as Robbing Graves, you had to laugh, but in for a penny, Robert it is, give it a shufti and “myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible” sounds about right, and yes a good idea to treat them all with “the same impersonal courtesy.” Manners maketh. And taketh? That CT in the jungle could almost have been a case of After you. The etiquette of murder. Greeks and Romans did nothing for Allardyce but there was something to the Zend-Avesta and the Finno-Ugric and the rest, to the psychostasia and negative confession of the Egyptian dead, to Gilgamesh and his shaggy companion.

No word in this whole big book on Malaya? Not a sausage? What good was that to a chap in a hurry? In company? Out of sight in his carrel in Kensington Library Allardyce drew an ugly frontispiece Kilroy in the book, big-nosed man gripping, staring over a wall, and below it he wrote Wot No Hantus?

Foyles was good and all in its chaotic way but who, no matter how light their fingers, would risk a paperback down the back of the trousers there more than once every few days? The secondhand places in Charing Cross had their role. But it was an ear to a certain bibliophile underground had first sent Allardyce to the Farringdon market, where he found a text so useful to his fugitive investigations that he kept returning. In his retelling of it to himself the old volume of colonial management had awaited him, hiding when the wrong hands descended. The Further Side of Silence.

“I have fought with and against them,” he had read. The natives, that was. Clifford, the introducer’s name, laid out the groundwork for Allardyce’s Malaya work twenty years before he was born.

I have watched at close quarters, and in intolerable impotency to aid or save, the lives which all these people lived before the white men came to defend their weakness against the oppression and the wrong wrought to them by tyrants of their own race; and I have seen them gradually emerge from the dark shadow in which their days were passed, into the daylight of a personal freedom such as white men prize above most mundane things.

If you say so sir, is what old Bowler would have said to that. By the same author: Studies in Brown Humanity. Arf arf. Allardyce was neither moved by nor despised such ballyhoo. This was the sort of thing he was after. Sir Hugh Clifford (KCMG) adumbrating stories of the lands, the ghastliness of “the Ghoul,” the Undone One, penanggal with her dripping comet’s tail of innards, the matianak chittering at gravesides, the polong, stillborn child, its tongue bitten off and swallowed and its spirit bound.

In that introduction, what Allardyce returned to was self-abnegation.

Nobody, I am assured, ever reads a preface. I consider, therefore, that I may safely regard this foreword as a confidential document, written for the sole purpose of salvaging my own sensitive conscience. From this point of view I regard it as necessary, for it seems to me that the imposture involved in issuing as a work of fiction a volume which is in the main a record of fact, should be frankly confessed from the outset. A knowledge of the truth that these initial pages will remain to some extent a secret between me, the proofreader, and the printer, will enable me, however, to write of personal things with a larger measure of freedom than I should otherwise be bold enough to use.

Well. A good way to disclose esoterica, tell it as a story. And consider Allardyce, the elect, reading what should go unread. Afterwords, too, are likely as ignored, and as full of secrets. And if there was truth in what went unread, imagine the unwritten. On, well, the farther side of silence?

Allardyce had known heat infinitely more punitive than this, but he sweated in the market.

[5]

When she was ten or whatever Maur was walking an Essex bridleway. Her mother was struggling to keep up by then. The girl, the herself Maur recalls, looked back at her mother from the path’s rise where a clutch of trees would die and where her son would come ultimately to stare. Looked forwards to her father with eyes only for his wife. Maur recalls her excitement at that stare between her parents. It did not efface her. For a while that was the last instant Maur had of unsour love for all therein but not since Ewan died. The death of the dead does not stop. It invades your memories. As if now, on the knoll in her own past, beside the girl she was, Maur’s child-to-come waits to be passed.

Maur runs. Hears Cybill behind her. Maur arches her back as if something blighting closes on them. The black sky is vast. No one is out. They run past a squat church and its yard. Cybill doubles over. Maur, gasping, takes hold of Cybill’s coat and hauls her on again under spaced-out streetlights at the outer rim of this mean village. Into the dark beside the hedgerow. A high and far-off animal alarm. The women stumble roadside saying nothing. Only when they are overlooked by hulks of field machines do they slow. A vehicle’s white glare fills Maur’s eyes and is gone before she can gesture. Her phone won’t turn on. A lorry trembles the scrub. Now light comes from behind and a car coasts past to a stop off the road and a man opens the door and asks if they’re okay.

Maur hears herself, thank you their car broke down if he could drop them by the station please?

The mean terraces of the market town. The last train has left. The women walk by a commercial estate. Teenagers stare at them behind cigarettes and the moony glow of phones. Taxis want payment in advance. At the cashpoint Maur presses buttons beep boop beep as if this were a night like any other. The cab takes them through constellated scrubland. Dance music in the car, not too loud. Maur leans against the window. She will have to consider what happened. Teller in his house. They go by a roundabout, a sculpture of coiled fish.

“Works,” the driver says. “Got to go through Erith.”

Woolwich, the tunnel and neon-lit parades. Roads fold in the miles towards Maur’s dark rooms.

Abruptly she says, “Can you drop us here?” Cybill looks at her. They get out in the dark by a sapling in a tube of wire not quite on Maur’s street.

“What are you doing?” Cybill says when the car’s gone.

“I don’t know, I just don’t want anyone seeing where I live.”

They come like night supplicants in the cycling colours of traffic lights. What about the quiet around them? Might it be tainted? By noises from that other house? Since which many hours have passed.

“My fucking keys,” Maur whispers. Another thing gone. She has to wait for Cybill to find her spare set. The light’s paper shade throws ugly whiteness on everything.

“Maur…”

“I don’t know.” To speak is like coming up from underwater.

Cybill says, “What happened?”

Maur considers. He’s a nutter we were lucky to get away. There was someone upstairs. What do you mean? We gave ourselves a scare didn’t we? What do you think?

Cybill says, “I just had to get out of there.”

That yanks Maur out of shallows of sleep. Seconds of nothing.

Again Cybill says, “What happened?” And for the first time Maur wonders if she alone saw what was seen. At the thought of the stairs Maur grips the arms of her chair.

Cybill says, “Fuck, he was a weirdo, weren’t he, Maur?” Her voice speeds up. “Coming at us like that, staggering around. I get why you went there but maybe we’re best out of it.”

Maur shakes her head. “You didn’t—”

“I don’t know,” Cybill says. “Stop.”

Maur starts awake to the scratch of cloth on cloth. Cybill is sitting up with her own eyes closed. Maur stares at all the shapes of the room. How could she sleep? She sleeps.

To wake again, to musty light. Her head aches. Children play in the schoolyard beyond her walls. Cybill is awake too, is holding the letter.

Maur emails the office that she can’t come in. She does not shower for the thought of closing the curtain around her. She changes her clothes. Now her phone starts. It comes up to a list of messages: Des; Jane; Cybill; Cybill; unknown; unknown. She opens the window and puts her head out to breathe.

“We should tell someone,” Maur says. “I mean…999? What would I say?”

“Search me,” Cybill says. “What even happened? Are you sure you want them seeing your number?”

Maybe miracles aren’t rare. Maybe they happen while cars go past and cans wait in the cupboards. Had there been, in that house, sounds other than Teller’s voice? Memories are not recordings. Maur is ashamed. Of something. Of the fancies of grief. If they were of another woman’s child.

“Okay that’s enough,” Maur says. “Get your coat on. We need to get out.”

She leads Cybill below clouds down Neasden Lane over the railways. Goes to a phone booth but its receiver’s tether culminates in splayed wires. (Maur’s young self was sometimes telephoneless for days when the bill was beyond her. She made what calls she must from such a box with Ewan on her hip.) To speak what she saw might decrease it.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re being ridiculous.”

Church Street in cold sunglow. The pretty redbrick copshop with bay windows like a country pile. Lamppost before the door exactly like a Pauline Baynes sketch, waiting as if for Mr. Tumnus. The man at the desk rolls his eyes but finds for them a boyish officer who brings them into an unmarked inner room and sits opposite.

“Sorry, where were you?” he says. He does not meet their eyes.

“Gravesend,” Maur says.

“Sorry, so why are you here?”

“I live here.”

“Right. Sorry, why were you there?”

When Cybill interrupts he looks up at her and Maur wonders at that authority, one of the kinds of maternity she could never garner. Cybill tells him to look her up on his computer, look up the Shackingham Campaign. He scribbles something. She tells him they found Teller’s address and went to ask a few questions and that after that, well.

“Sorry, yes?”

“Well, we had a bit of a barney,” Cybill says.

Maur says, “Someone else was there maybe.” Cybill does not look at her.

Teller had been aggressive, Maur says. Blamed them for something. An altercation. Yes, they’d been inside. No, they just wanted information. They repeated his address. “Will you check on him?” Maur says she heard noises. “Someone upstairs I think, and by then it was a bad scene so we got out. But I heard fighting. And what we want…” She looked at him to see the face of someone who was not at that house.

“We’re just asking you,” Cybill says. “Tell your colleagues. Have a word.”

The young man looks at them. After that dread there is comfort in seeming merely absurd.

—

Outside the police station Maur says, “Well that was a waste of fucking time.”

Another evening has come. How can that be? The women are cold when they reach the flat again. They dither in the living room.

“It’s getting on a bit,” Cybill says, “maybe I can just…”

“Of course,” Maur says.

“Just tonight, then I’ll get back.”

Look how shy they are.

Maur’s neighbour in his yard again, she can hear. She pulls open the door to where Cybill lies upon the sofa. She looks too still to be asleep. Maur sits on the edge and picks up the remote control and turns the television on and mutes it before the light comes up. Shining across Cybill’s face not opening her eyes. Maur click-clicks across late-night do-overs, bright faces, chat shows, vivid ads, bleak backstreet laughter, why so many repeats and why from so long ago? Spooked by the slither of old images, here was Norvelle on a stage, mouthing Chase me! under uncanny lights.

Present

On the Tube to Russell Square he stood gripping a strap and watched mothers and daughters and sons and fathers as pale as over-milked tea, a suited man in his bowler, two Sikh lads whispering. Young men tieless, more Teds, a young woman, nearly asleep, dressed as drab as if she’d been born here, maybe she had. Allardyce kept his eyes open for anyone, any presence, that might be after him.

He walked to Hunter Street in the sun, pausing to light cigarettes and glance behind. At a corner of the square a congregation of students with fashionable spectacles, Africans and Asians and who-knew-what alongside their white mates. He noted himself noting this and thought of Bowler and his itemisation in the cities of Malaya. He walked through the gathering outside the university.

Two women behind the library reception desk. —May I help you? the older said.

—I wanted to know about joining.

—I see. And are you a student here?

The younger woman covered a smile with her hand. She was only a little older than Allardyce and had a cast to her skin and dark hair precisely cut. He wondered if she was Italian or Spanish or some such.

—No, he said.

—Are you a student elsewhere in London? Or anywhere?

—No.

—Well. I’m sorry but this is a university library.

—Yes. I know. I thought—

—It’s only students who can use the resources, you see.

—Yeah. Yes. I mean what about, is there a fee I could pay?

—I’m awfully sorry.

—What about, what if you’ve got a special project?

—I’m sorry.

—If he had a letter? the younger woman said to her. —Like that chap doing work for Dr. Davidson?

Her colleague met her eyes with level surprise, then looked back at Allardyce.

—If you’re helping one of our staff with research I suppose we might be able to get you a temporary card. Have you a letter? Then I’m awfully sorry.

He stood opposite the entrance smoking in the sunlight near a group of young men debating Nyasaland when the younger receptionist emerged. Showing no surprise, she came to him.

—Can I have a light? she said. —She’s alright really, old Gibbs. Bit of a square. But she’d get in awful trouble. Can you get a letter? When he said nothing she said, —Maybe you’ll have to come study here, eh?

—Is that what you do?

She was pleased. —Me? Lord no. You thought I was a student? I work here, don’t I?

—I thought maybe part-time.

She smiled and to his eyes there was something hesitant to her look and quite distinct from those nearby in discussion.

—I’m Maisie.

—Steven. Steve.

—Why do you want a library card?

He heard a bit of East London.

—Got things I need to look up, haven’t I?

—What’s that then?

—Stuff about Malaya.

He regretted saying so. She blinked.

—You were there? National Service?

—I was there.

—What is it you’re after?

—I don’t rightly know. I wanted to see what you’ve got.

—Want me to?

He regarded her. The crookedness to her mouth.

—I might not get you in but what about a list of titles?

—You’d do that would you Maisie?

—Might do. Depends. I mean a light’s one thing but what about coffee? You like coffee?

—Coffee’s alright.

—Take me for coffee.

—I can’t now.

—Steady on, I can’t now either. A one-cig break is all. Day after tomorrow?

—Okay then.

—Malaya? Stuff about the language?

—There’s more than one.

—History? The war?

—No. It’s…He hesitated. —I don’t even know if you’ve got anything that’ll help. What I’m interested in is the abos. The Sakai and that.

—The natives?

—How they live and that. And, you know, what they believe. Religion. Stories. Fairy tales. You know the sort of thing. Gods and witch doctors and devils.

—Folklore. Three o’clock?

—Day after tomorrow. Here?

She laughed. —On a weekend? Would you want to meet where you work? What do you do?

—Bit of this bit of that.

—Honestly, you’re terrible. Tell you what, Mr. Witch Doctor. You know Meard Street? Soho?

—I can find it.

—There’s a café.

—See you there.

He walked to Camden to stand on the bridge and consider the sedate turn of filth in the canal. Around the pub by the high road rock and roll came from a wireless and people smoked in the sunshine. Flat-capped or bareheaded, men in short-back-and-sides Allardyce’s age and over, women in tight-cinched skirts, their hair in up-kicking curls.

—’Allo.

He greeted those he recognised. A villains’ pub of very minor repute.

—Fucking Commonwealth Day? someone said. —What the fuck’s that then?

—Everything changes, Allardyce said.

—Crying shame.

He took a beer. Sam came to him. If it had not been Sam it would have been another man. Sam was two years older than he, a quick-moving, furtively enthusiastic bloke. His very broken nose made his Aberdonian accent nasal and him seem dangerous. He was AWOL too, from the Royal Engineers. This connection they’d established a while back after drunken agreement on issues of bullshit, bootblack and corporals, though Sam had been a corporal. Sam had asked Allardyce if he’d help out with a job and they’d gone to a lockup behind Mornington Crescent where Allardyce had stood unspeaking at the door and watched Sam ask the bloke within, his face newly flushed above oiled overalls, whether he had the you-know-what he owed you-know-who. The man took money from the bottom of a toolbox and gave it over. Sam gave Allardyce ten pounds. It was like that the next two times. A muttering tailor, then a fat man in a natty suit too young for him who chattered to them like a friend. Allardyce though of only middling height was a big lad now and the way he held himself you knew he could fight, and Sam’s eagerness had a cruelty. Indeed when the fourth man they visited, in an under-arch office in Silvertown, swore at the sight of them and stood behind his desk and said he was done rolling over, Sam hit him on the side of his head without a warning, wearing brass knuckles Allardyce had not seen him put on. He’d known it might come to this obviously and been ready and his heart didn’t even speed up as he watched with a sort of quiet quizzicalness the arm going back up and down, the noise it made when it hit this bloke, oof blimey. Allardyce watched as if just behind him stood someone in rags, in a jungle.

The man moaned and bled and earned Allardyce’s respect by calling Sam a bastard in a sluggish thick voice while his secretary came to the door and screamed and stood staring. Sam told the chap who owed that he was naughty and reminded him that he knew what he had borrowed for and told him he had a day to think on his ingratitude lest word get out.

They’d done two more since then. Allardyce’s pay had gone up to twelve pounds. He did not know for whom he collected. That beating was the only violence he had seen though he was ready for more.

—Sunday? Sam said. —You free?

—What time?

—Evening. Eight till late as they say.

—No bother. You ain’t heard anything, have you? What I asked you?

—No, mate. Sam’s look was between suspicion and pity. —Like I said, you didn’t give me much to go on.

Sam claimed to keep a fingertip in certain military pies, to listen in on soldierly clishmaclaver. So he was one of those mountebanks of the city whom Allardyce had asked to keep ears out for any chitchat connected to Malayan special ops, or about some local native bloke responsible for some Irish cove being done in. For any goss about anything code-name Awful.

—You going to be alright till then, Choirboy?

He had no recollection of mentioning to Sam that nickname.

Later Allardyce rose from his bed and took paper from a drawer. He unfolded it so in the orange light come up from the streets he could see the smudges by which Hook had drawn a figure behind him. Through the glass he saw no motion, heard a dog. He imagined himself one and what he might hunt or by what be hunted. What might drift the length of the Mandai River to where it joined the Thames. That night he did not sleep again.

The fair was on Hackney Wick. Grass stiff with rubbish. He picked through crowds. People on the wheels and at the stalls and laughing amid the bugling noises and the lights on the dodgems. Half past seven, the towers of East London poked into a glowering sky. Allardyce could smell the damp. Under his feet plants pressed up out of England, which was still close up in a way that needed getting used to. Everywhere else in the world, even where colours were brighter, which is most places, eh?, other than this shithole, something like gauze was between them and his eyes.

Terror Train. All skulls and owls and painted spiders. I mean he had to. Start to end about five minutes. He sat with three lads not yet twenty who hooted louder than the makeshift monsters and chucked biscuits. A stretched-out sheet descended with tinny giggles and stared with dark paint eyes.

The entrances to the tents were like cave mouths, portals to fields of night. A shooting gallery. His hands itched. Paper targets pinned by goldfish. Air rifles chained to the stand. But he didn’t want to shoot, what good would that do? He chucked a wooden ball at a coconut and not only did he go and hit it first time he hit it hard enough to crack it.

—Look at that, the stallholder said. —Too strong for your own good. The milk’s leaked out.

He ate the flesh.

Queen Gypsy Psychic in red letters on green. He waited his turn. There were bright cushions everywhere. A woman, not old, scarf knotted over her hair. She wore thick glasses.

—Sit down then, she said. —Did you pay Derek?

—I crossed his palm.

—Good one. Give us your hand.

—I don’t really care about my hands, Allardyce said. —What else do you do? D’you read cards? Talk to spirits?

—Don’t interrupt, mate, I’ve a trance to get into. She reached again and he let her hold him.

—Yes. I see a lovely young girl. She’s pining for you. You’ve been away. You’re searching for something. You’re going on a journey.

—Anything bad? he said.

—Eh?

—See anything you don’t like the look of? If you can’t you’re no good at this job, I’ll tell you that.

She frowned and Allardyce took hold of her wrists and pulled her towards him. With his right hand slapped her in the face. She gasped and rocked back. She stood and staggered, tipping her chair over.

—Give over, he said, and stood. —I barely tapped you.

—Get out! She drew breath to scream and he took hold of her neck.

—If you call Derek he’s going to have a nasty accident. I’ve got a question. Got any army officers on your books? When you’re not here you’re hardly Gypsy fucking Rose Lee, are you, you’re based in Dalston. I been asking around. People in my old line of work and in yours. Your name came up. You’ve got a reputation.

—Get off me, she wheezed, but he didn’t.

—I heard you and a few others been boasting about meetings with brass. Care to tell?

She whispered, —Some bloke and some bird came to my house, paid me to do a reading on old junk.

—Junk?

—A notebook. Please. An earring. I don’t know. They wanted to know what I made of them.

The corner of the fabric lifted and the man came in rolling up his sleeves and Allardyce pointed at him, still holding the woman in his left hand.

—I wouldn’t, he said. —I really fucking wouldn’t, mate. Derek faltered. To the woman Allardyce said, —What did you tell them?

She began to cry. —Whatever, you know? Whatever came through?

He watched her fail to recall what she had said and then in her fear fail to come up with any lies about it. Allardyce pushed her towards Derek.

—You don’t even know, do you? Allardyce said. —You ain’t even got the guts to be a proper fraud. You don’t even know if you believe your own shit.

By the café entrance a stack of its flyers showed a shapely nude woman fleeing a skeleton. The room was painted black and was all over skulls. Maisie waited at the counter. Her grin at the sight of him faded back to a scowl she made comic.

—Shouldn’t keep a girl waiting.

—Got turned around, he said.

He had watched the entrance from Wardour Street and not gone in until after she’d arrived.

On Le Macabre’s walls the dead leered from their boxes. Women and bones cavorted. Bats and webs, cigarettes stubbed out in trepanned plaster skulls.

—Well, Maisie said. —What do you think?

—It’s different.

—I think it’s ever so clever. It’s my favourite.

—Your favourite?

—For now.

He bought her a frothy coffee and himself a tea. When she rested her cigarette smoke rose from the ashtray’s eyeholes as if it watched from hell.

—You don’t say much, do you? she said.

He told her he’d been stationed in Malaya with the Engineers, that it had all been over bar the shouting, that he’d spent a year sweeping beetles off the barracks floor. He bought another coffee. He said he was an orphan. She said her mother was a secretary in a school in Bethnal Green, her father an accountant’s clerk, that she was an only child. That she liked to dance and to swim and books. She asked again what he did since leaving the army and he told her again, —This and that, this time with a finger to his nose, and she was pleased.

—You’re awful, she said. —You’re trouble, you are. But you like to read. Whatever it is you’re up to. Why are you wanting to look up that stuff?

He said there’d been Sakai porters at his base and he’d liked their old stories.

—I love to read. Do you know Iris Murdoch? I got you a present.

She was shining. She looked windblown.

—Eh? I ain’t got you—

—You got me the coffee, didn’t you? But I’m not sure you deserve what I got you. We’ll see.

She told him to close his eyes and she told him to open them again. On the table lay a book without a jacket.

Studies in Religion, Folk-Lore, and Custom in British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

Some Beliefs and Customs of the Negritos, he read. Some Beliefs and Customs of the Sakai. Some Beliefs and Customs of the Jakun.

—Do you already know it? she said. —I bet you do.

—I don’t.

He wanted very much to search the index, but he made himself close it. —How long can I— he started to say, and his fingers touched a dry residue of glue on the spine where a class mark had been. —Where did you get this?

Her laugh was almost drunken.

She said, —I made you a list of titles too, here you go. But I went to the section and there’s me, looking around, and there it is, just poking out, so I go to make a note and I see it’s been two and a half years since anyone even had it out. Well. That doesn’t seem right, does it? Not with you waiting. So that’s for you. I said I had a present, didn’t I?

He turned the book over. —I don’t know what to say.

—Don’t have to say anything.

—Blimey. He turned it over and over and wouldn’t look at her and she gave a laugh.

—You sound almost angry! she said.

—I don’t want you getting into trouble.

—Oh they won’t know. They’ll never find it. Are you glad, Steve?

—I’m glad, he said. —I’m really glad.

—Well good then. I’ve three more but I took those out on my card, we get cards, and you’ll have to give them back. You get to keep the one that was taken out the longest time ago. That seemed fair.

—Thank you. It’s terrific. You’re crazy. And you say I’m the dark horse.

He took her to the Ship. She drank her vodka tonic, and regarding the lowing knots of old drinkers, he said, —Bit of a dump, but she said, —I don’t mind, it’s got character, hasn’t it? I mean Soho does, doesn’t it? Even now when there’s so many fakes around.

It seemed impossible to Allardyce that he was here, after he had been where he had been. Outside two women in saucy clothes shouted abuse at a big old man in a black cloak the heat be damned. —Jack, you old cunt! they called, and he cackled and stamped on the ground with an iron foot strapped to one foreshortened leg and said he’d been insulted worse by better whores than they. Maisie gazed and Allardyce led her to the Stockpot and when they’d eaten and came into Soho’s alley gloaming she wanted another drink. Allardyce patted his jacket pocket to feel the book she’d given him.

He was drunk, they both were, when they came to the glare of a pink declaration, the Flamingo, where they lined up and waited for the bouncer to glance at Allardyce and all but laugh as he shook his head. Though Allardyce did have on a tie as required, seeing those behind him, as young or younger but with clothes sharp-pressed and hair slick but without Ted excess, some wearing dark glasses in the neon evening, Allardyce understood the bouncer’s decision even as he looked the big man with the ruined ear over, another vision of violence welling behind his eyes, knowing with certainty that he could kill him. But Maisie was leaning in to whisper to the doorman, who laughed at what she said and rolled his eyes and nodded them in jovially enough to a warm sweep of music, a throng rolling to jazz, to which Allardyce had no notion how to dance, which did not seem to matter, so he was turning in the smoke and shouting at Maisie over it all as if delighted, losing her for moments in the heave, a commonwealth, dancers darker than his landlord and paler than he. All the time he smiled he watched himself from within.

—What did you say?

—What?

—To the gorilla.

—I can’t hear you, Steve!

Liar but no matter. A moment’s playful switch, so he was shuffling in his inexpert way with a young was she Chinese? woman laughing at or with him, putting him back at the club in Singapore, then Maisie returned from her own brief adventure and was kissing him hard, now, tongue in Allardyce’s mouth, and had he started it or had she?

Still drunk on their emergence later into the cool long after midnight where young people gave each other lights and a gang of dandy queers catcalled. Allardyce felt drawn. Saw himself in charcoal and ink. Too late for an antipilgrimage he wished to take but that could wait. He and Maisie stepped away, watched by that bouncer with his arms folded and smiling again beatifically, so Allardyce turned and walked back to the man who regarded him with the barest curiosity.

—Oh dear here comes trouble, called one of the watching nancies.

—Don’t show off, sonny, the bouncer said, and Allardyce hit him expertly and full in the face and the man keeled backwards and down spurting blood all over and lay unconscious while people screamed.

Allardyce walked unfollowed back from the commotion to where Maisie stared. Her face was flushed, her eyes and lips twitched.

—Is he dead? is what she whispered.

He actually laughed. —Leave it out. He took her arm and led her around a corner. —I mean, you saw the state of him. I done him a favour. He needed his beauty sleep.

She stared at him, her pupils big. —That was bad, she said. —You’re bad. You can’t go round like a hooligan like that. She was breathing deeply. She led him into Soho Square where sheltered by the shag and trees’ overhang beyond the railings Allardyce stopped, watching himself and her, feeling watched by other eyes, to light another cigarette in the shadows of her face below that canopy. Daring the unseen to harry him. Again he could not say which of them moved first, if that was a question with meaning, but they were kissing once more, breathing each other’s smoke. She held the back of his head and with her left hand groped at his crotch, moaning at the feel of him hard.

He opened his eyes a faint line. And of the leaves behind her, over her shoulder, swaying in some breeze as if to slowed-down music, the night made a columnar figure, an unclear face, observing. He did not pull away or scream like the witnesses to his assault. By some strength Allardyce only closed his eyes again and kissed harder. But his body must have changed because she reacted to his new tension. He pressed his hand against her belly through the sweat-damp cloth. He touched skin between two buttons. He would kiss no matter what held him in regard.

Allardyce worked at the fastenings of her shirt. She closed her eyes and bit her mouth and removed his fingers.

It came to him that he did not much react to what looked on at him in the dark garden because it did not surprise him.

[6]

Maur wakes from a dream of walking across a hillside all grey dust and it is as if that dust has been in her throat. She is so thirsty she is almost afraid. She rises in her nightdress, tries to swallow, has no spit. She goes to the kitchen and turns on the light.

At the table sits Tom Strude. He holds the letter.

Maur opens her mouth to scream. No sound comes out. Strude puts a finger to his lips.

“Jesus Christ,” she gasps.

Strude is in dark clothes. He waits.

“How did you…?” she says. Her words slow as it comes to her that there is nothing he can say that will make his presence all right. She keeps her eyes on his and tries to think of knives and tools and where in the house they are. She tries to think how fast she can run without shoes.

“You spoke to the police,” he says. “I doubt they gave you a very good reception but you must’ve gotten through because they did check. Like you asked.”

There is such stillness to him. He keeps the letter in his left hand and puts his right into his jacket pocket and says, “Yes. I’m going to take this out now so you can see it. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Do you understand?”

He stands. He draws out a pistol. He is not quite aiming it at her but nor does he hold it loosely.

“Sit,” he says.

She obeys.

“You were at Teller’s,” he says.

“They went to see?” she hears herself say.

“He’s dead.”

Somewhere a dog is barking. No, moaning. They barely do that any more. Thirty years ago every night was full of it. Strude takes a deep breath. He sets his lips.

“I understand this is difficult. This is not ideal. If you…” He considers. “If you look at the sun the thing to remember isn’t that you’ll damage your sight and all that, it’s that you’ll be carrying the sun inside you. And you won’t even know it until you close your eyes. And there it is in negative.” He shakes his head. “I realise that doesn’t help now, but it will.” He raises the letter. “Do you have anything else like this?”

She takes a long and shaking breath. “What do you want?”

“The situation’s dangerous,” he says. “And urgent. What I need is for you to help me. Help me help you. And—well, help all of us. Help Ewan.”

“What?” she says to the priest and his gun. “What?”

“Do you have anything else like this thing? The letter?”

“It’s Cybill’s….”

Maur feels an arrival out of her sight. She starts to rise, to twist, looking into the pistol as if daring him to fire, but he does not move at all. Maur pushes backwards but something grasps her from behind. She cannot call out. Something pulls her close and pinions her and Strude does not look at what has her but into her eyes. She draws breath to scream and her mouth is blocked up. Claggy rough darkness comes down. And withal the wash of terror as rag darks her eyes, there is within her, too, a déjà vu.

Testing one two three four five

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up

The place on the east coast which the reader is asked to consider

Who is this? Who is coming?

When first I met Edmundson he seemed a good sort though always somewhat vague in his manner as if something had caught his attention just at the moment you hailed him. At times I found it hard to imagine quite how he had made a career for himself in the army but made one he had, and if it was not glittering he had by all accounts acquitted himself perfectly admirably enough. He took fire at Omdurman with MacDonald’s 1st Egyptians and thereafter was invalided out, and retired to his estate in ——shire to live the life, he used to say with that self-deprecating air of his, of a gentleman farmer. He was not a frequent visitor to London but came down periodically to meet with his solicitors and discuss matters pertaining to business, and more often than not when he did he would meet with me and Perkins and Abrams in the club afterwards for a bite to eat.

On the evening of which I write, Edmundson was late. This was by no means an uncommon occurrence and as his friends we were mostly inured to it. On the night in question, however, he was more tardy than usual, and we grew restive. The tone with which we discussed our absent friend went from one of amused good humour to something rather more impatient.

When fully three-quarters of an hour had passed since the agreed time of our appointment we were considering whether to dine without him.

“Hang it all,” Perkins declared, “it’s really too bad,” and just then Edmundson walked into the room.

“There you are!” said Abrams. He continued in quite a different tone, “I say, old man, you look as if you’ve—well, I don’t like to say.”

Indeed Edmundson had about him the most harrowed look. He ran his finger under his collar and his face was deucedly pale. Our crossness evaporated and we pressed upon him a whiskey and soda. All thoughts of supper were forgotten in an instant.

“Now, what’s all this?” I said.

“Hallo, you chaps,” he said. “I’m most dreadfully sorry to have kept you waiting. The queerest thing’s just happened. The truth is it has me in rather a funk.”

“Out with it!” Perkins said.

“Well the fact of it is that I’ve seen something,” Edmundson said hesitantly. “Something I didn’t ought to have.”

He looked about him, and if I didn’t know the man better I’d have said he was afraid.

We told him to go on.

“Well,” he said at last, lowering his voice so we all leaned in to hear. “I have to go back a bit to make myself understood. In a way this story starts twenty years ago. I’ve no idea what to make of it. And if you don’t believe me when I’m done I’ll be hard-pressed to blame you.

“Now, have I ever told you chaps about          ?”

IV

The Sist

Spittle

In the morning he was exhausted but he was used to that. He went to the landing telephone and over the wobbling beat of music turned up loud her flatmate told him Maisie was out and that she would say a man had called. Allardyce took the book Maisie had stolen for him into the cold sunlight and read and wrote notes within in pencil by the practices of Senoi, Sakai, Orang Dusun.

Rain is water falling from a stone flower in the sky. A stone pillar supports the heavens.

Clouds came, the day grew dim.

The dead cross a switchbacked bridge, the Balan Bacham. At the end grows the paku ular fern. The dead adorn their heads with it, like she who awaits them, her own head wreathed with leaves, to go to the place beyond.

Held steady for him by his familiar, the halak shaman stabs the evil spirit, wounds it, with a bamboo spear.

On the limbs of the Mapik tree grow all good things, rice and durian and rambutan and flowers. At the base of the tree are breasts at which the spirits of children suckle.

The spirits of the wicked see and call to those in the tree.

Only when their bones are broken, their eyes turned backwards so they look into themselves, are the dead ready to climb.

He unfolded Hook’s scrawl-figure of himself, the unremembered helicopter. There behind him, still and always, a watcher.

Allardyce put a folding knife into his pocket. At the corner of Colville Terrace he opened the book and spat into the gutter according to the counsel of a Province Wellesley Malay. A tiny elderly woman was passing and she called him a disgrace and watched uncertainly when he spat twice more.

Another vivid day so the roofs and plastic signage glowed. He bought wax and shoe polish and cloth and from a cobbler laces and offcut leather. South of Gunnersbury Park he crossed the bridge where the river was narrow. In the botanical gardens he took a map and made no effort to seem as if he was strolling. He went among couples and families in the sculpted grounds, men and women sketching behind easels, so he might become a fleeting watercolour smear. Allardyce was not displeased. He passed through the Brentford gate and the rhododendrons to dense circles of bamboo.

Thick shafts in green and orange fibrous slats like reptile plates, thirty feet high, clustered in their geometries. He bent to the labels: Gigantochloa scortechinii. From the highlands and jungles. Allardyce took out his knife and the book and turned to where the Sungkai specialists guarded against certain grave enemies with withering touches.

No one was in sight when—no harm in technique mix and match—he spat three times again at the base of the growth, nor when he grasped a plant and put his blade to it. But for all the days and nights in the ulu, now, with London around him, he underestimated what he held and his flick knife was no panga. He sawed at the stem and his twisting and yanking made the long leaves of his sacrifice whip.

A man behind him said, —Here!

Allardyce did not turn.

—Here, you can’t do that!

A last rip and Allardyce staggered a bit and laid the severed thing down and turned to the gardener. A man in middle years, pink and wiry in overalls, staring through thick glasses.

—Look what you done! What did you do? You can’t do that!

Allardyce took hold of what he had cut and measured out four feet or so from the ragged stump and started sawing again.

—It’s alright, he said. —I only want this little bit from the bottom. You can have the top back.

That made him laugh much more than he had expected.

—You bloody little hooligan! You little shit!

The man stepped towards him. Allardyce straightened. The man stopped.

—You little cunt, the gardener said quietly. —I was in the fucking war, you don’t scare me.

—The war? Bit old, ain’t you? I been in two wars, mate. Allardyce bent again to his work. —So one soldier to another, you get about your business, I’ll get about mine. One stick, mate. That’s all I want. There…He yanked, —we are.

He scraped, removed gnarls.

—All done, Allardyce said. —Now mind how you go.

Swinging his new staff he set out in the direction of the azaleas.

—You little fucking sod, the other called. —You bloody bastard.

Allardyce did not turn.

[7]

and perhaps he was eight, nine, that time he went to the corner shop for her, when she sent him as was not unusual, whatever they do now, only twenty years ago they walked a mile to school blah blah, but then you did, didn’t you?, it was not unusual, a whole generation of bad mothers?, or a different way of being good enough?, of being just mothers?, because all this chimes with oh you know children are too cosseted these days, not that it’s not true but true or not who wants to recite the talking points? As if you can avoid them. In any case. That time. When Ewan came back. Don and Robert gasping to speak, Ewan silent as if it was the same thing. And though it was Robert who’d told the story in that stop-start child way, of the rough man who had come into the shop and hit the woman with him, in the face, hand right in the face so she had fallen down, made no attempt they saw to protect herself, and the man confronted by Mr. Singh and his brothers, responded to them with a kind of unhidden bored disgust, wasn’t it true that Ewan was quieter than usual in the hours after? Didn’t Maur wonder whether that was still in his head? What else had he seen, would he later see, what did it mean? Did he not say, days thereafter, suddenly, When the woman was on the floor she looked up at him, and she didn’t look surprised. It made Maur very still, made her feel made of brittle metal. And she opened her mouth to answer her son but his words had not been a question.

Darkness scratches her eyes. Maur labours to breathe, tape across cloth in her mouth. She hums out snot. Her wrists zip-tied behind her, she clasps palms together in backwards prayer. Is that other drumming Cybill in her own protest? The van rocks. Maur kicks and makes the metal wall a gong and nothing happens.

You can panic and prepare at the same time. No late-night walk home without keys made claws. Even in her terror she tries to think. The door opens and slams, Maur’s alone. The engine starts back up. She loses her edges. They take tight turns.

After a season she feels the sound around her, beyond the metal, change.

The vehicle stops. She learns then that she hurts. She tries screaming through the gag but it’s a terrible muffled sound. Instead she strains to keep her breathing steady. Listens again for steps. She imagines herself a haze figure in the semi-abstraction of some IR camera, like a pillar of dirty salt.

Tentative as a snail’s eyes, her thoughts reach for what has brought her here.

She hears the van door open. Feels new cold air, briefly lovely, can taste it even in the hood. Her heart pummels her.

“If you knew.” That is Strude. “Maur,” he says. “I’m going to take the gag off. I’m genuinely sorry about this. We just don’t have time. We had to get you away fast. And now—look, I can’t stop you making a noise but it would be better if you didn’t. And no one’s going to hear except us, and you need to understand we’re on your side. Okay?”

The hood is lifted but she makes out no light, the blindfold still tight. When he pulls away the gag it feels as if more cloth comes out of her than went in. Her spit spatters and she gasps. Feels the metal of a canteen on her lips. Cold water, such relief she moans.

“Slowly,” Strude says.

Maur screams. There are words in it.

“If we had time I’d do this slowly,” Strude says when that’s done. “I’d show you all our files. Play you videos, give you stuff to read. I don’t want to put the hood back. I need you to listen. You’re right to be scared but not of me.”

“What is this?” Maur says. Her voice is not good.

“I’ll ask you again. Do you have anything else like this letter?”

She’s too shocked to make a sound as the paper touches her face and it is terrible.

“That’s more than just startle,” Strude says. “Do you have anything else that makes you feel like that? Another letter? A pen? Did you ever throw something away because of that feeling? Matches? Camera? Toy?”

“No.”

“Nothing’s turned up? In your handbag? Down the back of the sofa? We all leave things behind. Whatever any of us do there’ll always be litter. You’ll leave something.” He mimics the scrunching-up sound of waste paper. “ ‘Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish’? That’s the question. What did you see, Maur?”

She says nothing.

Strude says, “Not that we all see the same thing even when we’re looking in the same direction. Tell me what happened at Teller’s.”

Maur licks her lips. “He was aggressive,” she says. “We ran.”

“That’s not true. You saw something. Cybill says she didn’t and I can tell it’s not true, but it’s not not true either. But you did. This is always complicated. How did it feel? We call it crepitus, that feeling you had. That’s the world out of joint. Time has allergies.” A long quiet and he says, “What came up was a kind of function.”

“Down,” Maur whispers. “It came down.”

—

“I thought it was another false alarm,” he says. “But I have to chase leads. And you’ve been noticed. I don’t mean only by us. If this sort of thing notices you that makes you a function, too. There’s no good way to explain any of this. But I think you have an idea what’s happening. If I made you say, I think you’d spout a hundred possibilities you wish you thought might be true. Everyone does. I did. But you suspect. What is it you think happened at Shackingham? Because, I don’t think you’ll want to hear it, but the report was right, pretty much. I get it that if there was some secret there’d be a sort of comfort to it. Conspiracy over cockup. But it was nothing except stupid accidents, which is bad enough, shitty command, miserable kids. Again, bad enough. And I am sorry. I was never lying about that. I’m not saying there’s no mystery. God knows there is. In the old sense of the word. I’m saying that it starts after. After the first death.

“You’ll have to let it creep up on you,” he says. “The knowledge. Think about bad wiring. Dirt on a lens. Something left unsaid. Maur, I need you to help us.”

“You want me to help you?”

“Yes. But I want you to want to, too. And I think you do.”

Her throat constricts. Tears wash her hidden eyes as what comes up as it always will is that yearning for that deadness, for an instant, to cease.

“Listen,” Strude is saying, “I don’t want to gag you again but I will if I have to. I’ll do worse if I have to. This is all precaution for your sake. The iterations I’m talking about…They aren’t stable. So the less you see right now, the safer for you.” Within her, by all the rest of it, is curiosity. “I’m going to lead you out of here and up some stairs and I’m asking you to trust me, to stay quiet.”

Someone, he, pulls her out of the back, into the cold, and she’s sucking it in, through a smell of trash, indoors again, quickly, a hallway, stairs, up, over here, guiding her, through here. A warm chamber. Maur is pressed to sit. Settles into softness.

“Most REs don’t know they’re gone,” Strude says. “That’s the source of a lot of grief. That’s why they fixate. Which is why you’re here. ‘Leave no man behind.’ Or woman. They talk a lot of crap, the Yanks, but they’re not wrong about everything. We have a duty of care.”

“RE?” Maur hears herself.

“Revenance events. As a padre…” His voice is gentle. “A lot of what I do is basically therapy. You can imagine…. You know the sort of thing that they go through. How that leaves them. There are therapies that work even for the last, worst kind of PTSD.”

He pulls off the hood. Maur blinks. Strude’s face is right before her. He steps aside. Low light. This small cramped living room lit by the grey of lamps. An oval table by a window, busy curtains. Dark beyond the glass. Late again, or still. How long has it been?

This sofa. Maur knows its floral print. On shelves are china thimbles and figures, ducks with wings around each other. Potted plants and a cut-glass bowl. Framed photographs on many surfaces. The pictures on the walls of Cybill, of Mark, of Nick and David and Jules on holidays, lit up by the sun. Of Jules as a child, her colourful clothes. Jules in her uniform.

Beyond the walls seabirds shout. Above Palmeira Square where the barrow is gone, the ancient amber cup. This cluttered room presses close. The photograph people smile. The oddments observe in their way. She has been here before. She is in Cybill’s house.

There Cybill is, sitting in a chair opposite, watching her. On a low table by Cybill’s right hand Maur sees a candle, a black-backed book, a little bell.

Redcaps

Back on the buses a woman asked if the stick was for his garden, for his runner beans. In his room he took time smoothing the shaft. He took his knife to the ends to flatten one and angle-slice the other into as sharp a point as he could and he held it over the hob. Rubbed the spike with beeswax, then bootblack, buffed it, heated it again and let it cool. He punched holes in the leather and tied it over the spearpoint he had made.

It was thick and not as smooth as you might expect of a walking stick, and that cinching was a strange sort of tip, not much of a handle. But, if eccentric, it might have been a cane. He practiced pulling the sleeve off to uncover the spike, jabbing. The motion took him back to bayonet practice.

Carrying what he’d made as if it were not unusual, Allardyce went south. He could not parse the drive behind his journey. He took a long route to Lambeth. By a junction of Newington Butts he leaned against a hoarding and smoked. Watched the corner of Dante Road and made no effort to disguise himself because he knew that his body and how he held it were different now from how they had once been.

He had for no reason faith that he would see what he was there to. And after nine o’clock the door of the terrace house on which he spied opened and a woman emerged. Young and plump and her hair was cut well and her clothes bright. She reached back inside and leaning on her arm a man came out now slowly in a pressed suit.

It was he who had come for Allardyce with a blade that time. Even beyond the traffic and the darkness Allardyce could see clearly the woman lifting her elbow for the man to lean. He was still thin but she braced herself as he stepped unsteady, and she patted her hair and pouted in performance, and with slack and spasming lips his smile was less steady than hers but not less full. They walked at the pace of his trembling legs to the Old Queen. Allardyce followed. Heard music within. Saw the tottering man raise his hand hello as he entered.

Watching him, Allardyce said goodbye to his own child self.

Sam met him where Crowndale Road met Camden Street. City-lit vapour hid the stars. —Evening, squire, Sam said. He looked at Allardyce’s stick. —Good of you to come ready.

No one else was near and he opened a jacket pocket to show a coiled bicycle chain.

—Honest though, I’m not sure we won’t need a little more.

In his other pocket he showed Allardyce a revolver.

Sam said the man they were to visit had it coming and such. Allardyce knew then that Sam had never killed. They went north beyond the fanning railway lines. At the end of Bride Street was the prison, the proximity of which made Sam chuckle and say it would save them time if this all went tits-up.

—You let me do the talking, Sam said.

—Alright.

—You just leave the talking to me.

Sam broke them silently into a tall backstreet house. The ground-floor flat smelt of must and they did not turn on the lights. In a front room full of furniture shapes below mildewed sheets, they hid behind the curtains.

—Be ready to get tasty, Sam whispered. —When I give you the nod, get on out there. Do as I do.

A good while. Allardyce heard a car slowing, a walker without. He looked into the darkness of the room and gripped his new weapon. There was something premonitory about the gloom, as if it had come too soon. Out of such in his aunt’s room he had emerged. What was too still, what was there, watching?

Allardyce heard a drone, something coming. As if at a new entrance/exit. As if there were a dog, a wolf, two great worms watching from somewhere deep and silent. His heart did not speed up but it tolled like a bell. He pulled the leather from his spear. He lunged out from behind the curtain and drove the bamboo point into the darkest shadows. It met nothing.

—Get back you fucking idiot, Sam said, —he’ll be here in a tick.

If the spear found its target, Evans said, it would send it leaping into the earth.

Sam started to say more but there came the noise of another car, stopping this time, though the engine continued, and now the quick steps of many people, and the front door was opening, and Sam had said nothing about numbers. He raised his gun.

Here came to Allardyce a carousel of images from Evans’s book. Presences with eyes rolled back, clambering things with shattered bones, white butterflies from a place beyond breath, great pigs with sharp tongues. He heard bellowing. Light came up.

It was not hantu nor kemoit nor grave-lingering dana kubor that came bearing down with the whispering of leaves and ghastly motion, nor gangsters of opposing faction nor blue-uniformed coppers with their truncheons drawn and no unseelie boggarts but redcaps of another kind. Khaki below those hats. They held pistols too.

Allardyce saw Sam’s gun hand come up and knew the stupid bastard would shoot and he brought his staff down hard on his wrist as the military police stampeded in shouting to drop the weapons, which, yelping, Sam did.

The RMPs shoved them to the wall and picked up the spear Allardyce had dropped and handcuffed them and said that this was the end of their little jaunt and that they were a disgrace. They turned the light on and showed Allardyce the shabbiness of where they were.

An MP shoved him for the door and said, —Eyes front, and slapped him.

—You fucker! Sam was shouting to someone. —You fucking fucker.

In the tarmacked streets three cars waited. The MPs shoved Sam, struggling, into one and Allardyce towards another of the vehicles, and the door opened and in he bundled, unfolding on the back seat with his hands cuffed behind him and the door slamming closed.

—Greetings, said a voice from the front seat, a voice Allardyce knew. The man turned to him and streetlamp light showed his face. —Long way from Salalah, Hook said. He half-sang it as if Salalah rhymed with Tipperary.

The driver was the woman from the jungle, from Camp Awfulness, who had stood watching him with he whom Allardyce called Milkman.

—I knew it! Allardyce shouted. He drummed his feet and he laughed and laughed. —I fucking knew it weren’t done, he shouted. —I knew it weren’t finished.

[8]

Cybill puts her finger to her lips. She’s changed clothes since London, a jacket in black or dark blue, you can’t tell in this underlit room, a stiff skirt, shiny leather shoes.

“You’ll stay quiet, won’t you, love?” Cybill says. “There’s no time to get the neighbours out so we’ve got to be quiet. I screamed bloody murder when they took me.”

There is not, but to Maur it is as if there is in this room a sealed and muttering square-sided engine.

“I was belting till they told me what’s what.” Cybill speaks carefully. “About being receptive and that. We need to be here because it’s somewhere familiar. I want to be here. You remember when you asked me about that house? The more I think about it maybe I did see something.”

She speaks with a rhythm like that of liturgy.

“Strude showed me things,” she says. “About how they…you know, the REs can get trapped. I can’t bear it, Maur. I just can’t bear to think of her like that. I saw you seeing. She wants my help.”

“What have they told you?” Maur says.

Cybill says, “I know it’s mad, it’s stupid, it makes no sense, I know.” She’s crying and does not sob. “I know it’s impossible but you’ll help, love, won’t you? When you know you know. A mother knows.”

There was the letter.

Maur looks out from the hollow of herself. At Cybill, who trembles. What then is the world?

—

This small-hours meeting in a humdrum flat fecund with shadows. Preparation for a summoning. Maur has the jimjams. Remember Maur your mum used to say that? The jitters, the heebie-jeebies.

It turns out her disbelief was always provisional. That disenchantment now suspended, here is fear. Philosophy is still pending. The downwalker brought with it uncertainty. Cybill mouths her daughter’s name and Maur exhales through many things, including envy.

Strude returns to view, two young men, a young woman, behind him. They don’t wear uniforms but dark jackets and dark jeans. One man carries a rifle. His eyes go back and forth. An older man stands at the threshold. They ignore the mothers and unpack equipment Maur can’t make out and set it on the table in the bay.

“Teller wasn’t a good officer,” Strude says. “Nor a good man. I don’t know what he told whom, or found out, but he’s been keeping secrets. Him and Sangster were friends of a sort. I know it struck you, Sangster going just at the right moment, and I get it. I don’t know what Teller told him, or vice versa, or how Sangster was with your kids. Maybe that’s the connection, what’s behind the letter.”

“Teller thought we sent it,” Maur says. “To punish him. Who did?”

“Don’t think ‘send.’ For reasons we don’t yet know, Jules focused, on Shackingham.”

“But Teller wasn’t even there,” Maur says. “He hadn’t been for ages.” Why should Jules punish him? For what transgressions? Or why beg him for deliverance? Or for her mother, via a C/O by whom she had never been commanded?

“He represented it maybe.” Strude frowns and shakes his head. “The connections might not be ones you or I would make. She was trying to say something, to what he represented. And to us it looks like that letter. And it’s poisonous.”

—

Teller finding it in his house. In his pocket perhaps. The touch of it on his fingers. That cover note, the look about him: the man had been harrowed, begging for release.

“Sometimes people talk about lingering,” Strude says. “But it’s more a problem of arrival. Some deaths are harder to get past than others. Not just for those of us left behind.”

Here is Maur. She blinks. Amid soldiers who are not rough with her, if they attend to her at all. Who exorcise the anguished.

“I won’t lie, Maur,” Strude says. “If things are bad enough for them to stay behind, it’s catastrophic for all of us. What happened to Teller is that he was touched.” By what wall-knocking hand? Maur hears in Strude a tough kindness. He says, “If that kind of pain brings you back you’re a mistake the universe has to rectify. All any of them want is to touch something. Especially you if you’ve been noticed. That could kill you too.” He pinches out an imagined flame.

Cybill, crying, says, “Why can’t my girl pass on?”

“We don’t know,” Strude says. “Whyever she…I’m sorry but whyever she did what she did, to herself, whatever might’ve happened with Sangster, maybe that’s part of it, all we know is something’s keeping her here. But we can help her. I promise. That’s why you’re here.”

“Why am I here?” Maur says.

Cybill and Strude look at her. “Because you were there,” Strude says. “You saw. That makes you a variable. Maybe it needed both of your attention to bring her back. Cybill, please, I don’t know. But you’ve both seen so you’ve both been seen.”

“What is that letter?” Maur says.

“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “If we don’t help her move on, Teller’ll just be the start. She’s hurting and lost. We don’t have much time. She doesn’t mean anything bad but you’re in danger. I’m sorry, Cybill, but I wouldn’t wish what’s happening to her on anyone. We have to help her focus, so she can go. She’s not meant to be here. You felt it. She’s not okay. People like us are rare. People like you, who see. You want the whole story. When this is done, I’ll tell you everything. About us. The whole history. What we do and why. But we need to move first, because this is happening now, and it’s unstable and it’s dangerous.”

On the table the soldiers construct a circuit: batteries, wires, a laptop, dense obscure machines.

“When she comes back she won’t be able to control herself. We have to do this, for your sake and hers.”

Cybill in her grief. The soldiers pay them no attention, attend diode-flecked batteries, a gauge, an oscilloscope, line scoring up-down. Strude brings to the table the book, the bell. The last candle.

“I know,” he says. “But trust me. We do what we do because it works.”

Maur wants to draw back the curtain to look down on slates. The prowling grounds of cat and fox. But none may see. Someone turns all lamps off within save one. The laptops glow sallow.

“It’s me she wants to talk to,” Cybill says to no one.

Quietly the young woman tells Strude numbers and turns a dial. Maur’s skin prickles. What must happen now? What is this thinking now occurring for the first time? In the light from the obscured bulb the room is a puzzle of black blocks. Aether gets taut. Another man comes in and raises a handheld meter and goes out. How many soldiers are here?

“Whatever happens,” Strude says, “don’t touch. We’re here because, let’s call it timbre, matters. Home vibrations.”

—

As if it is a duty to think it, just once, for the first and last time, there comes to Maur something almost outrage, the words This is mad. She gives that its moment.

—

A man with a rifle guards. Strude puts his hands flat upon the tabletop. The older man approaches, his face worn with a long hard lifetime, good God is he a soldier still? He puts his hands down too.

Maur now. She puts her hands down.

Everyone leans forward.

Hush. The windows rattle. Floating across Hove roofs, another dog noise. Strude lights the candle.

“Okay,” says laptop woman. “Cranking.” She puts centre of the table a brick-shaped metal thing all pipes and wires, lid open like a toolbox’s. It winks red and amber.

“I need you to focus,” Strude says. He lays before Cybill the letter.

“You said she can’t talk to me,” Cybill says. “What about the other way round? Can I say something?”

“You can say anything you want.”

To want to say anything, to want to speak to that thing that crept and crawled against time, Jesus.

Maur watches Cybill’s lips set. Strude takes Cybill’s hand and Maur’s. With her other Maur takes the young man’s. He that of the young woman. Who touches her free hand to a corner of the rugged laptop on which the older operator rests his own fingertips. Hand to hand to quiet tech to soft hand. Maur watches the surface of things. Of a glass. Of water she did not note before. On the table.

“Think of her,” she hears Strude say. “You’re mothers. Now it’s too busy having noticed you two to remember itself. You have to draw its attention. That’s a two-way current. Bring her to mind.”

I didn’t know her, Maur does not say. “Focus,” Strude says.

Oh I’ll focus.

It happens fast. Here she is by virtue of attention. So think of that poor kid she’s never met nor ever will, another woman’s child. Of the shadow gesticulating, holding strained poses of the dead, descending those stairs. Maur considers Ewan who has not come back. Is passed. Is it disobedience to think on that? Him? Not a mile off the unlit sea is tugging at moorings unwatched.

“Read what you wrote.” Strude sounds faint.

“I didn’t write it,” Cybill says.

“Well, you didn’t and you did.”

“ ‘Dear Jules.’ ”

“Yes,” he says.

It’s dark but Cybill must know these words by heart. Or Deario Julio as your dad would say, Maur remembers. You are bad you shouldn’t tell me things like that I don’t want to know!

“ ‘Or Deario Julio as your dad would say.’ ”

Cybill says each word slowly and one of the soldiers is whispering too. Flickers from those box-side lights, machinery mutter. Across a gap of time Maur makes out another sound. She cannot tell if it is within her head, a drawn-out drone like brass. A vibration.

How do you say herr and wehllb and utyo? Who better than Cybill to clarify? Below everything the dirge continues. Soldiers are patient. The candle flame is a white hole to somewhere else.

Cybill begins again.

“ ‘Dear Jules.’ ”

Dear Ewan, Maur thinks in a nothing voice. Dear Ewan o nthe wee kend and huyoidlr. Look how much she’s learnt. In the darkest corner Maur sees a dark square. It shudders. That tone is distant but approaching. She hears a scratching. We are here to commit mercy. Is this how mercy comes? On insect legs?

Ewan? Ticktock is there a clock or is it only her counting down seconds minutes hours in this other woman’s room out of which she wants to be now, in the air in the sun, and she would have her own son with her not whatever half-remembered half-remembering remnant to which they whisper. But is there not something Ewanlike to the feeling in the room? Maur’s nose drips. She sweats. Her crevices are slick.

A slapping. Candles and electric lights all at once go up and all at once go out and all noise ceases and here is the dark.

Someone swears Strude half-rises still holding Maur’s hand while with her other she grips the subordinate whose sotto voce proclamation speeds up as Cybill speaks the broken word parts, qoos nitlrak rylle, Cybill stands too and cries out and breaks the circle eliciting a hiss and stretches with her right hand for something and

a hand reached back, for Cybill’s, a hand phasing and weak even for the dead,

but it’s not the source of that Maur makes out, to glimpse through an instant’s daughter shape in a darkest corner upcoming by some generator sunk and hadal another vaster figure, with a tremble like glee, like play, that brought cold to her throat.

this watcher neither Jules nor Ewan

Who was this who was coming?

A lightless blare. The grips on Maur’s hands release. A door slams, someone shouts and Strude responds, commotion from below, the street, splintering glass and a banshee whoop. The soldiers move. Maur still stares into the corner where there is nothing now.

A window breaks. Strude pushes Maur. “Go!” he says. A soldier drags Cybill, there are voices in the corridor. A shot. Sirens. Torchlight swings. Down the stairwell. Beyond the block are bins like great steel drums and lights come on in windows above the yard’s dirt. An oily billowing, a car haloed in fire. Maur hears the hiss of wheels. Sees stuttering blue lights. Soldiers shove weapons under coats and cross the forecourt while Strude holds Cybill and Maur back and from somewhere someone shouts, “Oy you little shits, get away from it!”

A sound, Maur turns, and the young soldier behind her has dropped his rifle and his face is slack. A figure in its own darkness comes forwards, not like shade or shroud. The newcomer holds his pistol low by his midriff but pointed up at Strude’s face.

Strude moves there’s a shot and Maur screams and more shots come and she’s pulled into shadow by this new man, his pistol now aimed at her and then at Cybill, he grabs her too. He shoves them fast away from the commotion and glow and the other soldiers.

Gestures with the gun and says, “They won’t spare you.”

So Maur runs. Pulls Cybill. The man points their way. Aiming at Maur’s back. She stumbles into undergrowth behind the estate. Her legs shake. She holds Cybill, who is weak and cold and moans. Maur can hear the man behind her. “Quick,” he says.

She cries out when he says it because of what she hears in that same instant, quieter still, deep inside her, deeper than his voice, another.

old soul

clockless,

grieve ’cause you ’ re imperfect because you

grieve ’cause so you

’ re in it

made out of time by morning.

you

’ re nothing but so adjective so adverb

be ’cause you grieve ’cause you ’ re not perfect are you

good enough? you

’ re disgraced so watched by Aidos you

r marrow the humour of you r eye you

r thick blood is what you think with

it

makes you very still

That shame you wear as if it were indifference.

V

A Hiding

X

—How’ve you been, then, Allardyce? Hook said. —Let me undo those. He leaned back and released Allardyce’s hands.

The woman drove. Peeled away from the other car south by York Way.

—You’ve met Dr. Croome, Hook said. —I hope you don’t mind if I have a look at this?

Allardyce’s spear. He took the leather off and put his thumb to its fired point while the car curved by Hyde Park.

—I read it in a book, Allardyce said. —I mean I don’t know do I? Says it’s for dealing with a kemoit. Or a hantu.

They stopped at the corner of a dark mews. Hook led Allardyce out up grand stairs into an unlit house, a shared hall of unlikely squalor. Up to an inner door on the topmost-but-one storey, beyond it rooms with shutters closed, lit by lamps, bare but for stools and a kitchen table bearing mechanical debris as in a workshop, and tin bits and scrap and string, and a shoe, and odds and sods, and a Wireless Set Number 19 open at the back splaying its whatnots and connected all crosswise and fiddled at by a hunched man in overalls who did not look up.

Standing in the corner was the Milkman. No admiralty clothes now. A businessman’s suit.

—Trooper, he said.

Allardyce said, —I fucking knew we weren’t finished.

Hook held out the bamboo staff and the Milkman took it.

—Oh I see, he said. —Ingenious.

—Isn’t it though? Hook said.

—That’s the type of initiative that’ll stand you in good stead, the Milkman said. —What else have you been trying, Allardyce? Turmeric? Spitting? Amulets? Sage? Sand? Holed stones? Any Naxi stuff, or you’ve been sticking to Sakai?

—This and that, Allardyce said.

The Milkman gave him back his stick.

—You declined your final interview at our first discussion. Then behaved rather poorly after that, I think we can agree.

—Sir, I was…It won’t happen again.

—Indeed. We’re not idiots. There can be complicating circumstances to recruitment. One’s suitability to a particular task can be an obstacle as well as an advantage. Fear. It’s never a simple thing. Obviously it’s a commonplace that claims to be without it are either fallacious or dangerous. God save us from the fearless. Of course the merely cowardly is unacceptable in any recruit. But fear itself, and a certain intensity of it, a certain kind of reaction to certain stimuli, might be both a barrier to entry to our field and sure evidence that one’s suited to such work. If that barrier can be surmounted. That’s the kind of necessary shudder the Germans might call Grauen. The Scots might call it grue. I might say you have a horror of such and such, and that’s of import. As it would be if one made out in a scribble drawn with a certain kind of focus more of a diagnosis or even invocation than a caprice. Or if the residue of a ballsed-up summons hung around and took note of a chap, had a nip. Allardyce, you took an oath to obey orders and serve the interests of the crown. Do you stand by that?

—Sir.

—No matter how you might grue?

—Sir.

—You’ve not been absent without leave, but under examination, the Milkman said.

Hook said, —Hypothetically, if a chap were being marked on his performance, one thing that might increase his score, even while exasperating his superiors and indeed snafuing the whole process, would be if that chap showed a capacity to disappear under the examiners’ trained noses.

He huffed a laugh.

—And then, he said, —if, while they’re hunting, they get word that he’s going around spreading the fear of God by looking for them. As if to have another go. That might put to bed niggling doubts about him as a candidate. But where is he? Imagine the relief if one degenerate AWOL spiv collared by MPs offered up in exchange for leniency another. The point being, Trooper: well played.

The Milkman pointed to the bottom of one wall, as if an X were on the skirting.

—That way, he said, —is the flat of Edmund Ruthven. Mr. Ruthven’s thirty-two years old, a man of moderate independent means. He was once an equerry but resigned two years ago as requested by his employers due to certain proclivities. He’s a homosexual, that is to say. His current, what, close friend?, interests me a good deal more than Ruthven himself. Bratomil Mazur, fifty-three, a dealer in maps and illuminated manuscripts. He’s been here for three years, having made it out of Hungary and defected. Unknown to Ruthven, Mazur is an officer of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa. Do you know what that is?

—Polish intelligence.

—Indeed. A look. —This is where Dr. Croome comes in.

Croome did not turn from the glow of a screen but she nodded at her name and raised her right hand.

—Of course if you speak anything you’ll learn here you’ll be spending much of your life in solitary and so forth, Milkman said.

—I was SAS, sir.

—Quite. We’ve taken a gamble on you, Trooper. Don’t make me regret it. To state the obvious, if we have a repeat of your Johor or Salalah attitude, that’s it. Understand?

—Sir.

—Good. Now. It’s designated tryst night down there but Ruthven’s had to leave at short notice. To his father’s house. A medical emergency. Not, I might add, our doing, just happy chance. An opportunity we are not about to miss. Because not only do we know where Mazur is, but he’s alone, which is a rare combination; he’s careful. Hence us bringing things forward rather more quickly than we’d intended. And grabbing you. This year our friends across the water informed us they’d got word of an informant at HMS Osprey. Certain deep-water techniques being monitored. We’re keeping that under watch, but here’s our problem.

This was a new kind of information for Allardyce, such knots of secrets.

—Mazur’s in communication with a Canadian, name Lonsdale, who’s the real prize, and whom we’re all but certain is his Russian counterpart. We wish them to continue running this show. But we’ve reason to think we’ve had all we’re going to get from Mazur, and that he suspects something. When next he meets Lonsdale there’s a chance he’ll shut operations down. Which, see above, we don’t want him to do. And Lonsdale is clever and curious, and if Mazur disappears, let alone anything more dramatic, he’s going to get the wind up.

It was in the wind, rotor storms blowing as from a bad future, that the kemoit awoke.

—We’ve had very little time to prepare, Milkman said. —But we cleared the service boys out of this listening post lickety-split. Scrambled who we could. And we knew where you were, so here we are. One plays the hand dealt. It’s time for a bit of active duty.

On the table and along corner edges sat valves strung together on wire, glass bulbs glowing. Sand in little cones. A backpack-sized generator, all gauges and switches, connected by crocodile switch to metal rusted and familiar: a clotted secret part of the engine from the jebel.

Beyond the shutters Allardyce heard the city, London’s silence. Dr. Croome wrote her notes. She wound dials he could not make out.

—How do you sleep, Trooper Allardyce? she said. —Not well I suspect. Static climbed his limbs. —On balance I’m not sure your spear would have helped. I don’t know what attention you think you drew in the jungle.

—With what we did, Allardyce said, —how could we not have pissed off something?

—Oh that I don’t doubt.

She placed on the floor something like a battered metal shoebox, lid closed, lights upon it blinking faint blue. Croome gestured for Allardyce to hold out his hands and wrapped wires around his wrists. The Milkman put his finger to his lips.

Croome said, —I know what you’ve been studying. It seems to me an interesting convergence with Heidegger, should daseinanalysis provoke you. In my recollection, what Evans says is that should you put aside a tool for the use or interest of any such presence as those with which we now deal, it will pay it attention, and the attention of such is enough to change the world. But it’ll perceive that tool not as you see it or left it, but as broken. You should think of the aftermaths as always amid broken tools. Everything withdrawn, full of unreadiness-to-hand. What a relentless state. So if you ask me, in the efforts to foster anything like comprehensible understanding, it’s generally better to break any such tool you might put aside first.

Allardyce regarded her as if she spoke sense. Her face was ghastly in the green wave.

—Stand back, Croome said. —It can be a bit of a jolt.

—Remember the picture? Hook said to Allardyce. —Of the crash site? Play that over. Bring that to your mind.

Allardyce did so. Almost shyly considered the obscurity in the image.

—You watching like you did, Hook said, —I think piqued a certain attention in it. I do wonder whether you and it might speak—

—Let’s not run, Croome said, without looking, —before we can walk.

—Well, Hook said to Allardyce, —having you here may be more than enough.

And after a silent time Allardyce felt that he was swaying as if to a dirge.

Get up

He paid attention.

Get up at once

Something got up. At once. Something rose.

A spitting of the air as if thunder would come. Some unseen dog warned Allardyce of something and he felt he must lie down. Croome adjusted her machine, siphoned Venom energies.

Get up at once

Allardyce saw a new shadow, square edged outline at an infinite distance, a farther-off engine than Croome’s. Why could he hear the burr of chitin? A perfection of dread came, he struggled, was something dark behind him? A vortex of black leaves at his back? A bad outline.

The dog growled.

no some other thing, a memory out of date

Allardyce closed his eyes not to see any head formless, grown over. He dropped to his knees. Could not but imagine a sacklike misshape reaching for him. If it touched him his heart would stop.

howling through the room a sound of injury, of breaking, spiralling, at the limit point, of immolation

Attention.

What walked unseen passed towards him. Beyond him. He would not open his eyes. He heard a tread. A billowing as of fire. Come past him with a smell of fuel and hot dust and hot metal, of ruination, smoke,

And behind, beyond the dead pilot stared, perhaps, a forest figure

Allardyce did not look to see where a shape might hunker, newcome revenant sinking as if into a cave hole in its broken pilot helmet, accompanied by that other?, looking up at him from under memories of grass and cloth?, mouth unseen working to speak no sound, descended through the wood of the floor

Allardyce opened his eyes. Saw the Milkman, saw Hook staring, Croome motionless. The city night came back.

He understood with all clarity that if anyone were to enter the flat below, they would find Bratomil Mazur as hours-dead in his aspect as if he’d been a CT woman left injured in a longhut alive and readying herself for British soldiers only to be met before they came by something arising to render her long ended. On Mazur’s face would be an awful thing, the last look of a person touched by what should never touch.

[9]

Even with Ewan dead she’d always been hesitant to question him. Asking him about the military interventions against which Sonn would rail. Afraid of making him defensive. Of his opinions or—she felt guilty for the suspicion—that they didn’t really qualify as such. For a few months after, after you died, Ewan, Maur steeped herself in history, the storms of which had gusted through her little family. On the regiment’s postings, UNPROFOR and Cambodia, entanglements, British war. As if by knowing enough she might reveal her son’s secrets. Selah. No, though. Blessed clarity when Iraq came: this was no last worst obscure action in the English woods. No no-fly zone, no Krajina complicating Maur’s baseline suspicions. WMD, as Sonya said, my arse, my hairy crack, my unwashed tits. Maur declined the invitation of Military Mothers Against War even so. But went with Sonya, without banner or literature, to that massive Saturday march. Stayed until the size of the crowd had oppressed her.

And now she rolls in the darkness of the back of another fucking van. Braces herself, not shackled this time.

“Cybill!”

No response. Motion presses them together.

The vehicle decelerates onto gravel. Is descending. Stops. Footsteps. The door opens. Torchlight hits Maur’s face. She will not put up her hands, she looks right into the glare. Unseen behind it a man speaks.

“Come on then.”

That gun. He pulls her out, not roughly, directs her across concrete. The light goes out again. He pushes her. She hears clanging, touches interlaced metal.

Maur says, “What is this?”

“Simmer down.”

She hears his effort, hauling, the van door. Another moment of glow and beyond the wire crosshatch Maur glimpses Cybill, held, eyes closed.

“Cybill!”

Another door opens and closes and the man comes back. Turns on the torch again.

“We’ll patch her up,” he says. She can’t make him out behind the light. His voice sounds as if it hurts his throat and as if he’s unsure of his claim. It is an old London accent.

He says, “Let me tell you a story. I was in a shitstorm, once. Stuck in a shack with people coming to kill me. I was so tired. This is years back. I look up, and there’s a bloke I used to know standing with his finger to his lips. He beckons, gets me up. Leads me round a corner, points, there’s a door I didn’t even know about. He unlocks it. So I give him a nod, and I go through and get out, into the night. And I’m thinking, He never really liked me, this guy. What if he helped me out of spite? A while later I remembered that he got killed a few days before.”

A big dog pads into view behind him.

“Your mate got touched,” the man says. “What did Strude tell you? Let me guess. He needed your help to set your loved ones free. Ah. Pure kindness. How’m I doing? He’s lying.”

Behind the glare Maur makes out edges and cruciform angles.

“Your friend got touched and I know that’s what she wanted but that’s the point: you can’t let what you want get in the way of what you should. You want to see them again and then you do and look what happens. I’ve been trying to get hold of this one for a while.” He gestures, it could be at almost anything. “I left things out to try to snare it but I was at the wrong place! Tried again when I realised it was at Teller’s house. I could tell how he was feeling, and that sort of attention’s going to get theirs. But I wasn’t expecting you two. That made it stronger than what I could’ve set. I couldn’t control that. It’s focused on its mother. In the forces everything’s about the right skills for the job. From brass’s point of view, being dead is a skill set.”

Fluorescent tubes spit on. Maur is in a wire-fronted cage in the corner of a sunken and windowless cement chamber wherein is the van and benches and racks of tools by walls. A mutt with German shepherd in it moves behind her captor, its pale fur rippling. It sniffs at the man’s hand, at the fingers he curls for it. It watches her with melancholy eyes.

The man turns off his torch. “What Strude had you doing,” he says, “wasn’t exorcising. It was summoning. He was recruiting.”

Sometimes Maur hears him walking rooms overhead. Then hours of silence. The dog sits in its place down there, chained to the wall, watching her. Sometimes the man comes through the inner door and she backs away and watches him unchain the animal and take it out of the roll-up garage entrance.

When she tugs at the wall anchorings of her inner fence, the beast’s growls are so deep in its throat they might be a mocking dog query. What are you doing?

The wire enclosure is a few feet by a few. In it is a mattress, hoodies and tracksuit trousers, dry shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, bottled water, a bucket, magazines and paperbacks, battered, seemingly random. Beyond, weblike tangles of coloured threads on stick frameworks swing from nails, one by the door to the upstairs, one at the mechanism for the roll-up slats, one nowhere in particular. In corners are piles of grey sand, and stones.

He who brought her here is a pale white man not much taller than Maur, ten or even twenty years older. In shapeless clothes like those he’s left for her. When he’s there she stares at the karstic textures of his face, the grey of his messy hair. He moves like someone younger, and when he wraps the dog’s chain around his wrist Maur can see muscles under his sleeve.

To Maur it’s as if a sepia filter lies between him and the present. There is something of the ’70s to him, his air of shrewd violence, as if he is untimed.

He does not show his pistol. Sometimes he has her step back from the wire door, opens it and puts in store-bought sandwiches and replaces the bucket with a clean one.

“What is this?” Maur says.

“Where’s Cybill?” she says. “Let me go.” “What do you want?” “Where are we?” “Please!” “Where’s Strude?” “Who are you?” “What do you want?” “What happened to Teller? What did I see?” “Let me go.” “What’s happening?” she says. “What’s your name?”

The dog makes a whimpering as if it strives to answer. It looks at her and at its master, who puts out his hand again for it to lick. The man ignores Maur’s questions, yes, but not without sighs. As if to say, Bear with me. He regards her.

—

There’s no hard line, Maur learns, between terror and boredom.

—

Whenever the man comes and slides up a few feet of the main garage entrance, Maur sees night beyond, a steep sodium-lamp-lit driveway. He ducks out with the dog. She asks her questions when he returns. What he says is, “Here: cheese and pickle.” Or “Sorry about the bucket, I know it ain’t ideal.”

The lights stay on. He leaves her an eyeshade. Sometimes she sleeps.

—

The dog eats from its bowl and watches her pull at where the metal strands meet the wall. Pull pull pull. Maur considers Ewan. His fingers closed around branches. The bunching of his soldier’s arms, the careful expressionlessness that he wore as a boy when he knew she watched him.

She hears noises beyond the garage. “I’m Maureen Towns,” she shouts. “Tell the police, I’m here against my will!” The door rises. It’s her captor.

“The police?” he says. “You forgotten what happened last time you talked to them? You think they’re going to help? You’re in danger but not from me. I am too. But that’s old news. I know you felt it. In that room. Count yourself lucky that I smashed the window when I did and got you out. Look me in the eye and tell me you never felt something coming up in there. And not just Jules.”

“Doggy doggy,” she says. The dog watches her. Pull pull pull.

—

When the man comes to take her bucket next she says, “You said they lied to us. Why? What does Strude want?”

His eyes show shopworn menace. Amid the violence there Maur makes out yearning too. She sees him obscure it like a landslip, like the descent of cloth over a face. He brings a kitchen chair and sits close to the cage.

“I was a soldier,” he says. “Strude’s lot’ve been doing what they do for ages. Sometimes it goes badly. Twice when I was there. At Cybill’s, before you heard those kids outside do what I paid them to, before anything came through the glass, you felt something see you. The padre’s bunch can’t stop it. They’re nothing any more. Just coasting on old glory. So some of us have to come out of retirement. They won’t thank us. But it’s that or watch everything go down. They’ll come after me, and so will what they should be going after themselves.” He hesitates. Looking at her but as if to something else, he whispers, “You there? You back?” Shakes his head quickly.

“Mostly,” he says, “the dead are memories. No good to anyone. But if you’re the right sort of person and you die just right? Then get up at once, the bugle’s sounding. The Unit’ll step in. R Unit. And they’ll spin people like you any shit to get you to help.

“Die just right, and they’ll play the Rouse.”

Headland

Mr. and Mrs. Waverley told Maisie no overnight visitors but soon she was flouting that repeatedly with Allardyce and all they seemed able to do was try to glower when they saw him ascending the stairs or sitting with Maisie in the kitchen in the morning, in her bedroom itself when Mrs. Waverley had occasion to knock. To his cheerful greeting she or her husband would look away and mutter exculpation as if they must plead the lovers’ case to themselves and some higher rentier authority.

—Well they’re young, aren’t they?

—Well it’s weeks since she’s seen him, eh?

Maisie paid Mr. Waverley with Steve leaning on the door frame of her room, his shirt unbuttoned.

—Dirty old bugger, she said as though Waverley had looked anywhere but at the tea-coloured carpet and stippled walls. —Think he listens? Cup to the wall?

—I should coco, Steve said.

He chipped in for the room.

—I was sick of the old place, Maisie had said. —Too far from anywhere. And all them Jews!

She had given him a complex smirk at that. She’d already told him her father was himself Jewish. —Not like you’d know, she had said. —I mean it’s not like he’s, you know.

Steven Allardyce visited her parents for tea. Her mother was a quick and fretful person who kept trying to laugh in jolly fashion and saying, —Oh yes, Maisie, I like this one. Maisie’s father barely spoke but Allardyce appreciated the candour of the silences.

—He’s alright, your dad.

—Yeah they both are really.

On her birthday Allardyce gave Maisie a typewriter. Her happiness was tremendous and she looked at him with true surprise. No one had noticed the theft of the book but that pilfering had been the first of several such, according to no logic any more but that of Maisie’s thrills, and though she did not believe anyone could prove her guilt she resigned just in case, and in boredom.

She found work in a solicitor’s office near Covent Garden. She hated it but it paid well. She took him to the Partisan Coffee House on Carlisle Street to sit in window seats drinking lemonchik-tchai amid young men and women arguing over café filtre or a Fabian (extra mild ha ha). Maisie’s new glasses were thick- and dark-rimmed and vaguely Bauhaus curved. She cut her hair and wore looped strings of beads over a tight black sweater.

When Allardyce told Hook of her predilection for the establishment (“a coffee house for the Left,” capital L and all) Hook suggested that interesting conversations might occur there. —Keep your ears open. All Allardyce had to disclose was that the food was very bad and nor did he think much of the poetry readings, eavesdropped instead on disquisitions on Tanganyika and Dedan Kimathi.

—Steve, Maisie said, —this is John, or —Bella, or —Jeff.

When her acquaintances asked what he did for a living he said he was a soldier and watched them blink with surprise and suspicion and a sort of eagerness. To those who wanted details he said he was Royal Pioneer Corps. —Labor omnia vincit. He might roll his eyes to indicate that he didn’t know how he had ended up here.

—She knows that’s not true, yes? the Milkman said.

—Yeah. She knows I can’t talk about it.

The Milkman’s name was Cunningham. Don’t think we’ll be using that overmuch. Sometimes in his naval uniform, sometimes not, forever running his hands over collar, belt, pulling at his sleeves. He seemed more discomfited by sedate English weather than he had been in Malaya.

—And she doesn’t mind? he said. —They don’t mind?

—I think they quite like having a squaddie there.

In bed he threatened to buy a black high-necked sweater himself and Maisie shrieked and said, —Steven Allardyce, don’t you bloody dare, you’re a hooligan and that’s how I like it.

—And you trust her? the Milkman said. —Well enough? I can live with her thinking you’re a spy even if it gets you thrown out of her drinking holes.

—Trust? Allardyce said. —She doesn’t know what she’s on about. Her or any of her friends. I know more than any of them about it, for all their specs. They’re kids, you could squeeze their cheeks. No I don’t hate them they’re just wrong about everything. She won’t say nothing about me. She just likes the scene. She’s hardly a Red.

The day after the election Maisie was more taken aback than was he by the despondency of the regulars.

Allardyce put books by his temporary London barracks bed. His Evans. Good Evans. Ivor Evans. Well I ’ope I’ve a ’Eavens too, eh? A couple of other recs he’d found. The Enemy in the Blanket. The Night Side of Nature. Alice Werner in the McCulloch collection. The far country, relevant to Allardyce’s line of work,

is reached, usually, through a cave, or a hole in the ground, such as an animal’s burrow, or by plunging to the bottom of a pool. The Wachaga speak of several gateways, probably caverns, which formerly existed in certain specified localities, but are now closed.

He traced Maisie’s outlines and she would wriggle and smile with parted teeth and put his fingers in her mouth and suck them, shyly suck his cock sometimes, run her nails the length of him, following the grooves between his muscles with admiring lust that made him consider himself.

Allardyce attended courses. He did not always come first among the commandos and such with whom he trained but he was rarely out of the first few. The others called him Sewerman because they said what he was doing was something nasty underground. He sparred with them and shot with them and learnt new signalling techniques. In the New Year, Hook told him, he’d begin the final stage of training.

Some mornings on leave he would wake to Maisie typing.

—What’s that? he’d say. —Read it to me.

—Oh no, she would say. —It’s not nearly ready.

—Well. Seeing as I bought the typewriter you could say the ribbon’s mine, which means the ink, which means those words are already mine.

—You gave them to me so they’re mine now. And anyway the paper’s always been mine so yah-boo, you hooligan.

For Christmas she bought him a compass. He gave her a pair of earrings like little drops and a copy of Absolute Beginners. His own pleasure at hers made him blink.

He was to report to his new base on the thirteenth of January and on the night of the twelfth he and Maisie went early to bed. She whispered, —Do it to me, Steve, do me, and he pushed into her and leaned up on his hands to look down at her staring at him with intensity while she pushed her hips up, and a like urgency came to him even in his curious watching place and he accelerated to meet her bucking. The headboard knocked the wall and there came to Allardyce an image of Mr. Waverley poring over some SIGINT book of cyphers to unscramble such simple code, We are fucking above you, and he smiled as he thrust, as he came, and Maisie came too, not quite with him but seconds after, closing her eyes and biting down against her own cries, and as she clenched she farted audibly. Allardyce went weak with laughter. She laughed too though her face was red and appalled. His hysterics made her giggle.

—Stop it! she whispered. —Stop it, you’re awful! You brute!

He struggled to speak.

—It’s the wind of change!

—You’re so awful, Steven Allardyce.

Hook had shown Allardyce sections of Macmillan’s Gold Coast speech, had told him how important it was and that it had not yet been widely noted but mark his words it would be. The joke came too soon for Maisie. Still she laughed, at the pun alone, and because her lover could not stop.

Years ago a monster had come out of the sea here, a slick violent thing thrashing in the net and churning the waters with its tail and the wings it bore though it was benthic. It had killed a fisherman whose comrades revenged him in like manner, to salt it and display it for pennies. Lifetimes later Allardyce read such stories from the wetlands. He reached the coast where those men had made landfall.

He took trains and hitched and walked for hours between bare fields and frozen mud by lines of leafless trees. He did not ask directions in the shoreside village but one old boy trudging by St. Bartholomew’s grinned at him and raised his bare left wrist to his ear and mummed consternation that his imaginary watch had stopped.

Allardyce reached the town quay at the agreed time. In the river was a rowboat and therein a man in khaki. Yards across the water, scrub and a wood-and-concrete jetty.

—Trooper Allardyce? Hop in.

Not an island, though it was often so called, but twelve miles of spit and vegetated shingle following the curve of the eastern coast to meet it at its north edge in a path-thin causeway by salt marsh strung with rusting warnings and barbed wire the wind thrummed. Guards were supposed always to be stationed in raised platforms in the flats. Sometimes they were.

By bird-probed waterways he passed an airfield, on its paved stretches small aircraft invisible from the mainland. A bridge across a stream, hangars, sheds and cars and brick admin shacks, and here were people in a variety of uniforms. A low scrubby bush. At the end of every branch a bottle, beer and wine and milk bottles, brown and green and clear, some blue, as if to grow crab apples behind the glass.

Waiting, beaming, hands in pockets and pipe in teeth, here was Hook.

—Welcome welcome.

His was one of several offices clustered at a fork of paths. He had set up an easel by his window. The canvas was blank. His desk a tremendous mess. He pointed at the base map.

—Get that in your head. Obviously it doesn’t go off-island. A false start or two but all’s well that ends well. Not too many chaps start this tenure with an op like that. Our pals in intelligence were very happy to have what we got from lover boy, little enough as it was. He appraised Allardyce. —That mufti’s serviceable back and forth but it’s uniforms on duty. You’ll find us fairly informal but don’t mistake that for sloppy. This is a mixed unit, as you know, so you’ll get to know various flashes.

He beetled Allardyce down the corridor, gesturing at men and women at work.

—We’re a tight-knit bunch. Even the civvies here, and there aren’t many, are vetted closely. Not that they’re fully ITKO—“in the know,” don’t you know?—but rumours will fly about. And we share this place with a few others on their own hush-hush business, which I do hope they don’t mind us judiciously leaking so the curious might think we’re all at the same thing. Atomic research and radar, thank you, and everyone who rolls their eyes is right, there’s more to it than that, but they’re wrong about what. Which is the point. We’ve a brace of boffins on the technical side, a few admin wallahs—they really run things and don’t you forget it—various specialists, training, logistics, a few on secondment. And of course you few, you happy few. Our operators.

He knocked at a door.

—And the boss.

The office was no bigger or more salubrious than his. Behind the desk a woman. Grey-blue WRAF uniform, four stripes. Nameplate: Group Officer Carpenter. She might have been sixty or seventy-five. She waited without complaint through Allardyce’s sloppy salute and rubbed her splendid nose thoughtfully. Shrewdness and vagueness vied in her expression.

—At ease, Trooper Allardyce. Cracked affable voice. —Hullo, Hook.

On her desk he saw shell casings, bits of string, a soup spoon twisted as if it had lain in a furnace.

—I’m glad to welcome you, Trooper. You’ve already shown yourself, ah, a very able soldier. I’ve seen your reports. You’ve proved yourself a dab hand. I don’t doubt you’ve understood this but I have to tell you frankly that in coming here you’ve rather opted out of the usual structures. Promotion doesn’t come with anything like, ah, the regularity or systematicity and so forth you might find in other units. We set a lot more store by a person’s savvy and the sense they talk than bars and titles. Of course, SAS, you’ll be used to that. Even so. If your hopes were to make general I’d advise a rethink.

Allardyce could not see the waves through the window but was coldly conscious of them clawing at the land, scratching it into shape, throwing up on it refuse of the deep.

—War’s a terrible thing, Carpenter said. —You don’t need me to tell you that. Thou shalt not kill, the Lord tells us, but sometimes we must and we do. And we are right to. Though we may struggle to articulate how we know that to be so. Why, indeed, should we? Why would we try to explain ourselves?

The East Anglian wind shook the window. Rain would fall from the January clouds like fléchettes from a biplane.

—When I find myself struggling to express the inexpressible, do you know what I tend to do? I tend to sing to myself. To hum to myself, I should say. She smiled and her eyes were pale. —To hum without words but not without point.

She hummed a tune he thought he knew. Two notes, repeated.

—I know you’ve been given prep to do and a reading list. Strike the Mons angels from your mind, you’ve certainly been told that. More to the point is a harder-headed patriotism. Think of the Great War Motor Ambulance Fund of Two Worlds and Light. There you had outlets open enough of mind to suspect something of the nature of the world, whatever other guff they might have subscribed to, and brave enough to go against their own beautiful souls. Or then, one’s well aware that Conan Doyle is something of a millstone around our necks but the mere question he raised, of the military value of his fascinations, is part of our pre-history. See also Hereward Carrington and such like. History is very important. Those who don’t learn from it will repeat it, one hears a lot. The point surely is not to strive to stop history in what are its inevitable repetitions, but to articulate them just so. Yes? To use the echoes.

—A man of arms, a woman of arms too, is one who knows that at times one has to break certain of God’s laws for the sake of the morality without which there is no point to God or law at all. That of course is old news. Thus what Fort, another progenitor, calls…She read from a paper placed ready, —“the palpitations of hypocrisy—the brass bands of hypocrisy—the peace on earth and goodwill to man, of hypocrisy.” So, you and I and this group I’m honoured to lead. With its roots going back as long as England has been England, and an official inauguration, or an unofficial official one if you like, only a few years ago.

—What you will do here is both very simple and small and the greatest and most terrible thing. Here you will learn to, ah, break one more rule. That’s all. One more than you have already. But such a one. A transgression for the sake of the code itself. Do I make myself clear? Carry yourself with honour. Carry yourself in secret. For the sake of the code and your country and so forth, and for the sake of your queen.

—Welcome to R Unit.

His room was cramped and cold but his alone, as were all operators’. Mess and bar shared among ranks—cheery enough spaces with their tacked-up film posters, photos of men and women grinning on the beaches, scrawled underneath with inside jokes.

Jerry’s turn to brew up I see!

Abdul pulls it off.

Did somebody say parade?

—You’re the new bloke. Welcome welcome. Sit sit.

—SAS? Well begging your pardon.

At supper officers privates sergeants able rates corporals aircraftmen and aircraftwomen, an amiable crowd in mixed outfits at the bench-and-table setups. A few loners at the edges. Might Allardyce come to be one? Like that chap, slim young Negro in the uniform of the King’s African Rifles. Not the only colonial: three, four other black men and a woman, more sociable it seemed than the moody fellow. Were those RWAFF togs? Surely not long for order of battle. A Chinaman too in civilian clothes, well I never, an Arab or perhaps Maltese or whatever.

—Sapers. Ben Sapers.

—Bill Merrick.

—Hullo, it’s Allardyce, isn’t it? I’m Jeanette Hooper.

A ranking Wren, blinking behind her glasses, relaxed to the point of untidy.

—Gerald. Surname’s Verity and most of this tedious lot call me Very Jerry.

Glover, a slow, pale man. Daltry, clowning and big-eyed while he shook hands. Hensley, Kingston, Potter, Sutton. Never mind, it would come. Someone rapped on his head from behind.

—Knock knock! Choirboy!

—Bowler!

His old comrade took up boxing stance and Allardyce proper gaped and stood and the two men mimed the old one-two.

—I heard a rumour, Bowler said, —that the sweetest-voiced lad in the whole jungle might be joining us. He eyed the meat pie on Allardyce’s plate. —Hallo! Baby’s head tonight, you bring good luck.

—’Allo! Very Jerry laughed splendidly, very matinee idol.

Later Bowler sat beside Allardyce and they shared an odd shyness.

—You went to Awfulness too, then? said Allardyce quietly.

—This is Awfulness, mate.

—You know what I mean. The other—

—Yeah.

—Did you…?

There was no good way to get to the end of that question about that corridor. Better to let the words peter out and have it be his silence that he spoke. And Bowler’s own silence was full of answers to all questions. Bowler clapped his back.

—They tell you about the bomoh? Bowler said. —The witch doctor who done for O’Leary? Remember? The mission?

He leaned away that he might look at Allardyce.

—After all that you didn’t bother finding out what happened? Well you didn’t hear this from me and I can’t vouch, it’s all Chinese Whispers, but word is that the bloke we was looking for, someone did find him. This lot. He pointed to the room around them. —And that the Unit got rather a fillip from his shall-we-say expertise.

On the waterfront in Salalah, Allardyce upon the wall, turning the sketchbook pages to that face he had not recognised, that had looked native, you might say, something he remembered of rank and role to the adornments, and that look of terror. The mien of a captive, which he had torn free and dropped into the ocean.

—Which means O’Leary himself they might’ve even got back in service after a fashion, Bowler said. —But the big question now is why were we getting chitchat that some other lot was after our target? Not Brits. I got shitfaced on some truly awful stuff with a Sakai headman and he told me. Says he was just passing on rumours. It’s good to see someone from the regiment here, they take any twat who says he can hear his grandma on the other side, don’t matter if he can’t march a mile without falling over.

—How’s your grandma? Allardyce said. Bowler tried to smile.

—Don’t you remember? It’s me great-grandad I’m waiting on, he said. —Still. He looked away and neither man spoke awhile.

—I did like that headman, Bowler said. —I liked a few of them actually.

—Alright, everyone! Hook said. Wind rattled the crowded little meeting room that night. —To our latest arrivals, welcome to life at the front. You’re among the first recruits to this experimental unit and I hope that fills you with pride. And that it might perhaps make up for the underwhelming pay.

They laughed a bit.

—You’ve all signed the various papers, and heard the bloodcurdling threats, and you all know what loose lips do, and this is where I reiterate all that. It’s not just the brig. If you breach this particular contract, gentlemen and ladies, well, let’s say you’ll wander for eternity without a tongue or eyes or ears or you’ll fiddle about on a frozen lake or whatnot, take your pick.

You might be insulted if Hook didn’t make the injunction such a performance. Your life’s now a Fougasse poster. Old one-ball himself may not be behind you on the bus or up on the luggage rack, but while Britannia ruled whatever waves it did, don’t underestimate the new oppo. Whose losing struggle to keep up with Her Majesty’s forces would push them to ever-more-vigorous efforts. Whisper the details like you’re whipping up the kids at a panto, as Hook did.

—Orel Kowalchuk, he said. —Longtime head of the Russian Special Section, if indeed that is his name. As you can see— He indicated a doodled figure on the board, a silhouette with a question-mark head, —descriptions vary. Let’s assume the worst, of his and his chaps’ capabilities.

For all you knew, Kowalchuk—fat, thin, tall, stubby, young or antique—might indeed Be Behind You. Careless Talk (still) Costs (after)Lives. And, you might add wryly, in this particular line of military work, dusty windblown souls might get anywhere. On to luggage racks.

The first few days Allardyce was left to get the lay of it. Roadways constrained the beachland. Pumping stations, walls revetted by the promontory. A red and white lighthouse overwatched. Prefabs, corrugated shacks made habitation blocks, mess hall. Poky NAAFI shop: not the real business, not in so hush-hush a place, but near enough the ferry landing point to be staffed by locals (vetted and still of course in the dark about what actually went on a few score yards down the way), the shelf-crammed hut sporting on its door a hand-sized and hand-drawn but pretty impressive approximation (thank you Hook) of the official logo at which you’d likely have to take a second glance to note the circling legend Not an Actual F-ing Institute. A way across the flat land two great blocks like temples, called by the islanders pagodas for the jutting flare of their roofs. Allardyce ran to the iron sea. Rooted amid pebbles and slops of bloated wrack to find rusted bolts or somesuch from test flights or experiment. He felt considered, like a memory of a future visitor ruminating on the trash he in turn would leave, a watcher from space, from Saturn or its rings. On the north of the spit those other Quonsets and the building site were out of bounds, no fraternising please. Their whitecoats would come and go, Hook said, more regularly than Uniteers. The engineers, radar bods and wavelengths-and-aether wranglers on tasks not entirely unrelated to the unit’s.

Here as local rumourmongers knew had come the hush-hush ARDE after the war—but, except for the camouflage skeleton crew still truculently at it at the unfashionable end of the sand they’d been ordered out again, sharpish. If local cows did miscarry, if local clocks and watches did still stop, if ever they had, it was down to new work. ARDE had left behind casings, buggered tools, graffiti traducing those come after, Allardyce heard, toilets abrim with turds unflushed. R Unit, in countersnub, left scattered as much atomer junk as they safely could. Such tangles Hook, some days, came to draw.

Photography and Sketching Forbidden. Cheerfully he disobeyed that staked-out placard injunction. Charcoal, watercolours, all in sight of the words. Glasses at the end of his nose. He might turn and draw the very sign itself, cheeky bugger.

—Carry on! he called.

Come back to the room and Allardyce had to smile because there on the bed, freshly polished as I live and breathe, with a ruddy bow tied around it, was his spear.

That must be Hook’s writing on the note.

Good effort and good thinking. Now this is a souvenir.

—Practice makes perfect, the Milkman said as the Uniteers lined up. —We’ll be starting conventionally. To get your measure.

Like I need lessons in shooting from a salt, Allardyce did not say. They entered the Killing House. Watched from behind reinforced half-opaque internal windows onto the salvaged furniture and doorways. Allardyce’s skin felt charged with static. Bowler muttered behind him.

—Charge through, sorry, Abdul, bish-bash-bosh, sorry, Chingchong. Good fucking night. Oh my goodness me! Bowler said, doing supposedly an Indian voice. Allardyce looked at him quizzically which seemed to egg Bowler on to other such foreign-enemy voices.

—You alright? Allardyce said.

—Ah so.

—Whatever you say.

Allardyce fired into the rubber-coated walls, at the figures of plaster, plastic and painted wood that swung at them in doorways. Old enough, simple enough stuff. Why then this abrupt and dreadful cold up his spine? Why at the mere sight of a blank-faced figurine like the jenglot grown up did Allardyce struggle to breathe? What was this atmosphere that made his ears sing, mufflers notwithstanding, that sent Allardyce and Bowler out again into the sun to gasp and retch, to grue?

They were not optional, lectures in history and political science, in strategy, comparative thanatology, religion, mythology, in the techniques and blather of mediumship.

—We’re not, nor can we be, in the business of certainties and clarity, Croome said. —You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t, hedged with caveats and question marks. Dealing with what you’re dealing with one tends to hear about lingering. The problems and opportunities are, I’d suggest, more those of arrival. We’re not dealing here with memory. Revenance is something different.

She said, —The materials you’ll be working with seem harder to please or to cajole than we. Though that’s a metaphor—the idea of motivations at all. It’s all metaphor. For example: verticals; angles: they like those. But put “like” in inverted commas. Such lines pull them, let’s say. Which is the sort of thing that might help you.

—I won’t pretend any of us really grasp what processes are at work here. Learn to feel your intuition. I’m not telling you to trust it. Your intuition—yours in particular, I mean—may be your most important tool; being here proves that. But only intuition that happens to be correct. As not all is. So I’m saying trust your intuition when it’s right and not when it’s wrong. Well might you groan. Not least given the hazardous nature of what you’re working with. So first, foremost and constantly, apotropaic techniques.

—Allardyce! Hook called from where he stood. He gestured spear thrusts. —You can show us how to have a go.

—Thank you, Croome said into the laughter. She regarded Allardyce thoughtfully, her usual look of pre-emptive disappointment replaced by amusement. —And research, she said, —no less than intuition, might save your life. So use the library, that’s what it’s for.

Between ballistics hut and lighthouse, a building out of Dutch nightmare. Pitch sailless windmill like the stump of something older and more terrible, its door and the rims of its windows white against the slats. It was named according to the radio research once undertaken within, because R Uniteers appreciated that moniker: the Black Beacon.

—In the field you can phone in and get one of our admin to chase references or look things up. But it’s always best for you to look yourself.

It was never locked. Only nothing inside was to be taken out.

Allardyce gave over a notebook to quotes from volumes in the tower.

Scribbles of lost hearts and snips from tractates and traces of the Summerland. All manner of anomalistics. An uncommonplace book (how could you not?). An SPR obituary of Helen Salter, née Verrall, another of Aelfrida Tillyard. Mecanismos da mediunidade by, excuse me, channelled through Dr. André Luiz. Allardyce did his best with his Spanish and a Portuguese dictionary. Charlie Broad’s Perrott Lectures. Some shorthand-competent Uniteer amid the academics and curious had rendered their versions of Broad’s dry ruminations on Basic Limiting Principles and the necessity of a non-bodily Ψ-component for postmortem persistence. A typed-up list of everyone present in the audience, which Allardyce read and reread, marking the mysteries and/or those of particular interest with red asterisks.

He loved the Black Beacon best when it was empty but for him. Of course most books, papers, charters, programmes, pamphlets, agendas, jotters missals novels dictionaries and grimoires within were specific to the unit’s bent. But interspersed among them were volumes, boxes, audiotapes dedicated to more general arcana, from the vasty deeps of godhead and apocalypse down to prestidigitation, bent spoons and cunning folk. As well, too, more orthodox militaria. In this whole folly, his sense was, there was no document innocent of deeper logic, that this on Liddell Hart and tanks, that on Habakkuk and pykrete, this catalogue of photographs of mangled bodies sedate as sets, this on the Atholl Highlanders (oh, ’allo!), on the Welrod Mark IIA, and all those on a plethora of SOE shenanigans, both jiggery and pokery you might say, were all pertinent. That they sat just so alongside reports of oh I don’t know the armour noises at Glastonbury, Wilkins’s Strange Mysteries of Time and Space, sections copied by hand from The Golden bleeding Bough (Rudra and his battalions).

And what about that apotropaic business? For the Greeks the Ἀποτρόπαιοι were little gods. Your Romans called them Averrunci and they flogged away bad luck with whips. Now, to keep away the wrong sort of attention you’re encouraged, Allardyce, to consider black-eyed cups, blue eye-stones, buckled shoes in walls. All we know is we don’t know why what we can make work works. And no harm in appending to it other, foreign obscurities: examine photos of these multicoloured-thread-and-stick intricacies of namkha and, Allardyce, get thee to the Horniman to see an original, get competent at the tangles, so you can feel when the corner pieces are damp and know you’ve snared what you’re after. Don’t sneeze or scoff at any ideas. Pile up sand, Allardyce, and if you can insist to some watcher that the mounds of it need spinning, as if it’s cotton, that might keep them busy. And is the clattering glass bush by the admin blocks just a bit of fun? You might keep what you caught in haint bottles of pinched Gullah design, ta v much we’ll have that, on the boughs of trees.

In the pictures in Spiegelberg’s work, the phurba, the exorcising dagger, looked nothing like Allardyce’s bamboo spear. He frowned.

By and large Maisie was a good girl but she couldn’t always stop herself saying, —I mean never, though? Doesn’t it get you, having to keep secrets? Sorry, Steve, I know I mustn’t. But I’d be ever so frustrated, me.

Why? He considered that impetus to uncover knowledge she imputed to the world as if it were a native folktale, as if it were directions to a magic tree. In any case, in re secrecy, you’d be forgiven for wondering just what anyone made of discussions they might overhear. The jargon of traces and emanations. A modicum of verbal cam, and you could have the usual fun with rules, the old spirit-of/letter-of distinction.

If you wanted to relish feints with interlocutors who knew some state game was being played but not what, you could pootle up to Manchester on R and R, descend to the vault of the Lloyds Arms in All Saints or Old Star on Broadway to tease the spooks—not those ones, ha ha—with a coded insinuation or two to a befuddled asset. If word got back you might get a raised eyebrow and a wagged finger from Hook, but he was alright, old Hooky. On the other hand, hole up for giggles near Watkins Books or the Prince Albert in Primrose Hill, and Allardyce and Very Jerry and even Bowler might drop a few audible mentions of Dion Fortune and the Order of the MR in the Outer, then nod as if they could Say No More, and stifle their hilarity to see what solicitations they could elicit from the tramps and refugees of hermetic tendencies.

Sometimes some such game got played on you, fair play. Trooper Allardyce came quickly to know the two or three faces in each venue who remained unfazed by references to the beyond. A young blond woman with a scar upon her forehead; an austere Sikh geezer; a tall tough swarthy man. The first time Allardyce clocked that last, the man looked directly at him and nodded in greeting. Allardyce made no response.

Another time near the In and Out and there he was again, raising a glass to Allardyce. Bloody big hands. When Jerry returned from the bar with pints the watcher came to them and coolly they regarded him. His attention was all on Allardyce. He held his hands up as if to say, I come in peace. Yeah, Allardyce thought, and you’ll go in pieces and all.

—Help you, mate? Jerry said.

The man’s accent was strong. Allardyce could not identify it.

—I think you were in Malaya, he said to Allardyce.

Who showed no reaction. The man smiled.

—I think…There was a Sycamore, no? he said. —Casevac? In the jungle. Yes.

Allardyce made sure his face didn’t move. He did not know this bloke. When he said nothing, the last of the man’s smile faded and he said, —Okay, maybe I see you around. He turned and walked out.

—Bloody hangers-on, Jerry said. —Bloody Mitties.

I mean was he a Mitty, though, if he knew that Malaya had happened? If he had in his head an image of that helicopter, the spiralling cross, coming down?

[10]

“Strude was lying?” Maur speaks as if to someone. “I don’t know what he wants.” “He wants what we saw, Cyb. What was coming down the stairs.” “So what about what was in your room? No, not Jules—in the corner?”

The dog makes a sound. Maur pull pull pulls.

She sings. She dreams and wakes. Maur hears the door close overhead and, she thinks, several pairs of feet. The man has visitors. She puts her hands flat on the wall. Scraping chairs? People sat around a table above? The dog whimpers. Maur hears herself whisper but does not know what her own words are. She feels the trembling of the house.

Later, slowly, it comes to her that she’s hungry. That it has been a long time since the man brought food.

She grips the fencing. She feels distant fury. Not her own perhaps, but that of an arrival. She holds her breath and mouths words, names. The dog calls again and Maur feels attention pass through the room, bringing each crack and crevice into exactitude. Feels her edges go more precise in the regard

and the dog’s voice breaks off, Maur opens her eyes, the animal is looking not at her but behind her, into the dim, intently, it shies sideways and dips on its forelegs in submission or play.

Pull pull. New panic. Maur’s hands get about her work, her mind with what if her captor is run over by that bus everyone’s afraid of, or is caught by some baleful agency? What if he can’t return? Pull. Will she and this dog watch each other succumb?

She’s thirsty. She hisses. Whispers to her dead son.

“What would you do?” “You’d know.”

It’s later and the dog isn’t moving. Repeat repeat. Maur hears a keen, her own voice, fence won’t move, pull pull pull, which is to say, that she will die,

until the metal moves.

No snap or grinding loose, there is now, simply, where there was not a breath ago, a gap between loops of wire and wall. She thrusts her right arm through. Waits for the dog, even starving and thirsty, to rise. It does not. Poor dog. She shares antagonist communion. Maur weeps and her head aches.

Maur hears herself say, “Help me,” to Cybill. Ewan. A dry pounding in her head. This is not a perfect darkness. She sees edges. Her fingers touch the workbench. The handle of a wood saw. Brings it back and sets it to cut but it skitters, wrong tool. Reaches again. An awl she puts in her pocket. Strains whispering Wire-cutter wire-cutter, finds pliers, wait they have a sharpened bit. She closes them on loose fencing at the hole’s edge and twists.

Strand by nasty strand the wire comes apart.

Maur stretches the hole. Until she can haul through.

The wire clutches for her, she’s a Tommy in the trenches, a princess in a briar grown from a thrown comb. She is out.

She holds the awl like a dagger. The dog does not move, but for its gaze: that follows her. She creeps as if past Cerberus to the door to the above. She takes down a crowbar and pries. Her heart shakes her. The lock’s housing splinters. An unlit basement stair. Bar in right hand, leather-puncher in her left. Is he there? She who has prayed for his return now begs the universe to keep him away. She ascends. Somebody help. Another locked door, look at her levering away. It’s loud when the door goes but if he’s going to catch her he’s going to catch her, if he’s there he’s there. A corridor. Her breath is fast. Where’s Cybill? Steal forth. A kitchen without features. No fridge to hum. A window, and she stares into the first outside she has seen for how long? Tarmac below clouds, low rooftops, trees. Night glow. Beyond trash-strewn space, walls. She cannot see a light in any window.

Go.

—

But she hesitates. Pushes open one then another and another door. Weapons up.

A bathroom. A tiny bedroom, single made bed, clothes in a suitcase, maps of London and the world pinned to the walls and scrawled on. No phone. Net curtains let in the sepia haze of a forecourt. The world, the city. That’s a distinct new void out there. From whom can she seek help? You saw who came when you went to the police, Maur.

She tries the drawers of a cabinet. In the third are two rolls of old five- and ten-pound notes in rubber bands. She takes them. The flat’s front door is locked from without. The windows are painted shut. In the kitchen Maur holds a towel to a pane and taps it smartly with the crowbar and smashes the glass and the impact is at least a little muted, and she listens as cold air comes in.

Maur crushes the fringe of scintillas. She climbs onto the ledge and hauls herself wobbling through the opening she has made and braces and jumps the few feet to land heavily amid weeds and trash.

Amid all that dark, one distant corner does glow. The cut of an alley illuminated from beyond by the chilly moving light of some TV. No other motion.

She rises, stays low, runs on weak legs, hunting a way out of this estate, deserted, it seems, but for that one unit where now only a dog remains.

It may be of sufficient interest to warrant mentioning here certain misleading evidence which may appear. In 1896 a tree was found near the west shore of Wizard Island standing erect in 37 feet of water. The trunk was broken off just above the water level, and the roots at the base were seen through the clear water on the bottom as if the tree grew where it was standing. It could not be shaken from the boat, and it was evident that if the tree grew where it was standing it proved the lake to have been much lower than now at a recent time. Sufficient baling wire was secured to reach the shore, and it was discovered that the tree had no hold upon the bottom. It had drifted from the shore of the island. In July, 1901, the same tree was off the north edge of the island, at least one-fourth mile from its position in 1896. Owing to the steep slopes of the rim a tree frequently slides into the water in an erect position, and the lower part becoming waterlogged it floats about the lake with only a few feet of the top projecting above the water and thus furnishes a spectacle curious enough to excite the imagination.[*]

Old man of the lake. Dead hemlock draws its maps, investigates. Vertical out of the cold blue, you can stand upon it, feel its accommodations to what’s beneath. Share that treetop with tiny life. Your feet investigated by voyaging spiders. Generations on that cylinder world. Stand still and travel. Look down from absent canopy see the mossy bole dimmed by water and visible in the awful way of the submerged, in the abyss where its rootless roots go and from where they draw up what they draw, from where, dead, the tree grows, towards the light, breaching,

Skip Notes

Joseph Silas Diller and Horace Bushnell Patton, The Geology and Petrography of Crater Lake National Park (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 56–57.

VI

Precipitate /
Be Times

Pointing Sense

Keep at the same practices for days then weeks, and months go and here you are halfway through your long training. At once an old hand and not much wiser. Allardyce was alone when he was alone, so why did he not ever feel unaccompanied?

Newly arrived that week was a redheaded WRAC corporal name of Melissa Marks. Those freckles, that haircut, she could be a schoolgirl, but she was past thirty and struggled with fitness. At the range though she hit the inner target circle three times.

—Good. The instructor was a taciturn Welsh commando. —How are you with a pistol?

Better, again, than Allardyce. They shared a cigarette.

—Malaya, he said. —They brought me down to a place in the jungle. Get this: it was called Awfulness.

—Oh yes, I’ve heard that. There was a hush-hush test base in Accra called the same thing. I think that’s what they call all the substations where they chase up the likes of us. It’s a pun, isn’t it? For this place.

She flicked the butt away to where a gull came eagerly and pecked it up to hang glowing from its beak so before it dropped it it made them both laugh.

Regulations forbade lingering in the village itself but everyone knew there was leeway to that, step into the pub on the odd occasion for a swift one with a subdued respect for neighbours, no harm done. It was hardly as if the Fen Telegraph wasn’t humming with rumours about the unit in any case. Hook said, —Tongues will always wag. They’re proud as punch. Better they be chuffed that nuclear boffins, as they suppose, pop into their local than get too curious as to why they don’t.

An exception: such indulgence could not extend to Harry Aduba nor Joseph Manning nor Adele Mahdi nor, well, need one spell it out? Too much of a goad to curiosity for colonials to advertise their local presence. Doubtless they were glimpsed at times and that was acceptable risk and mystery, but a certain decorum was indicated. It was, then, a provocation aimed more at their officers than the villagers themselves that Allardyce and Bowler, pleasantly drunk on a summer evening, persuaded not only Melissa Marks—Let us show you the sights! Allardyce said—but a no-more-sober Dean Anthon into one of the rowboats and for a late tramp along the shore hedgerows to try to show him (a vague justification) a sett, there being no badgers, they were vocally aghast to discover, in Guyana. To wend ultimately of course back to the village and the pub. Where, muddy in mufti, they made great play of mentioning as if amongst themselves that Dean was an airman visiting RAF Mildenhall. Allardyce smiled and nodded at those of the village he knew by sight.

—It was in Korea, Marks told them. —I was in a car crash. I was in hospital for weeks and for the first few days I was off my head and having lots of lovely conversations including with people who’d been in the car with me and who, I didn’t know at the time, hadn’t made it. They were busy telling me things I’d later find out were true and that I’d no business knowing.

—Did you take much persuading to come? Allardyce said.

—Well. I kept thinking, the point is to know, isn’t it?

You had to nod at that sort of wise-sounding stuff.

Dean’s turn at a recruitment story. —Georgetown is a little place, he said. He drew its roofs on the tabletop in beer spill. He was a trim slight man with precise and quizzical expression and, Allardyce always thought, skin not so dark as say that of Harry which made you wonder if he was mixed perhaps, didn’t it? Like that student Allardyce had met at some jamboree at the Partisan. Stuart Something who’d discussed Old English with Maisie. Anyway. Dean sounded as curious as if he relayed someone else’s story. —What happened this one night, he said. —I felt a baccoo.

You might note his comrades gladly mentally add that term to shade and duppy, wight and bodach and trace and such. You could hardly have enough ways to mention such subjects, the pilfereder the better, making space for hallowed imprecision. Dean drew breath to speak more, was interrupted.

—Help you, mate? It was Bowler. Loud. Meeting the eye of a thickset glowering local. —What you looking at, mate?

Melissa Marks put her hands on Bowler’s shoulder and murmured and he answered her, not quietly. —If Old Farmer Giles doesn’t redirect his fucking gaze from Dean I’ll give him a Blue Streak.

Dean shook his head, almost with wonder.

—Alright, alright, Trooper Allardyce said. —Time, gents, please?

Such a promise of such violence. Allardyce did not turn his head. Ready behind him he felt those who had died. The man to whom Bowler spoke was unfriendly, yes, but staring, at least when Allardyce saw him, not at Dean but at Bowler himself.

On the island they bade good night to their companions and Allardyce and Marks went to the eastern beach and smoked awhile. Allardyce said, —I love this blackness.

Marks looked at him side-on. He kept the cigarette in his mouth and drew hard to illuminate his own face for her.

—So when do I get…, Marks said. She looked into that dark he admired. —When do I get to see them? Learn to deploy? It’s all a bit…

He did not feel the old-timer she made him out to be, and might have said so, but blimey he’d been here awhile, he supposed, enough to patronise or reassure her if he wanted to, for all—this he would not say—he felt barely more confident of methodologies and roles than he inferred did she. Only perhaps less uneasy about that, more assured that handles would fall into palms when they must.

—You’ll see, he said. That tone was indulgence, his insouciance studied. He could see Marks was not impressed.

—Night, she said after a pause, and walked away, and he listened to the sand under her feet. When he finished smoking he went to his room and drunk and tired as he was he wrote a letter to Maisie. In the morning Hook summoned him.

—If Dean or you or Marks or Bowler is seen in the village again, you personally will be held responsible and charged with various breaches of various things. Clear?

Allardyce never claimed to be the greatest shot in the history of the forces but he was fine, hit the right bit of the circle enough of the time. He was not the only bloke whose shots were greeted with dutiful raucous questions about his masculinity when Marks shot alongside him, and that was alright too. What left him unsettled was that Very Jerry and some others whose skills were less than his own yet passed through the Killing House eliciting visibly more satisfaction, put it that way, from the officers. That there was something to Jerry’s (or Michael’s, or Alice’s, or whoever’s) six out of ten shots on target (say) that did the job, this job, this unit’s job, better than did his own (say) seven. He felt it too. He knew enough to investigate.

Among Black Beacon box files he sought instruction on close-quarters battle. Woodhouse’s manual, Tracy’s trench-eye view, Fairbairn of Shanghai, Captain Noel. Fascinations with stance—the battle crouch—and with the squeeze. The whole-hand squeeze; squeeze your trigger like you squeeze water from a sponge.

A bundle of pages mimeographed so faintly he struggled to make them out. Jerusalem, 30th January, 1943.

I was dining at the King David Hotel in circumstances of exquisite boredom and took the opportunity during the after-dinner period of desultory conversation to seize upon an old acquaintance who was seated with a friend in a far corner of the lounge. I was introduced to the latter as Major Grant-Taylor and was told that he had just completed a course of instruction of the Arab Legion in close-quarters battle tactics.

You had to love how they wrote. A man of burning enthusiasm.

He found Grant-Taylor’s own words: The work you are going to carry out is not spectacular and will bring no rounds of applause from your friends. Well that depends what you mean. Grant-Taylor’s was an execution house, like Tracy’s faux ruins, Woodhouse’s revolver pit, the Killing House. Allardyce didn’t need to understand—he knew—only to surrender to a certain disproportionate curiosity at these cadences and knowhow.

Without the basics you won’t totter, if you don’t totter you won’t walk, if you don’t walk you’ll never run.

Rules be buggered. Allardyce put the papers beneath his shirt.

In his room he boned up on the Fighting Crouch. Principle of apprehension and domination. Obeying the text, he suspended a weight—a bottle of ink—the height of the mirror on his wardrobe door. He faced his reflection bent-kneed, elbow by waist. He traced with his image’s hand the string’s straight line. He pulled the imaginary trigger not with his finger but, as demanded, with a whole-hand crush. Squeezing the Orange.

Entry of the Unknown. Firing in the Dark. The cruel poetry of these techniques. He felt changes within.

If you are walking in the country with a friend and you wish to draw his attention to a bird of beautiful plumage, or to a gaily coloured flower, what do you do? You point…like this!

[11]

At dawn the sky beyond the clouds is the colour of skinless flesh. A woman pushes an envelope through the slot of glass-and-steel office doors on Cannon Street and walks on. For a while she’s nowhere.

The city finds her again, light leaching above. She alights from a bus in Hammersmith carrying a large handbag. She walks by the Irish Centre. It’s cold enough. Past the Palais she goes head-down into a pinched café full of plastic plants. She orders tea and takes a corner table. Opens a new issue of Homes & Interiors. Turns pages as the place grows more crowded though you might see her look closely at everyone who enters.

Des comes in.

She follows him with her gaze. He looks at her then away, and two, three seconds go by before he looks back.

He approaches, visibly recalling the handwritten injunction he received: this is his keep-your-shit-together face. She rises and gives to and takes from him a long, hard embrace. He whispers her name.

“Sh,” she whispers. “You soppy sod.”

He holds her out to look at her. “Jesus.”

“Get something to drink. And stay cool.”

He goes and returns with coffee. They stare at each other. There rises in Maur an urge to weep.

“Nice hair,” he says. She makes a ha face. It’s a cheap bob and a brown he’s never seen on her. He takes in her unfamiliar clothes. “Maur, what the fuck is going on?”

“Is Sonn coming? Did you call her?”

“I called her.” He reaches for her hands and she won’t let him take them.

“We have to be very ignorable, Des,” she says. “What did you tell your work?” He waves a hand, fuck them. “Did they open the note?” A stilted reminder of a scheduled private meeting with Amber. Maur’s middle name. And her handwriting. An oblique adverting to this café, venue of a meeting years before. She knew he would remember. A request that he ask Ms. McBride to join them.

“Maybe they think I’m having an affair, though what they make of ‘Ms. McBride’ I don’t know. A threesome? I’ve never been so interesting. What’s happening?”

“We have to wait for her. I can’t do this twice.”

When Sonya comes in and sees them she barrels between tables making Maur wince and gesture. Sonya hugs her, the women rock. Sonya’s sternum presses against her where a stone would hang, a charm.

“Maur, what the bloody hell?”

“I need your help,” Maur says.

“Whatever you need, darling,” Sonya says.

“Where’ve you been?” Des says. “It’s been days. What’s going on?”

“I’m so grateful. That you came.”

“Shut your mouth, mad woman,” Sonya says. “Get back to the attic.”

“What kind of trouble are you in?” Des says.

Maur shakes her head. “What did they tell you?”

“The police said you’d gone missing,” Des says. He blinks rapidly. She sees the thoughts he had. After a cover-up like that. Clothes left on a beach.

“I wouldn’t,” she says. And doesn’t look at Sonya. Ewan never would either, she’d have said.

“I know but after everything. You know.”

Is it redoubt or lack that even with Ewan gone there’s enough that she really wouldn’t? What is this not-good-enough strength? “I’m in really bad trouble,” Maur says. “I have to get away.”

“What is it?” Des says. “Why aren’t you going to the police?”

She considers. “I don’t know who to trust,” is what she says. “They’re in on something. The cops. I know, I know how that sounds. Believe me though, they are. I don’t even know exactly what but I’m not safe. I’m so so sorry to drag you in. I swear I’ll try to explain what I can when I can, but first I have to get away. And you can’t talk to anyone about this. Anyone.”

“Of course,” Sonya says.

“This is crazy,” Des says. “You have to go to the police—”

“Des,” Sonya says. “Enough. First things fucking first.”

—

She had run finally into the glow of signs. Old industries advertising services to no one. Maur gasping, not thinking to check the name of the street where she had been. The hour of the night on a clockface through an office window. Standing with the weight of the cash she’d taken. No context for these outskirts. Considering to whom she might turn.

Maur says, “I know this is a huge ask. I know it sounds crazy and I’ve no right. If either of you said anything like this to me I know how I’d feel. How worried I’d be. You have every right to…whatever. But I’m sorry, I can’t go into it. Not now. I’ve got tangled up in something and I’m in trouble.”

“Is it about Ewan?” Des says.

“It’s bad. Bad people. Please, Des. Right now the less you know the better. I just need your help to get away.”

—

The streets near her imprisonment all emptied out and nighttime and she had been alone. Had this ever been her city? If she had called for help, what might have come? Maur had walked miles towards a glow in the sky. Taking in postcodes on signs. These far northern fringes. Wended south. All alleys, no thoroughfares: London’s dream, the backstreet labyrinth of her first arrival, wherein anything might happen, remember that? At last to where moving cars were, and forecourts wherein no silent figures turned. Through to morning, hands in pockets on a wide suburban road along which tore those early vehicles. A large, squat new house called itself a hotel. She at the door, hands shaking. To pay the incurious man in the reconfigured vestibule from that stash. To give a name invented. To wedge a chair under the door handle in the noisome little chamber. To sob. To astonish herself by actually sleeping some on the dank foam bed, to wake with heart hammering, sit with knees drawn up and her back against the wall, to let panic come and go and to consider.

She had said to herself after a time, Come on now. Buses only. Go far. No underground. If you can’t make sense of what’s happening, decide how to live in senselessness. Charity shops for clothes. Get out.

An hour in a Cypriot internet café in Peckham. She had plotted it carefully before passing below the sun-faded sign into the smell of instant coffee and warm plastic. Proud of her cunning, opening scores of search tabs at her station, filling them with a debris of everything she could bring to mind to bury the lede of true targets, any red-flag words. So, floating between Audubon Society Canada and Charlie’s Angels and long-distance relationships and guitar standards and gossip and discontinued toys and I don’t fucking know, there’s nothing so hard as trying to think of random things but she’d done it, Maur had scanned pages with titles such as “How to Disappear.”

More top-deck journeys. She can’t recall the word for the tinfoil and metal shreds ejected to confuse radar but this was that. Another café with online access, Leyton now. She’d searched get abroad uk no passport.

“I need money,” she says, “and I need help.”

“How much?” Des says.

“As much as you can spare. I’m so sorry. Cash. Obviously.” Sonya is nodding. Maur sees her make plans. “And I know I’ve said this but for your sakes you have to be quiet about this. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t involve you, but I don’t know who else to—”

“You can stop that right now,” Sonya says.

“It’s okay,” Des says.

“It’s really not.” Maur makes herself sit back like someone not panicking. “I think I’m going to go to Liverpool. You don’t need a passport to cross.”

“To Ireland?” Des says. “You need something, though, don’t you? Are you going to Rho? What are you going to do? What have you got yourself into?”

“If I can get away, I can think, maybe. Figure something out.”

“I have keys to yours,” Sonya says. “I can get your ID.”

“I can’t travel on it,” Maur says. “And they’ll be watching the house. You used to know a few dodgy types over there, Sonn. Do you know anyone who could help? Who wouldn’t mind me being…staying low?”

“Yeah, I can’t see Rho being much good,” Sonya says. “I can give you a couple of names and addresses, drop some lines. But their glory days are long gone.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just if you trust them to keep quiet and they don’t mind me on a sofa. Des, I’m sorry to involve you.”

“You do need something,” he says. “To get through. Papers or something.”

“Can Jock help?” Sonya says.

“I can’t get hold of him.” Whenever Maur stops moving she hears a countdown start somewhere. “I better go.” After two nights, she knows how to find and walk into one of those mean house-hotels, pay whatever’s asked.

“Okay,” Des says. “Okay. But—”

“It’s completely fine, darling,” Sonya says.

“I’ll meet you.” Bring what you can, she says. What pounds you can spare and if you have any euros. She’s so sorry. “I know how this sounds,” she says.

She makes them go first and waits until they are out of view.

Highgate evening. Jane opens the door of Dig and Scribble onto someone she does not recognise until the woman says her name.

“Maur what the fuck?” She gives her a hug that is quick and rough and angry.

“Where’s Jock?” Maur says.

“I don’t fucking know. Where the fuck have you been? I heard you’d disappeared, I thought you might be with him. It’s been days.”

“You can’t tell anyone I’ve been here.” Maur sees in Jane old instincts of political suspicion. The woman looks out past fading awards through the window onto the backs of houses and nods. She gives Maur tea with the tea bag left in.

“How long since you’ve seen Jock?” Maur says. “I have to talk to him.”

“We all have to talk to him. I’m worried.”

“I think he’s in trouble,” Maur says.

“No shit. He’s been in a weird way. Then suddenly off he goes. Is it to do with what’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know. Can I see his office?”

She sifts through striae of his papers. Corruption in a council, procurement issues, arms sales. The scrawls on his wall calendar. She can see on Jane’s face a certain respect.

“What do you need?” Jane says. “What are you going to do?” Maur finds no laptop. She flicks through index cards, his cheap black notebooks below an old Troops Out! sign. Jane says, “He said to me his handwriting was like Marx’s.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Famously indecipherable.”

“I can decipher some of this.” A blue hardback diary below pamphlets, its days dense with scrawl in many colours. Jane mutters for her to hurry and Maur says, “What, are you expecting other fugitives?”

At the back of the diary are undated pages. Shack is written above one spread, overfilled with words in tangles and sentences crossed out. Phone numbers, addresses, names, reminders. It is the word that might be Gravesend that focuses Maur’s attention. Two weeks before the last appointment marked in the diary, she makes out, is it?, Meet Azeri (?????) Below it SCOTT keys.

“Who’s this?” she says. Jane shakes her head. Maur says, “I’m taking this book.”

“You’re not.” They watch each other. A poster proclaims an inquiry into the Belgrano. “Let me help you,” Jane says.

“Sure. Got a private jet? You can help me by staying quiet. If Jock comes back, tell him to fucking find me.”

They look up to a tap upon the glass. Little moth, little beast, the moon is on your side of the glass, all the neon moons of this borough.

Suppleting

Allardyce strove to trust his pointing sense. This was no season for beautiful feathers or gay petals: walking the trails of these waterlands, it would surely be a dunner bird to which he might draw attention, the remains of a thistle dried to wire.

We all possess this pointing sense. Oh yes.

In place of your natural pointing finger, the index finger, we give you an iron finger.

With his iron finger of war, Allardyce pointed.

This piece of human frailty between the hand and the forearm, which is called your wrist, has to be removed.

Allardyce would replace it with a band of steel. And yes this way of holding his weapon felt like expertise he must deploy alongside others more esoteric. That he gathered from the Black Beacon.

The low hill that shored up Lab 1 made a barrow. He waited in the terrible cold and Dr. Croome came out finally to look up at the glassy sky.

—Trooper Allardyce.

—Can I come in? he said.

—This is rather above your pay grade in here.

—That ain’t hard. I want to ask you something.

—Push off Trooper, I’ve work to do.

—Just tell me what these words mean, Doc.

—Look them up.

—I have.

She rolled her eyes but waited and he showed her what he had written down.

—Teleplasm. Come on now. It’s ectoplasm, what do you think?

—Doc, you ain’t listening. I know what the dictionary says, but what is it?

That got her interest. —Exudation, she said. She saw that was not enough for him and was pleased. —It’s not some slip that predated the universe; it’s a viscosity brought into presence by the scrape of matter and its other, a grinding of here and after, a and void. Do you see? she said. She perused the rest of his list, basic words from early training, similarly introductory lore. She folded it and put it in her pocket and he did not object.

—I’m sure you don’t think we put all that fiction in the Beacon just for light relief, she said. —Or dark. Time is a horizontal line. What cuts it into rhythm you can consider upstrokes, verticals I’ve mentioned before. That you could call narrative. This is germane. It can help you. Learn your history, Allardyce. The politics of incarnation. Having said which. Have you ever been to Canada? I once saw a sign at roadside, giving advice about what to do in the case of a bear attack. Play dead, make a loud noise, I don’t remember the specifics, but the point was the coda: “These techniques may not work!” Exclamation mark and all. One appreciated the honesty.

—You’re saying whatever you tell us is useless?

—Not at all. But it might not work.

She gestured for him finally to follow her into Lab 1’s windowless interior. White concrete, streaked. A projector pointed at a wall. Things like sconces attached every, what?, thirty feet. Allardyce reached out to touch the nearest, ready for Croome to tell him not to; she did not. A dark glass casing.

—It’s sand, she said. —Inside.

He lifted one like it was some dense apple from the ring that held it. Hefted and replaced it.

—How are you, Allardyce? Has it all been a bit much?

—I’m fine.

—Being given another chance as you were, you should take that as a compliment.

She led him down stairs into bitter cramped windowless tunnels below the beach. Her office was a deep chamber, full of machines.

—Let’s talk about it all then, she said. She faced him on a stool amid cold earth sounds beyond the walls. He saw her make a decision. —You’ll never run out of terms. Appar, haint, spec. So on. Their activities are as much tidal, it seems to me, as directed, let alone directable. I suspect some of my erstwhile colleagues—I’ve had another life, haven’t we all?—would have something to say about the disinclination to use traditional terms associated with one’s trade. One might call it disavowal. Negation. That’s pat, but the world can be pat. I can’t tell you what comfort or control it is that formulations such as the sterved or the swelted offer, but it’s rather charming that antique terminology should be reborn in such a thoroughly modern— Oh! She gave him an irony pout! —establishment. Believe it or not I’m not here to mock, though I do insist on my right to raise an eyebrow. To the extent that I’m a dissident on euphemism it’s only over the choice of nomenclature. I’ve always found gast, gæst, and particularly gōst to be so close to the dread unsayable as to be ridiculous. Some deploy, for the functions we deal with here, the term sequelae. Of war, that is, and, of course, life. The question of why they’re pretty much always of soldiers is beyond us here. I don’t object to that but I rather consider them suppletions. I choose that because it draws attention to the changes inherent in the state from what went before.

—You said revenance was different, Allardyce said. —From remembrance. That’s one of the first things you told us. What is it then?

—If I knew that. There’s an urgency to revenance. That’s why you’re here. Simply by being, if that’s the verb, and I’m not sure it is, their attention is like a warning of end times. Like the arguments of dissenters and ranters.

—Sounds exhausting.

—Exhausted, rather. Do you remember the earring Cunningham showed you in Malaya?

—Milkman?

She smiled. —Keep it in mind. Such things have their uses.

Croome took him deeper. An unmarked door guarded by a broad Gurkha with rifle by his side. He nodded and stepped aside and she led Allardyce in. Over his head a string of bulbs came on and set each other swinging. He closed his eyes a moment.

—Where’s the Venom engine? he said.

—What an interesting question. Why do you ask?

What could he say? Felt like it should be here?

He could not see the end of this room. It was all wooden shelving with numbered metal plaques. A maze into the dim. Above each number a box or object. Of it might be any size. A kind of reliquary though for what? A heaven of broken things. A sooty wireless receiver, all knobs and pitted lights. A belt buckle of odd shape; the tongue of a shoe, dry as bark. A tile cracked and patterned like a lost pictogram. A handle, no door. Bristleless brush; string of beads the colour of clotted cream. The tips of hats visible above cardboard rims, ends of wood and metal, tin bits, ceramic with muck upon it, stubs a dirty shade. Dust in the creases. Each piece telling nothing of itself and waiting to be given meaning.

On a low table by the door waited a ledger with a pen affixed by string. Above it at the threshold a dangling tangled geometry.

—I can see you don’t like it in here, Croome said.

—It’s not that. Allardyce swallowed.

—You’ll get used to it. Do try. You’re ahead of the curve, Allardyce. Remember there are contrary theories too, to everything I’m about to tell you.

She took a midsized cardboard box and put it in his hands.

—Open it.

He did not want to. He opened it. Within were folds of dirty white silk.

—Take it out.

He dangled it in his hand. He held it away from him as if it dripped. It was ragged edged, half the size of a sheet. He said, —What is this?

—A bit from a parachute. Sort of. Look closely.

Swallowing the spittle that filled his mouth he stood with her below one of the lights. She gave him a thick magnifying glass from somewhere to pore over the fibres.

—Use your fingers, she said. —Most of what’s claimed as apport is fake. You need to know a real one.

He didn’t know what he was looking for nor how he was closing in on it. The mesh, the grid. Allardyce stopped and bunched up the cloth and held it right up to the glass at one particular part.

—Found it, she said.

The weave deviated. It folded with perfect softness but stare again closely at the trajectory of threads, and here, seen very close, the silk strands splayed in any, all directions. Like lines from overlapping explosions. Lost any pattern. A random overlay, nothing weavelike, nothing a machine nor the subtlest artisan could ever have cohered from any worm.

When he could, he said, —What is this?

—I say it’s from a parachute, Croome said. —It’s not, as you can see, any more than that earring was an earring. That, if you like, was an earring in quotation marks. Similarly, this only looks like silk. Or thinks it’s silk, if you prefer. All apports are wrong, one way or another. We’ll be working on these soon. I’ve given you a head start.

She led him out. Allardyce went straight to the Black Beacon. He sought a dictionary and looked up suppletion. The use in inflection or derivation of an irregular form that is not related to the primary form of a word. As the use of better as the comparison of good, worse of bad. Of went as the past tense of go.

Again in Close-Quarters House, sand coiled in a spiral, by a tiny cairn of stones, each one holed by time. Some holes contained baby stones within.

—One can’t help wondering of such hollow presences at greater scale, Croome said to him once, of them. —What such eyes might see and do. A few hills, in Yangshuo and Guilin and elsewhere.

There was, Allardyce knew, not knowing when the knowledge had come to him or how, a way to feel, to get a sense of how effective some technique or other might be against not the quick but the you-know-whats. Even in their absence. Were they absent? That brought him up. Did he truly feel, in those rooms, as if he were, in fact, alone? Did not his adjudicators refer frequently to scopes and meters and thermometers and he’d assume barometers and little spinning four-cup anemometers tucked at thresholds as unobtrusive as such a course would allow?

That dreadful cold came. There was more than darkness and targets and puppetry here. Something tethered and let out just far enough to make him a sluice for grauen, the dread. So fork your fingers, Allardyce, and spit between them into corners.

He brought his spear into this test! Swung it at shadows with his off hand as he picked through rooms gun up. Masked mannequins made marionette lurched in goggles, cowls, balaclavas, once a prankster’s chicken mask. Shoot to knock them down, taking Grant-Taylor’s stance. Or he might now be ordered by a voice from unseen speakers to perform other actions using oddities and broken objects issued him. That all felt to Allardyce as had that silk.

His comrades waiting in their line carried, with distaste, a tin cup, a shoe with dangling laces, a fork, a book. The cup was shallower inside than it should have been. The shoelaces interwove in a way that made little sense. The fork’s tines were angularly wrong. What have you. All these slubs.

—An apport, Croome said, —is an object brought into the circle. There are two main theories about their appearance. Sudre says the medium works at the molecular level, possibly unconsciously, and with the aid of the suppletions, the control—on whom more in a bit—disintegrates whatever it might be, then channels that disaggregation from its original location through the intervening matter, into the room. There to reintegrate. Zöllner, Slade, Bird, a few others, say rather that there’s a higher dimension—a fourth, usually, though details vary—and that apported objects are plucked from our level, pass through this other, to be deposited back in the sitting. Apportology’s in its infancy, but this we do know: both these theories are wrong. An apport is not transported in from elsewhere in the world. It comes from nothing. Out of nothing. An apport is ex nihilo, and shed by revenance.

—We don’t know how many there are out there, she said. An important part of your job is to find them. They’re property of the crown, like swans. You might encounter them in the trails of what you’ll be controlling. And you can use them as part of that control. Among other things. Not all Roused emit them and not all operators will react to them as does…Allardyce, for example. But you’d best learn to recognise them as well as you can.

—All apports are wrong, one way or another. All have a snag.

The speaking horn Allardyce held was too heavy. You could only grip it awkwardly. Its handle carefully crafted, it appeared, and, but, it was too short and fat for a normal hand. These glitch tells.

Croome said, —These are what suppletions leave behind. Like droppings. And what use are they? An apport’s of two natures. The snag notwithstanding, whatever it may be, an apport is matter. As tangible in the world as its everyday counterpart. But. She raised a finger. —It is both phenomenon and, of a certain kind, noumenon. As well as matter, it partakes of the fetch.

She let that sit.

—Which means that whatever else its qualities—and different apports are highly variably not-canny—just as we can touch and interact with it, so too, unlike everyday stuff, can the functions of which it is spoor. The sequelae themselves. Which makes them tools of your trade.

Sapers looked at what he had been issued. The lid of a kettle, not the right shape.

—What would I do with this? he said. He made his own primness a performance.

—That’s the whole point, et cetera, Allardyce said. —To learn to improvise with what’s available, et cetera.

Sapers pointed with what he held. —Look, he said.

A fox lay on its side at the path’s edge. Its eyes were closed in an expression of concentration. It arced backwards so its muzzle almost touched the end of its brush, its belly was gone, the bobbins of its spine left by what had killed it.

[12]

These hostels are mummeries. Cash travellers, the fearful, the illicit, don’t choose where to stay for anything but a roof and because the gatekeepers let them in. No such mendicant ever decided on a resting place on the basis of a shared lounge or business suite, but there they are, or at least spaces so named. The remains of a proprietor’s old aspirations, flecked unhappy rooms like all the others but containing a chuntering old desktop computer, mugs and tea bags, powdered milk and a kettle. Where Maur had stayed on her second night was a chamber called the—the!—library. Eight feet by nine behind the plastic-fronted box where a man counted out her change. Even strained with terror, preparing her message for Des, she could not forbear looking. An armchair, though no reading light, so you were at the mercy of the shadeless central bulb or of the window onto Cricklewood sky. Cheap shelves on two walls—no pictures or posters on the others—half-full of discarded books in all the visitors’ languages, paperbacks expanded by many readings, or waterlogged and dried, some marked with abandoners’ names. A few hardbacks. London guidebooks archiving places long gone, war stories, romances, fat fantasies, thrillers, horror with black covers, “classics,” titles she found unlikely. In that moment she even wished for a book to contribute.

She travels for hours between London places hitherto imaginary. Ongar, Theydon Bois. Another guesthouse. Ewan comes to her mind. As if he ever leaves it. So does that library. War stories within such as he might have told had he been willing. Once he said to her what he missed was a good brew, his mates, London things in which he’d never expressed interest. Like lines he’d been given. Still, though, it might have been true. As if war is a machine to generate lack, every soldier missing what they miss, grass, a dog, sticky buns, a person it gives them pleasure to be fucked by or to fuck, a church, a child, parents, the evening sky above et cetera. An economy of pining. The job, as much as to effect aims, being to want something left behind.

—

In the morning she walks all the way to the appointed place, arriving early. Everything is connected to everything else. She sits with her hat on by a window obscured with glass-stuck promises of egg and chips and watches the entrance to the park beyond between the pound sign and the promise of a cup of tea that will be bottomless.

Her friends will take her to the docks. This will work, is what she whispers to herself. A hex. She is a greasy-spoon witch. On her second coffee she slips farther into her chair and watches comers and goers beyond bus stop and co-op and the funeral parlour.

And when Maur feels something hard in her side, when the air around her changes with breath and the warmth of bodies, coronas of everyday dust, when she feels hands on her shoulders from behind and hears lips part by her ear, so she almost cries out, what comes more quickly than fear or surprise or dread or shame is bewilderment. Because the door to this place is before her and she cannot understand how she failed to see her captor enter.

It’s his voice that is up close. He who says to her, Stay still, and Now slowly turn.

How could he have got to her?

It is not him she sees first, his weapon held surreptitious to her gut. When she turns towards the counter, where a young woman slaps down grease below a burbling television, standing before Maur, her expression all concern, is Cybill.

“Hiya, Maur,” she says. Cybill is pale. She too wears unlikely old clothes. She wears a hat and the fringe of her hair is newly black. “I’m glad we found you, love,” she says. “Come on now.”

Now stand is what the man whispers. Walk out and stay quiet.

Maur holds Cybill’s gaze. We?

She walks. Cybill ahead, the man behind.

Wind comes roaring down the runnelled way when Maur steps out, a herald of failure. If she were to run, surely he would not shoot here in view of this man, this old woman, this street sweeper with a thoughtful face, those drivers in their little cars. She might turn and hurl herself back towards where she was to meet Des and Sonya, no?

But the man gestures to a side street. Another van. And the truth is that as well as everything else, the fear and all, distant but unmistakable, Maur feels curiosity. Because Cybill leads, and not at the point of the gun.

Cybill says quietly, “I told him we’d look after you, he loves you, Des does, he’s in bits,” and Maur understands that she has been surrendered.

The bottle is not a glass apple. Though it is of perfume, it is Cabochard, it is by Grès, feel that, it is a cylinder, it is old, and on that metal tube it’s housed in is a pattern of black scrawls upon white. They are—yes?—the silhouettes of dead trees or their negatives. You could think them swaying. You’re crouched in that forest.

And white lights lead to red lights, and to fold and to crease precious paper use a bone folder. Because objects and clauses and words are haunted.

Where it will not be seen: a table, all laid out with crockery, and rich food that has started rotting from one end.

VII

Steady, in Training

The Ditch

Pamela! Todd! Carpenter! The men and women of the unit made the boss’s name a chant and sang it in the mess to cobbled-together tunes.

Pamela

Todd

Carpenter!

Damn yer a-

-n odd

CO aren’t yer?

—Come on, that’s absolute rubbish, Merrick said. He was smart as ever in the uniform of the Royal Artillery. —Doesn’t scan or rhyme. He played up his own voice, thin for a big man. —And it’s veddy veddy disrespectful.

They fell about. To Allardyce the humour was a decade late. Nineteen fifties bollocks in a new world. Was this nostalgia or strategy or the one as the other?

Long days of hitchhiking, of trekking across fields in the flat land. A late summer tugged at him. We had a stinker here, Maisie wrote, and Allardyce imagined hot grey grit and emerging out of it howling buses, the infernal specifics of summer smog. Pigs screamed at him on his way parallel to the sea. He waved and they were satisfied. On the cliffs he pursed his lips as if he would whistle, as if something might come in answer. He tugged at his ear. Swung his stick. He’d fixed a better handle over that bamboo spike.

In a village near Diss a parishioner directing him from church to wherever said something about bypassing the Grundle. To which, of course, whatever it was, Allardyce instead headed. Birdsong in the bramble. He found a threadbare place to push through, exhilarated by scratches. Into a cut packed by thorns and cow parsley. He walked the hollow way. This was the Grundle, this ditch, that its incomparable name. Landforms given personhood.

Had Allardyce lost time?

The trench shallowed and he stopped to peer at opened-out land from within a verge, as he did sometimes from within himself. He sat on stones and hugged his knees. There arose in him quiet and something that left him desolate or uplifted and he cried silently. He felt a perfect certainty that something joined him. Built in his head an image of what company he kept. Hello to that CT? And what was behind him?

The halak didn’t swing his spear alone, old Evans had said. His familiar held the spirit for him. What if Allardyce had aimed his first cack-handed thrusts not at any troublemaking grave spirit but at his own companion?

Grandad! he gasped and did not say aloud. Grandad Bowler! Why would you switch your affections? Was that what happened? Attention veering? Shaggy man, shadow made of leaves, ghillie man, hedgerow man, eyes of nettles, dock-leaf beard. Hirsute and green. Do you help me? Guide me? Why do you walk with me, if you do, and if you are a you and not some mere dappling? What recalled glint glints from where your ear would be? What warrior qualities do you discern in me? Thank you, my lost trooper, my vegetable Enkidu.

Allardyce unsheathed his spear as he turned but he would not make an attack, this was a soldier’s due diligence and a respect due; you would not insult a chap by not showing ready. And he was alone in the thicket. But by choice, by pareidolic strain, he made out outlines a little like those of his imaginings.

Every darkness between tussocks, every burrow where something might hide, every hole a portal, so many stories of ways out of the breathlands.

He came to the cavernous testing chamber. Midnight near. A dozen comrades in uniform, khaki, blue, grey, lined against the concrete. A few fixtures shed dirty light. Cold, the small windows blacked out. A generator thrummed. Close thereto waited a square-speakered machine. A rectangle the size of a desk, like some giant wireless, grille facing towards the centre of the room.

Croome was there with white-coated colleagues. So was Hook, his smile thin. And the Milkman, and Carpenter, braced on her cane.

Allardyce went to Hook and spoke quickly and quietly. —What happened to the bomoh?

—I beg your pardon?

—The bloke we was looking for in Malaya. Who done in O’Leary. The one— He lowered his voice, —you drew. What happened after we took him in? What’d he tell you? What happened to O’Leary in the jungle?

—Allardyce for goodness’ sake, now is not the time.

At the centre of the chamber on a wooden chair waited a brick-sized box of opaque glass. Sand spread out in intricate derangements. The ladle in the water in a pewter bowl in the corner, next to another such empty, was certainly perforated. On that little plate that must be churchyard mould. Such tests and snares.

—All of you, by now, Carpenter said, —I suspect know more than you know you know. At the least you apperceive it, you ken it, as the Scots say. What you’ll see in the Unit may shock you but I suspect it won’t surprise you. As operators you have various duties. Detection. Location. Evaluation, or, if you prefer, diagnosis. Acquisition. Invocation. Domination. That will be the hardest. Dispelling. Deployment.

Croome said, —Does it occur to you that for all the terror they provoke, the world might throw up whatever your preferred term because the dark without any such is more unbearable than that with?

She gestured at the sand.

—You know the Ps: prior planning prevents piss-poor performance. In our line of work we can’t do much by way of live-fire exercises. Even now. These are unusual days: rates of revenance we’ve not seen, perhaps ever. Still, we can’t be profligate. But we must familiarise you with what we’re dealing with. Who here has a hanky? Her voice echoed. Hands hesitantly rose. —Sapers, thank you.

She took it. It was bright blue. Someone tittered.

—You know what apports do. Or at least one key aspect. We have the fortune of working in a more enlightened age than did the Endor witch. That was where the Nazis went wrong with the Ahnenerbe: it wasn’t modern enough. I’m not generally one for the collective unconscious—I come from rather another tradition—but if I’ve learnt anything in this line of work it’s that there are exceptions to everything. And not that I can prove it, but I’ve come to believe that the CGEG and so forth of the bugle call we all know and love is born out of a sort of, well, race memory might be overstating it, but memory in any case. Of some powerful kind. An echo of a deeper frequency, one used for centuries to get a soldier up. Get up at once.

Get up at once, Allardyce mouthed. The bugle’s sounding. The day is here and never fear, old Sol is shining.

—The orderly officer, Croome said, —is on his rounds.

How long had Allardyce been holding his breath? How had he not until now seen the dark metal cube at the edge of the room? An engine, in the shade of which that other, clearer, with its speakers, was echo.

—Apports, Carpenter said, —touch both us and the lespries. Singular lespry, as in de corps, get it? Suppletions. Roused. The call-them-what-you-will. The g-g-g-…goodness me, as if I’d say that. She let her audience’s little laughs die down.

Carpenter put her palm flat on her chest and beat it in a slow, repeated rhythm. —Never underestimate common sense, she said. Beat beat beat upon her chest. —Consider what you know. Primitive man around the fire calling to anything you like. Plainsong. Chants and rhythms. What’s been called the “human chord.” Consider, perhaps, an après-human chord.

Someone turned out all the lights but one. Carpenter cleared her throat. She went to the door and opened it and before she walked out and pulled the door to behind her the sound of the sea came in. —Good luck, she said. —That is the mother engine. This is the Rouse.

Allardyce might have heard her say, —Life is just a prologue to a ghost story.

Croome leaned into the darkness by the speaker. Allardyce heard a switch.

First there was nothing.

There, a faint electric burr. As if after an age.

Under the nothing and the hiss, the remotest note swelled slowly. A dog farther away than any dog had ever been, sounding its mournfulness? Something midway between brass and drone.

The chamber rang. Allardyce bit down. Sound came up and light wavered. The women and men of R Unit grimaced. The tone now hurt the teeth. Allardyce pressed against the wall. On the chair the box began to glow with faint cold blue-cast light. There was not one note to the sound of the Rouse but two, a slow down-up-down-up, and the glimmer in the glass wavered too, to get up, get up at once.

It went out.

When had Croome begun so slow a walk towards the chair? As if she were a film of herself played wrong? Each footfall delayed and soundless in the dim? She was beyond the unspun sand. She held Sapers’s handkerchief. Tossed it, practiced, so above the chair it unfurled to descend wafting to slip flat down upon the chair itself. CGCGCG. Those notes. Everyone stared at the little blue square.

Now Allardyce saw that Croome also held the apport parachute silk. He did not breathe. She gauged and threw that too, so it too unfurled at its apogee and descended.

It did not reach the seat.

The silk came fluttering like something injured. To halt slowly in the air itself, above the wood. Settling on nothing.

Still that relentless noise. Making Allardyce sick. Seeming to yaw and warble at this new dreadful shrouding as the silk took a shape, its drapery over the rough form of what was beneath it, what invisibility it covered.

Its fringes hung, a hood, unmoving. Discernible beneath, sketched in folds.

a head

a shrouded face.

And when in the beat before whatever field held them broke and the sound stopped and the rag once more in the grip of gravity sank like a jellyfish, for that tiniest slice of time before it fell as everything should, the thing it covered opened cloth-muffled jaws, spoke silent sucking words as if opening to a vacuum within, mouth open onto unseen stars, Allardyce staring as the silk drew tight across a crumpled-cloth face staring directly at him.

old Sol

and Allardyce staggered and gasped as the cloth settled, but no, he was not surprised.

[13]

New Cross. Beyond a dry cleaner’s and a shuttered off-license, a bookie’s, its sign sun-faded to a shade between peach and rust. Shaun had once defended gambling, as if Maur had attacked it, quoting someone that it was love of the unknown. Towards this mean sirens’ rock between desquamating posters, Maur goes at hidden pistolpoint to a side door.

Her captor and Cybill, whom he also took, lead her up narrow uncleaned stairs which put Maur in mind of her first years in the city. Cybill unlocks a second door. Little rooms all but bare, clean enough, carpet a non-colour, empty walls and cheap chairs. A mattress on the floor. Maur’s back itches where the man points his gun. Her heart won’t speed though.

Oh here comes the dog! Padding from some back room. It comes without rancour, with a certain cowed care. It lets the man knuckle it gently, and it looks again at Maur. At her, through her, as if to something beyond.

Cybill gestures at a grey futon sofa. Maur goes to the window instead and looks out.

“You called this a safe house?” Maur says. She speaks as if to the pedestrians she watches in the glow below. “What makes it safe?”

The man says, “It’s secret.”

Net curtains again, even so high up. To a watcher below, Maur will be a visual artefact.

Now she sits as directed. The dog still gazes at her. Cybill faces her in a chair. On the floor is a cardboard folder. The man backs out of the room and Maur tenses as if she’ll run. She hears water from the kitchen. She does not move. Maur hears pots, pans, a kettle. She salivates at the smell of bacon.

“You said ‘we,’ ” Maur says.

“Eh?” Cybill says. “Oh. Yeah. He was dead impressed, you know. When we got back. It was a lot later than he’d thought it would be. He was fixing me up and we got, you know, interrupted. It’s not safe out there. He couldn’t believe you’d got out. At first he thought someone’d found you. He was”—cuss beat—“worried. He didn’t know who you’d told what. So he was P’d off too. But impressed.”

“That’s nice.” Maur’s eyes went back to the dog and Cybill saw.

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Cybill said. “The dog was in a state. Not frantic I mean, the opposite, and that had him worried. Stallo said he might’ve just left you to fend for yourself, but I wouldn’t have that. How’d you get past it? The dog. What did you do?”

Stallo. “I didn’t do anything.”

“That don’t seem likely.”

“Cybill,” Maur says, “can you hear yourself? You want me to explain myself? The last thing I knew, that fucker making a full English next door took us prisoner at gunpoint and you weren’t moving, I thought you were dying….”

“I get it, love. I do. But you know what this is about. Even if you’re telling yourself you don’t. You were there. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here. When I woke up…” Her eyes lose focus. “I was weak as a kitten. He patched me up God knows how, I think he had help to be honest, I was out of it but there might’ve been another voice. Anyway a hospital wouldn’t have been any good. But he knew what to do.”

Again Maur wonders why she’s not running. If she did, she thinks, the man would reach her before she opened the door. That is not the only reason she stays still though.

“How did you find me?” she says.

“What do you think? When we came back—I woke up in the van—and you was gone…he…” She gestures. “He got me a phone, didn’t he? I binned it on the way here. A cheap one so you can’t trace it. A burner, they call it. Buy it with cash and he says the rule is five days, no more. I called Des.”

“Des?”

“I thought you might call him or Sonya.”

“How do you know his number?”

“You can get numbers. I know. Sonn would take your side even if she thinks you’re wrong. Or doolalley.”

“What did you say?”

“Des barely knows me, we met what, twice? I said—well, I said you’d had a turn, didn’t I? You needed help. I’ve seen Sonya, she always thinks she knows best. Good on her, but I know that type. Des, though, he’s not so sure of himself when it comes to you. I told him…”

“That I’d lost it?”

“I said you need help. Which is true. I said you’d had an episode. You was a danger to yourself. Which is true and all. I said I could help you. Which is true. Course he wanted to call the police and I told him no, you were paranoid, wouldn’t be safe in the state you was in. He had to keep quiet because you might hurt yourself, but me and Jock knew what to do. I know he wasn’t sure. I called him straightaway, before you, I expect. I said if he heard from you it meant you was in trouble and I could help because I’d been just where you are, so I understand. And if it weren’t me who spoke to you, then I didn’t like to think what would happen. I said you trust me and we were going to do it together.” It.

“What if I’d called someone else?”

“Then we’d have seen, wouldn’t we?” Who else would Maur call? “I said to tell me if you got in touch. He called the next day. Don’t be angry, Maur. We’re on the same side.”

The negotiation Des must have made with himself.

“He told me what you said,” Cybill says. “I promised I’d take care of you. He loves you.”

This woman of whom Maur has spoken to Des, with respect, envy for the fury of her bereavement. Which she sees Cybill knows and knew, and knew how to use. Des thought her, Maur, mad for a moment, again, and helped her and he’s very kind but not all kindness is the same. Bewildered, so with care and cowardice he betrays her. Now he’ll suffer. Calling Cybill’s discarded phone. A ringing in the rubbish, chirrup from the highest landfill layer disturbing dirty birds.

“Stallo says it’s the number one reason people get caught,” Cybill says. “Reaching out, thinking it can’t hurt just for a moment. It will though.”

Sonya will hunt her, Maur knows. Remember Sonya watching her puke up wine and pills, oh. That’ll make her look harder yes but in a certain way with certain expectations no you don’t you know she’s always had your back.

“Des’ll call the police,” Maur says.

“As if they ain’t already looking.”

Sonya will think disappearances, COINTELPRO, MK-ULTRA, rendition, black ops. The world’s stranger. There’s no life any more it turns out because what’s death? Will Sonya blame Des for Maur’s second vanishing? Will he tell her he made a call? If you speak to them again, Maur, you endanger them.

“You know, don’t you, he was planning to talk to you?” Cybill says. “Stallo. He was going to tell you everything.”

“He never said anything—”

“I was dying, Maur.” Almost pride in it. “I got touched, didn’t I? Not as if he wasn’t busy. I don’t think he’s used to explaining himself anyway.”

“Touched by what?”

You have to look away from that smile. “You know that,” Cybill says. “This is what I’m getting to grips with,” she says. “If they touch you, sometimes, he says, with some of them—it’s always different—nothing might happen. Or you might think nothing’s happened then later realise how sick you are. Or it might freeze you. Or set fire to you. Or make you see things you shouldn’t be able to. Whatever. It might make everything old and knackered and falling apart, he says. It was too much for me. She’s not…right. She’s straining.” She frowns. “Not quite well.”

“Her?”

“Oh Maur.” Maur has never been so cold. “But it’s not just her,” Cybill says. “That’s the thing. At Teller’s. That was her but not just her on the stairs. Something was behind her, too.”

—

To be a mother. You remember what it was? Are you still a mother? To walk alongside shy alien agency. Time-travel through witness. Her tiny boy, say, raising a bath sponge to chew and suck on at once, Maur seeing it and gasping to recall and feel her own young mouth doing the same. Feeling the exactitude of jumps two-feet-together into puddles when he performed them. As if his hand she had held was also her own.

They’d watched some thriller once, another one she shouldn’t have let him. A man had shot another and a woman had gone to the victim and the shooter said, Is he dead? and the woman, accusing and admiring, said, Very. Ewan had turned to his mother. No more than nine and already a conundrum, but she had known before he spoke what he would ask, because the line had returned her to her own first childhood reading of that formulation, when, shy to ask a mother busy slowly dying, she had gone instead to her father to ask what it could mean. Dead was dead, no? Now she hears the provocation in that question. Wonders at her young self.

Dead, her father had said, is what it means. “Very dead” means “dead.” Even then that had felt not true.

Decursion

For most of two spring days Maisie and Allardyce lay together. She said she was sure he sent his letters from Scotland and it provoked in him affection that he was stationed closer to her than she thought. From the bed they watched daylight investigate the wall. They attended to neighbours’ chitchat and affectionate impatience with dogs or cats. Steven and Maisie ate toast or biscuits at whatever times they wanted, drank sweet tea, taking turns to make it, naked, tits or prick and balls jiggling and admired by the other issuing warnings about the kettle.

—Don’t burn that, I need another bit of that in a tick.

Once when they fucked a certainty overtook him, from how she gripped his hips, from a dare in her gaze, that Maisie wanted him to come in her, right up in her, and that made him abruptly as hard as he had ever been, and she whined to feel that and widened her eyes as he pushed, quickening.

Why not?

But his hips snapped stiff in sudden dread not of a baby but of slime, grease from a void, of cells dividing busy as yeast, and Maisie and he sounded their disappointments as he pulled out to look and spattered on her skin. And though the spurts of it were several and strong enough to reach her chin and make her gasp again, not for the first time, Allardyce in his long spending felt no sensation at all.

He rolled from her.

She said, —I love you.

—Love you too.

She pushed her face into his armpit. He squeezed her and listened to himself say, —I want you to meet someone.

Rene was late as was her custom. She called, —Sweetheart! loud enough to draw glances and give a studied edge to the waiters’ unflappability. Allardyce smoothed his jacket and tie and stood and she swept to him nudging table legs with her coat. She hugged him hard and put her lips up close to his ear.

—Steve-o. I could smack your legs, boy. She appraised him at arm’s length. —I can actually see you this time. How long’s it been, you little bugger?

—Auntie Rene. You look nice.

—Like it? A twirl. —That’s for you, Steve-o. New frock and all. She patted his cheek. —You ain’t quite at new-shoe level yet. We’ll see how it goes. For starters I need to know you ain’t going to disappear again.

She sat and took in the blush-pink and walnut walls, mirrors in scalloped brass and cakes behind glass, contents oozing. Women with gloves beside their saucers and nervous men in slick cuffs. She told him the place was beautiful and posh and that he was spoiling her. She flirted with the young man who took their order.

—How are you, darling?

—I’m alright, Aunt Rene.

—No one ever asked me anything, you know.

—I know, he said. —It’s alright now anyway. Like I said, I’m back in the service. Well I was never out you might say. How are you?

She made a show of preening. —You know me, sweetheart. I’ve been spending time with Jack. He’s a good ’un. I told you about him, didn’t I?

—He’s treating you right?

—Speaking of. Where is she then?

—Always late. Them students and pinkos rub off on her. She hangs about with an even worse lot than someone else I could name, eh?

Rene laughed throatily for him. He had told Maisie a different time.

—Before she gets here…, he said.

—Oh, Lor’, what now?

—Don’t be like that. She’s a good ’un too.

—Steve-o! You never!

—Leave off. I am going to ask her though.

—Oh, Steve-o, I am glad.

—I am and all.

The man brought their tea and they waited until he had gone.

—And Rene, not a word, alright? Got to get a ring, don’t I?

She turned an imagined key in the lock of her lips. —Are you going to— she began.

—That’s what I want to say. She don’t know anything about Mum. So don’t get into anything about it, alright? With either of them.

—Steve-o, you’re going to be engaged though.

—It’s my business.

—What sort of attitude’s that?

—Rene. I’ll deal with it. I’ll maybe even, I mean it’s been a while since I seen her. I don’t know. When I’m ready is what I’m saying. It’s my business and I’m asking you to keep out of it.

—I won’t tell lies for you.

—I’m not asking you to. She knows I don’t talk to Mum and that’s that.

—Yeah but does she know I do?

—Rene, if you’re going to make trouble I’ll walk out with her and that’s the end of it with you and me. I’m sorry, but.

Quietly she said, —Steve-o, for goodness’ sake, I’m on your side. Like always.

She set her face then in a bright crooked grin of greeting and stood and put her hands to her hips. Allardyce stood too and turned to Maisie, who was approaching.

—I didn’t mean for you all to get here before me, she said. She was flushed. —It’s so lovely to meet you, Irene. Steve’s a mystery man, isn’t he, but he’s always speaking so well of you.

Allardyce could see his aunt considering Maisie’s clothes and close-styled hair.

—It’s so lovely to meet someone from his family, Maisie said.

And Irene forbore even glancing at him.

—

They ate iced fancies and Irene asked Maisie about her work, and Maisie was dismissive but then said, —That’s not really what I want to do, though. She hesitated. —Steve got me a typewriter, didn’t you, Steve? What I’d like best is, well, I’d like to write I think.

—Is that right? Stories?

—Oh, stories. I don’t know. Poems maybe too.

He had never heard her speak of poetry.

—I’m trying to write something now. It’s ever so hard. I do it in the morning before work.

—How much have you done? Rene said.

—Forty pages. Well, thirty. Do you like to read, Irene?

—I like a good history. And I like a romance.

Allardyce had not known of his aunt’s taste in books nor of Maisie’s progress. He went to the lav and when he returned Irene was asking if Maisie knew what tasks he performed for the army. Maisie did a sweet blush.

—Come on, you must have an idea! Bet he talks in his sleep!

—Irene you are awful. I don’t know, do I?

His aunt smiled at him to show she knew she was being naughty.

—I like it, Maisie said. —Well I do, I mean, he’s, well, all secret and that. It’s a bit exciting, isn’t it?

They went to Hyde Park. Allardyce paid for a while in a rowboat and he showed off, pulling them out amid other boats and moorhens and ducks in fast jerks. Thin flat cloud could not obscure the sun and the lake’s surface was bright. The clothes and the traffic and the radio sounds notwithstanding, there was to him something Victorian in the scene. He was aware of his aunt’s eyes behind him, that she took in the sight of his back broadening with the strokes. He was no less conscious of her gaze than of that of Maisie, who faced him.

—He’s a frogman, Irene said. He moved in her unseen stare not without pleasure nor its other, and his mother came to mind. —That’s it, isn’t it? Steve-o?

—No, I’m the one who likes the water, Maisie said.

They were teaching him to dive in fact. He and Marks and Bowler and Sapers waddling in oilcloth coveralls shaggy with tanks and pipework into the frigid black water.

—What’s the matter? Maisie said to him, because she felt the pause in his rhythm. Which he felt too now she spoke, and he couldn’t have said how long it had been, that hesitation, or where he’d been, or who’d been sitting here for those seconds. He rowed again. What had made him falter was, yes, a feeling of the boat settling as if its weight had changed, as if someone new had arrived, yards from the shore as they were, had sat silently beside his aunt. Behind him. He wished he had his bamboo sticker. Allardyce’s eyes were good and had been trained to discern disruption and patterns but he made out no presence in or of the lakeside leaves. Could not but imagine them falling as if it were an indoor autumn onto the chair in the laboratory at Camp Awfulness, piling up.

The first of her writings Allardyce read, the first Maisie would show him, was entitled “Berrigan.” The thoughts of a woman on a train. He worked slowly through it and understood that the woman, who was granted no name, was on her way to visit a man who was dying. An older man, a lover, a father, a friend. Berrigan was either his name or that of a book he had written. The woman was stricken but energised by the death impending. Maisie sat on the bed and watched him turn the pages.

—So? What do you think? Do you like it? Oh you don’t, do you?

—Oy. Stop that. I do.

—Do you? Do you really? You think it’s alright? I mean I know I’ve a lot to learn….

—I don’t know what to say about it. I mean I’m so proud of you.

—Oh, Steve-o, you’re so nice to me. I have some ideas, it’s ever so exciting, there was a poetry thing before you got back and I met a woman called Franciszka, I don’t really know how you say it, it’s not English, she’s an artist and she’s so cool even though she’s ever so old, but nothing like my parents. She publishes little books. Such interesting stuff, and she said she’d look at my thing when it’s finished, well I did ask her, maybe I shouldn’t have done but I couldn’t stop myself and she was so nice about it, Steve-o.

Allardyce set his lips against what in him was goaded by what she’d written. He had left in the jungle much of that part of him that would once have wanted to mock it but still he felt that desire to say What is all this?, to say that they made no sense, these formulations, points of description, in what they disclosed or where (this pylon by the track?, the back of this school?, which intruded on the woman’s thought like this, mid-flow?). The piece did not seem to work as did other stories he read carefully and even with pleasure.

Allardyce could not have explained, and understood himself to be ashamed of, his suspicion, the sense in him that this story without start or end was tricking him. There was admiration too. He said to Maisie that he couldn’t believe it, that he had not known she could write like this.

—Honestly I don’t know if I understand it, he said. He made sure not to speak curtly. —I didn’t know. That you could do this. It’s brilliant.

She smiled and he saw she was disappointed.

They found a flat in Somers Town. Rene brought them a plant. Allardyce went with Maisie back to the Partisan. She read her story aloud, the only prose in an evening of poets.

—It’s on its last legs, that place, Hook told Allardyce. —If they’re the best the revolution has to offer, we can bugger off home. And it’s all still going okay with that crew?

—They like me alright. I keep quiet.

It seemed like not just Maisie but all her pals there were mid-scribble over their coffees. An Analysis of This; Towards a Philosophy of That; On the Other; Blah-de-Blah: A Novel; Such and Such: Stories; Whatever: A Play in Two Acts; What Have You & Other Poems. As if these tracts were all aspects of something larger. Now you’re talking. That was a familiar notion from Allardyce’s Black Beacon nights. Imbibing the Cross Correspondence, that madcap pattern-hunting of fine Society for Psychical Research minds, Sidgwick Gurney Lodge the Verralls Crandon Valiantine et al. coagulating their channelled and automatic-writinged gibberish, seeking some ur-text from the beyond. Imagine if Maisie’s thing was the final lynchpin piece to slip-slide all the ramblings and backs-of-envelopes and scraps, in the Partisan and the world, to where they’d be redeemed. Everything a sign, the world a code. What a gag.

—Allardyce? he heard Hook say. —You still here?

—There’s something else. I know it’s not really done to talk details…. I get it. But.

He said he did and he did. Techniques and ends unstated. A civvy might say, Half a mo, what the hell is the point of this?, but in the services? I’ll ask you no questions. Like that chap at Masirah said. A soldier in particular could get teeth into Theirs not to reason why. Not that that wasn’t its own kind of simpering. No one so sentimental as a soldier or so hard-headed either. You can ride two horses. Nod at the insight of Second Lieutenant Owen about the dulce-and-decorum mendacity, and nod too still grimly proudful at standing ready pro patria mori. Contradictions ain’t what they used to be, but then they never were. You don’t need to understand but you do need to learn. Reading and field trips

—to Souther Fell, to take EMF and temperature.

—to the roadside between Manchester and Eyam and a lichened square stone for William Wood here MURDERED July 16th AD1823 PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD, its hollow always empty of weeds and stones, Hook said, though their predecessors had filled it with pebbles, as did the Uniteers before they left. —Try not to get too fixed on the details, Hook said. —Who Wood why Wood by whom and so on. I’m well aware what you’ve been set to read is all about uncovering particular truths and secrets untold, touching the lost hearts, but those are precisely stories, not what we can do or would if we could. Not our remit. For us the key datum— He gestured at the stone, —is that history deems there to be a tellable story, of souls and business unfinished. That’s the energy we can do something with; the details are details.

—to the remains of a lead-mine entrance in Shropshire whence Edric’s passed army had set out.

—to Cornish moors, holed landscapes where Hook muttered about Kalemegdan.

Directed to read (before the exercise) certain tracts. Taught (before the exercise) particular gestures of fingers and of hands to deploy in case of dread. Never did Hook or any brass out and say to Allardyce or anyone, This is our role, these our skills, this to which you’re pledged. But even so, or because of that, each time, Allardyce understood a little more. Proud of the not-enquiring and the insightful unknowing, the apophasis of specialised violence. Self-abnegating national toughness might be its own reward.

—But, Allardyce said to Hook, —I know there’s a bunch of roles. And there’s them, Dean, I reckon, for one, who seem like they can almost see the functions. Which I mean I know you sort of do too. He made drawing motions. —And some of them can a little bit direct them like you do a bit. Again he pretend-drew. —Which I don’t know that I can. So why am I…?

—Apports are key, Hook said. —Rare and precious. That’s why part of the job’s to work out how to use whatever you get your hands on. How do you issue orders to the dead with a paperweight? A belt buckle? If you’ve an apport mug, should you hammer it flat and sharpen it and make a knife? What if they’re supposed to be the shapes they are? Whatever the truth, you’ve a certain talent with apports.

—And you’re not afraid of the functions. Or not in a way that stops you doing your job. You don’t keel over with your heart done in if there’s revenance in a mile radius, which one can’t take for granted. You’re an intelligent chap. And a sensitive soul! Croome speaks highly of you. Obviously we’re indulgent of intuition in this unit.

—Me, I’m a better administrator than anything. You may think me coy but honestly all I ever get is the odd hunch about where to have a bash with the old pens and paper and when I’m done, then and only then can I have a shufti at what I’ve drawn. And as to direct, maybe I might persuade one to hesitate by noticing it. No more. Only afterwards can I get a sense of whether I was onto anything and whether to crank up the old Rouse. And even then hardly precisely.

—On which point, d’you know which pages I get the most out of? The ones from which I get the greatest frrrrrrisson— He did have fun with that R, —are those I’ve started work on, then erased. And I’m as sure as I can be that they’re the ones the lespries like best too. I’m a code receiver without a clue of what it is I’m reading.

—According to Kardec, Hook said, —there are seventy-three different kinds of mediums. Seventy-three! Nocturnal, physical. Pneumatographic! Laconic, which is rather my favourite.

Incorrect. Allardyce, unspeaking, continued the list. Frivolous. Subjugated.

—What’s most surprising to me are the few images I’ve drawn of which I can’t make any sense at all. Allardyce thought Hook would find one such and show it to him, but instead the man described something with his hands. —A towerman cometh, he said. —A wall made of people. His voice petered out. Then he said, —There’s still no earthly reason—as it were—so far as I can see, that the Venom we found should have come down.

An August evening. Allardyce hesitated only briefly to see Melissa Marks leave the Camp Awfulness bar before he went after her. He reached her by the sea. She raised her eyebrow and smiled at him sardonically and he, watching himself from within, kissed her, or she him, or they each other. It was not passionate but it was greedy and a relief of some kind, and the reverse of relief, too. They went off the path into the shade beside a hangar.

Mediums who are obsessed. Mediums for trivial and obscene communications. Mercenary mediums. Marks’s smile was interested and not surprised. She scrutinised him as he gripped her.

—What’s this? she said. —Eh?

—Marksy…

He did not wish his voice to sound as it sounded. He understood that he had been waiting, auditioning, no, rather, weighing possibilities, evaluating Marks and declaring her to himself a bit of alright, as ish was the bright-eyed messy Wren Jeanette Hooper and Cynthia Wossname in the little NAAFI cubby about as far on the island as you could get from the business end of things, Cynthia with the tits, and that by whatever criteria he had been considering them as candidates, desire was not predominant.

—Do you even know what you’re up to, Allardyce? Melissa Marks said.

—Oh, shut up, he said. —You think you’re so clever, Marksy. Come on. Who does, eh?

When they were done he lay, considered slime and its ejection.

[14]

Stallo and Cybill look at each other and at Maur. They must start to try to tell her of the nature of things.

—

“You know the reveille?” Stallo says. “That’s the tune you wake up to, in the forces. Ba ba baddaba-da, ba baddaba-da, daaaaaa dah. Okay. But what if you’ve gone deeper than that? If it’s the last sleep? If you’re that far gone, and they need you to come back, there’s the Rouse.”

Softly this time, he sings two notes only. Ah ah ah aaah. Ah ah ah ah.

Stallo gestures at the folder. “That won’t answer all your questions but it’ll be a start.”

Maur draws out antique documents. On some sheets R Unit ITKO Eyes Only Do Not Reproduce. Lists of objects—spectacles boot minus laces pocketknife buckle signet ring teddy bear. A faded image of young men in uniform smiling blearily. Their features are washed out by age and light. Monochrome photographs of guarded men and women in ready poses, thousands-of-yards stares. In a bunk room, in the dim below thickets, in gaps in crags, on light-seared seashores, tired soldiers staring into the lens as if studiously not looking at something. At what might be another outline, in this concatenation of waves, of spray, of smoke. Maur holds up and unfolds a photocopy of an illustration torn at an edge, a hillside in charcoal, smeared almost beyond decoding. A jagged mountainscape, a wreck, a man. Behind the man some other.

“Of course the Roused aren’t like us,” Stallo says. “That’s the point of them. They have uses. They’re not safe. Just ask Cybill.”

A figure in chiaroscuro on a found throne of rock, a gun like a tool of sacred office on its naked lap, cadaver so desiccated its sex is indeterminate. It meets the camera eye with its own eyelessness above a darker mouth, wide enough that Maur holds her breath, not knowing if this is a perpetrator of new kind now in her life or one such a presence has touched.

Stallo is saying that the world changes when a Roused is in it. She thinks, When they come back. Even now, quickly, dutifully, This is crazy, or some such, goes through her.

“ ‘Back,’ ” Stallo says, so Maur knows she spoke aloud. “We’ll come to that. You just need to know that they do things, they have effects. That’s why you’d want to get them onside. Rouse them.”

An unrevealed army. Deployed in its ways. To intervene, perhaps as lightly as with a mutter, to shift attention at just the instant to ruin resolve. Or with catastrophe.

“They tried with others,” Stallo says. “But it’s only really soldiers that Rouse well. Our dead.”

“How?” Maur says.

“That’s what I keep wondering, love,” Cybill says, somewhere. What is the world, then? Maur wants to ask. What else is true?

“Why would you help him?” Maur says to Cybill as if Stallo’s not there.

“She came halfway,” Cybill says. “You were there. I have to help her.”

That line, it comes to Maur, is from stories, from films. It clatters out of Cybill’s mouth not suiting her expression. Why think your daughter would want or has anywhere else to go? What if so-called setting her free is banishing her to the existencelessness Maur, she supposes, hitherto in the vaguest way assumed? What cruelty, to release her to that, no? Maur’s not used to feeling scorn for Cybill. She wants to say, So what about what else nearly spilt into your flat, Cybill. It wasn’t just your girl. Maur frowns at intuitions she does not understand.

“I’ll tell you what the padre said to you,” Stallo says. “She can’t rest. With Sangster gone, Teller was the last one who hadn’t took responsibility for what happened to her, so she came for him. How’m I doing?” Cybill nods, watching Maur. “They’re about a lot of things, the Roused, but justice ain’t one of them. Did Strude say he needed you because you’re mums?” You might pretend there isn’t contempt in his voice. “It ain’t about you helping the Roused; I think they’re trying to help you. Warn you.”

“Them?” Maur says. But no one says anything about Ewan. “Warn?”

“It was the lies did it for me in the end,” Stallo says. “You know they’re going to lie, but you have a limit, don’t you? When I left I kept my trap shut like I promised but I been keeping an eye out. There’ve always been people doing this work, but it was the war got us formal. Not the Great War. There was something about that that didn’t…That was too much. It was World War Two and SOE got the Unit going. I joined not so long after. Was in twenty years. Granted, that was a time ago.”

“What were you doing?” Maur says.

So he gives her a look. “You’ve seen what you’ve seen, don’t play dumb,” he says. “But retirement didn’t take. I had to do something. I’ve known things have been going wrong awhile. I mean, after you’re off the rolls your time’s your own, we’ve all signed the act, but they can’t stop you being curious, that’s not verboten. So long as you keep your head down. But it’s not just that they were still lying to the likes of you; what can you do about that? It’s that I can’t believe how stupid they were being. Still are. I even put out feelers to my old bosses. Like I say, I could tell something wasn’t right. No one would listen to me and I couldn’t leave it alone and they don’t like that.” Why is he telling them this? What is he telling? “It’s not just you my old lot are after, it’s me too.”

The confrontation outside the tower block, amid teenage hooting and the violence of fire.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Cybill says. Maur realises she has closed her eyes.

“They’d have come for me long before I came for you,” Stallo says. “If they’d known what I was doing.”

“Which is what?” Maur forces her breathing to slow and feels her heartbeat slow a little with it, and watches the man and he’s looking at her sternly, not without concern. “Why am I here?” she says.

—

—now, he tells Maur—

“I saw you feeling it,” he says. “In the room.” He makes a scratch-scratch motion. “Something pulling at things.” The way his fingers move makes Maur feel like the world is threadbare. She recalls air disturbed. Amid and answering the pulse, the sound the soldiers invoked, had come for an instant the edges of the downwalker on the stairs, the outreaching of a daughter, touching its mother so terribly. But that’s not what Stallo means, Maur knows. As if that was not enough. Rather that behind/below that shade in the Hove room, when you think about it—

“You felt something else,” he says. “There was something else there. Waiting. Using Jules to push through.”

—

“What?” Maur hears herself say. Blinking fast, reeling still from these mad claims; how can there be further for her insides to fall? “What is it?”

“Depends who you ask.” That takes him a minute. “Something old. Something that likes having a laugh. According to my old bosses, nothing. You’re just mixed up, and I’m just causing trouble. Some of us know better.”

Us. Some furtive fellowship of like retirees, hobbyists of miraculous insight, those randomly bestowed bereaved not merely in thrall to hope, it comes to Maur. In upper rooms in undervalued halls, an elect beyond homilies, an unhappy few.

“We have to keep our heads down,” Cybill says. “If you know about this sort of thing the Unit’ll come for you. Or others, or them with that thing.”

She’s repeating what she’s been told. “Why am I here?” Maur says again. She’s looking at Cybill but it’s Stallo who answers.

“Because of what was nearly in that room. That shouldn’t have been there.”

He readies himself to say more and Maur interrupts. “What about Ewan?” She didn’t know she would say that and she doesn’t know what she is asking. “If that was Jules, I mean…whatever else…” Maur’s mind is full of what descended the stairs. “Where is she now? You came for me because I saw her?”

“Because you got out.” Stallo points at the dog. “What did you do?”

Maur licks her lips. “It lay down.”

“It ain’t meant to lie down. What did you do?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Thing is, I believe you. That’s why I come for you. I need to find out what you did.”

Cybill said he’d been going to leave her, didn’t she? Maur says, “Why—” and Stallo interrupts.

“No,” he says. “I need to understand, and you may not like being with me but you’ll have a better time of it than with Strude and his crew, so count your blessings.” He gestures at Cybill. “You were there, her kid’s trying to come through, and she’s even harder to focus than she should be. Sorry, Cybill. You should help her. I know you didn’t ask for this, Maur, but you’ve attracted her attention, and that’s hard to do these days. That’s why my old lot are mostly mothballed. But now you’ve got this one stronger than most for a good few years. And it kicks out that letter. She does. Jules. They spit them out sometimes, things like that, things a bit wrong, that we can touch and so can they. Apports, they’ve been hard to put hands on for years. You’d always get chatter about one-offs, but…I haven’t felt one like that ever. Let alone now. And you get past the dog, at the same time as I keep hearing there are new players out there, out of nowhere. And not just more freelancers. And if all that weren’t enough, there’s whatever pushed from underneath. I say, something was almost in that room. And if my old lot are in denial about that and think I’m the troublemaker, I still have to figure out what to do. I don’t get to opt out of this so neither do you. And you may not thank me but you were in it already. And you were being lied to.

“What’s Jules trying warn you about?” he says to Cybill. “It’s hard to reach any of them now, they’re weak. Like something’s infecting them. No wonder she’s afraid; you felt what was close. Using her, and the rest of them, as a way in. Preying on them. Which is no good for them and worse for us.”

For a time there is no sound.

“Why am I here?” Maur says.

“You mean, when it ain’t your kid?” Stallo says. “You saying you don’t care what’s coming for hers?”

“I didn’t—”

“Okay,” Stallo says. “You think it’ll stop there? With her? With the dead, even? What were you going to do?”

“I was trying to get away,” Maur says. “Out of the country.”

“Calm down, love….”

“Don’t you fucking ‘love’ me, Cybill.”

“You won’t get ten feet,” Stallo says. “Everyone’s looking for you. You saw what happened when you did your civic duty, how quick that got picked up. What do you think happened to your mate Jock?” He lets that sit. “Does a vanishing act just as this kicks off? He’d been doing his own digging, you must’ve figured. Follows his nose, bumbles into something…” He makes a puff of smoke with his hands. “Night night, sweet prince. If you think you can do better than him, good luck. But I can protect you.”

“I don’t want you—”

“I don’t want to have to either but here we fucking are.” The bulb glows. “And even if it was just the dead. Well. Don’t you want to keep your boy safe?

So when she can Maur opens her mouth, but Stallo continues. “You better hope what’s left of him keeps out of that thing’s way. Whatever Jules wanted to say, because they don’t come back with nothing to say, I want to hear it. And to stop that thing. And if the Unit’s gunning for me, it is for you too.”

It’s like they’re floating up there, suspended on the streetlight haze. As if the glare is a glowing autumn canopy.

“You never had to worry about favouritism because you only had the one,” Cybill says. “I’m sorry, that sounds terrible, I’m just trying to explain.” Oh you carry on, thinks Maur. She feels a bit like she’s stoned, as if it’s exhaustion that’s keeping her awake. “All I mean is, you know I love my boys, Maur, and I miss them. Jules was my oldest and my girl, though. People said to me wasn’t I shocked when she went into the army because she was always into, you know, she was my princess, she liked girly things. But I wasn’t, I don’t know why, I just wasn’t. She wasn’t scared of anything. I teased her that she was doing it to go into a job with more boys than girls. Her dad wasn’t too happy, he was worried. About her being in uniform. I said he was silly. Well who’s silly now? She used to tell me her secrets.” Maur thinks, You don’t know what secrets she didn’t tell you. “I’m sure there was a man. We’re all young once. Maybe there was more than one. But it was like she was anxious. Before, I mean, just before. I know she was going to tell me what was going on. She was having a hard time. She would’ve told me and she’s still trying to.”

The sky is graphite now and the bulbs are red dwarfs, stars dying in the streets.

Nineteen fifty-seven, early in the second month, the matter of the country shifts, sleeps badly, and houses throw down chimney stacks and the scales of roofs for miles in every direction and masonry scatters and breaks the skull of a boy, he will recover. The Blackbrook waters move as if something beneath their surface expected such a symptom as this shock. Unsettled frost-free night, and in the darkness, Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Show! Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Yes, It’s the Yes, It’s Yes

VIII

Such Are
Stories

Sit

Allardyce crept out so as not to wake Melissa. He put his hands to his pockets, chest, bum, left and right front, not knowing what each should contain but sure that something was gone from them, had slipped out of the world as if along a path pre-greased by earlier manifestation into it.

Even at night, nothing wildly unusual about a coatless bloke padding about this place, where the job did include that distinguishing intuition worthy of the name—perhaps to get under the clouds—from a mere maggot. Allardyce flapped his arms in the cold, loose as Worzel Gummidge, like one trying to commune with something rather than to inveigle a way into where he shouldn’t ought to.

These days you might even find the pagodas’ entrances unguarded, there being locks on every door and exclusion zones (everyone so carefully vetted) effectively an honour system most of the time. Plus in a poky place like the island word would likely get around as to who’d been or tried to be where. This time in any case it was Sapers leaning against the wall where the earth opened. There, the cherry of his cigarette.

—Homo sapiens.

—Never heard that one before, Allardyce. What you doing up? So underbloodydressed?

—Seen Croome?

Sapers blew his smoke sideways.

—Down there somewhere I imagine.

—I want a word, Allardyce said.

—Again? Sapers said. —Teacher’s fucking pet. Always giving her the eye. Rather you than me. Middle-aged librarians your type, are they?

—She told me to come by.

—First I’ve heard.

—Come on, mate. I’m bringing her an apple, angling for a gold star.

On he walked as if his business were legit. As if he knew what it was.

—Fuck’s sake. Sapers shouldered his rifle and drew from a pocket a key. —I’m not a ruddy doorman.

No one could have made these sharp-angled concrete corridors proper snug but would a heater or two have killed them? Allardyce’s prick was a nub like a little thumb. Metal doors to his right were closed and he made out riddling sounds. A scritchscratch like the drama of ink lines on a seismograph. Low voices he did not stop to recognise. At corridor’s end another grand gate, beyond it the ringing of machines and a wooden entrance inset into concrete. He took hold of its handle. Thick and reinforced and treated against the damp, such doors as this, when at last they crumbled, would do so splendidly. Wasn’t it just like Albert Speer to claim credit for Ruin Value? Allardyce smirked at the fact that he’d had such a thought. Vagueness and tendentious obscurity had their roles in his work but so too—Sapers wasn’t wrong—did an awful lot of swotting. About what comes after what came before.

Allardyce opened onto steep stairs down.

Too pompous to think about the ruin value of secrets, weren’t you, Albert? While you planned the remains of your Kraut Parthenon, we were digging out burrows that, when the time comes, can be filled quite and quietly in. Aboveground ruins would keep their underworld to themselves.

The stairs ended deep and colder still and hemmed in by the orange of lamps and an uneven ceiling.

—’Allo.

Hensley. A short, muscular man, more nervous than his physique would make you think.

—I’m here to see Croome, Allardyce said.

—Bowler not with you?

Allardyce frowned, shouldered past.

—Croome? He spoke as if expected at small doors each with a window onto darkness and silence or a scattering of diodes in some gently murmuring engine or the sway of a bulb and white-coated figures bent over a table and he could not see what. —Croome?

No he didn’t know his way around nor the scale of this warren, but he’d been down here more than most of his comrades.

—Croo-oome?

Think of all the worms wiggling away at arm’s length beyond the concrete. He came by a young scientist whose name he did not know, he’d seen her about, a pretty and mean-looking white woman with tightly bunned-up hair. They had to sidestep each other and still their clothes rubbed. He considered a friendly leer but she did not give him a look. Stories were that if he kept on, opening this door, taking that path, past this animal cage wherein cowered some aghast beast and that group of ugly artefacts in beams of cold light, he’d come at very last to a spiral stair up towards the lesser dark of night and rise like someone out of one of the many Gehenna gates in the world to exit the other pagoda, or another research building, or in the back room of an obscure accountant’s office all the way on the mainland, or in a monk’s hole in an old abbey. Et cetera.

Croome?

A threshold he had not crossed before. Croome looked at him over her shoulder and returned to her work without a word. He heard a whispering. Not from her.

Against the wall three dun filing cabinets. What a lark! Imagine the consternation of silver-clad archaeologists in aeons to come. We speculate that the priests of the Bureaucracene laid to rest office furniture that had performed honourably.

—You not going to say hello? he said.

Nothing. He closed the door behind him. Croome did not look at him, nor at the jagged lines of pen points scrawling on unspooling paper. She made notes, letting her hand run free like one of those mediumistic precursors it was up to Allardyce to study. She looked through a wire-reinforced inner window above her desk. From a speaker came white-noise sibilance. Allardyce stood by her, arms folded, stared at Bowler sitting in blue light.

He held up a book. Before a semicircle of five, six shafts rising from slivers out of dark glass boxes to shed glowing inkblot shapes onto the ceiling.

Bowler’s mouth moved. And was there, there was, was there a correlation between the movement of his lips as he read and glimmering shifts in the illumination?

Allardyce dropped his eyes, had to, to the tabletop, to where Croome’s hand wrote, that he wished her luck untangling later, to the yawing excitement of the scope’s green waveform, to files on which he could make out words. On one sheet, by a stapled monochrome of a smiling young man in uniform:

SSM Myers, Charles, RTR dob 14/6/19 dod 2/2/42 dor 1/7/57. SigR

0:2-2:1 SigUs ≈ 0:9 SigAv 1:3 Cond Disc.? SpecF? ObQuot ≈ 41.

On another Allardyce saw in different writing a big Cond BEN/Fr. ObQuot LOW and the curve, on the corner of a blebby image, of an antique diving helmet. Here an older form, older ink.

Pte Walters, Samuel, Manch. R. dob? dod 21/1/00 dor 11/3/42.

SigR 1:3-4:0 SigUs ≈ 2:5 SigAv 2:4 Cond Proj.? ThanT ObQuot ≈ 57

—Rifleman Walters, Croome said, seeing where his eyes went. —I tell a lie, not technically Rifleman, I think. I forget these designations. A redcoat, in any case. Rather an anomaly: by some way the suppletion here dated earliest, though there are many measures you can use for that—dee oh bee, dee oh dee, dee oh are.

—What happened to him? Allardyce said.

—Really, Croome said, —I understand the interest but it’s not your friend. Don’t get distracted with that sort of thing, trying to uncover the morals of the story. That’s not it at all.

—You’re not the first to say that.

She fanned the documents.

—Endless bookkeeping, she said. —To see how the parameters hold up. Dennison, Cocklyn, the hanged private…

—Watkinson? Allardyce said. —The pilot? I’d like to see his. I was there when we found him.

—You should know, she said, —that that urge to learn what ails ’em as it were, to hear ’em out, will lead you astray. None of them is a them for you to listen to at all, let alone to get to know. Better to consider it all one force, like magnetism, with distinct manifestations.

—What’s Bowler doing? Allardyce said. She put her finger to her lips. She dialed and twiddled and turned and plugged this into that and Allardyce watched his mate in the underlit room.

And did the ambient dark itself increase? Could one turn up the dark? Did the stanchions of illumination grow sharper, and Allardyce make out within the agitation of motes certain edges? Like an iron boot against an ocean floor. Like sunlight through an iron hatch. Question mark, he’d meant to add. Was that how it was? Here closest to him, to the glass, were there glints at waist- and trouser-height as of a belt buckle as of hooks and eyes, was there to the blue light at coat-height a redness?

The snake voice came louder. Now he made out Bowler’s words. To which the lights gyred.

—There was always somebody a man standing by one of the firs, Bowler said. Perhaps in the room beyond he sounded more animated. —This was in daylight you know he was never in front of me I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right and he was never there when I looked straight for him….

He took a breath.

—You see he’s light and weak but all the same I daren’t face him well then when I was making the tunnel of course it was worse and if I hadn’t been so keen I should have dropped the whole thing and run.

Books on the floor in there. A pile of them. Too dark to make out the covers but Allardyce would have been ready to take a punt on the kind of thing they were.

—…there came a sort of cry behind me oh I can’t tell you how desolate it was and horribly threatening too it spoilt all my pleasure in my find…

Allardyce said, —I could do a better job reading than Robbie the bloody robot.

—No doubt, Croome said.

—Well then?

He had not meant to sound so affronted.

—They seem not terribly fussy about the reader, she said. —About the subject matter, the genre, they are monomaniacal. Nothing else will do.

Bowler said, —I spent time filling up my tunnel and covering my tracks and all the while he was there trying to thwart me.

Allardyce’s heart shook him. Are you sitting comfortably? he thought to it as if it would listen along, and it beat and beat as if to say No, no, no, and Go on, go on. He watched and listened to Bowler read to the slats of light curbed by the boxes from which they issued and the forces Croome directed and monitored, and rapt, you might conclude, at what they heard.

—It’s all they’ll listen to, Croome said, —stories like these.

Bowler said, —I believe there are only a few blocks of concrete left now the rest has all been washed away but at this time there was a lot more though the place was a ruin.

[15]

Stallo in his bedroll lies in the corridor beyond where the women share the mattress. You know when someone next to you does not sleep. Staring through the curtainless windows into the dark, Maur whispers, “What happened? When you were gone?”

“It’s just snatches, love,” Cybill says. “I was in the lounge with him for a bit, upstairs from you. It was like I had a fever. I said, I think there was someone else there too sometimes. A woman giving me stuff to drink and cleaning me. I think she kept saying ‘Was it there?’ To him. Then we were in some back room, me and him. That’s where I woke up properly. All rags and herbs and muck about. We came back to the house and you were gone—”

“When you woke though…”

“Oh, course I was screaming blue murder. But he talked to me, didn’t he? Same as with you.”

Nothing he’s said to me would turn me and him into a “we,” Cybill.

Yeah well I saw my girl.

What Cybill said aloud was, “We talked a long time, he calmed me down. He was asking what I remembered. About what happened in my place. When we got back and you were gone, he asked me about you. He told me, like he said, sometimes when they, you know, they come back they leave sheddings, you might say. That’s what he wants. With leavings like that, like the letter, might be easier to talk to them. Find things out. It’s risky, you saw. Because of what else was there. But we need to know.” There’s excitement in that. “What’s going on. How to talk to her safely. What she’s warning me about. Like he says, it’s not just his lot after her. Or us.” Maur hears Cybill shake her head. “They all do different things. The Roused. If they notice you. Touch you.”

Few cars pass outside now, so each that does sounds lonely. Maur plays out in her head rising and letting the sleeping bag fall from the clothes she has left on. Across the threshold lifting her legs high to step over the man. Go the length of the corridor, touch the handle of the door, open it, to have it pulled shut again, not even having heard Stallo’s steps behind her.

That isn’t it. It’s what might happen but that’s not why she doesn’t rise, not only.

The question comes again: What am I supposed to do? There’s a fairy tale, and the king or whatever says that this woman has to come to him neither eating nor fasting neither clothed nor naked, stuff like that, so she turns up sucking bark and draped in was it rags?, netting? And he says she has to be neither inside nor outside so she says what she has to say on the threshold. Now Maur is one of those with reason to believe that you-know-what is not the end.

“It was terrible,” Cybill says. “When she touched me.” Maur knows then what she will say next. “But…amazing too. Bad but not at the same time. Like he says, I think she was sort of ill.”

She absolutely a hundred per cent is not well, Cybill, Maur thinks. She’s about as poorly as you can be.

“You remember when they used to get sick? When they were little? Did Ewan ever have that smell? Sort of sweet, sour, a little bit of wee. They go on about the smell of a baby’s head and it is magic, granted, but that’s the other side of it. The smell when they were ill, my god. What it did to you. Like when you hear them cry and you get milky.” Cybill laughs. “That smell was”—blank—“disgusting but it made me think I’d do anything for her, you know? I’d forgot but I smelt it when she touched me. I tell a lie I didn’t smell it exactly, but it was like I had.

“You wouldn’t think…When she touched me—it’s like I saw her hand—” It’s like a recital, how she says it, as if she’s standing up for the first time in a meeting. “Like her hands were sticky like in the park or—” Maur sees motion, Cybill’s pulling down her neckline as if for Maur to see marked skin from that contact, though it’s too dark.

“After she touched me and I was gone,” Cybill says, “I dreamt too. There was a prison underground.”

“An oubliette?” Maur says. I dreamt a deserted building once.

“I was looking down at me and at the same time I was looking up at me.”

Yes nothing about any of this is anything but stupid. It’s stupid to be hiding from soldiers of the state, let alone to be running from a presence on a far side of something, to credit your own fleeting sense of any such thing, stupid to be alongside a woman seeking to whisper to her own dead child, Is there anybody there?, and so stupidly stupid to, what? You can’t even give a name to the feeling about the staying-quiet of your own child. How can you not resent this? When are you done? How long’s right for sackcloth? You have no choice— No you have a choice, just not a good one.

Even if Cybill and the man beyond are deep asleep, and Maur is certain any footfall in his presence and he’d be up hands around or weapon to her neck, there returns that old political suspicion of official hands, less at heart hers than that of her circle, of Sonn and Raj and Sandrine, even Shaun, but long rubbed off on her, so to speak, and since, well, validated. So yes this is a choice, though here you are motionless because what you want has very little to do with any of this. With who hunts you.

With what came down the stairs.

Later in the night Maur gets up to piss and yes has to step over the man’s sleeping bag and he does not move. She feels grains like sugar or sand beneath her bare feet.

Carapace

Nineteen sixty-one. Léopoldville still reeling. Some women and men held themselves combative in smart clothes at the corners of low streets like sets, some were clenched and went more quickly, some had the gait of searchers in the waning chalky light.

—Quite a coinky-dinky, eh?

—Alright, Sapers, Hook said.

Rapid and dense local French came through the minibus windows. They turned on the Boulevard Albert, passed the Domaine Militaire.

—Seminar booked here of all places and wouldn’t you know it, look what goes and happens.

—Very droll, Sapers.

The vehicle swung amid a clatter of horns. New traffic grammar. They stopped after a time and Allardyce came out in his turn into dusty night and chop-chop through this open door ahead taking a one-two look to either side, another bool eh vard sketched by moon and lamps and windows glowing. Observers at a junction would have seen a few shapes passing from vehicle to house and the city was fuller now than usual of such furtive motion, and the stakes of noticing were high.

Dean Anthon and Bowler and Sapers and Allardyce and Potter and Marks and Hooper waited in their civvies in a room with insect corpses a kind of writing on the walls.

—Minor delays, said Hook.

—Oy, Dean, go have a gander outside, see what’s going on, Bowler said. It was not the first time. —You’ll blend right in, mate.

Dean smiled a bit. Through holes in grey curtains as small and precise as those made by bullets, though the glass was unbroken, dawn reached in.

—Yeah, mate, get us a baguette, Allardyce said. Dean smiled again. Didn’t say a word when someone made an oogoo-boogoo noise, a pretend African gibberish. Bowler, it was. As if the joke took effort.

—Remember the O’Leary business? Bowler said to Allardyce.

—O’Whoey? Sapers said.

—You still on about that? Allardyce said.

—I told you, Bowler said. —They had us looking for who done him in because they got wind someone else’d been looking too. Russians or Chinks or I don’t know. They picked up the trail again. It was a washout in Malaya but that’s why we’re here: they got wind the same lot’s here now.

—Where’d you hear that? Allardyce said.

—Come on, mate, you know how it goes.

With sunup someone rapped on the door in an agreed rhythm and Hook opened it to a slim-suited local man a way into his thirties and a shrewd-looking companion a little older whose clothes were clean and simple and battered and who hugged a satchel to himself. His eyes went everywhere. His face was lined by trials, and, Allardyce thought, alcohol. Behind them came Croome in a bright summer dress. Well.

—Let’s get started, she said. —Lunfunga here has kindly agreed to share his expertise with the Unit. Lunfunga hails from the southwestern shores of the lake, and despite what you may be expecting he’s not a mulozi but a man with his ear to the ground, a degree of local clout, and an impressive knowledge of the field. And of self-protection.

—Sure, Sapers said. —We flew halfway around the world to a country on fire just for a lecture on wog hoodoo.

—Sapers, Hook said, —do shut your fucking cakehole.

You could see in Croome’s patience how many of such informants were liars, mad, drinkards (palm wine or other), or simply wrong, though none of that meant they might not also be of use. She spoke in French to the escort. He looked faintly disgusted.

—We’re here about majini attacks, she said. A shade of uncertainty went over her face and Allardyce knew she was not sure if she was mixing up languages and words for spirits. —Bear in mind that the Bulumhu, like a lot of drum cults, though you might hear them described as exorcisms, can be considered ways to domesticate the interlopers. Not drive them out but use them.

—What’s new about using them? Allardyce whispered to Bowler.

—Not in the body, though, Bowler muttered back. —When did you last take them into you?

Anyway Croome gestured and yes the older visitor was drunk, and belligerently fearful.

—Kutui Kooku, he said, and it was loud, and Croome said, —Doucement!

—Voici l’oreil, said the other, younger man to her. —Il a dit.

—Here’s the ear, Croome said to the assembled. —That is to say, take notes.

Lunfunga started again, in French and Kiswahili and a language Allardyce didn’t know, too rapid for him to make out much even in the first two. Every few sentences the escort would translate the disquisition into clipped English.

—This man. Knows all the balozi in his area. This is sorcerer, yes? He says that because he is assistant to the chief they must ask him permission. To do their medicine.

Lunfunga took his bag from his shoulder and brought out a stick like a conductor’s baton and pointed it at each Uniteer in turn. Bound with string to the tip was a desiccated thumb-sized beetle. Black specked with red.

—This is kafwabebela, the translator said. —It protects.

—Brachycerus apterus, Croome said. —Several of which have selflessly volunteered themselves for examination.

The translator said, —He calls this good erizi.

—It’ll be in the report, Croome said.

Lunfunga opened his mouth and with the care of a child he closed his crooked teeth very gently on the top and bottom of the beetle’s shell. Held it there, his jaw unmoving. What he said now he mouthed only with his lips, as clearly as he could.

—He says this will keep him safe.

Would it though? To Allardyce it seemed that even such urgent working on the world as this, against what presences understood it as a barrier, even this countertransgression would not hold against, say, a building walking. A tower of traces. The insect’s own mandibles were poised between the man’s incisors, as if it had come crawling straight up from inside to peer out of him.

—He says he is not safe here, the translator said. —Not now, with you.

“You” us? Allardyce thought. No: the insect seemed to look right at him with its dead globe eyes and point with its antennae. “You” me, he thought.

—What’s all this about, really? Allardyce heard Bowler say.

With a nasty start Allardyce came back into place in himself. His heart sped. He lifted his own stick. His bamboo spear.

—This’ll do for me, he said, and got the laugh he sought.

—Settle down, Hook said.

—Can this bloke— Allardyce began. He took an unsteady breath and raised his eyes from the kafwabebela’s to Lunfunga’s and said, —Dis-moi…niambie kuhusu Dzengi? Ndio unaona? Ekuk?

Lunfunga breathed out to make the insect corpse rattle.

—Very good, Allardyce, we all know you’re jolly good at languages and you’ve done your homework, Croome said. —Now’s not the time, so stop showing off and pay attention.

—Why are we here? Bowler said. Allardyce knew it was a gift to him, this shift in attention, was grateful.

Croome said, —Because there are results to some of these erizi. And because of the whys of the protection. The world’s changing.

Lunfunga would not take his eyes from Allardyce or the remains from his teeth. He spoke again and the translator did his best.

—It is dangerous to know. The balozi do bad things. Use poison to kill a person and make it that the dead come back, kizwa. A kizwa can go to bed with a woman and leave her husband asleep on the floor. Make her happier than the husband.

—Mais il dit qu’elle ne peut pas tomber enceinte à cause de ça? Croome said over Lunfunga’s mutter. —Il est absolument sûr?

The translator waved her down. —He says nothing about babies. He says new people come to ask about all the kizwa. He says this is why…The man mimed biting down. —He doesn’t know what they want.

—The new people? Croome said. —Not us?

—Others. Asking questions.

So someone was sniffing around.

—Viens! said the translator to Lunfunga. To Allardyce he said, —He is a Tabwa man. You ask him about Dzengi and Ekuk. This is Aka and Kwele, not Tabwa. This is like me asking you about Germany and Italy.

—I could tell you about Germany and Italy, Allardyce said. —And it sounds like you could tell me about Aka and Kwele stories, too.

—Because of my work. Not because I am an African. What about Mongo stories? Why do you leave that out? If you are going to ask about when the forest goes walking—yes, you see, I know what you said—you should ask about biloko, too. Ekuk and Dzengi, it would be nice to meet them, yes? Biloko, though, not so nice.

Ekuk masks were of bush presences. The Aka held Bembe the creator to be withdrawn, leaving behind the forest god Dzengi, fecund friendly demiurge. Of which Allardyce had tried to shape his shoddy Swahili into questions.

—Alright then, thank you ever so much, Hook said.

—Biloko are not so nice in the stories, the translator said.

—Well then, Allardyce said. He reached, not quickly. Took the kafwabebela from the informant’s hand. Allardyce put the insect to his lips and, closing his teeth down on it, paused, bit down harder so he felt the splintering of chitin, Lunfunga’s face all uncertain outrage. Allardyce’s comrades and superiors watched his impulsive punishment of this sot for the crime of staring at him, of not answering his questions. Allardyce’s mouth filled with dust.

The visitors left. Croome was right. Allardyce did his research. Had found Dzengi in the Black Beacon. Sought stories of all such plant-shaggy walkers-alongside from everywhere. The biloko though! Yeah you’re right mate, he told the translator in his mind. Keep your eyes out for them. Shades furred with grass. Watching. Taloned. Eaters of intruders with their great hollow-way mouths.

—Allardyce, said Croome. —Would you mind explaining what that little performance was all about?

—Dr. Croome. It was Bowler. —Why don’t you tell us what that meeting was about? You’ve got a whiff of something? Why are we scrabbling so hard for protection? What are we worried about?

Croome and Hook did not look at each other.

—You’ll have noted from Lunfunga’s intel, Hook said, —the recent machinations of spirit experts. Making rather more noise in relevant circles than we’d like. As I don’t doubt you can imagine, things are rather febrile in the continent at the moment.

He held up a pamphlet.

—Hot off the presses in Onitsha Market, the latest from Ogali Ogali. The Ghost of Patrice Lumumba. In comes SIGINT from the Nigerian station and then up turn some copies in unlikely locales in Congo itself. Seems rather a cheeky provocation, we can agree, to have a newly spectral Patrice scolding his enemies, so up go our ears, but Kinshasa assures us that beyond a genuinely preternatural ability to knock out words, Ogali has nothing of the in the know about him, so, false alarm, surely. But for a couple of details.

—First, what with local events and readings from the boffins back home, we’re in a state of heightened concern full stop. Then, what might seem merely the stylings of an outraged hack took a turn for the more intriguing when, in the context of such alarm bells, one of these turned up during a search here, alongside what appeared at first to be some rather tawdry little mystery novels but which were in fact secret documents, in a hastily vacated house.

—It appears as if this play…He shook the book, —is perhaps a joke or a talisman, as far as certain affiliated locals are concerned. Or, and this is my own view, evidence that they too are getting signs of various beyond-the-veil jostlings and working out what flag if any Ogali was flying. So our hunt and the oppo’s for Ogali’s inspiration overlap. And through that very dead end we realise a connection between genuine mysteries of non-local balozi pursuing the invocation of those angry things of which Lunfunga spoke, and unusually politicised activists and their ilk. All this rather puts matters in our purview.

—Of course a number of people have for understandable reasons done runners from this neck of the woods recently. Sapers, here’s where you take your bow. This has been catch-up. We were indeed here to have words with a chap or chapess of interest, but just as we arrive they disappear. Keep this in mind when you hear what our final guest has to say. Keep questions for her at a NITKO level, she’s not in the know. Frankly I’d be surprised if she couldn’t describe our operations more exactly than we’d like, but she’s an absolute trooper and she’ll keep decorum. Ears open. Pay attention.

The Uniteers checked their kit and smoked. —Mate, Bowler said quietly to Allardyce. —What was that about? You prancing around with the beetle? He continued without waiting for an answer. —You heard Hooky. There’s trouble both sides of the border. He made a swift throat-cutting motion with his finger. —So we’re going all out for protections and chasing rubbish leads. Don’t you reckon? It’s not as if I can make any sense of the chatter, from the Roused and that, but they are agitated, I bloody swear I was thinking, we’re always poking around in cults about them. The dead. What if they’ve got them too? About us?

—Come on, Allardyce said. —Whatever readings we’re getting, they don’t believe anything. You’ve heard Croome. You’re projecting, and that…He went into a Croome impression, —is a serious mistake.

—If you say so. Bowler was disappointed.

Or, Allardyce did not say, what if they have cults about whatever comes after death? Whatever is to the dead as they are to us. I never told you, Allardyce did not say, I saw you reading to the Roused. Allardyce still had beetle on his lips.

Hook brought in a blackboard and stand and a woman entered.

—Miss Park.

She was in her early middle years and plump and her boarding-school air and shapeless floral dress might have inspired humour but that it seemed intended so to do. The Uniteers were not stupid and had met assets before. This was what they’d been waiting for and they listened with adequate respect.

Miss Park wrote names in chalk. She drew lines from some to others.

—Au revoir, Patrice, she said. Crossed out Lumumba. —With him gone it’s a mucky business, but the situation seems as on course as one might hope for, and our Friends agree.

She was very English. You could hear the capitalisation bespeaking Langley and such.

—However, she said. She tapped Damien Kandolo. —The continuing value of this one we’re not sure of yet. Allardyce heard amusement. —Some of this business started with him telling me he wanted to switch sides. I literally had to hide him under blankets. And now he’s convinced that he’s subject to someone’s unwelcome attention, not sure whose but he’s an idea, as do I, and he’s terrified of what might happen.

She circled Blouin. —Ask me to place my bet, this is who’s at the centre of this retaliation. A rather wicked half-Guinean, surrounded by acolytes as such types often are, and there’s little one wouldn’t believe her capable of. I don’t merely mean morally, though that too, I mean she’s a woman of great abilities. She’s intelligent and recognises talent in others, including, I rather suspect, really remarkable abilities.

Park regarded them gravely.

—Obviously things are in flux, she said. —There are plenty of peculiar rumours about who’s jockeying to keep the flame alive, as it were. Internal debates, not all particularly comradely. And in that context a nom de guerre recurs that Hook here tells me might be of interest to you.

She wrote the word General.

—Difficult to get details about this chap the General, or just General. Half-caste or Arab, perhaps. What’s interesting is where the Russians are in all this. I can tell you that while it’s all people’s-friendship this, Lumumba University that, and cash-aid the other, they’re not minded to antagonise the oppo, i.e. our good selves, by delivering actual material aid to Orientale Province. Precisely why one can deal with them, or deal with not dealing with them: we know they won’t let the glorious future of the international proletariat interfere too badly with realpolitik. Which, as you can also imagine, doesn’t go down wonderfully with all of Patrice’s comrades. I don’t know how much credence to give this, or what it might mean, but I gather it may have something to do with your bailiwick, so. Kandolo tells me there’s a dispute between some around Blouin and some behind the Iron Curtain. We don’t know where this General…She pointed at the word, —is now. But he keeps coming up as on the former side. And among those unhappy on the latter, is a name not familiar to me, but that I’m given to…In any case, I’m speaking of one Kowalchuk.

They circled when Park was gone.

—So, Hook said. —For all he’s in charge of our counterparts, Orel Kowalchuk may not be as in control internationally as he’d like us to think.

What of those stories? Dead babushkas screaming into cockpits, pulling planes out of skies. Fingering the mechanisms of locked doors. You knew where you were with Kowalchuk and his boys, and girls too, absolutely, of course, apologies, ladies. Heirs of Bokii and the Special Section, that oh-so-Soviet bureaucratic oscillation between gnosis and pragmatics, institutional witchery if you like. You’d grant Kowalchuk’s lot collegial respect. For all they were the enemy and for all the likely Cosmist trappings (Dead of All Countries, Unite! Good luck with that.) Still we’re all colleagues; we all draw SATOR squares on one side of the desk and file reports to Accounts on the other.

So absent Kowalchuk or his giant state, this supposed faction of nationalist balozi of whom Lunfunga hinted, Lumumbite witch doctors up to who-knew-what, couldn’t, no matter any stories, be playing geopolitical games worth worrying about, could they? Surely the Unit could stand down? We’re worried about the non-aligned, now, are we?

—We don’t know how ITKO Blouin is, Hook said. But someone around her, the ahem General, perhaps, would appear to be not entirely ignorant of Rouse matters. You’ll be briefed. The point is, we come all this way to ask a few questions and immediately get wind that our best line of enquiry has relocated. We’ve missed him.

—Or her, Bowler said.

—Or them, Dean said.

—Indeed, Hook said. —The troublesome Blouin or one of her lot has protégé(e)s, and yes that last word has a second E in parentheses, who are, it would appear, in our line of work, and who have, with exquisitely irritating timing, done a bunk.

They left the Congo in a stubby plane.

[16]

“Yes, it’s risky but we have to talk to her again,” Cybill says. She mouths Jules too quietly to hear while the sunlight hits the mattress. “He says not to get our hopes up. At best it’s like someone whispering through a wall, and that’s without…Still.” Cybill shines. “But we need to hear, to be safe. Well as safe as you can be. Anyway, I told you, he’s got mates. Like that woman. Help us stay a step ahead.”

“Of who?” Maur says.

“That’s it, that’s what we need to know.”

“We should just get away.” Cybill just looks at her.

The van, gym bag of gear and dog in the back, a winding journey of declining stationers and such, big bins guarding backstreet houses. To stop and sit at least another hour near a telephone box.

“Heiko knows her stuff,” Stallo says. “She can help me put guards up, so we can at least try. Be ready to stop, though.” He spoke quickly, like he was done waiting. “She really wants to tell you something, Cybill. It’s how urgent it is makes me curious.”

He goes to the phone at last. Keeps the booth door cracked and the women huddle by him and eye the corners of the street while he dials and shoves in coins.

“Ready?” he mutters. “…What are you…?” Stallo turns amid the little panes. His mouth works. “Wait, wait…You owe me…. Yes you fucking do, you…No! We agreed…” A long pause then, a static soliloquy down the line. Stallo rubs his face. “Heiko I need your…What do you want then?”

He stops and puts the receiver back onto the cradle. Pushes past the women, ignoring Cybill’s queries. Stallo folds his arms on the steering wheel and his eyes are closed.

Cybill says, “You said she’d…”

He says, “Yeah so did she. She’s bottled it.”

“Well we do it without her.”

He looks at Cybill then, shrewd and eager, but at last, hesitant says, “No.”

“I need—”

“So do I. Have you been paying attention? We can’t blunder into another fucking séance without protection. Let me think.”

Cybill’s face is all fury but she’s quiet. She stares at Maur and through her, from the looks of it. Who died and made me a periscope? Maur thinks. Pointed down?

Jules, Cybill mouths, then whispers, “I wish my boys were here.” Which makes Maur blink.

—

He drives again under the bright city vault. By oil rainbows on concrete, through bass beat from some flat. Stallo nods in decision though no one has spoken. “I do need to learn whatever I can. And Jules wants you.” Maur can see him hating having to talk like this, to lay things out. She pays attention. “Look, it was never just us and the Yanks and Moscow,” he says. “But this was the last thing we were good at. Peking did its best, India, the French—” He made a rude noise. “And there’s always been independents. Amateurs and pros. KH, we called the worst of them. Trouble for us and the Russians too. Later you’d hear about an Azeri woman.” Maur sits up. “And some are still around, and even if they’re clowns they can still be dangerous.”

“And it’s one of them pushing what you felt in the room?” Cybill says. “Behind my daughter?”

“And your son,” he says to Maur. He hits the wheel, not hard but not softly. “For whatever reason—and I swear it makes me feel mad—there aren’t many who seem to clock that something’s wrong out there. I have to give Heiko that; she did. That’s why she’s fucked off. But I don’t know who’s doing this or why. My old employers are only gunning for us because they’re too dumb to see the real problems. You can’t fight—fuck, you can’t even run properly—if you don’t understand something about what’s hunting you.”

“What did you mean,” Maur says, “when you said this thing likes a laugh?”

She’s waiting for his answer but his attention switches and it takes her a moment to realise they are repeating a route from minutes before. Stallo takes them past that bookie’s a second time. Continues on towards where the road descends.

“What did you see?” Cybill says when he has taken them a long way.

“A car,” he says. “Parked by the flat. Someone in it.” His whole body has changed.

“Do you recognise it?” Cybill says.

“They wouldn’t be that slack. It might be nothing. But something got Heiko spooked, I don’t know what she heard, but…” He shakes his head.

“They’re waiting for us?” Maur says. “Who?”

“Have you been fucking listening?” he says. “Either the Unit. Or, worse, whoever it is they don’t think exists.”

“Oh,” Maur says. The city illuminates her. Maur, be stupid again. “Okay.” Hunch and memory come when they will. “Jock,” she says. The others turn to her. “You said he found something out. Something serious enough that they…well, he’s gone. Maybe we can find out what. Something about that woman, the freelancer you mentioned. I saw something he wrote.” She closes her eyes. Meet Azeri (?????) SCOTT keys.

“What?” Stallo says.

“We need to get his notes.”

Maur and Cybill wait in the van’s darkness. You know the dog is there by its breath. They’re near a lit-up raucous place (“Tallahassee Fried Chicken”) where bright images of fowls with feather-thumbs up grin with teeth at the thought of being eaten. Teenagers yell and she imagines Stallo scaling a wall, levering a window, creeping the corridors of Jock’s office with his untimely physical ease, too old to move like he does.

Cybill is probably thinking of her daughter. There rises in Maur a shout at Cybill about her sons across the sea. Their silence is like that after a fight.

Stallo comes out of the backstreet curves, brings wind into the vehicle with him.

“Someone else’s been in,” he says. He’s excited. “Same idea as you. In the last day or two, looking around. They’ve tried to clean up. Not well enough. I don’t think they knew what they was looking for. My old lot probably. I hope. That’s a known quantity.”

“Did you get them?” Maur says.

Stallo hands her a small digital camera and Maur scrolls through the pictures. Flash-garish, Jock’s study, cabinets, the papers on his desk. An address book, all of its pages.

“Wait,” she says, as if her companions are interrupting her. Back and forth through Jock’s eccentric letters, codes and hieroglyphs. She turns the screen to Stallo.

“I told you. ‘SCOTT keys,’ ” she says. “But look, there’s no Scott in here.”

“So?” Cybill says.

“No Scott in the esses,” Maur says. “And of all the Seans and Susans and Simons and whatever, there’s only one with two addresses. Sarah. Sarah B has one address in Balham and one in Lincolnshire and look what it’s called, it’s not got a street number, it’s got a name.”

“And?” Cybill says.

“He wrote it in capitals and he doesn’t do that for names. It’s not Scott, it’s ‘S-COTT.’ ” A place code, like—remember—MFLAT, like HOU-PARL. “He was saying ‘Sarah’s Cottage, Keys.’ He told me he had friends who lent him places sometimes.” Even now, in the stupid time, comes the old astonishment that some people just have two houses. “What if he didn’t get taken at all; what if he got wind of something and he’s hiding?”

“It’s not much,” Stallo says finally.

“I never said it was.”

“Still,” Stallo says. “What would make him do a bunk just at this moment? If he’s not dead.”

—

They drive. The roads grow wide.

“If it was your old unit,” Maur says, “waiting for us at the flat, if they found you, they must’ve followed you.”

She stares into the inscrutable headlights behind and truly can’t tell whether the leap inside her is hope of being found or despair at being caught. It’s whatever is the name of that combination. Stallo shakes his head but he too looks at the reflection.

In splash zone a muskeg grows lit as if by water by hinged machines moving as if in some performance to this mute audience of collapse. Trash bowled in heaps. Langridge shot, glass shards, ghastly gas masks, icons, gilt. Platforms for snow. A visitant endured as if recalling that it is told it must. What grows amid the moss and stones and iron and rust zones

is lichen and tiny bodies that eat it and needle-eye predators that eat them and all are new, hybrid, ecosystem of combine where the ghost dripped, where apports decayed in both natures, rot spreading in unhurried inhuman pace, infecting buildings and the ground, carried on the talons of the most curious brave birds, to scratch tree bark,

the dead might climb them.

Objects blink out of presence no less than they appear.

IX

7 P’s

Special Sections

—Cyprus? Melissa Marks said. —How’s a coloured woman going to hide in Cyprus?

—You not listening? Allardyce said over the taxiing. —It’s likely not Blouin. It’ll be the General maybe, and he’s not a Negro if Parks was right, or not full, anyway. If it’s not another waste of time.

—This’ll be your first actual op, won’t it, Allardyce? Marks said. He wagged his fore- and middle fingers at her in a fuck-you and she laughed. The engines kept whining.

—All that sitting around gave me an idea for after, Glover said, as pale as ever in the hold. The others looked at him in faint surprise: not like Glover to chat. —What else am I supposed to do when I’m done with this? I’ll shack up with Mad Mike. Go freelance.

—What about Major Hoare? Hook said.

—He’s started some group, Glover said. —4 Commando. Force Katangaise.

—Ah, he’s a condottiere now, Hook said. —How dashing.

Glover’s face was impassive and you could not tell if he knew he was being mocked.

—We’re all soldiers of fortune one way or another, Hook said.

—Speak for yourself, Allardyce said.

—There’ll be more like that coming. That’s where it’s all heading.

—No thank you, Allardyce said. —I’m old-fashioned.

You might consider such concerns the obverse of the so-called General’s crew; too much commitment on that side, not enough on the sellsword other.

—Did I tell you? Allardyce said to no one specific. —Thinking about pseudonyms. Lunfunga, that’s the name of a tree.

Civilian vehicles ferried them to a Nicosia courtyard. Another little meeting room. When Carpenter entered the Uniteers cheered.

—Now now. Carpenter smiled. She wore her full uniform despite the heat and she leaned upon her stick. Always when she looked at you with those pale eyes it seemed she saw a road beyond you down which she might go. —Hello, everyone. I, ah, gather you’ve been briefed that relations may be more disputatious on the other side—or perhaps sides, I should say—than even we’d thought. And that certain cells have started distinguishing themselves in the field.

—Seems there’s an axis emerging, Hook said. —The General’s lot might have taken Mao’s side in the great split as far as that goes, but to be perfectly honest we’re not sure how far that is. As much as anything they’re just getting support wherever they can.

—Blouin may be trouble, Carpenter said. —But she’s not in the know, it still looks like.

—She is, rather, Hook said, —if you can credit it, an inspiration. To the wretched of the earth, with their noms d’anti-impérialisme. The General, possibly a.k.a. Abu Shabh. They are a self-aggrandising bunch. Not even sure if it qualifies as a group, but for now, in bilingual Greco-Turkish honour of this island, they’re code name Kokkino Hayalet, a.k.a. KH. You can look it up later.

Carpenter said, —Reports are a person of interest has recently and hurriedly arrived from Congo as the temporary guest of Savvas Barnabus, a disgruntled refugee from EOKA. Who, it’s insinuated, tends towards hermetica. Park’s assets suggest that this guest is part of the KH axis.

—For all its tininess, Hook said, —KH has global aspirations. They wouldn’t be the first group of twenty people who styled themselves the Absolutely International World Party of Global Revolution or what have you.

—Ideally, Carpenter said, —one would set out to collar and interrogate this new arrival. But as ever, there are complications. She spoke so melancholically. —One of the questions when facing a potential threat is whether it’s better to over- or to underestimate it. In a perfect world our enemies would be weaker than they believe. But this world is fallen. So when we hear that a target has evaded our attentions, insinuating new capabilities in the company of those at least peripheral to terrorists who remain a factor, in a place on which history has not yet closed the book, we must assume the worst. With EOKA and the TMT stoking things up, this is a powder keg. We don’t know what, if any, protections are afforded the visitor by his hosts, nor of what he or she is capable. Perhaps it was worth losing the minor prize, Kandolo, for something greater here. That’s the basis on which we have to proceed. Urgently. This is no longer a capture operation.

Allardyce and Dean Anthon hiked through baked slopes. In position by nightfall. A last quarter-mile on their bellies, crawling patiently enough to raise no dust. They wriggled into distant view of the stone farmhouse alone in thorny country.

—It’s a waste, Allardyce said. —With what we’re about, you’d think if you’re going to huff someone, you could use them. Interrogate them after. My first day in the Unit—well, my first night—was checking out a bloke called Bratomil. After we done that I kept thinking, He was intelligence, Lord knows what he must’ve known. Of course we want to find out. Even recruit him. Whether he likes it or not.

—They’re trying, Dean said. —What do you think Croome’s doing in the labs? Anyway, find the right apport, use that to do someone in, it will recruit them. Heard that story?

—The trouble with apport stories is that there are too many. There’s nothing some special apport or other can’t do, according to blarney. All I’ve ever seen ’em do is touch the Roused. Which ain’t nothing.

—I always thought of it, Dean said, —that they can be touched by the Roused.

—What’s this? Allardyce gestured at Dean’s neck, from which hung a blue and white glass circle eye. —A nazar? You going full tourist?

—They call it a mati here, Dean said. —You too good for that? Too tough for the dead?

—To each their own.

—Don’t come the sceptic, Dean said. Gestured at Allardyce’s staff. —Your breath still smells of beetle. “Locals always have resources,” Dean quoted Hook.

—I know it, Allardyce said. At the sight of a low, gnarled cedar he muttered, —So…, to start to tell Dean of the kallikantzaroi that took their long saws with malice to the roots of the world tree, to illustrate his respect for such knowledge, but abruptly the relevance of these goblins to their thanatic expertise was unclear to him and it seemed as if to cite such folklore might sound like teasing, as if he did think Dean was credulous, and Allardyce’s voice petered out. So he said nothing, full of minor anger, and thought, Yeah you would go on about “locals,” wouldn’t you, Dean. Allardyce did not probe what he meant by that. Still, as far as he was concerned, a badge of honour for a Uniteer was to distinguish efficacious old saws and amulets and practices from the stamped-tin tat of the gift shop and what old Dean didn’t seem to be getting even after however long of Allardyce being in the R was that it wasn’t the precautionary principle itself that startled him but the sheer naffness of that little talisman. And Dean could say what he wanted but his spear was not the bloody same, it was not.

Anyway.

The sky greyed to dark. Lights showed in the house’s upper windows.

—You know where we got the intel about this location? Dean whispered. —The Russians.

—That’s what intercepts are for.

Dean shrugged. —Tangled webs, he said.

They came forwards like snakes through the toughest weeds for the shade of a barn’s remains. Over hours the lights went out until it shone still in only two rooms, it looked like, where the gathered agents of whatever conspiracies planned or drank, took sleep in shifts.

Oh three seventeen. Allardyce tap-tapped, sent sitreps in coded bursts. From his bergen Dean brought out the VRLA battery and the dark container that, its brick shape and lineage from the imp-trapping glass of one Bergiguier the seer notwithstanding, they called a haint bottle, for another, unsanctioned inspiration.

With crocodile clips Dean connected a contraption of gears cranks and dials around a clot of old iron to a transformer and transmitter and the battery and the bottle.

—Check me, he said.

Allardyce looked over each part of the apport, the machines to which its energies would, cross fingers, connect. The squelch knob and the noise gate and other such. Dials for amplitude.

—Check.

His heartbeat seemed not faster to him but hollower, harder, every moment.

Dean muttered as faintly as a voice could go, words that had no place on that hillside. Allardyce shuddered; it was as if all the unseen earwigs around writhed at what he said. Dean slotted a cable into connections. —How’s your op cherry pop going, Allardyce?

—Get on with it.

Dean winked. Pressed a button.

There was no sound but Allardyce’s skin trembled as if the earth were a black speaker on which dust danced. And as if—it was to Allardyce like he had just woken from the longest sleep—brass sounded

took him back to that barebones flat, that sending of attention through a floor, his true first mission

to the flanks of a mountain

Within the glass light came up. The bottle shone blue.

On the warm hillside. New silence grew. Dean took hold of the trap with both hands.

Wait wait! Dean waited as if Allardyce had said it. Allardyce looked about, time gave him a moment, among the tiny motions in and of the dirt he discerned that one was of an insect come close. He cupped his right hand in the visitor’s path because it was a beetle the size of a finger joint and as it investigated this new barrier he took his other hand and pulled a thorned stalk from the soil hissing as it pierced his thumb so he dripped black and he held the point over the insect and pushed it all the way through inverted it and raised it to his lips where it unfurled its ruined wings and cycled its limbs purchaseless in its distress, dying, and with care so nearly infinite it could have seemed like kindness Allardyce brought his teeth together slowly slowly to hold the beetle’s shell. Move softly and die quickly, poor animal, you don’t need your life to do what Allardyce seeks from you. He held it in his bite. He patted Dean then and nodded. Dean watched the sacrifice fumble in Allardyce’s mouth.

Dean whispered, —Bloody thing. Then, —Blessed thing. He pressed the bottle’s catch.

With a hiss as of gas the lid came up and a dim glow touched them. And too quickly to consider the motion Allardyce let the beetle drop after all that and spasmed as if he’d felt a sudden cramp or the touch of something uninvited and he craned his neck and pushed forwards enough to pass his head into the path through which such a part of one unfolding from the trap might

[17]

Dawn. London falls away. Maur looks over agribusiness, pylons like skeletons unaware they’re dead. Birds above the ossuary. But the van’s rattle sends her back to trips to festivals, too, decades ago, so it’s as if she’ll smell grass. What comes to her then is her pregnant journey to her father. In her mind this time it’s as if Ewan sits alongside her on some third seat in that woman’s car, alongside his unborn self within her. He’s seven maybe. Just before you knew for certain, when he still might have been almost any way. Ewan, Maur says to him. Ewan, she says, all love and yearning. She read a book, a novel about a woman and her son, and though she could never thereafter bring its title to mind, she remembers its claim that children are friendly but decadent and that they always change the topics of conversations. She used to repeat the line playing with Sonya’s daughters and wish that Ewan, too, little man, would do as that story had described, veer imperiously chattering across subjects.

But those pylons: she can picture him picturing himself climbing them. Can see it herself, too, at all his ages, that startling tough body.

“You really think he might know something you don’t?” Cybill says to Stallo. “Jock? You’ve been in this for years.” They cut through morning wind in gulleys.

Maur says, “If he’s there and he knows anything, even if it’s not new, we should find out.” Stallo looks at her with interest. “Including about us. Cybill and me.”

Stallo says, “You’re mediums. That’s the most important thing to know.”

Maur closes her eyes. Cybill says, “Because I’m a mother?”

Stallo says, “Every medium is a medium because of whatever makes them one.”

Four miles after an apologetic village, a dip beyond newer houses. The birdcalls sound so anxious. Maur walks alone off the A road on a pathway dark with growth. The bushes bow under wet air. She shivers. It’s good to be under the sky. Through a split in the bushes, to this garden, this hiding house. A cramped Victorian building fussed at by trees. No lights in any window. She hesitates as if, she does not know why she thinks this, something might rise from beyond the horizon, some composite thing.

She knocks. Again.

Maur leans down and pushes aside the metal flap of the letter box and calls, “Jock. It’s Maur.” Looks up at the guttering, dark downpipes that hint at geometries. “Jock. You better let me in.” As if, if she mums certainty that he’s there, she might conjure him. Gusts shake the hedgerows. She feels the presence of Stallo and Cybill in the lay-by, waiting as they promised, not long. “Impressive how you put this together,” Stallo said. “If you’re right. I used to get messages from beyond too.”

“Turn around,” Jock says from within, “and go away.”

—

Maur steps back. She didn’t hear him creep into place by the door. Perhaps he has been waiting there at the entrance forever.

“There’s a shotgun aimed at you,” he says. “What the fuck are you doing here?” She would barely know his voice. “Go away.”

After a silence the door opens a slit.

“Jock.”

He’s a shade in the shade of the house. Twin barrels command her attention.

“Maur,” he whispers. “Fuck.” He comes forwards enough that she can see him. How ghastly his face is. “How did you get here?” He backs into the cottage and with the gun gestures for her to follow. “Close the door.” She does. “Through here.” Into an inner room. “Stay still.” A shuffle and soft thump. As of an apple, an animal, a spider from a tree. Jock turns on a light. He has draped a blanket across the shade of a table lamp.

“You’ll start a fire,” she says.

The room contains two old armchairs. Long curtains. A radio of ancient design, no television. On the walls watercolours and fly-specked prints. “Sit down,” Jock says.

She obeys.

“What you been up to?” she says. “Burning the candle at both ends? Not going to offer me a cup of tea?” She’s pleased with how she sounds. “The drive’s murder. I wouldn’t have had you down as a gun person, speaking of.”

“How did you find me?”

“By using my head.”

“I thought you were gone,” he says. “A goner. I’ve got nothing for you.”

“You’re the one who disappeared. I thought you were dead but you’d just fucked off. What happened? I wouldn’t have held it against you if you’d died but I didn’t think you were just a coward.” Her anger’s real.

“Spare me,” Jock says. “What am I going to do?” He truly sounds as if he might cry. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as ever. Trying to find out who killed my son.”

His laugh is ugly. “You don’t have any idea.”

“That’s the point. But I know more than you think. I knew where you were, didn’t I? Let me tell you what’s been happening with me—”

“I don’t want to know.”

“What are you going to do, Jock? Your friend Sarah, whoever she is—”

“She’s not my friend. We work together sometimes.”

“Sarah doesn’t know you’re here, does she? How’d you get in?”

“I know where she keeps a key. A hollow in a tree.”

“Fucking hollows in fucking trees. How long before she decides to get away for the weekend? What then?”

“She’s out of the country. It’ll be a while.”

“Plans change.” That makes her laugh; Christ, do they. Jock’s eyes widen like a spooked horse’s. “You have to help me, you can’t ignore this,” she says, and wonders at her own words. “I know you’re scared, but if we found you, whoever else is looking will too.”

“ ‘We’?” he says. “Who’s ‘we’?” Then: “I really don’t want to know….”

“Cybill,” she says. She gestures, Put the gun down, put it down. “Someone’s coming after us as well as you. Strude.” She can’t make sense of his expression. “Please talk to us. If we work together…” She can see that goes nowhere. “Jock, I’ve seen things. I think I know what you’re scared of.”

Oh his face.

“Cybill’s here with a friend. Sort of a friend.” His eyes widen even more. “I said I’d come and talk to you because you know me, and if I don’t come out in a few minutes they’re going to come in to check, and they’re going to be nervous, and so are you, and no one wants that. We need to talk.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I just need to be left alone.”

“That’s not an option.”

He says, “Fuck.” He lifts the gun as if he’ll fire at heaven. He leans his body against the wall and his head on his shoulder. He says, “What did you see?”

Obtrusion

a third body asway between others amid eucalyptus of a clearing hanged again corpses sentenced to a second death quite still in the still so no leaf moved nor the note upon the British uniform declaring this sentence the only motion in spite and glare of one pair of eyes without life and lips and teeth death inadequate to end the straining of which for a last -id after yuh in race-hate curse too tenacious for the long drop to conclude it

fell back gasping out of the skull-shaped zone of revenance, stabbing in Allardyce’s own skull.

Dean pressed him down to keep him out of sight and whispered to him to shut up, begging to know, What did you do? What did you do? Allardyce scrabbled at his mouth and head as if that might clear it of that gallows presence come up in him as if his guts were grit in which the gibbet had grown, he’d known which function they deployed here and had read up on the Sergeants Affair but could not have known how the wood would feel rising through his throat and out of his mouth with all the bile of the deadman newborn swinging from its tip like a tongue and smearing him with its arrival into this night and he hacked to clear his mouth of visitant rage.

Allardyce turned over from where he lay supine and stared where Dean was staring.

Allardyce strove to breathe. Two living men on a hillside. A heavy container open in one’s hand, the light out behind the glass now like obsidian. Empty until the reversal of that vibration that Allardyce could still feel though farther now, pushing across the slope, guiding what it made or woke according to the machines’ modulations. Glass empty for now of the agon of the hanged unhooded and abroad and famished.

Dean checked the gauges. Stared towards the darkening house. —Allardyce, you idiot, he said. —You’re damn lucky.

Allardyce let his heartbeat slow and found the slick and twitching beetle before him and was not overshadowed by shadows of nooses. He saw nothing. Saw nothing lurch swinging across the uneven yards to those stone walls. There was nothing to see, the Cypriot slope and stones were clear but for his breath. He watched first one then another and another random patch of ground as if a figure paused there on a rushed and lurching penduluming creaking journey. His gaze reached the walls. A wind came up. Clouds from nowhere.

They were without intelligence about the interior of the building or numbers. Allardyce stared at a section of blocky wall as if at a heavy shape swung through that stone at rope’s end. To ascend. By men and women sleeping and on guard. Long past any walking it walked for all each step would stretch a rope and kill it more. The house was quiet and quiet emanated from the thing Allardyce imagined within and it had no shadow. Here in the dream house someone slept who was a guest, shifting because though a local irregular kept watch in rugged hospitality, the traveller knew in their sleep (in Allardyce’s mind) that something was come. That before it taught them to speak the silence at which it was so fluent it would, because such were its orders and nature, know their mind. And thus a person-shaped nothing lowered itself, let its knees fold so that the edge of the nothing where its head would be came up close to the skin-wrapped skull of the sleeper. The dangler, Allardyce imagined, leaned in, making a third space where spheres overlapped

The night closed. From the farmhouse came a shriek.

In the upper window a bloom of impossible dawn on a grove and other lights came on and the scream of the man did not stop, and goats and a dog joined in and men and women shouted in Greek and now they were screaming too.

A rush as of air. Dean was doing something with those controls. The Rouse was sounding. Light began to glow again in the bottle. All noise in the house stopped. Every little light of lamp and candle and that one big silent light of a past unending corpsey morning from hundreds of miles off went out.

Crossing the stone-flecked earth towards the British soldiers nothing came. Nothing returned at great pace. Allardyce stared at no figure, no comrade.

He stood though Dean tried to pull him down. Allardyce rose, shaking like a dead tree himself, moved by the hand of god and wind. The shadows of stones moved, their angles, as if a point of morning death passed over them, spitting weight suspended, mouthing that it was not would not be sated.

[18]

When Stallo comes out of the darkness with the big dog by his side, Maur sees in Jock no sign of recognition and only then knows that she was watching for such intrigue. Jock hefts his shotgun and the motion has no authority. But Stallo shows his hands. She knows his pistol is in his pocket.

“You better keep that thing under control,” Jock says of the dog. “I’ll shoot it, I swear. Jesus, Cybill?”

“Jock.”

He leads them into the kitchen, where they stand while he makes tea, barely bothering to aim the weapon now. He puts down a bowl of water and the dog looks with its lovely penny-coloured eyes and laps eagerly enough. The pans on the stove are clean and the sink is empty. Jock hands out mugs and they go to the living room, where Stallo stands by the window.

“How are you here?” Jock says.

“We got a message,” Maur says.

“I did,” Cybill says.

“Cybill got a letter. We tried to…We investigated. It turns out you can’t trust anyone in the army.”

“Oh is that so?” Jock’s lips work and Maur wonders if he can read, in the women’s new hair and unlikely clothes, any details of their flight, but he says nothing. The tea tastes like dust.

“I don’t want to know,” he says. “Anything. That’s why I’m here.”

“Well we        do,” Cybill says.

“Then why’d you let us in mate?” Stallo says. “Anyway, try to stay dumb all you want but it’s too late for that.”

Maur can see Jock wants to say what happened to him more than he wants not to revisit it. Though by telling it he won’t escape it.

“If I say, you’ll go?” he says. The pointlessness of such a bargain. “Leave me alone?”

Night bird sounds. The wisha-wisha of the trees.

Jock says: “I got a letter too. A typed letter, not an email. Someone saying they had information about Shackingham. You get a lot of that, you know that, but this had a couple of details that weren’t public. Enough to get my attention. But also it said they—they said they—wanted information from me, too. I was intrigued. There was something about it.”

“When was this?” Maur says.

“A couple of weeks before…well.”

“Before you went.”

“So I call the number.” He’s looking down at his cup, doggedly getting through this. “Guy with a foreign accent. He asked me for details about the campaign. Obviously I said I couldn’t discuss it, and he was cagey, but like I say he knew stuff he’d no business knowing. Dates and names. It felt like he was testing me. I thought maybe he was another whistleblower. Army. GCHQ, even. Make sense of the cloak and dagger. He mentioned some political stuff I wrote ages ago, so I know he did his research.” He looks at Maur but the entreaty’s too subtle for her. “He was asking what I thought about this and that.”

“What and fucking what?” Stallo says.

“Said he was from Baku.” He shakes his head and hunches. “That was sort of a joke, though, it turns out. A code or a test. I think I failed. Mostly he was talking about our campaign. About Cybill. And, Maur. He said it was time to meet. That I was in danger.” He says that flatly. “Told him I’d heard that before. But the thing is I’d already been feeling…It makes you paranoid, this work, but sometimes you need to be. I’ve had my mail opened. You’d be insulted if they didn’t. I’m saying. I’d had a feeling since getting the letter. I still wasn’t sure what his deal was but I was up for giving it a punt. Leaks can be worth it. I’m not stupid. I said in public. Outdoors. Parliament Hill.” He smiles without humour. “It’s close, in full view, and you might as well go traditional. Tinker Tailor Journo Thug. So there I am. As much nervous as curious. I’m waiting. And there she was.”

“She?” Stallo leans forwards.

“The bloke I’d been talking to up until then was a gopher,” Jock says. “I figured….”

“You met her?” Stallo says. “The Azeri?”

Jock slowly nods.

“Fuck me,” Stallo says. He turns in place.

“She’s not really from there, though,” Jock says, still watching Stallo.

“No shit,” Stallo says. “Yeah, you were in danger alright. You fucking idiot. Yeah you should be paranoid. Do you have any idea…?” He takes a moment. “Her,” he says decisively. “It’s her. What exactly did she say to you? About me?”

“What?” Jock says. “Nothing. I don’t even know what you’ve got to do with this. I don’t know who you are.”

“Well she does,” Stallo says. “She fucking well knows. And she knows I know about her, too. Enough to figure out what she’s bringing.”

“She called herself Azeri,” Jock says. “Said she’s not from there but enough people think she is that she’s alright with the nickname. Said she even made a start on the language. That made her laugh.”

“Were you scared?” Cybill says.

“I was something. I kept thinking, I need to walk away.”

“Stop,” Maur says. “Tell this properly.” He breathes out. To Stallo, she says, “Who is she?”

“For a bit,” Stallo says carefully, “I didn’t even think she was real. But that’s because she’s smart. Keeps her head down.” He looks at Jock and Maur sees him make a decision. “Started hearing about her a while back. I don’t know where she came from. There’s always someone gets excited about this stuff, but names come and go. Not hers though, if you can call it her name. Now it’s like the ground leans her way.”

“What does she want?”

“Me dead for a start,” Stallo says. “The Unit gone. A whole different setup. Power maybe, but not like most people do. What she really wants is the fucking floorboards up. The whole thing undone.”

“Why?”

“Oh you name it. Never any shortage of reasons out there. But for her…I think she’s always felt connected to something. I’m not saying I understand. But she pushes for it, or gets pushed, and she’s not slowing down, and whatever she’s after, it ain’t to build.”

“Connected to what?” Cybill says.

“What you felt, there in your flat. Behind you know who.”

He hesitates and it’s not like him.

“Whatever it is, it’s been waiting longer than anything ever waited. Down deep. Waiting for us to come along.” Maur hears Stallo as if he is too close. “Like I said, it wants a laugh.”

—

Stallo looks at Jock, and when he speaks again time comes back. “You’re the first person I know who’s actually met her, the Azeri. So whatever it is that’s going on, it’s meant she’s come here. Left her little secret kingdom.” He shows disgust with his lips. “To talk to you. Of all people.”

“She comes walking towards me in the park,” Jock says. “She’s, I don’t know, thirty? Bit more?” Maur was thinking of someone much older. “Long black hair under a scarf, dark glasses. There was something weird about her. Hard to describe. She’s hard to describe. As she got close she said to me she needed to talk to me about Shackingham.

“I have to trust my nose.” Jock sounds as if he’s pleading. “Doing what I do. I remember thinking I should be careful in case she was crazy. It was like my nerves were screaming. She wanted to know about the campaign, everything, all the stuff we hadn’t released.”

“What did you tell her?” Cybill says.

“Nothing. At first. I said that I wasn’t there to give her information. She got this look on her. On edge but sly. She told me she’d make a deal: she’d tell me something, I’d tell her something. We’d take turns.”

She not looking at him but at the mud of the slope down which they walked. Her English too precise. Maur can almost see the meeting. almost hear it, and engines and the sounds of animals in the far far distance, in the gaps in Jock’s description.

“Nothing felt right,” Jock says. “I wanted to go. The way she was talking, looking at me. And then…I don’t know how to say this. It was like I saw something. Caught sight of it. Behind her.” He sketches with his hands. “A big dark box under the trees.” His voice is coming faster. “She’s staring at me, so far as I can tell. I look again and I can’t see anything now, it’s just me and her. She asks me what I know about Marco? And Wran? And Regnal?”

“Did you?” Stallo says. He’s harsh. “Know anything about them? What did you say?”

Jock shakes his head. “I don’t know those names. She must’ve thought I was a lot more clued up than I am. Or maybe she thought I was being careful. She asked me what I thought had changed since Marco was gone. I couldn’t say anything. I could tell you I was trying to draw her out but I was just…If she knew I was at sea, I think she’d have gone. She said it wasn’t just that there’s kabus now—I don’t know what that means but I didn’t want to interrupt her when she had that look.” He closes his eyes. “She said there’s empty people and she said, ‘This is the cone of dust.’ Her voice, Christ. She said, ‘What do you need me to say so you’ll tell me what I need to know?’ I don’t know how it got so late. I don’t even know what I was saying back. Suddenly it was evening.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard,” Stallo says. “She has that effect.”

“We were there in the dark,” Jock says. “Then she said I was in danger. That I couldn’t trust anyone. Including you.” He looks at the women. “I think I said, ‘What happened at Shack?’ but she kept asking what did I know about the program?”

A start overcomes him at that memory of being alone with the woman among trees. To have her round upon him and with her whisper bring more darkness. Maur, too, holds her breath. Listen to me, Jock says the woman said. There’s no time. Had she a weapon trained upon him? No, both her hands were clasped together in a foreign gesture of urgency. Just tell me. She said, The stakes are very high. Tell me everything you know about what’s on its way. And tell me, Jock says she said, everything you know about the Rouse.

He swallows and blinks and brings himself back into himself in the underlit room.

“The Rouse,” Maur says.

“Kabus is a spirit,” Stallo says. “Of the dead.”

Jock says, “I ran.”

“Why?” Maur says.

“I said I don’t know anything. And she did something to— I think she thought I was lying, wanted to make me answer her. She…”

Something goes across his face as if he stares into a bad sky.

“Jock!” Maur says when his silence won’t break. “This matters. What did you see?” Talk to me, she’s saying to him, you and me, you and me.

“Mate,” Stallo says. “This bint, it’s all down to her. I need to know what she wants, why she’s doing what she’s doing. She asks you about Marco as if they never worked together. She shows you whatever she showed you. Trust me, she believed you in the end that you don’t know shit or you wouldn’t be here. Some of us are still ready to fight what she’s called up, you get me? Some of us think this place is worth saving. Despite itself. Not that we’d get thanked, that’s not why you do it. You get despised and do it anyway. It isn’t everyone who gets threatened by the likes of her and walks, you’re a unicorn. I want to know how she’s unlocking what doors. Some people can’t wait to end things. So listen to me, Jock. You really want to tell me what you saw. How she tried to persuade you.”

Jock makes a bad and lonely little noise.

He says, “I don’t even know what I know. It’s not even like a memory…. You’re threatening me? What can you do that’s worse than what she did?” He lets that sit. “Anyway. You already know.” Something passes between the men. Jock’s mouth moves, he’s back there at the point when dark descended. “It was like a door opened. I don’t know how to say it. She was talking and it’s not like I saw, it’s I knew it’s not empty on the other side. So I had to run.”

He sinks into a chair as if boneless. “She showed me,” he manages to say, “enough. That’s all I know.”

Maur sees within herself the heath, a woman, behind her a tower, a towering excellent tower, that pounds as if with a heart or a thousand dead hearts.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Jock says, “and I wouldn’t help if I could, and I can’t, and if you want to talk to the fucking dead that’s death you want to listen to. Death. And something inside it.”

—

Maur and Cybill and Stallo gather in the kitchen.

“So who is she?” Maur says.

“It started ten years ago plus,” he says. Stories. An Azeri or Armenian or Uzbek or Greek or Kazakh or whatever woman, specifics depending on who told you what they’d heard from whom, anyway she had about her the feeling of someone from steppes or mountains (Eh? Maur thinks), and she this woman was full of questions, austerely and deeply angry. Bringing feelings that changed the air. Seeking objects and knowledge, and threatening, and impossible to find. Promising to change the existing state of things.

“She’s asked about me.”

“Why?”

“She hates me. All of us who were in the Unit. When it mattered. And now, too, for all it’s past time. That’s got to be why she sent that thing to…it almost got them. And you two.”

“What’s the cone of dust?” Maur says when she can.

Stallo shakes his head. “Everything has a name with these people.” He gestures in the direction of Jock in the other room. “He’s not the only one who finds it hard to talk about what he’s seen. It’ll happen to you too. That’s the nature of this.” He works his lips. “Dealing with the likes of your girl,” he says to Cybill. “Let alone other things. This is bad.” But his look is one of want.

Maur’s laugh sounds mad to her. “Really?” she says. “Bad?”

“We go in the morning,” Stallo says. “Keep moving. We still need help and I have an idea.”

“Come on, Jock has to tell us…” Cybill begins.

“Even if he could get the words out,” Stallo says, “about what spooked him so bad he fucking ran away from his entire life without a plan or a hope, you think whatever he saw in that one second could tell you more than you already know?”

“But we’ve come here and we’ve got nothing,” Cybill says.

“We’ve got everything,” Stallo says. “He’s too scared to lie. What’s trying to get through is…with her. Oh come on.” He interrupts the question on Maur’s mouth. “You’re still acting like you think giving things names is going to help. What else do you think there is to say?”

Ah. Mocker! is the dog’s name

R is for what? Resh, the old sigil for the draped head, for the letter. Ra, rho, r, R. The R snarls with dog’s voice, teeth bared, vox canina, the littera canina, says a book of letters named for paradise. R is for dogs. With switching sharp and pointed tail it snarls quick and dead together, we have attested, Horace, Virgil, tristia robustis luctantru funera plaustris, R R R R R, that trilling rolling R snagging these sad funerals jostling great wagons, and look, hac rabiosa fugit canis, a mad dog.

R makes the world tremble. At the threshold of the underworld, Cerberus, vast, rrrecumbent (recubans), makes the rrrealms (regna) rrring with that latratu trifauci, his trrriple-thrrroated rrroarrr.

X

It Is Not
for You

Sacramental

Allardyce kept finding rice and confetti no matter how many times he ruffled the old thatch.

—Oy not in here pal, the landlord said. He raised his broom.

—Congrats, mate.

—Congrats, she’s a blinder.

Allardyce found his brother by the door in a loose brown suit and with a whiskey in his hand. He had not examined his features for years but they were still familiar.

—John.

—Steven.

They watched Maisie in her short white dress.

—She’s lovely. Wish you all the best.

—Thanks.

—You’ve filled out, blimey, John said.

—Well it’s the job, isn’t it? Thanks for coming.

—Surprised you asked me, honestly, so thanks for that, John said. —Was it Rene made you?

They laughed.

—Yeah, Allardyce said. —You been alright?

—You know.

—How’s Mum then?

—Wondered when you’d ask.

Allardyce pulled his shoulders back. He looked at his brother and he did feel for him.

—I’ll just finish this then I better go, John said.

—I mean, stay and meet Maisie.

John hesitated and laughed and reached out his hand and Allardyce took it and shook it.

—You’re alright, mate, John said. You could hear that he policed his accent and that he was still afraid of his brother.

—Well, Allardyce said. —Thanks for coming.

—One good turn and that, John said.

Someone turned up the jukebox and it was hard to hear anything but the belting. Allardyce swayed a bit.

—Maisie!

She came to him and she was drunk too and there was confetti in her hair too.

—Maisie, this is Dean and Jerry and Melissa. This is Maisie.

—Your wife.

Everyone laughed. The women shook hands. Melissa said something nice about Maisie’s dress and gave her a cigarette. Allardyce experienced at the sight of them together he did not think unease nor guilt, was it a sort of dulled excitement? Anyway it was alright, and he could not give it a name.

Mrs. Lanner pulled him into a hug and Mr. Lanner shook his hand again.

—It’s lovely to have you in the family! Mrs. Lanner said. —It’s all very mixed, isn’t it? You know such interesting people, Steven.

Her mother kept watch on Maisie’s friends no less nervously than she did the soldiers and sailors and aircraftmen and -women. Allardyce’s friends wore suits and nice dresses. Maisie giggled with a tall woman of her acquaintance in a bright wrap and with Sten, some reedy white man with black hair and puppety limbs who danced like a girl, if you asked Allardyce, and with a pale man in, yes, a suit of a sort, though he had taken off his tie if he’d had one on, a shabby sort, all scraggly beatnik bumfluff. Jeff something-or-other. Allardyce had seen him reading a poem at some performance.

Irene took Allardyce’s elbow and led him to the bar.

—You can buy me a drink now and all, Steve-o. Can’t avoid me all night.

—As if, Rene.

—So. What brought this on?

—I don’t know, he said. He tried to say it in a voice of exasperation at a stupid question. He tried, —You know what women are like, she’s been on at me…. but that petered out in his mouth. Maisie had not, at all, gone on at him, for all the time it had been. He had proposed not even out of a sense that he should, but without any sense at all.

Mrs. Lanner looked alarmed at Irene’s stories but Mr. Lanner laughed. Irene winked at Maisie and Maisie blushed. Allardyce had never seen Maisie smoke as much as she did that night. She was doubled up with laughter and sharing her cigarette with a drunken young woman with big green eyes and black hair, Amy, that was it. Amy who painted her own dreams in watercolour or something.

—Well, I didn’t know you worked with so many different kinds of people, Mrs. Lanner said to Allardyce. —Dean, is it? He seems nice. And what about that chap?

—Jase?

A Trinidadian queen.

—Actually Jase is Maisie’s mate, he said. —So’s Susie. He pointed. Susie was a dancer in a club and her makeup was very vivid. She was half-Chinese.

—Such interesting people, Mrs. Lanner said. —I didn’t know she knew such interesting people.

Hook had sent his congratulations and put £20 behind the bar. Sotto voce, among other toasts, Allardyce and his comrades raised glasses to the Unit. Dancing, with Katie, he couldn’t remember her surname which he knew he’d seen more than once in the little magazines Maisie brought home. Coming off the floor sweaty to where Bowler and Maisie shouted in conversation, Melissa looking on, and Allardyce caught her eye and they looked at each other in a dare that was complex and not without pleasures again.

—I’m getting tired of it, to be honest, Bowler said. Maisie sipped her gin and nodded. —Same as any job, isn’t it, he said to her. —You start to wonder, don’t you, what’s it all about and that, eh?

—Oy, you, hands off my wife, Allardyce said. Everybody laughed.

—Do you think I can’t see you? Irene said to him so only he would hear. —You’re in a state. Where’s your brother?

—Gone, ain’t he? Allardyce walked away from her.

—I dunno, I dunno, Bowler was saying, shaking his head, and Maisie shook hers too, then smiled at Allardyce and beckoned him to rescue her. It took a time to reach her through back slaps and handshakes.

—Steve, this is Alison, Maisie said.

The woman was a little older than most of the ex-Partisan crew and her hair was longer, a corona. She said she was an artist. Maisie told him Alison was doing the sets for a play and might be doing some designs for that publisher Gaberbocchus she had mentioned, did he remember?

—Don’t worry, I know I’m not allowed to know what you do, Alison said. Allardyce laughed to cover his anger at his wife.

Bowler drank steadily. —Alright, mate? Allardyce said to him.

—Man of the hour.

—Whyn’t you bring her from the NAAFI? Sheila?

—I don’t know, mate.

—Not going well? Allardyce said.

—Going fine, mate, I just dunno.

Maisie circled the room with a gladness that left Allardyce in a certain awe.

—Some of her mates, Bowler said, and shook his head. —Fuck me.

—Yeah, Allardyce said. —Not my biggest admirers.

—Not hers either, some of them, by the looks of it.

—I don’t know about that, I think it’s all this. Allardyce indicated the room. —Bit trad for them, I expect.

—So she made an honest man of you. Why now?

Allardyce shrugged. —I showed you that mag, didn’t I? With that story she wrote?

—Yes, mate. Very impressive. Can’t say it was my sort of thing.

—I know what you mean. But it’s going well for her, getting stuff out there.

—Right. And so you get married soon as she starts coining it in from littayrachar. You gold-digger.

—Har har.

Allardyce had an urge to explain, as if he could, how Maisie’s small successes correlated with a growth of anxiety in him, so that he had proposed at last.

—Her mum and dad been on at her but if she’s been bothered she’s kept it to herself, Allardyce said. —It’s been me. All the coming back. My coming back I mean. You know.

—I do.

Deployed at no warning to places of which sometimes you’d not even heard the day before. Mostly to wait sequestered incommunicado for days in stuffy rooms in neglected barracks, returning to base oftentimes with neither briefing nor debriefing. Careers extending in scuppered missions and all the last-minute standings-down of the military life, punctuated one time in, what, three?, by some journey or other guarding some sly FO bloke or officer of unclear affiliation, or at times Hook himself, in some backwater riverside town of ramshackle logs and walkways (Peru) where alcoholic exiled Englishmen spoke only as if to practice accents from a lost era amid patient locals, or along the side of a rocky slope where shepherds’ huts were cut out of the stone (Turkey), or above boisterous bars (Accra, the Hague) where dealers in black market apports fenced wares.

And for all his hankering and striving and his hunting and bartering duties, in the years now of this, Allardyce had got his hands on nothing terribly much, certainly nothing even close to matching any of the fairy tales of the nonparries—for nonpareils, get it?—those supposed legendary lespry extrusions snagged and with effects beyond any more as it were usual apports. Unique interventions. With their names. The Recruiter, the Listener, the Cutter-Through, the Balance, the Book, et setteh rah, none of which anyone knew for sure, you know, existed, and all of which every Uniteer would absolutely deny having dreamt up, so word of which, whether true or not, could only have come from…Well, put to him, Bowler had answered the question of their source by pointing down, right through the ground of the spit itself, towards where he read the Roused their stories. That Bowler.

Some dealers couldn’t produce even the more modest apport they’d promised. To Allardyce’s eyes, the consternation of the three he’d challenged in such moments seemed genuine. He believed that they believed that their property had vanished.

A few times his missions had Allardyce in camo with rifle out, even whispering to or turning dials to cajole putative incarnations again. To have them wreak havoc unseen or to bring his own bloody sanctions. After the first couple, he was not revisited on every such occasion by the Cyprus hillside. Still less rocked. No more than every time he’d put one in some bloke himself was he by the first, from the swamp. But, like the surprised Chinese gent, that night was never too shy or far. Dean Anthon and Steven Allardyce making their way slowly as if they sauntered. Had the bottle been heavier than it was half an hour before? It was closed again and glowing again, its fields charged up, its content recalled. Job done?

Two shoulder-smacks to knock the door open, no need to fear the noise. The eight within had all been past caring or waking, and Dean had not even teased Allardyce for turning away from their vorago gazes, nudging with his boot the head-down woman on the stairs so that the desolation on her eyeless face was directed at an empty shadowed corner. Who even was the target? And who unlucky? They’d ascended, Allardyce up front, picked through the corridor that smelt swear to god like a copse in the morning to a locked room forced it and beyond a scatter of revolutionary tracts not all in Greek or Turkish and three fallen candles all with wax upon the floor and the flames out the house somehow not gone up the tremendously bellied dead leftover not of any traveller to this island Congolese or otherwise but he who that girth suggested and they’d verify was the host Barnabus himself. Head honcho of this crew. They’d seen photos but those mottled facial contours stern eyes loose jowls had been nothing at all like the sun-scorched endless howl that awaited them on a twisted neck. Residue was drying on the boards before the body. As if fallen from a witness to this end. The spattered remnant spunk of spiteful death.

Blighty again. That and every time. To be sluiced by adrenaline, to shake, to half rehearse half think not on the activities he had been engaged in the very day before he lay there in the bath or cleaned his boots or took out the rubbish or went shopping list in hand for corned fucking beef or wandered the markets of London. Drunk at his wedding and considering all that.

—What was you talking to her about, mate? Allardyce said to Bowler. —Maisie? Looked like you were well into it.

—Just this and that. About her mates and that.

—Not your types, eh?

—I don’t know, Bowler said, as Allardyce had known that he would. —They’re fine. I don’t know, mate, I just get fucking angry sometimes, who doesn’t? And it’s easier if you, well, to blame, I don’t know, someone else. Don’t you ever…Bowler’s stare was intense enough that it drew Allardyce’s proper attention. —I told you I was a bit surprised you didn’t want to hear more about what happened after you was gone, after Telok Anson.

Where would that get you?

He—it, ’scuse I—was, on paper, a reader, was Haley, which him and Dean had sent on down the slope, that secret third goner at the Irgun’s hands, boots knocking between Martin’s and Paice’s from trees by Even Yehuda, kept from the press and snaffled for the island, what with his reputation. And the state of that Barnabus face showed the “Haley” thing had done its best to rummage around in the book of the skull. Hence the hope of a consolation prize—well we may not have got Abu Shabh or Regnal or Gen’ral of the KH but we’ve got some nous and knowledge of his host. Allardyce had delivered the bottle back proudly enough. And no one had complained. So after weeks of not even any rumours, he had sought out Croome stood with her arms behind her back while she watched Bowler through the glass at his own now-we’ll-begin task. During a pause in which Allardyce’d asked her what had come of that interrogation. And it had been a true shock and disappointment to have her say to him something along the lines of Oh that didn’t really work. It’s theoretical, that kind of questioning. In principle, you know, take a signal, transfer it into another kind of signal, it all makes sense, and some of the Roused are more suited on paper than the others, and I’d a thought that the private might be one but everything is vanity, I’m afraid. I’m told you did a very able job but translating at the other end is a different matter.

After all that.

Even when it’s someone else’s thoughts? he’d said. Not its? After it’s been trying to eavesdrop?

Especially then. Or at least no less. All we got was a screech of gibberish.

He had said, had been certain it had occurred to her, that that might not have been error.

—I just never saw as there’s much point, Allardyce said to Bowler. —You do what you have to, what you’re paid to, that’s it, isn’t it? Knowing this that and the other doesn’t help much.

—Aren’t you curious though? Bowler said. —About the whys? I sometimes feel bad about some of the stuff we’ve done. I’ve done. Some of the ways I’ve been talking, even, you know.

Bowler’s mouth still moved but the sound ebbed. It was just as if a silence swelled up before Allardyce registered what must have raised it in him, making out through a contingent clearing in the room a pattern on a dress. The design made him stand. A stab of recognition. Bowler’s mouth faltering. Allardyce followed

and came back not quite sure how long he’d been gone, mid-stride, the fabric no longer in his sight, and he remembered to smile when anyone congratulated him. Daltry holding a beer on his head while he danced. Now Hensley (not at ease, and you could see surprised to have been invited), now Sutton, saying something jocular, his mouth even more crooked than usual. Allardyce kept looking.

—Aye aye!

—Get that down you.

Allardyce pushed through.

—They ain’t half an odd lot, Maisie’s mates, ain’t they?

—Don’t you start.

—That bloke Jeff, is it? Banging on about star charts and spirits.

Thinning a bit but the room was still crowded. Allardyce saw the flitting colours again.

—Mate!

He turned the angle of the L-shaped room to where the bar continued and where there were more tables and chairs and where farther from the jukebox the stiller air was fugged, to the under-window bench where sat Maisie leaning forwards in shy concentration, next to her Irene, and next to Irene the wearer of that dress, big flowers on vivid blue, looking at his wife with a fugitive and accusatory attention she transferred now to him, his mother.

Irene stepped to him and blocked his way. —Steve-o.

—What you doing here? He spoke over her shoulder. He spoke quietly but some revellers looked up.

—Steve-o, his aunt said.

Maisie said to him, —Now, love.

His mother stood and faced him and set her chin though her lips trembled. She was the same. Only more lined, the same jitteriness to her, eyes moving quick.

—You’ve no cause to speak to me like that, my own flesh and blood, I never did, she said.

—Never? Coming in here…

—Now, love.

—Steve-o.

—Alright, he said. He looked at his mother. —You’ve had a drink. Say your taras.

Behind him movement. Someone considering saying something. His brother gone, there was only Irene to be between them.

—Speaking to me like that, his mother said. Her makeup disgusted him though she wore less of it than did his aunt.

—Come on, he said.

—Every right, she said. —As if I weren’t invited.

So he blinked. —You what? He looked at Irene.

Irene inclined her head. —Calm down, she said.

—Now, love, Maisie said, —I think it’s nice your mum’s here, and Irene put one hand to each side of Allardyce’s face and looked into his eyes and whispered, —Pull yourself together, sunshine, your mother has a right.

Allardyce took hold of his aunt’s elbow and steered her all the way out into the lamplit street. She staggered a little in those heels then found her stride and sped up to take his arm in turn and as they went now towards an alley corner it was unclear who led whom. She folded her arms.

—Who do you think you are, Rene?

—I’m family is who. Grow up.

He was abruptly accompanied: behind him, his own past selves. Behind them certain dead. He looked them right on, dead on if you like, his heart did not speed up, he pushed out his chest to dare them. The thing was he couldn’t say just what it was he felt. About the intruder, if that’s what to call her. He was reciting lines. He saw the world again, brought his attention back to it, to Rene, daring him like he’d dared those followers behind him, and he said nothing, telling her everything he thought, not just about her nor about his mum but about the world, articulate in that worldlessness. And his teeth clenched, and his right hand clenched. And Irene saw it. And she did not move.

—Go on, she said. —Go on then, have a swing.

Maisie shouted. Where’d she come from? She shouted his name.

But Allardyce was already turning and raising his hand to his own face, slapping his own cheek. Blimey, that propriety, blimey as if you haven’t hit women before, blimey, and hit them in the face too if a bloke had to, blimey, shot them right there in the fucking face or stuck them in the fucking gut if it turned out necessary. Blind me. His sight went. Shame waxed or was it scorn? Because what had risen in him with his hand he knew was no moment of uncontrollable rage but some sense that so it was that he should respond to disrespect.

Irene was mouthing at him, was she telling him again to have a go, have a go?, and from the alley entrance Maisie too said more. And his mother.

—I never did, she said.

His aunt’s expression grew calm.

—Family’s family, she said. —For today she’s your mum and I don’t care what you say.

—It was me, Steve, Maisie said. Irene shook her head but Maisie said, —I asked your aunt to ask your mum.

Well, there you go, that was just perfect. What was there to do but scoff and walk it off, into the dark awhile? And what of the rags of his boy-self? You remember? he might have said to his brother had he not gone. His brother might have said, Ah, mate, she’s our mum.

Do you remember? Maybe what matters about the past is what you cannot remember, and memories are just sediment.

Allardyce kept his lips together. And if his pearly beetle-clutchers moved behind them, if they made talking biting shapes, well, that was his body, not him. He didn’t know to what, if any, memories it gave voice.

When he was a child, after a shouting, when out he’d gone, after rainfall, London had been a city of knife-edge lines and lights and angles, all excess precision. It was after that that for a while it had had no saturation. Now some cosmic viewer was ready to switch reels to colour after grey-toned years but Allardyce knew that that was a switch back. To the vividness of earlier rubble. The green of weeds against the redness of tile, spilt on by a broken pipe of absolute white. Colours abided under his own small hands. The blue of his mother’s dress.

—Steve, it’s our wedding.

What could be said?

What stories could he tell? Slapped legs, weeping into his face until he wept too, variable, rules you couldn’t know and umbrage you couldn’t predict, blah blah—all matchable by many in that room and you don’t see them turning their back on family, do you? John and Steven-as-was, in their own mud footprints, by, say, a window broken. It was not his tears that came to him. Maybe it was not just the crying in fact to which he veered but a look, a sigh and silence. And he was not at all sure what it was he was doing now.

—I’m glad I got to meet her, Maisie said. —All families fight.

And, and you had to admire this, Maisie took her leave of him, heading back for the ajar pub door to join peeping spectators. Jeff and Alison and Sten leaning out of the threshold heads at three different heights ridiculous as gawping Bash Street Kids. She didn’t give them a glance, took cigarettes out, lit one, regarded her husband. Put her weight on one leg in a stance he had not seen her take before.

—Come on, she said. She called to his mother, —It was nice to meet you. To Allardyce she said, —You should come and dance with me. She went inside.

His mother looked away, biting on her nails. No at the skin at the side of them, that he remembered.

—Come on, mate, Bowler said, and when had he come out?

—Here’s what you don’t get, his aunt said to him. Right up close, just for him. —A wedding ain’t for you or Maisie, God bless her.

I’m not stupid, he could have said. I know that, Rene. But he was only just initiate from the inside to such marriage insight and it was not possible to be sure yet how everyday were his mood swings. Maybe every groom wants to punch someone, eh? Maybe a wedding’s not a wedding unless someone nearly gets a black eye, something borrowed and blue. And while you’re on the topic maybe it’s the most normal thing in the world to be making an honest woman of your woman as and when she starts to drift quietly farther away down the corridor of life from you like some slow-motion Eurydice, you not turning, not really, just the tiniest glance over the shoulder, no wind sweeping her back voidward but under her own steam and at her own gentle pace, going somewhere else. Maybe that’s why most people get married. To mark the drift. In which case Allardyce was growing up.

Rene said, —What is all this, darling?

To that he still had no answer. He could have gone in and punched the panelling; a certain lizard interest wanted to witness that performed rage. Pay a little extra for cracking the wall. Showboat. He could only say, —Keep her away from me.

Irene said, —I ain’t anyone’s keeper.

Well that he had to give her.

His mother blinked and shifted on the toes of unlikely shoes. The wind raised gooseflesh on her and she paid it no mind.

Allardyce laid an arm across Bowler’s back and said something like Ah bloody hell eh let’s get them in, and they went back. He did not seek Maisie but found her. She conferred with friends, two women with hair flattened straight below bands, a man whose cuffs showed. They all smiled at Allardyce and if they were uneasy they did a decent job of hiding it. His wife smiled at him too and there was love in it, and that curiosity and some new sort of calm.

That night as Maisie sat at her mirror and turned her head to unhook her earrings he said, —What did you say to her? What did she say to you?

—It was bit difficult to follow really. I said thank you for coming and she started describing you when you were a little boy.

—With my baby blues.

—Your eyes aren’t blue.

—They used to be.

—It was a bit like she was reciting, Maisie said. —Like she’d memorised the words.

[19]

Jock comes in and hesitates and Maur abruptly knows that he’s considering getting bedclothes for them, until he shakes off that hospitality instinct. Leaves them without a word for the room where he sleeps. Maur and Cybill and Stallo sit.

“The Azeri,” Stallo says. Dread is contagious: only just heard of her and now Maur feels a creep at the word. “I wonder why she thought he knew something big.”

“He doesn’t,” Maur says.

“Or does but doesn’t know he does,” Stallo says.

“We have to keep an eye on him,” Cybill says.

“What do you think he’s going to do?” Stallo says. “Dob us in it? Anyone who’s bad news for us is worse for him.”

“No, for his sake,” Cybill says. “If she’s after him. I mean, we found him, didn’t we?”

“He’s not our problem.”

—

They lie on the sofa and the floor for what’s left of the night. Stallo’s breathing shifts into sleep though Maur knows that one unexpected sound will wake him immediately.

You won’t fucking believe it, Sonn. I know! It’s fucking mad. What have I got myself into? Didn’t I say to you I felt like I was just standing still, like I was waiting for something? Well wash my mouth out!

Yes Maur wants to smoke with and talk to her friend. She wants to be very angry at Des, but when her mind plays upon him it is, rather, with complex sorrow. Ewan; lying there the dark around her she can’t conjure him as a wished-for interlocutor, though silently she tries. Sonya she’d speak to, yes, lose hours in shit-shooting, any old nonsense, about all this stupidness stupid as it is (not that Sonya would doubt), about pretty much all other things, the children, Ewan and the girls and their men, and their women maybe in Ruby’s case, Good luck to her, she’s got a better chance than we ever had, Sonn had said, Would that did it for me, hah!, and nothing in particular, and what they might do, the comfort in complaining, the reassurance in the drifting similarity of their talks, whatever the world or year, despite or because of that slight sense that they, the two of them, didn’t change enough, whatever that might mean, enough to be apt for the nuttiness of everyday life, she wants her there, You’ll never fucking believe it Sonn, Go on then Maur, and so on. Even Rho, she’d talk to Rho, who had at least a touch of that vinegar Des lacks, poor Des, she’d chat to Rho though might not tell her all this, how would you even start?, but there’d be comfort in it, not as much as with Sonya but something. To Sonya she could admit everything even not knowing what there was to admit.

Cybill sleeps. Maur cannot or will not follow. She hears after a time the creep of Jock from his bedroom to the kitchen and knows she has been waiting for it. She goes as quietly as she can. He sits in the faint light of a torch on its side on the table. Big man in his dressing gown, his face fallen and vague. He looks at her without surprise. There’s dignity in how he does nothing to disguise his defeat.

Maur sits and for a while that is all, the two of them in that dark.

“I always tried to keep my politics out of it,” he says. “In the campaign. Not that it was a secret. But I mean, so no one could say I wasn’t doing a good job of it, whatever. That I was biased. You think the Philiposes vote Labour? Let alone ‘without illusions’?” He breathe-laughs. “I’m a refugee from every group you could name. I’ve been through them all.”

Another long quiet.

“My old man was nearly a priest,” Jock says. “Did I ever tell you that? Can you believe that?” Yes. “He was a lefty but he was a cunt too and a god-botherer. Sorry, I know I shouldn’t say the C-word. You know, after 1917 there was a group called the Militant Godless.” Another laugh. “Run by an ex-priest. That appealed to me. But not for that long, to be honest. I remember reading some article. I can’t remember who by. What he said was, if he saw a miracle or…” Jock puts up his arms and makes a gothic groan. “Or whatever. If he saw that, it would be more traumatic to him, because as a Red, he didn’t believe in any of it. A bit of me always thought that was cobblers. He was saying he wasn’t supposed to believe it. I mean, would it stop you being a Red if there’s more than is dreamt of and that?”

“You tell me,” Maur says. “Does it?” She puts her fingers out, draws shadows on the wall. “What are you going to do, Jock? You can’t stay here.”

“I don’t fucking know.”

“You know they’ll come.”

“Maybe. Maybe they won’t. Whoever they are.” He picks up the torch and stares right into the tunnel of light.

“The soldiers,” Maur says. “His old unit. And this Azeri, too, sounds like. And whatever she showed you.”

He flinches. “You understand that I’m not…,” he says. “I’ve got my shame.”

“What did you see?”

Watching his face she believes that he’s seeing it again, and also that he still can’t speak it. He’s underlighting himself now, ghastly.

“Maybe they are coming,” he says. “But I have a hunch that fucking soldier boy you’re with—no, don’t tell me anything about him—that whatever his plans are, they’re not about getting away from this. He’s zeroing in.”

“I mean we have to face it,” Maur says. “My son—”

Jock says, “If I go outside, even for a minute, it’s like the sun…” Old Sol. “It’s like some eye looking down on me.”

“Maybe it always was.”

“But I didn’t know. Now I know.”

“You’re not going to sit here like this. Come on, you’re Jock, you get the bastards….”

“Stop.”

“That’s your thing, you can’t just—”

“Can’t I?” He sounds as if he’ll cry. “What are you supposed to do when you find out nothing’s what you thought it was?”

“Christ, Jock. Look at me. You think I don’t get it? And it’s not even my kid who— But we have to do right by them,” she says slowly, “whatever that means.”

There’s a kitchen silence. The dark hours get on with waning.

“I am sorry,” Jock says. “That it didn’t work.”

“The campaign?”

“I really wanted to do it,” he says. “Bring them down. Whoever it was.”

“We still don’t even know what happened,” she says.

“I wanted to,” he says. A part of her, even now, wants to say I know you did. “Anyway I’ll take my chance. I’d rather do that than go with you.”

“You don’t even know where we’re going….”

“Neither do you.”

She stares at him as if thereby she might pull his gaze to hers. She says, “Come. Come with me. We can’t just stay still. That’s hardly going to keep us safe. We have to do something. When we can, when we…I mean us.” She gestures between him and her. Looks briefly towards the door. “Whether you’re right or not, about him. I don’t know. But I know we have to be ready, we have to figure out what’s going on, not just him, so we can—” She hears a motion and stops.

The huffing subsides. Just Cybill or Stallo turning in their sleep. But when Maur opens her mouth again she has nothing, no plan, no intrigue, to offer.

She stands. Jock? Oh Jock’s gone, left wordlessly a while back, to sit in fear perhaps, anyway she’s there in the kitchen alone. Struck by her own silence, she ascends. Opens the doors of each room on the upper floor and cannot make much sense of how these little chambers fit around the stairs. She cannot count them with certainty. The house does what it must but it is not obliged to help her. Outside the first bird, though it’s not quite dawn so what do you want foolish bird?

Back in the kitchen it’s as if attention fixes upon her. She can hardly breathe for it. Her nose drips. She salivates as if she’ll be sick. She touches where her forearm meets biceps; it’s damp, she is slickening. She stands at the pane and sees the line where land and sky touch, and can hear that bird, and something like whispering. Revelation holds back. In the dappling light through canopy the path around the little house glows.

And there’s motion. Beyond the garden on the slope Maur makes it out through thickets, an imperfect shape glimpsed imperfectly, a figure, Stallo she assumes, and the dog approaching him, and then she starts and squints and can’t see whether it is a person but there’s something alright, there is, it moves through a gap in the green as if quickened by her curiosity, and it is the dog, the dog alone, not running but as if with an aim, as if it seeks something, as if what it hunts lives over the hill. It turns its head, sensible of her. Looks directly through the gap in overgrowth or undergrowth, the growth, at her, doggish, urgent, and why is what she hears as if from so far off like a dog calling across a canyon? Maur can’t tell if it looks at her with challenge or canine regret or what, and now she can’t see anyone waiting for it, but Maur is taken up by fear of it meeting what waited. A moment of pain takes her and when she looks back the animal is gone.

In the living room Stallo is tightening his pack.

“The dog,” Maur says.

She does not wait while he says, “What the fuck are you talking about?,” she passes Cybill while Stallo goes room to room, calling for the animal.

Maur finds Jock above. He sits on a little bed below a faded reproduction of a Manet and he is shocked by her anger.

“You fucking idiot,” she says. “Trying to make out to yourself like there’s a plan here? You think by saying you’re a coward you’re being brave about it or something?”

“Where’s the fucking dog?” Stallo calls from below.

“Gone,” she shouts. “You’re not avoiding anything,” she says to Jock. “They’re going to find you, and you hiding like this, doing nothing, it’s not doing nothing, it’s a choice.”

Stallo enters behind her. She gestures towards the window, the hill. “It got out or something. Whatever that dog keeps looking out for, it’s close enough now that it slipped out to find it.” I saw it going, she does not say. To where it or another dog was howling, a place of dog cries. It looked at me and that was its leave.

“Fucking no,” Stallo says, runs down the stairs, opens the door.

“Jock,” she says. She won’t let him look away. She doesn’t know why this matters so. “If we found you we won’t be the only ones. You said you’d rather take your chance. You fucking owe me. For your sake or mine or Ewan’s. Get your shit. The dog’s got out. What if it comes back? What if something brings it back?”

Advance

Allardyce and Bowler, in a bar, twelve miles from the site of an old battle. They were obtrusive—this was part of the game. Local men sipped from small glasses and stared at these Englishmen in civvies barely less strange here than their uniforms would have been. A failing farmer of the region had had enough medium about him to feel—he’d let it be known—something important in his fingers. Intel received and word got back to him and he came to bargain. Pulled from a dirty bag a rust-clotted pitchfork head.

—That’ll be handy, Bowler said.

Who had ever seen an apport arrive? The world seemed always to phase-shift, rather, from a state of withoutness to one of apport-containingness. Now this bloke had put it about that when he found it, he’d immediately known—here as so often it got hazy, something to do with recognising it as one his grandfather had owned, or something, in any case bracket that for now—precisely when the metal head was from. Perhaps it was when he’d touched it that it had actually slubbed into existence (“fabricated,” intransitive, in Unit argot), pre-aged. But its custodian insisted he knew when it had apparently been made—that is, not that he’d be attuned to these distinctions, when it would have been from. That the metal was—begot of was the Unit term—the spring drought of 1917. Which was why Allardyce and Bowler investigated so tenuous a lead. Because no Roused, or uneasily dual-natured apport, had ever been persuasively sourced to those resonant years, ’14 to ’18.

—Yes, it’s quite the head-scratcher, Croome had said. —We call it the Kaiser’s Enigma.

Also GWG or S: the Great War Gap, or Silence.

—You’ve clocked the lacuna, I’m sure, she said. —We have a few fragments from Ladysmith and Vereeniging, a bolt from a Vickers, the bottom half of a badge from the Royal Flying Corps but for its snag declaration “Per Arbor ad Atqui.” But then, chronologically next, going by begetting, is a piece of shirt from what might be the Black and Tan War, don’t tell anyone I called it that, and a pair of goggles from the NREF Shackleton kit.

She’d ostentatiously considered Allardyce before continuing. —It’s not entirely unknown for there to crop up this or that apport that pushes at the boundaries. A so-called English rouble from Murmansk and the SYREN force, 1919, for example. And they can be strong. So if you ever come across an apport begot of ’14 to ’18, you get hold of it and you keep hold of it. I have a space picked out ready in the storeroom. That would be quite the quilting point.

—Spook stories of the era abound, of course. Whatever it is in the First World War Event that constipates these energies has no such effect on narrative. Perhaps it even fertilizes it. Why, given that, of all the to-dos across all of history, would it be that war which would be ungenerative of suppletions or apports?

—I give up, Allardyce had said. —Why?

—Theories abound, you’ll not be surprised to hear.

Given that GWS, it might seem perverse that so many object rumours stemmed from just the regions of France where those armies had tussled. Such leads were more often false than those elsewhere, but that churned-up earth, as if in hope, did throw up true apport shards. Though never from those years. Rather, from such fields R Unit whitecoats had extracted, for example, a half-finger-sized sliver of verdigrised metal bearing a seven-digit number of which the first and last were illegible, the others 83131, the letter A, a space, then USN C. An apport of weak sort. And how could it be remnants of a US Navy dog tag from the Korean business? By all means, construct the events that led up to some Yank veteran dropping it, no it wasn’t impossible, but it felt more pregnant than that. As did what Croome herself had told Allardyce she had disinterred only eight months before; a black plastic rod a few inches long, ragged with unfamiliar camouflage, Source stamped in its side.

—No clue, she’d said. —But it is apport, at least a bit, and it is military, and it’s not doubleyew doubleyew one, no matter how one gets one’s hopes up in that area. One might imagine these things bubbling up. Somewhere. To emerge. Out of such regional fonts.

—After lespries have dropped them? Allardyce had said.

—If you like. Speaking of, which is your favourite? Of our charges?

Blasphemy!, though Allardyce would bet everyone in the unit had an answer, and even though that adjective was doing an awful lot of work. Could you consider a favourite among somethings that filled your gut with ice?

—I have a soft spot for old pilot-face, to tell the truth.

—Watkinson? Good choice. Its flares have proved useful. Its blight, too. It’s quite the heartstopper. As is the insinuation that it may be able to understand, as it were, our purposes and orders, beyond rote training. And at least to a certain degree to be read in turn.

—That again, Doc? You fooled me with that once before.

—That’s hardly fair, she said. —Hope springs eternal.

He had not found Watkinson’s record in those cabinets of names and shorthands he’d made a start at decoding (rank, name, reg, dates of birth, death and Rousing, signal strength range, signal strength usual, signal strength average, conditions of manifestation, special features/flares, obedience quotient (a crude anthropomorphism)).

—This temporal void we’re talking about, the Kaiser Enigma, Croome had said. —I don’t imagine it’s unrelated to other facts of revenance: that it’s so vanishingly rare to be able to Rouse, let alone deploy, non-military functions. Or that the suppletions aren’t reducible, certainly not to the soul, psyche, uncanny, supernature, nor to what Fort called the damned. And certainly not to what’s really happened to the individual in question. The heart of the Rouse-nature is, among other things perhaps, but centrally, a social function.

—So?

—Such bracing philistinism, Allardyce. So that war was one of the instants, if not the instant, above all, perhaps, of which there is a before and an after. And you could make a related case that it is at once the most familiar war, the kitsch of which we can’t escape, and the most unimaginable. The most impossible of which to speak. Including, perhaps, among the dead.

A black hole, Old Sol, black sun.

—What’s your favourite? Allardyce whispered to Bowler now. His hands hovered over the metal. —Of the lespries?

—I like them all.

Allardyce did not put his hand down. —What do you make of the GWS?

—Fuck do I know? Bowler said. —Silent or not it’s always there, though, if you ask me. The war. When you talk to them.

The Frenchman watched.

—You still reading to them then? Allardyce said.

—You still jealous?

The farmer said, —C’est quoi le problème?

If it were me, Allardyce thought, I’d give them more than you do. I’d read them Marion Fox. I’d read them Oliver Onions. (There came to him with that a jolt of unease, a query as to what it was to certain other stories and styles that kept him out, what it was to Maisie’s.) Anyway, you know what, Bowler? You always were a bit of a mawkish sod when it comes to the lespries and, sorry, but not the most hard-headed. It’s the obvious choices with you. You hear “Father of the English G—t Story” and you probably think, Yeah, what could be better? All without stopping to think, Funny, ain’t it, how many of Monty James’s so-called you-know-whats are touchable before they’re seen, less like spirits of dead and more like devils, things that plop onto the bed with a horrible mass? What about when you read the Roused, as you certainly did you unimaginative so-and-so, “Count Magnus”? You think when you sit in that room with them things glowing like kids around you you’re reading them stories of their own kind? You better hope not, mate, because it’s not just the big old human lespry that features in that story, it’s what it walks with, something absopositivelyfuckinglutely not human, not even a dead one. Something with the and I quote tentacle of a devil-fish, and why would the story’s reassurance, if that’s what it is, that that’s an allegory be necessary if you weren’t a bit concerned that it was all entirely fucking literal? That that’s exactly the sort of thing that makes its way down the aftercorridors alongside what we work with? Or behind them?

No I don’t know anything. But what if, eh? And don’t get me wrong, Bowler. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read those sort of weird things. I’m saying go for it, go harder I’m saying read ’em Jean Ray too, read ’em Hodgson. Then ask yourself if maybe why we can’t get any Tommies to appear is because, like in that story, there’s other stuff in their way, especially in those trenches. All that formlessness in that night land.

So the Uniteers kept on with their apport hunts in general, as of course they must, and with the specific hope that that dreamt-up treasure they called the Woah, from WWOA, World War One Apport, might appear. With its whatever-it-might-be snag.

—Put your fucking hand down, Allardyce.

He fingertip-touched the implement. Rubbed it. Felt for that tremor, like stroking your eyebrows the wrong way. Like shoving something up your slit.

Opened his eyes and shook his head.

—Nope, he said. —It’s ruddy dingnich.

The polyglot pun of the Unit. Ding nicht an sich. Not apport at all.

—It’s going well for you, isn’t it? Hook said. New maps hung on the walls of his office. Europe as a whole, Portugal, Morocco, South America, Southern Africa. Pins protruded. Allardyce heard the laughter of soldiers outside on their way to training. —We’re all very pleased with how things are turning out. How’s married life?

—Sir.

—Excellent. Croome mentioned something you’d said to her, Allardyce. You may recall me wondering if our poor chap’s Venom coming down wasn’t as random as all that. There’s an aura about…Hook’s hesitancy was not characteristic. —One can picture lines of force. According to intel, none of Kowalchuk’s lot would have the means to do that any more than would we. Which is rather concerning. I want to show you something we got out of that house in Cyprus.

Hook passed him a pamphlet. Cheap blue paper cover.

World’s Most Famous Detective, Allardyce read.

LORD LISTER COMES AGAIN

by

WALDO MORTIMER

POCKET EDITION

—You and Dean couldn’t do a deep search, you were in a hurry. We went over it a lot more thoroughly after you were back. All sorts of interesting gubbins.

—So it wasn’t a total washout.

—Not a washout at all. Do you like a whodunnit? Dive in.

Allardyce opened it to an image of a shield within.

ASSAGAI

The People vs. the State. Aspects of Guerrilla Warfare. Political Terms.

Today, the fascist upholders of a «white supremacy» will stop at nothing in executing the barbarous activities which make up—apartheid. To pessimists the recent No Trial Act seems to mean that the people have no answer to oppression

Allardyce closed it and turned it over. On the blue back:

Suspense

Action

Don’t MISS OUR NEXT ISSUE:

LORD LISTER IN HONG KONG

—The only suspect with means, motive and opportunity, Hook said, —was colonialism. Good old Lord Lister. That’s how the Assagai comrades in the ANC get their stuff across borders.

Wordlessly Allardyce commended the militants for their cheek, this foppish aristo disguise.

—This lot ain’t ITKO though? he said.

—Not as far as one knows.

—Then why do we care?

—Assagai themselves aren’t officially clued up, but one never knows where or how far word’s got out. We have another such pamphlet from an asset in Morocco. And he, said asset, believes it came from our Blouiniste chums. So connections are indeed being made. I think this belonged to someone in Kokkino Hayalet, KH itself, no less, one of those independent troublemakers, the General’s lot. We can’t have missed them by more than a whisker. They’re still putting out feelers.

Like a devilfish’s arms.

—If they’re spreading knowledge to other comrades then we might have both an intel and a counterinsurgency problem on our hands, Hook said. —Cyprus didn’t stop them.

—We can’t think they’re that powerful, surely?

—It’s not my job to think and it’s certainly not yours. If nothing else we’d like more info, on the precautionary principle alone. And from what this would suggest…Hook tapped the cover of the fake mystery, — it’s not just the Peking axis they’re chatting to, they’re even staying friendly enough with the edges of the CP-aligned.

—Come on, Allardyce said. —If you went by who had what in their library, you’d think we was Trots and Tankies and Maoists as well as SPR members, and Lord knows.

—Good point. But that’s not how the rumours are cooking. One hears KH are keeping fingers in with Reds of all flavours, and to those most broad-minded they’re offering unique services. Imagine what happens the more that gets taken up. That’s where you come in. You’re going places, Allardyce. It’s no secret that the Unit isn’t much of a place for the careerist. Nonetheless from time to time we do recall certain norms.

He slid an envelope across the table.

—Here’s a bit of a fillip for a newly married chap. I’d say this would bring you a smidge more respect but honestly, who among us could have any? Trooper no more. Congratulations, Sergeant Allardyce.

Allardyce wrote to Maisie telling her about the promotion and that he was excited to return to her.

—It ain’t a lie, he said to Melissa.

He sat on her chair naked but for socks. She lay on the bed, shirt and bra undone.

—Bit of extra money and that, it’s good timing, Allardyce said. He bit at the nail of his thumb. —Even so it just felt, you know, it was like I was watching Hooky through tinted glass or something while he told me.

—Well. Melissa watched the smoke of her cigarette.

—What’s the matter?

—Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Allo.

He came close to saying something about her being jealous but there it was, that roteness, that tendency to just say his lines, because no, that was not what was in her voice.

—Sergeant Allardyce, she said. —Sergeant. Ess tee Allo, Stallo.

Why did he feel as if this, his being here, was necessary? That was about as clearly as he could put the situation to himself.

—Why are you here? she said. Blimey as if she could read minds.

—I was just wondering that. He looked down at his bobbing penis. —Then I remembered. He rose and came towards her and she smiled at those socks. —Pretty impressive eh? Promoted and all. Here comes Stallo.

—We needn’t have waited for that, she said. —I mean, Steven Allo would have done it. We needn’t have waited for Sarge. There’s been a stuh waiting there all the time. ST, just like a saint. You’ve always been Stallo.

[20]

“Stupid dog,” Stallo says. “Fucking stupid thing.” Maur hears the loss in his voice. “That’s the last of them. Poor fucking thing. That’ll make life a bit harder. It was useful, having its eyes.” His hands are tight on the steering wheel.

“How did it get out?” Cybill says.

“Same way as anything. It found an exit.”

It followed a call. Maur turns to Jock hunched beside her in the car. As if, small enough, he’ll remain having not come. More shame vibrates from him, to have accepted this escape, too afraid for the pride of surrender.

“That dog was following its nature and that’s all any of us can do,” Stallo says.

“What was its nature?” Maur says.

“To get out. I always thought it wasn’t going to last. You have to be realistic. Maybe it felt sickness getting too close. It might’ve been prone to whatever’s spreading among the revs, even as a mongrel. I thought it would get easier, not harder, to keep it here. But inheritance is always messy.”

When the light goes, Stallo talks of his history of fighting.

“Sometimes in my business it’s like you only ever have one enemy but it comes in as many forms as…there are things. Not only men and women but rocks and trees and cars and everything. Everywhere.”

He says there’s no life that is not undergirded by violence. That it simply is such violence in slowed-down form. He says that everyone who has ever lived has a nemesis, and is nemesis to something in turn.

He is showboating, is what Maur thinks.

“Even so, this time it feels different,” he says. “This time it’s…all careering towards something.”

Carefully she says, “So what do you think Jules was trying to tell us?” She sees him register her patience with his elliptical speech diminishing.

“If I knew that, dot dot fucking dot,” Stallo says. “Maybe we’re bystanders in some long war.”

“Between who?”

“That’s what I need to understand.”

“But you said there are new players too,” Cybill says.

What’s that expression on him? In any case it’s faint and it’s controlled.

“Players. Yeah. For a while now.”

“New…revenants?” Maur says. “Or people?”

“Not always clear. So, clear enough the Azeri’s right up in it, channelling that thing, but it’s like there’s a whole army with her. And I do not like that.”

“Shadowy, you said,” Cybill says.

Dim figures. He tells them. As if from a light beyond the dark.

“That’s what the Unit won’t get to grips with,” Stallo says. “No matter the fucking evidence. You felt it; something stalking British dead. And the Azeri and these others are with it. Calling it or following it. To set something off. Just quietly enough that brass can kid themselves.”

“But you said this thing’s making the Roused sick?” Maur says. Stallo meets her stare in the mirror. “What do you fucking mean?”

“You can’t just say these things,” he shouts back. “I don’t mean, I won’t, I mean, you can’t, it doesn’t work like that. Right, Jock? He fucking knows. All I know…I was with the Unit a long time, and even for me it was years before I realised it’s not just the Roused over there…That thing, that other thing was never alive. And it’s not just something bad. If I’m right it’s more like the bad that bad things are.”

Everyone is quiet for a while. The old car rattles.

“I told you, my old lot are in denial. It’s been the Revolution in Military Affairs,” he says it in a mocking voice, “and PMCs and outsourcing and barely a peep from the beyond for so long they’ve only been kept in a basement out of sentimentality. So when something does happen, like this, these new people and this fucking shadow, they’re too far gone to even clock it. If they do realise anything’s shifting they just want it back how it was in the good old days. Might as well bring back horses and keelhauling. So they lie to you and try to recruit your kids, as if that’ll do the job now. As if that’s safe and the world’s not changed. Russia’s kaput. KH and Marco’s lot are scattered or dead. There’s a vacuum where our enemies used to be and it isn’t only nature that has a problem with that. We’re all the Light Brigade now.”

“We’re going to get far away,” Stallo says. “For breathing space. I will not let that thing have its fun. Push comes to shove—” A startling look of longing takes him, banished by suspicion. “I’ve got a few things stashed a way away. I’ll try anything once. But we can’t go in blind.” He looks like he wants to though. “We still need intel from someone who can help.” He makes a finger-and-thumb phone. “Help me understand it. How to find it, how to keep it away. How to fucking end it.”

Stallo has keys into a warehouse full enough of cheap electronic stock to hide them. Cybill sits back to the wall reading the letter over and over in the inadequate light from the yard. Stallo cleans his weapon. When he goes to his sleeping bag, Maur takes his place at the windowsill. She makes out the spread-out tines of trees where they cut late-night lit-up windows. She takes out a cigarette. Put that light out! Yes, if your eyes are quite the thing maybe this is the cherry on the top, this tiny tiny glow, where there should be only darkness, but fuck’s sake just let me smoke, she thinks, and smokes, and no one stops her.

“Can I have one?”

Jock.

“Wait until I’ve finished,” she whispers back. One’s one, two are two. Jock’s in T-shirt and underpants. His belly overhangs. He stares down too as if he might discern something that could help. “How you doing?”

He shrugs. She passes him the packet. Jock points out with his two fingers and a cigarette between them. “Everything out there,” he says, low. “How can you tell what matters and what doesn’t? You remember when we started with the campaign?”

Which brings to her mind Ewan again, looking down at her, his hands gripping boughs. He’s always there; that’s like her promise. His shyness, her own, hoping that with her looks at him she said the things her mouth couldn’t. Or unsaid what she did and shouldn’t have. He said things too.

“You told me Ewan’s mate Robert seemed like he wasn’t telling you something,” Jock is saying, “or was worried about something. He said Ewan had been talking about Don.”

“Yeah,” Maur says. “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Well that’s just it,” Jock says. “I didn’t tell you. It didn’t seem like much. It might not be. But it’s been on my mind. I looked into it. I got hold of Robert.”

“You never—”

“Hang on. He didn’t tell me anything more than you did and it was obvious he didn’t want me there. But I did a bit of digging. Don? From Ewan’s judo class? Don Yates?”

“Yates, that was it.”

“He had troubles. Robert told you he’d been sick, right? In and out of psych wards. Depression. Schizophrenia.”

“I mean depression schmepression,” Maur whispers. “We’re all depressed. Schizophrenia though? Poor kid.”

“Since he was young.” Jock puts out his cigarette on the window’s edge. Draws nasty shapes with ash. “His mum looks after him. I went to see them. Turning over stones.”

“What the fuck does Don have to do with Shackingham?” Maur does not understand her own anger.

“I don’t know.”

“Is that why you didn’t tell me?”

“Nothing to tell.”

“I’ve had your Make No Presumptions speech.”

“I went because when I asked him about Ewan’s mood, Robert said I should ask Don. Said Ewan went to see him after the Balkans.”

What? Maur mouths.

“Said Ewan seemed suspicious of him—Robert, I mean—a bit paranoid he said—and blurted out that he’d talked to Don, as if that might persuade Robert to admit something.” He shakes his head to show this makes no sense to him either. “He has nothing to admit. And Don’s damaged, it’s hard to talk to him. It was mostly his mum I spoke to, and there was nothing.”

“So why are you telling me now?”

“We’re not exactly in the same situation now, are we?” he says. “Ewan went to see an old friend, end of. Now? I don’t know what’s irrelevant any more. His mum told me she heard them arguing. Well, Ewan agitated, Don upset. She was going to ask him to leave but it had calmed down when she came in, and he was going anyway.” Maur can see that one reason he did not say this before was concern for Ewan’s state of mind. “She said Don told her, ‘Yew said people from the telly know secrets.’ Was it just you who called Ewan Yew?”

Walk the ridges demarcating such flatland. Cliffs in erosion. Be watched by trellises. When through the obscurity over Britain strained sunlight comes to outline what people call woods. The work is done by the outline. Ink blown across paper, witches’ fingers drawn by children. The trees of England, country dappled by whiteness. These and the trees that are dead. That, from something in the soil, climate and disease, stand in barkless dignity, clacking monuments to themselves. Skirt them as close as you can.

For fuck’s sake. These trees are the bowers of Albion or something, roll your eyes at the matter of the place, these uncouplers and vectors, the ceaseless twig jostling, these are what grow, dead, below untuned skies. Drab, English and eerie. Of course.

XI

Lines in
Diagnosis

A Needle in Ink

Hensley had started shying again like a little beast when he saw Allardyce. Allo in particular. You’d clock him sometimes, Hensley, emerging from a pagoda with that dazed and dozy face of his doughier than ever, blinking as if desperate to become his own talpine parody.

You had to give him a bit of leeway, Bowler said, what with what he was doing down there. —He’s channelling. They got a sniff of him having a bit of nous so they’re strapping him up and asking Is there anybody there? It’s hard going.

Bowler inhaled like a dog. Allardyce made silent barking motions.

Even in so insular a spot you couldn’t know everyone. Once in a bit someone from that other lot, the more-than-semi-detached project on the spit’s north-eastern edge, might zip in and out of the NAAFI, and the boys and girls of R Unit would give them the eye, la di da faces, as if it were the fault of those engineers that the Uniteers were ordered not to chat with them. Adder Fog, their project was called. A less secret secret moniker, soon to be leaked as if accidentally. Allardyce wondered if the arrivistes knew that their most important work was to distract attention from the Unit, for all the arc of their array, a two-thirds-finished wedge of concrete flattening out the shingle, thirteen of what would be eighteen great masts with wires or cables radiating from a point. All out of bounds. The fucking cheek! Their island!

Psyops would put it out that it was something like MADRE-based over-the-horizon experimental radar, and that might be real as far as it went. But for the Uniteers, fairly or not, this might be a bid to subcontract certain aspects of their own craft. Specifically SIGINT. The murkiest, dubiousest, most untrustworthy and compelling of intel garnered from the functions they guarded and/or the after itself. Of which, name notwithstanding, Croome always insisted, —There’s no reason to believe that particular abyss is after anything. It may not even have existed before we started operations.

—It’ll never work, was Stallo’s take on Adder Fog.

—Very possibly not, Croome said. —But I’m here for any progress, in calls, coding, and comms.

Working or not, Adder Fog wouldn’t be up and running for months or years yet, leaving R Unit restricted to (or enriched by, you pick) old-style table rapping, plasm splattering, sepulchral-voice blaring of a few mediums, willing, unenthusiastic like poor old Hensley, and unwilling. Most particularly right now in re seeking the plans of Kowalchuk and his Special Section. And of those tenacious dissenters Kokkino Hayalet, the ITKO Third Worldists. Who did seem to get about.

Meantime, nothing to stop nighttime breaches of rules. No number of unmarked-uniformed armed guards of their parvenu sub-project neighbours would stop the Uniteers from scribbling OO Was Ere I Was Ere or No One Mention the Fog or various warding marks on the sides of sheds and the walkways of the expanding construction, or peeing in corners chosen to show off the stains, just on principle, you understand.

More pin-marked places. In Amsterdam a pocket book, pages torn out, the printer’s mark not quite that of any printer. In Leeds a regimental button without a loop to attach it. In Tehran and Montreal Sergeant Allardyce watched Hook pay substantial sums for fountain pens. On the former Stallo could never find the snag, the thief, as they also called it; the other had no tines, was just a dart. You could have made with it no mark more regulated than with a needle dipped in ink. In Vienna Sarnt Allo held a pair of scissors to his cheek and closed his eyes.

—No, he said.

—You sure? Sapers said.

Just give him a look, cheeky fucker.

Hook and Croome tasked Stallo and his fingers with pronouncing judgement. Double-checking in the windowless room of boxes. Stroking what few finds there were these days, while they were itemised.

He suspected Bowler to be the only one of his comrades who knew that every few apports, every few touches, Stallo lost a bit of time. Once, when he saw Maisie at the station, Stallo was abruptly uncertain how long it had been since he had fucked Melissa, but he remembered then that he had bathed before the train, so that was alright. He was moved enough by his pleasure at the sight of his wife that not only did he resolve in that moment not to go with Melissa again but he wondered why he ever had.

Maisie told him of the story on which she worked, her hopes for it. Stallo—she quickly called him that—was happy for her and happy not to be shelving apports for a tick. So it was with cool curiosity that he considered one possible answer to Why Melissa Marks? Because she does not write as Maisie writes. Which is to say, she is not Maisie. You can’t like someone for who she’s not can you?

He remained carefully indifferent to the poetry he heard at those readings to which Maisie still took him, but to see her attention on them pleased him, even as he felt himself drawing away, from her, yes, still, despite that station moment, according to no plan or strategy, as if in response to tides. Her friends murmured their approval of her stuff and their own and he hated some of them a bit. That was a moment when Stallo wanted—watching her listen to the rhythm of some other poet’s words—to be the only one she spoke to.

The unease provoked in him once by the glazed conviction of her stories, the staccato prose, was gone, and he was not badly troubled at the faint remaining antagonism against the work, the sense that that’s what he should feel. Lie down, he told it. Still, the certainty that he was in the right place didn’t come when he was at her side, for all he wanted it to, sort of. It was alone or with a comrade, out in the cold air, weighed down by the tools of his work, that he felt most Stallo.

No resting on laurels. Regular retraining. To Stallo, Bowler: —It’s all change in CQB. New techniques. We’re dinosaurs, mate.

Is that so? In Hereford the SAS men kept their respectful distance and cautiously eyed the Uniteers—Stallo, Aduba, Sapers.

—Not like that, Sarge! Get your arms up!

The tough short Scot who taught them was a staff sergeant with a blemished record. Everyone called him the Master. Aduba was his favourite, sullen but uncomplaining and quick and with a good eye.

—Too slow, the Master said to Stallo. —Higher. Fucking arm up and out. Away from your belly. How old are you?

Stallo took up the dynamic new stance demanded. Straighter of leg, extendeder of arm.

—Come on, Sergeant, I don’t care what fucking skullduggery you’re up to or how hush-fucking-hush you think you are, if you can’t shoot a gun you’re dead and gone.

Well funny you should say that.

The speed of his motions did increase like that but Stallo felt, what could you say?, affronted, on behalf of that old clenched pose. Standing taller, sweeping for targets, he could not shake the sense that quicker as he was, he was losing something. Some connection. What if—

Yes, what if fidelity to a now-dead way, despite, because, even, of that interment, might accrue something not otherwise tappable?

Well. No R Unit without hunches.

Alone in his room Stallo held his pistol again as per those Palestine police instructions. A spirit of Britain. He could have snorted at that but he did feel it, too. Enter each room—he imagined it—back in the fighting crouch.

In this range one practiced the ending of the lives of the living by the living. Stallo rendered unto Caesar to get the pass. But a companion went with him, not seen. And he knew, as he knew when an object was apport, that when he followed the antique imperial ways what he deployed with stiff arms was pointing sense. The dead method might, backed by other energies, issue its instructions; channel grauen and grue the revenance wrought; order the Roused into actions.

One time Stallo went through the Killing House unwatched, with his outdated ways, and without ear protection. His shots made his inner ear sing, and that noise and its aftermath became a kind of silence.

[21]

Some East London edgeland. Jock shaves his head. Cybill and Maur cut each other’s hair and dye the results new colours again. Maur puts on clear-glass glasses and changes into new charity-shop clothes.

“Strude’ll see right through this,” she says.

“There’s fuck-all we could do that my lot wouldn’t see through,” Stallo says. “We’re just running interference. So we keep moving. In the scheme of things the Unit’s a spent force but they can still be trouble. The priority’s to make sense of what’s on the way up while they’re on the way down. What agenda the Azeri’s serving. What she’s trying to let in and why.”

“Why would…?” Jock said.

“I can’t talk for her,” Stallo said. “In Haiti they’d call what she did an expedition. A conjure. L’envoi mort. Only like I say I’m not sure it is mort. We need to talk to someone who understands this shit. At least better than me.”

In the basement of a prefabricated place by a crushing yard is the turpentine smell of a forger’s workshop. The toothless young man takes their photographs and makes ersatz identification in various names. Stallo pays cash. By night they drive to Portsmouth. “Just don’t even think about it,” Stallo says as they approach the checkpoint. “Think about anything else.” Maybe fear makes Maur look bored.

On to a dirty ferry like she remembers from schooldays before the tunnel. She stands as close to the prow as she can and bids her heartbeat slow after the adrenaline of the border. She watches the water split before the ship and sidle away in foam. In Le Havre Stallo surprises her with French. “Languages, scouts, recon, signals, maps,” he says. “What do you think I spent my life doing?”

Not just that. “The things like Jules,” she says quickly enough to surprise him. “What do you do with them?”

“Come on. They’re weapons if you know how.”

He steals a beaten and ugly Saab. They go south for hours. At Tours he dumps it for another car. Through the night to Poitiers. They eat in a cheap café and wash in its toilet. Another replacement vehicle. There are bright children’s books in the Ford he drives east and south to Clermont-Ferrand. At a roadside they clear out of it all such left-behind stuff. Dump it in a ditch. You don’t want the sheddings of play around you, do you Maur?

It wasn’t as if Ewan didn’t play. It really wasn’t. She remembers watching him do so. Climbing trees of course. She could see that he never felt so safely in his body as when he relied as much upon his hands as his feet. Like he was the opposite of that Greek hero or monster drawing strength from the earth. He got his from being un-earthed. Up up up. That was how he’d played: in a fervent and committed way. In the football matches in the street, frown frown frown, focus, never very good but he’d make an effort. She’d known what it was she saw. He’d kick the ball just the once or twice per game, as if despite best efforts he’d not quite reached it but for those couple of touches, rather than that he’d made himself not avoid the ball completely. You might have had no idea if you weren’t his mother, in a belated revelation, that play was rarely a simple source of pleasure.

“I hope these directions are right,” Stallo says. “It’s the best lead I’ve been able to finagle.”

They park and take turns to sleep. In squat market towns in Occitanie, youths eye them from the edges of squares, standing in ways to ruin postcard configurations. Jock keeps drawing Maur’s attention. His expression of calm desolation. They can’t talk just the two of them. She feels a cold pity for him as the light changes on his face. He’s not a renegade, not a mother of the lost. He’s just here, in this non-place. He’s the most lost of all of them in that moment.

“No one I ever knew was more clued about the sort of thing we’re dealing with.” Stallo says it like a plumber discussing pipes. “However much that’s saying.”

They eat in the car. Undulating country, mountains lopped off at the top, hollowed out, made bowls of grass.

“What if your lead’s wrong?” Cybill says.

“Then we keep looking.”

Beyond some tiny town a stone barn, homes divided out of what was once a single dwelling. An old woman claps her hands free of dust as they pass and she stares into Maur’s eyes. It’s twilight. Stallo points into the pines. Abruptly takes the car a way off the road, brings it to a stop.

“Now we wait.”

Vehicles pass while he pores over his map with his hazards on.

“Time was this might have been easier for me,” Stallo says. “I’m not used to walking alone.” He waves his hand as if the others question him. “I don’t mean you.”

When it’s properly dark and they’re alone in this foreign country, he drives again, to find and take a road between thickening trees, onto a passing place and beyond, slowly off the asphalt into the wood, to stop again amid shadowed green. Stallo checks his torch. They all have on jeans and jumpers and jackets. They eat what chocolate and bread and cheese they have left. They step out into the dark and the noise of windblown trees. Lights sweep the trunks as a car comes behind their hide and does not slow. The forest closes behind them.

—

Maur follows Stallo through rot and moss. She has no fear. Stallo turns on the torch for instants every little while, his hand over the bulb, to take brief bearings. For dark hours, then, Maur and Cybill and Jock in their shivering inexpert ways follow more noisily than he a light that could be swamp fire. Still, Maur does not think she could have moved like this weeks earlier. They ascend a cut. At the ridgeline beneath the canopy, land opens below Stallo, he points, and Maur sees dim illumination. He raises binoculars.

“Yes,” he says.

Maur can sense growing tension in Stallo’s motions. Deep in the trees, farther than most would walk, a house. Three storeys of brick darkened to liver by rain and age. Ivy like old script. Pale curtains dulling the windows like cataracts. The house is more midnight than the surrounds.

“Give it a bit,” Stallo says.

Later, according to who knows what hunch or knowledge, Stallo descends, crosses the last metres of undergrowth, fast and low, to stop right by the building and turn and gesture for the others to follow. He goes by the wall around to double doors. She sees him tinker at the entrance. Jock jogs slowly behind as quietly as he can. Cybill bends her back and does an ungainly scuttle. Maur in her turn goes tiptoe hands out front like a cartoon spook to slither to a stop on damp grass. She does not hear a click as Stallo works. The door simply slides onto darkness.

The hall floors are uneven flagstones far below the ceilings. Stallo leads past a kitchen where pots and pans hang like misshapen fruit. He holds his pistol low. By dark shapes, furniture, a parlour, rooms to either side. It is too dark to make out anything of the photographs in their frames but people outlines, the up-down of some posed family. Towards stairs. From which Maur feels a tugging. She inches up them knowing the wood is eager to betray them. On the floor above they are watched by paintings of which, too, she can see only shapes and shadow.

Their way, according to Stallo’s intuition, is through a library. The air of this room feels dry. Everything shifts. As if a wire has snapped. A hair across a threshold has been displaced.

Maur, a shadow, turns, sees Cybill, shadow too, turning too, Maur sees her alarm, and Cybill says her name and Stallo jerks his arm up at the sound but Cybill says, louder, “Stallo,” and now there is another noise. Something falls, hits a wall. Maur stares but in every corner there is only darkness. That noise repeats. Comes again twice, three times, approaching with what feels like glee.

Maur sees motion. The matter of the room itself flurries, objects jump, a cushion flies from its sofa, books spasming from a shelf, a chair rattling, dancing below a table that trembles as if in fear as if something unseen gathers. It roars across the dark in a growl of straining floorboards and rucked-up rugs and tottering sideboards.

Something clutches Maur. She’d scream if she could.

She is tugged, shaken like a despised doll. Maybe she cries out, there is noise and some of it must come from her, because she can breathe again, she’s shouting, and here returns the image of Teller’s corridor, that terrible disobedience of little things, of lifeless things in the approaching company of something beyond life, and rushing at her head now a small hard heavy missile comes pop! into her temple and as she reels that is a slap upon her face, an assault of boisterous air.

The curtains blow. There’s light. The beam of Stallo’s torch amid an object storm. Jock is shouting. Maur is grasped again. Cybill is clutching for her? the letter in her left hand?

Was there another there?

Cybill holds up what she carries and Maur cannot hear her but as that cushioning black fade incomes at the edges of her vision she makes out, does she?, another figure stood hands up in fight stance face smeared and wrong

“Arrête.”

Everything is suspended.

“J’ai dit arrête. Ça suffit.”

Strained severe voice. A clap of hands. Everything falls. The drapes slump. Maur hits the ground and learns she was suspended above it.

She opens her eyes. Sees Stallo grinning.

He does not wipe the blood from an injury on his face. He shines his light at the doorway. A woman watches them. Her nightgown still billows and nothing else does and there is no wind. The woman is small and very old, her white hair up in a tousled bun. She stares coldly and with dignity and ready for disappointment. She holds a little pistol.

“Well,” she says to Stallo. Her voice crackles, her accent is quite English.

“Bonjour, Doc,” he says. “Been a while. You upgraded your comb, then?”

She says, “Sergeant Allardyce.”

Free Association

—Just a tick, Croome said.

Stallo held a broom like a weapon. The glare and breakinglike sound of the camera flash filled the sunken room and made glaring edges of the concrete. Croome took a new position and another shot. Dead centre in the little chamber’s floor a housing was empty. Whichever oaf had retrieved the bottle after the experiment hadn’t watched their boots and the Escheresque chrysanthemum of sand lines that surrounded it was smudged.

—Yes, quite, Croome said at Stallo’s look. One more shot. She joined him at the threshold. —It doesn’t always work so well, but this one was a corker. As soon as we opened the lid it set to spinning. Not a thought for getting out. Absolutely intent.

Trapology, barrier research, always seemed to buoy her. He knew she would compare the intricacies of these patterns made in distracting sand to mandalas and cat’s cradles and plotted graphs.

—Have at it, she said, and Stallo swept up the trails of Roused obsession.

She regularly requested his assistance now. With the organisation of the apport storehouse, wherein he had to brace himself at the proximity of those items. Somewhere that gold earring. Something in a crate big enough for a motorbike.

Croome led him through swinging doors into the heart of the country. He glimpsed equipment, rabbits and guinea pigs in cages in rooms he’d never entered, cloth-covered shapes, the sway of something attached to something else, bits suspended in air according to no obvious logic, drapery hanging by more than gravity.

—Listen, Stallo said. —You know Bowler’s my mate….

—And yet?

—You still got him on storytelling duty. Does he pick what he reads? Because he’s never had the greatest imagination.

—Green-eyed monster, Sergeant?

Unlocking entrances, tugging a cord like a chain in a toilet to turn on unpleasant striplights. The pull swung by Stallo’s head, weighted with pebbles. One wall was all cabinets, on the floor scratched hexafoils. Croome opened one of the drawers and gestured for Stallo to see the bottle within. The light on it glowing to say it was not empty. That made him sway a little, to know among what he stood.

—I’ve been going back to some of my early training, Croome said. —The realms of the symbolic, imaginary and real don’t operate at all for an oscillating function as they do for your mind or mine. But nor are they quite different enough to completely rip up the rulebook.

—Who’s that then? he said of the box.

Her smile was broad. —Sergeant, I am shocked. How infra dig to ask such things or relate to the REs as named comrades. But we can’t help ourselves.

She saw him look at the designs in the floor.

—Sand piles wouldn’t last here. Too much footfall. Even I, paid among other things to trust in no safeguards, am reasonably confident that they won’t get out, with the currents and fields we have at play here. But one builds in redundancies. She pointed at the light cord. —Whatever the motor for their efficacy, I’ve come to think it’s because of the stones’ point of view. But this little attention grabber— She gestured at the floor, — is down to the suppletions themselves. Empty this pond with this punctured ladle! Count every grain of rice! Spin sand into ropes! Even so I consider it slander to suggest stupidity on the suppletions’ parts. I think what we consider traps they commit to in full understanding but for the opaque reasons, and out of the ardour, of the dead.

—Time was you’d have told me off for using words like “commit to” and “understanding,” he said. —And “the dead”? You owe yourself a quid.

Croome took a note from her right pocket and put it into her left. She slid the drawer shut and pointed at various labels by other handles.

—Drowned. Shot. Fell off a horse, believe it or not. Malaria. Hit by cannon fire. Crossbow bolt, if you please. Some of this lot go back a ways. —Watkinson I believe you’ve met. Stallo noted where she gestured. Yes, please consider there to be quotation marks around the name. In my most austere moments I wonder if we should nix the use of pre-mortem monikers altogether, but convenience does trump rigour. Myers, old dependable. Camberwell. Hall. Walters. Cocklyn and Haley. Poor old Hutchinson. Singh and Reverend Boole and the rest.

—How many in total? Stallo said.

—How long have you been working up to that? Not always easy to get out direct questions about these matters, is it? I know it seems maddening you don’t know the answer to so simple a question. But then it isn’t. So simple. At what level of signal does one count a Roused trace as “there”? What about signals in phase or antiphase? And so on. Do you imagine we’re so perverse as to keep such matters from you out of spite? That desire to know that sort of thing isn’t a help. It isn’t merely theatrics that you’re expected to do your job in the dark. You may remember I urged you once not to get caught up with the lespries’ secrets. Those are for them, not you. Hence best to try not to think of them as thems, at all, let alone with stories. Rather, as spikes in a waveform. Easier said than done, I do know.

She waited but Stallo did not speak.

—By all accounts the reverend, she said, —in his breathing days, was not a particularly thoughtful man. More a close-the-wall-up-with-our-English-dead sort. Now, when I take readings, even I find it hard not to interpret them somewhat anthropomorphically, and by those standards Boole the suppletion, “Boole” in quotes, is considerably more wracked and interrogative a function than was its heartbeating predecessor. And is becoming more so. One supposes that the step over that last brook can’t but occasion a crisis.

Stallo said, —“One sure touch deep—biting.” Something something. “The red honey that the soul stored pours, and she, the bee, is gone.” Croome looked her question and he said, —Owen. Walter, not Wilfred. And he wasn’t even there. It turns out you don’t have to have been in it to get it.

Croome said, —Not even fifteen years since the Unit was started, in this version at least, and one already feels old and as if things are passing one by.

Disavowable channels between crown and cunning folk and unwitchers and spaewives went back, certainly. For every radical Besant, for whom the Summerlands were a rebuke to the now, there were those of other politics or none, who could be made assets. With her High Tory inclinations, Violet Firth (as had been) wouldn’t object to Psychic Self-Defence being a resource for Britain, though regrettably it was tosh. And serving as the foundation of what new death and its results were the insights of those apportless charm years of war, that night-land, the dark sun, the trenching hours, slurry thorned by the long teeth of snag verticals and barbed wire making a tendrilled place, brimming with faces slipping from grimaces, noiseless screams beneath delighted death-cries of bombs above. Nineteen fifteen, Robert King, “Occult Aspects of the Battlefield,” invoked “swirling groups of combatants who had left the body, locked together in an intense emotional stress, fancying they were still engaged in slaughter.” You could be sure the War Office had its copies of that. What’s the word for something that is a nightmare and a dream, a dreaded outcome and an aspiration all in one?

—The world changes, Croome said. —It’s the oldest jeremiad in the book. O tempora! O mores! Have you met Simmons?

—New research bod?

—Tall rather vulgar chap. You’ll get to know him. My point is, he has his own methods that one could not have imagined a few years ago. He’s a biologist by training, and you might think that’s rather on the wrong side of a divide to be of use, but there’s no post-thanatology without biology. I mean, life is dying, isn’t it? He’s been working in Chorleywood on what I’m given to understand is a remarkable new process in the bread industry. Voice too deadpan for the cheapest contempt. —You might hear him called the Baker. It’s all change in the world of bread, he tells me, no less than in our thing. He insists that there are applications to be gleaned from chivvied yeast. One doesn’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud, but still. My job’s to get at what makes things tick. This is to what I was adverting. My initial studies were in France. Freud and certain acolytes.

—Maybe you can help me, Doc, Allardyce said in a stage voice. —I have awful dreams.

—Delighted as I’d be to have a go, I rather think you’re a little too somatically embodied for me to help, Sergeant. My work was on the structures that follow that state.

The guards waved Stallo in now. The whitecoats below barely reacted to him. He could not always trace exactly the passage from one to the next moment. Might come into himself as if with the smell of sap on the fingers. Once he opened a windowless door. Tape turning reel to reel in the underlit room and Croome whispering into a microphone, facing an empty chair. She saw him. Did not gesture for him to leave. He held his right ear in finger and thumb and squeezed it, as if that might comfort him.

—Stop, was what Croome said into the apport microphone. She held it out then to the chair, and waited. She took it back. —Return, she said into it, and held it as if for a response again. Then —Line. Then —After. —Before. —After. —Bone. —Head. —Nothing.

Blink your eyes, Stallo, as if to clear them, and make out what you can. Each corner full of shade, within it lines, a shape that, like that man upon the stair, wasn’t there. The hard terrible perfection of a cube beyond all others. Every Roused shape is a perfect shape. Blink, Stallo. Each corner full of silence, in each silence soundless sounds of origin and trial, of going-together, Enuma Elish, Diwan Abatur. Stallo you are well-read in purgatories. Croome spoke her words and Stallo considered animals just out of sight, dogs, wolves. A great two-headed worm in the road, fastened by chains at each wheel-like mouth. Stallo held the door frame. Was leaning in like a neighbour. Like a colleague asking if you’d a minute.

—What happened to Ruthven? he said. He could not tell if Croome remembered the name. —The day you recruited me. The nancy-boy whose boyfriend we sent a lespry after.

—You were recruited long before that. And why do you ask?

—Just wondered if he ever got suspicious about what happened.

—Why? A thoughtful look came over her. —Truth be told, there may be a shade of Bratomil in our stores.

—He was never Roused.

—No, Croome said. —But if the cessation of life is caused by the resonance of a particular lespry, it can increase the chance of that causing resonance in turn. Interference.

—You’re saying Bratomil’s in Watkinson now? Stallo said.

—Nothing so exact. But suppletions are affected by their interactions, as are we all. The Watkinson function may be fractionally Bratomiled.

—Do they talk to each other? Stallo said.

—You know that’s not a useful way to put it.

But how could he not wonder how such interpenetration, was that the word?, would impact the micropolitics of the as-if dead? How many ripples of enemyness and bystander were now part of the R in “R Unit”? And what did that mean for their philosophy?

Croome had him run his fingers over an apport Morse signaller of outdated shape. She asked him then to tap out whatever came to his mind, inserting spoken words between. She asked him to imagine, too, that they were not alone in the room and that as well as her he addressed a haint.

Advance, he tapped. Listen. Neutralise.

—Consider, he said aloud.

Sitrep, he typed. Retreat. Hold. —Father. Mother.

—Really? he heard Croome say. —You don’t have to suck up to me, you know.

He finger-tapped. End. Friend. —Time, he said. Enemy. Start.

—Though I would be lying, she said, —not to admit, to my chagrin, how helpful some such well-worn lines of enquiry can be.

Stallo finger-tapped, Tell Me Who You Are.

He waited for her disapproval; she must have known the code. Croome did not offer it.

[22]

Maur stands by the bedroom door, watching, as Stallo told her to. Croome lays out a pressed grey dress. The old woman takes off her nightclothes and begins to change without embarrassment.

“You’re tangled up with Allardyce, then,” she says.

“It’s about my son,” Maur says.

“Oh, I daresay.”

“What did you do?” Maur says.

The woman stops with her garment unfastened. “That could mean a multitude of things.”

“When Cybill’s daughter came back. That didn’t feel the same”—she gestures back in the direction of that night’s confrontation—“as that.”

“It was not.” She walks out.

The study is large and tidy and books fill the shelves on every wall. Her big dark desk faces out directly into the upper reaches of trees below but when she sits Croome turns the chair to face her visitors at the entrance. Stallo’s smile is glassy. He holds his weapon dangling.

“Doc,” he says.

“Am I to be impressed with your insouciance, Sergeant?” she says.

“You were never impressed with much.”

“What was that thing?” Maur says.

“You’ll think it arch,” Croome says, “but I prefer the French. An esprit frappeur.”

“Well done for setting that,” Stallo says. “Didn’t know that was possible. Long time since you were a confused teenager, Doc. That sort of skill’s exactly why we’re here. It’s nothing of any mind,” he says to Maur. “A polt’ll just rattle your windows and chuck things about.”

“There are benefits,” Croome says, “that outweigh even the odd broken glass. Even if bark is worse than bite it isn’t entirely biteless. As you’ve experienced. Though the bark alone is quite enough to discourage most interest. And if its capabilities are limited and simple, it’s also less prone to backfire and endanger its user than an RE, which is a blessing, and it’s less likely to be distracted.”

They all let a silence come and go. Maur holds up her own hands, wondering that they still grasp in a world of such things.

“To what do I et cetera?” Croome says.

“Any chance of a brew?” Stallo says.

“That is quite the brass neck,” Croome says. She watches him with what looks to Maur genuine curiosity. The night behind bathes her in its dark. “Sergeant, it has always felt to me—don’t you have this sense?—that no one connected with the Rouse ever has a quiet retirement. What is it that’s interrupted your own autumn years?”

“Remember Hong Kong?”

“Are you appealing to an old comrade? How sweet.”

“Remember Madrid? When was it you left the program, Doc?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because it was after me, so I don’t know how clear things were when you handed in your notice. That there was…well. Trouble brewing. I know you knew that, of course. I think you knew before anyone. But the scale of it? I could never tell how bad you thought things were. Or are.” He seems to consider each sentence before speaking it. “What were we even for, the Unit? What are we for now?”

“You aren’t a soldier any more.”

“I’ll always be a soldier.”

“Oh very good, yes. Although.” She tilts her head. “It seems to me an aspect of you has retired, no? Or a close collaborator, if you’d rather?”

“That’ll do.”

“We never know what we’ll miss, do we?”

“Fuck’s sake,” Stallo says. “Enough. I almost didn’t come here you know.”

“I might have missed the chance to reminisce? Heaven forfend…”

“Fucking tempting to just turn around and start hunting but…I don’t have a death wish.”

Croome regards him with interest. “Well in point of fact, even talking only about the living, for all that sense I mention, it’s not really true. There are those who simply leave everything behind. Who go from being ITKO to…” She twirls her hand. “To being solicitors. Contractors. Consultants. Art dealers.”

“That’s not you or me though is it?”

“It quite fascinates me. I remember when I was training. With the quick, I mean, before I heard a whisper of the Roused, when dinosaurs roamed. Reading Jenseits des Lustprinzips and some of the very affecting testimonials that came out of the war and so forth. And then, I’m not quite sure why, but the causality felt rather direct, reading, of all things, Sapper.” She smiles. “Cyril McNeile. Which very clearly showed that not everyone finds such a war impossible to let go of or a trauma in the first place, however thoughtfully they may have written of it at first. Yes of course you can make an argument that those keen to insist that they were never touched by it or that they enjoyed it are the most stricken of all, but I wonder if the more disturbing fact isn’t that some of them are telling the simple truth. Mutatis mutandis? From one war to another? Hot to cold? What do you think?”

“Dub-dub One’s one thing, Doc,” Stallo says. “What we did’s hardly the same.”

“Ah, but both,” she says, “and specifically and only both, perhaps, are characterised by grauen. A certain fear and a particular trembling. What if there is no Kaiser gap?”

“Don’t start….”

“What if you and your comrades were the last holdouts of that earlier war? As the Japanese soldiers in the Pacific jungles are to the war that came after? Perhaps I’m quite wrong and most of our ex-colleagues really did give none of it another thought,” she says. “When they left. Perhaps you’re the anomaly.”

“Alright, Doc, give it a rest.”

“I thought you were here to hear me speak.”

Somewhere a clock is ticking.

“My, our ex-comrades…” Stallo shakes his head. “They’re not much of anything any more.”

“I wouldn’t dispute that the glory days are over. But I don’t pry. Leave an old woman to her dotage is the vibration I strive to put out into the world.”

“Yeah go on,” Stallo says. “As if anyone knows the in-house stories like you.”

To Maur, Croome says, “What he means is the stories that occurred between the Roused themselves. So to speak. That due diligence can become tiresome, can we just assume metaphor henceforth?”

“We used to talk about the farthest light,” Stallo says. “When a lespry wouldn’t do what we wanted we’d say it was because it was shying. Like a horse. Because of what it could see ahead. What if there’s more and more of that about? Ahead and behind.”

The window frame rattles hard. From another floor, Maur hears something fall and crack. No one moves. Croome gives another austere smile.

“It’s just her dog,” Stallo says. “Her guard.”

“It isn’t mine,” she says. “One doesn’t have it. One may entice it awhile.” She stands and walks towards Stallo with slow dignity and points at his side, by his leg, where he carries nothing. “Where’s trusty Excalibur? Your spear, your Sharur? One heard—”

“I bet you did,” Stallo says. “That’s what I’m saying. You always kept your ear to the ground.”

“Another helpful aspect of what you encountered upstairs,” she says. “These days I mean. It doesn’t seem vulnerable to whatever ails increasing numbers of actual Roused.”

“Like her daughter,” Stallo says. Points at Cybill.

“Could you tell too?” Croome says it breathily, urgently, to Cybill. Who says nothing. “You might ask yourself how you could have that sense. Of suffering.” She shrugs as if the word will do. “Beyond what’s given in its essence.”

“And of it being hunted,” Stallo says. “How long’s this been brewing? And what’ll keep it, you know, out of reach?”

“I’ve been rather avoiding thinking about that,” Croome says. “Some years, if I had to guess.”

“Maybe that’s why the Unit’s been going downhill,” Stallo says. “The kit’s falling apart. The nature of the age. There’s a new kind of death about.” Maur feels witness to that, a dying now occurring for the first time. Not her son though. Such new-dead status is reserved for Cybill’s daughter, Cybill with her fucking folded arms.

“So how do we stay safe from what’s coming, Doc? It was there when her daughter started to arrive. That was a power spike, and it found her. But she’s still close, and she has something to say.”

“I always told you it wasn’t about individual secrets.”

“Due respect Doc not everything you told me was true. She’s right there. How do we let her tell her mum whatever it is she wants to? Without drawing attention?”

“What’s an empty person?” Maur says. All heads turn her way. “That’s what she said to Jock. Your Azeri.” Croome’s eyes widen and she looks at Jock and then at Stallo, at Jock again. “She said there were empty people now. We’re meant to find out everything we can about what’s happening, like, yeah, what was behind Jules. Stallo you said a kabus is a spirit of the dead. What’s an empty person?”

“The Azeri,” Croome says. “Well. Legends walk among us. Might an empty person not be what’s left when a kabus leaves?”

“Isn’t that just a corpse?” Maur says.

“Enough,” Stallo says. He slaps the tabletop. “We don’t know what she meant by that, and what matters is that thing she’s ushering in. The Azeri’s a fucking fanatic. Wants renewal and doesn’t give a fuck about any of us, I mean any of the quick. And she wants revenge too. Over the years we put paid to a lot of plans. Including Marco’s. If I’m not wrong, that nutter was the last of her collaborators from the old crew. Maybe more. Whatever last-ditch effort it is she’s got going on now, it’s not going to be pretty. Year Zero. Start again.”

A quiet follows.

“It’s true,” Croome says. “Our erstwhile employers don’t seem to be pursuing things nearly as seriously as they should. Whether because they’re complacent or incapable. Or both. They’ve no adequate response to such times. And humans being human, rather than admit that, one imagines they tell themselves there’s no cause for concern.”

“Which leaves it down to me,” Stallo says. “Us. I want to show you something.”

He looks at Cybill. She takes out the letter. Hesitates, hands it to Croome, who strokes the envelope, her fingers lingering; removes and unfolds each sheet. Breathes out.

“Oh,” she says finally. “My.”

“Subpar they might be, but the old crew is after this,” Stallo says. “And us. But I think what was in that room got a whiff too.”

“I’m sure,” Croome says. She stares at him. “I’m going to ask you to leave as quickly as is feasible.”

“Soon as we’ve got the measure of things. Get some advice about how to do what we have to. We have to tread very careful, and your house is protected.”

“To a degree…”

“I need your eyes. This one’s kid…” He gestures at Cybill. “Look at the letter. I’m telling you, it wants to say something.”

In the kitchen Maur sees bread and crackers and olives and cheese on the side and considers again the awful continuance of the mundane. Beyond the windows, night is going on a long time for them.

“All right then,” Croome says. “You really want to do this.” Her weary affect doesn’t disguise excitement. She goes to the windowsill and does something with two old machines. She turns out the light and the glow of a wavering line on one screen illuminates trembling needles on the gauges of its neighbour. Out of, made of the darkness in her mind, a sense of a tower looms within Maur abruptly. It’s distant and gone again, that bodily architecture. Time is all there is now.

“Very well,” Croome is saying somewhere.

She could have been sitting here in the green dark for years, Maur could, listening to the static from an unseen speaker and to Cybill’s voice, looking up to where Jock sits with his eyes closed, and back to the letter, lying there unfolded, the edges of the papers weighed down with saltcellars and egg cups and cutlery. Cybill whispers its words. Oh yes, as she croons quietly you can hear the want, but it’s brittle.

Jules? Whisper whisper.

Cybill moves her fingers to the last page. Maur thinks, You are leaving too much out. She thinks, Cybill you are doing this wrong. Maur can discern, though, fewer words upon the middle page than she had thought. Does it flutter at the edges?

Behind her lips Maur says her own son’s name. Listen to nothing, come touch my shoulder, Maur thinks. Jules Jules Jules, yes, but behind her, not that sneaky thing, behind that maybe, are you listening too? Her nose is running. It will drip upon her shirt. She feels her stomach roil, she needs the toilet.

Croome sits with back very straight staring at the outlines of running ink, the lit-up waves. She’s frowning. And the windows and the wood of the house creak and Maur thinks she might as well whisper something but before she murmurs You, Yew, the proportions of the room she sees go wrong and Croome’s eyes narrow and she gasps and even in the shade Maur sees threads of spit stretch and split between her lips.

—

Croome fumbles at the machines and turns them off and takes in a breath and stands and turns on the light. Breathes heavily with her old arms shaking.

“Why’ve you stopped?” Cybill shouts. The last word very loud.

“You stupid woman,” Croome says.

“What about your protections—” Stallo says.

“As I bloody feared and bloody told you,” Croome says, “it’s not adequate for whatever that was. You’ve no idea how much trouble I just avoided. There is attention you do not want to draw.”

Stallo stares at her and his mouth works. Then: “You see?” he says. He’s plaintive. “It is, it’s waiting. Just beyond her daughter. Fucking see what I mean?”

Curious episode. Single-file into the cold after two days in the hostel, watched in turn by mountains. Been to see the church, as would any visitor, and the old great house, and turned to pages of Travellers’ Phrases, asking of shopkeepers and the museum attendant places you might find pleasure in walking, Off the beaten track, you know. She laughed, the last, the young curator, and answered in a lovely clipped English you praised. You bought sausage and cheese and dry biscuits. Lunched at a beer hall. A woman in middle years and clothes modish enough to suggest that she was not local asked you where you were off to.

—I’m here for family, she said. —Look, I’ll show you where you could go. You counted out unfamiliar money. She went with you outside. At the corner where the main street met a tucked-in alley no locals were near, she said in a new tone, —Proceed as planned, no more signs, so quick. Readings are going up, careful.

Rucksacks on backs you set out in the direction of the afternoon sun, chattering together through town fringes, past men and women on errands smiling at all you Englishmen. Checked your maps, made a show of it, turning them like wheels as amateurs do. Into alpine country. Haltingly you asked permission to pitch in an old woman’s orchard. In the morning accepted the bread and milk and washed at a pump and set off for the peaks. The land fell away towards forest. Your demeanours changed as you went into it. You watched a village from another time, children in clothes like illustrations, men and women in the shadows of their witches’ wooden houses. You knew where were the grazing grounds, the woodland heart, the church and the graveyard.

Night and goats complained. Ready. Weapons, equipment in your hands. A lopsided theatre bounded at north and east rims with white dead trunks like teeth, west and south a stretch of shale. It was too late for the couples who came here to fuck, the children to hide and giggle and watch or play other games, and what with the recent stories, and so on.

Flurina Rey, born 1871. She’d married, it was not happy. Had two children, both died, one young one very young. You could not afford to assume nor discount anything in such a search. Flurina Rey had had failed love affairs and her husband intimidated the men from the village and had died, and she had tended what she had and was treated by her neighbours with anything from kindness to scorn, and by the local children with cruelty or fear. Some had called her Catillon after the last witch burned, some a poor old thing.

In 1957 she was found—that passive! But so it was, her discovery and subsequent glimpsing not in the nature of an act. So she was found, leaning over her kitchen table, her body stiff. Three years thereafter a boy came running home crying that he had felt a hand on his shoulder as he came through the graveyard. As he trod, he admitted to the priest, on Flurina’s grave. He died four months later. Someone saw lights and outlines. Someone smelt flowers—her favourites—and Flurina’s baking. By this clearing. With which until her death there had been no stories connecting her but which recently had been named the location of her short-lived trysts. Her husband had been an angry man. Why these reports reached critical mass now you couldn’t know. This was now urgent, a passing place.

Without speech you set up your station, your circle of salts, your traps, your field Rouse. You’d been sent after better leads and would be again. The lights of the machine did not illuminate but punctuate, giving shape with constellations. After three in the morning came cold clamminess. The wishing of leaves ceased.

What was left for the unplanned? Not lespry invoked but some fugacious spontaneously revenant fetch, returned-but-not-called-forth?

You were ready or at least not surprised. Looking into the dim of the slope at a flicker like phosphor or a candle in its last guttering and the gust of a skirt.

This stumbling woman.

The presence of what had once been gone. The death of plants and insects in its path, you, animal too, hammering within. Oh she’d come outlined in dark and falling over the shame, no same, same few yards towards the clearing again and again overlaid at different ages, none persuasive, stuck on a descent. While you watched. Striving to breathe. Dialled through frequencies. Where she’d be an insinuation, this windblown random hantu, your engines lent her substance to decide what they would do.

Don’t speak. Her silent steps, her face. What children she would have grasped. No pleasure to that violence, no sadism.

You strove to clench your shivering fingers and with a sound like twigs snapping discharged your traps’ energies

outlined the walker in its stances arms and legs out like a baby experimenting with the fact of itself, silhouetted by the aura you’d granted her, parody of the Kirlian, you shouting in jargon as if to invoke millispectra and res units might impress the returnee into staying, siphon it into the cone of glow—follow the light!—to where that dark bottle waited, but

her feet adrift, mouth open in complaint

the glass cracked.

A horrid new noise, the opposite of a Rouse.

She was gone and you, all of you, were only blinking and holding your hands to your ears and the emptiness of the night made your skin itch. There she was, gone.

Perhaps no more children would feel the passing brush of fingers or the drawn-out apoptosis resulting. You could call it a rescue. Had there been anyone to lie to, just in the know enough, you might have said you’d done it for the kids and succeeded, rather than to recruit and failed.

XII

Defence in
Depth

Trench

—Do you know who are the worst savages in this country? said the embassy man.

Hours out of Nairobi. On the car’s right, a whaleback of rock. Acacias clambered its lower flanks and birds circled its peak in languid hunger, taking turns to descend to where something had died. Mulligan, his name was, glanced at Stallo. —Sergeant, I say, you want to know the most irredeemable tribe in this shithole? It’s us. The African has an excuse: he’s an African. But we should know a damn sight better. Like this bloody farrago you chaps are looking into.

Stallo and Very Jerry watched him. Squinting little face and he could raise an eyebrow well but only the one, which meant he’d practiced. You could see Mulligan thought himself shrewd.

—It’s when you’re winning, he said, —that you have to be most careful. If Baring had done anything like Hola a few years ago, everyone would have said, Righto, finger to lips, because we were in the thick of it then. But in ’fifty-bloody-nine it was all over bar the shouting. “If we’re going to sin we must sin quietly.” Well, they ballsed that up.

Allardyce and Jerry had lain low at Nairobi Barracks, reading case reports and Hansard, and the local troops left them alone, only staring at them in the mess with baffled awe. Stallo was a man who provoked such looks now. From all except Mulligan, who had heard vaguely about their destination and had stopped by their table.

—Hullo. You’re heading south. May I tag along?

What hearsay his company might generate would be better camouflage than no stories at all.

—Yes, I know you’re here about Hola, Mulligan said. The Uniteers kept their faces blank as if unsettled at his perspicacity. He was pleased. —What a bloody mess. That’s what I’m getting at. He smoked into the whipping air. —Rank bloody savagery, and, worse, pointless. And they loved it! The settlers. The white Mau Mau. Not my term.

There was a knack to rumours. Thank you Psyops for disseminating such whispers that Stallo’s lot (research, was the assumption) were there to deal with some new (secret) Hola fallout. Not untrue. You could call it a mess but you couldn’t call it an accident. Not in a country so absolutely planned. Swynnerton Plan, the Pipeline, the Cowan Plan of which Hola was articulation. Should they refuse they would be manhandled to the site of work and forced to carry out the task. Any reasonable reader, the coroner had said, would construe that as carte blanche. A few intransigent prisoners, taken a couple of years and a previous nation ago, refusing to know that the fight was lost. LFA and KCA and the 40 Group, oath takers who never called themselves by that animal-cry name Mau Mau that the Brits bestowed, but, it becoming unsloughable, very well, had poets among them run a post-factum acronym. Let those letters stand and have stood for “Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru.” “Whites go home and freedom for Africans,” or thereabouts.

Retrocausality might do the trick for some things, excellently, but it had not helped in the Hola trench. Monstrous heat. An experimental garden, work duty. Into a deep ditch looked upon by officers and five guards for every prisoner. Sullivan had said, —Dig.

They would not, they said.

—Very well.

Sullivan blew his whistle. Signalled in the blows. The unsheltered men had held each other under the attack.

—A little respect next time, boys.

Then. Sullivan and his men had hollered in new panic. Seeing, some said according to intel, in the interweaving limbs of the bloody prisoners a nascent architecture, a rising tower of flesh. Hearing a terrible call.

The guards had come in again, harder. Six whistle blasts. Such a stupid mess.

—How many? Sullivan had asked at last. Dead, he didn’t bother to say. Eleven. Everything was always about accounting. Those for whom accounts were kept bickered over tallies. Peel: There are obvious risks in dealing with subhuman individuals.

Stallo’s own mild disgust at this stuff made him curious. Killing was one thing, his trade. In which, except for a very few occasional moments of unofficial outright smack-your-face argy-bargy he took no pleasure, though nor did he balk at it, nor in the commission of which work well done might he not take professional satisfaction. Killing was what it meant to pursue politics, the other means, what he’d chosen or what had chosen him, fair play to that. The queen has her beasts and so on. But this, this mucky bloody inefficiency. Well. Needs must. Had the crown not pried at local fractiousness it would not have deserved to rule. So to deal with time-servers and traitors. The government put villages behind fences and bombed highlands and dragged men behind cars.

—I won’t lie, Hook had briefed. —It’s been nasty.

Slicing balls, cranking volts, dropping men, drop after drop, not so much strange fruit as strange suspended roots, epiphytic stalks grown into forests from the mandrakes of the condemned. Sullivan’s garden, Erskine’s garden where monkeys made excited mourning in a crossbar canopy. Clear a path with pangas, walk on bloody earth.

(—Jesus, Stallo, Marks had said. —Where do you get this stuff?

—Can’t choose your dreams can you? he had said. —Anyway I’m not complaining I’m just saying.

Some dusk-light trick: her freckles had been invisible. He’d watched her as they walked waterside and she’d looked like an older version of herself, an adult to her usual sixth-former, and then like someone he did not know at all.

—It all depends what you mean by “choose,” she’d said, and taken her own sidelong look back at him and, he remembered, he’d actually lost the rhythm of his steps at her knowing, her expression of something like interest and calm dislike.)

They’d say it needed doing. Well that it needed to be done which is almost the same. Didn’t mean Stallo had to fucking like it. You could get a long way, though, a long way, by not thinking about it. That just took a bit of grit. Which Bowler seemed not to have, kept going on about this situation, like a civilian. Yes it was effort to not dwell but not so much as all that, and worth it. And if he could hear Croome somewhere in the back of his mind telling him that not-thinking about something isn’t the same as not thinking about it, well, good for clever clogs, he still wasn’t thinking about it.

Mulligan probed. It might not have been the case, as tradecraft operatives such as he clearly liked to say, that more than half their job was figuring out what their own ruddy side was up to, but it was an exaggeration, not a lie. His efforts to pal up, store up credit with Stallo and Jerry, be rewarded with a nugget or two, had never been going anywhere, but he laid out a good bit of local goss as his own offering, as they’d known he would. They left him crestfallen.

Ten soldiers waiting, and Stallo and Very Jerry made twelve in R Unit bush camp. An echo of the jungle bivouacs of Malaya. Hooper, weirdly tough for the first time since Stallo’d known her, glasses and all, Hensley (shy away, Hensley!), Potter, watching him cautiously, Mahdi with that shrewd unhappiness. Hook. Missions led by whoever was the best for the job, and now that meant Stallo.

Before dawn, on a day that would be searing, he addressed them. Everyone wore insignia-free veldt khaki.

—Cover is we’re here preliminary to a follow-up enquiry. That’s bollocks and everyone’ll know it’s bollocks. They’ll think we’re poking around because we’ve got wind of something, and they’re not wrong. Those of you on-site, what you’re doing is apport-hunting.

—Your sensitive mitts not going to be with us, Sarge?

—You’ll have to manage without me to wipe your arse.

—Bit of a waste of Adele, isn’t it?

Adele Mahdi met Stallo’s eyes with his usual quiet suspicion. —Hardly, Stallo said. —Mahdi can play local guide.

Mahdi did not look local, was black was all.

—We’re piggybacking an ongoing NITKO crew called Operation Prodigal. Though not for the reasons they might hope.

One benefit of making up with certain former enemies, as Kenya showed could happen even after remarkable unpleasantness, was access to information. Garbled of course but what wasn’t? (—The Bible’s just unclear intel, Bowler once said.) Those around Kenyatta had tipped the wink on infighting, passed on the claim that after five, six years, Stanley Mathenge had returned. Forest fighter, the holdout.

—There’ll always be those who don’t know they’ve lost, Stallo said. —This whole thing could be hearsay and bullshit but we’ve had some non-stupid reports that someone’s in the bush round here, and there’s word of 40-R—that’s 40-Renewal, hard-core—linked to Stan’s outfit. Turning their backs on the new deal.

—R versus R, Bowler said.

—Why us?

—Because, Hook said, —we are highly suspicious of coincidence in the Unit. If Stan is out there, it seems a bit much that he perks up just as we also get meaningful jaw-jaw about unquietness in the Hola ground.

He let that settle. Rumours from, Stallo gathered, that most unlikely source, again: Moscow. Very much the main enemy, of course, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but if there were something to this chitchat, even some relatively minor nonaligned group would be best dealt with chop-chop. Balance of power and so on.

—Yes, Hook said. —Listen to the tapes. If Stan is there, let’s find out what he has to do with it. Bring him in. Dead or alive.

Neither anecdotes of revenance nor gauge spikes on ectometers were rare; the Uniteers had come because of these stories on that tape. From the camp.

The Mau Mau pyramid. Old colonial bogeyman, that ziggurat. Ridiculed but tenacious. The Mau Mau howl. A man should not ululate; that was a woman’s funereal noise. From a man it was terrible, the reports explained. Nothing should sound like that.

I’d never heard it myself until then. Now imagine it multiplied by more’n you could imagine. Mau Mau bastards.

Stallo listened.

I heard about the pyramid years ago. In Special Branch you learn about such things. It’s beastly stuff, just beastly. I never thought I’d see it. In the trench. I knew something was happening, there was a surliness you might say to them, but I never in a million years. At first they were crawling on the ground—

Who were? All the prisoners? Some of them? We are talking about the living men are we not? Why did only some of you report this phenomenon?

Crawling and crying. I mean of course it was the living ones, of course it was, but at the same time it didn’t seem…

It was almost as if it was the others, the ones already, you know, the ones who’d passed on, who…

They were writhing and howling and the others sort of fell back on top of each other like acrobats or something but torn up. Layer after layer and they kept moving, that’s what was so ghastly. Piling up but they kept moving. It was like nothing so much—I’ve seen bombs, believe me—as a bomb site, all tangled-up body parts and blood and muck, but still…alive? I suppose—

—crawling right through each other so you can’t tell where one bugger ends and the next begins, all bloody and slippery

Alright alright. The dead:

Mwema Kinuthia, Kabui Kaman, Ndungu Kibaki, Migwi Ndegwa, Ngugi Karitie, Koroma Mburu, Kaman Karanja, Kinyanjui Njoroge, Karanja Munuthi, Ikeno Ikiro, Mungai Githi.

Stallo and his comrades knew the names, that knowing the obverse of the assiduous unnaming elsewhere. It is not Stallo, though, who recites this litany.

Eyes everywhere. But they didn’t look at us at all. Men a tower barrow how many of them dead? Not sparing executioners and torturers a countergaze. Well it’s no wonder is it? I mean, it shouldn’t have happened like it did, but given that it did it’s no wonder what came up.

The tape whipped from a spool then and spun, tuhtuhtuh.

Pyramid my fucking eye. Sullivan dreaming up shit to cover his back. True, Intel had traced KH contacts with Kikuyu intransigents, and you had to imagine the cultural exchange. Your rites for ours, what do you find works?, Have you tried smudging?, How do you keep an angry ancestor at bay?, How do you ask their help? Maybe not Mathenge himself but some disgruntled ex-Akurinu abjuring the Holy Ghost for those more profane, stoking up ngomi to restless malevolence, a weapon certainly but hardly even close to the A-bomb, anyway, someone ITKO among the Kenya movement was talking to them.

And then these bush stories. Pyramid my eye, Stallo thought again, yes, even though, then, now, months, years later, something did appear to be up, something was going on, farmers and police, locals and whites, telling tales that the waganga were seeing it again. Yards high, in the bush. A pyramid that walked, made of the dead. Stallo thought, My eye. Walls that walk.

They probed in little teams. The vegetation was like scales and wire. Stallo followed brown waters. He would stop when birds announced dawn. As if pushing through thornbushes around a fable castle, Uniteers carried their apports. This man half a spoon. That one a battered shotgun though it could not shoot. A club, at least. Shards, books, paper, cloth. Stallo a bit of a radio.

—This is shabby stuff, Bowler said. —Don’t you get sick of it, mate? It’s no way to make a fucking living.

Stallo laughed and Bowler indicated the sky. Nothing was unprecedented, this being a big world and history long. One night Stallo said to Hook, —What’s the biggest apport there’s ever been?

—Lord, I don’t know. I once sat on a chair that Benner—in charge of research before Croome, in a sanatorium now, poor chap—swore blind was a congelation, which is what he was wont to call them. I was once told the Mary Celeste was an apport.

—What was its snag?

—That I never heard.

Then, —You know when you check if someone’s breathing with a mirror? Stallo said. —There’s a mirror lost somewhere in the storeroom, I heard, still clouded up. The snag’s some bloke’s last breath.

—Oh, you don’t believe that charming story, Hook said. —Is it Nelson’s? Monty’s, in your version? Churchill’s? An unknown ever-so-’umble brave rifleman’s?

—No, you’re right, I don’t believe it, Stallo said. —It’s a bit much.

—I’d entertain it if the snag was, I don’t know, a too-thick tain, or something. As I recall, the story goes that that’s one of the special apports, no? With the unique power to show you something-or-other?

Now Stallo smiled. —The truth, is what I heard. But yeah, God’s not Aesop. Still you can’t tell me no apport has unique effects.

—They all have unique effects, Hook said.

—Then they ain’t unique.

—Touché. They’re all equally extraordinary.

—Some are more equal….

Hook said, —I do so enjoy our daily joust.

Escorted by a tracker, a thoughtful and portly SIS man came into camp to pass on rumours and point at maps. An unknown region. —Goats taken from here, here, here. And with regard to your query, he said carefully to Stallo, —I’ve not found much that seemed relevant or folklore not already in your dossier. I only have…From his pocket he took out and unfolded a typed sheet, and read it over silently. —So apparently, among the Kamba, some young women marry chaps who are already dead.

Stallo held out his hand and the man gave him the paper. —Ta, Stallo said. —What do you know about the Mau Mau pyramid?

—Not as much as you.

On the sixth day Potter, quick and silent despite his bulk, found tracks. Stallo whispered at nothing into the apport radio. He held it to his ear. They continued into the thickets for two more days. With a little daylight left, they found a camp. Wedged in a junction of trees, Stallo looked out to a stockade, huts, a trench beyond hard earth. Figures. A sound behind him; he gestured with his free hand to shut it. Kept his eyes on the figures in his glass.

—Twelve, maybe?

The Uniteers huddled. —Looks like they’re packing up and backup’s a day away. What are we thinking?

—It’s, what, three to one, but that doesn’t count…

—Yeah, what if they have lespries?

—Hooper. Potter.

They took battery and scanner, and Potter hitched a Rouse engine on his back, and Stallo sent them to a raised place with the least bad line of sight of the 40-R, if so they were, pulling their camp apart. With dark the Uniteers spread out beyond the perimeters. There were no fires. A melancholy rolled off the place. Stallo felt the shifts of wind.

But before agreed go-time there came up from beyond rises of stone and earth an abrupt, shockingly loud collective wail. The night animals went silent. A clatter then of weapons, shouts. A scream of pain, another patter of shot. Stallo signalled: Deploy.

The unit’s haint bottles opened, glowed.

Move up on the left! Move up on the right!, Stallo fleetingly considered shouting, old grassroots trick of the outnumbered, as rifled shadows came already into view. A scarred man moving in a crouch holding an old weapon. Still the screaming. The ground reverberated. As if a building fell or walked. Another noise like footsteps in shallow water, running too fast. A mucked-about-with tape.

God help him, men waited in the clearing, saw him. Stallo gestured at what the unseen shadow-cages released and pointed with the pointing sense. He saw felt knew a weapon’s muzzle aimed at him.

A dark crawled across his vision and he fought to breathe. Time stuttered, he saw motion and felt the stare of many eyes glimpsed against the dark sky the multiple unfoldings of limbs composite moving

and

God bless you Potter and/or Hooper reading the field and sending whatever awful Rouse-reversed it was that sucked away a cone of enemy revenant drone and

Stallo could breathe again because that glimpsed pylon was not there now and

Stallo stood and shot and this newfangledness was still all wrong so he pressed his elbow back to his gut into the fighting crouch, homage and invocation, and swept around no doubt by intrigue gusts and the goading spikes of energy from the Unit’s traps and hidden amplifiers and coaxed and directed by the skilful fingers of Hooper watching feedback in the gauges and Potter dampening down reverberations in the danger zone, Stallo made himself a funnel, he squeezed the orange, made his pistol his metal finger, indicated, commanded, begged without words.

The man coming for him fired.

And was there another

stood in the air? in the bullet’s path?

Sunlit for an instant in beams not there in boots black with foreign mud lost light upon a tricorn Brown Bess musket man strobing in and out of ruined pose torn whole torn glowing in the night in sunlit red coat

and did it strain

for the shaded gun still aimed at Stallo and did

it reach inside the wielder

?

Screaming still. No, again. Someone shouted in Kikuyu. And had there been behind Stallo another older verdured watcher?

Redcoat, gone now, had swept through the enemy, blood drops crooked like fingers, falling uphill. Three men lay where it had passed. Two were stiff and dead and too cold and the last lay dying.

—Hensley? Stallo said.

Bowler shook his head. —Don’t know, he said.

—He was channelling, Jerry said. —Giving it tongues.

They followed Jerry to where Hensley had knelt and Jerry traced with his fingers a soldier-shaped emptiness between thorns and stone.

—Oh fuck, Stallo said.

What had marked the dirt might have been the underside of a pack, the butt of a rifle, knees and hands. What had left its marks might be soles (you had to laugh). This was Hensley’s silence, he was nowhere now.

—

Stallo’s team came to where the last enemy scratched and clutched. Disarmed two who lay with British knees in their backs looking up with that expression Stallo hoped never to wear, of someone caught by an enemy who’s seen comrades die. Six men and a woman killed by British bullets. Others in rigor as if much longer gone than they could possibly have been, faces dreadful, skins chill, a glaze like hoar.

—Good job, Potter, Hooper, Stallo said.

—Sarge?

—Dampening down whatever the fuck that was that attacked.

Owl-eyed, they looked at him and then each other.

—No Mathenge, Sapers said. —Maybe he was never here. Or he got away.

A man busy dying.

—He’s barely a kid, Bowler said.

—Boo-fucking-hoo, Jerry said.

Bowler said, —He’s on his way out.

—Hear that, sonny? Stallo squatted by the shaking man. —English, mate? You’ve not got long. He spoke softly. —What happens now? Where you off to, you reckon? What do you have to say for

and the sound of dry branches, so the sky had moved a bit and Stallo stayed still as he had learnt to do when he lost seconds. He felt the inside of his mouth with his tongue and it was open and whatever part of him it was that kept on when he left had been speaking. He was still where he had been. He waited but the sentence his return had interrupted would remain for the rest of time until the universe died unknown to him, unsaid. Stallo let his heartbeat slow.

—Who exactly are you lot? Stallo said. —It’s like everyone knows everyone in your line, isn’t it? Give us a hand? There’s you, Blouin’s bunch, Assagai, Moscow, EOKA, Peking, KH. That’s what we call them, them we’re most curious about. I just bet you’re comrades. He whispered then, so only the dying man could hear. —I clocked your towerman. Did they help you with that? Are you helping them? Is all this “you-them” missing the point?

The man gasped.

—No rest on earth, eh? Stallo said. —Thi ndiri uhuruko. Go on, mate, tell us.

Whatever the man was watching it was far away and coming closer. He whispered too.

—Is that the oath? Stallo said. He click-clicked his fingers. —Get me a bottle. An empty one. The lespries are back in theirs? Set it up fast.

While they did so the dying man closed his eyes. Stallo put his ear close enough that had the man pursed his lips he could have kissed him. The man spoke the idiolect of the dying, whimpers and words made of breath, as if to an animal at a gate, as if a dog answered from a little farther beyond.

Stallo said, —See you in a bit.

The man’s breath stopped. Stallo heard no insect static. No knock of boles and boughs. The dead man spoke silence. And the battery began to hum. And a cold light came up from the blue. A dark light, you might call it, that lit up Stallo’s face.

[23]

How is Maur supposed to speak to Cybill or receive her mutters? Even now it seems she’s still waiting for a community of loss, but Cybill’s cathexis goes in a different direction from hers. And Jock, it’s as if he wants to speak but can’t tell whether to be forlorn or conspiratorial. A childish way to hold yourself for such a big man. Staring at Maur, as if auditioning to replace the fascinated dog. Anything she can think to say to him is cruel, he’s so out of place.

“Roused are rare now,” Stallo says. “Ailing or not, Jules is strong to have come through. At first without even a channel. A proper haunting. Against Teller, for whatever reason. And she shed that.” He points at the letter. “That’s why the Unit want her. Back to their glory days.”

“A temptation and a conduit,” Croome says.

“And we’re in the way.”

“Glory days,” Croome says. “That is going back. We were too lax too long.”

“Including you.”

“I didn’t exonerate myself. For now,” Croome says, “while you’re seeking information and weighing options, from what I can tell it seems to me that your main task is to keep that echo—to keep whom you lost, Cybill—as safe as you can. Out of harm’s way. It reads constrained, afflicted to some extent, yes, in ways…increasingly common among such phenomena. And yes, hunted, and yes, if my numbers are right not just by our old colleagues, Sergeant.”

“Tell me about it,” he says. Then: “Seriously, I know you have thoughts.”

“Stories about stories.” She speaks slowly. “They have their fables too, the suppletions. I realise how that sounds. And how much I’m contradicting my younger self. But so it did come to seem to me, in any case, what with the particular spikes and fluctuations of the signals bouncing around those old rooms. And no matter what barriers we liked to tell ourselves we erected between them. Might as well have been cuckoo spit.”

“What stories?” Maur says.

“Of course we’re talking here about the testimonials of some most eccentric channelers, and my own interpretations—reached after a long while and rather against my better instincts—of ambiguous data. You understand.”

“What stories?”

“Stories about us. And more to the point, their own scare stories.” Into the silence that follows, Croome says, “Oh yes.” Her wryness won’t quite take. “The things under their beds.”

“Like your poltergeist?” Maur says.

“Goodness no,” Croome says. “That’s not really much more than an excitable and rare electromagnetic field.”

“Way more powerful,” Stallo says. “And not mindless. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. I worked with a bloke who told me about—that. In some ways he was a clown. He was proud of it. Blah blah gift of laughter. But he knew about this stuff. Maybe because he was a clown even people who should’ve known better didn’t clock how clued up he was. It was a family business with him. He told me about a…Something like this. An entity.” He didn’t like saying that. “That his dad faced.” He pushes out his hand in an expulsive motion. “More by luck than anything maybe he managed to kick it out, in his version. But still, it was all We must remain vigilant, the way he told it.”

“And now,” Croome says, “one infers you’re wondering if there’s been vigilance enough. A sense of imminence is certainly growing. As I say, on the other side too.”

“Where’s Jules in all this?” Cybill whispers.

“And the Azeri?” It’s Maur’s voice that breaks the moment. “She wasn’t with the Russians, you said.”

Jock blinks. “The Communists?” he says. “She looked too young.”

“No, it wouldn’t seem that the Azeri would ever be Stalin’s revenge,” Croome says. “Though some intel suggests she did actually emerge from Russia, that moniker notwithstanding, and she’s clearly an ideologue.”

Maur says, “I still don’t understand why she’s doing this.”

“There’s never a shortage of fools or knaves,” Croome says. “Or sadists. And perhaps there’s inheritance.” She watches Stallo.

“What are you talking about?” Maur says. “Stallo?”

“I told you, she fucking hates us,” Stallo says. “Everyone, us most of all. Wants to watch it all burn.”

“It seems less than fair,” Croome says, “that she’s chosen you to be synecdoche for the crown, Sergeant. You of all people.”

“Why?” Maur says.

He shakes his head. “There’s no shortage of people who hate Britain. Or me. For a thousand reasons.“

The house, old enough to tremble in some winds, full of doors left ajar and light and dusty chambers, has that openness that is to Maur intensely un-English, a sense that thresholds and corridors do not so much lead anywhere as dispread into each other to let quiet through churchy spaces. Maur goes room to grand room, pulls open shutters and looks into garden gloom, the slopes of the country. Bookshelves line rooms other than the library, overlooking furniture settling into age, watched by painted watchers and the monochrome eyes of photographs of younger Croomes, colleagues, lovers, staff, who knows?, children, enemies, amanuenses.

Maur waits to be told to stop, that this or that place in the house is not for her to visit, but save Stallo saying they must stay within the walls because you never know, no such word comes. She opens drawers onto linings cut from wallpaper and wrapping paper to fit the trays containing nothing, parses dead flies dot-dotting window ledges. Sounds, the house whispers. Maur stays girded, to be the object of alien or late curiosity.

There is doubtless some local uninterested or respectful enough to ignore whatever occulta lie about while they clean. Croome is the type to inspire and demand loyal-retainer-ism.

It’s a large house but its layout cannot be so complex as it seems. Maur can make little sense of how it is she turns a corner and is back at a junction where the stairs rise. She won’t investigate such anomalies. Let the hallways hypnotise. She bargains wordlessly with the house and what dwells in it.

Below the kitchen a windowless basement—cave in French, “kahv”—stretches out to make her gasp. At the ceiling supported by prodigious pillars of stone and brick all covered so they look like black earth itself, the yellow bulbs like mutant mushroom nodes, dirty light across tables and iron machines, diodes and doodads, gauges dials and grilles and old parts, antique headphones microphones otherphones and somethingphones Maur does not recognise.

She could just plug one right in, no one will stop her.

Maur won’t do that, oh she has done that. She holds in her hands and does not recall picking up what looks like some very old headset-and-jutting-mouthpiece by a wall-of-slots combination such as she has seen in films in which young women chirrup into the funnels with that long-gone British trill, Hullo, caller, the prod and push of stiletto-like plugs into sockets, and the wire, patched and sutured, extends from what Maur wears now on her head as if it is some pinchbeck crown all the way dragging across the dirt that must be traversed by mice, perhaps rats, and up again, and she would push it into one of the little dark holes like eyes or lamprey mouths between the switches and the screens, but someone, it must be her, has done so. Oh you. Yew? Yoohoo.

Hello, Central. Yew?

“Yew?”

No needle jumps. The sound Maur hears is that of her own ears against her hair, the close-up noises of a body alone. Yew? “Yew.”

How long should someone stay in place at such a task? What’s appropriate? What is etiquette?

“Yew.”

Where the walls meet the floor the light seems most inadequate. Maur makes out the discards that have come here to rest. Rectangular can that once held petrol…flange of metal a hoe remnant…cardboard from a box that looks as soft as suede…tight tight ball like compressed tumbleweed, of scrags of wiring offcuts and broken ends, tangled as if a giant child scrunched them. None have any colour, they are made of shade. She is whispering her son’s name.

You know of course you’ll fail, at parenthood, in more ways than you might tally, seeing yourself doing the failing, hoping you succeed enough on the way, but you can’t know, going in, how spurts of guilt and its resentments will clench at you, the shame and regret at that dudgeon, vexation at that in turn and so endlessly on, from snares abounding, set by a world, what?, what?, all innocent. Guilt-trap images on TV, family dramas, that’ll do it. Ewan sitting there seeing fathers and sons, or sons without fathers, or mothers who rebuked her with the happiness or the particular unhappiness of their invented children. His homework. There in the middle of her kitchen table, biology textbook open to a box on physical stimulus and development and touch and Harlow’s monkey and her wire mother, “The Nature of Love,” Maur’d looked it up after her talk with Sonya, she remembers, little animal quivering overwatched by the food-nipple and ghastly face of the uncovered metal motherstatue that felt wrong to touch, clambering for the terry cloth mother for all it offered no calories. As if anyone of any age should be allowed to see such images, let alone children themselves, and why would those pictures come to Maur’s mind now? That scrap metal’s brought them back. She says her boy’s name under the earth with all the guilt she felt at that old sight of staring metal and a huddled little beast, and she insists again that what you never hear about is that experiment from the wire mother’s point of view, and she considers another thing you never hear about which is a wire child. What about that and how might a mother huddle in the presence of a wire son? Jesus Christ unthink this you disgrace. She’s crying.

Maur removes the headphones and takes the stairs, which lead her to where they should.

Croome is there, as if waiting.

“Ah, Ms. Towns. The prodigal returns.”

Don’t try your schoolmarm shit on me I’ve been intimidated by more arch than you, what do you think, you’re some Jean Brodie of the returned? All my ghouls are the crème de la crème ha ha.

Croome purses her lips as Maur says nothing. She takes Maur’s elbow and leads her into the kitchen and listens awhile to the rest of the house at the doorway then closes the door and sits and gestures for Maur to do the same.

“And how are you?” Croome says quietly.

Maur’s shoulders move as if she’s laughing.

“Yes,” Croome says. “Fair enough.” She folds her hands together and glances at the door. “What has Stallo told you of himself? And his experiences? I’m trying to ascertain what and how much you know.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s just bad at shedding light.”

“In my time I’ve seen him tell stories, and I’d have said he does it rather well. I’ve sat in rooms full of listeners no less rapt at his silences than his words.” Croome inclines her head. “He’s frustrated with me, or so he thinks. I suspect he’s more angry with himself. He doesn’t have a clear idea what he’s even here for. He’d like my help but has nothing to offer in return and doesn’t really know what shape that help might take. If help I could. I’m not criticising; I have no idea either. Anyone who tells you they really understand the nature of these functions we deal with is either a liar or mistaken.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Maur says when she can.

“I think…I’m pointing something out to you.” Croome frowns. “Because perhaps you, unlike your companions, might actually hear me. That letter. I haven’t seen or felt anything like that for a long time. If ever. If I had…” She’s careful. “If I was sceptical about Stallo’s dramatic claims—including the sort of presence that might be attracted to such a beacon—that goes a good long way to undoing it.”

“That letter’s nothing to do with me,” Maur says.

“You’re certainly wrong about that. Just because it was her daughter which—well, it’s a sight more complicated. What’s he told you about apports? Yes, this one was likely shed by what was born when Cybill’s daughter died, but shed from where? And with the involvement, let’s say, of what other forces? You’re not here by chance.”

Maur closes her eyes. “Are you saying my—”

“Now, now,” Croome murmurs. “I’m saying that as you know, something is reaching over, and that you’re part of this. You’ve surely seen how Stallo looks at you. He’s jealous. He wasn’t always a lone wolf you know.” She considers. Takes a notebook and a pen from her pocket and tears out paper and writes upon it. Hands it to Maur. A telephone number. Croome goes to the door. “Tea!” she calls. Maur puts the page in her pocket.

—

When the others have come in Maur is warming the teapot and she makes some comment about being an Englishwoman in France and so on.

“I have to make some decisions,” Stallo says. “You alright?” he says to Maur.

“Maur was asking me about those stories we discussed,” Croome says. “I was explaining that one couldn’t always tell from where they originated. The living or the dead. I owe myself a pound. Who first said, for example, that Sergeant Allardyce once fought the devil?”

Everyone looks at him. Is that much more to commit to, Maur thinks, than everything I’m now supposed to? Stallo says, “No.” His voice is level. “I don’t know who, I mean. And as if. Fuck’s sake, Doc.”

Croome says, “Sergeant, how am I supposed to know what you have and haven’t told your companions? Or me? This certainly isn’t the first time you’ve suspected enemies of dastardly invocations.”

“You mean the Russians again?” Maur says. “Or—KH?”

“A.k.a. Red Spectre,” Croome says. “At a certain point everyone was reading Fleming. When the films came out a whole subgenre of nicknames sprang up. I was Dr. No-You-Can’t. Never to my face of course. Bowler was Odd Job, wasn’t he? The sergeant was only ever Stallo. KH I heard some of the chaps call Red Spectre. That way they seemed a greater threat.” Maur thinks of Sara and her posters and marches. Of Sonn, her clenched fists, scrappy sardonic dissent.

“That lot were all Mario Tronti plus Eileen Garrett,” Stallo says. “In any case, yeah, they were straining for something. They had big plans. And then I thought history turned. We all did.” He looks to Croome, she nods.

“Indeed it did,” she says. “Poor old ‘Nergal.’ ”

“You’d be done by now if the padre had took you in,” Stallo says to Maur. “He’s too incompetent to clock how incompetent he is. That’ll be the way until he sees that thing come up over his shoulder in the mirror.”

Croome puts her hands down flat on the table, comes visibly to a decision. “I heard some years ago from someone who helped you in your business. Helped you a good deal. Irakli, was it not?”

A dangerous look takes Stallo. “I don’t remember mentioning that,” he says.

“No,” she says. “But he mentioned you.”

He watches like an animal at the edge of a clearing.

“A number of years ago,” she says. “When we seemed to have seen the last of you. I wasn’t one who believed that, I should say. Anyway, I wasn’t in this house then and I wasn’t as careful. Or perhaps he was assiduous. In any case, he found me. Had the good sense not to come to where I lived, unlike some, but buttonholed me, rather charmingly I must say, in the village. ‘Excuse me, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Stallo told me about you.’ One might have thought him a fool to open with that but it did the trick. You must have spoken highly of me. Very flattering that he thought I could help him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Stallo’s voice is flat.

“I’m doing so. As I say, I’ve learnt to be careful. Including about what I disclose and when. And to whom.”

“Who—” Maur begins, but Stallo raises his hand.

“What did he want?” he says.

“My help,” Croome says. “With a self-imposed mission. He had the gleam in his eye of a driven man. I wondered if he’d come to this country just to see me, but no, he said he was on a trail. Looking for sites of old experiments and battles. He’d moved here, France, for the apports.”

“I know that. He was wasting his time with what he was after. I told him.”

“As did I when he explained. But he said there’d been a ruckus, of some sort, and as a result, fallow ground was momentarily less so. He was excited. And seeing as he asked nicely, I did test what he gave me, as best I could. He wasn’t showing off, it was more he was seeking verification. I didn’t have our old resources, but one has methods.”

“What?” Stallo clenches his fists. “What the fuck did he have to test?”

“Fibres. The tiniest pinch. Which I thought, as I told him, were apport. Remarkably so.”

A whole complex of emotions goes over Stallo’s face.

“He seemed,” Croome says, “terribly, terribly pleased.”

Cold World

There were always warnings for the curious and this was a unit for the curious. If a few comrades still called Stallo Bookworm or Prof it wasn’t because he read but because he didn’t pretend to find that aspect of the work tiresome. Guest speakers rarely had bad turnouts even when attendance wasn’t mandatory. Academics, civil servants, officers, business leaders, scientists, foreign dignitaries, British MPs of every main party though by a margin mostly Tory—afterwards you’d see them on promised sightseeing ambles escorted by Hook or Carpenter herself.

On those days, warnings went out and noticeboards in mess and bar were checked for collegialisms too free with specifics. Here was Carpenter on such duty with an eager guest, and this time alongside them Simmons, a.k.a. the Baker.

—Hello hello, Simmons said, nodding to Stallo as they passed. He was a young and firm-chinned white chap rising up the boffins’ ranks, talking a shade too much and fast and with hair the slightest smidge too long for Stallo’s druthers for a man in his position.

Bowler, quietly in their wake: —How are the mighty fallen, eh? Reduced to tour guides. Singing for supper. Quid pro quo.

Yes, there was to these occasional visitors’ eyes delight at the Official Secrets they’d signed, annexes and all. Their hosts made sure at least once per visit to call out sharply Please stick with me whether or not any guest even glanced towards a path not taken, a little gift to thrill them at the proximity to banned ways.

—How many you reckon are ITKO? Stallo said.

—Not a lot, Bowler said. —They’re all TWITs.

Don’t object that TWIT is no more an accurate acronym of “the wrong idea” than is ITKO of “in the know.” Anyway you had to remind yourself sometimes what the secret soul of the job was, so earthbound were most days. Even given a manifestation according to dials and your inner ear, often you wouldn’t see anything but everyday walls and the usual old sky.

Carpenter’s face as she went by was like the empty centre of the world.

Whatever the truth of her WRAF career, the Uniteers placed her on the scene at every visitation for a century, every limen where anyone had ever said the skin of history was thinning—Delphi, Cumae, Sein, Ouessant, and in Albion especially, Chudleigh Caves, Cranmere, Dozmary. Procopius said the Goths pointed in Britain’s direction to show where the dead went: well quite. And Carpenter was there.

They placed her, too, at the intersections of politics and prosaica, the fallout from various reports, the end of National Service, the seeking of a line, meetings with advisors to the incoming government, in rooms with Yanks to discuss “Supernatural Counterinsurgency in the Congo,” newly released by CINFAC.

—Maybe she’s Roused, Stallo said. —Most successful Rousing of all time.

—Heard that before, Bowler said, and Stallo was disappointed. Just one tale among many.

—She’s a gee-gee girl. Saw Fred Archer on his dead horse at Newmarket, got her started.

—No, it’s the Bungay shuck.

—She goes to Preston looking for a headless dog there.

That sort of animal slant might get you talking. So it was nigh on impossible to get civilian revenants up, okay. But if you couldn’t snaffle that grail, what about starting smaller? With the functions of dead beasts as a way in? Animals could do their part. Worked for vaccine research, didn’t it? And shampoo? Peddars Way horse, a reed-shadow-thin fox snared in a Welsh graveyard, bleeding hart, the Orkney white cat—what might prods and readings thereof teach?

Croome tapped her nose. She sat by Stallo deep under the pagodas. Her eye to microscope lens above supposedly apport clay, he with crocodile clips attached to an apport windscreen blade.

—Anyway, we should all strive for humility, Croome said. —A docta ignorantia.

—If I had an issue with being ignorantia, Stallo said, —I’d go bloody mad in this unit. He watched the waveform play tricks. —Like Adder Fog, he heard himself say. —No one tells us nothing.

—Oh, they’re already getting signals, Croome said. —Some extraordinary things at remarkable frequencies.

—How d’you know?

—No comment.

Stallo gave silence its moment. —What do you think happened in Kenya? To Hensley? he said. His own words surprised him.

—It was your report I read, Croome said. —You were there, not I.

—Have you ever known a rev to do that before, though? Ours can’t. Even O’Leary’s body was there. Stallo considered the photographs, monochrome inexpert images of remnants and scraps of camo and the curious vegetation. —This time, nothing. Not going to throw me a bone? I’m a good enough sport, aren’t I? What do you think happened to Hensley? We buried an empty urn.

—Poor Hensley, Croome said. —Good man.

Agree to differ, Stallo thought. Though poor sod indeed.

—We’ve no actual proof there were any revenance events during that operation except our own, Croome said. —I’m aware of your report and I wouldn’t discount it just because none of the others describe facing anything similar to what you reported. Or took the credit you offered for banishing it. If the enemy did deploy their own RE, however briefly, yes I suppose that might be what took him. For Hensley’s sake, if so, I hope he was done for first.

Past two in the morning, a buried firing range.

—No Bowler? Croome said.

—I did tell him, Stallo said. —He’s in a mood. Again. Said he keeps losing things.

—He’s not the only one. If revenance can deliver, might not it also extract? And how would one know?

The pistol was apport or partly so. At last! Re-engineered by techs, stuck together with bits of non-apport, if-you-will stock matter, and with just enough of its snag (extra bolts blocking the firing pin) carefully pared away that it could actually shoot.

Bang bang!

Stallo in the dark barely felt the kick. Small bore. The weapon was inexact and fritzed with his pointing sense. That made him furious. It was worse than no gun. What does it know? was what he asked himself of it. He could not follow its misdirection.

—A bit of work, she said, —that thing might do the job.

—But the bullets ain’t apport, he said. —So even if I can get the aiming right, it’s only going to work against the quick. You wouldn’t waste my time, so what is this…?

Croome put her fingers into a gun shape.

—What one would really like to ascertain, she said, —is how to rub off apport nature from gun onto ammunition. To use against quick and dead both. Smear each bullet on its way out of the barrel. Scrape off apportness as it goes.

—That would be a terrible idea, he said.

—An awful lot of traction has been got through terrible ideas. This is how we’re researching transfer. If we can’t isolate what makes apport apport to make our own, might we not transmit it?

—You know the apports that are, you know, special? Beyond the obvious.

—You’re on the lookout for legends. Yes, down here one hears many things. That all apports emerge not from suppletions but from the sand. That hell itself is a pit of eternally burning apports that are not consumed, and such. That they have a life cycle, and what we find are merely one instar. All nonsense but I like it. I’ve taken a look at a couple of such reputedly one-of-a-kinds. They weren’t even apport at all.

She showed him her catalogue of all reported and investigated items. Lists are magic; that’s old news. Candle, book, bell, mirror, spear, bully can, button, et cetera. Letters of code after brief descriptions her judgement. Thousands of N’s. Nnnnnnnnnn for one long Nnnnnnnnnno this is not a bloody apport thank you very much. Some hundreds of U’s, for uncertain. A very few Y-plus-question-marks. Fewer Y’s unqualified.

—It would be easier, she said, —if we could be waiting ready when they appear, but we’re doomed to discovery, if at all, too late.

What reports there were suggested they arrived with no little drama. Annie Brittain said they came with a noise like a whip, Perriman that they were warm. A violent process, then. That sent Stallo back to early lessons in Apports & Their Nature, Black Beacon texts. McKenzie’s Spirit Intercourse. From the middle of the Great War, of course, capitals G and W. Amid typical enthusiast’s blather.

Apports are objects belonging to the physical plane

—Let me pause there, Croome had said. —And suggest that that rather depends on what one means by physical and plane and indeed object.

belonging to the physical plane but occasionally a flower of singular design and beauty is brought from spirit spheres and materialized. In such a case these could not be left in physical conditions, but are dematerialised before the close of the séance and returned to their own sphere.

—He’s wrong, she’d said, —emphatically, in at least one particular. As evidenced by our storeroom of the non-dematerialised. Nonetheless there’s something important to this, re apports’ source.

To Croome, Stallo described what he called My Experiments, not without humour. Showed her diagrams of circuits and engines, books on spectrology he’d taken from the Beacon (she made no remarks on that). Schrenck-Notzing on materialisation. Papers he’d disputed visibly in red pen so Croome would have no concern that he was soft on Sudrean heresies. Fourth Dimension theorists (godawful name) sharing what Croome called the FM, the Fundamental Misunderstanding: that apportation was transportation from elsewhere on Earth.

These objects were not mis- but unplaced. They had not existed until they existed. They emerged ex, well, indeed, nihilo. They were copies, according to Croome at least, ambergris, discharge pearled into the form of things. Adding to the mass of the world, they yet retained something of their originless origin.

—Do you still have that pig-sticker you made? Croome made a spear-thrust motion. —I was rather interested in that. It isn’t often any of you lot surprise me, you should be flattered.

—I wasn’t in the Unit when I made it.

—Yet it worked, did it not? That is to say, you’re here, aren’t you? Having fended off attacks.

—Har har. Yeah I’ve still got it. But lucky me, now I get to use broken crockery or laces or whatnot on the lespries. Even after all this time I don’t know how I learnt how to wave that stuff around, but wave it I do, and blow me if it doesn’t work. At least sometimes.

—You can be effective using apports that make no sense to you, Croome said. —Because you’ve drilled. Instilling muscle memory, so you don’t have to think. As well as instilling in the suppletions superstition. Skinner’s a funny one: wrong about his bloody pigeons, but one can get effective practice out of wrongheaded theory.

Stallo wanted to tell Croome then of his fugues, that they seemed to be growing longer, at moments of spectral deployment. That he did not know how in such states he obeyed or gave orders, for the remote viewing, infiltration, that strangest silent interrogation, acts of Permanent Enemy Removal, how he did not disgrace himself. Perhaps he should trust whatever directed him. Still, it was strange to be a good soldier and not be sure how.

—Not unlike a pigeon that thinks if it turns around three times widdershins it’ll get a treat, she was saying, —so the traces of the Augured Up learn that this chap waving this odd old thing that they can discern in this manner means Go up there and put your hand in the bonecage of that other man and close your chilly fingers. Or Stick your head in this man’s head and think his thoughts. Or Explode. So on. And when the pigeon gets its seed, that means it is correct. We operate by the superstitions of the dead.

Croome was as dim as a shade beside him.

—There are ructions, she said. —In that camp. Among the drawers of Roused. Always have been, always will be. For example, woe betide any of its ilk that the cluster that appears to believe itself Haley, which you doubtless remember from Cyprus, appears to, so to speak, believe are begot of any of the chosen people.

—Jesus can you untangle your clauses….

—My point is it has translated and retains a version of that prejudice of the living. But since your Hola mission, and the spoils therefrom, the readings from the lespries have been especially boisterous. The Kenyan function in particular seems a destabilising influence.

—He’s in a bottle, no?

—It is, yes, but it can’t be news to you that there’s leakage. One sees occasional spikes and peaks in signal, and what would appear to be corresponding to and correlated, very spooky-action-at-a-distance style, in some others. Watkinson, for one. She stared at him.

—Like a conversation? Stallo said finally.

—Your word, Sergeant.

—Which you still can’t translate.

—One can’t help inferring. Or supposing. He saw something settle over her. —If one did use an apport bullet, or even bullets that had…had apportness squeezed onto them, to shoot such a function, what do you think would happen? If there’s a death beyond death, its parameters are opaque to me. Yes I’m breaking my own rules, speaking like this.

In the dark, on his way to the Black Beacon, Stallo heard the scuffling of animals, and it was like he’d taken a first step on the final roadway, was investigated by the fauna of life’s wake. It should have been too cold for flies but they were never far. Flies and dogs and horses in the foothills of death. Worms small and worms great. Of course these are all just symbols, ways of gesturing at iterations we can’t understand. Fair enough, Dr. Croome, but potayto potahto there are flies and dogs and apes and lions according to some, and worms, after life, watching the way, is what the books say. And we’re en route to meet them. He loosed upon them this worm that eateth them and maketh them as if they never existed. S .. a.

Croome, Stallo said to her in his mind in her absence, I’ve seen the drawing in the Diwan Abatur, and that thing you don’t want to fuck with. This is the likeness of the two-headed Worm that standeth in the road, and two chains are fastened to it. And it terrifieth the souls. I don’t doubt it does. Fur or spikes all down its back. Its jaws great circles full of teeth, like gears of a machine.

Oh, S .. a? It means saka, which is end, or boundary.

All this Stallo thought, quite curious and calm. He could have been joshing, as he always could. It wasn’t such animals but dead soldiers he’d come to the Beacon to investigate. That night he was alone. He came past Fiction, where Bowler often sat cross-legged on the floor. —Do you actually like ghost stories? Bowler had asked once. Yeah he’d said ghost. The question had brought Stallo up and Maisie to his mind, for whatever reason.

Stallo wound, as was his custom, from the top shelf of the Beacon’s pinnacle down counterclockwise, slipping out books and pamphlets according to that other unknown guest, intuition. And returning to those texts he could never leave alone.

Debout les morts! Arise, dead. Books and books and books. One Alexander Boddy, say, vicar and seer of the front, who knew apocalypse when he saw it. It would take SOE two and a half decades from then to shape the R Unit but Stallo knew where to read of the seeds. Of “angelic” intercession keeping zeppelins away. The French knew it was never angels. Debout les morts! but, bad fortune for them, they did not have—Stallo sighed as he always did before the sentimental fact—the matter of Britain.

Can you be proud of something for which you have no responsibility, of which no understanding, over which no control, the existence of which no proof? As if the history of the nation isn’t the history of such pride. This was an isle of the unquiet. Didn’t Langley bitch about that? Why indeed should the limeys have so much greater Rouse success than their better-funded and more institutionally energetic cousins? Because we’re British was no explanation but it seemed not to be untrue.

Stallo hunted stories of ’eavenly ’elp. Reach the bottom floor and he’d go right back up again. New materials on each rotation. For instance! Here was something that hadn’t used to be there. A bright yellow cover poking from Associated Materials.

Lord Lister! How’ve you been? Not seen you for a while.

LORD LISTER IN HONG KONG.

On page 1, the almond shield again, spear ajut behind. ASSAGAI. No 6–7 July and August. 1/. Aspects of Guerilla Warfare. Education—For Slavery or Freedom. Dictionary of Political Terms.

No, still not ITKO officially but this wouldn’t be here without those connections, the ongoing reading material of someone very in the know indeed. For the first time in a good while, Stallo went back to the intel write-ups on Cyprus.

General had never been there. Representing Gen’ral, a.k.a. Regnal, at the farmhouse had, though, seemingly, been a right-hand man or woman, name, according to best inferences, of Wran. Who had, astoundingly enough, escaped the intervention that had emptied out the hearts and minds of his or her hosts. Which bespoke great luck or apotropaic skill or both. Wran had also—Stallo read further—along with some other younger, rapidly rising comrade, barely out of his or her teens, name not yet ascertained, been in Kenya. Well well. Where KH had supposedly been holed up in Nairobi, Lord Lister’s further adventures had been found, the connection with Cyprus made.

Maybe that Kenyan under the shingle could shed some light if Croome’s researches on interrogating, signals, got anywhere. You could deal with the Russians. The Chinese, you could at least understand. Wran and the Gen’ral and their ilk? Agents of chaos. Quite how they saw it…well that was the point of all this, to ascertain that. Changing the world—that went without saying. In this realm though, specifically? Support for various comrades—in this context give the word a sneer—with their special skills, as well as a constant murmuration about Larger Plans, of ushering in. Chaos, like he’d thought. Stallo tutted.

—Keep it down, it’s a library, Bowler called from below. When had he entered?

—Aye aye. Stallo descended. Frowned at the texts on Bowler’s desk, turned over Tentative Scales of Class Rates and Distances Between Common Points in Truck Line Territory, what the very actual fuck? And this? Railway Accounting Rules, open to “This page is intentionally left blank.” Well if that ain’t quite the Epimenidean pronouncement.

—Care to explain? he said. —What’s this got to do with anything? Where’d these come from?

—You know we can order stuff in.

—Yeah but why would you?

—I don’t understand you, mate, Bowler said. —I’d have had you down as the bloke most likely to ask for more stuff.

Blank pages came to Stallo’s mind, there in Great War officers’ notebooks. —What are these though?

—All I know is the lespries like them. It’s their favourite. Even more than ghost stories.

Stallo blinked. Bowler’s expression was of new cunning. As often these days.

—Sometimes it’s like you think you’re the only person does homework, Stallo. Seeing as you ask, I was chasing up some Boer stories, poking around the Transvaal, looking at the Irish Guards, the concentration camps—ours—and that got me onto Monty’s grandad. He had his detractors. Turns out in the 1880s someone published a pamphlet listing his achievements.

He waited.

—I get it, Stallo said. —Blank.

—Thirty-two pages of blank. Someone did the same, same year no less, against one Winfield Hancock….

—Bowler. Mate. So. The fuck. What?

—So I don’t know exactly, do I? Except that I had that pissy little empty booklet with me when I went in to the lespries, along with a load of the usual stuff, to do some reading for Croome. And they were fucking fizzing. We couldn’t work out why the signals were so high. Mostly if you read them spook stories it sort of gets them stoned. But these spikes were way up, and when I fetched the pamphlet out of my bag…He shrugged.

—They spiked again?

—I thought it was to do with the earl. Until later I was reading to them from a totally other book and it had empty pages at the back.

—What book?

—Can’t remember.

Well, Stallo considered that bullshit but let Bowler continue.

—Anyway I got to the end and didn’t realise, so I was turning those last pages over, not saying anything, and I swear you could feel the air get sticky. Them getting het up again.

Bowler was het up himself.

—Croome starts saying, “Go on, go on, keep going.” So I kept flipping, saying nothing. She was getting readings she’d never seen. That got me curious. Been digging. Turns out there were blanks in books before but they get more common after 1918. And you start getting more pages that announce themselves blank. You could call that a lie if you want, but what if they fucking prove contradictions can be true? Something shifted after the war, something arrived which means “True or False” won’t cut it any more. If it ever did. And the lespries love it.

Bowler seemed to measure something unseen.

—I don’t know how it is I’m letting you down, Stallo said. —I can see from your little puppy eyes you want something from me that I ain’t giving. Sorry to be a disappointment mate.

—Yeah, Bowler said. —Me and all. Nihil hic deest.

Nothing is lacking.

He’d never heard the island’s klaxons, and when they woke him in deep night Stallo was frozen for seconds unsure what the clattering groan was, loud enough but weirdly muted, not registering as an alarm until he remembered of course they must not reach the mainland. Still, Stallo had time to realise there would be whispers about this across the water.

Torchlight slicing through the dark, a sound like hooves up and over the roofs. Soldiers in underclothes, tense and ready, for what? Passing his door, Glover said, —Intruders.

Then Stallo had a rifle too and his clothes half-on, hagstone on a string grabbed from his windowsill and slung around his neck to bop him on the sternum as he went between buildings according to no good plan, in ways that would come to anger him later, seeking orders and finding no one to give them and running instead goddamn it as part of what was almost a herd, everyone stripped of expertise, by, well, if his own insides were anything to go by, what you might call fear.

and then

he was at the lab, and they were going in in phalanx, and within it was more urgent and frightening than outside and there were screams.

and shots in random rhythm the length of the corridor, fuck that was just begging for ricochets, We’re better than this, and sure enough like he’d conjured it a splinter tracing a line on his face, that would hurt when he felt it.

In muzzle flare he saw men and women hunched, a face, a young man, a newcomer to whom he’d barely spoken, he’d got right into the thick of it hadn’t he?, the man, Pinker that was it, swinging his weapon every which way while in that instant everyone else was so still it was just Stallo and Pinker seeking each other’s eyes to wordlessly communicate.

Yet there was a third, unseen. A third thing rising.

—

Stallo watched his own poised stillness, this was paralysis, and right after that shock came shame at letting the lads down, but too quick for the nature of his immobility to be visible (he’d later assure himself), those not so unsure did move. Aduba, Bowler, each grabbing from their wall hooks one of those glass globes and flicking the battery switch to active and lobbing them over Stallo’s head and down to the dark past Pinker from where whatever was that other thing regarded and they shattered to spray glass needles red diodes and sand amid the amplifying energies.

Stallo thought, Yes—and raised his weapon, and changed his stance to old-school shooting—as the sand began to gust as if there were holes in the walls, as if the sea wind shoved at it. Yes, and in its spread mass he made out crawling lines like iron filings scuttling to map magnetism but these were spirals, spinning out, then tangling instantly together into a single sand braid but a convulsion and all patterns were gone and the sand was everywhere again, one grain deep so invisible, and

a howl, a damp snap, and the man’s call ended. Metal scraped on concrete. Here came from the guts of the world a shadow rushing at Stallo, hunched, an animal, no what came as predatory as any beast was a fucking hurled chair, faster than a horse could run, and the blare of some rifle shot deflected it and from the very farthest darkness beyond it Stallo was watched.

Stallo swung up his hands aiming his iron finger

Stallo squeezed the orange and the loud silly sound wasn’t the point and the ptang of his bullet through the presence that wasn’t there into the concrete wasn’t the point, Stallo wasn’t crying that was blood, the point of it was the point(ing sense)

Was the motionlessness of the not-thing in the corner that of contempt?

Stallo came back. Saw again out of his eyes. Into stillness, a new quiet. He ached.

—Torch! Someone handed him one.

On the floor in the room beyond he found Croome, sat cross-legged, bruised about the face. Her white coat was smeared and the floor winked with glass scintillas amid wet papers.

—Stallo, Croome said, watching him. —You’re a bit late, she managed as he came to her. —It’s gone.

[24]

On the third morning in the château, Maur wakes very early and lies breathing desperately and as well as ebbing and confused dread she’s awash with surprise, because it has been seasons since she has recalled a nightmare. In this one she walked into an unlit room. A figure sat on the bed its back against the headboard. She knew it must be Ewan according to the logic of the night vision. She said something to him. What it was is lost. She stepped closer and the waiting figure moved, under its own power or by random settling under gravity. Either way it turned its head. Its head fell to face Maur. The sight wrenched her from sleep. Did the features change in the instant of coming to face her or had they always been what she saw? As if such a question had an answer. What turned to her was white cloth and buttons were its eyes. A ragdoll head the size of a dead man’s. Black-stitched mouth a gleeless horizontal line.

Grey light slants across her. She waits for her insides to calm. Is still as if mimicking what she glimpsed, what chased her out of sleep. There’s no running-from that is not a running-to. Vice versa also.

Coming down the stairs Maur hears Stallo’s and Cybill’s voices raised, Croome in a calmer lower tone.

“…you’ll just see,” Cybill says.

“I very much don’t want to,” Croome says.

“Doc, this is why we fucking came here,” Stallo says.

“Well that was very stupid of you then, wasn’t it? And none of my doing. And have I not helped you? In any case? As if doing so was safe for me?”

They are in the main room by one of the great windows overlooking the wood. They go still when Maur enters. Cybill looks at her as if in challenge, Croome with interest. Jock as if he wants help. Stallo turns to the darkness of the trees and says to no one in particular, “I fucking always said you stay still in this business, you lose.”

Maur goes into the kitchen. A small pile of onions and root vegetables waits on a chopping board. Dried herbs hang. She washes cups. Croome comes in. Sits facing the door. Maur does not turn.

“What do you think is the opposite of a Roused?” Croome says.

“I won’t say someone living,” Maur says.

“Good!” Croome says. “Don’t. As with most things, the question goes beyond its words. And I don’t presume to offer an answer.”

Maur had played a version of this game, What is the opposite?, with herself, as a child. A paradox had intrigued her. Itemise an object’s adjectives. Invert them to invert it, seems obvious. But how many adjectives should you reverse? Is a bad tall black dog more or less the opposite of a good tall black dog than is a bad short white dog? What are the qualities of the Roused? Which contingent, which definitional?

Croome says, “Perhaps Allardyce has told you my preference for suppletions over various other terms. Before his time, one other I briefly auditioned was gidim, for a very specific reason: so far as one can tell from the Mesopotamian sources, the gidim are not the spirits of the dead. Not the soul. The existence of which was not in doubt. They too are, were, are, a new thing, born at the moment of death. Now, they may not understand that, but I always thought we should.” She lights a cigarette and draws lengthily. “So, yes, here we are. I tried to tell Cybill that what accompanies her is not her daughter.”

“Why?” Maur says.

“Because the truth is important.”

“You told me,” Maur says, quietly too, “that you don’t know the truth about these things. That anyone who says they do is wrong or a liar.”

Croome opens her mouth as if to respond, lets out smoke instead and inclines her head. Nods.

Maur says, “And you’re not talking about—”

“No, not about whatever stalks that which tries to speak to her. That is another sort of thing altogether.”

“Is that why you won’t you try for Jules again?” Maur says. “Cybill’s not going to stop.”

Croome looks her over. “It is. I don’t like my readings. At. All.”

“You enjoy this too much,” Maur says. Croome raises her eyebrows at her tone. “I’m sick of this vague something-nasty-in-the-woodshed shit.”

“Say I do. Enjoy it. That doesn’t preclude the possibility that it may be as exact as one can get, does it? I have two choices. One: formulate my suspicions about what’s occurring, what watches, as best I can with highly specialist jargon. Warn you about the possible emergence of a massive qualiaphagic para-entropic nihilocrine cluster, and so on. Now, not only would that involve a tremendous amount of hedging, it also wouldn’t satisfy you. Or I can tell you that I suspect that whatever it was that you sensed, you more than Cybill, so Stallo insinuates, which is why I think he’s interested in you, is something that has been waiting since before the first human died.” She watches Maur through her rising smoke. “How about analogies, then? A word such as galla. A sort of pantheon-specific joke. Counterpart to the gidim. Asag is a galla particularly opposed to Ninurta, who oversees, among other things, war. War, which is the Unit’s business. If I use that word, you will say, What’s a galla?, and I’ll hem and haw and mutter in minatory fashion and when I shuffle out of the room you’ll hunt the shelves until you find one of the various encyclopaedias of mythology here and through the pages you’ll flick and you’ll find galla, and you’ll see the approximation. You will see devil. You will see demon.

“We were always aware,” Croome says, “that what we dealt with was only the tiniest nub of what might be at work. One hears or reads sometimes of rare moments of…I suppose one would have to call it incursion. Or investigation. In Enoch. Louviers. By, should I call them moments? Vectors? The forces concerned are clearly related to but not isomorphic with those I and the sergeant spent our lives working with. Very considerably stronger, and without even such traces of apparently comprehensible drives and desires that we discern in the suppletions. With very other motivations. There’s no one I’d rather see face down a galla than the sergeant but I’m afraid that’s not saying very much. One certainly admires his sense of duty—not without some surprise—and bravery, if you like. Sensible to source as much information as he can before any—confrontation. Best of luck. The sergeant is a remarkably able man but he does have certain blind spots. I think he simply can’t or won’t hear certain…The revenants, like Allardyce, no matter anything I’ve said to him, do seem mostly to understand themselves as our aftermaths. But consider for example those natives…Zulu, is it? I don’t recall, Stallo would. They’ll tell you that the spirit of the dead is manifest at the base of their spine. In the shape of a worm. Which might suggest not so stark a counterposition between haunting and the irruption of the” something “other.” Those two syllables Croome has used might have been wholly or holey or holy. “My manner, trying as you may find it, arises in part because one of the few things I can say for certain is that there is something nasty in the woodshed. And everywhere.”

Maur does not remember lighting her own cigarette. “You haven’t said this to Cybill, have you?” she says.

“Would it help? She seems to feel she already has what information she needs. She’s just eager to establish contact despite my very strong protestations.”

“Even now,” Maur says. “The word séance…” She shakes her head.

“More than half a century I’ve been doing this,” Croome says. “And still I find myself rolling my eyes on a daily basis. Telling myself not to be so bloody silly.”

“And Stallo?”

“I think the fact that I aborted the probing is at least some of the data he’s after, though he’d love more. He’s many things, but not gung-ho. Not with everything out there. Clearly he’s impatient to face down what’s coming, as he says, but he’s no fool, he believes he needs more, and I think he’s right. Long after I’d retired, but still some years ago, one began to hear reports of those strangers in our arena of concern. Forces unknown, at the same time as very odd signals on specialised bandwidths. That was fairly seismic. If you hear of them at all you’ll hear them called by various names. DA or VA, for example. That’s Dark or Void Army. I know, I know. Sobriquets earned, apparently, by working with unfamiliar aftermaths behaving in ways they never have before and never should. And that we can’t re-create. They, along with the Azeri, are who Stallo sees behind this—summoning.”

“Stallo didn’t say all that,” Maur says. “Not so clearly.” They watch each other. Croome nods. Listens for a moment for the others. For all her grande damery, Maur thinks, she’s afraid.

“You can understand why Stallo would want every bit of information he can find,” Croome says. “If, I gather, not always to share it. And he wants me with him, if you can believe that. For expertise. Of course I’ve told him I’m an elderly woman with no intention of going anywhere. And you. What do you want?”

“I want to live,” Maur says. “I don’t want soldiers to find me. I know it’s Cybill they’re really after. I don’t think I want them…to do whatever it is they want to do with, with Jules.”

“Not Jules, but go on.”

“Or with Ewan.” Yes. “And from everything I hear they’d be the least bad…force, to find us.”

“Perhaps.”

“I want this, maybe,” Maur says, raises her hands. “A safe place.”

“You certainly can’t stay here, I’m afraid. None of you. In any case that would lessen whatever safety there might actually be.”

“I’m not saying that. I want to be okay. With people I love.” You’d enjoy this one, she thinks. The image of Sonya raising an eyebrow at Croome out of her sight. She’d get on your tits, Sonn, but she’d make you laugh too. “That’s what I’m going for.”

Croome gives that a respectful moment before she speaks again. “Given what’s ranged against you, there’s nowhere safer for you to be than with Stallo. There may not be much else you can—”

“Yet,” Maur says. “For now.”

“For what it’s worth, I wish I was in a position to suggest to you some better strategy.”

“I’ll work it out. On which.” Maur leans in. “Why did Stallo’s ears prick up when you told him about his friend?”

“Irakli?”

“Who is he?”

“An old contact of his. The sergeant certainly doesn’t appreciate being more known than he believes he is, does he? A contact who appeared, at least when I met him, to have samples from an apport.”

“We have an apport,” Maur says.

“True. But even allowing for the fact that that letter is…Well, look. I’ve spent a good few years studying the gidim. They’re more than the mere memory of the world, stone tapes. If they don’t think, they do perform a thinkinglike action, though what they as-if-think with their as-if-minds is beyond our knowledge.” Maur blinks to see the old woman hesitate.

“Go on,” Maur says. “I asked him about it. What you said to him. He was even grumpier than usual. All he’d say was Irakli had let him down and that you couldn’t believe true believers.”

“What does that mean, I wonder.”

“I think you know. He told me whatever Rak had dreamt up, he was kidding himself.”

“He said that?”

“He did,” Maur says. Then: “But he did look…”

“As if he wished to be wrong? That if he was to chase hopeless punts he’d rather try his own? As well as whatever resentment he feels at Irakli’s so-called betrayal, I also wonder if he wouldn’t be in denial. He’d be quite aflame with jealousy if the claims aren’t false. Stallo’s always been rather caught up in the romance of the most dramatic and rare apports. These of which the skalds have sung, and such. Not only of unparalleled je ne sais quoi but impossibly begot. You understand?” From the house beyond the hall, steps become audible.

“You know that there are none?” Croome says. “From the Great War?” Watches Maur’s reaction. “Yes, a conundrum.” Her eyes flit to the door.

“I don’t know the difference between being afraid of death and simply not wanting to die,” she says. “I’m too old to join you, despite Stallo’s blandishments, but I am afflicted by at least one of those conditions. Plus I can’t bear the cold, and he wouldn’t out and say anything but I’ve a sense of where he intends to head.” She puckers her lips and quickly says, “My point is, I’m not convinced. I rather think you could do worse than find Irakli and what he has.”

Cybill’s voice descends the stairs outside and Croome sits back and watches Maur’s face.

“Jealousy is only natural,” Croome says. “I am sorry about your boy.”

A beat without a breath. “I’m on the run for my life,” Maur whispers, “because of another woman’s fucking kid.”

“I don’t think you’re a bystander.”

“How do I talk to my son?”

“As you always did, perhaps,” Croome says. “I don’t mean to be unkind; I think you know how to take him across a threshold. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘him,’ but my own rules can be a bore.” Croome stands to be ready when the others come in. Says quietly as their footsteps approach: “Maur do you know the Hittites called the day on which a person died the day of their mother?”

leave medical wraiths to wraiths

obscured missions

forgotten symptoms

careful as if glass

imagined mouths in miasmata,

imbalanced humours

hexed

bored through, zymotic agents

effort syndrome

struggling with the vapours

soldier’s heart

XIII

The Phase
Shift

At Least the Second Time Hearing a Story

Stallo was still a bit unclear, still gathering himself, when Croome came back from whatever and commandeered him away from clean-up duties. He followed her between chambers and jogging Uniteers went by.

—I want to show you something before anyone else mucks it up, Croome said. —Poor Pinker was just…I don’t think it was us that thing came for. No disrespect to him but a head count of one isn’t wildly impressive if that was their aim.

Pinker’s organs had been soupy in his dying body. His comrades had kneeled by him—when the thing that took hold of him had gone—and all the man had whispered was that he had seen a tower. Then he was done.

—Are you joking? Stallo said. —It got through everything. All our barriers!

—I’m aware of that. Look at this.

The turmoil of the apport store. Cotton-tangle traps broken, scattered among the mass of what they had failed to guard. Croome picked up a pitted old metal ring like a dinner plate’s rim. A chakram such as some said had been carried into the trenches. Not that it could have been begot of then.

—Go on, she said.

Stallo put his thumb to its edge. He breathed deep.

—No, he said at last. —If it had a snag, it doesn’t have one now.

Croome nodded. —Christ, she said. —If these had just deported, that might make a little more sense to me. Than whatever this is.

In heaps: a camera lens, a spoon, a buckle, some of those many notebooks. Letters from a girl, can openers, pocketknives, tabs, watches, IDs, bug spray, chewing gum, sweets, fags. Croome said she thought the world was a little lighter now. So what of these, things now de-snagged? For them there was no name. Mere objects, the flaws in them repaired by the enemy presence, the point of conjunction sealed, no longer the impossible-and-real, just the expected. Not apports. Not even curios.

—You heard?

Unofficial intel about official—from some mole Comrade U: opposite numbers in an anonymous-from-the-outside warehouse in a Moscow suburb were also right now itemising the costs of intrusion. Of knocking, of the sheer fucking noisiness of violent intervention among the sectioneers and the, let’s face it, never wildly impressive Soviet haints. Were counting dead and newly unapported apports.

—Them too? Bowler whispered.

—Bullshit, Sapers said. —They’re leaking that so we don’t think it was them who done us.

—If it was them, Bowler said, —wouldn’t they want us to know? He knuckled Sapers’s head.

That pride with which officers announced We remain the overwhelming spectral superpower (whatever that counted for, sh) was ever leavened with bewilderment as to why. If this was the end of that pre-eminence, it seemed not to be at the hands of Kowalchuk’s Special Section. Nor (the emphatic reassurance came) was this the unintended result of some jealous experiment over in Langley, in this last arena in which the superpower was less than Rome to London’s civilising Greece.

—Got to be KH, then, Stallo said.

—It’s like a test, isn’t it? Bowler said. —Can-the-Russkies-and-us-put-aside-our-differences-against-a-shared-enemy?

Stallo made a Doubt it noise.

—Wasn’t even about us, Bowler said. —I’ve been trying to work out what it was they was after, sending that thing in.

—Go on then, Howzat, Stallo said. —What’s your theory?

—Piss off, Bowler said. It was not the joshing Stallo would have expected. —They were here for whatever the Adder Fog lot are doing.

—Wran and the Gen’ral wanting to fuck up their research? Stallo said. Gen’ral now a.k.a. Fisherman, or Angler (dangling bait for what?). And Wran? The consigliere-cum-engineer and brains-trust of the outfit.

—Or what if they wanted to nick whatever they’re building up there? Bowler said.

—How the fuck are you going to use lespries to steal?

—Search me. It’s all new rules. You know what defences they got past? And Stallo don’t you think the time’s done for cricket nicknames?

Well la-di-fucking-da. Stallo said nothing. Considered again not just remote-viewing investigation but the enemy’s bleeding out those energies in the apport stash. And provoking the violent allergy of matter: Stallo wished Pinker luck against dogs and wormheads.

—Bowler may have a point, Croome said to Stallo when he came to her. —If this was orchestrated by Wran et al., then quite apart from their capabilities being considerably more advanced than we’d thought, we urgently need to make sense of their motivations.

—Their motivations is they’re Reds, even if Moscow wants them done in too.

Croome looked at him and he saw her genuine curiosity. —Stallo, she said, —it would be better to say nothing than to dutifully recite.

Croome scrawled for him a reconstruction of the intruder’s route.

—It came in here and Pinker was in the way. Of…She pointed, —lespries and apports. You saw what it did to some of the latter. Now, the Roused are still there. But perhaps…diminished? Distracted?

—Demoralised? Stallo said.

—That’s your word.

Yeah, he thought. So is turned.

It was not a new observation that after a while you didn’t really know into which and out of which you were emerging, the world of people and shops or of covert missions and the dead. All you could do was look across the chasm of a bifurcated mind, and strive not to get dizzy.

Fiction came out of Maisie in a rush. The stories did not depict events so much as they were catalogues of the world, trees, clothes, emotions, experienced as if through the window of a careering train. Here is London, they said, here I am, here is this life. Stallo still drew little pleasure from them or their like in the magazines in which they appeared. Though he remained glad of what all this had done for her. Though he was curious about these house journals of the milieu he watched because it was his job and because he chose to. To scan the broken-up lines of poems, to peer at the post-cubist pen-and-ink renderings, to work through the lists—they did love their lists—and cool impressions, Stallo knew that some part of him was supposed to be angry still at what he read. To suspect and mistrust it, as once he obligingly had. But there was no percentage in that and he was free now to ask himself what such writing really raised in him. And he did not know, or know if it was nothing at all.

Sometimes he found himself within Maisie’s stories. He would be given a name that might nod to those given him at birth, or called Soldier or the Man or something.

—Why am I Mr. Lobster?

—It’s an old name for an army bloke.

Remembering how she once was made him consider how he would now seem to those who’d known him young. It’s through others that we experience time. To see her at parties, conversing with editors. Her confidence astonished him. Alison Purdey and Jeff and Sten and their ilk in their colourful clothes and with their careful hair, making sure to look Stallo’s way often enough, to smile at him. If Maisie told them of the arguments and unspeaking between Stallo and her, they hid the knowledge adequately. Wankers, yes, but still he kept the company of the post-Partisan diaspora, even occasionally in Maisie’s absence, and if he was a mascot—dissident soldier boy!—to the shaggy poets and politicos and spivs and mystics then why would that be anything but useful? Watching as he did from back a bit, back from the inner lip of himself, and having it over on them, seeing as he did the condescension with which they regarded him whether they knew of it or not.

—Don’t you actually like them a bit though? Bowler said.

What kind of a question was that? All Stallo could muster was, —Do you? and it emerged as a sulk.

—Well not everything they say’s a load of bollocks, is it?

—So? There’s plenty of people who don’t talk bollocks who I don’t like and plenty who do who I do.

—Is that right? Bowler said. —Who? Who do you like?

When Stallo could not bring forth an answer he said instead, —Anyway, plenty of it is. Bollocks I mean.

Maisie’s people were permanently smoke wreathed in a way that soldiers never seemed to be for all that they lit up no less. His own fumes seemed only to inelegantly dissipate. No justice even in Brownian motion.

What kind of a question even was it, Bowler’s? One he carried with him, that it took him a day and a half to answer to himself, another day to offer to Hook, in his report on the meetings.

—I like them.

—I should hope so. They’re an amiable bunch and you’d be no good at this job if you didn’t.

In London, Norwich, Brighton, among the hip, Stallo soaked up the light. He liked Maisie too, loved her, whatever you wanted to say really, and it was not clear to him why he watched her as if he were made of wood.

Look. You wouldn’t, but if you did ever hint-hint at the Unit’s work to impress some bird—or bloke, why not, if you were Marks or maybe Carpenter years ago or Sapers, say no more—who possessed just enough wide-eyed SPR credulousness, and there was more of that about again, you’d likely advert to banishment. You wouldn’t, I mean, sometimes you might, you did, everyone did it wasn’t a big deal, it was just flirting and nonsense. For such a type, it might be mutter mutter faraway look whisper laying unquiet to rest this and help them move on the other. How would they know that any such “exorcism” failed as often as it worked? Not that Croome, say, hadn’t raised a handheld exsufflation engine that bad night under the island and spoken certain words and run the Rouse signal backwards, more or less. But had that thing been recalled, or left of its own opaque volition?

—When it does work, why does it, and where do they go? How can one dismiss them without a sense of that?

—You’re overthinking it, Doc, Stallo said. —I don’t know where the living go but I can still send them on their way.

—Killing is ontologically simpler, Croome said. —You can’t kill something that’s not alive.

—Says you.

—I do. It would be a relief if one knew.

—Back to your decoding then.

—Oh, one’s still on that, believe me. Watkinson’s in my sights now. It does seem unusually readable at the moment. And agitated.

Irene gave him letters his mother had written him. Alone, he burnt the first, but its sublimation bothered him. The second he threw in the Union Canal when he woke from something, from some other thing’s control, to find himself beside the water, the paper in his hand, and he stood throwing stones in after it, cheered on by watching children until it went down. Potter retired. All that mass, aging now, and he still moved well.

—What will you do? Stallo said.

A send-off party in Camp Awfulness. A banner above the bar read Cheerio.

—I’ve put a bit aside.

—What if you get bored? Or you run out of money?

—Oh. Potter gestured. Raised an imagined gun. —There’s always freelancing with Mad Mike and Moneta and Gan-Ganowicz. Growth area. But I’d rather walk dogs. Eleven years I been doing this. The bones may creak but I never had trouble with it like now. With the lespries. Even ours, I mean.

They all stared at each other.

—That’s true, said Bowler. —And there are others to deal with, too. The independent revenuns.

The way he said it you couldn’t tell if the word was revenants or revenance.

—Either I’m changing, Potter said, —or they are. The Roused.

—Or the world is, Stallo said.

—Same thing.

—

In any case best try right quick to address the shortfall of apports since that thing came roaming. Subtler investigations had to take a back seat to some heavy-handed dealings with the fences of this market. Yeah, you heard what we’ll pay, no arguments, plus we don’t bring you in this time, you know who I am.

Admin chewed over reports, earning the adjective redoubtable with which Carpenter had always described them. They flagged less preposterous leads. So Very Jerry and Marks and Bowler and Glover—oh God help us not Glover he’ll bloody kill someone and not in a useful way—and Stallo went off-island following such trails and on their own recognisance, enquiring of compulsive collectors and psychotics and shrewd and lost souls. Prodding keys, mouth organs, treasured chocolate bar wrappers from another time, dollies, spectacles, bootblack gone hard. Few were snagged and suitable to the restocking of the storeroom.

—It’s a shabby lot, Stallo said.

—Here. Hook gave him another Intel form.

—This has got to be bollocks, Stallo said. —You seen the date they’re talking about—?

—I have, Stallo, yes, and as you say, very probably guff, but what if, eh? What if?

Stallo arrived in the capital late evening and took a turn through the known haunts, if you will, where a Uniteer might tease out hints from the obsessive. He drank slowly, and why it all should have made him feel melancholy he’d have been hard-pressed to say.

—Allardyce.

There: the same fucking big-handed swarthy bloke who had been here the last time, how many months or years ago? Who had pointed at him then and said, —Malaya, I think you were in Malaya, and then had had the sense and swagger to leave without a further word. Back again. Grinning lopsided, raising one of those great paws in greeting.

That’s why I’m here then, it came to Stallo. I mean that doesn’t make any sense, but obviously I’ve been looking.

—You been sat here this whole time? Stallo said. —How’d you know I’d be here tonight?

—I been here a lot of times. In case.

—You just happened to come here on the off chance….

The man laughed. —No I heard you might be down tonight. I heard you and your friends had a bad problem.

—Oh you heard did you?

—Hey, come on. The man still smiled. —I talk to people. You talk to people. You know. My name is Rak.

—Where you from, Rak?

—I’m French.

Stallo would have bet a lot that he was not.

—Righto. Well I’m Allardyce, but you know that.

He waited. Rak smiled.

—You won’t tell me what happened in Telok Anson? Rak said.

—A mate of mine got rescued, Stallo said without pause. —That’s a long time ago.

—In the forest. I want you to tell me that story.

You could never be certain from where you might pick up useful gubbins.

—Why don’t you tell me what you want, Stallo said.

—I just did!

—You want more than a story. Why should I?

—We are both soldiers, Rak said.

—So what? Stallo said. Rak laughed.

—I am an aeronaut, Rak said.—Helicopters. Not of the Army of the Air— He translated the French Air Force title directly, —but ALAT, the “Land Army Light Aviation.” You know, though. I go between. I was—you know Algeria?

—I’m aware of Algeria, mate, yes.

—I was in Algeria. It is the first helicopter war. Hélicoptère. He said it again the French way. Stallo watched memories go through him, as if Rak were mesmerised by non-present craft, the shuddershudder of their passing vivid behind his eyes. —Everyone has stories. I don’t know what you are interested in, Mr. Allardyce.

Cheeky! What a smarmy little face.

—Maybe you’re interested in dead people, Rak said. —Maybe you have a spear you make. Come on, you know people know things. What I am interested in is helicopters, so I go to make collections of the stories about them.

—Why? Stallo said. —They’re tools. You might as well collect stories about hammers.

—Maybe there would be good stories about hammers. I am an archivist of the hélicoptère. I came here because I hear that you see something in Telok Anson. You and me, we share something, okay?

Rak worked his mouth and Stallo did not know what he was doing until the man pursed his lips and let out a string of drool that stretched towards the table and snapped and landed wetly.

—Come on! Ectoplasm. He wiped the spittle with his sleeve. —You deal with this, yes? You know who it is who makes this word? For this stuff? Stallo said nothing. —Charles Richet. What else does he do? Mesmerisme, ectoplasme? You could hear those final E’s. —And also? The helicopter. He invents it. You see? What I’m interested in and what you are come from the same source.

—Just because you can draw a line between two things doesn’t mean they’re connected, Stallo said. —That’s how a kid thinks.

—That’s how we all think, no? Especially in your business. I know you lost men. No, listen.

Rak spread his fingers like a sunburst as he sought words.

—Do you believe? He pointed up. —In God?

Stallo shrugged.

—Okay, Rak said. —I believe, I think. Because of helicopters.

—Oh yeah?

—Yes, Richet and Sikorsky. Come on. Holy! I believe and I listen, I hear about everyone believing. Just because you aren’t alive any more, would you stop believing?

—Well, Stallo said. —Depending on what happens in the first few minutes after, you might want to rethink a bit. One way or the other.

—Okay, but. So maybe there is different, new theologies.

—Such as?

—You know I don’t know, Rak said. —They fight over there, of course, too, like us. You heard this too.

Actually, Stallo hadn’t heard so very much about that. He kept his face still. Schismata in the Summerlands. Alright then.

—Everything is strange now, Rak said. He couldn’t keep all urgency from his face. —New forces, new spirits, new problems, new religions, new devils. I think you and me can help each other. Will you help me? I am not okay. I am afraid of what happens. You don’t have to like me. Okay? But I promise I tell you everything I hear, and you tell me the same.

—Why are you saying all this to me?

—Because of stories, because I’ve seen you, because you stopped to pick up…Rak considered. —In Malaya. You were there when Deane-Drummond and some navy man visit, and their Sycamore came down. And no one dies.

—A miracle. That Stallo said flatly.

—Or the opposite. Maybe a sacrifice gone wrong. You took something.

—Where’d you hear that, mate?

—I heard. Did you take something from the crash? I see something in you. Do you have still this? I can have it?

—I wore it like a ring, Stallo said. Had he taken anything and if so where was it?

—You don’t wear it now. You aren’t married to this crash.

Stallo stood and the man stood quickly too. —Sorry mate, Stallo said. —Ain’t got it.

—Wait, the man said. —We want the same things.

—What do you know about what I want?

—I know what you’re here to find.

—Everyone in our line’s looking for the same sort of thing….

—But you think this one might be special. Might be fifty years old.

Stallo folded his arms. —Go on. Tell me more about me.

—Whoever the ones are who attacked you, I am not their friend. I just listen. Is how I know what you’re here for. I came looking for it, too. Before you. From the same man. Rak shook his head. —Is not what you want.

—Oh yeah, so I shouldn’t bother going, eh?

—You should go. I know you will. Why you would believe me? Since I saw him, I listen for when he says what he has again, who comes.

—So you kept an eye on him until he arranged a visit with my lot? Rak nodded. —And you were here to talk to whoever turned up for it?

—No, Rak said. He pointed his right forefinger at Stallo’s face.

—And what if it wasn’t me?

—Is always you. Always you they send for the important ones. So when you go, you know I don’t lie. Maybe we can trust. And listen, I want only from helicopters, okay? I give you all the others. We swap, if you find any of my kind. What do you say?

From an inner pocket he took out a card and held it out. Stallo did not pretend he wouldn’t take it. A PO box address. Stallo walked away.

Behind him Rak said, —We are both soldiers.

Stallo waited awhile outside the North London house, made himself a dark shape in the dark, watched. Was intrigued to feel excitement. He knocked. It took a time for the door to open. No greeting, just eyes watching as if from a burrow.

—Evening, Stallo said. —Let’s see it then. He pushed past and in.

There’d not been much in his thin dossier but enough to know that old as he was the bloke shouldn’t look this old, this trembly, I’m sorry mate but I’ve seen your DOB, did you live hard or what?

Stallo took in the narrow path between papers and files and artefacts in strata beyond apprehension. He dawdled. It agitated his host. Down thoroughfares of detritus, components of war and peace by the looks of it, pumps for bicycles, boxes Stallo would bet contained ticket stubs, those he’d bet contained beakers bought on discount, a regiment of car batteries, a dry fishtank out of which stared cutlery, a pile of tools and wood offcuts. This stacked-up inner architecture a keep against time. Arresting, not without dreadful cramped beauty.

—I was in the war, the man said to Stallo. Thin lips in skin like paper and those eyes still wide but not now with suspicion. Looked like some new emotion. —In the trenches, you know. God how the stars did fall. We was under orders but you couldn’t hardly move any which way.

He looked about with fear undiminished.

—They said you was a buyer. We advanced God knows how I’m still here. I found something in a hole. What will you give me? I mean you’ll be doing me a favour take it off me hands. Let’s see if you can keep it away from me eh?

—You was in the trenches?

Poor old lad raising his hands again to show Stallo, paw paw, parting remembered wires.

—You know what they did, the old man said. —Over you go! You hear all that stuff about the Christmas match and maybe that happened, I couldn’t say I didn’t play in that but we did have a kick-about. They give us a football. When it was time. So, the whistle to go over, they made it kickoff, lobbed the ruddy thing up into the mud and off we went after it, keeping it going, you’re running along there, squelch squelch squelch.

The only spectators trees. Everyone had seen the pictures. Trees dead as anything, quite dead, as a doornail, a dodo, but still overwatching, more present in their skeletal resilience than they’d ever been alive, you’d say as plucky as little Belgium if there was anything at all so likeable to the upthrust trunks as that, if they regarded the slime of battle with anything other than stern unsympathetic deadness, cross-branchless but still standing, rood matter stripped of the filigree spread as if the last metaphor for other possibilities must urgently be eradicated, delenda est, leaving only the uncanny vertical, a talon pointed in theodicean accusation straight up at what allowed this the inevitable storm. Kick the ball between such goalposts.

Stallo was keeping his own breathing shallow and quiet as if so as not to disturb what might be there with them. Because of the dates under consideration, because of what filled this gent’s mind and house, and that question of the Great War’s lack.

—Kept me alive that did. That ball. You wouldn’t think you’d give a stuff about it what with everything going on and shells going off and muck all over and chaps lying down there with half their face off….

Oh you would though.

—All the lads I saw moving was shuffling in the mud under their kit and you could imagine it was extra time so I kept on after it. All them who wasn’t going forwards you seen them fall on their knees like they was praying. Of course I was scared I don’t mind telling you but even shaking and shitting me pants and fumbling along you’d see your chum getting at that ball and you’d only bloody think to yourself Oh no you don’t matey and you’d speed up and give it another punt and off it’d go. I don’t know how it kept on but there you are. I remember thinking if the Jerries or our lot put a bullet in the blessed thing, well. They never did.

—It kept you alive?

—Veered off didn’t it? I’m after it and I try to give it a wallop but my boots are all stuck and I go down and I shouldn’t tell you but I get meself up leaning on me rifle and I give the ruddy ball a whack with that instead don’t I, and I’m thinking, Oy that’s cheating, and it only bounces off a helmet, a Jerry helmet, and there’s only a head still in it sprouting off the nasty bits of what was left. Even with all the bangs and my ears ringing I hear someone laugh behind me, well you would, a dead chap’s only gone and headed it, hasn’t he, good effort too it goes between two stumps and someone shouts Goal! and his mum’ll never know how he played. I’m off after it and a shell comes down just where I’d’ve been. It makes a right bloody mess of the other midfielders as you might say.

His voice had maybe always been so.

—You remember how it felt to give it a kick, he said. —Makes you feel like a kid again, you must’ve played footy when you were a lad, yes. Come along this hallway, come down the stairs and some nights I brace meself as if it’s going to trip me up, I swear.

Stallo, steady now. Go on with him. Look and see. To step into the dark was to feel something waiting. Way behind Stallo’s eyes what was in him both trembled and was still. Ready to play?

The old man was at a threshold. —Anyway, he says. —Anyway. I kept on after it and in it goes into a dugout and in I go and down I go and there this was and here it is.

He gestured. In the centre of what space was left in his living room, on an upturned crate, a smutty box overlooked by other objects on sofas and on chairs and on the windowsills and by the walls. Long dark curtains pulled to and the central bulb in its vase-shaped shade a horrid light. Stallo reached out. He was still and let his breathing calm. He put his hands on either side of the wood and rested them like a parent feeling a baby breathe. It had once been cherry red and was now the black and green of mould. He opened it.

Within was a nothing. A clotted dirty remnant of boot, say. A satchel piece. Nothing in particular. A section of rotted belt, a knot of puttees, some nothing like that.

Stallo laughed.

—This? he said.

—I found it.

—I heard you had something for me. Is this what we’re talking about?

—When I went down there in that hole that old ball was gone. I could still hear it, mind. It was like soup in there, I lost my rifle and all. But I did find this.

Stallo tried to stoke up hope again. The bit in the box was battered absolutely to fuck. He touched it. Sometimes it took a minute. Come on, though, the most orderly order in the world was just random sweepings. Steady now, even broken this could still be—

He touched his pointing finger to it. No jolt at all.

But buggery shite he’d have put down a few quid that there was something in this house. Shame, shame. That’s what comes of letting your excitement get away with you.

—You found this? Stallo said. He lifted the trash thing as if it were a sceptre. —In the German lines?

—I did I did.

—This? Stallo said. —You found this? In the lines? The German lines? You? Found this?

No particular reason to give the doddery old sod shit. It came without spite. There was never a Cain scar to mark out the combatant. Hence the waves in Stallo of what might have been compassion at the sight of any ageing buffer in the streets, the fields, plumbers and publicans and brickies and police and nursery teachers, any one of them might’ve killed at the request of king or queen, country, and if he never quite felt the jolt of telepathy for which you might hope, as far as he was concerned there just had to be something about that combat gnosis, right?, the ties that you could never know bound. I’m just fucking with you, mate, he thought.

—This?

He put the unidentifiable and useless thing back down.

Stallo thought again about that sense of a ball keeping you company. Making a dog of you. He looked all about into the tiplike corners and, at the sight of desiccated plants atop discards, his old accompanier, that inside or behind-him watchingness he did a good job not thinking of for months at a time, perked up, and Stallo recognised what rose in him and it to be excitement, at the potentialities of objects. Alright, alright, I get the message, he thought to his leaf-flecked alter-self.

On top of the TV a white plastic fan facing away as if ashamed. Cardboard boxes wound about with string over their beer or bean logos. Cabinets. Books. No mildewed leather. Stallo walked into the hallway.

—Where you going? Oy where you going, this is my house. The man shuffled after Stallo not touching him. —Oy.

Something in Stallo heard each step as onto fallen leaves, as if this gloom were that of a forest.

—Oy.

Stallo lowered himself to his knees to look between engine parts, extension leads, paintbrushes.

The widows’ accusations and the children’s complaints.

—You what? the old man said so Stallo knew he had spoken aloud.

—I’ve heard this story before, Stallo said. —That and your morning sense and a hunch I can’t shake is why I’m looking. I’ve heard your story. A nasty game that leads to widows’ accusations and children’s complaints. Stick…He raised his arms as if there were a rifle in them, held wrong, —and ball…He kicked his feet, —mikku and pukku. Which in the middle of the chaos disappear to who knows where? Well we all know where to, is where.

He pointed down at the netherworld. Tablet twelve, among the other eschatologies of the Beacon. Unlike someone, this old man never had anyone to go fetch the lost toys. Not that that went well. Ellag, Gilgamesh’s ball game, distressing the families of the players, the womenfolk in fact, at least that’s how it was told…. Ring a bell? You’d be a fool not to clock that what’s being talked about here was a game yes but also war. Mother Inanna, you lady of battle, send heads rolling like pukkus. That’s balls to the rest of us. Where else would they end up? Well might you sob, mate.

—Don’t worry, Stallo said. —You and your stick and your ball…it’s an old story, is my point, you’re in good company.

Oh my ellag! The game has not palled!

I’ll fetch it boss! Enkidu had said.

Okay, but down there you best put on your dirty clothes and careful what you carry and take your shoes off and keep your voice down and don’t say hello to anyone you know. For fuck’s sake, Stallo thought, what did I just say? He blinked.

Into the kitchen, no room to sit, kettle and grill, and Stallo opened the door onto a rear yard and stepped out and breathed in the cold. No closely overlooking windows. Weed life all filling up the walled-in space waist high and quivering in the dregs of city wind. Drat, he hadn’t even considered that might be waiting, so now Stallo, surly, mouthed Thank you to whatever might eye him made out of that undergrowth.

The old fellow was muttering anxiously as if who knew what the night would bring in? and Stallo turned and squatted down to examine the bricks by the lit-up door. It looked to him that it was gathered more thickly here, the dirt. Not just the exhalation of the city but of impact. Look: a very faint handspan-sized circle of grime amid crumbled pointing.

Stallo closed his eyes. Touched the mortar, felt the London grease that surely covered the house. He pressed his fingertips into the wall and tried hard not to let himself be suggestible. He stayed like that for seconds but he couldn’t tell. Was this the same nothing as when there was nothing to be felt? Or was it a latency?

No it was not a faint circle but a palimpsest of many such.

Stallo pushed past the man gently enough and opened drawers until he found a once-sharp knife and he took one of the old jam jars on the windowsill half-filled with pennies and tuppences. He opened it and poured out the copper on the side and the old man made a sound of distress. Stallo came out again and knelt, held the mouth of the jar against the wall in his left hand and the blade against the house like a razor against a cheek in his right and scraped down. Tiny crumbs of marked matter fell over his hand and to the ground and some into the glass. The old man kept quiet and Stallo moved the knife like a strigil.

When he had collected a dusting he stood and reentered and locked the door behind him. The old man looked afraid.

—I tell you what, Stallo said. —I will take it. I’ll take that thing from you. That thing you found in the foxhole. I’ll even give you a ton for it, how’s that? Can’t say fairer than that, can I?

It could have broken your heart to see the old lad’s astonishment and pleasure.

Stallo paid him and left with a Mind how you go or such. He took a few turns in the North West night to the meeting of a backstreet and a main, near small shops before which people conversed and the smoke from their cigarettes glowed with cheap neon. Two young lads stood before a garage door. —Bit late for you, ain’t it? Stallo said. He clicked his mouth and made a Scarper face and the boys did not obey but stepped back into the shadow by the pebbledash to watch him. He went on to another darkness beneath stairways in an estate, to where the rubbish was. He looked into his bag at the lid screwed tight upon the glass jar. He took out the nothing he’d bought from the old fellow and dropped it within the bin to land with a faint paludal squelch.

[25]

“You with me?” Stallo says. He and Cybill and Jock and Maur stand in a small bare room of Croome’s house, far from her. Still, though, he mutters. “So it’s down to us, to stop the Azeri and her thing.” Maur can hear conflict in him. “I mean, it’s looking for us, and the Unit is too, but we should be okay if we’re moving. Now we know she’s behind this we can figure out where she is and how to get some defences up. We have to keep going.”

“Where?” Maur says.

“North.” He stares. “I’ve got an idea.”

“We should find your friend,” Maur says. She is unused to Stallo’s surprise. Maur’s own calm feels strange to her, but she makes it her own. “I know you didn’t believe what she told you about him—”

“Look you don’t understand,” he says. “What she said, whatever he thought he had, it was bollocks.” His tone is unsure.

“An apport…”

“Not just an apport. What he was obsessed with was just fairy stories.”

“How do you know?” she says. “Couldn’t things have changed? Stallo, it’s a lead. Why would Croome lie?”

He’s silent, and he’s listening, and not like he doesn’t want to.

“What if he knows something,” she says. “Let alone has something?”

—

Croome comes after them into the courtyard. She does not wave and Stallo does not look back at her or smile. The car moves into the dense green of the track and trees close above it and brambles reach for it. “Fucking whitecoats,” Stallo says. Maur learns how much tension he’s picked up there only as she sees it ebb some, when their vehicle joins others on the road.

“Classic mistake to try to go to ground somewhere remote,” he says. “If you have to hide, do it in plain sight.” Then, “If we could find her…. I wish she’d listened to me.” Then, “If we don’t do what we have to, that’s it for all of us if you ask me. Croome and all. Never had her down as a coward, but I can’t exactly make her come.”

Really? Maur thinks. Cybill, too, sitting next to Stallo in the front, looks at him when he says that.

“Okay,” Stallo says then, quietly. He keeps his eyes forward. “Okay. Alright then, so what if we were to give old Rak a go? Among other things. We do need all the info we can get, so we have to put ourselves in the thick of it.”

“How would you track him down?” Maur says. “And the Azeri?”

“By asking the right questions,” Stallo says with new energy. “Of the right people.”

—

Nothing hesitant now in how he zeroes in on some particular zone after hours of driving. Near enough to the station of this midsized town, where blocks squat over tobacconists and cafés making not much effort.

“Wait,” he says. He’s not gone long. He pays cash for a room, cleaner that it could have been, even. When the guarded man who led them there leaves, Stallo with his pocketknife cuts angular signs into the wood of each window and in the lintel of the door.

“I put some messages out,” he says. “I’m on the hunt. Like I say, looking for the right people. Who know a bit about what’s going on. There’s a knack to this. If informants don’t know anything at all it’s pointless, but if they know too much it’s dangerous. I’m going to do some rounds.”

“You’re not leaving us here,” Maur says.

“ ‘Leaving’?” Stallo says. “Don’t you know we’re in this together yet? You’re staying here because you know it would be mad to come with. Comment se porte ton français?”

“Pas mal.”

“Yeah?” He says something in French too fast for her to follow. “Not good enough.” In that moment he doesn’t look unkind. “Didn’t I listen to you? I’m just asking you to return the favour. I’m the one who knows which sort of people in what sort of places to talk to.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Jock says. It has been a while since he has spoken and they all look at him.

“I’m sure you were good at your job,” Stallo says. “I’m sure you had your snouts. Probably excited to use that word and all. But I’m not talking about leaks on council malfeasance.” He rolls that around. “I’m talking about getting a lead on an old comrade.” He nods at Maur. “And the unquiet whatever, more generally. And the end of the fucking world. How’s your record on that, Jock? I think I’m the less likely of us to piss my pants. Please.” That makes them stare. “For now. Just to get started. I don’t have time to…You’ll be safest here.”

Stallo looks at Cybill. She has her hand where she says Jules touched her. He raises his right forefinger and wags it, walks out, pulls the door to.

Maur examines the markings he made. Sigils she hasn’t seen before. She tries to get them into her head but they are recalcitrant.

“My god,” Jock says quietly. “I’ve done some dodgy things in my time, but…”

“Going to tell us about your disgraceful past?” Maur says.

“Nothing that would surprise you.”

“What got you into it all?” she says. She sits by him.

“Same as anyone. Injustice. Blah blah.”

“Blah blah.”

“I mean who do you think gets into this sort of politics anyway?”

“Posh students trying to impress girls,” Maur says, and he smiles a bit.

“Not only them,” he says. He isn’t looking at anything in particular now. “I can’t think of anything worse,” he says quietly, “than having them come back. I don’t want my dad back because he was a shit. And I don’t want my mum back because she wasn’t and I loved her so of course I don’t.”

“There’s no of course about it,” Cybill says loud enough to make them stare.

“What did Stallo mean by that?” Maur says to Cybill. Shakes her finger. “Like he was telling you off?”

“I don’t know, love. I told him I miss my kids. I never said anything more than that, did I?” She sounds only angry but Maur sees her tears.

They eat the sandwiches they have brought. They hear no one coming up the stairs. Maur watches at the window.

In the much later night, she goes to the door. Jock sleeps but Cybill looks at her, eyes wide. “I’ll knock like this,” Maur whispers, too fast for debate. One two one two. Maur raises a finger to her lips and leaves.

It is cool beyond Cybill’s grief, of which for all her own Maur is jealous.

Piled-up garbage in an alley in slow collapse. There will be rats. Maur seeks the brightest places. She’s giddied to be alone. She could go anywhere, ha. Her steps are silent in her trainers. She has a few euros in her pocket: Stallo handed them out like a teacher, when they stopped at a roadside coffee place. Where, Cybill and Jock watching, she with anger palpably a mystery to her, he mute, Stallo asked Maur to repeat what she’d said to him about his old contact.

What’s your alternative, she said. You can’t just drift us around until you bump into an idea. Or a friend. Or an enemy. Croome said he has something that—

I told you, that can’t be right, he said. And I told you he let me down. I can’t trust him, we were supposed to do a mission together….

He seemed tentative.

You’re not even sure how to use the letter, she said. Ignored Cybill’s look. You say it can help us talk to Jules but then it’s too dangerous to try. If what Croome said is right about him…She waited for him to object again, he did not. Who even is he? she said.

Someone I used to know. You can discern yearning and such in his snarly old voice when you know him a bit.

And he’s on the scene? she said. So he does know things?

He didn’t say, Alright then, didn’t even nod, but when they returned to it the energy in the car was changed.

—

Maur can stop in sign-light. It makes the night quite black above. She can conjure in it figures, treetops, lightless towers. Which feel to her like Ewan’s imaginings. As if she walks in a city such as he would find.

Yes, she was so glad when, in his young teens, he started to go into London alone. She didn’t take it for granted, it wasn’t as if he’d been a cowed child, she’d insist on that, but hesitant yes, and with that apparent sense with which he had approached most situations (not climbing), of guardedness, as if he wasn’t welcome, she’d never felt him enjoy (say) travel, he had not, as she’d realised she’d hoped, seemed enchanted with any higgledy-piggledy Spanish town on holiday, had shown no great enthusiasm to slip off or have adventures. Maur had not liked to wonder if her boy was something of a coward, but no that had not been it.

Beyond a shopfront window with Arabic and French advertisements a young man probes computers’ souls. He raises his tiny screwdriver a moment and she waves back but her attention is not on him but on his window, the image of the street and herself. Over whose shoulder she stares in hope of seeing someone walk behind her, not clear but clear enough.

And there is a shape.

—

There is a shape and Maur almost falls and it does approach, but it’s wrong, is it?, and anyway she blinks or something and her son does not come or come back.

—

Maur is less fearful of any alleys than of the void over which she walks. With a hand to metal holding up a bridge she roots herself. Oh this panic spiral. I miss you! Assure whatever listens. Sonya if I could speak to you. Rho be well. Des, poor loving Judas, we don’t live in the same world any more. Oh Ewan.

She pauses on her way back to the sleeping place, makes out a dog howling somewhere in the French town. A burr as if of crickets though it is not warm. Maur wants memories.

Névé

Beyond squat blocks and concrete were junctions with older wood lines and shallow sloping roofs. Punctuating points of minor town pride not due to intrinsic beauty but because history had not eradicated them. Flatbed trucks passed locals with their heads down. The cold made you near-ecstatic. Here the long reach of the White Sea’s fingers. A few miles north, Lake Onega.

Stallo came by Finland. He, Bowler, Sutton, Merrick. The whisper of their skis. The sky that winter night was occluded, the snow that nameless dark white, white unlit, like a mistake in vision, and Stallo second in line keeping low, gear like echoes of old Shackleton kit but for the unlamented boots. Leaning on staffs, Stallo’s now splinted and reinforced bamboo spear. The trees were goblin outlines.

First light they were huddled watching quiet country. Before dawn they saw dwellings. On a rail line scant miles off came lamps. No bell, no blare, only muffled clatter.

—Well, that ain’t scheduled.

Reactor waste off the books, bound for Karelian water. No stars still, and now the intruders knew the location of the iron road.

Only a mile from what on most maps was the town’s north edge, beyond wire in a zone of collapse, concrete cracked in the ice and patterned with spilt oil. The travellers found the brick longhouse: word from sources whose names they’d never know. Two days and nights on a dusty upper floor. They lay to look down through a window sooted where someone had had a little fire. When they moved with military care away from their viewing point, they made on the floor asymmetric dust angels.

—Anyone for briefing? Stallo said.

—I read it all already, Bowler said.

—It’s already read, the Red reading, eh?

When Croome had shown him what they would be using, Stallo had turned it in his hand.

—This can’t be apport, he’d said.

—You must feel it.

—Christ yeah, but…the date.

—You may recall me mentioning that some valued possessions do abut the Enigma.

—But, Doc, you can’t say the Murmansk business wasn’t part of it….

—I’m saying no such thing. But if you were to ask a gent on the Clapham omnibus his opinion about the British intervention into the Russian Civil War, what do you think his response would be? Precisely. He has no idea it occurred.

—What are you getting at?

—I don’t make the rules. Revenance is a sociological business. And whatever you and I might think, the crown’s Archangel intervention obviously isn’t so tainted by whatever quality the Great War has—I use that tense advisedly—as to preclude apportation.

Now he took off his glove and ran his fingertips over the paper’s wrong nature again. Dated 1918 itself, defaced by hand-stamped ink obscuring the sigils of a dead tsar.

—That’s the most blatant fucking snag I ever seen, Bowler said, and Stallo nodded, but those dark bars were not in fact the apport’s abyssal navel. Each Russian Provisional Government note had been printed in England bearing the mark of the Romanovs, their power already truncated in a cellar. A staggering stupidity. Did a head roll in army HQ for such inadvertent White propaganda? Recruited Archangel locals had hardly hankered for restoration—hence the laborious blocky obfuscation on every original. All money is specie of occupation, all comes marked with authority under erasure. The English rouble was distinct only in its tactlessness. The censor’s black corrections to that faux pas were no snag; what that flaw was, Stallo still did not know, though he could feel its existence. He whispered to the undiscovered bleb.

Such spoor might even, cross fingers, be stained by its proximity to the cacophony of the Passion Dales. Stallo fingered it as if sent to buy a toy.

On the third day a shuffling below. The Uniteers took up positions, rifles aimed at the stairs. Hands held up came into view.

—Uritsky. I am Uritsky.

The contact was a small and frightened murine man. Behind him, Croome.

—Very fetching, Stallo said of her Russian clothes.

—Blagodaryu va.

—How was the conference? he said.

—As dull as expected. Scientific cooperation across the ideological divide de dum de dum de dum.

—Well you stayed long enough. You’re late.

—My apologies, she said. —We had to wait in Murmansk. I got a warning I was watched. False alarm it turns out.

—I doubt that.

—Undoubtedly I was watched and undoubtedly they don’t believe I’m an assistant to the delegation of British chemists. I suspect they’re having quite the conniption that I wasn’t on the plane back. One hopes they’re following the trail left by SIS. But Uritsky heard I was under surveillance by an ITKO agency, which suggests more insight that one would like. The whole thing’s been rather heart-in-mouth stuff.

—No disrespect Doc but I fucking said I wasn’t happy putting a boffin in the field.

—We had no choice. None of us are happy.

—You look fucking delighted.

She looked nothing but calm.

—Another change of plan, she said. —Uritsky’s coming back with us.

—Oh is he now?

—Yes Sergeant he is. Uritsky bit his nails. —Kowalchuk is onto him.

Bowler watched Uritsky with melancholic professional curiosity.

—How? Stallo said.

—I don’t know and neither does he, Croome said. —But Kowalchuk is correct to be paranoid. There is indeed a mole. From her coat Croome brought out documents, handed them to Stallo. —At least one. Here’s their assessment of forces.

He read. —A Chink mole, too? he said.

—As well as ours? Well, they think so. She tapped the papers. —Perhaps the Americans. Perhaps all of the above. Kowalchuk’s group is under enormous pressure. You think we have it bad?

Stallo’s Russian was enough to get a gist. For all his professional respect for the PRC’s efforts in this realm, suspiciously outlined herein, he frowned. He’d gone through translated taproot texts in the Black Beacon, the Shurangama Sutra, Fa Yun’s Fanyi Mingyi Ji. He’d slogged over the antique fieldwork of the Orientalists, typologies of the gui. And yes you might crowbar what forces you encountered in the field into one or other of the categories if you wanted. So he had sought insight in the taxonomies, into whatever powers were behind shifts in the states of things both pre- and postmortem. He’d found provocations, ways of thinking that improved his understanding of the lespries tout court. The Hungry, yes. There were the Hungry. There were the Droughts. He read of the dead that, in their lingering, assumed the shape of objects, and he wondered about apports. And what about the Cruel Ghost?

—The Cruel Ghost became a demon in his old age, Bowler said, seeing Stallo reading Uritsky’s documents. No real magic at that convergent thinking, not that Stallo could smother an impressed stare. Bowler, too, had gone through this stuff before, as ordered. Where there were Reds beyond Moscow’s purview, look to Mao’s disciples.

—What about hints of nonaligned trouble? he said now, waving the papers.

Croome said, —Uritsky’s take’s the same as ours: KH is vying for ground in the colonies, getting Kowalchuk agitated, and it’s possible Peking is at work through KH, no?

—That’s what Hook says, Stallo said. But given the current wrestling over the Great Helmsman’s line, the caution of relevant secret departments, Stallo could not see the attacker on the island, or whatever might harass Kowalchuk, originating in the gui-prodding basements of China’s Second Bureau. —Why would Peking bother?

That simultaneously dramatic and yet, in the scheme of things, weak-tea attack.

—Granted it was bad for us, Stallo said. —But what did it achieve for them? Except to get our attention and get us pissed off?

—Maybe Peking’s helping KH with resources and letting them do whatever they want. To annoy us and Moscow. In any case, Kowalchuk is in trouble, which means so is Uritsky, which means so are we. And what’s more, Sergeant, Uritsky thinks there’s arguing in KH, too. In at least two directions. Whoever it is calls himself or herself Regnal or the Gen’ral is pushing on with some plan, backed up by Wran and the old guard. Others, under a young turk who goes by Marco, want a very different direction.

She gestured at Uritsky. —Information’s being stolen from the section. Kowalchuk’s furious. Thinks Regnal’s behind it, if Uritsky’s right. What’s gone missing is Intel on the chort. Chort is devil.

—If you ask me it’s just psyops, she said. —Grave dirt, clandestine meetings at the bathhouse at midnight, diablerie. But perhaps there’s something to it—KH trying to tap some…particular kind of function. Kowalchuk seems to believe it. And Uritsky’s terrified.

—Understood.

—I’m not asking you to mollycoddle him. But we have to get him out. Between the suppletion you tapped in Kenya—

—Oh that’s still working out is it?

—Bowler not discussed it with you? He saw her surprise smoothly covered. —Yes it is rather. Between that and Uritsky, we might get a better idea of what’s going on.

—Long ago gave up any hopes for that, Doc.

—Recruitment, Stallo said to the Uniteers. —First for a while. Credible reports, it says here, apparition, Brit question mark. And we’ve got just the apport that’ll maybe help snag it. So to speak.

Croome showed a photograph. A young man in uniform, Private Charles Mardell, 11th Royal Sussex. The Finnish Legion—mooncalf division of Red refugees fighting under British command; Lenin permitted it—had been ready against the Whites who’d pushed them across the border, but threatened mutiny if deployed south against their comrades. We know that Germans and Allies are imperialists, but of two evils we have chosen the latter, as the architect of the Red Army had insisted. Men of the good ship Glory had disembarked in the midden of Murmansk ice and filth for a few weeks of such uneasy, unlikely collaboration, the truculent legion policed by bewildered Sussex men like Mardell until the end of mosquito season, when Brits and Reds had settled into more appropriate antagonism.

—And here they fell, Stallo said. —Some of our lot in any case. Including Mardell. Stay sharp.

By the window Uritsky played with a cigarette.

—I don’t like babysitting, Stallo said. —You light that and I’ll do you in myself.

Dusk, and they trudged the snow in civvy clothes.

—What waved a flag about all this then? Stallo said. Hunched into her fur collar, Croome shrugged. A whisper raised in status enough for investigation, among all the intel of rising shadows, dead parents, dead children, lost hearts again, angry dead, hungry dead. In a place like this where you couldn’t move for the unquiet, every stone had its Lares. Uritsky did not complain or slow. He must have been hungry for a gruff affirmation; civilians love soldiers’ approval. To bestow a glow, Stallo knew all he needed do was say Well done.

They skirted fences past last buildings. The night, impatient in that season, rushed them. Rock outcrops seemed to watch askance. Stallo, on point, could not tell what it was that made him cautious. He raised his fist and everyone was still. Out of the dark a dog came bounding gladly. It lolloped in the haunch-deep snow and stopped like the men and the woman it saw. Ink dog, an outline. It growled a question. A man came over the hilltop, weapon on his shoulder. He said, —Idite syuda, whistled and took two steps and stopped, too. The wind stung them all.

—Dobryy vecher. Uritsky spoke from behind them and his voice was desperate and conversational.

—Privet.

That timbre Stallo knew: one straining to be reassured. You could see the man consider whether this encounter might end well but Stallo took in lines of sight and flight. He would wish the outcome already decided otherwise.

The man said, —Ty poteryalsya? There was in his voice a guarded curiosity but he was gripping that rifle hard. Stallo raised his weapon and shot him.

In the ringing silence the hunter clenched and the flare of his own rifle shot illuminated his face. He fell and the snow took him.

Stallo turned. Merrick lay amid the white, struck by the wild bullet.

His ears cleared and Stallo heard the dog that circled its prone master howl. It came at him in terror. He shot it and from where he lay the Russian man cried out in a last sadness to see that. Stallo went to him and took the man’s rifle out of his stiffening hands and threw it. The man stared into the sky and mouthed a name. His attention was all on his dying.

Merrick kicked his legs. In his side a bloody hollow around which his fingers fluttered.

—He’ll die, Bowler said to Stallo. Quietly enough that Merrick would not hear.

—Yes, Stallo said. —Fucking damn it and fuck.

He went to make sure the dog was all dead and shot the Russian a last time too.

They helped Merrick with too much morphine. He too whispered as had the man who’d killed him, he looked at the sky and Stallo listened and heard from him, —…bottom of the garden…He heard, —Good dog, and Merrick was dead.

They carried the bodies into the darkness amid the trees and laid them down naked, sacrificed kings in a cruel religion. The stones watched. The Uniteers said a few words over Merrick and even over the corpse they called Ivan, for whom they had no anger, and the dog. They carried the clothes to dispose of them piece by piece in holes and in the hollows of wood far distant. The snow would cover the blood and tracks.

Beyond Luvenga a natural rent by the goddess’s mountain, Akatyeva.

—Here.

A local woman had told the priest that she’d seen figures moving in impossible ways. It was not a hollow but an opening out where the pathway turned. Stallo stationed Sutton to watch.

—Kowalchuk’s lot’s supposed to be coming too, so keep your eyes fucking open.

Croome unfolded tripods and battery, protected on two flanks by stone. Night made her clumsy. Clouds obscured the star points and it was a blessing, softening the remora bite of cold. The Uniteers made wires describe five points. At the centre Croome placed a bottle trap, open. Five bulbs came up to shed their light inward.

Stallo brought the Rouse out of his pack. It was heavy. Square speakered machine, echo of the mother engine on the English spit. It might have encased, behind the grill, a bugle or its remnants, apport with tubes that went nowhere but into themselves. He set it down.

—So, Croome whispered.

—It would be better if we hold hands. Uritsky’s inflection made him sound sad.

—Would it indeed? Croome said. —I daresay it would also be better if we provided a table and chairs and a secret buzzer and a smock with hidden pockets for prestidigitation. This is fieldwork and I need the men on watch and we make do.

The Rouse machine bore no dials nor any gauge. How freezing that metal must have been in this old roadway for the curious, the north-seeker and the damned. Stallo was tired of the sound of the wind. So, as it might have been, so, there came now another noise.

The memory of a tone. One note breathed out by infinite throat.

Without opening his lips Stallo sang accompaniment to the machine.

get up at once

the bugle’s sounding

It was as if the Rouse box itself was in the shadow of what he could not rightly see but knew to be a more perfect cube.

get up at once the bugle’s sounding old Sol is shining

for all that it was still night. The blare of selcouth brass. What bathed them was luminous darkness. Stallo’s men kept their weapons up, up flared the lights of the electric pentacle until all there were written in many-angled white and its shadows, and the bottle was dark within. Stallo, chest tight, awaited a thing that thought itself returned. Now in the first instance of his knowing he was witness to a Rousing. The Rouse. Revenance not memory, a harder and uglier recall.

Gunshot.

He opened his eyes. Had not known they’d closed. He read Croome’s lips, It’s not working. He made for her. Time broke again. Stallo came close to the wires. To the

call-up sound

of the Rouse. Suffused

with the drone of it he slowed

—Lie still.

Blue daylight. Stallo disobeyed Croome. He held his head when he sat up but he did not hurt. He felt awake and good.

—What happened? he said. —Who shot?

—What? No one.

—What happened to me?

He stood in the snow. The gear was packed. Uritsky watched him. Bowler waved at Stallo and his expression was inscrutable.

—What do you remember? Croome said. —Sergeant, look at me.

—Do we have—?

But he saw the haint bottle then, closed, sealed, its diode winking on. She saw him see it.

—We weren’t having much luck, she said. —Until—now, Sergeant, listen to me—until your control came in to help us.

—What? he said. —Oh fuck off. No.

—Yes.

—Absolutely not, fuck off fuck off.

—Whatever you say, Sergeant.

Stallo teetertottered like a tent pole untethered, a comedy, catching himself and putting his hands to the sides of his face and rubbing those thick clumsy-making gloves across himself and trying to clutch with them as if they might take hold of handfuls of ivy or greenery or hairlike root filaments and rip them out to find him beneath. You green face, you hantu, you shaggy ghillie thing, you forest, you Grundle, you vegetable companion! How long have you been waiting? How long have you been straining to part my inner overgrowth, undergrowth yourself, to speak through me? You gramineous Enkidu! What did you say with my throat?

—For fuck’s sake, no.

—

Croome told him a new voice had come out of his mouth. She said it had spoken words she had not recognised and could not reconstruct. —As much like silence as words, she said.

He said, —As if there were weeds in front of its mouth.

Giving it lips.

—Whatever…came up in you…called for Mardell, she said. —We wouldn’t have done it without your control.

—Fuck’s sake, he said. —I do not want to be a medium.

—We’re all mediums, Croome said. —In a way. It’s just a question of figuring out how.

Croome said:

The voice from Stallo’s throat. And something had approached. Down the stone channels. Faced away presenting its back. An old uniform limned in frozen glow. That figure laboured like a sick man repeating a last pilgrimage. All the cold in the world had come and up came the Rouse (she said) and the walker walked as all there stared in its direction save Stallo. It had come against the motion of its own dead legs. Inches above the snow, tilting slowly, she said, like a spindle, spinning on the axis of its body so its face came into her view, obscured by the shade of what had once been upon it, she had glimpsed old sickness, tight skin and shadow holes of typhoid, the wetness of sweat dripping in all directions.

Her eyes shone at the memory. Towards the yawning trap. A private again, in the last throes of an old virus. Staring its concern for a point that circled it, a Roused echo orbiting it.

—What? Stallo said.

She said, —There was another one. Or a trace.

The way you must talk about the dead there was no line between report and story. Not I saw, but there had been. That night there had been intersecting with the Mardell thing the flit of a faint sketched-out face. A Slavic face, Croome said. The rags of another presence. Mardell a haunted haunt.

—And then, she said, —it looked at you.

—Not at me, Doc.

—What? Oh, I see. At—

—At my control.

—Of which you’ve no memory?

—Not this time.

He said that and she looked at him with her keen and curious interest.

—We closed the box, she said. —And it, or I should perhaps say they, are inside.

On the journey home, before the foothills, they saw approaching a small group of Russian soldiers who had not spotted them and did not proceed with care.

—They found Ivan.

—Or the dog.

—I told you, Uritsky said. —These are Kowalchuk’s.

—If they ain’t local bods, if that’s our opposite numbers, then we’ve got even less to worry about than we thought, Stallo said.

The enemy had no great energy. Perhaps the Uniteers should let them alone. But no, after consideration, giving permission by looks alone, Stallo instructed Sutton to place the newly full bottle down in the path of those oncoming. Sutton grinned.

—Oh now really, Croome said. But she did not intervene. Her sigh was theatrics.

—Call it a test fire, Stallo said. —You know you want to see it again, Doc.

The Uniteers withdrew to a ridge to watch, to trigger the bottle, to visit on the enemy the matter of Britain, in the Russian morning.

[26]

“Did he ever tell you stories?” Stallo says. “Ewan?” The shock of the mention holds Maur still. “The forces are gossipy as fuck,” he says. “Did he ever—ever—tell you any Chinese Whispers about the work he did?”

You should call that game Telephone now. Then what comes to her is, The work he did? What did he do? There must be those for whom black ops is a cover story. What did Ewan ever do except be a soldier? Her, sitting with him in the kitchen, she looking at him, he sometimes looking at her, under their smoke, he, her son, sitting there a soldier.

It takes her a while but she shakes her head.

—

A tower block overlooks unfinished foundations where the skyline lowers and shallow pits where gulls ascend and descend in constant double helix. Some places are built to have no hinterland but it will never work. There’s an eagerness to this town that’s unseemly, like that of a child not loved enough. Deny somewhere its unconscious and it will acquire one or die, and in the latter act succeed at the former. Stallo leads them to one of the apartment shells, the topmost floor but one. It’s bare within but for dust and a little dirty furniture, clean old clothes and four mattresses in a room where wallpaper peels like bark. The air tastes rusty.

“We can’t play too safe.” Maur can see he’d rather say nothing and have them simply accept what he does. “We have to get the lay of the land fast.”

“Who from?” Cybill says.

“People with a certain interest. We can’t be specific, it’ll be an alarm bell for them who know too much, and anyway, people don’t know what they know. Ask for specifics, they’ll cast about and tell you any old crap; nothing worse than someone trying to be helpful. So I’ve put it out in the right places that there’s someone new around who might help them. That’s going to mean a lot of nutters. So you have to learn to listen. We might get more out of some gibberish about werewolves than from someone who’s actually ITKO. ‘In the know.’ ”

They’ll stick together for survival. Like it or not, none of them disbelieve that any more. Maur and Cybill change themselves once more. Jock watches. Stallo shaves his scalp as the hints he’s loosed travel. He wears dark glasses and drab overalls and chain-smokes strong cigarettes until the apartment stinks of it.

—

It’s only a few each day. Lost souls, but who’s not lost? “I tried to vet them,” Stallo says before he opens the door. “By word of mouth.” He’s distant with excitement.

The first is a man. Just a man, about whom there’s nothing distinctive. Nothing to justify the slam of Maur’s heart. He’s her age-ish, neither fat nor thin, an anxious white man in shabby clothes and to her amazement after he has been and gone she cannot bring his face to mind. Hours later a young woman stylishly dressed. An elderly wife and husband late that day.

Jock stays in the mattress room, out of sight. Cybill and Maur sit by the window, Maur half-hidden in a scarf from beneath the folds of which she watches.

These initial few simply present to Stallo in quick French some occult hearsay and pay him or he them according to bartering Maur can’t follow in notes or whispers. She gets a little of the sense.

“Nothing useful,” Stallo says when they are done.

The next day, and after that, others come to consult this puppet-self Stallo has thrown up. Soon it’s Maur who answers the door if the knock is right, short short long long short long scratch. She cracks it and those in the graffitied corridor say, “Le chercheur?” So she leads them in to sit on a hard chair before Stallo as severe-faced bare-scalped staring mendicant. While Cybill glowers from her own corner. The visitors sit up straight and ask after their dead.

“Comment va ma mère?” “Est-ce que mon oncle a un message pour moi?” They ask Stallo what the weather and the crops will be—Maur’s French improves—and what numbers to choose for gambling, how to keep a devil’s attention from their children. Mostly though they are there to speak to dead parents or spouses, to friends, once to a dog, to children.

“Que pouvez-vous me dire?” Stallo says to his interlocutors at the end of every session. The impatience he masks Maur can always feel strongly then. Her own old This is mad comes up too. Sometimes, if they prefer it, he says what he says again, she supposes, in quick Arabic. Now, what can you tell me? And a whisper to them, names, or hints thereof.

To which few have anything. If they blink and seek something to say, he’ll wait, but his eyes disengage.

When he speaks as the seer there’s a kindness to Stallo Maur has never seen in him before. He weaves reassurance and platitudes together, implies secrets, communicates intimacy. Nothing is clear, he says to someone, you understand that, but there is someone who walks with you.

“Ma soeur.”

Someone taken too soon, he says, yes. She says be at peace. That what words were spoken have flowed on like water under winter ice. This woman’s expression! And then up from under that gladness, disquiet. She says to him, so Maur can hear, “Qui est celui qui vient?” Who is this who is coming? “Ou quoi?” Or what indeed.

Stallo proper looks at the visitor then. Go on, he tells her. She shakes her head. I hoped you’d know, she says. I don’t know but I don’t like it. Neither does my sister.

As the soothsayer he’s paid through tears or smiles or scepticism too, in eggs, old books, money, bottles of questionable liquid bobbing with particulate, icons sometimes inside the glass, eau de vie for drinking or to preserve charms or both, burner phones. He says, Knowledge is the best exchange. Things are happening. What do you hear? What do you see? What do you know about troubles over there? Who knows about these things?

Most visitors say nothing to that, and even if they do Stallo shows no reaction, so how does Maur know that some splinter of information or other has struck him when it does?

A young woman says something like, Time’s running down, I think. I’m not here to ask you what my sister wants, I know what she wants, she wants to have not died. I never stopped speaking to her, after, and she talked to me. Until now. That’s why I’m here. Something’s taken her. What happens when someone dead dies again? Her voice is steady but tears pour from her. It took her.

If I can’t help you, Stallo says, why are you here?

Because it’s not safe to talk to them now. The stronger, the more dangerous. I’m here to warn you.

She stands and Maur stands too, but she can see a no in Stallo’s face. After the woman’s gone he says, “Sometimes even if they know more you can’t push for it. Listen to your gut.”

“I’ll just mutter a mysterious goodbye like a fortune teller, then,” Maur says.

But still. When a troubled man begs Stallo to explain why he’s beset at night, what it is he’s angered, his sleep a prowling ground for presences not of his own projection, why he is losing items from his house, when Stallo has said to him the kinds of things he says and the man stands up, Maur leans down to Stallo and whispers, “There’s more.” She takes his cigarette from him and drags and French-breathes up from her mouth into her nose, to jet it out from her nostrils. To the man she says, “Et?”

“Quelque chose vous poursuit,” he says. Something pursues you. Maur could laugh. Tell us something we don’t know. He says, “…posent des questions. À propos de vous.” People are asking questions.

When she leads him away, meeting Stallo’s stare, she whispers something to the visitor, but it is no translated-into-French spook kitsch, no The veil is thin tonight. What she says is that they’re looking for Irakli, before she pushes him gently out. Turns back, her heart battering her, her face calm. Every fifth-ish, sixth-ish visitor thenceforth, according to obscure hunch, she says it again.

Human, as Maur did, they all take their times alone, even Jock. Walk as they agreed they probably shouldn’t, in clockless hours. Stallo on his rounds, money for information, the others just to breathe solo. In a friperie associative Maur finds a small handbag, a colour not found in nature. The leather has the tired sheen of old skin but it still closes. She doesn’t know why she needs it but she buys it and puts what little she has in it.

Cybill fingers her letter. Maur watches her going over and over each page, the changing nature of the fascination in her eyes. When Maur takes a step towards her, she folds the letter away.

Once when they’re alone, Maur comes to Jock, who just stares at the door. “Jock, none of us want to be here,” she says. “All we’ve got is each other.”

“We haven’t got each other,” he says.

If she could only find the right thing to say, the right combine of exhortation and sympathy, fatalism and commitment. How long has he craved that? Since before he went into inadequate hiding. Before this new time.

“Listen. I think something might be happening with Cybill’s letter—”

“I don’t want to know,” he says. “I don’t care what you need.” He does not even look angry. He takes his own time alone in the streets.

—

“I’m sick of it,” Cybill says to Maur. “She’s here.” Cybill thumps her own chest. “But I can’t get her.”

What are you supposed to say to that? “You know what we’re here for,” Maur says.

“Instead of it talking to her?” Cybill says. “Yeah, because Captain Hook’s scared of a crocodile.” Maur laughs with surprise. “He’s losing it. Do you even hear anything ticking?”

“No, but then I don’t hear anything. And Cybill, we did get kidnapped by the army.”

“The army, yeah,” Cybill says. “Not whatever this…” She gestures. “This supposed thing is that’s coming. All I want is my family and that’s Jules, that’s just my boys and Jules.

“I didn’t know what was up with her at the end. I thought she might be pregnant but…After she passed. They would’ve told me. When she was a little girl she told me everything. Not that she always knew what it was troubling her. She was cheery but just once in a while she might wake up all scared and she didn’t know why. No. And I suppose there was almost a secret or two. When she was a really little girl once I come in on her didn’t I and she was crying and washing and washing her hands. I said to her, ‘Who’s been saying things to you? Oh Jules you’re a beautiful girl, who said something?’ I was ready to storm into that school, I pity the kid, or the parents I should say, because it’s the parents you have to blame, but she wouldn’t tell me. She wouldn’t say who. I said to her, ‘Jules, darling, it’s me, tell me.’ She never stayed upset long but, and she wouldn’t tell me what it was upset her then. I said to her father I couldn’t believe it. Usually she told me everything! He wasn’t surprised though. Kids can be cruel I suppose but…Now my dad, he was awful when me and Mark started out. Black this black that. He changed his tune when the grandkids come along. I keep thinking about that. When I’m going over what happened to her at the barracks, whatever this bullying was, what this bloke done, I keep thinking about her when she was a little girl that time. How it was like she was protecting her own bully. Why shouldn’t I just go back to Strude? At least he was trying to help me talk to her.”

Maur struggles for something to say. Cybill waits politely but not forever.

“Some of what people are saying about how it feels out there…” Maur shocks herself. “Maybe she’s staying quiet now because she has to. Maybe she’s afraid.”

Peter says there are worms in hell. The murderers are cast into a place of worms like clouds of darkness. In Krimibhojana the hater of the father becomes a worm, in a lake of worms, that he eats and by which he is eaten for a hundred thousand years. Mark says there’s comfort in thinking Christ means only that pain is unending when he warns of the worm that does not die. Perhaps though he means there are worms too far gone for death to take them. Three corpses or worms, sanchong, live within you, head, chest, belly, and hasten your death, and their agents are the jiǔchóng, the nine, the ambush and coiling and inch-long white and flesh and lung and stomach and obstructing and red and wriggling worm. They make their way to your back, the worms. The tingler, it crawls its way on pilgrimage, to shock you. The convulsing peristaltic worm, the walker in hot nights, is the liar to, the seducer of, with false caresses, the mortification of the English gone abroad, at the moment of change. Nineteen seventy-seven. What are you being served? Are you free?

Worms take the highway of your spine. Some Herero break the back of the corpse because a maggot lives within the bone and without the precaution of the violence it will become the ghost of the deceased.

The worm is line and it is linelessness. Worm is fly is vector is & and is connection. Smash the white path to kill a ghost.

XIV

Coop the Main

Accommodations

Stallo and Maisie moved, as if it might help. One more room and a little garden, a rectangle of scrub in which Stallo would sit on a kitchen chair taken out for the occasion. To watch birds and the fall and rise of a rake over the fence as the neighbour worked her own space. There as long as he could stand it Stallo might stay considering the earth and what grew in it. The haunted haunt from that cold Soviet ground. And the companion that Stallo’s colleagues insisted was with him, as he supposed he had long supposed. Quiet walker-alongside that, after Mardell’s enbottlement, Croome had sought to outline. Hold these. (Conducting handles.) Stay still. Electrodes on the scalp. Raise your finger when you hear a sound. He’d put a stop to that. Stallo sought his control in conjunctions of sunlight on twigs, in how dandelion stems vibrated.

He would stand in the doorway of Maisie’s room—she left the door open—and watch her back and listen to her typing.

—Maisie.

She’d say nothing and he’d say, —Tappety tappety, eh? or something like that. There might rise in the trunk of her cigarette-smoke tree a gnarl as she dragged without taking it from her lips.

They still did it sometimes, sex, and when they did, it brought quick sullen satisfaction. They would move apart as wordless in the aftermath as in the event.

Stallo surprised them both by still coming to her readings. Sometimes. Rushing oblique monologues, or those catalogue-like descriptions, words not quite doing what you’d been taught to expect, and why had such works once troubled him? Why would he have cared one way or another? He’d sit in the back of the bookshop/café/gallery etc., ignore the double takes from the likes of Alison Purdey, that lithe man called Sten Marcel, editor of one of those magazines, from others Stallo knew.

—Stallo?

—Alright, Alison?

—It’s been a while. This is Jeff and Amy.

—Think we’ve met. Stallo raised a hand at Amy, young, kohl eyed, lips slightly parted as if in a perpetual surprise.

—How come you’re here? Jeff was saying. —We were hoping a mate of mine would turn up, d’you know Skully?…

Alison tutted at that and rolled her eyes. Which Stallo clocked, along with the glance between the women, and a glent of recollection in him. He filed that name for later investigation.

In the Q & A after her reading Maisie outlined a novel that she said was nearing completion. She’d described it to him but he’d had a sense it was stalled so either he was wrong or she was dissembling. In any case that was the moment when Maisie and her husband caught each other’s eyes, and he smiled and she did too and they stayed for an instant connected by lovely secret humour. It put him in mind of when she brought him that Evans book of Malay lore. Which he still had, had read many times. He might should have spoken a Menik Kaien spell over oil and cenduai flowers and rubbed it into her clothes if he wanted her still to love him.

Simmons the Baker was, according to some estimations, joint head of the scientific section now. He found Stallo talking to Croome.

—I’ve been hearing a lot about your exploits, Sergeant, he said. —I’d be grateful if you could come by, I’ve a few things I’d like to discuss.

—Sir.

—I’ve been swamped setting things to rights here, but I’ve read up on the Russian mission. I understand it may be down to you that we have Mardell and his—accompaniment, in storage. Well done. I also understand you’ve not been keen to run tests on your control?

—Sir.

—I understand it may be a bit of a shock but that is what we’re here for. Have you been manifesting any plasm?

—Sir.

Very Jerry and Sapers and Marks squeezed by and from behind Simmons they gurned at Stallo without noise, made blah-blah motions with their mouths and rolled their eyes.

—“Sir” what, exactly? Simmons said. —I’m asking you to run some tests. Croome, would you do the honours when you’ve a mo?

—Sir.

Croome watched Simmons walk away as coldly as did Stallo.

The old man up in North London, so far at least as Stallo could ascertain, was just an old man, an old man who had been a young man once and under fire, under that fire, no less, one of that dwindling generation. Just vaguely ITKO enough to be on the edge of apport trades but that was not so very unusual. Another old codger fantasising about his prize from the Waugh-ah (so they all chewed that diphthong in Stallo’s imagination), due diligence, the lead now ascertained to be dead and not in the good way, Stallo’s report marked FOS (supposedly “Fallax Opinio Sustentatur,” though the Uniteers’ preferred “Full of Shit” seemed more likely).

Stallo went to Melissa Marks’s bed, where she fucked him with that shrewd appraisal that (he, no fool, knew) was exactly what drew him to her as opposed to any other skirt he might find on an afternoon in Diss or wherever. Still though, sometimes that was also the expression that had him look away feeling as if he could have said, I swear if you don’t wipe that look off your mug I’ll wipe it off for you, if he were another man or she another woman.

After they were done, angrily he supposed, he said, —Do you know the name Skully? She shook her head. —It took me a while but I found it, in the Beacon. I’d seen it in a list of names, side-marked in red. J. Skully was in the audience of Broad’s lectures in Cambridge a few years ago.

I think I may say that for my part I should be slightly more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my present body. Bit arch, was Broad, but then he was a pansy. There weren’t many philosophers of reputation inclined to turn their attentions to matters with which the Rousers worked. Those who did were flagged. The details of as many as possible of those who’d attended recorded. Some nondescript little chap in the back row with a notebook.

—It sounds like Skully’s a hanger-on, Stallo said. —From what we’ve got, he’s around the hippy-hippy-shake lot that, well, that Maisie hangs out with. Broad doesn’t know much but he’s not a fool. Maybe Skully’s as interested in actual thinking as he is in the Grateful Dead.

Melissa Marks leaned up on her elbow.

—Jeff mentioned him, Stallo said. —And Maisie was pretending not to be interested.

Marks looked at him, amused, you’d have to say.

—What? he said.

—Stallo, up to a point I don’t mind being a way for you to be spiteful to someone else. She laughed and lay back down. —But enough’s enough. Fuck off now, there’s a good boy.

Stallo and Bowler rowed out to sea the colour of stone. Push his hand down into it and already at the limit of his reach Stallo’s white fingers hazed out of sight.

—Messing about in boats, what can I say, mate? Stallo said. —I’ve heard it’s the bollocks. I don’t feel too clever though.

He had not suffered like this before.

—Morning sickness? Bowler said. —I mean you’re eating for two now.

Stallo flicked him V fingers.

—You want this? Stallo said. —You’re jealous?

—Talk to a control? Fuck yes!

Stallo lay back. —But you don’t, do you? he said. —You don’t talk to them. They might talk through you, maybe, and you don’t even fucking know it.

—But that’s what this is all about. I don’t understand you, Stallo. How many years have we spent doing this? Pressing buttons and waving apports about and feeling for cold spots, and then it turns out that you’re a sluice. For—

—I know what for, thanks, mate.

—Well do tell, Bowler said, —because I don’t.

Yes Stallo had gone back hunting details and advice for this. But even with Kardec it was all Rapping and Verse-Making and Convulsive and Incorrect. The control didn’t come up.

—I don’t want to talk about it, you’re right, Stallo said. —But seeing as you won’t leave it alone. One, something happened once, that’s all we know, whatever Croome says. Two. What good is any of this to me? I can’t remember anything. Three. Controls are bollocks.

The control! Guide, the driving discarnate gesturing like traffic police to bring into play other entities beyond, a role regarding which the Unit was traditionally sardonic. So some of the dead were jobsworths ensuring an orderly queue? What a load of shit.

—Some of the nutters even admit it themselves, Stallo said. —Eileen Garrett’ll tell you Uvani—U-fucking-vani!—is her own subconscious. Why are controls all suspiciously helpful natives? Red Indians and Egyptian princes banging on Um Big Cobblers?

Talking of C. D. Broad. Elevated hieratic twaddle, he called control business.

Bowler said, —But I saw you.

—And four, Stallo said. —Four, why would anyone want it? Not all controls are lespries. Why aren’t we talking about that?

—What are you on about?

Yeah I thought maybe you didn’t do quite the homework I did, Stallo did not say. In the last century Dr. Billot said such entities were angels, like those in John Dee’s shew stone. Nona, whispering through Lujza Ignath, said they’d never been alive. Old Roman controls said they were between humans and gods. William James said they were demons.

Stallo did not say anything to Bowler of the years of lost seconds, of slippages behind his eyes, of the trees. On the shoreline a figure walked, a smudge like a mark made by Hook in the desert.

—I dreamt I heard a kid crying the other night, Bowler said. —I woke up thinking, Oh blimey, that’s just what we need, a baby here. I was awake but I still thought I could hear it for a while. I don’t know what’s going on any more. Did you ever hear of anything like what we found in Russia? Two Roused spliced together? He did not pause for any answer. —Has Simmons buttonholed you yet?

—He had a word.

—I’d’ve thought you’d be one of the first but maybe he thinks you’re too much Croome’s. All sorts of new stuff they’re up to now.

—Well we’re all busy.

—That we are. Croome more than most. And Simmons more’n most too. It’s all change in the labs. You know what Sapers told me? He said Simmons had him doing call signs into a 19 radio. Apport.

—What? Stallo sat up. —I didn’t know we had one.

—That’s just it. He tells Sapers it’s just been sitting there bust and no one’s wanted to touch it. He’s opened it up and done some rewiring.

—What?

—I know.

—I can’t…Might as well smash up a relic. How does he know what he’s doing?

—I don’t think he does, Bowler said. —He’s just mucking about.

Stallo performed aghastness.

—Anyway he’s put it back together and he’s getting Sapers to send signals on A channel, Bowler said.

On the second time trying Stallo said, —Did they get anything back?

—No. But he was doing an outline test on something too, Bowler said. Made a tap-tapping motion with an imaginary apport rod: a classic method for ascertaining the edge of an RE. —Sapers said he was using that apport, you know, sliver of glass from a porthole? Simmons’d tied it to the end of a stick. So he could keep his distance. He’s pushing so it’s like it’s going right into the Roused.

—Ouch.

—Yeah, but no reaction. And pretty soon it wasn’t coming up against anything at all.

—The haint went? Stallo said.

—Sapers reckons something went wrong with the glass, not the haint. Maybe it was one of the ones stopped being apport.

To Stallo’s own great surprise he vomited abruptly over the side of the boat and it pleased him to spill none of it on himself. The stringy cloud coiled and undulated like an ocean animal. He said, —Better out than in.

—Well you say, but is it though? Bowler said.

—So they have you mucking about with these things, Stallo said to Croome. —Simmons. Taking them apart?

He made sure to be there in her laboratory without Bowler, when Croome was alone with apports laid out before her, lit up by the sine curve from her oscilloscope.

—Nothing new in that, she said.

—They have to come from somewhere, Stallo said. —Is that what you’re looking into? The source at bloody last?

From the tabletop he picked up a scab of rusted metal the size of his palm.

—What do you mean? Croome said. —A little more respect for the spoor, please.

—I’d have thought we’d be in Iraq more often to be honest with you, Stallo said. With his fingers he traced the coastline of corrosion. —I hear things.

—In your forays in Occult London?

—Laugh if you want, it’s the cradle, isn’t it? Which is maybe why you get stories of apport dumps out there. Maybe history sheds apports and lespries are just a byproduct. What is it we’re actually up to, you reckon? He stared at her until she looked back at him. —We’re fighting the good fight, you might say. Killing Humbaba. Like we always did.

—“We”? Croome said. —And Humbaba? Humbug, more like. I would not have had you down—

—Play along, Doc.

—Very well. She stretched her fingers and turned a dial and there came a rush of air from beneath the glass of a bell jar over a shoelace apport and in the percussion of equipment settling in new negative pressure Stallo tried to pinch a tiny promontory of the old iron in his fingertips and palm it without taking his look from Croome. It wouldn’t come.

Croome said, —Gilgamesh is hardly the earliest peering beyond the veil, though. What about Çatalhöyük? What about the Aurignacians? The Hohlenstein-Stadel figure?

—The Löwenmensch? Stallo said. Testing her excited him. He knew the foot-high animal man carved from tusk four hundred centuries ago. —The clue’s in the name, Doc. He’s a lion-man. Just like Humbaba. His roar’s a flood, his mouth is death. Who would go down into his forest? they say. Well, us, that’s my point. That’s who. That’s what they pay us for. We’re Gilgamesh and company saying, Fuck off, Humbaba, this is our forest now.

—You sound like you’re having a splendid time with all this, Sergeant.

—Why all the changes? he said. He indicated the bench and the litter on it. —Bit less…reverential. Bit more hands-on with the stuff.

—These are, as you say, rumbustious times. Which demand experiments and new methods.

—You must be a bit pissed off, Simmons coming in over your head.

What a look she gave him. Not without humour.

—There’s never been unanimity on how to proceed. We’re all functions of our time. I’m of a different era. Simmons is clearly talented. Fine, I am a snob and I am appalled by the idea of a vulgar food scientist lording it over me. How am I doing?

—Not lording it over you, Stallo said. —Over the dead.

—Swear jar, please.

Stallo took a shilling from his pocket and put it in a lidless biscuit tin on her desk on which was pasted a label in her handwriting: dead / ghosts / &C.

—As far as I’m concerned, consciously at least, it takes all sorts, Croome said. —And there’s no reason an industrial chemist or whatnot shouldn’t bring invaluable eyes to the issue. Nor am I a nostalgic. Far less than is Hook. I rather welcome a spot of vulgarity. But it isn’t working. And whether that’s to be laid at Simmons’s door or whether he’s just unlucky depends on who you ask. Because one does hear of new difficulties and new things rising. And familiar phenomena altering. I’ve told you the suppletion is a function not of an individual but of history. For all that, it acts as if it believes things.

—Maybe it believes it does, he said.

—One must proceed as if that’s so. Daseinanalysis. Necroanalysis. Thanato-analysis.

—Thanalysis, Stallo said.

—Oh, well done that man.

—So what does my conn troll believe? he said.

—You agree then that is what it is?

He had nothing to say to that.

When Stallo was a child, he taxonomised his favourites: colour (green), toy (a little train), football team (Edgware Town), food (chocolate ice cream), jumper (green with stripes), socks (red and green), weather (nameless to him, that kind of cold-but-not-freezing evening with rain as fine as dust). A universe of ranking. When had that ceased?

In his mind he auditioned Bowler and/or Marks for aid in a transgression but he always knew that it would be his alone to commit. Bowler would want it too much and if Marks helped it would be in service of that cool knowing with which she regarded him.

Yes, he could buy equipment or source it perhaps from some less frequented storeroom, but you never know what superstition will demand of you. He was one of Croome’s lads, always pootling around down there, even when she wasn’t. It was only three days after he had decided on his course of action that Stallo came down “looking for Croome” and when he found she was not there he did not close the door to her lab, did not move quickly. He unclipped the leads from her oscilloscope. He lifted it and for a moment it felt like a cube, but no, it was about a foot by a foot and a half or so and twenty inches high and heavy. Stallo walked out with it, puffing, and though he was ready to explain that Croome had asked him to replace it, he did not think anyone would challenge him, nor did they. Of course it would have been trickier if he’d had the rotten luck to bump into Croome herself, in which case, well, they’d have to see. But he did not. He did not find out whether, had they met there in the dim corridor, Croome would have smiled, put her head to one side, said nothing, and let him have it.

Certainly though there was no need to take detours, leaning back against the weighty thing, where was he off to? No advantage to taking it as if on a walk, a turn or two by a window onto animal cages full of dark. Nor to set his burden down at the entrance to the empty room where Bowler read to empty chairs. To catch his breath. To look in through its glass to fascinators, hagstones dangling. A tin hamsa hand affixed to the doorframe, below which greetinglike palm some wag had written in pencil How, Paleface, and below that a scrawled algiz. No wait there were two algiz runes. One in chalk, a handspan high, the vertical crowned with a triple fork, Drawing of a single black algiz rune: a vertical line with two straight diagonal arms meeting it near the top to form a Y shape.. Bunk but in for a penny. Elk, Grimm called it, but in the rune poem it was elk sedge, a fen plant, so daþ grimme blode breneð beorna gehwylcne ðe him ænigne onfeng gedeþ, it’ll hurt you, stain you with blood if you reach for it. Just because the fucking Nazis liked it didn’t mean it should be verboten, now did it?, look at Operation Paperclip, no shame to this thorny life. Below it, though, tiny, rendered in dark, that sign inverted. The young futhark. He’d never seen that deployed as guard like this. It might have been a comrade’s joke. Counterargument to Yggdrasil. Pick up the scope, Stallo, get on with getting out. That mark was not the sedge but a tree upside down, the fork not roots but a canopy growing into the underworld, a dead tree, the Todesrune, and what it meant was death. It was not K, Anglo-Saxon calc, though the strokes were identical. Yr, the yew tree, A single black algiz rune drawing, showing a long vertical line with two shorter diagonal lines branching upward from its top to form a Y shape., R.

Stallo took the oscilloscope all the way to London. To the room he kept there several miles from home. He set it on the table. Stared into its face. Dials, lights, connectors, sockets, screws. What he read in cream-on-oxblood sans serif on the shield plate on the steel front was

MODEL 1035 MK III

OSCILLOGRAPH

COSSOR

INSTRUMENTS LTD

LONDON

MADE IN ENGLAND

Stallo put his hands back to the cold metal and indulged another fantasy, that he’d feel that old feeling and know this thing itself was actually apport. Search for the snag—open it up, pick up the tube sockets and find them to be black eggs, and replace them as carefully as if it were back into a nest. Or—he gasped in admiration of his own unconscious—he’d realise that the sixth line of that make and model read, rather,

DANDLE MEANING

, and that the third was diminished and scrambled,

CROSS

, snagged.

Open his eyes and it was not apport again.

He did open it. He cleaned the reservoir and the oil caps and dabbed them with solvent. Shone his light inside, touched his solder here and there, careful as a midwife, and as he did with his left hand he raised a jar of dust, the shavings from the old man’s wall. Stallo shook it gently and let the residue patter into the innards of the machine and the points he made of connection.

So literal a ministration.

For the first time now he considered the nature of divisible apport. Vapour, water, dirt. Must each part have its copula of two natures? The specks fell. A problem of mereology; if dust were snagged would each particle be so or was it something in the aggregate? Stallo closed the machine. He powered it up. Touched it once more when the current ran through. It felt no different. That was alright. That was as expected.

A green glow. Light like that of the magnesium streetlamps of a bygone age lit him.

He measured. No signals in or to and from anything in particular. He let the thing play. Positioned it on a tabletop facing out across the city roofs and he put his face close to the round glass and watched the flutter of light as if he were a bathynaut peering beyond a porthole and reading biophosphor script of big-jawed fish. Up-down-up-down, stutter stutter went the waves, measuring nothing, he reading them still, reading nothing.

A weekend leave this time, his hope for a city sunlit, clouds picturesque. He told Maisie he would return on Saturday then came early. Call him stupid if you will, he was not expecting the drably perfect fact of opening the door with yes fucking flowers in hand to hear voices from the living room. Maisie and Sten Marcel. Not this Skully then well well. And not scampering in flagrante but clothed and standing and just blinking, but all pretty clear. By the time Stallo stepped forward and cast the flowers aside and raised his right fist the sheer theatre of it was a drag, and yes Sten’s eyes went wide in satisfying fear but when Maisie said, —Oh for fuck’s sake, Stallo, it was mostly with annoyance and without shock. He put his hand down.

Sten, unpunched, left. Maisie went into the kitchen and came out with two mugs and gave Stallo one and sat down and sighed. Stallo started to say something and she told him to take it up with Melissa. She did not sound anything but tired.

He made himself surly. They sat across from each other. A cut of sunlight explored. Stallo looked at the glowing wallpaper and auditioned things to do or say. I can’t believe, How long have you, Get the fuck, What’s happened between. To reach across and take hold of her hand. To reach across and give her a smack. To stand and leave. He sat still. Is this distress? he thought. He tried out, Fucking slag. He felt even more as if he were a character. He thought, A control is a middleman, and middlemen are spivs, that’s a spiv line. He thought, It’s my own fault, I’ve been ignoring her. He thought, How do I feel about this?

No clearer back at base. It certainly felt important. It felt like a moment. But that was about all he could tell himself for sure, for all he mooched and ruminated.

—Sergeant Allardyce, Hook said. —Would you oblige?

An American visitor. Hook whispered no limits for the tour, so the bloke must be fairly ITKO.

—Brantley. Stallo put Maisie away from the front of his mind for a bit and rubbed his fingers against his trousers before he took the man’s offered hand. He knew he’d been doing this on and off since his experiment with schmutz. —I’ll be obliged if you’ll show me whatever you consider interesting.

The visitor was in late middle age and his belly pushed against a belt tight enough to advertise that this weight was new. The bulk made him like a carving; his shoulders were wide. A white man, deeply tanned, who ran his hands repeatedly across his buzz cut. His clothes were civilian but had he been rising from behind tufted earth with rifle in hand beckoning men to follow him he could not have been more military.

—Let’s go this way, Stallo said. —Sir.

The black tower watched them. The American shaded his eyes and looked into the marsh.

—You been here before? Stallo said.

—Here, England? Several times. I’m not what you could call an Anglophile exactly but it’s always a pleasure. You’re a Londoner, correct? I can tell maybe three accents by now. You mean here, this region? I’ve been to Beccles, Lavenham, Foulsham. He named them with pleasing outsider precision. —Here here? First time. I’m sure it won’t be the last. Obviously there’s a history of cooperation and I’m excited for that to continue.

What verticals there were in the demarcated wetland were stems of reaching bushes and bonelike boughs mottled. From a dead tree it was as if a shade rose to come wodwo closer to examine the men in its habitat.

The American said, —Would you take it bad if I said you-all are a surprise? I mean that with respect. Were you in the service during Suez? The swan song. I don’t mean you have no skills or insights left, and history sure does matter, if nothing else you guys are proof of that. I know stuff lingers. The Commonwealth. He smiled. —But I think the direction of travel is clear. You understand my meaning? Except! Except.

Brantley threw up his hands at the moor.

—You do this so goddamn well! We do our damnedest. Ops Crimp and Masher and Wandering Soul. I’m sure you’ve been apprised of our efforts to scare the bejesus out of Charlie with dead comrades.

Stallo had. Voices out of overhead planes.

—I bet it made you laugh. Everything you heard is true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying VCs don’t have a thing about screaming souls. I’m not saying Tape Number 10 didn’t scare them. It sure as hell scares me. But I can tell you they draw a goddamn lot of fire. There are speakers lying there in the jungle after some pissed gunner’s kicked them out of his way so he can fire back.

Stallo thought of the choppers over Malaya.

—And whether or not they persuade anyone to defect, they don’t suck up anything more important, Brantley said. —No matter how we try.

A trumpet flare is a funnel in reverse. It would be a poor Uniteer who could not have intuited the dual nature of that experiment, tones and infrasound smuggled between frequencies of the unheimlich broadcast, straining to draw in energies, while booming out spook stories.

—We code the Rouse just like you do. We’re playing it like goddamn pied pipers for the Vu Lan down there.

—Yank or gook?

—I’m not particular. But no dice. Hence research trips like this. It sure isn’t for your weather. We do what you do, same places, same techniques, same everything, and get pretty much nothing. I cannot make any sense of that at all.

Before he left, Brantley gave Stallo a reel. —There’s the audio. Go on, should be good for a few yuks.

And so yes the Uniteers had some fun with their copy, playing it in the bar. Discordant reverberations of a soul in hell calling for his daughter, warning comrades against fighting and dying and being left lost, provoked among the British soldiers the jeers and laughter invited, but not without a certain admiration. And the photographic images of those psyops men under strapped loudspeakers, concocted voices of immiserated dead blaring from their backs like dirges from the crack to nowhere in a huldra’s spine? Well there was something to that sight, no doubt.

Brantley came to Stallo’s mind when Maisie was arrested in Grosvenor Square at the demonstration outside the embassy. The police kept her awhile. When she came home Stallo asked her if she’d enjoyed her fashion show. He pointed at her colourful clothes and invited her to give him a twirl. He asked whether she was pleased with herself.

—I am actually, she said. She was dirty and her makeup was smeared. She said, —Admit it, you’re impressed, and against his own will and expectations he laughed because it was not untrue.

They had sex, the first time in ages. With what it came to Stallo to consider affectionate dislike. While he lay on his stomach afterwards, still slick, he said, —How many pricks you had in there this week? and she said, —Oh for God’s sake. In the end she reached over him for his cigarettes and smoked and looked at the ceiling. She said, —It’s not good, you know, in a flat voice. —It’s pathetic really, that you’ve never said anything to me about what’s going on in the world. I don’t even know what you think of it. Vietnam.

—Was Sten there? Stallo said. —On your little jaunt?

—You can think what you want, she said. —You know what I think about it. You do now anyway even if you weren’t paying attention before. But I’d properly respect it if you disagreed with me. Look at what you do. All your secrets. I’m sure you know more about it than me. I bet you know all the dates. You could tell me what happened when, who did what, all the way back. I used to love that about you. I bet you could tell me what Ho has for breakfast.

—You say I know what you think about Vietnam, Stallo said. —As if you haven’t just suddenly decided that oh, wow, your heart beats on the left, maaaan. I’ve been here the whole time, Maisie, so if you want to reinvent yourself, go ahead, but don’t try and get one over on me.

—Christ’s sake, Stallo, you have to think something, as well as just knowing things. What do you think?

He tried at first to say nothing in response. When she repeated the question, he said, —I think you should be a bit less bloody pleased with yourself, and she regarded him without expression.

The intruder on the spit had put a brake on complacency the Uniteers hadn’t known afflicted them, but they had nothing with which to replace it. And yes it was an occupational hazard, but Stallo did feel followed. As other men puttered in their sheds (with their wives getting up to who knew what?) and built their model railways (he supposed), so Stallo in his attic fiddled with and fossicked for bits for the oscilloscope.

Connect it to a shunt now and you could watch the lines on the display attempt to measure current, but what could you learn from that havering? It was as if the scope were a hopeless try-hard pet, panting at him with idiotic love, so Stallo gave it a little smack and said, —What are you up to?, to see the jumpjumpjump of lines. Clearly it thought it was measuring some fluctuation or other but there was little ruddy logic to it and no connection he could fathom to the noise of the city through the rigged-up jacked-in mic out of that top window.

—Settle down, he said to the box.

What was the kind of transducer he needed? Had he been able to, he would have taken home whatever Hook had brought from the Venom engine. He’d have wired it so the current to the scope was generated by that debris.

Mix mains electricity with that so produced, that might power something, no? Might voltage be apport? Mix apport water with water from the sea, hose down a revenant’s dream of its own surface, snagged atoms bouncing back from its edges, mundane liquid passing through. What a spray sculpture.

When he went into the storeroom on jobs for Croome he scraped his nail across the surface and into the crevices of every apport he could touch. A dust collector. Transferred it to matchboxes. Thence to rub inside the oscilloscope.

Put out queries, get what you can back. What is it you’re after? Old military gear? Can do. If such shifty suppliers were ITKO they kept it to themselves. If apports passed through their hands they didn’t make a meal of it. The busted-up remnants of a Hayes piece Stallo got hold of weren’t apport but they had their pathos, false-start machine bits older than he, and he liked their subaquatic provenance, and he venerated them in his way and wired them to the scope and tried again to see what it was, if anything, that he sensed and could not hear across the city at night.

There isn’t always a hinge point. Sometimes there were days of touching controls, turning a dial a hair this way, a breath the other, meditating on the patterns, altering frequencies gathered, cleaning them of noise. Certain slopes and troughs of the line which might once have seemed to him contingencies now coded as artefacts of another kind.

Many nights he gazed into that round window to the other world of vectors and translations, seeing sounds he could not hear and telling himself that this was insight, that he was an explorer, smiling a green cold shining smile. Until the screen-drift changed.

A rising and abrupt wash of shock sent Stallo to his feet stepping backwards away from the glow upon the table with arms outstretched, a through-flush of dread, grue that made him shake, and what preceded it by an instant, he would swear, what sent him up, had been a spasm and fanglike jagging of the lit-up line, lost already as he moved, afterimage teasing his eyes as the baseline waver returned, the anomaly unrecorded.

[27]

It’s a long while after performance hours as Stallo prepares for the night’s rounds and Cybill looks out and down at the nothing backyard and Jock is out of sight again and Maur stares at the greasy remnants of the street-food supper, when that code knock sounds at the door. So they all go still. The protocol is not to answer after it’s full dark, but here comes the rhythm again. Not stopping this time, looping.

Jock comes out of the mattress room. Stallo gestures for Cybill and Maur and Jock to get behind him, reaching into his belt. But then, there’s that intuition that you’re supposed to—

Maur crosses to the door. The others stare at her and Stallo mouths furiously, but she’s there with her hand on the bolt, feeling the vibrations.

“Qui est-ce?” she says. Stallo braces and raises the weapon. “Arrêtez, qui est-ce?” Maur says.

The knocking stops. A young voice. “Vous cherchez le prêtre-hélico.”

Prêtre? Maur sees Stallo’s eyes go wide.

“Irakli?” Maur whispers through the door. Sees more astonishment at that from Stallo even as he steps up and pushes her aside, puts his weapon behind his back, opens the door, reaches out to pull the visitor in, closes the door again and brings the pistol back up.

“Hey!” the kid says. Raises his hands. Not as frightened as he might be. A boy, late in his teens, lean, pretty in his way, all angles and dark eyes and soft streetwear fabrics. He watches the gun like something not welcome but expected.

“Je suis Vam,” he says to Maur. “Il paraît que tu cherches le prêtre. Moi, je suis là pour te jauger.” Stallo lowers the gun but not completely. He looks like he’s trying to decide on an emotion.

“He’s here to check us out,” he says. “For the priest.” He looks at Maur and the question in her face. “In scare quotes.”

“Your friend,” she says. “Irakli.”

Now Stallo can’t keep excitement from his expression. “Fuck me though,” he says. “How the fuck did he find us?”

“What do you mean?” Maur says. “That’s the whole point of what we’ve been doing. And it worked.”

The kid already has a certain pose again, as you can tell he likes to.

“I was hoping to find him,” Stallo says. He blinks rapidly. “We have to be careful.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Maur says. “On y va,” she says to the young man. “Amène-nous à ton patron.”

“Wait!” Stallo says to her. “Fuck’s sake, we are not just waltzing off with some kid….”

“Croome said,” Maur says. “He has something that can help us—”

“Hé!” the boy says. “D’abord les garanties, après le boss viendra te chercher.” He needs something for whoever’s sent him. He’s reaching—slowly, asking for permission with his eyes—into his pocket. Brings out a little digital camera. Stallo takes hold of his wrist but the boy meets his stare. In heavily accented English, he says, “Have to know who comes looking, no?” He mimes taking a picture with his empty hand.

Maur puts her own hand on Stallo’s. “This is what we’re here for,” she whispers. “Cybill, will you fucking help me?” Cybill only stares.

“How did you hear about us?” Stallo repeats the question in French. The boy gestures loosely at the town outside and Maur is intrigued by relief at such vagueness. She doesn’t want to know, and doesn’t want Stallo to know, if word reached this boy from Stallo’s interventions or her own.

“He heard because you put word out,” she says. Her own urgency interests her. “Look I’m not a soldier unlike some, but is this really how your old lot would come for us? But if your friend sees it’s you…”

“It’s not just them we have to worry about as well you know,” he says. But Stallo lets go. Slowly the teen raises the camera. Stallo tells him in quiet French to be careful who he shows this to. Even so, Maur can feel his eagerness. Stallo does not smile as he looks into the lens.

“Deux jours, trois max. Si le boss kiffe la photo, on revient.” The young man smiles off-kilter at Maur. “Soon,” he drawls. “Be ready.”

She says, “Oui, j’ai compris.”

The boy gestures and Maur opens the door and he walks out.

Maur sees Cybill’s unease. On Jock’s face she sees only the lostness she expects. At the sight of him, side stories pass through her, things that won’t happen. Jock galvanised and striking out alone against the Azeri, who’s broken him and threatens everything. Cybill on her own journey. Stallo and Maur left together, another terrible two. Stallo is looking at her and it might be with admiration or anger or anything.

“Well you lot enjoy your beauty sleep,” he says. “I’m certainly not nodding off, not now.” Still, he can’t keep all hope from his face.

The Undrowned

John said, —Mum says she’s looking for Dad.

The brothers sat in some pub. John was shy like they were on a date.

Stallo said, —He’s dead.

—We don’t know that.

—Bollocks we don’t. A villain like him. And if Rene’s wrong and he wasn’t done in then he did a runner years ago. Jesus fucking Christ.

—Alright, enough of that please, John said.

—Why you telling me this?

—I’m worried about her is why. Irene not said? Mum wants to see you.

—Auntie Rene knows what I won’t put up with.

—What about—?

—Let it die, John.

They drank.

—How’s Maisie?

—Maisie? Stallo said. —Alright I suppose.

He could not diagnose the worry on his brother’s face. Was it of or for him? As if those were counterposed. Stallo knew that in such uncertainty as this he might usually say what felt expected of him but this time he did not know what that would be. So neither man said anything for a while.

—How much is she losing it? Stallo asked his aunt, later. —I mean, talking about Dad?

—You should see her, Steve-o, Irene said. Then she said, —I’m sorry, love, I don’t mean any trouble.

They walked Soho. Stallo spectated the sheer daftness of men and women, walking the new ways, bright clothes, the clicking boots.

—Wait until you’re my age, Irene said. —Imagine how it looks to me. You sure you don’t mind me coming? You sure you want to go?

Maisie’s thirtieth, some Carnaby Street joint. He was glad she’d asked him. A while since they’d seen each other. Her friends who recognised him were cautious and polite. Those who’d met her before surrounded his aunt gladly, those who had not were delighted by her. Plenty of people Stallo didn’t know. They danced with nervy jerky pleasure. He was a smidge younger than his wife but to see her do that dancing made him feel much older. She even smiled at him.

Jase catcalled and hugged him and fuck it that was alright. Alison. You could see she was scared of him still but she wasn’t rude. Jeff, whom Stallo’d always found good value, as they say, meandering from subject to subject like a ruminant from grass to patch of grass, and here with him he forgot he’d done it already and reintroduced Amy, who smiled at Stallo like she shouldn’t oughta. Not that Jeff caught on. One in five or six of the topics on which Jeff touched provoked Stallo’s professional interest. That was hardly so odd in this world of tarot cards and esoteric dilettantes, but, again, due diligence and all.

Sten came in.

—Is that the one? Rene said.

The men nodded at each other in an odd courtesy.

Stallo came home alone that night, and just as well. A message for him under his door. Return.

—Settle down, please, Hook said.

That voice.

—I’m sorry to have to tell you that we’ve had a severe setback on mission, Hook said. —Details are still patchy. What we can make out is that, ah, there was an intel breakdown. Various material was lost, and— And I’m sorry to have to tell you that Sutton and Daltry were KIA.

There it was. A new stillness.

Stallo and Bowler met each other’s eyes. Behind everyone’s gaze, Sutton doing this, Daltry that, this last thing that was said to him or that he said, this final thing done, salt passed, a nod. Sutton’s skew-whiff mouth as if he couldn’t wait to get out a wry observation. Everyone had a Daltry story. Him prattling on, boom boom, voice loud for laughs. Prancing about sock round his neck like a tie. The Uniteers pretended Daltry hadn’t annoyed them, soon believed it. A memory came to Stallo: Sutton watching Merrick hiss out his last breath in the snow and that crooked face, Sutton’s that is, that mouth twisted and lopsided not in its usual smile but with a wince of terrible compassion.

Daltry and Sutton’s prologues were over. —You’ll know more as we do, Hook said. —For now we mourn two fine men.

Pour out drinks for the dead. That night Stallo went alone to the edge of the sea and threw stones into the water and wished that each of them was the ugliest and densest apport. Bowler came to stand by him.

—What happened? Stallo said. —You hear a lot more’n me.

—I don’t know, Bowler said. —And I definitely don’t.

Stallo heard the gulp of his missile being swallowed and thought of distorting circles overlapping.

—What does Uritsky say? Stallo said.

—How the fuck would I know? I don’t even know where he is.

Okay then. Stallo’s head was full of the sudden teeth of that oscilloscope line. The event, the something somewhere that had lit up his room.

—Whatever it was, he said slowly, —I think I know just when it happened.

—I bet you do, Bowler said.

—Eh? What does that mean?

—Are you taking the piss, Stallo? Bowler turned to him and this, this hissed charge, was what he was there for. —Because seeing as you ask, I heard you were part of the job. That they called you in and you—

—I’m not in B Group, am I? I was in London.

They glared at each other. —Well then, Bowler said, —my apologies. What I heard was you and your fucking control talked to the lespry we Roused in Kenya, before the op. That that’s where the intel came from. But given how the mission went, maybe it lied.

—Lespries don’t lie because they don’t know what truth is, Stallo said. —Plus I wasn’t there.

—

The remainder of B Group were in the mess when Stallo came for supper. He paused with his tray of sausages and greens and gravy at the sight of Harry and Manning slumped at the table. They did not speak to each other nor to those who came to them solicitously.

Stallo found Dean Anthon.

—What happened?

The two men smoked facing the mainland and the dots of their cigarette ends moved below them in reflection.

—Was alright, Anthon said. —At first. Then…

He threw his cigarette. They had hunched together once. It was very vivid to Stallo. Hiding on a hillside, watching space through which a swaying cursing man might have careened.

—What happened?

Anthon said, —Won’t you even ask who? Isn’t that the main thing, Sarge? It was the pilot.

—Watkinson.

—I heard there’d been trouble with him but I never thought nothing of it. From the start it weren’t working well. Like the controls were sticky.

Not that kind of control, Stallo.

—But it wasn’t the equipment, it was it, Anthon said.

Understanding was not the job. Oh not this train of thought again, but he couldn’t get off once on, so Stallo tried to speed through all the stations. You don’t need to understand if you even ever can (anything that is) to make use but are you in fact using if you don’t apprehend at least a bit? This island had been invaded, through all defences, and they still had no sense how or why. Now this. Wouldn’t hurt to understand this, now, would it? All this time and Stallo would still be hard-pressed to be exact about what they did. The Roused. Why was I not there? he thought. Why wasn’t it me on whom the pilot turned?

—I don’t know what it was doing, Anthon said. —But there were other things there too. He looked at Stallo as if seeking help. —I never felt anything like that. I think there were wild spirits or something, and Watkinson, we were tuning it in to block them, but it turned. It didn’t stop them, it turned around and came towards us, in front of them. There were shadows all around me. I boosted the signal hard. But…He shook his head. —It did nothing.

Stallo felt from Anthon despair out of proportion even to this grisly betrayal.

—Even before then, the whole time, all the lespries were skittish. The enemy was waiting.

—What went wrong with Watkinson?

—If you ask me it didn’t go wrong, it chose…It was like it wanted to do what it did, Anthon said. —I saw it, Stallo. He looked right at him. —I mean saw it saw it. Whispering now. —I never saw any of them before. Sheets and apports, yes, but…But it was there looking right at me.

Perhaps there had been in Anthon’s stare a warning of the full degree of B Group’s anger. Certainly Stallo was awake in the smallest hours, ready to hear steps in the corridor, to rise from his bed.

The conspirators chose as close to a quiet time as there was. Stallo went silently after the nightwalkers. Into the mud, towards the lab. Outside which more figures waited in black clothes with balaclavas or scarves around their faces. Stallo shivered in unlaced boots and watched, beyond sight. In the low light of a lamp he saw them tread east under burdens brought out from within.

When they had gone he went to Joseph Manning, on guard. Manning stood wide-eyed with his rifle dangling, staring after his visitors. He said, —They had, I mean…

—Did they threaten you?

—I mean, not exactly, but some of them—

Stallo imagined pistols stuck in belts.

—I couldn’t stop them, Sarge, Manning said. —I’ll go get—

—Wait, Stallo said. —I’ve got this.

Big lad like Manning couldn’t stop them, was it? Stallo followed the conspirators. A long way out from the last buildings, crabgrass whipped his legs. The swaddled figures trooped on. One man carried chains, another a haint bottle, another a battery. Things Stallo could not make out. Two hauled a slopping tub. One under a metal box like an old radio. Rouse engine.

Stallo was close enough to hear his quarries’ voices now, their anger, the agitated wind. The men, no not all, that one was obviously Marks under that half-arsed mask, stopped and crowded and worked at something huddled on the stones together and laid out and prepared items like offerings.

At last Stallo felt at the back of his neck a throb and his skin prickled. Here it came, below everything; now he heard static, the drone of the Rouse machine, and everyone stepped back.

Never only a sound. It came through as if this were a thin place, a shaking in the darkest parts of his bones. He saw the sequence translated with oscilloscopy eyes. A green line inside him.

get up at once

What did the predecessors of the unit’s whitecoats sing or play?

The air was very still and the waves of the shore had stopped.

No, the causality must be reversed, those old words that Stallo mentally recited had been added lifetimes ago to a tune itself faint echo of a discovered revenanter function, the wave.

old Sol is shining

The dirge ebbed; the Uniteers parted very warily and between them on the shale chains coiled in a pile in starlight. What was filling that bucket under which Marks staggered?

—Lads, Stallo said. His voice sounded close up to his own ringing ears. —This isn’t good.

They spread out and looked at him without surprise. Darkness flitted across the metal and the covered faces, antiglow, as if flames or their opposites lapped amid the links. Even without moonlight the sky was cloudless enough that Stallo could make out what they carried. A broken end of wood, a bent clipboard, a flask a shard of glass a knotted piece of rope. A mottled brown boot.

—You been stealing apports too?

—Keep out of it, Sarge.

The chains moved. Stallo’s innards fell away. Everyone stepped back again. The chains slid and clattered touched by no one and not pulled by gravity, and those darker and more rusted than the rest hauled up.

And someone gasped an order, the men and woman stepped in and two men yanked what links they held taut and strained against them like competitors in a tug-of-war and the shifting metal right between them did not move as it should and someone among them threw the stained and ancient handle of a tool right at that central shackled emptiness, shouting, —Yah!

The soldiers kept their distance and two, three men averted their eyes from the nothing held by apport chains as if it were a basilisk.

—Enough, Stallo managed to say.

—Keep out of it. This ain’t your problem.

—Course it is. Stallo knew the voice trying for bluffness and considered saying the man’s name, Beller. —Can’t let you do this.

—Sarge, this was the one. I don’t know why they haven’t got rid of this treacherous cunt already but it did for Daltry and Sutton and enough’s enough.

—You going to do an exorcism? Stallo said.—How d’you think that’s going to go? You been training?

He knew that to attempt and fail to stop them was his role. Someone threw a chunk of shell casing. It rebounded from emptiness.

—Stop, Stallo said. But no one was listening to him now, they were leaning in to strike with whatever they held. They brought their apports down like flails. Stallo heard contact.

—Gone native, you cunt? one man shouted.

—This is for Sutton, someone said. Used both hands to swing an apport tea tray. It stopped hard without a sound of impact. The Uniteers set upon the unseeable.

Will you let them hurt you? Stallo thought. He waited for the scream of an endlessly burning man. The Roused stayed silent.

More masked soldiers were coming out of the shade of huts.

—What are you going to do? Stallo said. —You can’t kill it.

—It’s taken care of, Beller said.

B Group and their friends took hold of the chains and dragged them, careful not to touch the hollowness they held. They took the bucket and the tub of slop and everything towards the beach.

—It fucking burns, someone shouted. —Wrap your hands.

If it just hurts you’re lucky, Stallo thought.

—Who’s got the gloves? Get those boots on it and be careful, don’t let it touch you. Get ready to pour.

What if you’d had your spear to hand, Stallo? What if you used the methods in the book? Thrust with that weapon into the space beneath where a crashing pilot’s ribs would be?

—No!

Here now was Simmons the Baker. Running flat-footed in his lab coat and underwear. —What are you doing? he shouted.

Stallo stepped into his path. —Go back to bed, he said.

Behind Simmons, Stallo was surprised to see Bowler, not watching the masked group struggling with their load, but Stallo.

—What are they doing? Simmons said. —Stop them! Do your bloody job!

Stallo said, —My job’s to make decisions and keep people safe.

—And to follow orders!

—Fuck off, sir, Stallo said. He saw now that a rowing boat waited like the shadow of a whale. He was disappointed that Croome was not there with him as the raiders slid it to the sea, climbed in carrying what they had, staying to either end chains taut between them, and he watched closely and carefully for a long time as the boat’s lights rose and fell and headed out beyond the island of Britain.

Spaces between the ranks of traps in the haint-bottle storeroom; two bottles were gone. Stallo’d only seen one. He gave his report to a clenched-faced Hook and Carpenter before the sun came up.

—The boat’s back, he said. —No idea who took it or when they brought it back.

—And you can’t name them? Hook folded his arms.

—It was dark, they had masks, could’ve been anyone.

—Oh, certainly. Anyone at all. I’m sure you’re quite at a loss.

—Simmons is complaining, Carpenter said.

—Due respect, ma’am, Stallo said, his voice growing gentle to address her, —Simmons isn’t ops. I have to assess a situation. In a split second. I believe following Simmons’s orders would have risked inflaming things and I don’t know what might’ve happened. In the heat of the moment I used inappropriate language to him, ma’am, for which I sincerely apologise.

Hook even smiled at him for that. He clapped Stallo on the shoulder but the worry—was it fear?—on his face did not ebb.

A meeting of the whole unit.

—Let’s not pretend anyone here doesn’t know what transpired last night. This is the first and last time any such insubordination occurs without very, very serious consequences. You could see Hook struggle to find something to say. —You represent the bloody crown so bloody act like it. Obviously everyone understands…. I worked with Sutton too. But the asset that…We can’t go around losing priceless bits of kit. Let alone discarding them. Anyone want to offer up any wisdom? Hm? Anyone any hunch what might have happened?

To ask was to say I know you will not tell me anything and even Do not tell me anything.

I’m taking this calmly, Stallo thought. A lespry’s gone, hasn’t it? Would I be this steady if we’d lost an H-bomb?

—I do understand the men’s feelings and I don’t blame them, Croome said coldly. —But that Roused was…I had work I wanted to do with it.

—Those in particular? Stallo said.

—Those? she said.

—They took two bottles.

She looked at him, pleased. —Ah yes. Well, one of them. One we have back, in any case. She couldn’t help herself with that smile. She nodded and drew again on her cig.

—Yes, she said. —Watkinson’s. After they came back in. Left it on the stoop at the back of the lab. Empty of course.

—I only saw them carrying the one anyway. No sign of the other? Did they even have it? Where’d that go?

—Oh, the Kenyan? Croome said. She smiled, again, faintly. Eventually shook her head. —AWOL. Somehow.

[28]

Maur wakes to a hand over her mouth. It’s Stallo, looking into her eyes, left hand closing her lips, right forefinger on his own. She controls her breath and nods and he takes his palm away and she sits up. Cybill and Jock stand by the doorway. Jock has a new look about him, a readiness alongside the fear. His fists are clenched like those of a man who could fight once. Maur can hear the building creak in new ways.

Packs on their backs they stalk the dim corridor between rubbish and hunker in shade. Maur hears ascent, from somewhere. Her heartbeat makes her shake. There are always gangs and other travellers passing through and squatting here; this place has never been silent. What’s different now? It is, though. Different.

Stallo gestures them past doors and the sleepers behind them. Now from many directions come impacts. At a corner, into the fire escape. The dark shaft is full of echoes not all of which behave as they should. Stallo, crouching, raises his weapon, points it the way they must go, down. Down is from where came the bad noises. Down, something blocks their way. Maur sees him aim.

Maur’s breath stops. She closes her eyes and waits and hears up-coming. But no shot comes.

What was that though? That susurration?

A tremor goes through the wall and the floor that holds her up.

Stallo? Cybill? Jock? Stallo? How do you call names when you must make no sound?

Opens her eyes again.

And

this is            is this

the same stairwell

.              ?

And how is she alone?

—

Alone, Maur presses her hands to her mouth, alone. Feels the exhalation of a building. See the turn of a guardrail, the angles of descent. Maur is in perfect darkness as still as she can be, listening for her companions who can’t have slipped away from her but there they are, gone, she’s hearing something, pressing down a whimper in her throat, a cold as if frost rises from her soles and she braces herself because up to the shadows of discards and broken furniture and the missing banister slats from the dark way came that new sound, if it was a sound. The sound a void makes.

Around corners and up from below. A clap. Those stairs complain as on them the newcome presence rose. Another slap of palm on palm emerged from a chitin drumroll of flies. And waouh, ouah, vaf, jappe, the wouf of hounds. Maur peers over the lip down untrodden since a collapse of industry, shaking as something rose.

Clap. That was not skin but rope gone taut above a great weight. Maur closes her eyes. And

Maur whose eyes are open again cries out at vectors and loping motions amid motes in profusion, in instants between glimpses, at yawl-music of beasts and that soft applause of an infinitely long and laden noose beneath beyond the menagerie and pendulum, horizon of all, this shadow play, shedding such suggestions towards the world, Maur hears something laughed.

A shout. Her name. She sees Cybill.

Cybill has found her, stepping out of the hallway, past her—bold—with, look, Stallo and Jock behind her, Cybill standing between Maur and what still came. Cybill gasps with effort and between her and the hanged, the laughing incomer below, was a new outline, a young woman. Whose limbs went from poised to splayed passing through no motion, who flickered like a jammed signal, and with her each waxing the legion beyond, which rose and whimpered like fauna aware that they were watched by what was bad and vast and sent them, hesitated. And when that guardian soldier ebbed, the stair-climbing collective gathered itself and behind it all something kept smiling. The Juleslike thing flickered and was faint and Maur hears from Stallo “No!” and the snick of a weapon not firing, and the approacher rushed up. Jock comes forward. Shoves Maur back, and she rights herself by Stallo with his weapon out, and Jock is pushing Cybill away too and in her place he is taken hold of by unseeable hands, and pulled, and his mouth opens and you can see he can’t breathe, as if a swarm fills his windpipe. Animals were calling, a man’s voice whispering something about the sun, and Jock can’t shout.

—

The soldierpersongirl flared again like a filament, and Stallo fires, and all the zoo of sounds, the piss drip of a man hanged by a desert, the laugh of far-off play, and Jules, if it was she, went out

And Jock is dead and cold.

And Maur can’t not look at him.

Stallo is shaking her. Has been for a while.

“We have to go.”

Jock, unbloodied. His clothes are stiff with dust, his face is the colour of ash, filth in the creases of his scream, in his eye sockets, covering his open eyes as if he has lain desiccating in a tomb for months. Maur whispers Jock’s name.

“Oh, Jock,” Cybill manages at last to say. She reaches out as if she’ll close his eyes but who wants that on your fingers? “You saw,” she says to Maur. “What Jules did. She was protecting…”

“But she was going out,” Maur says. “Jock distracted it—” She turns to Stallo. “Was that an apport gun? Apport bullet? How did you—”

“It’s not the weapon,” he says. “That’s just part of a, like a ritual. It’s in how I stand. It wouldn’t have…It was way too strong, it only worked to confuse it because of her. And him.” He looks at Jock’s dead face. “Fuck. Fuck. I didn’t think they could possibly find us this quickly, but the Azeri’s thing’s stronger than I thought. And…Maybe we, I knew it was a risk, putting questions out, but I thought if anything it would be what’s left of the Unit that would come first, and them I can handle.” The confusion in his voice frightens Maur. “We have to go.”

It is not he but Cybill who leads. Making for blocked doors and the smashed back window to the old Peugeot that Stallo has scouted and knows he can start in an instant. Maur crosses the place where she was saved, where cold already fades and nothing is left but a certain resonance.

One’s a rusted rectangle jutting landscape overhead perpendicular to the boarded-up façade. There’s no fringe of remains within; what it contains is sky. One is smaller, more dirty, oxidising. It’s a thicker integument, and on the inside surface mould and mildew grow peripheral to the empty air the shape holds up above the stickered glass of a repair shop still open, into which customers go, only some looking into the mute declaration. One is rare, round, suspended from two hooks below a protrusion like that from which hangs a gibbet. A collar without a neck. The hollow ring announces its zero. It doesn’t matter if the stationer’s beneath is a stationer’s or an empty space. Plastic edges bleached by the sun into an unmarked page, or one haunted by colours; tin mottled so that it’s a map before it is a name; wood as soft as the old stump of a poem. These vacant declarations have their emphases.

XV

Bheesty

The Caution

The stranger standing in Carpenter’s office was somewhere past forty, moderately tall, handsome in a donnish way. He fully beamed, open-mouthed, as Stallo came to the relaxed attention expected. Carpenter, rheumy and perhaps even vague; Hook; Croome; and Simmons sat watching. —This is he, Carpenter said to the visitor.

—He’s a fine signaller, Croome said. —Fine all-rounder.

—Signals of a certain sort, said Simmons.

The visitor gave a wheeze-laugh and nodded and said, —Yes, I’m on board.

—Sergeant, Carpenter said. —This is Mr. Myton.

The man surprised him by shaking Stallo’s hand. —Hullo, he said. —It’s Lionel.

—Mr. Myton has some questions for you, Hook said.

—I’ll have a bash, Stallo said.

—Excellent. Bash away.

—So, Myton said. —I’m getting the measure of the operation, what you chaps are doing here. Part of what I do is suggest ways that organisations might streamline. Narrow in on certain core tasks and the like. Now, I’m sure many of my questions will be foolish in the extreme, and I apologise and ask you to bear with me. Your people here say you’re the best.

—Best is a bit…It depends, Stallo said. Hook mouthed at him, ITKO.

—I’ve read the Unit’s reports and documents and so on, said Myton. —But I think it’d be jolly useful to hear from the trenches. I remember the Stone Age with this stuff, long before your time. Lord, we were floundering about. But while I’m not at all gainsaying the progress of these more enlightened times, I’m wondering if there’s no prospect of something more targeted, as it were. Take for example your unit’s last trip. I understand it wasn’t cost-free. He gives that a respectful moment. —And while I’ve no doubt Private Mardell, freshly liberated from Russia, is a sterling new asset, one does wonder whether we might not be more active in recruitment.

—That’s out of my league, Stallo said. —If I ever find the Recruiter—heard of that?—when I’m apport-fishing, I’ll let you know, but don’t hold your breath. That’s the sort of thing the boffins are trying to sort.

—Is that so?

—There’s work on the arrays, Hook said to Myton. —Seeking and sending various signals.

—Well, calling out to see who responds would be one way, certainly, Myton said. —I have even more direct outreach in mind.

Croome said, —We’ve a long way to go.

—We’re optimistic though, said Simmons. —All sorts of ideas.

Myton did his laugh. —Yes, and an awful lot of them the same as mine, I’m sorry, what a bore.

—Why’m I here? Stallo said. —No disrespect but Hook’s right; you want one of the Adder Fog lot.

—Downplaying your own skills again, Croome said.

—Don’t ask me about Mardell, Stallo said. —And certain jobs you might ask me about, even if I did do them it wasn’t exactly me. You’re asking the wrong bloke.

—Stallo, say we were to drop you somewhere, Croome said. —Some corner of a foreign field that is forever. Somewhere about which we’ve had no rumours of anything, no reason to suspect revenance. But we place you dab over the ground where some poor random chap lies. Is this what you have in mind, Mr. Myton? Rather than waiting for something to stir, that is? Stallo, if you tuned in to that which keeps you company, and let’s say I’m there and I switch on the Rouse, what do you suppose happens?

After a time he said, —You know better than me, Doc. Stallo uncoupled his vision from himself. Went back a little to look out from within, a way of seeing he had not experienced for a while. He considered, saw himself, a figure in the dust of this daydream. Near where his child-self had lived had been a stub-end of green to which his mother would take him sometimes and where she would smoke and watch him nervously while he investigated half-buried broken bricks and grass and daisies. Now he was visited as if by something of the bramble thorns there, reaching with him into an emptiness over an imagined old body.

When he heard Croome say, —The point, Mr. Myton, is that there’s no certainty, Stallo came out of the grey country.

—You can’t call something out of nowhere, he said. Myton waited. So Stallo said, —I suppose if you kept reaching, I mean I can’t be sure…But we don’t have the capability for that sort of reach. I wish we did. Although “Nothing’ll come of nothing” is a bit rich. He shrugged to indicate the world. —I mean these days there are defo signals coming out of nothing if you ask me.

—Who would you Rouse? Myton said to Stallo. —If you could? He did not wait for an answer. —Have a think. It’s an interesting question. Thank you ever so much for your help. Dr. Croome! He stood and placed his hand over his heart. —Hook! Shook his hand. —Group Officer! He saluted Carpenter playfully. —Is that still the term? I’m tremendously grateful.

Myton followed Simmons out. When they heard the jeep set off for the creek and the London road, Carpenter said, —He’s always been like that. My goodness, twenty-four years I’ve known him and he’s still the same old Lionel. He is a caution. She liked that enough to say it again. —He is a caution.

They quartered in a nondescript hall close to San Po Kong, hoping (it would prove in vain) to get into Artificial Flower Works, where the uprising had started. Troops patrolled the street.

—We follow trouble, Bowler said.

What they followed was word of Red Spectre. A.k.a. KH, which in reversed honour of this visit someone had started calling Kong Hong. Amid all the hoohah of the students you did pick up more scuttlebutt about visiting rebels such as those who’d carried literature into Malaya and Kenya. Spirit-talkers and spies.

Beyond the arches of Sai Ying Pun, the director of the mental hospital politely guided Croome and Stallo through the corridors. —This is the laundry, he said. —These are the secure wards.

—I don’t blame him for not wanting us there, Croome said to Stallo as they left. —In any case we come all the way here and now even we’re not picking anything up.

—Don’t believe trouble’s coming?

—On the contrary. It certainly is. You remember Brantley, our American guest? He’s an intelligent man and one of the best of our friends over the water. He’d be interested in what we’re about here, if he knew. Which he might do. Leaky ships, et cetera. Since Vietnam he has a particular interest in Tết Trung Nguyên and hungry spirits and the like. It was he who pointed out to me, though I’m not sure he understood the importance of what he was saying, that if as I claim the revenants have never been alive, there’s no particular reason there shouldn’t be Roused functions disabused of that fallacy from the word go.

—Is this to do with what Myton was on about? Stallo said. —Is that why we’re here?

She regarded him with interest. —I don’t think Myton overmuch cares what any function believes it believes. What we might most effectively invoke, and how, are his concerns. Efficiency is his business.

That might have been mockery or admiration.

—Clue’s in the name though, Stallo said. —Revenant.

—Revenance is not return as well you know. Whatever Carpenter might say. You’ve read the briefing. She held up her hands. —This is a land of shen and guishen, ancestors, forces, gods and demons. Those that lived and died, or believe they did, and those without such illusions. That are quite other, and know it. What if referring to all such by overarching terms isn’t so much foreign vagueness but a precision we Anglophones lack? Brantley corroborates it: Kowalchuk is not in control. Obviously. We’re here in part because Enlai’s jumping to take advantage.

—Yeah but, Stallo said, —I still don’t think KH are on Peking’s dime.

Croome said nothing.

—Brantley was frustrated, Stallo said. —About the Rouse. How it works. For us.

—Poor chap, it drives him spare. Obviously one would do anything one can to aid allies. Anything at all of course. At the same time there are those at Awfulness who aren’t wholly glum that we have one last technical edge. Brantley will continue to try to entice us with intel in the hopes we’ll help him out. That’s his coin. KH, threads in Malaya, Kenya, here, everywhere. This is the American century; we just live here. But believing as he does in our particular aptitude, how much worse when some new bunch of malcontents get a toehold on the aether? Because why can’t he? He let slip to me that there’d been a visit from KH to that hospital recently. One of their bigwigs. A little baksheesh and a night in the basement. Used to be—well, comfort women for the Japanese were there. An execution chamber too. There’s long been talk of visitors. Which is why I’m disappointed to have got no readings at all.

She had never said anything to him about the oscilloscope.

They followed the route of those rumoured raisers, askers-after, prodders of wild spirits and bad death. Mount Davis Road, for what was once a camp; Bride’s Pool; Dragon Lodge for the remnants of the nuns; Murray House and Tat Tak School in Ping Shan. No flicker on any machine.

At dawn on the third day they sat in Victoria Park and watched the sun come up.

—Simmons is a decent scientist, Croome said.

—But?

—I just think it’s advisable to keep an eye on other possible methods. I also think he’s a prick, but that’s by the by. I want as much information as I can get about—and out of—every suppletion we have. You’re aware the whispers continue that there’s trouble among them? That if they were the quick, one would describe them as afraid. I wondered whether you’d had that impression yourself, in your dealings. She looked at the sunlight on the harbour. —Bowler, for example, in particular, certainly seems to, and to be committed to effing well getting to the effing bottom of it. You know his flavour of fervour. To effing well find out what the effing KH are doing that has the effing lespries so effing antsy because you can’t effing well tell him it’s effing coincidence, and so on. He’s determined to discover who is this who is coming.

That early light on the sea looked to Stallo like oil.

When she returned to what had been their flat, Stallo’s now, Maisie smelt of smoke and perfume. She smelt of sweat. She could have moved all her stuff out ages ago. He could have insisted. He didn’t know why they did not bother to try to avoid each other. Why she came from wherever she was and with whomever on the nows and thens to seek some trinket or book or whatever. She kept her key. (He always maintained private rooms elsewhere, and changed them out no less than twice a year.)

Every few weeks, on no schedule, he might look up to a sound and there she’d be. Growing out her hair. They’d watch each other. She was not always alone.

Maisie, hands on hips: —Hi, hubby.

—Hi Mais, Stallo would say. —Hi Alison. Alison Purdey would have the poise to not raise her eyes. Or —Hi Jeff, hi Amy. Jeff was excited to see Stallo, though he’d always glance at Amy. Who stared at Stallo too.

Sometimes Stallo would arrive and Maisie had been and gone, left a note, perhaps, asking if he knew where this or that was, without even a tone of dislike. Was she really returning just for such things? They saw each other at concerts, sometimes. At the readings he, yes, still attended, to, no doubt, much surprise. Three times over many months they spent the night in the flat together.

He whispered, —Hippie.

She smiled, not pleasantly. She said, —I could call you things.

They fucked, he was not sure why. Once Stallo with mid-thrust deliberation fantasised that the wetness of her was not just her desire but the spunk of other men from whom she had come deliberately unwashed to humiliate him and he, at least, came hard.

He could have laughed at the politeness of their postcoital catch-up. (—How’s so-and-so? —She’s fine. How’s thingummy? —Well, thanks.) He asked after Amy and not Jeff, as if it would provoke her. She shook her head and said Jeff was getting into some deep and crazy shit. She said, —Do you know someone called Skully? Or Isabella?

Stallo made sure to show no reaction. Hearing names from his own old briefings, for the first time in their whole relationship Stallo considered the possibility that Maisie had been, was, watching him. On behalf of someone. Among other motivations, perhaps. Just as his own feelings for her, such as they had been, were never obviated by his notes on her associations. What if she relayed the gist of his questions, interests and observations? To what end?

He said, —Rings no bells.

Good luck to you, he thought. If you are. No I don’t think so, he thought, if after all these years you’re just now getting to do-you-know-X-and-Y? you’re stretching softly-softly to the point of never-never. Probably you just know I know things and you know Jeff’s into things and you’re intrigued. But if I’m wrong, good luck to you.

It would only be another element to this, this strong and oddest of connections, which didn’t sound in his description of it to himself like love the way that got talked about.

On his birthday he came in to find that she had left him a present, of all things, wrapped in brown paper with string. A pocketbook two inches by three bound in brown leather. She had had the front of it embossed, Stallo. That caught his breath, as clear a goodbye as anything she’d ever said.

—What about when you get promoted? she had said once, years ago. —Then you’ll be— And she had paused because her knowledge of ranks and hierarchy was partial. —Smallo? Lallo, Callo, Ballo, Gallo.

—I’ll always be Stallo.

—I want to get your thoughts, Croome said. Into the pagodas, an offshoot hallway past which he had gone who-knew-how-many times. A steel ladder down to where beyond the walls brine-sodden sand strained.

—You bringing me here because Simmons did Bowler? he said, and regretted it at Croome’s cool disappointment. A radio was playing somewhere. He followed her around submerged corners. In one chamber, stacked and empty traps. In another, a chair in inadequate darkness. Stallo felt like a man in negative.

—We’ve been too content to proceed by familiar ways, Croome said. —We need to be proactive. On that, Simmons and I are in perfect agreement. It seems the lespries are distracted. As if by a signal.

Oh look, a laboratory lined with bench and burners and shelves, by oh look, another reading room. Had he previously been here past this door with its hazmat sign? In his memoryless state? His body, anyway? Had there emerged from behind it such noises of industry? Had his eyes seen through the glass, scudding striae of dark smoke, such motions of protective-overall-and-mask-wearing figures feeding objects into some grinder?

—Jesus. Are they smashing up apports?

—This is an experimental facility, Croome said. —We’re experimenting. In case it’s slipped your mind, something was sicced on us right here not so very long ago and we need counter-Rouse techniques. If not medianimic, then we’ll try chemical, biological, so to speak.

Apport miasma to choke the living and persuade the noumenal that it, too, choked, Stallo supposed. Dip the tip of his spear into the room, coated with, what, some sticky varnish to amass the soot, would that make it more dangerous?

—Speaking of, anything from Adder Fog? he said. —On where that thing came from?

She said, —We all have our need-to-knows.

In another chamber an open bottle glowed moon blue. People in white coats and surgical masks. A gurney, lying on it a scrap and scrag of cloth, black in this illumination, mottled with a darker black of mould. A stretcher from the Boer times, maybe. And leather and canvas straps that looked much later begot, random interwoven matter. A belt, rope, bits of parachute. The stretcher sagged, its apport cords strained, Stallo held his breath. One man reaching over held a crude knife, iron, stained by age. Obviously reshaped, the edge of the blade cut much smaller, for fine work.

—Until such time as an obliging visitant sheds an apport scalpel, Croome said, —we make do and mend.

This was no prank. Those gathered did not wave rubbishy metal in the air. Prod prod. Tongs. Stainless steel in the operator’s fingers with beyond the new scissor hinge pitted and ugly apport metal offcuts attached, special pincers to reach in to unseen insides and tug with horrid concentration at a node, so for all there was not a thing you could make out, you could not but vividly sense the elongation, the threat to split and rupture, of a bobbin of recalcitrant organic-ish unmatter.

The woman worked with surgeon’s motions. The needle-nosed ends were wrapped in flattened metal from the apport store, the curl of a tiny eye and scales. A chap would know that look anywhere, why, that was surely the submissive glum friendliness of an illustrated animal intimating, Go ahead, eat me, remains, bless my soul, of a sardine or a mackerel tin hammered flat and folded around the tool to probe other than the mere world.

Why not recast it more precisely? The sentimentality of the salvor? Or maybe the eggheads had a concern for what melting might do to the composition, the wayward qualities obscured between atoms of such apported things. There may be nostalgia in the material for its first form.

And—where did this thought come from?—what if that at which she tugged, pressed, the nothing before them, was less an inside than a copula? A skein joining, say, Mardell to what Mardell bore? What orbited it/him. Stallo wondered if he witnessed an attempt at separation. What energies such fission might release.

Here came Stallo back again into his body. He did not know for how many seconds what walked with him had come to take a look through the browed and blinking windows he provided. What do you want? Stallo asked it like an irritated friend.

Lamps flickered. Strips of white bandage. Here on this other table what was there? A feather duster, ancient. A stretched-out finger from a rubber glove or a scrap of skin? Stallo picked it up and it was a French letter. He put it down again and rubbed his fingers together but they were dry.

One investigator wore old spectacles. Many wore gloves in strange variety, one a stiff old cricket protection on his left hand, another a woollen on one and an arctic mitten on the other. They gripped again at nothing as the lead investigator poked the tabletop.

—That’s not very bloody nice, Stallo said. Is it? he added wordlessly to what walked with him. —Is that a baster?

—You can imagine what would be helpful, Croome said. —As per our conversation about bullets. To pass on something of the revenant to that which has none. To squeeze something of the apport into the quotidian. Smear a bit of essence. Why should we not try to make what we need, rather than make do?

List again those fables, revenant objects of which, per Uniteer stories, older wraiths whispered to those newly manifest in the language of silence they were deadborn knowing. That Recruiter. The Seven-League Boots, which provided passage from here to there and back again. Stallo looked at the emptiness on a table at which his colleagues probed. —That’s got to hurt, he said.

—Why? Croome said. —As I say, they aren’t souls or memories.

—Well, Stallo said. He watched the blade go down. —Even so.

Even so, he unsaid. You could still seek fellowship with a companion you resented, look.

—Even so, it must hurt.

On their way to the surface they passed Simmons coming down. He saw Stello and his shock became anger and then was gone and here was flatness again.

—Yes, he said to Croome. —Good idea. Always good to get some insight from the best and brightest.

[29]

Someone’s dragging Maur. The sight of Jock won’t leave her. That expression, what you look like if you see what can’t be thought.

“Come on.” That’s Stallo.

Jock, you did try, you were brave, like before, against the state.

Now she’s out of the darker shade of that squatted block to streets lit by storefronts where she and Cybill and Stallo are watched by the night people. Stallo turns. Nowhere in particular. Some junction. Close enough to a raucous food place and the spillover of its customers that they might be waiting for them. Maur’s hands shake. She holds them up in wonder and Stallo pushes them down.

“Jules saved your life,” Cybill says to her. Maur can’t look at her. Jock saved us, she does not say. And I think he might’ve saved what’s left of your daughter, too.

“Jock.” That she says.

“Do whatever you have to.” Stallo speaks through the vehicle sounds and staticky music. “Mourn how you like. But right now we don’t have time for a performance.” No you’re wrong, Maur thinks, it’s not that, that’s not fair. He helped us. Did right by our kids.

Stallo leans against a wall and lets a great breath go through him.

“The thing that took him?” he says. “The revenant, in front?” He jerked his hand above his neck and cricked his head. “I used to work with it. It was never that big though. It used to be in my unit. You understand? But what was underneath, what rode it up, what was playing with it…it takes things over. Makes dead comrades turncoat. The Azeri and those VA fuckers found us. That little bastard with the camera, must’ve given us up.”

“No,” Cybill says. “Why would he?”

“He must be with her,” Stallo says.

“Why though?” Cybill’s voice wavers but she sticks her chin out. “You heard what Jock said about her….” Cybill blinks rapidly. “If she knew, why wouldn’t she have come herself?”

“Two nights after he turns up, we get a visitation? You think that’s a coincidence?”

Now Maur can speak. “Couldn’t it be?”

“You already said everyone and their mother’s looking for us,” Cybill says. The women look at each other and nod.

“You said yourself you’ve been putting out questions that could flag attention,” Maur says. “Or maybe it’s not a coincidence, maybe they did hear about the kid, but it wasn’t his fault.” This possibility feels important. And Stallo won’t let his face change but she can see he wants it too, for her to persuade him again.

He says, “We have to fucking find him. Right now.”

“Vam,” Maur says. “That was his name.”

—

From corners and from under eaves, Maur and Cybill watch Stallo count out notes for uneasy men and women at café counters. Moneylenders in social clubs. He cajoles. A few times he threatens. These are his circuits, the means by which he’s supplemented his vatic performances, trawling for word. A baser show of muscle and money retracing others’ routes. The hours go fast. Still it’s not yet dawn at a club churning out desultory europop where a bouncer folds his arms amid milling smokers and the rejected and eyes the women behind Stallo and tells him in English he cannot speak to the boss.

“It’s not him I want,” Stallo says. He beckons and whispers. The man is big and thirty years younger than Stallo but fear makes his face a boy’s. He tells Stallo something.

“Good lad,” Stallo says. To Cybill and Maur: “This way.”

Walking again, not too far. A quiet street barely lit, a mid-grade hotel with something to its tatty glamour. They stand across from it.

Stallo says: “Jock,” in an almost mocking tone. He glances at Maur. “You know what the purest mourning is? That you can do for the dead? It’s when your mate gets took out so close you get blood on you, there’s your baptism, right?, and you drop and crawl, and keep your own head from exploding so you can kill the people who killed him. But you do whatever you need to, Maur.” His disgust bewilders her.

Cybill looks at her with sympathy and something else and they follow. The brasswork in the vestibule is tarnished. In French Stallo describes the young man to the sleepy concierge. He radiates certainty that he will be answered and he is.

“Watch him,” Stallo says. The man behind the desk stares at Cybill with deep unease. “If he moves, sound the fire alarm.” He hesitates an instant and gestures for Maur to follow him to the stairs.

Room 113. Stallo flattens against the wall and nods. Maur knocks, the same rhythm as their own code. She stares at the spy hole. Hears clicking and the door opens on the chain and a sleepy voice says something. Stallo is there, foot in the gap, shoulder to the wood, and with a splitting sound the door opens hard and Stallo’s inside and Maur follows, closes and leans on it. Stallo has the scrawny young man, naked but for boxers, against the wall, forearm to his throat, pistol to his head.

“So we did have a visitor,” Stallo says. The teenager is wheezing and croaking and wriggling. “How’s your English? But it wasn’t your boss. What did you fucking do? Qu’est-ce que tu as fait? Raise your voice or move and je vais te tuer. Com-fucking-prends? What did you do?”

Vam sucks in a long breath, blurts French too quickly for Maur to follow, then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” His English sounds much better now than before, though high-pitched with fear. “I swear! I’m waiting…”

This kid’s nothing like Ewan so Maur doesn’t know why he puts her in mind of him. What is he, seventeen? Eighteen? She barely knew her son at that age so what is this rising at the sight of his distress?

Stallo puts his forehead to Vam’s and keeps pressing, as if he’ll push his own skin and bone right through the other’s. The young man whines and his mucus specks Stallo. Who does not let up.

“You didn’t get word to the boss already?” Stallo says. “After I posed so nicely? Who did you tell what?”

“Stallo,” Maur says.

“No one!” the boy says. “I wait for what to do is all!” He gestures. “Mon tel! My phone!”

Maur says to Stallo, “Look at him.” As if she knows how to discern strategic lies. But look at him, do, his veering eyes, this isn’t the shame of discovery, this terror is bewildered.

For a moment Vam’s spitty breath is the only sound.

“You’re still in fucking trouble, mate,” Stallo says, and pushes the young man onto the bed. Stallo keeps his gun aimed and wipes his face. “If you didn’t have anything to do with our visitor then you’d better be scared too. Because it found us so it can find anyone. Unless they have real fucking skills. You know anyone like that?”

Already Maur sees sullenness rising through Vam’s fear.

“So what are we waiting for?” Stallo says to him.

“The boss!” Vam says. “To tell me what to do.”

“No,” Stallo says. “You’re going to arrange for the boss to meet us. You and all. Call for a pickup.”

“I can’t call—”

“Then fucking text. Or send an email. You better think of a way. Don’t try to tell me you don’t have an emergency signal. Say you’re bringing visitors. Maintenant.” A yearning goes over Stallo’s face, quickly covered. “Right now. You better.” He waves his gun but he’s looking at Vam with new curiosity, almost shyly.

East–south-east through early light. Vam’s car was a BMW that had made Stallo tut and steal something more nondescript. He’d told Vam to drive.

“How you find me?” Vam says.

“You can find anyone if you put enough effort in,” Stallo says. He sits next to Vam, pistol at his gut. “Enough sticks and carrots.”

For a long while no one speaks.

Beyond the city they stop to piss and for coffee at a horrid roadside place. “Careful,” Stallo says to Vam, shakes the weapon in his pocket. “Lead on.”

Outside, Maur smokes. Her hands still shake. Cybill joins her and stands awhile looking at nothing.

“At first I thought it was the army come for us,” Cybill says. “Or the police. I thought it must be them. Now I don’t know if I should be…relieved.” Maur looks at her in wonder at that and the sight of Cybill’s face. “Don’t tell him, Maur, alright?” Cybill whispers. Looks back to make sure they’re not approached. “I thought they’d found us.”

“Don’t tell him what?” Maur says. Then: “What did you do?”

“They’re my kids, Maur,” Cybill says. “Please don’t tell him.”

“Cybill…”

“The first time no one answered. The second time it was Nick picked up.” Cybill’s eyes are very wide.

“Jesus Christ. When?”

“A couple of days. Before Vam. I didn’t say anything, Maur, I wouldn’t do that. I was so quick. I just needed to hear their voices. I did my best, alright? So don’t…don’t you…Look, I went a way away from the apartment, to one of those places with the booths for international. I paid in cash. I didn’t even say a word. I just listened. I was thinking, I love you, I love you. He got it, bless him. After a minute he said, ‘Mum?’ ” Her voice goes. “I put the phone down. That’s all. Can’t have been fifteen seconds.”

“Cybill.”

“The thing is you don’t know, Maur. I’m sorry but you don’t. Because Ewan was your only and I’m sorry but it’s true. What if this is it? How could I go on to the end if that’s it without hearing them again? I didn’t even say goodbye. I said it without saying it. I didn’t even breathe.”

Siphoning machines and digital routines might wait on the lines connecting everyone who matters to Cybill and to Maur and to Jock. Maur shakes her head. “Jesus Christ.”

“Well la-di-da,” Cybill whispers. Then pleads: “There are people waiting for me, you understand? I have other children….” Maur flicks her stub into the dirt. What goes across Cybill’s face then might be shame or defiance.

They pass few buildings on these slopes. It comes up to night again. A land of cutouts: tough plants black paper on grey. Alone on the road, far beyond any town, Vam drifts the car gently to the green verge far in darkening country. Twilight seeps up as if from the earth.

“We walk,” he says.

Single file in the grass. Maur’s legs ache. She hears Cybill wheeze. They climb a hill among many. By low trees. The sound of an occasional car dopplers in the distance. Maur follows Vam and Stallo on a trail in the hillside that kinks into a thicker grove and night sounds. Sometimes it seems to Maur that they are not four on that shadowed rise but five. That she is not the last in line but the penultimate.

“Easy,” Stallo says.

It could be Sonya. No, no, it isn’t, obviously, it is not one of Maur’s accompaniments with them. Not her son or her friend. But she’s mouthing as she walks. She’d be telling her friend what’s happening if she could, where she is and why, making it bleakly funny so they’d cackle together, if they wanted to be witchy in at least that way for a bit. Sitting with cigarettes and drinking wine. A hollow of wet grass. The travellers pause. They eat from their provisions. They huddle in their fleeces and are very cold. These dead trees don’t speak with canopy sibilants, their language is staccato.

When Maur wakes early light has come behind the cloud. Stallo and Vam talk quietly a way off. Cybill sits motionless. Her eyes aren’t open but she hears Maur shift and says, “I’m sorry about what I said.”

Standing before the largest snag Maur is only a little startled that she cannot recall arriving there. She hears Stallo behind her and she says, “Ewan would have….” Her son braced at the uppermost V. Monkey boy, she’d called him. She cannot recall him coming down, only ever going up. At her feet branches upthrust from black earth as if already dead, as if they are the tips of those above repeating, looping. Ewan always rising on the dead wood, as if to crawl up through muck in the sky to emerge at her feet, smeared and cold and as white as the wood that bears him out of a grave. No one asks Maur why she cries out.

There comes an airborne stuttering. It races the next twilight over the trees.

Howling beyond the canopy, metal in that storm announcing itself, one shouted word in monologue. Wildly reaching arms. The thing is so low. Utter utter utter, all the way down. Utter utter utter utter. It tips as if to gaze at Maur precisely. She is pinioned, a figure in a landscape.

Vam waves. And Stallo. Stallo is running.

He runs around the clearing, the copter turning to track him, waving its endless greeting. He leaps up and down as if he would touch it. It’s only just above the trees. The helicopter is small and black and aged, all struts and pivots. Stallo glories in the downdraft. Each instant Maur blinks in the roiling she sees in the rotors a cross suspended. It descends with the ungainly grace of its kind. Leaf dust rushes to meet it. It settles on its sleds. The clarion diminishes, the engine whine declines.

“Hello!” Stallo hollers. “Well hell-fucking-oh!”

He circles the engine on one leg, the other, the other, a hopping strut, parody war dance. Faces the glass. Puts his hands on his hips. “Well?” he shouts. “Well?”

Down Among the Said Men

They were tearing up Paddington for the flyover; down below, all in suited best, people from their twenties to their sixties, pre-clustered by their clothes. A preponderance of grey or brown or blue; cheaper ties; sideburns; hair more or less kempt.

—No smoking down here, please, ladies and gents.

Stallo recognised some faces. No one acknowledged anyone with whom they had not arrived. No one was introduced. They drank strong police tea. Stallo stood in his suit (brown) with Bowler and with Hook, as close as they could to the corner of the crowded room.

—Why the fuck we here again? Stallo said.

—Search me, but his nibs don’t look chuffed about it, Bowler said. Hook drank the tea and said nothing.

A constable led them to a long lamplit range with targets affixed across from a uniformed officer and a trim tan man in his early middle years with tightly coiled hair. He grinned and took everyone in with a vivid stare. Now, he was very familiar. The officer thanked everyone for their patience. It was a pleasure, he said, an honour, to introduce his guest, who needed, of course, he said, no introduction.

—Hello hello, the man said. —Thank you to mein host!

You knew the rich jocularity of his voice. Every word a setup for a punch line.

—Blimey, Bowler whispered. —Yin tong yin tong.

The man they were there for narrowed his eyes and pointed to a group of older men and one woman in fine tailoring.

—Backroom boys, and girl—my goodness, a thousand apologies—of the corridors of power, if I don’t mistake myself. Three men of his age. —Army! How am I doing? And for my next trick, ha ha.

Group by guarded group, he identified them: police; intelligence; SBS. None acknowledged his correctness but some smiled. —SAS, he said, pumping the hands of a tough young man and, Stallo saw, of the shooting instructor, the Scot he knew from Hereford.

A newcomer came quietly and Stallo blinked to see the thick glasses, the smoothed-down hair, that it was Lionel Myton. In his jacket he looked like a smart-ish poet. He saw Stallo see him and raised his eyebrows.

—You know him? Bowler whispered sharply.

But here came the curly-haired man to take in Stallo and Bowler and Hook.

—I believe you must be Messers Hmmm, Haww and Harumph from the Say-No-More Battalion, eh? He winked. —Thank you all for coming. I realise you’re all frightfully busy and I promise to make it worth your while.

He walked towards a shooting booth and clicked his heels and shouted with Germanic accent, —I vill now show you all my enormous veapon!

From his waistband he drew a .44 Magnum smoothly, and at speed he dropped into a half crouch and aimed and fired. Even in the floodlit room the finger-length flames were vivid and people started at the rapid fire. He shot every bullet in the pistol. He stood, angling the weapon up amid its stink. Every one of the six targets on the far wall was hit. The man smiled and put his gun away and everybody clapped.

—I don’t claim anything but strictly amateur status. Another reason I’m truly grateful to you professionals for indulging me. What I’ve asked you here for isn’t to suggest pistol-shooting methods. You’re far more expert than I.

That performed humility was well done.

—And I’m eager to learn myself. I know modifications are being made to plans and strategies as we speak, in Hereford and elsewhere. We’ve all heard a thousand times that strategy dictates tactics. And we all know, don’t we?, that that’s rot.

—I’m here to suggest that these tactics need to impact strategy. And ultimately, of course, politics. You, he said, gesturing at those he’d said were police. —You do an absolutely sterling job. But how long do you think we can carry on with this Dixon stuff? Gentlemen, you will be carrying pistols soon. A tragedy but a necessity. We have our thinking all wrong. That’s what I want to discuss.

The man’s voice was urgent for all that he modulated it with comedic up-downs, funny voices, foreign accents. And there came bleaker comedy, that he did not intend. With his warnings that those police guns would be used. That the threats to the country were not of invasion but of decay from within. That the epoch was sclerotic. A crisis not of edges but of innards, you could say, he said. Drugs. Yes. The hard-faced SAS men and some army people listened attentively enough, but others were less courteous. Stallo could not tell if the relentlessly jovial speaker noticed.

He said Britain faced a new kind of existential threat, and though he remembered to hum a little musical silliness at that he could not obscure the fever of his opinion. —We need, he said, —to counter terror.

When he was done there did come more applause, but those who checked their watches did not do so discreetly.

—Poor chap, Hook said quietly. —I’d not have had him down as a hysteric.

—He’s onto something, Bowler said. —He’s just got it all the wrong way round.

While the SAS men engaged the shooter in pistol talk, Myton came to the Uniteers. He patted Stallo’s shoulder, and Bowler’s. Shook hands with Hook and called him Hooky.

—He’s a remarkable chap, isn’t he? Myton said. —Benters! he called. —You bloody vagabond!

In a wobbly bass the other said, —The roaring of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, by Jove!, and the two laughed and shook hands and performed the in-joke echoes by which men of such class established fellowship. Benters gestured at the SAS trainer. —I’ve been boring this poor fellow long enough, so you come as a merciful release, Lionel.

Lionel Myton surprised Stallo by bringing Benters to meet them.

—Stallo, Bowler, Michael—

—Oh, Mike, please, he said.

—Or Benters, Myton said, —if you’ve no objection to that old nickname. Cuppa, Benters? Snifter of something more spicy? You don’t mind, do you? he said to Hook. —If I borrow your chaps for a few hours? I’ll make sure to get them back safe and sound and I’m grateful to you for bringing them. I do hope you found this useful.

Hook nodded and Stallo understood that they were not there at his suggestion, that Hook was not privy to plans. That it was Lionel Myton who had requested their attendance.

Myton chatted about his consultancy work in Europe and raised his eyebrows and laughed when Benters asked how his children were, and answered, —Letting it all hang out, man. Benters said he was keeping busy, and the cabbie startled them by shouting from the front, —I knew I knowed you! You’re the sandwich man from the pictures! and Benters gave him a moment’s full charming attention and said he was too kind.

To Stallo, Benters said, —I know my place, but jesters have licence to tell the truth.

In the Special Forces club, Myton chose chairs near a window. The place looked hesitant and time-bleached. They drank good tea. Men at other tables read documents and newspapers, and some few were in quiet conversation.

—Ah well, Myton said.

—I know, that was a bit of a bloody waste of time, Benters said.

—The SAS—

—The SAS are always ahead of the curve and perhaps I proved that even a clown can shoot a bit, but I can just imagine. He put on a plummy voice. —What on earth was that bloody dago on about? They’re fools, Lionel.

—Agreed.

—What I want, what I need, is to make the case to people with open minds. Like you chaps. Really open.

—Don’t get too excited, Myton said. —Just as there are some with eyes to see in, shall we say, conventional unconventional warfare, so there are plenty in the unconventional unconventional who are quite happy in their myopia. Now as you know, I’ve been very struck by our conversations, and I wanted these two to hear another pee-oh-vee than that generally presented to them.

Stallo wondered how ITKO Benters was.

—I’m not sure of the reception you’d get at Camp Awfulness, Myton said. —So before Muhammad goes to the mountain, I’ve brought the best thereof to Muhammad. He indicated Bowler and Stallo. —Give your presentation, old man. Your other presentation.

Benters sat awhile and pondered the faded curtains.

—They say permissive and all the blimps and buffoons are supposed to rally against that, he said. —And some do. As if permissiveness, as if permission, is the problem! For goodness’ sake, please! Go ahead! Permit, permit!

—That shall be the whole of the law, Myton said.

—Surely the question is, What is it we’re permitting? I welcome it, you know. Young people should muck around a bit, of course they should. Drugs…now, drugs is another thing. Really it is. But even then…I mean, there’s sheer wickedness, of course, but then too there’s the silliness and curiosity of youth, and I find it hard to be excessively fire-and-brimstone about the latter. He smiled very beautifully. —They might doubt it about a square old codger like me but I say bring on the New Age they go on about. About bloody time. Only let’s do it right. Let’s make it healthy. Lionel, you know I’ve seen things….

He looked at Bowler and at Stallo and away.

—I was at Belsen. I’ve seen piled-up…I’ve seen absolute evil. And I have to tell you what I’ve been trying to tell those silly buggers in the basement.

He seemed bewildered by his own anguish. By the limits, Stallo saw, of the armour of the joke.

—God help me I feel it coming again, Benters said.

That lingered.

—You’re serious chaps, he said. —You can’t tell me you don’t feel the change in the world. There are powers. Ha now look we all know that, don’t look at me like I’m potty! Well, they’re on the move. This is a time of…trials. If we’re bloody lucky.

—Yes, I wanted you to tell these— Myton said, and Benters spoke over him.

—I’m sorry, I know they’re good men, all those chaps below the station, but they’re establishment men, and they cannot fathom what’s on its way, not even when I give them just the glimmer, just a glimpse. Drugs and terror! That’s real enough and that’s all I can get into in that sort of venue. That’s the fin, we can all see that, but I can make out the shadow of the shark underneath too. And that’s what has me scared. How do we get through to them? That the world is changing. Wars used to end, for one thing. How do we communicate the first idea of what’s really going on?

—Some have a clue, Myton said.

—Perhaps. Some. There’ll be forays that’ll tinker at the edges. You mark my words, though, Lionel. What’s coming…is sheer evil. If they don’t even realise the scale of the symptoms, how can I persuade them to look for the disease?

—Which is what? Bowler said.

—I doubt I need to tell you fellows. Whatever it is you get up to out there—and rest assured Lionel’s told me very little, and I’ve kept secrets for the queen many times—still, of all people, I suspect I hardly need tell you that there are certain realities that the bloody so-called pragmatists deny. “I am master of this college; and what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.” The zone where you chaps conduct operations. You don’t need dancing tables to understand that this is an age of ritual. I mean, all ages are, yes, but now more than ever. And ritual isn’t the problem in any case, I’ve no concern about that. Again, the question is which rituals? Performed by whom, to what end, and under what direction?

—When I walked those stinking filthy dead lands, he said, —I recognised the ruins of a ritual. Of an abominable sort. One that came terrifyingly close to succeeding. Ultimately, thank God, it failed, but at what a cost. What a cost. And what I sense, what’s happening now, is something of a similar sort. Something shifting.

—One listens. He closed his eyes to show them how he looked when he listened. —It’s bloody silly to think that one’s own moment is the only or most important one, but it’s no less bloody silly to think that some aren’t in fact more important than others. It’s our luck, good or bad as you prefer, to be alive at the dawning of a new age. Which means the end of an old one. Those of us blessed with a certain sensitivity…

When he spoke again it was quickly. —I believe that there’s a fight going on for what I call the Overmind. My pop was a remarkable man. A pioneer. I have some small knack but he was far more attuned to all this than I am. I’ll wager the kit he knocked up is still better than half the stuff you use today. What I’m talking about when I say Overmind is what he called the Dragon power.

No one laughed or looked away.

—The thing about the Dragon is that it can be beneficent or malevolent. That depends on various things, not least us. But when it wakes, the Dragon is always dangerous. And right now, all this bloody mess and chaos…The Dragon’s stirring. That’s all there is to it. There’s a war on and the bugger of it is our side doesn’t seem to realise. I’ve felt something, and I can’t help suspecting you have too.

Stallo said, —What is it on its way then?

Benters gave a sad smile.

—I’ve known a good number of remarkable travellers on this road, he said. —I knew Stephen Ward. I liked the man. Really, I did. I was wary as hell around him, if you’ll pardon that phrase, and I didn’t trust him, but I did like him. Intelligent man, and powerful. Flaming Red, of course, but you know, even that, initially at least, I respected as sincere. And because he was a civilised, cultivated man, he didn’t treat it as his be-all or end-all. Though ultimately it was part of what destroyed him. And took down others. Some of whom deserved it, some of whom did not. Certainly for all I know he may have been a spy, and Dialectical Materialism is a wicked and dangerous doctrine, related intimately to that kind of Hitlerian bestiality I saw in Poland. Both diminish and negate the Overmind, and lead to nothing but chaos and destruction. A black hole.

—But he had more esoteric interests too. I was uneasy about his trajectory, which is why I never accepted any of his—insistent!—invitations to join his circle. It was mostly about sex with him, of course, but I’m convinced that was the means, not the end. I think they were trying to scratch a way through. Bloody stupid thrill-seekers, no better than this lot today with their drugs, and considerably more dangerous.

—There’ve always been thin places, I don’t need to tell you. And things that…come and go at those borders according to schedules and exigencies we can’t hope to know. It would be the deepest idiocy to try to follow them. Well, how much worse if you’re so intoxicated with your own beastly cleverness, and so taken by the idea of a threshold, that you can’t even be bothered with such places that are out there but you insist on trying to create your own? As if that won’t attract the worst sort of attention.

—I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had close runs, a few hairy moments. You can’t not in this game, of course. I’ve trailed that Dragon. I’ve sought to fight it, in its worst iteration. Ever since I wandered in its ashes in the war. We both did, Lionel and I. He could tell you some tales. And in turn, I’ve been trailed by it. Perhaps it can smell Pops on me. Because my family and this thing have history. Once you notice such a thing, it notices you back. Notice is a door.

—You know Petitpierre? He told me that the worst influence he ever had to battle was at Ward’s house at the Astors’. He said he had no name for what he fought there.

Benters composed himself.

When he could, he said, —But I do.

—Before the Great War, my uncle Billy was up at Cambridge. And one thing led to another and he came to the aid of a divinity student who’d been messing around with things he shouldn’t. There followed, as I eventually persuaded Billy to tell me, the worst night of his life. About midnight the other chap slipped into essentially a coma. And the presence he’d been communicating with, what Billy was there to dispel, instead started having a go at dispelling Billy.

—He told me that what came through that sleeping man was a hot stinging darkness. That stank. He called it a vortex of black force.

—Now, Billy was a strong chap, but it left him battered. It was a mighty battle. At the very last, and at great cost to himself, he managed to defeat it. And saved a soul.

Stallo waited for Myton to end this.

—There’s never a time, Benters said, —when there aren’t clamourers at the gate. Mostly they’re harmless or friendly, people we once knew. But there are exceptions. And certain moments or places or people, you know, licentious, weak-willed, chaotic, attract those other lurkers. And strengthen them. Perhaps some were once men and women, perhaps not. But they are the Dragon. In its most wicked form.

—Later it was Pops’s turn to be called, to the aid of a lugubrious publican in Dover who’d developed an enviable habit of predicting the gee-gees. Absolutely flawless. He was colourless and rather vain and he loved the celebrity he gained from this parlour trick. Being a minor prophet. So much did he enjoy it that he…Well. Obviously what had been happening was, knowingly or not, he’d been dabbling in the shallows of the Overmind. But in so doing, in his carelessness and vanity, he opened himself up to something.

—He thought this visitant was feeding him information. What it was in fact doing, of course, was feeding on him. He did the upside-down-glass-and-alphabet trick to talk to it. Language is also a gate; the more he talked, the more it took over. Started to drive the poor man mad. His wife came home to find him burning the bedding. He got rid of his dog because it wouldn’t stand for him, howling, not letting him get close. Lucky he didn’t kill it. He ended up so changed, so terrifying to his wife that she asked Pops and a few other friends for help.

—They tried a rescue circle. Pops told me the story. They put their protections up and they beseeched that unwelcome guest to leave. Do you know what it did? It made that poor man sick up liquor he’d never drunk. It poured its whole self into him so his body swelled up like some slobbering mess. Gibbering, stinking, filthy-talking. Saying the most unspeakable things.

—Thankfully they had the sense not to attack it physically; instead they kept on with their prayers and incantations. But it was very powerful. More than a match, it seemed. But God knows how, in the end they managed to contain it. And then, at the very last, with every ounce of strength, to exorcise it. And the poor chap collapsed as if punctured.

—Why am I telling you this? Benters said.

Indeed. Stallo met his eye.

—Because in some way I don’t claim to understand those various ghastlinesses were aspects of the same thing. Avatars of the Dragon. Unusually direct, having somehow got a clawhold on this side, but it’s the same presence you note in a hundred stories. Peering, as it were, over the shoulders of our dearly departed when we speak to them. Because he knows that close behind et cetera.

—And that’s what I feel again. It’s probing again. To get in. The same thing I felt in Germany, but stronger. I say, the times they really do a-change and they really are a-changing. There are long cycles and shorter cycles and the whole bloody thing fits together and it’s complex enough to take your breath away.

He moved his fingers, wheels within wheels.

—Afterwards, the publican promised my father he’d leave this stuff well alone. He broke that promise of course. Because this is an addiction. In the end he reached out again to what had claimed him before. And died in a madhouse.

—What was so awful was they had the impression that it was playing. It has a thousand names and I hardly need to recite most of them for you here. You know them well. I know one more. What possessed—and that is the word—that man? It told him what to call it. He put his fingers on the glass and said to it, Who are you? And letter by letter, it introduced itself.

He whispered.

—Old Pal.

—Thank you, Myton said to Benters finally. —I wanted Stallo and Bowler to hear this. Thank you for keeping us abreast of the stakes. You and I will speak more about this, Benters.

—I don’t want to be impertinent, Benters said. —But if there were ever any chance of visiting you chaps at your base…?

—Let me see what I can do, Myton said.

When he understood that Myton wanted him to leave Benters rose and made a show of tapping his nose and said, —Yes yes, of course, need-to-know. He shook everyone’s hands.

—Thanks for the presentation, Stallo said. —You’re a hell of a shot too.

—And you know your stuff, Bowler said.

They waited until he was gone.

Myton said, —I think we might be permitted a snifter after all that, don’t you? He gestured to a waiter.

—Well? Stallo said.

—Well, Myton said. He lifted his glass. —Here’s to Eve, mother of our race, who wore a fig leaf in the right place. He drank. —He’s a dear old duck, Benters. I’ve known him since SOE days and admired him almost as long. Still, he has become a little embarrassing.

Bowler frowned and looked down into his drink.

—You’re not telling me us here is you having a laugh, Stallo said.

—Not at all, Myton said sharply. —You’re not hearing me. He’s a brilliant man. A first-rate mind, a first-rate shot, a patriot, for all his foreign blood. And a man who really does know whereof he speaks. He’s way ahead of the Whitehall stuffed shirts. We could but wish they’d pay his sort more respectful attention. I don’t know that I’d have even what sense of the changing stakes I do without him. But. Unfortunately the poor chap found the way, then veered off into the undergrowth. What you just saw is the problem of the open mind. Open it too far, anything can fall in or out.

—So that same old comrade who’s a genuinely insightful tactician and medium will also bend your ear for hours about Rosicrucians and poltergeists and Odic energy and Lord knows what rot. I’ve never spoken to him and not learnt something invaluable. And I’ve never not had to sift for such needles in an awful lot of straw. He is never going to the base, you can be sure of that. Not that I don’t trust him not to blab, I trust him implicitly. It’s just too painful to see a good man put two and two together and come up with seven.

—What was the needle in all that? Stallo said. —Why are we here?

—In truth I’m not sure yet. That is the point. Of the needle. Listen, Hooky’s no fool, but he won’t see what he won’t see. Benters is one hundred per cent right about the new times. New enemies. The SAS may work its way around to things, maybe even SBS. But we have to move more quickly, and I have to tell you that neither Hook nor Carpenter sees it.

Myton took in Bowler’s and Stallo’s stares.

—To be frank, I think even Benters’s problem isn’t that he goes too far but that he doesn’t go far enough. Still, he can’t be the only one to have cottoned to the changes, and what concerns me is that our enemies aren’t as hidebound as our friends. Or us. Kowalchuk knows very well that we’re at the rim of things. And, to use the last code names I’ve heard, Nergal, and Wran, and their young helpmeet Marco, that whole crew, may well know too. And based on that, they aren’t just pursuing the path towards a glorious future in ways of which Moscow happens to not approve, but are actively scrapping with erstwhile pals.

—And how does such a tiny outfit punch above their weight in this arena? Because I wonder if Benters would have any of that sense of incoming if it weren’t for them. Whether they might, in fact—and unlike Kowalchuk, for whom steady-as-she-goes will do just right—be rather trying to beckon something than to banish.

—As the chairman reminds us, the first step into the foothills…He hesitated and laughed. —I lost it. I was trying to Mao on the fly. The point stands. That’s the thing with paranoia. It’s a bore and a pain and ridiculous until it’s the only thing that’ll save you.

—As for us. I don’t mean the Unit, I mean this country. As well as whatever it is that Benters says is approaching, and I think inextricable from it, the enemy is now the enemy within. That’s what we have to contend with. In the street, in the university. And in here. He hit his own chest. —In the bone house. And I’m afraid brass really don’t get it.

—Obviously I’m going to ask you to keep these discussions to yourselves, gents. They sat in strange community. —In the meantime, I’ve various irons in various fires, and I can always use the help of chaps who understand the shapes of things.

—The thing about Benters is he never got over Poland. Which, good Lord, makes sense. And he loves freedom and I respect him for that. What he doesn’t understand though is that these are, just as he says, desperate times, and necessary measures must follow. My enemies’ enemy and all that. Needs must, ends and means.

He gave them a telephone number and a PO box address.

—If anything happens to put you in mind of anything Benters said today, will you let me know? And keep me posted with your progress in general, the sort of thing you’re up to at Awfulness. And when I’ve anything to report, I’ll return the favour. What say you? Together we will drag our dear old services into the modern day. Non carborundum. Good to see you both.

He left them to finish their drinks.

—What the fuck was that? Stallo said eventually. But Bowler would not join in with his scorn.

In a room above a public house, echoing distance from chalk hills, Stallo’s lifetime ago, perhaps at the moment of his conception or his birth, an entranced man rising like some ill-controlled barrage balloon of distended flesh and that hot stinging darkness hissing its own name, spitting out words from a dark mouth, your Old Pal. What bad entreaty, wheedling and bullying, what ineluctability, pity the man and his wife, his discarded dog, the whispering circle of rescue, here came a rising vortex. Old Pal. God help us. Stallo considered Benters’s father whispering and manipulating strange tools. He knew there would have been a burr and clicking. In his imagination, in the moments before that afflicted man twitched and, mouth hanging open, rising on legs too rubbery to support him, just before he hauled, was hauled up like a marionette into clotting shade, to Stallo the air had thickened, and distantly, as if from the end of a long path into hedgerow, had risen the tremor of the wings of flies, wet and bestial breath.

—I don’t know, Bowler said. —I’m just a soldier, mate.

—Long time since any of us was just anything, Stallo said.

The kind of attention that Bowler turned upon him then!

Bowler spoke formally. —I used to think you nicked something from me.

Who me mate nah mate me why’d I want to go and do a thing like that, etc. Stallo waited quiet enough. Funny pair we make, he could have said in that old room. What did you lads do? he might have asked of the old-timers in the corners in their chairs in their cups in their conversations in their retirements in their dotage in there. Is this the reward? Lifetime of bang bang, the creep the cut, talk about it don’t it’s all the same, stop traveller as you pass by, the old, are you a warning to the young(ish, be honest, mate) or a promise? Yes ha ha they are. Is this what we get for being the inevitably less civilized men, and not only men neither, guarding and feeding the more, as Orwell had it? You read Le Carré, Bowler? Oh he’s ever so good. Yes, yesss, it’s the reading matter doo joor for everyone in the line of work, laughing at it and loving it for what it gets right and wrong, so the contrarian soul might like to be an abjurer but they are the business, Maisie had left one on the kitchen table which you might say was a little dig at Stallo’s own circus but was quite funny when you thought about it though she might have held back from the fucking bookmark at We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds. Bit rich disagreeing with the disagreeable when it’s what used to get you wet, darling, and in any case what pray tell was so very disagreeable? As if you even know what the things were.

—I didn’t know how you did it, Bowler said, —but I thought you had.

—Stole what?

Bowler’s glance was censorious and a little surprised.

—Well all I know is one minute I feel like my gramps is keeping an eye on me and then after Telok Anson he ain’t any more, and you seem safer in the fucking jungle. I wasn’t even angry. It’s not like I’d been making much use of what I thought you’d took. It’s not like I was even sure I’d had it. But it turns out you can steal something the person you’re nicking from doesn’t own. You make it theirs when you take it from them.

—This’ll be us soon, Stallo said. He gestured at the other men. —It makes you think.

He smiled because some of these chairs were so knackered, because there was a smut that would not come out of the skirting board by the door, because flowers in their vases were exhausted, because there was a ring upon the tabletop where someone had not used a coaster, because of how the floorboards sounded. There was no bitterness in Stallo’s laugh, only fascination.

—Like I say, after a while I changed my mind, Bowler said. —Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t even sure you knew you’d stolen it in the first place, but time passes and you get thinking. Whatever it is you have, I don’t know if it was ever meant for me. How is O’Leary?

He winked and drank.

—At least I think maybe it thought it was, at first, Bowler said, —him or Gramps, and that’s where the dreams came in. When you go undercover some bit of you’s always got to believe your story, we all know that, so maybe the dreams I was having and the memories of a grandad I never even met were a leshy having a go at its own legend. Then along came you and it changes plans right quick.

—Are they happy? Stallo said. —These old boys? You think they look happy? I know, who’s happy? But the funny thing is I think mostly they more or less do look happy. Good luck to them. Behind enemy lines slitting throats, and then it’s tea and biscuits here. I am not knocking it. Why don’t we have our own club?

—Anyway, good luck to you, Bowler said.

—And this is the big question of course, Stallo said. —Who could be a member? Just us quick? Or the suppletions too?

—Has Maisie left you yet?

—She’s left me. Or I left her. Hard to say.

Stallo could not say how great was his sadness or loneliness or if it was at all, in that moment. He considered what he’d been told; that this was the start of an end, of another kind of vortex.

[30]

What a first time. She recognises the motion from screens, but, virgin at this, Maur can’t say how unusual are these specifics, how dramatic this rush, how fucking low they go, and the night. All she can hear through the sealing earphones is that repeated utter above a drone unending. As if it’s the noise of the universe and it was there before this flight and as if the helicopter has tapped into it is all.

Stallo, strapped into the cramped space, refusing to wear ear protection, bays and howls and shakes like a man winning a race. Cybill grips a hand strap and keeps her eyes closed.

Just formlessness and edges beyond the pilot, through the helicopter eye, the bowed display of reflected console lights. The copter shadows earth contours. Blackness reaches for them, black woodland interrupted by stripped dead wood fleetingly glowing in their passing. This flight is like a run on the uppermost branches, the craft supported, as Ewan once was, all trees God’s Tree.

When it came for them, the craft touched down with that whole-body hmph and settled like a surly animal. The pilot, dim through shines on the glass, waved Come here and Maur clambered perfectly awkward into the interior all straps and metal and canvas and tried to look over the seat back as Stallo opened the front and clambered in and leaned and hugged the figure in the jumpsuit face invisible with the helmet.

“I can’t believe it,” he kept mouthing. Then stopped and pain passed across his face.

The pilot had put up a right index finger and made a twirling motion. Taken them up. To where they hurtled, no arc light shining, unheralded, not through the pitch but of it. Maur rocks like a baby. She wakes with a change in the pitch of that invocation and is astonished that she has slept. The helicopter hovers in obscurity, preening with its unique kind of stillness.

The descent endless until it ends, strange gentleness, a touchdown she does not know has occurred until the blades quieten their bullroar. She does not fall because they are down.

The night will change. There will come no jubilee but loss and what low figures take city back ways in its unaccounted hours will be contra and distinct from those who walk them now. End times for sodium, cursory apocalypse, diodes to bring to its close that sepia era, that will have burnished rejectamenta and swaddled noctambulists in a darker light than of the sun that rejects them or that they abjure. No more smoulder’s glow, campfires above.

What will show your way? A thousand circuit moons. Ghost-white light, gegenschein from frost and cars’ steel to uplight faces.

Now though that doomed small-hours fashion pertains. Your loves and those who love and miss you and are unsleeping in grief and ignorant bereavement stare from midnight windows, go into stretches of shuttered businesses and solemn formation, they cross urban water and take stock of memories of you, not in a city on fire but one lit as if by the afterglow or just-before warning.

XVI

The Vortex

Party Time

Stallo ate dense turkey and pulled crackers with Very Jerry and Hooper, who wore bits and bobs of her uniform deliberately askew. The adequate cheer of the singing and the smoke and the darkness outside. It felt to Stallo like Hrothgar’s hall. He wished he had not gone to the hut on the beach the previous night, where a nervous visiting padre had held a little midnight mass. That he had not sung quietly among others close to black waves. Didn’t even know why he had.

Hooper hurried him up. —Party at the bar, she said.

Huddled into his coat and approaching through the darkening afternoon Stallo was surprised to hear rorty hoots and a jangly, competent guitar from within. The heat hit them as they entered, a blast of music, a growing crowd, Mahdi and Kingston raising glasses to see him and was that the lovely Sheila canoodling up with Bowler again?, sly dog, and surely that, yes, amid the mufti and uniforms and laughter, between two heads wearing cracker crowns, was what was her name? Cynthia? Who was NAAFI too if he remembered rightly, and should they be here? Come to that, Stallo had certainly never before seen those four long-haired rockers playing in the corner.

—Friends of friends of friends, Hooper bellowed in his ear. She laughed at his expression. —We cleared it with brass. They even paid for them.

Well they weren’t the first NITKO or civvy visitors, of course, and measures could always be taken, even at Christmas: Paper bells and robins and reindeer covered up admin on the walls. Stallo drank and danced a bit.

—

He grew his hair. Went among crowds at readings and declamations. Audience to rhythmic denunciations. Tell me lies—stop my mouth. No reason to dispute much of the content. Stallo did not sneer at the congregations. He only watched, interested, cool, withdrawing. He was by no means the oldest of those cross-legged and listening but he was older than most. He sat like the younger men, shoulders low, nods taking in his whole body, and he was welcome.

There were in the throng still those he knew or had known, no surprise, part of the point of being there indeed. Was that Alison looking down at the stage? If so she moved fast when the performance was done and he could not find her. But look, here was Amy coming towards him, right hand outstretched left pulling old Jeff behind, Jeff, who smiled as best he could at Stallo.

—Hey. Amy rapped with her fingers on Stallo’s chest as if it were a door.

—Alright?

—Good to see you, man, said Jeff, and smiled and told him they were going to get a drink and have a smoke and hadn’t it been amazing? Would he come with them?

He declined. Amy moued and Jeff said, —Ah, shame, next time.

Later when Stallo reported it Hook looked at him in a way that implied he should perhaps have gone with them. But Stallo was left mostly to follow his instincts. He saw colleagues at these meetings, sometimes, Manning with Afro and shabby leathers, Hooper too old for that jumper, hair untidy and big glasses. He guessed at others, high and dirty and more than once performing on the stage. Silently he wished them neither good luck nor unmasking. Stallo always looked for Maisie at such events. He did not find her.

He moved to a smaller flat in a questionable corner of Kentish Town. Brought home women some nights. He put what military stuff he did not keep at base or elsewhere in a locked chest so those who came to fuck him would only see a few prints on the walls and books on windowsills, some once Maisie’s. Stallo walked with demonstrators against the war, observing, in part for himself. He was as curious about his own motives as he was other marchers’. Always. A curiosity that did not resolve, the question its own end.

Three days in Vietnam. In Spain he sat with a pistol on his lap outside a room wherein Hook and a translator argued with a terrified-sounding woman. Huddled under a cloak in a perahan tunban overlooking Sabzawar, where six hundred years before Timur had built a tower of two thousand enemies, screaming men cemented (per certain sources) into a minaret of the dying. Close his eyes, Stallo might see it stalk the hillside. You couldn’t trust architecture! Skeleton walled up in the basement or not, all of it was built on bones.

In a Belfast attic Bowler whispered to him, —You know he’s right, mate, trouble’s on the way. Or here already.

—You been chatting to Benters again?

—No, but look around. I mean what’s happening in America. And look at us. Do any of us think we’re on top of it all? You can tell they’re trying stuff out at Awfulness. And I ain’t a scientist, but you can tell to look at them that it ain’t going well. The way they’re scurrying around. I reckon they’re going deeper. Deeper and deeper. What are they trying to reach? All the way down?

They went to the safe house by a disused pit with scalloped edges where diggers had had at it and from within which came the voices of playing children. At the table waited Melissa Marks opposite a narrow-faced man.

—I already told you, he said. —Now for Chuckles and Cheerful over there? They don’t say much, do they? He laughed unhappily. —There’s a meeting. Some in the leadership are going abroad. Italy maybe, I don’t know. To meet comrades from I don’t know, but a couple of our lot going are interested in the same sort of thing as youse.

—Cathal visiting Marco, is he? Marks said.

The man laughed again, quite loud. —Cathal? Marco? You’re behind the times.

Marks took Stallo and Bowler into the hallway. —You get the gist: there’s a cell in the council, doing outreach. To KH. Who are still trying to make friends. Or offering services. Or something.

—What was that about Marco? Stallo said. The younger dissenter.

—Unclear, Marks said. —Trouble at the top. You know what they’re like. Whatever they’re up to, KH I mean, it still doesn’t seem like anything we can make sense of. Or anything Kowalchuk ever did.

They called it in. Whatever was to happen though was pre-empted by events, perhaps by chance perhaps not. Explosions.

—This is a nasty load of shit, Bowler said at the television. Black and white and too small for the mess, images seemingly fussed by the east-coast wind. —Fuck’s sake, Bowler shouted, and the picture came back, carabinieri and the hooting of their vans.

—Poor sod looks full-on haunted now, Stallo said later to Croome.

—Bowler? she said. —Well it’s an ugly time. I think he’s right to be concerned. Aren’t you?

Christmas yet again. Again! On his own. Who gave a toss? Stallo at his table in the flat, not a safe house nor where he kept the scope. For the who-knew-whatth? time he opened the notebook Maisie had given him however-many years ago, and, again, wrote nothing in its pages.

—Was it an asset tried to take out Brezhnev?

Hook said, —Why on earth would we want to get rid of Brezhnev?

Stallo wasn’t back in Belfast when People’s Democracy marched but he bet himself there was a KH fellow traveller or two in that crowd. With the island’s antennae on them. Same went for Tokyo University, but look, the siege was ending. Operation Breakfast began, Cambodia was shaking and burning. And Stallo received a letter. He opened it and read it. He folded it closed and opened it and read it. Got up and sat down. This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing that got time going again, was it?

His mouth might have sounded out a name. Stallo went to his bed and sat on it reading and rereading. Outside the cold bustled to come in.

[31]

Maur wakes because the sun is reflecting from slanting rooftop glass onto her face. She’s alone. She rises from piled-up bedding in a black-painted cubby. She searches the scabby corridors. Finds a toilet and uses it. It smells musty and won’t flush away her piss. No water comes from the tap. She knuckles sleep out of her eyes.

She emerges from the block on a stretch of blistered concrete. A way off is the helicopter. It looks so much less proud than in the night. The space extends beyond to a fringe of rubble. Low buildings become habitable. The half-ruin of a complex, one storey but for rooms here and there protruding higher, a mast for something, an antenna. Warehouses and their last falling walls. A great barnlike edifice. From somewhere comes a toc-toc of tool on metal and is that the spit of hot oil?

Beyond, miles of other flatlands, crabgrass and pebbles, boulders strewn as if left to be seen. Piling up where the plain ends, they become a knoll. This place is at the bottom of a basin of slate. Big birds circle with fascination over helicopter remnants: a broken-looking hulk at the farthest edges of the field; another, skeletal, open to the bright air, engineless.

Maur’s dream revisits her in the slanting light. Jock’s body and face, his intercession. So she brings to mind Ewan as if in compensation, a desired duty. He is a boy again for her. He loved his monkey boots, wears them in her memories and now as he hauls himself up the helicopters as if they were trees. Clinging to the edge of a rotor blade that dips and rises under his weight with the stiff elasticity of a bough. She can’t see it cleanly.

She follows that sound of industry. In the hangar a huge door is minutely ajar. The air inside is full of haze and the ambience of sunbeams passing slantwise through holes to pick out a maze of aircraft. A score at least. All different models, uneven gyroscape. Each glowers with the proud absurdity of the grounded helicopter.

Maur goes as if into the woods. She has no vocabulary for such a setting. Each craft must be a specimen of a type. They are unreliable guides; their rotors point in all directions. They make sounds of settling metal, nothing is ever still. They are two-seater and four- and six-, long bodied, globular, piled-together struts and sleek flanked. Red, rusted, blue, black, of no colour. Broken, rotarless or glassless but for serrations at hatch edges, and if not new then clean for all their scuffs, and seeming to regard her.

In a clearing between them, someone hunches over sparks. The pilot. Who raises and shuts off the torch and hinges the welding mask up from her face and meets Maur’s eye.

“You’re awake,” she says. Takes the helmet off and lets it fall. The woman looks at her with unease and disappointment. “Come.”

—

She is Maur’s age or so, thickset and sallow and with a guarded expression. She looks strong and her close-cut hair is almost white. Her overalls are very dirty. Maur cannot place her accent.

Maur follows her to a back door in the chamber beyond which amid fallen plaster, a few rooms have been swept clean, though ancient charts and calendars still hang upon their walls. In a kitchenette, bread and fruit and coffee. Cybill and Stallo sit at a table in a wash of light. They watch Maur as she comes in. Stallo nods, Cybill does not. Stallo’s face has to it a sullen and stricken look beyond what Maur has seen before.

“My name is Dila,” the pilot says. “My husband…” She nods at Stallo. “His friend.”

“It was a while ago,” Stallo says. “We were babies.”

“No,” Dila says. “But we were young.”

She goes to the window and opens it and leans out and whistles. Maur sees, walking across the yard’s pitted fringes, the teenager. Mostly he watches his feet, but he looks up and calls briefly back to the woman and Maur does not recognise the language. Dila shouts something and the young man rolls his eyes and walks away and Maur inhales quickly at the flounce, the habitus of teenage males, though Ewan was never so unguarded. Stallo, she sees, is staring at the young man with something like hunger, something like shyness. Like he wants to be excited but is not sure he’s allowed.

“Vam,” Dila says. “My son.”

She says it to Maur. Her companions have had time for such reveals, and don’t react. Maur watches Vam. Says, “Boys,” to Dila, astounding herself.

“It’s a good place.” Stallo clambers with Dila and with Maur over the rocks. “Nearest town a way away but reachable.”

Dila sits at the base of a tree. Behind them, at the limits of Maur’s view, is that window, and in it the dab of Cybill’s face. She wouldn’t come.

“Yes.” Dila has on mirrored glasses now.

“When?” Stallo says. “When did Rak die?”

Dila looks at Stallo with his own distorted face. “Years,” she says. “He did all the things he did. You too, with him, sometimes.”

“Not so much,” Stallo says.

“You two together.” She shakes her head. “All he did, places, thousands of hours, in the sky, people…A lot of people would kill him, you know? I wouldn’t forgive them but I would understand. Some tried. They’re in the dirt. Not here, other places, before. Well done that they find us, but in the dirt they go. Anyway.” She tosses a pebble at Stallo; it goes wide. “All those things he did, and then he’s ill. Just ill like anybody.” She coughs, to show them. “Then it hurts to walk. Then he can’t get up. Then he dies.”

When Stallo’s silence is done he says, “He was a good man.”

“He was?” Dila says. “Maybe he was. I don’t know. I loved him, I know. I know I miss him.”

“Me too,” Stallo says.

“Okay,” Dila says. “We miss him.”

Stallo says, “Dila, thanks for coming for us.”

“If I didn’t believe what my boy told me, I wouldn’t have, okay?”

“I’m sorry about that. I told him I’m sorry. I didn’t know who he was.” Watching him, Maur thinks, Depends what you mean by know. “I would never,” he says. You can’t see Dila’s expression with those glasses on. “Thanks for coming for us.”

“For now.” Dila raises her hand as if nothing is a bother. “But not forever, Stallo.”

“We’re gone as soon as we can. Dila, I need to know what Rak…Towards the end, did he talk about things being, you know, about things changing? Getting worse?”

Dila sighs. “This, these, you know. Dead people. This is your thing, not his. Not mine.”

“Yeah, but.”

“But everything is connected, okay. You think I don’t hear things out here?”

“I know you do. That’s why I’m asking. And as I remember some of Rak’s machines were built for that. To hear.”

“They do lots of things. But you don’t get Rak, you get me. You’re alone now,” Dila says. “You think I don’t see?” She looks at Maur and says to Stallo, “Is that why you’re with her?”

“Don’t you worry about me,” Stallo says.

“I do. You are jealous, yes? Because you’re alone now?”

“All right, that’ll do.”

“Why are you here, Stallo? What I can do?”

“You came just in time. I know your choppers, I know you’ve scrambled our trail. I get that….” He shook his head and frowned. “You say this place is safe. How? That’s why we needed to come. Before he died, what did Rak say about something trying to come through? Did he warn you?”

“You asking me who comes for you?” Dila says. “CIA? SIS? Spetsnaz? You tell me.” Her tone is almost singsong but Stallo just says, “You know what I mean,” and Dila sighs again and says, “He used to say Angra Mainyu will come. I don’t care, Stallo.”

“He’d want you to. He wouldn’t tell you something like that for nothing. My old bosses don’t believe it but you should.”

“They come after you, right. You don’t want to stop it, Stallo. Not really. You want to understand. I know you.”

Stallo shakes his head. “Dila we just watched something eat a friend of ours. So I need intel, yeah, so I can stop it, whatever this is.”

“You can’t stay.”

“I don’t want to. A few days is all. But you’re right, I need help. I know I don’t have the right to ask but I’m asking. Whatever you know. And whatever you have. I heard he had…The way he—and you—kept this place out of trouble. I’m asking you to help me understand. How can it be safe? How come you’re still here?”

Dila smiles. To Maur she looks very powerful. Tinted sockets, scorn in her mouth. Big lumbering insects crawl on the stones.

“I know about Rak’s ideas,” Stallo says. “Anyway they’re yours as much as his. Or more. He told me what he’d decided was true: the sun wheel rises, angles equals angels, end times, Rimmon and the air devils—and, yeah, the threat, Angra Mainyu. I know it was…not a game like not serious, but a game like when kids tell stories. Dead serious. Him, him and you telling a story. Maybe you thought it was just a story once, including about something intruding. But I don’t think so. Not any more.”

“Stallo,” she says. “He told me you said this to him. Years ago. Asked him for help. To me he called you Ezekiel. ‘The day of trouble is near.’ ”

“Once.”

“Did he? Help you?”

“Sort of. Yes.”

“You’re angry.”

“A long time ago,” he says, “he helped but I was disappointed. Will you help now?”

“Don’t I help you? I didn’t come for you?”

“You did. Thank you. But Dila I need more.” From how he spins his pointing finger Maur knows there are secret techniques of helicoptermancy. Scatter yarrow on turning rotors, read its patterns. “What do you know about Dr. Croome? What did Rak show her?”

Good Night

Stallo, alive, spitting distance from Christ’s age when he died. His mother had him when she was twenty-four and Irene was, had been, a bit older, but if she was sixty she was only just so.

People jostled in the pews of St. Stephen’s in their best black, a few in scarves and rags of bright colours. She’d have wanted that, you know how she was. The ceremony had already started and he tried to squeeze into the rearmost line and the woman up to whom he sidled looked at him with recognition he did not share and murmured, —Hello, Steve darling, not here, love, go on, up the front. She gave him a bump with her hip back into the aisle and the priest paused and people under the vaulted stone turned to see. So Stallo walked in silence the length of the church. Past men and women watching as if he were a character from a story, for the most part as quiet as if witnessing his arrival were their purpose there. Shoulders back, towards his brother, who stared at him with what looked like fear. Stallo took his place by the coffin.

He heard a drone and whooping sobs. The grief of his mother, not next to him but close. She was afraid of him too.

She did not approach him at the wake. She stood across from him in Irene’s living room while his aunt’s friends circulated. They came to him to be received with his distracted patience like a king’s. This was blah blah, this wossname, this such-and-such. Some Stallo recalled a bit from when he was a boy: the tobacconist, white turban black suit; the publican of some less favoured place than the So-and-So’s Arms or wherever it was to where he understood the mourners would soon decamp. He ate two sandwiches. His mother watched him.

—It’s good you came. Stallo did not know this woman. Her accent was strong Jamaican. —Irene loved you, she said, and for no reason of which he could make sense it was that statement of a fact he’d never doubted that had him looking abruptly up, blinking. And he could say nothing as the woman patted his hand. —My poor boy, she loved you.

—It’s good you came, his brother said.

—Rene, Stallo said. John touched his glass to Stallo’s.

—Auntie Irene.

He saw his mother crying still, speaking with great urgency, to Maisie.

Who saw him see her. She put her hand on his mother’s arm and whispered sympathies once more, took her leave to come to him. Rene had liked her, hadn’t she?

As Maisie approached through the quiet crowd, Stallo startled himself by thinking something like, Well might be it’s time to give Auntie Rene a ring eh?

Anyway here was his wife.

—You look well, he said. —Who told you?

—Steve-o, I’m so sorry, she said. —It’s an awful thing.

She wore a black jacket and skirt and a bright green shirt and her hair was long. She was strange to him.

—Didn’t see you in the church, he said.

—Thought that was maybe just family.

—No.

—Well I’m here. It’s awful, Irene was such a, she was…I didn’t know she was sick.

—I didn’t know she was sick. No one did. When I talked to her the last few times, I was talking to, well, to the cancer too. The whole time. Inside her. Like it was listening.

She looked away. —My dad’s not well, she said. —Not like this, it’ll probably be alright, but there’s been hospitals and that, and I’m so sorry. Rene was wonderful.

He was steady now for fuck’s sake but thinking about the meeting of the three of them the first time in the tearoom, thinking less about Maisie now so different it was like she was acting or like she’d been acting before, than about Rene, who seemed to him to have been exactly the same the last time he’d seen her which was, when was it?, a few months ago, oh, sorry Rene, you lose track of time, as she’d been back then eating cakes and smoking at the table, exactly the same as when standing in the doorway of her house while he, a boy, came to her, he opened his mouth and made no sound, couldn’t take a breath.

All those resources on the island and none for him. Good luck trying for that. Too rare and precious for private use, which wouldn’t work anyway, as they’d always say. They might have been a bit lax these days but liberating Rouse engines? Even if he could run one? On his own? Forget it.

Maisie watched him and what didn’t but could almost have come out of Stallo’s mouth, to his own shock, was something like Good that you’re here you can put me in touch with Jeff he knows Skully doesn’t he? He knows that Isabella, is it?

He turned from her and couldn’t, no, didn’t look at her concern. He had a certainty of how it would be to punch one of the walls, the particular kind of just-right pain, call it a flat or an exact pain, if he aimed precisely so the force went into his knuckles and perfectly down the shaft of his ulna and radius. As a child he’d been forbidden from entering his aunt’s bedroom. Stallo had been inside it once, ten years ago, slipping in at night to tell her he was alive. He shook his head and left Maisie behind him and went to it now. He closed the door on the murmur of the gathering. He half-expected to find others within seeking their own silences but he was alone. There the bed in which she had sat up that time. The wardrobe in the gloom by which he’d stood. Pictures, clothes in the cupboards, dressing table crammed.

He sat. On the bed. He swung his feet slowly up and swivelled, keeping his shoes off the coverlet, lying where Irene had lain. Turning his face into her pillow, a perfume of perfume and cigarettes and skin he learnt that he knew and there it was waiting.

After a time he opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling until he stood. He whispered his aunt’s name and went to the mirror. Held his palms down above the clutter of brushes and compacts. Moved them over the rubble of Rene’s routine.

The door opened. His mother stared at him.

He did not jump back or shout but looked at her a minute then back at what lay before him and with ostentatious deliberation picked up a squat bottle shaped like an apple with an inch of yellow scent still within. He took off the top and smelt a dominant note in that aunt-smell, astringent so concentrated. He put the bottle in his pocket.

—You can’t take that, his mother said. She came in closing the door. —Steven!

—You’re embarrassing, he said. He went to step past her.

—Steven.

Stallo, he nearly said. —Actually, he said. —You know what? We’re here for her, so let’s give her this much. It’s what she would’ve wanted, as they say. I’m sorry about your sis.

His mother’s eyes went side to side.

—Anything you want to say to me? he said.

—You ain’t fair, she said. —It ain’t fair. She began to cry again. —Don’t, Steven. You’re not fair and it’s not right. Now she struggled to get words out. —You! she said. She picked up a hairbrush and threw it at him, so weakly it fell to the floor between them. She looked at it and shouted, —Sorry! with snotty sad anger. Stallo went for the door again.

—No, don’t! she said. —I miss you, don’t you miss me? Who’s going to look after me?

He descended. He saw that his fingers trembled. The knowledge came to him that he might start to send his mother a bit of money via his brother which made little sense for the life of him, and so on.

—John, you seen her? Maisie?

—I…His brother looked in the direction of the door. —I think she went.

So Stallo realised that he had thought she would come home with him, call it a last time, call it pity. He was shocked by his own sadness that she had not.

You could ask around, have a word with a mate who had a mate who had an in with a dollybird in Ops who had the ear of someone in Intelligence. Rak was indeed on the radar, though of no great concern. File marked E for Eccentric. P for Potty. A man ITKO only, it said, re topics relevant to/abutting his own obsession(s). Faith by choice, idiomania.

Melissa Marks spent a night with Stallo, a joyless coupling but a relief. When they were done she opened his door and stood draped in his shirt where any passing person could see her and said, —I’m sorry about your mum, Stallo.

—My auntie.

—I got that wrong. I’m sorry about your aunt then.

—When did you last hear anything about Marco? Stallo said. —Or any of that lot?

—Stallo, go easy. Go to bed.

So long as he didn’t turn Stallo could sometimes conjure up or make out the faint slap-slap of a bounce and impact following him.

—What the fuck is going on? Bowler said. —The lespries are in a right state.

—I know. Antsy as fuck.

—Yeah, but worse, Bowler said. —Even the ones that used to be nice as pie. It’s not like they’re just scared, they’re different, some of them.

You want to get out there, Stallo did not say. That that was the way all over the place, that was not just revenance but the world, and Bowler stared at him as if to agree.

—Did you ever hear anything about that bloke up North London way? Stallo said. —Trenches veteran? Stallo said the old man’s name. —You’re better at rumours than me.

—Am I fuck, Bowler said. Eff-oh-ess I think, just one of a number.

In the test chambers the air stirred. It seemed to Stallo that he passed more and more soldiers of the Unit down in the sunken hallways, that increasing numbers of them were being granted their moments underground.

He found Croome.

—What do you want? she said.

—Charming. He put the apple bottle on her desk. —This isn’t base, he said. She said nothing. He said, —It’s an apport. I think it is.

—Do you? She picked it up. —Why? Where’s it from?

Now, he would hardly say, I think it is because even though it’s inert to my fingers no matter how long I hold it when I put it in crocodile clips hooked it up to your buggered oscilloscope I got something, I think I did anyway, not much but subtle, and it must’ve meant something.

—Just test it would you? he said.

—An apple for teacher, she said. Stallo licked his lips but what he had been going to say he couldn’t yet, he found out.

—Stallo, I will let you in on a secret. Yes, we have here a few machines into which I could slip this for a readout that would in other contexts allow me to place a tick or a cross in a relevant box. Perhaps even allocate it a score out of ten. But, and I find myself certain this won’t come as news to you, your senses are at least as accurate as anything down here. I’m not going to be able to tell you anything you don’t know. When have you ever asked me for clarification like this? Why would you do so unless you want a different answer than the one you’re getting? You say this isn’t base and I’m put in mind of Freud on negation.

She slid the glass apple back across to him and he turned it in his hands. Now it was his silence. Until he said, —How would you go about Rousing someone from an apport anyway? Someone who’s not a soldier?

Croome pursed her lips. Not without kindness.

—Stallo, she said. —Stallo, Stallo, Stallo.

Hook announced that Carpenter had chosen the music herself and rode out affectionate groans. Records rather than a band—this was a very particular do, not another Christmas party in an out-of-the-way corner of Blighty to be adequately policed by a payoff, drunkenness and the Official Secrets Act. Everyone moved as best they could to old rhythms. When the third song started, though, they all laughed and cheered because it was only “Lola,” wasn’t it? They danced much more wildly. Carpenter smiled, supported by Hook and, blimey, the Milkman. Couldn’t be too long till it was his turn.

—Hullo, everyone, she said when the song was done. —Thank you awfully for being here. They cheered and someone began For she’s a jolly good fellow. —I will confess that last tune is one I asked someone else to suggest. It seemed a little unfair to sentence you all to my preferences.

She cleared her throat. In every corner of the room multicoloured balloons jostled like garish flowers, tethered by strings tied through the holes of stones, a few of the lighter of which pendulumed just below the ceiling, from where they would sink slowly over hours as helium escaped. On the wall were pinned up several large sheets of paper on which someone had drawn sheet-draped spooks and skeletons all waving and written above their dead heads in dripping horror-film font Cheerioooooooooh!!!

It was never a simple thing to tell where Carpenter was looking, those pale old eyes seeming both too precise and not precise enough, but to Stallo it was as if she ran her gaze over those apotropaic lalas tangled in with the decoration. Those stones, the life rune by the door. String and sand piles.

—It’s been a jolly long time that I’ve been doing this, she said. —I’ve seen advances in our field miles beyond any I’d have imagined when I began. I’ve seen good men and women die and go unmourned by those for whom they gave their lives. Except here. Here we mourn our own. And, you know, I’ve, ah, always thought that it’s a certain sort of privilege to live and die as a secret. We work with secrets, and we are secrets too. It’s been an honour to work with such an excellent lot. I commend— A moment of weakness seemed to take her but she came back. —We all know how important stories are to the work we do, and I’m grateful to you for your patience in listening to my boring stories.

The little crowd laughed. Stallo had never heard Carpenter tell a story.

—All work and no play, as they say, she said. —Well we work jolly hard here, and I’ve been working hard—not as hard as you lot, of course, but hard for an old girl—for as long as I can remember. So here we are, and thank you all. Now, you get back to your party.

They cheered and clapped and toasted her.

So if retirement meant the end of work did that mean that she would play now? It was impossible for Stallo to imagine it. Croquet? Chess? Ludo? But then it was no simple matter for him to conceive of himself playing, either. Or anyone. He recalled of course the scramble over concrete, the urgent running with other boys and girls through bomb sites, stones thrown, the lunging of It, and these were games and he must have chosen to play them, but think of them now and he could not distinguish them readily from his armed walks through the Malayan jungle. So he thought of football, and that was a little more like it perhaps, but here to his mind came marks upon a wall.

He found Croome at the end of the bar. He leaned in so she could hear him below the music.

—I want to borrow an apport.

He could see her wondering why he asked given she must have known it was he, or that he was among those, who had been ahem borrowing the odd minor lala from the store and sometimes not even bringing it back. Of which she did not complain.

—Let me start again, he said. —I want to borrow the Venom engine.

She watched him. Stallo did not say, I can’t slip that out on my tod, but I swear to God I feel like if I run the old boy’s oscilloscope on real power like that, I’ll get a result, a breakthrough of info that you could really do something with, and given they won’t tell us lot about Adder Fog this is my next best. I’m looking for something.

Croome spoke as if to the ceiling.

—Have you mislaid any pens or combs or such like recently? Or is that just me? Anyway, you want the Venom.

He said, —Let’s see if KH’s fingerprints’re on it. He covered up his own mild surprise to hear that. —I don’t mean actual prints obviously, but traces. You think that plane came down on its own? I bloody don’t.

—If I wanted to, she said finally, —I couldn’t help you with that. Sergeant, you know there are still some items on which brass keep a check. Why? What do you know about it? A shame in a way, I daresay you don’t see it in operation very often, as I do, that engine. If you had I might ask whether you had the sense, as do I, that when running it looks rather squatter than when it’s not.

—Sometimes, Stallo said, —it’s like I see a big cube sitting there, behind all the other apports.

—One half-sees all manner of things, Croome says. —I’m tempted to add “in this game,” but I rather think that’s life, tout court.

—Yeah but it’s more than that. Even speaking about it, Stallo felt as if he were not quite awake. —What’s an echo an echo of? It’s like that.

—Other cubes are echoes of it?

—Other shapes. All of them.

—Everything is made of shapes.

—Well there you go.

—Behind which it waits? Croome said. —Not dissimilar to how a control is behind a medium?

Stallo turned abruptly away. Across the room, beyond the dancing, Carpenter walked slowly for the door. He thought that she would die soon.

[32]

Vam watches Stallo, and he watches Maur. She seeks out his stare, and is made tired by it too, the fascination of a young man with a drive—if her intuition’s right—opaque to him. She sees in him antipathy, curiosity, lust maybe.

Stallo watches the boy cautiously, you can see him see his old friend.

Vam stamps out of his mother’s inner room, slamming the door behind him. His mother comes and shouts something after him as he gets into one of the old cars there and the women watch it recede the length of the grey line that is only just a path, into the wasteland. It jackknifes, Dila says, for axle-testing miles, to a minor road which, after a while, joins one a little more major and so on.

“He’s a child,” she says. “Wants to go play with his friends. In town. Wants to go fuck girls. I told him not now, not with this.” She gestures at Maur and into the building where the others are.

“But he has gone,” Maur says.

“He will drive around, come back. I need him, I want him to help me. With how we live. Especially now. But you know.” She shakes her head. “He’s young.”

Maur tries to think how she would describe these days, to others, to a friend.

“Where will you go?” Dila lights a cigarette and gives one to Maur. “You can’t stay.”

“I know. Stallo said, we’ve said we’ll be gone as soon as we can.” She gestures. “It was me said we should look for you.”

“I told him, I told you,” Dila says. “I never heard of Croome. If Rak came to her I don’t know when, I don’t know what he said.”

“Yeah I know you said that. Stallo’s told you what’s happening though.”

“He told me. His old people, they want him and Cybill. And this Azeri fetches up some Iblis. Because she’s angry? What? Stallo says he’ll stop her.”

“We need resources,” Maur says. “I don’t want to just keep running either.” Pauses in interest at that. “We need to be prepared.”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“I’ve seen what they can do. The, the Roused. Let alone this other thing.”

“Yes,” Dila says. “I’m always afraid.”

“But it does feel different here,” Maur says. “Safer. Or hidden. Sort of.”

“I have a child, so.” She makes a wry little You know face and Maur thinks, Yes. “Maybe Stallo’s right, maybe he’s wrong about what’s happening. If he’s wrong, no problem. If he’s right, okay, it’s bad. But yes, that’s why Rak and me made this place. He’s addicted, you know? Stallo. He needs this. My man was the same. Always looking for this thing, that thing. To keep hold of himself. I don’t know how you can have friends if you live like Stallo lives. Like my man lived. But he liked Stallo.”

Maur won’t risk asking, Do you know why they fell out?

“I have work to do,” Dila says.

Mostly, she says, she takes hers to her clients’, then their aircraft. Haulage or investigation, licit and illicit. Who cares for flight plans and ATC? This is an area of Visual Flight Rules. She’s virtuoso enough, and unfussed enough by legality, probity, danger, to make a living.

“You want to move something you don’t want seen? Want to break out of prison? Okay, in and out. I can be Nadine Vaujour every day, for money.”

The little craft disappears with its prayer.

For Maur to think of Dila’s caring anger / angry care is to remember her own son. It’s to yearn again to stay up late with Sonya. Sonn! Where are you? It is not the first time that envy passes through Maur for those who just have dead children. To have it happen, for it to be the vastation it can’t but be, and then, then to continue, with it passing into your past, inevitably leaving you stained, but to go on, God! Shame comes after the envy as before.

Maur enters the cathedral. In the shallows of which, near the light from the great doorways, is Stallo.

“Where’s Cybill?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“When did you last check in on her?” He sees Maur’s uncertainty. “That thing. Finding us like that. Using a rev to find us. It shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“How do you know what it should be able to do?”

“From everything I’ve ever seen, I thought we’d have more time. Jules must’ve been…reaching for her mum. Now…”

“What are you trying to say?” Maur says.

“Cybill can’t feel Jules,” he says. “At all. She’s straining.”

“We’re all straining. Maybe Dila would let us stay…”

“Believe me,” he says. He’s hesitant, as he rarely is. “Even if she was okay with us staying and even if that didn’t mean that laughing thing wouldn’t just be fucking…out there, unopposed…Even if all that, it shouldn’t be safe here.”

“What do you mean? You think she’s lying?”

“No no. Rak wasn’t the first to make his own god machine, you know. He started this whole thing, out of, I don’t know.”

“This whole thing?”

“Religion.”

Nothing should descend as helicopters descend. Helicopters don’t want to fly but fly they do. Miracles.

Stallo once mooted to Rak, he says, that all this started because a bullet from the ground came in and the head of some poor knocked-about pilot, only mildly altered from the front, was altogether more absolutely opened up behind to decorate the inside, and ever after, like an iron swine below a cross, that helicopter, Rak’s first favourite, was haunted. Pushing Rak to create new expertise, tweaking an altogether new kind of collective, not for yaw and pitch but the amalgam of the dead who rode within and might have done. No, Rak said. However many grumbling and desolate dead there might or might not be within his machines, they weren’t the power. He was a priest, he insisted, of a distinct helicoptrous secret.

“He told me holy fucking stories,” Stallo says. “You never knew if he heard them ’cause he was looking for them or if he came up with them himself. If he was thinking, ‘What if it was like this?’ Like, ‘What if you came up over a ridge of rocks somewhere and there was the boneyard?’ ” An imagined hidden valley ringed by rocks and updrafts. Stallo mutters Rak’s descriptions. Come down skirting the ridges lowering speed to see amid the scree and patchy canopy remains through which trees grew. Lianas and bramble and curious root fibres snagging light-bleached rotors drooping in dignity, gripping bent and broken struts, up through corroded metal bellies and around mushroomed seats in mimicry of the belts, flaring out into the world through burst glass. Ruin after ruin lying across each other in rest. Rak had decided it existed, Stallo says, and thus gone looking. Rak’s decision to believe and his pantheon, rewards and purgatories: which came first?

“Anyone can believe anything,” Stallo says. “If they want to.” Every helicopter is made in the image of god. One rotor and two rotor it made them. “Of course he was crazy.” He shrugs that that does not matter much at all.

Against the inner wall some way from the hangar entrance is a flaking ornamented cabinet such as you might use to display old medical equipment, heirlooms, shabtis and the contents of old graves. It stands before a window through which light comes to pass and also through the case’s glass back and front, illuminating what’s within. A slotted bar like a Meccano piece. Pedals and their housings. An instrument panel, speed- or alti- or somethingometer, dials and levers, the splay of wires like roots, furred with decay. Stallo pulls open the door to investigate and touch.

“What are you looking for?” Maur says. Even as she does a sense of Ah yes, not understanding but the satisfaction it can inaugurate, goes through her. It doesn’t feel quite like hers.

“Something not there.” Stallo closes the glass and walks into the aircraft maze.

“Why didn’t Dila come straightaway?” Maur says. “She knew it was you, she had the photo. Why wait?”

“I told you I never knew if I could trust him at the end. Maybe she feels the same about me. Fairey.” He gestures. “Half a Whirlwind. Don’t know. Widgeon.” Batteries and bits lie about them and the floor is like a snake pit with cables. Stallo smiles at a grey hulk on its three wheels. “Sycamore.

“He put what he tracked down into what he built,” Stallo said. “They’ve got their charm nature. He was always after specific objects. Helicopters pull and repel. So you end up with something that’s an amulet and something like a church and a saint, all at once.”

They reach the centre of the great chamber, surrounded by lines of dust and light through windows and holes.

The last helicopter awaits them. Maur looks into its hard face. Its coagulum supports loom. You don’t have to be an engineer to know it’s patchwork. It dwarfs what surrounds it but is not one of the long-bodied twin-rotored things she knows from films, has only one set of metal blades ready to draw its halo. The four rotors don’t match, each arm distinct in length and faded colour. An irregular crucifix over a cockpit that is an excellent tower, a splendid clot of parts, plates, pieces of other engines, pipes, circuitry, and screws, its irregularly bulbous window a congeries of spliced convexities and seams. Its wheels and struts are wound about with rope and cable that web the floor.

For those rotors to spin! For that cross to turn and the tug of it, the celestotropic energies of negation rising so it might shake mightily and the walls shake too and to the insistent shout of its voice, its body rise, rood.

Maur hears a sound and realises, making herself gasp a laugh, that she is making it, breathing like a child, like her little boy once breathed, in staccato bursts, as if to imitate that helicopter’s chop.

“He liked pointing out that kerosene’s old fossils,” Stallo says. “ ‘My god eats ghosts,’ he said.” Stallo meets the stare of the final helicopter. “He said to me that’s why they’re scared of it.” He shakes his head. Warmly he says, “Silly old sod.”

Inside herself Maur sees it rise, that voracious apotropaic vortex-riding utterer.

—

“Let me show you something,” Stallo says. “About why we can’t stay.”

Outside beyond the cracked flats of concrete in scrub surrounds, stems rustle as animals scatter.

“Here,” he says. He checks but there is nothing in the sky returning, and he points all the way around the compound. “I had her show me the defences. I’ve been trying to work out how they do stay safe here. Because they’ve been here a long time. I’ve been trying to work out why she’s not scared.”

“She says she is—”

“He was. Look.”

He takes her to a stool-sized cracked-off bit of something by a bush. In the thorns, a time-blackened engine part, no, a small, a tail rotor, is it?, as tall as Maur’s thigh, protruding from between hardy plants. He leads on again for minutes in silence, circumnavigating. Digs with his hands. Beneath loose earth, a strongbox. He taps it in its hole. On to a crude carving on a stump, a stylised helicopter above a field of ghastly figures arms raised in fear or supplication. Upon the ends of the branches of a thorn bush hidden from the buildings are two, three bottles, invisible until close because the glass of them is coated with dirt. Stallo shows Maur a fingers-thick cable buried at its base.

“It connects them all,” he says. “These aren’t enough,” he says. “They’re all something. But even linked and even however rare some of them are and whatever Rak knew that I don’t, this is not enough. It shouldn’t work. It can’t work. I don’t get it.”

“These are protections?” Still, still stupid.

“Yeah. And I’m not saying they’re nothing. But they shouldn’t be strong enough to keep this place off-grid and out of sight anything like this long.”

“Then what…?” Maur says.

“I keep thinking about what Croome said. But where could he get anything like that?”

“An apport?”

“An apport like that. Strong enough for this. It makes no sense.” Oh he wants it to be true. “If she was right I’m just missing something. Fuck me we need the help.”

“Or?” Maur says. “There’s an or.”

“Or the only reason this ever kept them out of trouble is because no one gave a fuck about them. There was nothing here anyone wanted.”

And Maur does not say, Until us. Until now.

“What does she say about it?” Maur says.

“That the defences were Rak’s side of things. He came and went. Fetched things.”

“What the fuck did she do?”

“The best of it.”

A crude and basic faith before her. Rak had said he was embarrassed and excited to tell her everything he’d come up with, all at once, over a long night, in the air, shaking over a delta. And she had listened with her face set, and when at last there was no more to tell, she had mooted intercessions, had switched from asking and suggesting to decreeing the nature of the faith, to Rak’s delight, with his breathless collaboration. Thus the holy helicopter spoke to them. It was Dila, Stallo says to Maur, who told Rak what were the monomaniac bisyllabic holy words on which the helicopter insists, which Maur hears coming now. Other utter mutter chatter stutter cutter clatter shutter sputter flatter clatter scatter shatter brother mother smother utter other.

At the other end from the dirt about which you had to have equanimity, the hole where the worms might be (so ’70s a disgust), were other troubles.

Once at least, try to understand the rules by which some food was unsafe. Ask the child.

It’s less taste than a trauma of shape. Of variation. It’s the feel of distinction and difference and categoric specificity in the mouth that freezes him. Skins and membranes distress; the rupture of textural zones is dangerous. Salad a horror from the thousand-plateaux bursting of skin stalk leaf seed chamber into something neither shaped nor unshaped. If he has to he’ll swallow without chewing; anything to avoid that awful process of transition, of the wet inside-caressing transformation from the multiply edged to the edgeless within the cavern of the mouth.

Beans, potatoes, cheese (cheddar) are safe. The pastiness, the mush, without boundaries to assert, so they surrender beneath the teeth, those dividers. Formlessness is safer.

XVII

Invisible
Encounter

Harbour

Stallo told Rak he would meet him in Battersea by the water, in proximity—alright then—to the heliport. Rak had new scars upon his face and was hunched into a black leather jacket. Stallo felt shy. Not of Rak’s palpable anxiety but in the face of his enthusiasm. The fact that Rak wanted.

—You have to believe in something, Rak said as if he heard Stallo’s lack.

—No you don’t.

—Okay but you can choose, Rak said.

—You either believe or you don’t.

—No. Why did you write to me now, Stallo? You know I wanted to talk to you since years.

Stallo put his hands in his pockets and led Rak on a riverside walk. Gulls shouted.

—Look, you were a soldier, Stallo said. —And you know things, we work in the same sort of areas. Sort of.

—I try not to care about the dead. You and the Russians and Nergal and Wran and Marco…What you do is up to you, you know? I do my own.

—How do you know about them?

—You think all your secrets stay secrets?

Stallo had the strength to say nothing. He considered rotors and it made him think of the wing sounds of flies.

—Everyone knows Stallo, too, Rak said. —I’ve been thinking of you. I knew Low-Level Greville. I listen for air stories. So I heard of you.

—I’ve got no air stories.

—Come on. You still say so?

—What do you know about that lot, Nergal’s lot?

—Always asking questions, Rak said. —Some of them are asking How do you wake something up?

—Oh yeah? Stallo said when he could.

—Yes.

—And how’ve you been feeling? That’s what I wanted to ask you. You feel like things are changing?

Rak’s smile was cautious and eager. —Things always change.

Stallo breathed estuary air deep. —You can see which way the wind’s blowing now. Biafra, Kent State, wherever you look it’s not just all still shitty it’s getting worse. Moving faster. Don’t you think? Couple of years back someone kept telling me that these are bad times. In a deep way I mean. I thought he was a nutter to be honest. Now, well. He shrugged. —But I’m not getting much joy from talking about this with most of my lot so maybe I’m the nutter. Fine. But even if I am, I would like to know if it’s true. And outside of my unit I don’t know many people who are up on any of this sort of stuff. The world. So I’m asking you.

—I told you what I think.

—Barely. Anyway I’m asking you again. So you do still? Believe in—God? And the other? Rak nodded. —So what do you want to do about it?

—Do? Rak actually stopped walking, and his surprise seemed sincere. —Live. Survive.

—What is it? Stallo said. —What you can…what you feel. Tell me.

—Oh, you want something from me now? I wanted something from you. Since we first spoke. And you believe in nothing, then?

—I didn’t say that, Stallo said. —Did I say that? I don’t know.

—You want me to help you? Tell me what you saw. In Telok Anson.

Lips a tiny bit apart. God almighty, you could see it, you could see he wanted this for writ. He was there for scripture. Don’t fill in all the pages of your bloody bible, Stallo wanted to say. Leave some blank.

He learnt then that he envied the faith Rak was building. If he could not have that or any such at least he could hoard Rak himself, his acquaintanceship with this oddity, this man ITKO and, but, at right angles to his own work.

Tell Rak what he’d seen? That wasn’t so easy. Not when it was more than a decade ago and when the whole job for all those years had been in no small part about not saying. Though Stallo had practice at obscuring by telling, Look, it was just this thing, no lie, no omission, but the downgrading of revelation. So there I was…. But that wouldn’t work now. Maybe Stallo should have brought Bowler. Told him there was a bloke wanting to talk about that fucking swamp. But then Bowler was a cagey sod these days and maybe Rak was already chatting to him, what about that? Maybe they went way back. If Bowler even saw anything. In the vortex.

“Saw”?

Well, he’d somethinged something.

It was one thing for Stallo to offhand disclose that this or that figure’d emerged in a whirl of leaves and that it didn’t look like anything he’d seen before, whatever, saying it to hide it; another to say it to one listening like Rak listened. These East End streets around them seemed full of quiet light, seemed what was left of a city after everyone was gone.

—I don’t know who the pilot was, Stallo made himself say.

—I do.

—He was fucking amazing though, I tell you that.

—Yes.

—He come down and…With his hands Stallo described the motion amid the trees.

All that to tell. How the helicopter brought up the slough of the jungle to meet it, Sycamore down tree mulch up. If you had offered him money or put a gun to his head Stallo could not have named the emotion it raised in him to disclose these sights. Nor even if it was good or if it was bad. What he knew was he felt vulnerable enough that his breath sped up, which made him marvel. After all the work he’d done, it was this telling that made his lips tingle.

He broke off because Rak’s rapt expression distressed him and he covered that with a frown and said, —Why do you want to know?

—I need, Rak said. —I want.

Need, want. They’d come so far. When Stallo stayed silent a moment longer Rak told him in a voice not without humour that someone called Cornu could walk in the air. Let me tell you about the old history, he said. Priests and their saints. Why not choose a god-machine who helps you walk in the air on spiral wings?

So when that little hymn was done, Stallo, braced again, recounted the descent, voice from the storm, image of a figure. Rak nodded and his eyes were wide and Stallo was certain none of this was new to him but now he was hearing it.

—I don’t know what it was, Stallo said. —In the downdraft. If anything.

—Oh, you know, Rak said. —The road to Damas. Is it a wonder that you saw what you saw though? Your spirits, okay—how could they avoid that?

—What, helicopters eat ghosts? Stallo said at last. —Is that what you’re saying? Or they shit them?

Rak grinned with what seemed a boy’s excitement. —Look at the face of God and you go crazy, no? He made a cartoonish face. —Why should there be no joy? You read Sikorsky?

—Now you’re just taking the piss, Stallo said.

—Bless him, bless the vessel! Rak slapped his own stomach with laughter.

—You enjoying yourself? Interesting what your prophets don’t like, Stallo said. —Sikorsky did a runner after the Bolshies. And Charles Richet? You were right, he does crop up. And it is funny, him being the start of your thing and mine. He was a piece of work. I work with all sorts but he was quite the old racialist. Don’t bother you?

—I don’t need him to be good, I only need him to be holy.

Back to where they’d started. Rak leaned on the railings of the bridge. The heliport jetty was empty of vehicles. Three engineers worked together on some task by the water’s edge.

—So there we are, Stallo said. —I’ve given you mine. What have you got for me?

Rak extended the index finger of his right hand and drew circles with it, then a figure eight. He looked into up-shimmer from the dark water. —I don’t know yet, he said. —I feel something, yes. Like you do. I mean. Something not so good.

—Oh you do?

—Yes. A god needs an enemy.

—Couldn’t it be God coming?

—Is something else, I think. I tell you what I think. The Sheitan is something that was never born. Was here always.

—You’re a gnostic, Stallo said.

—Rak pointed as an imaginary craft grew closer. —Okay. So something nasty. The shapes it takes. Like a hornet. Bringer of pain. Yes? But a giant. I will tell you. YH-32 Hornet. First helicopter gunship; air corps call it the Sally Rand: death and fucking, together. Why would it not be this? Its rotors are not equal. He drew a long shaft down in the air and a short crossbeam. —And tips of the long blades? Where would be INRI and the suppedaneum? Ramjets. So it comes fast. And low. And loud. And spitting flames. Under a circle of fire.

Rak whispered the war cry of that Hornet, crackling his spit to make a conflagration, boom boom boom boom.

—So that’s what I call the enemy, Rak said. —The Hornet.

Down from hell, hungry to swallow the saintly Sycamore of Stallo’s memory, came behind his eyes an ur-helicopter of shade.

—You see it your way, Stallo made himself say. —I’ll see it mine.

—How is that?

—Don’t know. Yet.

Rak pointed again. And now there really was a speck at the edge of the world. A true helicopter, tinny echo of Rak’s conjured forms but hardly without mad metal splendour. A helicopter does not want to fly.

—Listen, Rak said. —Control. With the collective…

—What?

Rak pushed his foot down on a nonexistent pedal. —Control. Moved his left hand. —Collective. You make a god, it doesn’t mean it’ll help you. You make its enemy out of nothing, it doesn’t mean it isn’t your enemy. When I say my prayers the rotors warn me. I don’t know or care what Nergal and Wran and Marco want, but you hear about someone asking, How do you wake up Scratch? You know its other names? I don’t know what’s coming for you, Stallo, but when I dreamt up the Hornet, Hornet was waiting for me to dream it. Is your devil waiting for you? The helicopter devil is waiting for me.

[33]

In the weed-grounds by prefabs, watched by their guests, Dila is shouting at her son and he at her. To see it makes Maur feel longing. She watches the angry gestures and loss and relief are not antipodes. She recalls her son jumping in puddles. Maur tightens around herself the thin blanket she’s dragged from one of the half-reclaimed rooms. In her head Ewan and she are joined, again, by sister, mother, lovely half-abstract, her father, yes, and Sonn, again. Maur’s adept enough to dispel them before she labours to breathe as if through cloth.

“I was peed off with her,” Cybill says quietly, beside her. “I said to her, ‘We always tell each other everything, don’t we, how can I help you if you’re going to stop doing that?’ I said, ‘I don’t care what it is, you have to help me, darling. You have to.’ ”

Maur hears Dila say, “I think you’re trouble, Stallo, but I know you aren’t a liar, and Rak liked you.” Dila laughs at her son’s scowl as he walks away and shouts foreign words at him in a tone of teasing irritation Maur remembers wanting to use.

Cybill holds the letter. Maur makes out ink, blanks. Cybill’s lips are moving. What she says, after a moment, is, “I still can’t feel her. I haven’t…” She shakes the letter.

“I know,” Maur says.

Cybill shakes her head. “I can’t feel anything. What if she’s— We have to get out of here. See?” Abruptly she reaches out and touches the paper to Maur’s own hand. Which Maur snatches away. One page drifts down. It lands half-open and barely filled, its corner pointing right at Maur, whose skin does not resile.

“Where did Rak go?” Maur hears Stallo say as she approaches through the machines. “When he was looking for stuff?”

“I said I don’t know.” Dila’s voice. “He told me something loosed it up. Not for me to know. Best neither of us knew everything.”

When Maur reaches Stallo he is standing alone between the little gods.

Quickly she says, “Listen to me. Those defences—I know you’re worried and you say they shouldn’t work, but they are blocking.”

“Why say that?”

“Cybill touched me with the letter. And I didn’t feel anything at all.”

Stallo looks slowly around the maze and his breath speeds up. “Then we have to work out how.”

“So we can save the dead?” Maur says.

“Among other things.”

Would it be so bad, Maur wonders, to just remain? Become someone new, disappear? Obtain the birth certificate of some dead child (that’s how it’s done, she’s heard)? Stay here, maybe? Given that these boundaries do hold? She lets herself imagine it. She doesn’t even want to, not really. But for a moment. Could you live in a helicopter that never landed, Maur? Nurse a child in the back, maintain that sacred hover?

“What is it we’re looking for?” she says.

“We all have our dream apport,” Stallo says. “Me, the Recruiter. End an enemy and bring a lespry onside in one go? That’d save the unit from itself. Rak’s was anything to do with copters, of course. God, the number of useless mouldy old bits of crap he dug up. ‘This is the one, this is the one!’ No, mate, I’m sorry, they were pieces of shit. What he really wanted was something begot of lost machines. Early models. I told him it wasn’t going to happen, but hope springs eternal. As far as he was concerned, every bit of string was a tether from something like that. They were lookout posts, those proto-choppers. What gave you elevation. And if the revenance of that doesn’t get your blood pumping, well. Think of it like a prayer. Liminal machines not fully sky not fully earth.” A mocking incantation. “They gave you the gaze. Not that they worked, but when’s that ever stood in the way of anything? That’s no obstacle to apports. But that wasn’t the problem, and I told him he’d never find anything like that.”

“You wouldn’t help him?” Maur says. And why won’t you say it? she thinks. That there are no apports from that war. Croome, sitting across from her at that table, hurriedly trying to tell of the drought. That conundrum, I called it. Urging Maur, in her way, to come here. That’s what you mean, Stallo, isn’t it? Why won’t you say?

“There’s only so much I could do,” Stallo says. “It was never going to happen, him finding that, I was sure.” Something hardens in Maur and she keeps her knowledge to herself, not sure why. “I didn’t used to be on my own,” Stallo says. “I had company.” He waves that away. “It was the letter got you started, wasn’t it? Touching it. Touch everything here, then. Come on. The rule is always move, and she wants us gone.”

Maur looks at the infinite surfaces and components and remnants and textures of the reliquary.

Stallo says, “Yeah let’s find the power.”

Celebrant

So the Unit lads went down to London together on a lark and Bowler insisted on a bus tour. Stallo carried his disguised spear, he didn’t know why. In you go near Tottenham Court Road, laughing because you could do whatever you wanted, surrounded by tower blocks in the open air of the top deck, behind a Swedish couple who tried to ignore the soldiers drinking and loudly play-arguing. On a corner somewhere, run-down remains of a shop, the outlines of a sign frame, through which Stallo stared. He kicked the back of the chair in front of him and wondered why. The Swede lurched and rocked and did not complain.

—Leave it out, mate, Bowler said with unease and a grin. The look became conspiracy, a true and different smile. Opening his bag, Bowler showed Stallo a trap bottle within, of new design. The blue of its window, best he could see in this grim daylight, glowed. The bloody thing was not bloody empty.

—What the fuck? Stallo said.

Bowler laughed. —Come on, mate, I’m not going to let it out, he said. —Just giving it a day trip. Why should we be the only ones?

—Give me that, Stallo whispered. —Jesus wept. He was relieved to be angry.

—Don’t you think they deserve a bit of playtime? Bowler said. —Don’t you feel them pining to go home? Oh you do.

Ruthven came to Stallo’s mind then, and Bratomil and the night of his entry to the Unit. And how here he was.

—How’d you even get that? Stallo said. —Fuck, I don’t want to know. He took Bowler’s bag and told the men to their groans to get downstairs.

—Stop the bus, he said, and the tour guide looked uncertain and Stallo said, —Stop it if you want to keep your knees.

When the vehicle had left them Stallo said to the soldiers. —Sober the fuck up and get back to base, you cunts.

He did not go with them. He spent two days alone. In the London Library. He plotted out a route. On the third day he walked it. Labouring under his pack. He did not open the bottle but he felt the company of mismemory, something believing itself out of time—wrong on that point, profoundly of the moment. Marks on walls might as well have been some appalling alphabet. You could go hunting. Hunter. And huntee. His burden accompanying him. Stallo’s was, he had to remember, like everything was, a ghost story.

Rene Rene Rene!

Right let’s get you back again, he did not say, but it was as loud in his ear as if he had.

Should the suppletion, lespry, baccoo, hantu, with him be released, what would it experience of this old and ugly place? A different skyline, a penumbratropolis, the block-shapes of edifices long gone? Textures of mildew. All powered by dark cubes, iterations of another in the city’s heart.

Hook greeted him at the office as if it was he who had summoned Stallo. Hook’s tone was friendly but his face blank. Stallo was fresh from training, in shorts and a sweaty vest.

—Stallo! There was Myton. —I’d love a word, he said. Then to Hook: —Well alright, old man, I’ll be on my way. Only I implore you to think about what I said.

—As if I’d ever consider your suggestions other than carefully and with deep respect, Hook said.

Myton and Stallo were crowded by spring. The season seemed frantic.

—How’ve you been? Myton said. He moved with the vigour of a sportsman. His hair was full and barely touched by grey where Stallo, two decades younger, was thinning at the crown. Lionel Myton cleaned his glasses.

—I heard about your aunt. I’m sorry. I understand you were close.

He turned off the path and headed for the spit’s southern tip. On the crunch of wetter sand they walked beyond anyone’s sight but their own.

—Hook and I go back a ways, Myton said. —He’s doing an excellent job holding the fort here. Now, it’s perfectly true we’ve different ideas about what’s needed for the services. For the country. You might say it’s that debate between the forces of business-more-or-less-as-usual and those of us in favour of a root-and-branch change. Entirely entre nous, Hook’s hopes to go from acting CO to permanent are going to come to nothing. Which doesn’t of course mean that the continuity faction he represents, as it were, won’t retain the whip hand. Sadly.

He showed Stallo a grin like that of a performer for children. They stood scant feet from waves obsessively patting the shale. A mile below, fish probed the dark with their own blunt heads.

Stallo saw Myton’s cool intelligence. He did not ask Myton why he told him this, or when he would see him again, though he knew he would.

A parcel came from Maisie. Stallo recognised her script. He did not open it. He put it in his drawer to rest as the light of days lengthened and shortened again. The Uniteers exchanged rumours.

On the 23rd December A Squad returned from uncertain duty, two helicopters smashing through iron evening skies on the seaward side, and out of their doors stumbling men and women who’d started airborne, were already drunk and singing that Slade song with its promise about the future.

Another fucking Christmas. It was a minute ago Stallo was eating a mince pie on his tod in the place he’d got with Maisie, and who the fuck knew where she was now and did he care? It would be a relief to think he’d gone away from his body awhile, pushed amiably out, that his skittish confuckingtrol or whatever had been driving him since then, that would give him an excuse for it being a year or was it two or what since? A minute ago. But it was only seconds here and there that old Grundle ever snaffled, and Stallo could itemise events, Myton and Benters and the missions and the London trip and Rak and his helicopters. And Rene, Auntie Rene, from whom there’d be no card this year and to whom he could give no belated paper-wrapped bagatelle. Welcome to getting older. Tickety tick.

All hands were on the bunting and the paper chains, unfolding concertina bells, a head-high tree in the mess and another in the shed they used as chapel. Atop the former someone perched a Sindy doll shrouded by a white handkerchief with eyeholes cut out, the tree between its splayed legs. The music grew louder over hours. Dancing up to midnight, a whoop, and the volume went up again.

Stallo was still drunk at breakfast, after a horrid sleep, full of a sort of unlaughed laughter, apocalypse humour sustaining him through food that folded into lunch. He went to sing carols loudly. Drank more. Threw stones into the sea. Darkness came early. Stallo met it with Bowler and a bunch of others on the beach passing a joint. Night. Stallo was leaned behind the accommodation block with Dean Anthon and some new arrival and Cynthia Caygill from the NAAFI before them, each woman bracing, each man pushing, Caygill shivering as she kneeled, the dark-haired senior sister in the PMRAFNS whose name Stallo could not remember with her back to him and her palms flat against the bricks, muttering at him, —Hurry up it’s fucking freezing.

She rose briskly when he stopped, pretending to be done. She nodded and said, —Thanks for that, Sarge, which made him laugh, she was walking away and he could not recall how she’d come to be there with him, and he put his dick away and blinked at motion in the darkness and the sound of spit.

In the mess again, more music. Hook entered swaying enough to show that he could be indulgent, though he said, —Steady on, chaps, more than once. Stallo could read it on his lips. In the corner the television shone. Croome stood with a glass of something, her eyes bright. Stallo for a second thought it was records amplified from the far corner but that Elvisy voice reached the crooning end of a song and switched into a Mancunian accent or something like it. —’Kin’ ’ell! You lot can effing party!

Cheers, of course. Through gaps in the crowd Stallo made the singer out. —I come from the Miss Gibraltar pageant to this, you know, the man said into his mic. Wide-eyed slinky-moving young bloke with a big grin. —It’s a funny old life. ’Kin’ ’ell! ’Tenshun!

—No more fucking jokes, just sing, you twat, someone shouted, friendly enough. Cheers again. Info on the walls covered? Stallo thought, then that he didn’t care. Danced a good while. King Hell, King Hell.

He clocked Croome on her way out. He followed. They were not alone in leaving the music behind. He and these few others ready for the next phase, he didn’t look to see who, wandered as if by chance after Croome. To the rises of concrete out of the sand. Shivering he entered the labs where Aduba sulking on guard cupped a cigarette and inclined his head to indicate them in. Stallo swayed along a hallway. Doors were open. Men and women gathered at each threshold, some in paper party hats, smoking, sipping from paper cups. Loud songs from several sources. Machine and human throats. A room of Bunsen burners and retorts in which Melissa Marks and Sapers, if you’d believe that, among others, danced. Someone turned the corridor lights off and a chorus came of shouts disapproving and approving. In another chamber rabbits and rats huddled in hutches in terror at the men and women snogging and, laughing, Stallo did a bit of snogging and groping, got groped too dirty cow. Didn’t think he had it in him so pissed but someone, was it Sheila?, in the shade had her hand on his hard-on and then he was thrusting in a corner and she was gone and the lights were up again.

—Not that way, mate. A guard he did not know, young chap, tough as you like in army uniform, redirecting Stallo from this apport store with infinite patience.

—You need a drink, Stallo said.

—Off you go.

Stallo sucked at a drooping joint and passed it on to others. He heard the tiny dry-leaf-footstep sound of the drug’s smoulder and saw a woman’s pretty lips illuminated. She did statistics maybe, he couldn’t remember her name and she wasn’t there any more or he wasn’t.

He did not recall descending the iron ladder but here he was in the understretch, below windows. Halls not so crowded but hardly empty or quiet. Still a fair few open doors though more guards at more junctions, if not at attention not yet drunk nor stoned. Such polite shepherding the only option that night.

—Not in here, mate.

—Not that way, mate. An inclined head.

On we go. A string of tinsel all festive, plaited with was that some threadbare old belt? The glittery red string of the decoration was coiled overhead in midair not held by wires and not tethered to any wall and absolutely unmoving. And across the chamber a cracker’s paper hat crowned emptiness. Just hanging in the air. A strip or something of snagged stuff tacked to the inside to keep it on a revenant bonce. Unless it was actual apport, the whole knickknack itself, you never know. Anyway there a suppletion must have been stood used as decoration. Noël in the trenches.

—Merry Christmas, Sarge.

There was a hush underneath this deep for all the noise. Through a very dark room, Stallo passing the glowworms of a cluster of smokers who seemed farther away from him than they could have been (the scale of the excavations!). A huffing swishing sound; the hairs on him rose. Get on your knees do you begin to pray or do you pretend to pray is there any difference? Stallo was like a diver at the lowest place where there was light, watched from below that with curiosity, without sympathy. Blacker tunnels. Had he been here before? In every underlit corner a square engine that became nothing as he approached.

Yes maybe it was just the booze and weed talking, but these passages through which he walked without hesitation and as if he knew where he was off to he would absolutely on anything you wanted, a Bible if it floated your boat, swear he’d never trod. Footsteps and music from all directions. Discipline has got dweadfully lax, Carpenter would be ah-paul-ed. Or did she start it? Stallo was trying every door he passed, when did that begin? Open store cupboard, closed closed, open empty, closed, two open one empty one a lab wherein a frightened-looking tech blinked at him through—bless!—her protective glasses, white coat and all, look at her burning the midnight oil, saying, —No, no, sorry, it’s— and him giving her a cheery thumbs-up and shutting the door while she ran to secure it, and over her shoulder him seeing on the bench top two little cages with rats at the crisscross bars.

—Bowler?

Now this stock house he knew. Beyond the reinforced internal window he could see the blue lights of traps in storage. What he heard, below the strains of music, were quick footsteps, the impact of a kick and something thumping along the halls. Well fuck I’ll be in goal! Stallo thought, and sought the source of the sound.

—Bowler!

Stallo said it too loud when he saw the man’s face among others. There was no football and Stallo could not hear it any more. Bowler was, what? Keeping unhappy watch? Stallo passed him. He knew the benches, those mounted cameras become black squares, the trolley again, the secondary table. There was music and. Smoke, dark figures around that strap-wrapped surface. No one spoke. Too dark to make out faces. No you could if you wished to but he would not.

On that table the cloth and leather bindings rose and fell and rose

and strained and snapped back. Rose and strained.

Someone stood with his hand in a rag, apport rag. The bloke stroked at the air between the bindings. Someone traced unseen edges with an apport crop. Someone caressed what was secured or tried to, around a right hand shabby apport paper wrapped into a dirty mitten which she pressed against whatever was not visible, yielding, moving, solidity,

and

the paper flattened

where it met the surface of the Roused, and someone had nothing on their left hand and whenever he or she pushed it alongside that covered right where the latter braced the left simply went through and down.

Careful, it came to Stallo, they can do you a mischief. But the unprotected unseen touch of whatever seemed not to hurt the toucher, and someone was laughing. Bowler watched. His face was stricken.

At one end of the table, a man. His face covered. Pushing with his hips, arse out, trousers around his ankles, sliding, gripping the gurney’s edge, gurning, here it is again down the corridor, a merry Christmas song, cheeky wink, braced upon his toes, repetitiously shoving his midriff forwards and back. He wore a rubber johnny, that one surely that Stallo had seen here or somewhere around here unrolled. His sheathed erect prick jutted parallel to the tabletop, unshuddering. Stallo did not look at the man’s face. With each thrust his penis angled a little down and did not bob but slid with precise direction.

Stallo squatted tableside. Eyes cock-level. Felt feral with fascination. No one paid him attention. Uncovered, unconstrained by any apport stuff, his face went through the outskirts of whatever might have jostled there being rogered if there was anything there as there must have been, perhaps an instant of cool, as if beyond the boundaries of revenance and imagined memory of skin his face entered a certain current. He laughed because his eyes and face were in whatever it was, and closer and closer to the dick now accelerating. It astonished him. Someone whispered, —Yeah.

Close enough that lean a few inches farther and it would take nothing for him to put his face in the path, open his mouth, take the rubber right in, he laughed in delight, I’m so off my face, he could just lean and turn his head and be mouthfucked even as whoever stood there with his face obscure fucked this revenant too, rutting holes of the living and the dead all at once, and that thought almost demanded actualisation, but for a little rush of, what?, shyness?, and Stallo reached out instead through whatever lay there to grasp and squeeze.

Not all Roused blistered on contact every time and hey maybe because it was Christmas Stallo didn’t feel a thing but the penis in his palm.

The man bucked, thighs rattling the tabletop, he shoved in Stallo’s hand and in the unseen arse, cunt, dead remembered mouth or whatever, went stiff, went still. Spurts filled the nipple at the prophylactic’s end. Stallo gasped too. Kept wanting to turn his head to look behind him, seeking control, looking to see what shaggy figure might watch, what basajaun, what Strohbär pfingstl Burryman, long hair, long grass.

And the man was done and Stallo took his hand away and sniffed his fingers. Could smell nothing but the inhalation made his head whirl. Was his skin tracked with moisture, drying even now? Sweat, a smear of slip, the trace of beading cum leaked from perishing apport rubber, squeezed through, at the very tip, like it’s weeping, there, is that a pinprick?

The man pulled the apport from his prick and spunk spilt on the outside of it.

—Who’s up? he said.

Someone with another covered face took the johnny and squeezed it out and wiped it and spent long seconds fumbling to pull it on unrolled like that. When he succeeded he murmured, —Hurray, and readied himself.

Stallo turned away. Behind him it all went very slowly.

—The lespry’ll have a go at you next, grease up, wayhay.

—Get it on it, I can’t find the bloody—ah, there we go.

He had to look back and it was a drunk woman now at table’s edge, bending over face hidden skirt rucked up and ruffling as something unseen pushed at her and into her too. She laughed. Sounded like Sheila. Bowler watched and bit his nails. Stallo tried to make a question out of his expression. If Bowler answered with his own Stallo could not read it. Nor was he certain what his question was.

—Stallo.

So Stallo took his place when that was done. Watching himself from deep inside. He rubbed the rubber someone handed him on the side of his own trousers, which he pulled down, found himself hard. Took awkward ages of stretching and pulling on the soggy thing, then, not having apport gloves, had no way to feel above the tabletop for any folds to hold,

of flesh or

hole, nor even

of what variety or shape whatever if anything it might be was, till someone’s apport-kerchief-covered hand traced before him and seemed to splay an entrance. Couldn’t help a quick glimpse at the watchers around him. Stallo did his best not to say to himself any of the names of those he saw. Nor to dwell on a sense of being in the regard of a greater smiling watcher. Nor to linger on the entertainment, the singer from the mess, ’kin’ ’ell ’imself, Stallo’d have sworn that was whose absolutely stunned face he glimpsed among the onlookers. Which silly bugger let him down here? Dimly Stallo heard the man’s voice and he was making no sense at all, he was reaching towards the table and what it held, blimey anyway if he spoke he spoke in tongues. And there you go.

Through the skin-thin rubber was pressure on him as of tight flesh, and a clinging sting, Stallo closed his eyes, his mouth, shoved, gripping himself with his own right hand right through what he fucked until someone slapped his wrist and he let go and other fingers replaced his own, on sped his shoves and he fucked the blank and the comradely hand, pressure rising to a dark pitch, nothing could stop him then, and he imagined watching this encounter, figures of memory, his own and other, featureless, rough as pillars of salt, starers like menhirs, fixed with geological attention,

[34]

There is a night, after hours of trailing unreacting fingertips across the grease and grit of surfaces, when Maur comes instantly awake. She’s listening to the sound of a child whispering, a child trying not to cry. As the sense recedes she thinks it is a boy and mouths a name. Then that it’s a girl crying for her mother. Then she wakes fully and hears nothing. She rises. Walks into the night wrapped in her blanket again.

The hangar is cold, is as it should be. They might be in vortexes of their making, the maelstrom chariots. Maur picks through shadow struts and is not afraid of the dark. She finds a craft without a door and climbs inside to sit where a pilot should.

Leather creaks. The cyclic and the collective are gone but she holds out her hands as if to take hold of them. Where the flight gauges would be are holes wherein bats and birds might roost. Again Maur makes a tiny faint rotor sound like her son would once have done. She sits to discover why she has come there.

She unfolds to stretch and then is abruptly motionless in the reversed-explosion pound of her heart.

Something someone watched.

Someone something before the web-cracked glass, shades darker than the shade in which it stood.

Maur stares into the pall at a silhouette as of a woman watching her out of abyssal mud. Its head snapped back and it began to fall stared at her threw up its arms in clear warning as it went down and there is nothing on the concrete. Maur is alone and struggling for breath. She listens. Hears footfalls in the maze of ghetto birds.

—

She knows Vam’s voice. She cannot see him but she hears him walk quickly between aircraft, murmuring urgently to himself. She recognises the soft percussions, the sounds of a boy-man striking his own head.

Maur breathes again when he’s gone. She goes to where the door opens onto the concrete to look out at that landscape of the future. She runs to Stallo where he sleeps. It is the first time she has ever had to wake him so, put a hand over his mouth. He does not start at her touch, just opens his eyes.

Lips to his ear. “Something’s coming,” she says. “Or here.”

He doesn’t demand more. Cybill, too, comes awake like a soldier at Maur’s touch. They take the black corridors. A faint noise and Maur feels Stallo clench, and she restrains him because more quickly than does he, she makes out that it is Dila approaching.

“Don’t turn on the lights,” Dila whispers. “Vam,” she says. “Oh God, oh, Stallo. Vam. He came to me. To confess.”

Vam sits in his shame in his mother’s room. They have no time to rage. He has described Cybill and Maur and Stallo to a town friend. He has not asked him to do anything with that knowledge but knows for whom the other boy works, that he is paid and raised in status among the villains of the little city for every snip of intel.

Dila looks at her boy in a terrible way, and Maur feels such empathy and shame of her own. You can’t know when what’s coming will come.

They gather what they can, scrabbling silently in starlight. Dila has her go-bag. Her son bows his head and once he says something in their language and she crosses the darkness and slaps him hard. He does not cry out.

—

Dila has a pistol out. Behind her Maur and Cybill, Vam steered with one hand on his shoulder by Stallo, who has his own weapon in the other. Scuffing quick as they can under the sky. Everywhere it’s as if Maur sees glints.

“Stallo,” she whispers.

“I hear it.”

Run and jostle.

“Stallo, no, let me,” Dila says. And—

A blaring blow and the shadow of a helicopter jumps at Maur in the oily light of a shot. Someone is screaming. Dila shoots again. Somewhere Stallo yells, “Hold fucking fire,” but pistol shot keeps coming and a resonant unzipping of more powerful percussion to make your helicopters sing. Maur follows Cybill into the great chamber towards the outlines of one black machine among the rest, and with sound like wrenching chains an unlight spills onto everything. Dila has triggered some mechanism and the roof is opening, screaming and raining rust and moss and the night onto the travellers and those who hunt them. Maur sees Dila crouched and fumbling by the helicopter’s base. Not the composite, the god, not that decoy, something small simple and black.

The pop and electric breath of a radio, close. A new volley and the slap and whine of a ricochet and Dila cries out and snatches back her hands and lurches up into the cockpit. In the fainter dark Maur sees Stallo fire three glaring flashes, shove Vam stumbling on. Maur and Cybill reach the craft’s open rear.

“Stallo!” Cybill shouts; Maur pulls her in.

Dila in the pilot’s seat and glow rises as if the instruments are a witch cauldron. Her face is green, her mirrored glasses glow, her expression is still aghast, she calls at Stallo, at her son, to come. The cross begins to turn. Stallo comes running, drag-pushing Vam, who stumbles, is it deliberate?, Vam twists and looks wildly about him, Stallo puts his pistol to the boy’s head, Dila howls. And Stallo fires, and Vam is still, and the pistol was, is, aimed not at him but beyond into the dark. Cybill and Maur stretch their arms, and Stallo hurls Vam at them and they pull him in, he’s crying, saying sorry again and again. He sprawls and here comes Stallo, and the world splits, so loud is a new shot.

Stallo pulls himself aboard shouting to go. Maur does not watch him. She looks at Cybill. Who stares back.

Cybill sways with the helicopter. Teeters as it ascends. It tips as black-clad figures run at it. Dila mouths fury. Below the cockpit a cable wound about a strut of the front wheel stretches as the craft rises, tightens, holds it so the nose tilts, Dila works the collective and matter strains, and in the glare of another muzzle flash Maur sees that cable stretch up and glimpses a charred knotted rope bit tying it to the metal. Sees that fray and split and fall away and a great pulse passes through her and the helicopter lurches up. There is blood on Cybill’s lap. The aircraft swings. Cybill dangles at its lip and below her men raise weapons and Vam is crying.

Maur holds on to Cybill in the hole above the world. Cybill frowns with concentration at her new wound. Takes hold of Maur’s hands, her own are slippery. They make Maur’s slick too. Cybill speaks urgently, holding Maur’s gaze. In the cacophony and because Cybill speaks in prefiguration of a silent tongue, Maur can hear nothing. So she nods, says, “Yes, yes.” Something is touching Maur’s fingers. Paper, the letter, blood upon it. Maur tries to take it and Cybill relaxes her grip and her eyes close, she will not see the sheets tug free, leap into the spiral of the blades as Maur fails to reach them.

Dila takes them up through the opening, rotors inches from the edges, and Cybill leans gently out and goes.

Maur cries out and reaches and Stallo grabs for her in turn and holds her tight and Cybill folds into space. She cannot follow the apport letter up. She goes down. She goes down and a hive, a collective of unseen arrivals rose, drawn by the spin, and Cybill goes down. Maur wails. Up goes the Sycamore, blaring. It eats the dead, and rides the nothing left. Maur pulls her shirt taut, covers her face.

—

When she unshrouds, looks out, they are in the night. Somewhere behind them, Cybill is spread-eagled and still at the centre of cruciform blades. And Maur knows, and could not say how, that the men in the chamber are calling up dead, now that tether is split, protection broken. Rousing. Sending presences to bring the aircraft back, to bring her back.

But the helicopter too is powered by something released, giving it the thrust that Dila, sobbing in her rage, rides, channels, with which she pulls away.

If we draw together the preceding analysis of contingent[*] contact with advanced forms of postlife, many implications follow for immediate action. The chances of man’s future felicity are enormously enhanced if a world order of human dignity is consolidated. Intergovernmental and covert organizations must anticipate such an occurrence (bracketing here access to the source) and prepare optimal responses. Plans should be at hand for an intervention on/with any such function, and for ensuring provisional arrangements to ensure such an event.

Skip Notes

[Sic—author (technically) non-eDV. Sent for your consideration—worth an approach?—given situation urgent.]

XVIII

River
Without a
Shore

Leave

Anyway.

Got called to do a bit of consulting for the cousins at some point, then back home and Stallo had a few days off, first time for a while. Oh good. Should have watched films or whatever. Muck about on the allotment. He’d have to get an allotment first, but that was probably past due. Anyway he did have a go at putting his feet up, putting the bins out, Morning, yes, lovely, having a few wanks and a few biscuits and thinking about anything but the base or its underneath. But after a time you have to admit you can’t settle. Anyway, telling himself off for a busman’s holiday what he ended up doing was he only went to a bunch of mediums.

Professionals, names out of the phone book. The old Uniteer game but never hilarious, and getting ever less funny to be honest. Stallo wasn’t perfectly sure what he was about. Except that as ever, besides the mad and tragic, even some cynical charlatans couldn’t help being dowsing rods of sorts. Still, he sat listening to saws and vacuities “from” “beyond” as if expecting nothing. Just in case of matters arising.

A whole lot of the usual until Kentish Town. There the “companion” of this last-but-one on the list, this woman’s “guide,” another Big Chief cartoon, had Stallo rolling his eyes as his informant snorted and coughed and hawked with her eyes closed. After all the quavering lead-up and the Are you there? and the I’m getting, I’m getting, and an abrupt and, credit where it’s due, rather well done settling into a new heavyset habitus and a deepening of the voice and a clipped muttering like an extra from “Little Plum, Your Redskin Chum,” the woman sat up very suddenly in her chair and opened her eyes, not seeing Stallo, or doing a far better mimicry of such unseeing than he would have thought she could. She opened her mouth too and what came out was a noise of static, of dead air. She said only that signal search, and he did not interrupt and out he went sharpish into the jostling dark streets thumping in the bonecage having been warned again.

—Sheila not around? Stallo said to Cynthia as she handed him his fags. He was surprised at his question.

Cynthia said nothing. Didn’t look at him, but then she never really had.

Stallo found Bowler. —Alright, matey?

—Been a tick, Bowler said. —How were the Yanks?

—Loud.

—Are they fucked?

—I’ve seen wars run better. They still can’t Rouse for shit.

—Well I mean, who can?

—Except us.

—So we say but does that seem true to you? Bowler stopped where an old tree bent over tarmac. He kicked it exactly as you would a car that would not perform. —I mean, this shithole!

—Might have a point.

—This is all we can do, Bowler said. —But it’s getting sticky.

—It is, isn’t it?

—It is. Feels like whatever we’re doing isn’t what we thought. While you were gone…Bowler considered how to put something. —Every time we got one up, every time, it was facing away from us.

—How could you tell?

—Believe me, mate. Like it couldn’t bear to look.

They walked the bluff, the sun pushing them from behind.

—You and Sheila not…? Stallo said, and whistled suggestively.

—She’s gone.

Stallo considered saying something about love’s course but stayed silent.

—When were you last back down there? he said. —Under the lab?

Ah well now Bowler looked at him. —A while.

Try to descend these days and protocols at the doorways were rather tighter again. A sort of embarrassment underlying the discipline. Don’t talk about recent laxness or convivials. Stallo watched Bowler trying to decide whether to tell him something else.

—When I Rouse now, Bowler said, —sometimes it’s like they’re whispering between themselves. I’m tired of this, mate. And I’m tired of Myton, too, no matter how much he likes you and me. The shit you hear about him. About his pals. Fucking fascist witches and whatever.

Stallo said, —What you on about?

—Come on, that’s the sort he works with. All kinds of bastards.

—Who doesn’t? Anyway what else you going to do? Private work? That seems to be the choice these days, once you get out.

—Fucked if I know, Bowler said, —but that isn’t the point.

You might expect a bloke whose work was the ending of life and weaponised deployment of its aftermath to have a bit more to tell. And Stallo was not without stories, but he was no seer; his unasked-for expertise was very other. Inscrutable companion, sneaking briefly forward to look from his vantage maybe, to unspeakingly direct matters awhile. Stallo snapped between moments. Unstopper the bottles on suppletions of very great wavelength or amplitude or something, and the air and shade and drift of motes just might fleet through configurations and bring to mind an outline, a body spread-eagled against all sense, eyeless eyes, and no matter that any such inner glimpse was gone fast or how many times he did this, you couldn’t get used to that.

Mostly he saw nothing. Heard the hiss of escape like a gasp of relief, the spring-loaded lid click, nothing, rising, nothing arriving where he waited.

Was it a side effect of final intervention that those deployed against with Roused gained brief terminal sight of what came for them? Did some not-canny sadism of the revenant grant that? That would explain that of those times Stallo’s missions put him in earshot of target-function contact, it was often momentarily pre-empted by the loud dread of the (for one more mo) living. Leaving Stallo to picture an encounter. Some warlord or spy or pinko or reporter or troublemaker or turncoat raising their head at a last sight, a

frogman twisting in drowning throes with a tank on his back and the stub-ends of ripped tubes waving in revenant sea that did its killing a long time ago

redcoat staring, silly tall hat, silly red coat, silly shiny buttons shining, hole in forehead, silly look upon his face, spray of brain coning out behind

woman falling endlessly, a look of disbelief, this cannot be happening, I must have misunderstood, attention turning on the watcher

and staring, targets growing stiff, cords of the necks pulling, attention too absolutely on what lit them with licks of phantom flames or the silent glare of muzzle shot, cold settling, dead hands making incursion into them, that last company imprinted on their eyes.

Who the fuck was Connor Long? Attached to the Unit at large, as it were, for a fair old time, word circulated. It was May and warm and he had them line up. No parade ground so they did it between the buildings.

—I don’t pretend I’ll be able to replace Carpenter.

He projected well and the sea wind did not obscure his voice. He pushed his chest out, fit for all the little mound of his belly and the white in his hair. He rose repeatedly on his toes, Cunningham and Hook behind him, and it was the first time they looked old to Stallo. When had he last seen Hook sketching?

—She led the unit through tumultuous times and we are all in her debt, Long said. —All I can do is try to keep the ship steady.

Stallo tried to catch Melissa Marks’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at him.

—There, Long said, —is the sea. It surrounds us. It protects us and was a presence we had to overcome to build our nation. It made us and it tested us and we rose to that test. And conquered our enemies, and the sea itself. When we say Britannia rules the waves it’s not mere jingoism. I hope you’ll indulge a naval man when I say that what surrounds us now is another kind of deep. I believe it’s time for a new era of exploration. The task ahead is to explore, to conquer the new pirates we face, to rule these other waves.

Yeah yeah yeah. As if you got to choose. As if an era didn’t come up and smack you in your arse leaving you to make the best of it. But Long was not wrong: there were more and more pirates. Moscow Peking KH and now even more was the growing impression. Hence doubtless why there were, too, those growing numbers of freelancers on the angels’ side. Such as Glover had gone on about. Who might—who knew?—end up being of use. If it wasn’t yet their carnival, you’d come to feel that the epoch of outsourcing approached.

Stallo took out the little parcel from Maisie that he had kept in his drawer. Within was a letter. And tissue paper, as if in protection for something else, some present now gone.

Dear Steve, he read.

Dear Steve, Dear Steve-o, Dear Stallo, do you have any other names yet? Dear Evets, Dear Ollats, Dear       . That last one might be the best, do you think? I’m not meaning to be cruel, please don’t think me having a go. I suppose I’m having a bit of a go, I dare say when you know someone as well as I know you (which I’d say was fairly well, not necessarily any more than that), it’s not ever possible to have a chitchat that’s not also a little bit of a jibe. I’m not quite sure why I’m writing to you even except that I feel a sort of urgency, isn’t that funny? Thank you for all the nice times. There were a lot, and if I know you (see above) what you’ll be doing now is cycling between i) hating me ii) hating yourself iii) denying either or both i) and ii) and/or iv) having no feelings at all. Or—and this I think is the most likely—v) telling yourself you have no feelings, which is a bit different if you ask me. Maybe you don’t and didn’t know what’s going on in the back of my head like I never realio trulio knew what’s going on in yours but it feels trite to say we’re all unknown and islands to each other. I think some of us are a bit more islandy than others and that you are a lot more so than me, including to yourself, and keen to stay so.

Blah blah. It was as if there was something missing. Perhaps he was skipping bits.

I won’t pretend I’m not pissed off with you for some of it, for the way you stayed away in your hole, and if it was away from you too that still counts, but I won’t say I’m not pissed off with me, too. Nor that I don’t still feel a bit of what I used to for you whatever it was. I suppose I’m writing this partly to say I’m angry and partly to say don’t be angry, to say that to me and to you both, to say don’t be angry with me or with yourself. You’re a good chap as much, at least as much, as you are whatever else you are. I hope you find out what that is if you ever want to. It didn’t work but there you go.

M xxx

Well. Well. What was the point of that? The evening came. He might have shouted, Call yourself a writer? in the direction of London. He folded the letter and you would see no desire in him to tear it up or to hit his desk with his fist or to shoot into the sky.

A helicopter took Stallo and Croome and Hook through the dark.

—They’ve been watching certain addresses for months, Hook said. —Quartermasters and such. Obviously the Claudy business makes matters more urgent. The chap we’re here for is Father William Kelly. Picked up five days ago in Portugal, where he’d been touching base with gun runners and go-betweens—PLO, a couple of Shigenobu’s JRA associates or opponents, which is an increasingly vague distinction. A right little trade fair.

—Kelly’s one of ours?

—No. He’s been persuaded to chat. He’s been having it away with the wife of a chap in his cell and she’s distinctly unimmaculately up the duff. We’ve warned him that tragically word might get back to his cuckolded comrade. For the most part what he’s been giving up is exactly what you’d expect, useful enough, names, places, dates, deals.

—But we’re here because…? Stallo said.

—Well, because of a chance remark, really.

In Hereford the officers eyed the R Uniteers. —Hook? We spoke on the phone. The older of the two men was tall and spider thin, his voice almost choked with poshness, but there was nothing comic to him. —You’ll see.

A small chamber, one-way glass beyond which was an interrogation room wherein a man about Stallo’s age sat running his hands across his expression of great anguish and a bruise. He smoked. He had on his priest’s collar and it was bloodied. Let him keep it; it would soften him, to consider himself martyr. The SIS man left the visitors and appeared beyond the glass and the captive flinched to see him.

—Father Kelly, they heard through speakers. —I want you to tell me again about the last day of your meeting.

—Oh God. Again though? Okay. He spoke as if it did not count as informing if you did it fast enough. —Okay so on the last day I’m there and it’s hot as hell so it is and a man comes to the café. I’ve not spoken to him but I’ve seen him, young fellow with the people I’m meeting, keeps to himself, quiet like but he wants to talk now. I’ve been told I’ll be meeting someone and I wasn’t expecting it to be him, so I’m wary. He says to me, and I don’t know his accent but he’s not a local, and it’s not so easy to understand him but mad as it is at first I think he says to me he wants help exercising. Says he needs it real bad. As if I can help him with that! He gestured at himself, though he was wiry and full of energy. —I says I don’t understand and then I make sense of it of course, and he’s sounding out the word wrong, so I realise what it is this fellow’s asking me on behalf of his group the name of which I don’t know so don’t ask me.

In the observation chamber the other SIS host turned as Stallo reached for the door.

—Oy, he said. —What do you think you’re doing?

But Stallo was out of the room and as the escort told him to get the fuck back here he reached the second door and went in.

The questioner blinked and Kelly turned around and stared at Stallo, who put his palms on the tabletop and leaned down.

—Father, he said. —What exactly did he want your help with?

You could see the man’s bewilderment and see him feel the other interrogator’s anger, you could see hope that ill will between captors might help him. Good luck with that, sonny. Stallo said, —What did he say he wanted you to help banish?

—Jesus I don’t know, I couldn’t make much sense of it. Efrit I think he said, his English was better than my whatever but not great and we were both whispering and nervous and I couldn’t make it out.

—One of your comrades wants your help ousting something…Stallo made the sign of the cross, —and you can’t be bothered to figure out what he’s after? I’d call that dereliction of duty.

— What do you know about anything? Kelly said. He sounded as if he was about to cry. —And what do I know about this stuff? You think I’d get permission from the bishop?

—A little favour though? Off the books?

—Laugh all you want, I’m sure you think this is hilarious.

Oh Father you’ve got the wrong end of this stick.

—This isn’t to be played with, Kelly said. —You hear things, and…Of course you hear things. But look, even if I’d been able and minded to do the rite, which I’m not and wasn’t, I told you he wasn’t perfect at the language. He was trying too hard. It wasn’t exorcising he wanted either, we worked out. He didn’t know how to say it.

He played with his hands and Stallo willed the SIS man to keep his trap shut because Kelly wanted to say something he didn’t want to say.

—It took a while, Kelly said. —Him trying to tell me what was happening and what he was asking for, and we went round the houses talking crazy crazy stuff, and then in the end, I think I got it. What he wanted—

—What crazy stuff? Stallo said.

Kelly blinked. —I don’t know, that’s what I mean, what he was saying didn’t make any sense.

—Like?

—God help me. Alright. Your man asked me what I thought the dead believe. He asked me if I died did I think I’d still be a Catholic. He said he knew of a priest who’d changed his mind. After. Said he helped look after a congregation same as I did and they were uneasy. That’s when we got to what he was after. He wasn’t looking for someone to get rid of something here, I think he wanted help to block something bad on the way. And there’s no fucking word or rite for that.

Back in the overwatching room, the interrogator said, —We called you in as a courtesy, sunshine.

—Come off it, Stallo said. —One, we both know you didn’t call anyone in. Two, you’re under orders. And three, you want him off your hands. What you mean to say is Thank you.

SIS were good at keeping their faces impassive.

—What do you know about the bloke he spoke to? Stallo said.

—Marco? said the other man. Now it was up to Stallo and his comrades to keep their own faces still. Someone was not successful: —That’s right, mate, you’re not the only ones who keep their ears to the ground.

—What do you know about him? Stallo said.

—Swarthy feller, big plans. He’s hanging about with a PDFLP offshoot. Which hardly preclude him being in Moscow’s pocket, though I doubt it. But Hawatmeh’s lot aren’t particularly spiritually inclined. This wasn’t a meeting of specialists in, well, your area. The rest of this jamboree was all too worldly. Bombs, regroupment, capitalist running dogs. But. Marco’s on his own jobs.

Which Stallo had inferred to be about summoning. Ushering in. Rather than getting in the way of.

—You’re the experts in this bollocks, the man said. —Some of the oppo seem to see this as a crisis. Same as us.

—Seeing what? Stallo said. —Crisis for who?

—This. The man raised his hands. —Signs of the times. And crisis for us, I’d imagine, but them too, maybe. Look, that’s your department, mate, I’m not going to pretend to have a clue, okay?

If you stand in front of something, you can block it, but you can catch hold of it too. Long came to Stallo’s mind then, surprising him. He let that intuition roam. From Long to naval to propitious it went, to standing before an arrival, pressganging. Recruitment. The other man kept his eyes on Stallo’s with care enough that he seemed anxious about where they might go if he let them. Down, towards the rooty muck from which biloko might claw their way. Up, towards whence a Hornet might descend.

[35]

Your loves and those who love and miss you stare from midnight windows. Bringing them to mind is the least Maur can do. Sonya and the rest again, not shying from the pain, their loss, of her. Their cycles of What’s happened to her? and How can she do this?

Des said to her once, “You keep all your friends in separate boxes.” Yes Maur loves her sister, but what does love mean? “Whatever love means.” Maur remembers when Prince Charles said that. Someday her prince would come. Is a belief she’s long since left behind, no, she never had. Princes don’t know what love means but to be fair who does? I love you Rho, I miss you, even if, oh you know, family. You love your friends. You love Sonn, Maur. Your son, and her. You can feel anger at your friend and it might be blistering but it doesn’t frighten you. Not like anger at him. I love you Sonya. Of course you do, babe, she answers in Sonya’s voice. We grew up together.

You are, it comes to her, the sum of the drink, the decisions made, not made, the sardonic looks, the slants of sun, the other people’s babies, the your own baby, the smiles and cruelties, the joints, the food, the gardens, the papers, the complaints about lovers, the work, the not enough money, the eating out anyway with your friend and toasting that fact, the If you’re my friend. Which has Maur weeping, and, Sonn, how many times have you wept for your friend?

No catastrophe so great that the next day doesn’t come. They will miss her and agonise but they’ll pay bills and buy bread and wipe muck from kitchen surfaces and take out rubbish like soldiers back from war and watch TV and their memory-palace altars to her will not be dismantled but will become surrounded. Perhaps they think she went mad, diagnose her breakdown. Not mine, she thinks; the world’s.

Later, when she dreams of this time, Maur will see Dila. Dila weeping beneath those instrument-lit mirror shades, raging at her son, and sometimes in the dream will be Cybill too. Sometimes Dila will gesture back at Cybill to show Vam whose death he has caused, and Cybill will stare at him with a new disappointment.

In the actual world, amid a stony geography miles from any lights, where the craft at last comes down heavy, it’s only when the hymn of turning rotors ends that Maur hears Dila’s anger. She must have been screaming the whole contour-scoring night-blind flight.

What did you do? What did you do?

Vam sobs like a child.

Below the overhang of the helicopter’s visage he hunches and puts his hands up but lets his mother hit him again and again, shoulders and head, again and again and again, until she grows tired, and leans against the cockpit, staining a distortion of her face upon the glass.

Stallo has his pistol out. Dila shakes her head, her expression more exhaustion than horror.

“No,” she says.

“He ain’t a kid,” Stallo says.

Dila shakes her head.

Maur feels such aches for her. Whatever renegade morality you inhabit, who’d be Medea? He’s not a child, no, and yes, he’s a child.

“They’d have found us,” Maur says. She hears herself. She puts her hand on Stallo’s shoulder. “They’d have found us anyway.”

“Not that quick. Like you said, whatever was there, it was blocking things.”

“Those were people,” Maur says. “Soldiers or something. That void army you talked about? Whoever they were, it wasn’t revenants, that was people.”

“Yeah and weren’t they bad enough? All because kiddo over there told his mate his mum had guests.”

Between memory and reverie, Cybill keeps her eyes on Maur. Sometimes she falls again, as she fell, diving or released. As if she saw it, which she never did, Maur has within her an image of Cybill’s last place, her head back, throat up, back arched too far, perfectly central on waiting helicopter’s blades, those of the unfinished god surely, legs and arms dangling down as if reaching for black earth or water, the urschleim of their mixing.

“We fucking owe her,” Stallo says. “It’s down to Cybill we got out of there at all. When she went, she freed something up.”

“You calling her a sacrifice?” Maur says.

“I don’t make the rules. Things don’t have to be nice to be true.”

The copter struggling against gravity, soon to settle under power, the release of it, of Cybill in that place, billowing them up to eat the spirits sent after them.

“No!” Maur says. “It was the cable. That old rope…It snapped. Broke the barrier.”

Stallo stares at her, then at Vam, who stumbles, still crying. Stallo raises his pistol. Dila puts herself of course between him and her son. Puts her arms around her son, keeping him in place like a snare, protecting him with her back. She begs Stallo, swears she will school her son. She shouts at Vam, he keeps his head down while she cradles it and slaps it. Stallo stands with his pistol up, aiming at them both.

“Cybill called her kids,” Maur says.

Stallo does not lower his pistol but he turns his head.

“What?”

“It might not have been him,” she says. “She called her boys a few days ago. Same place we met Vam. They might’ve been following since then. It could be anyone.”

Dila and Vam go quiet too.

“He still fucking knew what he was doing,” he says. “Still might’ve been him.”

Maur says Stallo’s name, and he swears.

He looks around to verify they are in an empty landscape and he screams at Dila, wordless at first. Then, “Where did Rak go for his stuff?”

“I don’t know!” she screams back. “I don’t know! All he said was in the quiet.”

Stallo lowers the pistol, takes on a look of cunning near-madness.

Dila strips out parts of the machine for salvage. Vam helps her. They fill their bags with pieces. Dila might make a machete from a rotor, Maur thinks, if she can. Kit herself in the offcuts of a god. Vam takes a crowbar and beats a hole in the windshield. It’s hard to do. He blinds the dead engine.

“Where you will go?” Dila says.

“North.” Stallo points. Maur’s surprised because he shows no hesitation.

Dila gestures across the land another way. The opposite way.

“They’ll find it,” Stallo says.

Dila says, “Of course.”

“But maybe not for a while,” he says. The wind will work on it, the scrub will seek roothold. They’ll find a mountain’s memory of what landed.

Autonomous

The young women and men Stallo was introduced to (careful contacts) in Milan spoke to him in English more gung-ho than competent, and he did not reveal his adequate Italian. In crowded houses with mattresses on floors and shouts and animation from all rooms and corridors in a tobacco fug, his hairy hosts disputed not with Stallo, but as if for him, he on a collapsing settee audience to competing theories and sectariana on, oh, the killing of Calabresi, the Peteano bomb, Lotta Continua. He sat in the pose of one primmer than he was, who would, unordered, wear such an ill-chosen suit as this, trim his hair like this, grow that moustache. He learnt little he did not already know, but certain names mentioned kept him going, connections implied by interlocutors eager to show off to the older English comrade. Angler himself, now, for leads. So he’d best establish his bona fides. There’s nothing like shared hermeticism, is there?

Sure, they described the people’s armies for him, but, too…they hesitated at the edge of a secret, checked the room, tallied those neophytes and journeymen present, decided what could safely be said.

So Stallo went slow. Auditioned questions to triangulate Red politics, spectrality, the ingenuousness of the naïve.

—I heard that there’s a professor here, he said. —Ernesto de Martino?

Didn’t move his head at the momentary glances.

—PCI, a young woman said, full of disdain. —And anyway, he is dead. Why?

—Well I heard about his work, Stallo said. —I have interests.

—Why him?

Make sure you look a little hesitant, Stallo.

—They just put a book of his out in English. He talks about…Stallo stumbled carefully over the word. —Paragnosia. He says we have to break the prejudice against the, the scandal of…certain kinds of powers. Like shamans, you know?

If you had the knack there wasn’t much to pricking up the ears of such dilettantes. Throw together quotes from the right people. It didn’t hurt cute correspondences could teach you a lot, too. So was Stallo bullshitting or letting them into a secret? Yes he was bullshitting and letting into a secret. He made sure to look defensive as he said, —It’s not crazy, okay? He says we should go beyond Hegel, like Marx did. He said—

Stallo fished out of his pocket a note he’d prepared.

—Listen. “There’s no doubt that the liberation that magic makes possible is of an elementary kind, but if primitive humanity hadn’t achieved that, we wouldn’t be striving now for a final and complete liberation.”

A young man pursed his sullen lips. He nodded and looked around and some of his comrades nodded too.

—What if beliefs are part of a way to what we all want? Stallo said. He put his fist up. —Liberation. He waited out another look. —I’ve been looking into Gerda Walther, too. You know her? On mysticism, and, her earlier stuff…

Faces opened. Jab with the well-liked local(ish) Communist on magic, cross with the militant become communicating vessel on a train, that ecstatic 1918 (!) visitation prompting years of channelling, even the likes sometimes of fash like Ernst Röhm, good lord, and…—What if, Stallo tentatively said, as if the idea were an embarrassment that he could not dispel, rather than bait. —What if the Phänomenologie der Mystik came from the same place as her Red stuff? What if it’s all one project?

A few more titbits. Ruptural solidarity, left theosophists, emancipationist spiritualists, radical democracy of death, the Association of Beneficents.

—Yeah something about some comrades with someone called the General or Regnal, Stallo said, vague, just as if this weren’t the culmination of what he had to say. —Or the Angler, or Nergal.

—I hear these names, one man said. —Friends of friends maybe. If you need…

—And Wran and Marco, Stallo said. —And are they trying to call for something?

The young radicals closed the door to the rest of the house and looked at him with new uncertainty. They conferred in Italian too quick for him to follow. They suggested quietly to Stallo that, look, nothing was certain but if he wanted to know more here were some he might talk to: a French woman whose name they did not know; another called Isabelle; an Algerian guy, Rais Burhan; Katashi, who had fled to Palestine; a British guy who went by Skully.

Oh-ho. Well bloody well. Not exactly surprise but the gladness of a hunch fulfilled, leads validated. He’d fascinated the right people with himself, so why did Stallo feel like sneering?

On the other side of the water he drank in the same old places. They were not the same now.

—It’s Stallo!

—Jeff! Hallo mate. Yeah: I tried to go back to Steven but it turns out that ship’s sailed.

Jeffrey Ogier’s fondness for the bar was why Stallo had begun to frequent it. It had taken several visits for Jeff to notice or approach him.

—Haven’t seen you for a while, man, Jeff said. —What gives? How you keeping?

—I’ve been worse but I’ve been better.

—Yeah. You and Maisie. Wondered if you guys would patch it up. That’s a drag, man. I’m sorry.

—Cheers.

—So. What you doing?

—This and that, mate. What about you? Stallo waited through answers. —You know, he said, as if after long thought, —this’ll sound a bit, I dunno, but it’s weird to run into you. Fact is I’ve been thinking about you. Not like that you poof ha ha! I was thinking about stuff you once told me you were into.

It took some hours and a second meeting for Stallo to bring up names. It didn’t feel planned in that moment. I could’ve fooled me, is what he thought, and laughed into his cigarette.

—You said you knew some bint called Isabelle, right?

—Isabella, Jeff said. —Did I mention her to you…?

—And some bloke in the same line, weird name…

—Skully. Why?

—I was trying to remember is all.

Stallo looked down exactly as if he were trying not to catch Jeff’s eyes, as if he were shy of the truth. He was a joke, was Jeff, but no rule said they couldn’t connect to what mattered. Hardly.

Stallo mouldered. Made sure not to go back to that place. And yes a couple of weeks after that last visit when Jeff rang his doorbell and stood at the entrance with a joint and booze and a takeaway, blinking at the dirty flat, Stallo did wonder how much the squalor was camouflage, how much just what he was now.

—Jeff! he said as if surprised.

—Hey. You remember Amy?

Green eyes. Yes, Stallo recalled. Less willowy than when last he’d seen her. No change in that big stare. He kissed her hello. —Still painting? he said, and she blushed.

—Oh no.

—I miss my aunt, Stallo said, earlier than he’d thought he would. He waited out the silence. —My mum, you never knew her…He shook his head. That was right, yes? he thought.

Jeff looked around the room. —This is no good, man. We have to get you out of here.

Later Stallo said to Jeff, —Skully, right?

When Jeff nodded, Stallo saw his surprise and he thought, Easy, not so fast. That wasn’t like him. He didn’t keep track of lost time now, could not have said when he exited the flow of it to hand over to that other or what he’d just forgot. So he held off saying certain things.

Another visit. Amy played with her black hair.

Then: —Look, Stallo said abruptly. Exactly as if it were still hard for him to do so. —I know you lot are friends with Maisie. That’s fine. I just—

—Actually I don’t see much of her these days, Amy said. —We don’t, do we, babe? She’s keeping to herself. Has done for a while. Everyone’s got their own stuff now.

—I think she moved, Jeff said.

—She did, Amy said. —To Brighton.

—Right, Stallo said. He had not expected to hear himself say, —With Sten?

Jeff shrugged. —I don’t know, man.

—I don’t think so, Amy said.

Stallo went with them to parties and others from the earlier days greeted him with distrust, pity, curiosity.

—I tell you what, mate, he said to Jeff. —I want the fuck out.

—Of London?

—Of all of it. London, the scene. The army, for sure.

—It’s weird to think of you in the army…. Why don’t you leave?

—Not that simple. Can’t just walk. I tell you what, I’m no one important. But even what little bits I’ve seen…Jeff, it’s dark, what goes on. And the army’s just the tip of the iceberg. You heard of Watchguard? The guy who started the SAS, David Stirling, yeah? What does he do after he leaves? He gets into TV production, doesn’t he? He made the laugh sound nasty. —And what’s the other side of the spectacle? Stallo moved his hands like interlocking gears. —Starts Watchguard, so-called consultancy, bodyguards, counterfuckinginsurgency. That’s perfect for governments, mate, arm’s-length stuff, they love that. That’s the world now. That’s the troika; state, media, secret armies. All the greisliness…

That he hadn’t meant to say. He sped up his voice.

—This feeling, this, fuck it, all the sudden bugaboo stories you’re hearing? I know you are, come on mate, I know what you’re into. Things are spreading, getting weird. How are we supposed to live in a world like this? What do you fight fire with?

He saw the awe he’d sought to sow.

To Awfulness and back by careful routes. Caucusing with Hook and Long, tracing suspected operations on maps. A cat’s-cradle of threads between pins. Men and women dressed like ramblers came to the base to present Top Secret dossiers without departmental logo. At night Stallo listened to the sea wind, it sounded like a young child.

He marched. Wore a patchwork uniform and made it shabby. His beard and hair were long. He stood near the speakers. Risky, no, ballsy, not to hide his military affiliation, but to obfuscate what it meant. He watched television for hours. Pulled in by images like text in idiot’s cuneiform. He watched the news and he watched quizzes and he watched The Comedians and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club and listened not to the words of the jokes but to their rhythms and beats, the fecund silences before punch lines and yawping laughter that he imitated in his room, alone. He watched children’s shows, all growing stranger.

[36]

They come to a road (Stallo saw it from the air) and follow it for hours to a town. A settlement of low effort and long habit. The locals mind their business. Maur and Stallo pass through. Endless border country. Hypermarkets here are not so clean and they are full of minor national specificities of modernity. There is bad food to be had. They push north. Their economy is grift and minor theft and barter and occasional performance again. Boardinghouses, spare bedrooms, deserted blocks and over-shop apartments, cars, a day, two nights, three, finding a vehicle for the next few scores of miles, paying for it from their dwindling euros, or Stallo breaking thereinto, both of them silent almost all of every day. Stallo staring with a focus and that expression Maur doesn’t like to see, that he took on screaming at Dila for information.

“We have to get away.” He repeats this as if Maur has made some counterargument. “Get more miles under us.”

“She flew us God knows how far.”

“You can always go farther.” He glances in the mirror as if fell presences might come for them in a car. “Rak’s protections are down. Distance’ll help, but we have to assume it’s looking.”

With his new glazed conviction, he seems to be talking to himself. He looks through Maur and speaks quickly.

“Like I say, It was stronger than I thought, to find us the first time. And then again. Yeah. They had to send people—those barriers needed breathers to get across, but they found us. But then, like you said, Cybill made a call, so what if that was what did it? Something as simple as that. Or maybe it was the letter. Even with the blocks. Or when they went down that thing smelt it. Either way I still don’t understand enough. But then we don’t have the letter any more. That might make us harder to sniff. But if they’ve got it now that might make it sniff harder.” He hesitates. “If it even cares about us any more.” There’s no freedom in his face when he says that. “And if it is still after us, why? We’ve got nothing.” That he almost shouts.

“You said you had some stuff stashed. Stallo?”

“What?”

“You said you had stuff to try. If worst came to the worst.” She makes a face to ask, Hasn’t it?

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Okay. Okay. Maybe.” At last his shrewdness starts to come back. “That thing’s looking for me? Two can play at that as they say.” He glances at her. “It’s a fair way.”

“You have to show me what you use, this time. To hide us.”

“I’ll show you.” Then, “Go on, what did Ewan say to you? Did he tell you he wasn’t alone? All of a sudden?”

Whether he truly expects an answer or not, she has none.

“No you’re right,” Stallo says, “you are right. That means north, fast. But I still can’t help wondering about seams. Whether we need them at all, revs.”

That look on him. Maur doesn’t say anything about his maundering because for once he feels to her less withholding than not fully present.

He steals a van. He drives them north, never going too fast, finding busier roads, through the night.

She spasms awake in grey early morning. Stallo very still beside her. Not looking at her or anything, that she can tell. They are in the shade behind a warehouse, a ridge of concrete and crabgrass at the edge—Maur cranes her head—of an empty industrial zone.

“Where are we?” she says.

“Arras. Saint-Laurent-Blangy.”

“Going to tell me why?”

“I have an idea. I never talked about Rak, you know.”

“Well Croome knew about him, and he knew about her. It doesn’t sound like he was as careful as you. Maybe it wasn’t Vam or Cybill who caused trouble, maybe they got to Croome.”

“They?”

The wind whispers past the van.

“Hey,” she says after a while, and snaps her fingers. “Earth to Stallo.”

—

The grand sweeps of architecture for the dead, arches as of heaven and ranks of white crosses by the Rue du Général de Gaulle. They bide where traffic screams by and the road diverges and jog across to where between barrowlike memories of trenches they stand near a tower of dark Scottish stone. Remember With Honour. The car sounds follow them into Crump Trench. They wait away from other visitors among rolling grassy grounds. Faint declensions, explosion holes now soft with growth. They walk between walled dead. When the day closes they cross the grass and haul through into the cramped interior of a clutch of growth.

“This is Claude,” Stallo says.

Stallo looks in the dirt at the base of the fertile mine crater, according to no instinct Maur can understand. He goes to his knees and spreads his fingers and lies as flat as he can amid the stems and lets the muck get on him.

“That’s Clarence over there,” he says. “We’ll visit him in a minute. There was Cuthbert too, but he’s gone.”

He sounds like he can’t wait, he’s changing abruptly. In the moonlight he is a man between stations. Maur’s never felt such urgency from him, or anyone. He puts his hands flat and rubs and rubs the earth.

“What is this?” She keeps her voice cool.

“Rooting.” It’s cold in No Man’s Land. He rubs. Crooks his fingers. It’s hard to look away. Maur watches as if walking in on sex.

After it must be a minute of his eager stroking of and sifting in the ground, she whispers, “My God, are you trying to find an apport?”

His hands keep going. He doesn’t look up at her but she squats to see, and his expression, aimed down, is shrewd and pinched and almost desperately leering.

“Jesus,” she says. She stands. “You’re trying to fucking fish for something. After everything you told me about them, how they appear, how’s that supposed to work? Were you just lying the whole time?”

“Come on,” Stallo says, not to her. As if he thinks he sounds wily, not mad. “Come on then, Rak. What if? Was that it? What fucking if?” He lifts his head to look about then pushes it back down. Now he moves more slowly, as if he’s massaging the grime. It revolts Maur. He looks at her and seems to really see her for the first time in a while. “Put your hands down here.”

“Even if you could just pull an apport out of nothing,” she says at last, “here of all places, it wouldn’t…” She straightens her back then. “Oh. Okay.” Remembers what Croome said and almost said. Chooses not to disclose that to Stallo, what, how much, she suspects about that cavity in history. He’s clutching too hard to focus on her.

With what Croome said and how Rak’s place was hidden, at least from, from the likes of Jules, and that other thing, how could Stallo not be uncertain of his nostrums? And if he has been wrong, well, his friend Rak might not have been. So why not try? Like clapping for Tinker Bell. Just in case now in this time of need he might be heeded, fingering the grass and mat of fallen twigs, with her help even—why’s she still here after all if not?—to feel beneath his nails the pearlescent handle of a hairbrush remnant or a shivlike shard of shaving mirror or the lid of a pen or. Where better? That out of this earth might bud just for him an imperfect replicant. With its snag energies and its potentials, grant us oh revenance a slug of thrawn and misrecalled stuff. How much greater would it be? Hoping’s one word—he’s never seemed mad to her before.

It’s a shock to Maur to see him pathetic. She lets him claw.

“Come on,” she says, only when it’s very fully dark and his movement has grown slow and his breath loud. “This hasn’t worked.”

Stallo whispers, “Maybe they don’t drop from the Roused, apports.” He looks up at her. “They find their way to them after they come up out of the earth.”

Asynchronous signals | not be received together.
Attenuation | is the decreasing.
Capture Rate | Snag how many you will!
Chop Mode | and slice time.
Discontinuity | a wrong jitter.
Division | Perfect squares in the graticule of things
Earth ground | to be Anti—
Edges | are changes, of which game is phenomenon.
Envelope | Plot this please.
Glitch |
Glowing trace | is always bright non-signal.
Holdoff Range | How long will you wait?
Interpolation | The false friend. You cannot discern the event.
Leading edge | From which follows.
Noise | stochastic, undesired
Peak-to-peak | Asc/Desc- end
Real Signal | may exist in the physical.
Rise time | may mislead you.
Trace | Line, verb and noun.
Transient event | pulses ex tenebris.
Trigger event | Change in verticality.
Writing speed | could not be more important.
Z-Axis | The third dimension. You need not stop there.

XIX

Into Gemot

Heads and Squares

Italy again, to cultivate those connections. Stallo ascended to the roof of his digs at night, picked a few of the acronym jargons of his work, wrote a hex of them, a SATOR arrangement, that might put out fires and fevers, protect, or the opposite, whispered it amid the watching aerials. A brief diagnostic probing of intuition: what came to him, under self-disgust that surprised him, was unease that kept him from sleeping when he was done.

In the morning he sat at a café table blinking and holding his aching head. People passed through the square on their business and the light made them glow. The abodement did not ebb. This was not supposed to be, dread was not appropriate. Stallo, so used to knowing the positions and movements of every person around him, could not fathom the source of whatever seemed to scorn the trinket but efficacious protections he carried. He saw in the way the women walked by, the men leaned smoking against the walls, nothing that would give him reason for this fucking speeding of his heart. A bloke with sideburns and untidy black hair too long, beneath a dirty balcony; a woman with a pram, looking Stallo could not see at what. Was she too still? Was he?

Stallo pushed back his chair. And the sun skipped a sliver’s-width of sky and he was exhaling, was not standing as he had intended but was now at another table, so sitting again then, not still. All the sounds of the day were up close. He put his hands slowly to their table’s edge to stand again.

—No, don’t, a voice behind him said, quietly and close to his ear. Something hard pressed into his lower back.

Stallo was still. Someone leaning to speak to Stallo from behind; he might seem a friend in mischievous discussion. They sat together.

—You are alone, the unseen man said. —You feel that?

For a moment Stallo thought, Of course I am, but it came to him that it was not his solo travel the man spoke of, and he gasped again because he was truly unaccompanied.

—It will come back, the man said. —I can’t keep it away so long. I thought you would have something. But I want to meet you. The man who has been asking about us.

Some in Stallo’s view must have been spotters for the cell. He ran through options.

—What shall we do? the man said.

Even as the shock of his controllessness receded to leave Stallo pretty bloody sure that with a bit of grit spunk elbow grease pluck guts mettle bottle he might twist to perform the violent manoeuvres of his expertise, what adrenaline sluiced him was of a sort of elation. Professional appreciation for the audacity of this. I mean, a sneak off-job, to render some target Tango Uniform, in public, in broad bloody daylight, was big-ballsed enough. But to parlay?

So he said, —What now?

—Why did you come back? the other said. —Why do all you’ve done?

—I’m a seeker, Stallo said. —You know how that is.

—So you say. We hear about your questions. What do you want?

—Liberation. Stallo said it as if the word brought a tremble.

—Tell me.

—Tell me. Who are you? Stallo gave it the paranoia of the activist rather than his own.

Stallo’s eyesight stuttered and he made something out, the intimation of the haze of the burr of the glimpse of the edge of the shade of the shape of the weight of the strength of the limb of the figure, a figure, a something behind him reaching to touch him, to hold his hand on to the table, look there was nothing but the empty air and the metal top, but Croome said revenants were metaphors and the metaphor of a cold hand held him down and why was he not dead or mad? Was he? Were these ravings, in the piazza?

No. No this was some subtle instruction to a subtle Roused, a finesse of necromancy, to just hold him in place.

The man said, —What is it you’re looking for?

Stallo worked his jaw. —Something’s wrong with the world, he said. —The fantasmi are afraid, and when they’re afraid…

—Not only them.

—You know, then, Stallo said. —I knew you would. I keep hearing about you. I’m here to—

Hold it Stallo, don’t say too much. Let them see you be careful.

—Sometimes now I think I hear a baby, Stallo said. He had not known he would.

No answer.

—You know, Stallo said. —Something’s coming.

—Why are you here?

—To stop it.

Wait that could not be right. He wanted them to think him of their party and they were the invokers, weren’t they? Or they stood in the way? Waiting? In that moment of frozen sun, it was all confusing. So:

—Why are you here? he said in turn. And there were silences that were withholding and there were those that were hesitations and this one felt to him like the latter. —Only someone said to me, he said, hesitating himself now, for real, —maybe what’s coming is coming in part because you’re calling it. Maybe. What do you say?

When he had waited through another silence he said, —Will you tell me about it?

—If what we try, the unseen man said, —is not to change everything, there’s no point, hm? And the old promise coming, close, not here, not yet, the promise is to change it all, too.

But he sounded guarded, and like he was waiting for a password.

—There’s change, Stallo said, —and there’s change.

From within Stallo’s own hand a rustling reached out to counter those emptiness fingers that held him in place, grasping them

was only the briefest instant, here was his control, back, ’allo old son, and this its moment’s return had been achieved past whatever guards and traps were around to constrain it, and the snap-to had been long enough for it to do something, because the man out of his sight was hissing as if learning something bad.

Stallo felt the metal in his back again.

The man whispered, —You move, you die. I am not alone here. I think you have a secret.

—We all have secrets.

—Are you a liar? Maybe you are doing a job. A mission. Stallo stayed very still. —Some people want to stop me, you know. Not what comes.

A fly walked its filth on Stallo’s spoon. He watched its curving reflection. I swear. The proximity of death did not strip from his monologue within all its humour. If this cunt tells me we’re not so different I will deck him. Look, the return of his companion had brightened Stallo’s mood. He felt fucking chirpy.

—I don’t know what you think you know about me…, he began.

—What will happen now? said the man from KH. That older voice. Stallo knew to hear it that he was a disappointment to the speaker.

—You’re the one with the weapon, mate, he said. Stallo, pull it back on track.—Please, I don’t know what…I came looking for you.

It was only even a lie if you was singular.

Gen’ral (it seemed likely) said to him, —I could kill you.

Yes. There might be consequences, but he could do it.

—You’re Angler, ain’t you? Stallo said. He didn’t tire of these name games. He breathed in, the air felt hot inside him.

—You feel them? Regnal said. —Around you?

What, the sequelae? Yes, he’d have said he felt them. If one were to touch him Stallo might slump in his chair, too mummified too quickly or slick and saponifying, or too cold for this day, or without the slightest mark of distinction depending on the nature of the directed. You had to credit him, he must be quite the power to give them this sort of purpose in the morning on such a lovely day, in sight of old Sol, if he really could, if he were not lying. Stallo could not say if he was afraid. The square teemed. It would be nice to have this out, to talk about it, though Stallo did not know quite what it was about which he would like to speak. I just ruddy bloody fucking bet, he thought suddenly, Marco’s here too, too, somewhere. Watching the two of us.

—I feel like I’m losing it, he managed to say. He laughed. —I’m here because I heard your lot got through some barriers a while back. Manifested on the coast in England. Against the enemy. Our enemy. A recce, was it? Looking for what?

—It’s me who’s here to ask questions, the man said. —Tell me about your mission.

Stallo rehearsed in his mind. The mission is liberation!

—And not just that, Regnal said. —Everything. Whatever you know about what’s happening.

—Smuggle that last in, eh? Stallo said finally. —Not as sure about the causes of the dread of the day as you’d like?

He realised that the man had spoken again, that undefinable accent growing stronger, that he Stallo was coming in late after every sentence or two. Not swagger, propaganda or polemic; Regnal wasn’t declaiming, Stallo made out, he was describing, the world, as if for validation of his own intel in the snippets Stallo heard just too late. The man spoke names as if he’d been sneak-peeking at the whiteboard in Camp Awfulness. Fluent in the secret world’s pidgin.

Did he bloody know who Stallo was?

—What is the mission? he realised Nergal had said. And —How are you doing what you are doing to us?

Oh-ho. Pry open an eye, Stallo. Show not a jot of surprise at that, don’t let him see that so far as you’re aware, you and your lot are doing nothing to them, which is rather the bloody problem. Let’s find out what it is that’s being done at least, if not by whom. This man was sizing Stallo up yes that was it. Fishing. Not sure who he represented or what. Mr. Cool-as-a-Cucumber-Voice was a bit at sea, truth be told, sixes and sevens.

Are they all with you? Stallo said. These dead watching us? He realised he was not speaking aloud.

How come you’re onto me? Stallo said silently again. The problem we have now is that what you expect me to say is, I don’t know what you’re talking about, leaving you to probe a bit more, which leaves us in a bit of a pickle because that’s not me dancing the dance it’s God’s own truth, whatever’s happening to you is news to me. And if any of it’s down to us that’s blind fucking luck, mate. Not that I’d say so.

—That’s what I’m here to ask you, is what Stallo said. This was professional courtesy. This strange meeting between embattled men. Collegial. Will you bond with me about exasperating superiors? Shall we roll our eyes together, you killer of my allies, you enemy? Do I look like I was born yesterday?

—What do you know, the man said, —of Città di Apporto?

—Come again? Stallo said.

—Their town.

Whose town? The revs? Less than you, I imagine.

—Who can you bring back? Stallo said. —How good are you? How exact? Bit of a blunt instrument, Rousing. Which pisses me off because— He had to stop. —There are people I’d love to aim for. To talk to. Who’ve you lost? We’ve all lost someone, it’s what you do with that that counts.

Stallo, he told himself, you’re an old man now. Not that he believed that excuse for those quick blinks, Rene at her door, leaning on the frame glowing with her hair up. The tang of Vimto. Telling him from the kitchen that he was good boy. Play with her glass animals, careful, don’t break ’em, I’ll talk to your mum.

—“Nergal,” Stallo said. Of course he’d be named from the oldest spook story. —That’s a bit much.

Light filled the square and Stallo tensed, it was not his tension, it was the strain of a shaggy floral walker pushing out energies to unnerve the sensitive, and Stallo could feel the oscillating frequencies of other observers. Now look, squint against the sun.

When he came back again he waited awhile, turned, and there was no one behind him. His skin did not prickle any more. He saw the waiters’ faces, that they did not understand what communion had occurred between him and the whisperer now gone, between Stallo and discorporate attention, that they were afraid and would no more have approached him than they would a priest talking Holy Ghost talk.

[37]

She knows that Stallo is drawing hiding runes on the map, from their routes. They sleep in the outbuildings of a farm into which he breaks, to find amid the old tools half a sack of sand that he pours out by the door. It still seems to take him effort to speak. “Anyone knows to look for two of us, Brits, a man and a woman…. I should go alone.”

He’s almost asking, though.

Stallo, are you back with me? She doesn’t say it—she can see him trying, and he’s not as obscure now as he has been. He’s embarrassed or ashamed, making an effort.

“Why did they kill Cyb?” she says.

“Whoever it was they didn’t mean to shoot her. One of them was yelling to hold fire. In English and all. Me they’d do, you I don’t know. Cybill?”

What with her some outsider artist of mediumship or something, a bond so strong that not even death, etc. Maur imagines rooms full of terrified bereaved, locked up, observed, prodded, to provoke their Roused. The blackest of black sites, the haunted rigged to engines.

To the west she glimpses the reconfigured slag heaps like great black dunes beyond the roofs.

“Forget what you think I should know by now,” she says. “Start from the beginning. Tell me all of it.”

He settles back and considers as he drives.

“Manning was always a bit of a lugubrious tosser and him and Dean never got on which surprised me.” She listens.

“After the glory days, when I left the Unit I was just out on my own. Years.”

“We did get hold of Wran, years later, the boffin on their side, yeah, tip off, no, I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Wran and Marco and the old Gen’ral, they were all around the top of the KH, but they fought like rats in a sack. That type always do.”

“Kardec,” Stallo says. “Richet. Maxwell. Worth your time.” She makes no sign of it but commits the names and information to memory.

“No spiritistes this time,” she says.

“No,” he says. “Crooks only now.” Can’t give that a smile, though.

“It was you said we need distance,” she says. “And quickly.”

“North,” he says.

He takes their dwindling money into the appropriate tabac, the civic hall, the shuttered kebab shop, the nail salon in Hénin-Beaumont. Alone in the dark van she imagines making a phone call next time he leaves. She’s no captive now. Ring the embassy. It’s Maur Towns. I’m coming in. From the very cold. Your ex-operative? Yes, I know where he is.

But she’s seen what she’s seen, these sanctioned powers won’t save the world, won’t save Ewan, or her.

The streets of Lens are quiet but not peaceful. By the Boulevard Émile Basly axis, boarded-up and redbrick maisons mitoyennes cramp up to faded lots and decline as if waiting for something to happen. Satellite dishes and bleached posters sag. Stallo pays for a room, a cleaner whitewashed attic than you’d think, above the Bar de Calypso, where only old men still come for Rapido and to argue PMU odds. Through the floor Maur hears their temporary landlord hawk phlegm. They buy food at the Portuguese grocery.

“I can get SNCF passes at Léon Blum, no questions asked,” Stallo says. “IDs’ll take a bit longer. A bloke called Le Polonais, for fuck’s sake, can do us Belgian ones. Apparantly not so good as ’e used to be”—a French-accent stage whisper—“but hopefully good enough. I’ll get it in motion.”

He pours out more sand. “Cross fingers. With this and all the route-tracing I’ve done. And we’re a long way now anyway.” He’s not sure. Places holed stones at every entrance. Scratches the shapes in doorway wood. “Belt and braces. Be careful.”

“You too. Be quick.”

She rubs pencil on paper over the marks he’s cut and studies them. When he comes back Stallo has twine. “Three days,” he says. “That was as quick as he’d do it. I mean, we could just cross….”

“Better to have papers, no?”

When he leaves again he stops by the door several seconds and says, “Sorry about going a bit cuckoo back there.”

Maur goes through every drawer in each of the room’s small chests, uncovering only dust. She can’t say what it is she seeks but she’s quick and purposeful in a way she hasn’t felt for a long time. Cuckoo or not, she thinks at Stallo, you still wonder if Rak was onto something.

She sits on the windowsill. The street is empty enough that she might have slipped out of time, and an abrupt urgency overcomes her. She empties out the tissues and change and lighter and cigarettes from that baggy off-brown handbag picked up among tatalatta, still with her. She pushes her hands into her pockets, turns them out. Looks in every drawer again.

In Stallo’s case is an inner pouch and in that she finds a couple more hagstones. She picks an egg-sized one, holds the hole to her eye. The course of things, the trajectory of the world can be an arc like gravity’s, the curve of a stone tossed by a visionary child to terminate at some bobbing scrap. She looks from the rock’s point of view at the mess of what she carries—there should be something else. She doesn’t know what but there’s something not there. Maur puts the stone on the bed and shoves that stuff back into the bag and picks up the stone and hesitates but returns it to its own place with relief and agitation she doesn’t understand, that brings up sudden claustrophobia. She gets her coat, she auditions the thought that she will get water or wine at that shop, that that’s all she’ll leave for.

As she passes beyond the threshold she could gasp with release.

—

The cool of the night is lovely. But there’s a pace to her heart, and still she’s pushing her hand into her pocket then her bag, feeling again as if for something.

Through the dark, Rue this Rue that, Victor Hugo Jean Jaurès, she doesn’t slow, breathing better outside, glanced at in passing by those gathered by food shops watching her pace through distorted music, it’s late but hardly so late she’s alone, not in these parts. She turns for those rewilded cones of industry she can’t make out now, after dark, even where streets widen.

An older man among the mostly youth at the edges of the late-night place enters a bar and meets her stare with a question, an instant’s smile, so unsubtle and unexpected and, well, French that Maur laughs as longing surprises her. For a—she would like a word for it—the sort of thing she has with Sonya. Had. That gets you. Maur imagines fucking him or anyone to mum intimacy for the duration of an encounter. Of course she does not want to fuck but you can’t do a friendship one-night stand.

During her few steps towards the bar entrance she goes in and finds the man and he tutoyers her. That verb has always made her happy. He buys her a white wine. I had a son, it would take almost nothing to say. He died. It was terrible. His death is years ago. She sips the wine. I believe that in every language of the world there are ways to say that things are not as you might believe. There’s a word, my father told me once, it comes to her unexpectedly, an ugly word a poet coined for something, a surplus, extrabelief, aber, auber, aberglaube, a crust of superstition on truth, like barnacles, a vine. The man doesn’t understand but he’s kind and interested and she tells him vines have roots. The aberglaube’s might go deep. If superstition works it’s not superstition it’s magic and lots of people have been killed or crowned or both for superstition. I don’t know how to say that I believe and don’t believe at once. There are true contradictions. I miss my son. All but the last could almost be some other’s voice, impossibly channelled. As she approaches the door, all that might be.

The man reaches for her and touches her shoulder, well enough, in her mind now, but Maur walks right on past the entrance, and she does not go in to meet him or to tell him anything.

She feels in her bag as if for a stone. Coloured lights are behind her, amid bungalows and wire-drooping poles; she’s one of fewer here, so late, at a railway’s edge, hearing tracks murmur as if in memory or expectation. She feels paper. She draws it out. There is not much light here equidistant between two streetlamps, but enough that she can see upon an envelope Jules’s name, in Cybill’s hand.

Maur pulls her hand away and lets the paper fall. She gasps deep breaths.

She looks around as if someone is coming but no one is. The nearest car sounds streets away. Maur picks the paper up at last and feels a There, that of There now, of There you are. She lights a cigarette—it trembles—and holds the letter that she saw taken from Cybill’s fingers skyward. It does to her skin what it did before Dila’s compound.

What did she see, then, in the helicopter? Could this have been rotor-blown up and down again into some secret cleft in her bag? Did she always have this, then?

Come on.

She opens the envelope; every sheet is there.

“ ‘Or Deario Julio as your dad would say,’ ” she whispers. “ ‘You are bad you shouldn’t tell me things like that.’ ‘you’re a trooper ha ha and we so proud of you you don’t to go in go in inwats on n n y e.’ ” Maur says each of those single letters by its name.

She turns to the second, the middle sheet. And look: you can see the crisscross creases where it has been folded.

“ ‘no hoy yor sha an awr,’ ” she reads aloud from the top. “ ‘bur sl i oos ryet hor c h o t m a c a.’ ”

Maur sweeps her finger over the greater emptiness in the page.

From the bottom: “ ‘jy aw q aa ur yas di vulba fng an by nodad senslo ofc har lie alar worm yur ma.’ ”

The third page. The writing starts midway down.

“ ‘I k b har todt things happen here are all looking to see you and look after yourself’ ”

The bad words are froth at the edge of spreading nothing.

Maur is visited by images. Cybill whom she mourns and did not love plummeting. Do you still have your copy too? she thinks to her. Maur imagines a cabinet of copies. A drawer full of the letter in various iterations. She makes a sound just to hear one.

“Jules?” she says. Is it you? she does not say.

—

She whispers the message again, every word and mutant word. Afterwards the silence sounds to her like that when a child has left a room.

Delights of Dust

The old country. The island. A young soldier, a woman Stallo did not recognise, watched him as if he were a pop star.

—Did you hear that? I swear I heard a kid crying.

—Not you too, someone said. —You lot are getting old, Stallo. Your ears are going.

At his debriefing with Hook and the Milkman, Stallo said nothing about the Italian square. Stuck to All going okay, nothing concrete yet. He did not say that KH top brass had come and all but blown his cover. He said nothing about that whispered voice, its facility with fleeting suppletions, the dread the man had attempted not to let him discern, his probing as to whether, if Stallo was a double agent, it was Stallo’s crew who beset his own in some way. Stallo was a soldier, and this withholding breached orders and the chain of command, and that was new. His silence on the matter surprised him. He wondered what he was about.

Of course, there would be danger to blurting out that someone in the Unit might be leaking, if you didn’t already know who.

In any case, even had they been sure what he was, and simple as his Italian-visitor cover and disguise had been—Stallo regarded his image in the mirror, the harder cast of his features here—he’d have given decent odds those in the square would walk right past him now.

Hook and Long represented the Unit at Carpenter’s funeral.

—Do you think they even knew? Bowler said. —Her family? All the fucking shite she’s been up to?

—Course not.

—Did she have a family? Sapers said.

—Everyone has a family, Bowler said.

—Well that’s bollocks.

—Everyone has a family, Stallo said.

—Last of the old-school blah blah, Bowler said.

—You going to be alright, poppet? Stallo said. —I didn’t know you were such a fan of hers.

—Hardly.

He said it again before the wake in the mess. —Fuck that, Bowler said when Stallo came to his door to ask if he was coming. —Hardly. Us sitting there getting weepy right above some fucking nasty shit down there in the tunnels? I used to think she wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing.

—What are you on about? Stallo said. —What do you think now, then?

—I’m not going to be part of this mawkish crap. You know what’s screaming under your feet.

Croome was raising her glass in the hall when Stallo entered, and saying Carpenter’s name. She looked right at him. He came to her and stood quietly while she watched the singing.

—Well, he said. —We could do with some decent leadership. Get her back for us?

Croome laughed.

—Simmons, Long, what the fuck do they know? he said. —Don’t tell me you can’t see it’s all going tits-up. We need the old expertise. Maybe my you-know-what’ll help. He thumped his chest. —Go on, Doc.

—I wish I could, she said. She eyed him. —We’ve discussed this. Would that it were that easy. Though, would you really want it anyway?

—She was good at what she did.

—If you say so. What is this new fascination of yours? Let the dead choose the dead, is it?

—The Roused aren’t dead, Stallo said. —You’ve been pretty insistent on that point.

—Touché. But perhaps I’m not talking about them.

—Touché.

—Re Carpenter, I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. Not that there aren’t experiments going on, at some of which you’ve had a peek and which I must say I’m surprised haven’t motivated your curiosity more than they seem to have. He said nothing. —To each their own. One gathers there are still rumours among, as well as about, the suppletions. If you ever do find that particular rather useful apport, Stallo, that would be a help. You used to talk about that. One about which— She performed a portentous voice, —lo, it is said to bring the killed to the killer’s side, or whatnot. Go search the apport trail.

—Chasing fairy stories?

—Until then, she said, —let the dead bury the dead is excellent advice. And why would you want her back? Knowing her, she’s doing a recce for us right now.

Stallo considered that very trail, that Silk Road, watching the ceiling in his room. It might have been anger that kept him from sleep. Or sent him wandering, passing guards with a raised hand. He smoked weed in the rain. Wound thick tape around the bamboo of his spear. Keep it together. Envisioned a piling-up of apports in the dark, in the desert, a swirl to or from an underworld. Dragged-out nights felt smeared. That bloody sense of a sloucher slouching to be born. He carried his pistol everywhere, his own little weapon, it does not matter what type, it was not listed in the armoury. He walked in daylight with a toughness he sometimes resented, a further punishment, withholding any vindication or relief of collapse.

A night. Looking up through library windows, Stallo glimpsed movement. Sentries fanning out. There came no alarm. He rose. From the doorway, voices, faintly. He felt no surprise nor any foreboding. He returned his reading matter to the shelf and went out.

He did not know whence came the sense of where he must go but he knew that he must be quick. He whispered, no clue what.

Whatever the sentries sought that night a stupid protocol of hush had been declared. There were no red bulbs in particular windows—Keep your eyes open at all times—to silently declare emergency, let alone the worst-case-scenario klaxons. His superiors strove to contain whatever this was without full-battle-stations attention. You could almost feel sorry for them, so flagrantly did this bespeak panic, because he’d have had to be the doziest of cunts not to know something was up, if you couldn’t taste catastrophe.

When he heard guards, Stallo flattened against walls, crouched in the dim behind buildings. Blimey, he mouthed. I bloody know, guessing what his unseen comrade might be saying. Together he walked alone. Off the paths. With each step he lowered himself a little more into the grass. As if he descended stairs, as if the undergrowth were entry to Dis. This way, yeah? Here, you reckon, yeah?

Stallo waited, steeled against shivering. A hollow. Dew, brine, mud.

A thousand million miles away, you know, just behind him, the lights of Camp Awfulness made edges and the murmuring went on, not growing louder nor waning, the chatter of Everything’s fine nothing going on. Stallo looked north-northeast towards the guard towers in the flats. Don’t trigger the floodlight unless you have to. Good luck, chaps. He did not mean that.

Hours. If you didn’t know maybe you’d say they were no tenser than any other.

Footfall. Expert down-placing of a boot upon the wet rootstuff. Stallo listened in treeline shadow. The steps stopped. Close enough for something.

Unseen, from the dark, Bowler whispered.

—Alright, Stallo?

Bowler’s voice across the stems of weeds. Stallo saw nothing in the line dividing the blacks of waterland and sky.

—Alright? he whispered. Soundlessly he moved. Put his hands upon the earth as if to draw strength. Animals speculated awhile. —I thought it was an intruder at first, Stallo said. —More like an extruder, eh? What you up to?

—How’d you know where to find me? Bowler said.

—I will tell you the absolute truth. Not a clue.

—Yeah, I hear you. There’s a lot of that about.

—Took a bit of advice, decided I’d hole up here.

—Good call, Bowler said. —Someone in your shell-like? How is old Grandad? Give him my best.

The whisper moved.

—So, Stallo said. —What is it you’re up to?

—Me? I’m testing the perimeter.

—Oh yeah? Are you? Testing the perimeter? And how’s that going? How’s the old perimeter?

—It’s shoddy, mate, Bowler said. —It’s shoddy. Standards are slipping. I mean, we both know that.

Staying low, Stallo moved sideways. Imagined that Bowler did the same.

—Hey, that bloke Tun? Bowler said. —Tracker in Kota Tinggi? Ever so fascinated with me and you, remember? I keep wondering what he saw in us. What he knew. How he knew. Something like how Hook knows, or his fingers and pens do, even if he doesn’t, maybe.

—Fair warning, mate, Stallo said, —for old times’ sake. I’ve got a pistol.

—What‽ A pistol! Oh my stars and garters. Oh my giddy aunt. I’ll come over all funny. Truth be told I’ve got a something too, Stallo, and not just a pistol. I’ve got a bead on you. Oops, ladies and gents, Bowler said. —He looks left.

Yes, Stallo had turned his head, even in such darkness.

—He looks right, Bowler said, as Stallo did. —He hunkers like a soldier. Britain’s finest. The queen’s beast. Why you here, Stallo? Why are you alone? Come to see me off?

—Again, straight up. I don’t know.

—Well then, Bowler said. Now his voice was sad. —Let’s just have a minute.

—You’d have thought, Stallo said, —we’d have chatted more about it. What went on under the labs, I mean.

—Why? Why would I think you would talk about that? Sometimes I think you don’t know yourself at all, Stallo.

When Bowler spoke again Stallo understood that he was trying to say something important. —I can’t put up with this shit, was what came out. —Not another day.

—So just go, Stallo said. —What’s with the cloak and dagger? Just go AWOL after R & R, just don’t come back. Why you scampering around in the dark?

—Pot, kettle. How’s the oscilloscope? Bowler laughed, it was a bad sound. —Did you tell me about that? Rack your brains, go on. He can’t remember, ladies and gents. He’s not sure. And while we’re at it, did he tell me about losing moments? If not, how would I know? Did he tell me during one of them, in which case did he tell me about it at all? I’m just fucking with you, mate. No hard feelings. To answer your question, you don’t always have the choice about how to take your leave, if you’ve got your eye on a particular keepsake, do you? As to why the leave-taking at all, what can I tell you? I just don’t believe in it no more.

It took Stallo two goes to speak.

—Who needs to believe in it to do it?

—Oh, fair play, Bowler said. —Fair play indeed. That’s you all over, isn’t it? You could say he has a fucking point.

—I mean, in a way, said Stallo, —you’re embarrassing yourself.

—Fuck of it is I always liked you, Bowler said. —And I don’t know if that’s despite or because I could never tell if you’re as pigheaded as you pretend to be.

Into Stallo’s head came an old sight, the cold and bloody visage of a boar. He said, —So you got sick of telling ghost stories?

—No, I’ll keep telling them. Like we all do. This whole operation’s a ghost story. And I’ll keep reading schtum too, more than ever. That’s what’s important, according to some. Our Kenyan friend, the one you shuffled off the coil.

—Does he know what you’re up to? Stallo said. —When have you two been chatting?

—He? Bowler said. —Not it? I’m telling teacher. Anyway, you were never interested in postmortem interrogation.

Was that fair? —Yeah because it’s bollocks, Stallo said. —Even Croome says so.

—What do you mean even? She says so more than anyone. Still tries, though, doesn’t she? Some of us keep trying, Stallo. Never know when you might make headway. All the stories we read ’em and we never get to find their bones or right their old wrongs or hear their stories. Don’t you want to? Only thing I ever thought was squeamish about you. Or superstitious. Let me tell you, if you ask a question and you don’t hear any answer, and I don’t mean you you, I mean anyone, you have to work out if nothing said anything or if something didn’t say anything or if something said nothing. And if it’s the last, how to make sense of it.

—Bowler, Stallo said slowly. —You don’t sound well.

—Do you ever regret not having a kid? Bowler said. —Is that what this is, this little chitchat? You trying out being a dad? That bloody makes two of us. Bowler laughed hard.

—What does that mean? Stallo said.

—It means actions have consequences. Consequences that need dealing with.

That brought flashes of the party up behind Stallo’s eyes. The smell of booze and blare of rock, lights in all sorts of jolly colours, the terrified faces of odd little bunnies in cages, excitement among other things on the faces of comrades and strangers who shouldn’t have been there. The singer making the strangest words among others’ whoops. Eyes on, as it were, from every corner, distant approaching eyeless eyes.

—There’s no real edges between them, Bowler said, —what’s on the table and anything watching. It was as if in answer, so Stallo had to wonder what if anything he had said aloud.

—Where’d Sheila go? Bowler said then. —NAAFI Sheila?

—What? Stallo said. —Why? Long time ago, and anyway you’d know better’n me.

—Still on the payroll, I can tell you that, Bowler said. —Maybe she’s been laid up, eh? Or maybe I am a dad now after all, or maybe any of us are, maybe you are, Stallo. I’ve seen you. I saw you, mate, and her, and the rest of us.

When another memory started to come up Stallo sort of clenched.

—That night…, he said. —Down there. Christmas. I saw things. I know you did too. What’s a little red cross on a trap for?

Stallo didn’t know where that question came from.

—Ha, Bowler said. —Of all the things you might have asked about from that night, that I didn’t see coming. Chemical, biological. Apport rot might mean apport bugs and apport cures. I don’t doubt they’ll go for nuclear too if they can figure out how to apport it. What we do down there isn’t nice, that’s what I’m saying.

—It never was. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be done.

—Yeah, but it doesn’t mean it does, either.

From the shift in his voice, Stallo believed Bowler looked away.

—I don’t like standing on a pivot, Bowler said. —Brass might tell themselves nothing’s happening but you and me know that’s not true. The Dragon’s stirring, as poor old Benters would say. I did used to think a lot of Carpenter once. And she was good at her job. Croome, well she’s Croome, isn’t she? I wouldn’t trust her but good luck to her: I hope she does manage to set up her apport factory, conjure them out of base bollocks. Squeeze apportness into any old tat. And if the special ones don’t exist, maybe she can make them. Pay no attention to that fucking cube, and don’t pretend you haven’t seen it, Stallo. Bowler was speaking very quickly. —Why would I care though? What if what we’re doing is a load of shit and it was always a load of shit? I mean, I like a noble doomed cause as much as the next cunt, bit of tragedy, mmmmmm, delicious, but you get to a point, don’t you, when you think to yourself, It’s not just that you’re going to fail but you should. I mean of course. The world is going to change and it fucking should.

—You’ve been undercover too long, Stallo said. —This is standard hippie stuff, I thought you had more balls than this.

—Jesus, Bowler said. —Listen to yourself. Perfect example. If you think I’m running off to join the revolution, you’re not listening. What’s the point of that? No, I don’t blame the Reds. I don’t mean the Russians, Orel and his lot can fuck themselves too, I mean all the rest. Have at it, I want to say to them. Do what you want. Open your eyes, Stallo. Except your eyes are open, that’s what makes me sad. I’m sick of all of this, what we done to the quick and the fucking dead.

Stallo said, —They’re not the dead.

—I don’t even know what the word for you is. If someone said to me, Are you and Stallo mates?, I’d say yeah, but I don’t know what that means, or what the truth is. What even are you? How long we known each other?

—Don’t come the old soldier.

—I can’t make any sense of you. I know you’re cleverer than me, but…so…what I don’t get is why you don’t want to think. Maybe your instincts are right, staying up here now. I know you been down though, down where I am. You wouldn’t like what’s been going on but the thing is, you wouldn’t hate it enough to do anything about it. Worst of all worlds. So you turn a blind eye. Look at someone like poor old Glover. He just doesn’t think about it. Now, that I get. Or Milkman or Hook or Carpenter, on the other hand: they think about it and they’re all in. I get that. It ain’t me but I get it. Or fucking Myton, who’s so jolly bally grumpy— He put on a crude version of an RP voice, —because he thinks it’s being done wrong. I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, but I get it. You though, Stallo. You sit there, I see you, and the whole time, you’re making a decision. You’re thinking all the time about how you’re not thinking and how you’re not going to. And what bugs me about that is you’re not a sentimentalist. You know Yours not to reason why is a load of shite, so it’s like you’re obeying it and taking the piss out of it at the same time. And I judge you, mate, I do, for going along with it anyway. Jesus wept. Fucking hearts and fucking minds? Age of Aquarius? Age of Capricorn more like. Even Stirling seems to believe his own shit, he’s a god-botherer so it’s Bible-and-gun stuff, but that Capricorn African Society he started, oh they want equal rights, alright, equal rights for all so-called civilised, now that’s not quite such a kumbaya, that’s a civilising mission not done yet, that’s fucking stewardship for you, but he’s doing alright out of it, isn’t he? You’ll never lose money on White Man’s Burden. Hearts and minds and sliced gonads, and that’ll go on a long time yet but none of it can stop everything ending, and it shouldn’t, and you can give it all the big-man blather you want, Stallo, act like you don’t give a shit as much as you want, here you are, even though you’re not invested and you’re not a sadist.

—Ta very much.

—I didn’t say you wouldn’t cut off a sack if you was told to. You would. That’s my fucking point.

—Well I must say, Stallo said, —I do feel lucky to be here for your midlife crisis. It’s funny because it seems to me that the people’s friend here, Comrade Bowler, used to be a bit of an old racialist himself when it came to Dean and that, and I’m just thinking this is a bit of a dramatic way to work off your guilt, isn’t it?

He was sullen in the silence that followed and bit at the inside of his mouth. But the words already being said, he added to them.

—Maybe give Oxfam a fiver, he said, and it did not help and the quiet but for night sounds continued.

—I used to think, Bowler said, —“He’s just not a curious bloke, is he?” That’s not a crime. But it ain’t true. You read way more than me, you bone up for every mission and in between, except when I see you deliberately not doing it. When you was in Malaya chatting to the Sakai either you’re a fucking good actor—

—I am.

—Alright, we all are, but don’t try to bullshit a bullshitter. I saw you; you wanted to know the stories. You’re more than curious enough. But now you keep deciding to go along with all this and making this decision to not. Know.

—Are you finished?

—I been finished a long time. No one’s forcing you to listen. Go to bed if you want.

—Where you going to go? Stallo said.

It was a while before Bowler answered.

—Maybe…he said, —Apportville.

—What the fuck’s that? Stallo said.

—Don’t know yet. A name.

—Unit’ll be keeping a beady eye out for you. Not worried?

—I’m not as it happens. I’m nearly done. We all have to know our limits, Bowler said. —What you’re good at, what you’re bad at. The people united will never be defeated, say I, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s true. And I don’t think KH or Red Spectre if you like are going to win a war any more than we are. I’m too old and too tired to get involved with the living. Stick to what you can do something about. And I’ve got some expertise. We’ll see, won’t we? No more working like this. On anyone. Including the dead.

—They’re not dead.

Stallo waited but Bowler’s retort did not come.

Something approached though. As if a presence slipped into place from behind Stallo, stepped in front of him to watch from beneath a pelt of shadow, to block a path, and something passed him by, another vivid visitance, a rush of hot stinging dark, the smell of a man. Again, again, Stallo caught the cluck somewhere close, the whimpering call, of a baby.

—Bowler, he whispered. —What the fuck have you got? What have you took? What you done?

No sound came. He raised his weapon. Stallo rose into the fighting crouch and turned to take in every quarter of the night. The pointing sense failed. He did not shoot. He had shot people he could not see before, into darker darks than this. But he did not fire after Bowler. This was a send-off. Which thought brought to his mind Maisie’s last letter, in this imagining its pages unmarked.

Stallo envisioned Bowler, a man running, bearing something with him, heard the faintest splashes, and perhaps he did make something out now in their direction, glimmering in and out, ignis fatuus, a wisp of light in Bowler’s hands, blue, glowing.

[38]

Each time she looks in her bag again it’s with hope and fear that the paper will be gone, she’d say again if she were absolutely clear that it wasn’t within the whole time somehow behind a kink of fabric, but no there it is. Every time Maur takes it out again, the touch of it comes with cold air and her stomach turns over.

She walks without slowing so long tiredness comes for her all at once at the last, and when she stops she pulls out the letter and opens it quickly as if to catch it in a change. She reads it where she finds lights; at the corners of byways, no one in sight. Close to some antique mining tower with decommissioned wheel and a cul-de-sac. The night can’t get darker and Maur can’t keep walking forever. The thought of those cramped walls back where Stallo must be waiting—in what state?—is still impossible though. The sense of something silenced—not yet. Stay out here or return—neither thought is bearable. She reads the letter by two-up-two-downs, front doors that will open to the silent street, small garages to one side, green verge beyond concrete to the other, Rue de la Liberté, okay. Moths investigate the lamps; any other walker is a surprise, a figure from a story.

She doesn’t understand the fear that pushes her to accelerate after hours by a yard below shuttered windows uplit as if the sodium bulb here is celestial. The terror waxes at a new junction where she turns right as if to a whispered order. Watches the traffic awhile. One car is half-lit, idling where a street juts from this larger one. She marks the dim figures within and walks again. She crosses a narrow traffic and pedestrian bridge above a ring road, below the dark peak of the terril, the waste hill. Feels attention on her.

On the farther side, the edge of this town, is empty ground. Horns sound ahead. Beyond a last house, at the foot of a slope, one of those cars that came from behind and passed her has stopped ahead too abruptly. More complaints from drivers who’ve had to swerve and brake. Headlights curve and sway across an empty field. A motor guns and now lights turn to face her and shine. And they come.

—

Maur runs. Does not turn or retreat on that bridge where the car can follow. She runs forward towards it several steps and veers and jumps the low railing on the right and careers into the overgrowth, the thickets that hem the motorway and surge around the hill.

She takes uneven ground cutting over a path into the dark jumping a ditch, soil and weeds and woodland. Through the on-off traffic sounds behind her and her own labouring breath she hears the car come to a hard stop and doors slam, and running. Stems whip her. Trunks on every side, rocky ground with trash unseen among roots, she changes direction and stumbles hands out, half-falling-half-sliding down to where this meets a steeper counterslope, her jeans snagging, and she has an instant’s image of this middle-aged woman, her herself, slipping into humus, the absurdity of this flight.

She hears a shove, a pushing through the complaints of wood in her wake.

Maur huddles in a bowl of shadows at a dead-tree base. The wood whispers to her. Above her she sees the black bough shape of a catapult V, as where Ewan might have braced his weapon. Ewan what have you been and gone and done? She can’t make out those sounds of someone after her now. Soldiering is patience. Did Ewan tell her that? Did Stallo? Once she might have thought that she’d waited long enough, but Maur stays freezing and filthy and still, looking into the dark for a long long time, becoming more and more a thing of cold and the world.

Until she’s pulled back into her body out of something like sleep?—is it possible?—by careful footsteps on sticks and stones. Maur puts her hands upon her face and spreads her fingers as if she tightens a sheet upon it. She sucks as if breathing air through weave. Maybe she’s praying.

A noise comes, what might be falling, stumbling down that great made hill. She makes out movement. A man is framed on the edge of the sky. He holds, manipulates something.

Up from a lower close ridge into silhouette, as if out of the earth itself, another figure. This body moves, it is moving, in a quite wrong way.

It is rising into her perception and it comes, is coming, with speed quicker than seems possible with such clumsy and spasming stiff-limbed motion, then stopping much too suddenly. When it is still, when it is being still, its arms and legs are out according to no sense, until it’s moving again like no person running she has ever seen, coming with its head up and its mouth she’d swear open. Maur blinks. Blackness rolls in and out of her.

—

From thickets below, a new voice. The instant it ends you cannot call it to mind, cannot say if it was a woman’s or a man’s, what it said.

—

Dogs far off.

Into that canine echo a new noise. Someone gasps, is gasping, in guttural predation, coming towards her. And a rush of ruah, breath, across the declivity, something spoke something in greeting and as it whispered Maur hears a man scream, a gasp cut short. Something falls, her mind closes.

light back to her with the call of a bird.

She’s in a foetal shape. Awake in faint light. She’s shaking in sodden clothes. She sits up and pain makes her gasp.

The gorge sheens. Ice powder gyres on the slant. Maur’s gaze ascends to sun behind frost. Descends to a shape on the slope. A figure sprawled. Another, close to her. Before her. Something stands. A pillar as if of salt.

Ewan?

A figure in frost. The crystalline edges of a guard.

Nothing is still like the dead are still. Without the minute motions of blood and nerve, the warmth of life, so focused on the unworldly kindness of its overwatch, so utter was the Roused attention of this shade that it had forgotten to remember itself, forgotten to unbody, neglected to neglect to be corporeal. And was in that distraction just solid enough just long enough for the dew to settle and freeze over the gap of her absence into skin-thin morning ice. Maur knows what she sees is the instant after a leaving. Recalled to itself as Maur woke and remembering to unbe, leaving this hollow figure, afterimage, vectors of a face, body now evanescing as she watches, into cold smoke.

Maur blinks at where the statue had been.

“Did you see?” she whispers.

Not Jules’s face in cold. Nor had it been a man the frost commemorated. It was not the shape of her son that protected her and watched. It was another woman.

You have asked us to address whether certain specified techniques designed to be used on a high-value function comply with our legal obligations as outlined within the JSP 383 Joint Service Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict (2004 edition), with particular reference to Chapter 7 Section C (“The Dead”), and to the restricted EEE codicil thereto numbered 7:31.1 in the uncensored (eDV Eyes Only) edition of JSP 383. You have informed us of your intent to apply enhanced interventionary techniques upon the function, for the purposes of information extraction, and of your intent—insofar as the limits of our expertise allows—to inform the function of your intent so to do.

XX

Being of
Imminence

A Sounding

Stallo sent a brief letter full of acronyms and insinuation to R. Ganswindt at the PO box address Rak had given him at their last meeting, all that time ago. Unsure if it was still checked, he put out careful word into whisper networks too. Ask the thin man on the Camden corner twitching with what you’d reasonably think DTs. Tell the shelvers at the SPR library, those you disdain, the fences, the hawkers of spectral tat.

Where’s the helicopter priest?

He didn’t avail himself of the Unit’s Gossipeers. Best to assume interception by higher-ups.

Within three weeks he received a typewritten response. Greenshank Creek. Gibraltar Point. A given time.

He went early to that point of converging paths and sat like a vagabond whistling “The Lincolnshire Poacher.” It was a cold and watery sun illuminating him but the tune put him in mind of Cyprus, the Akrotiri station. A man came from the west.

Rak was thinner than he had been and his face was very lined. He rubbed his hands together as he came.

—So, now you find me? Rak smiled crooked.

Stallo stood and gestured and led the way across the crabgrassed ridge to see the sea.

—It’s been a while, Stallo said. The gulls shouted. —Not a peep from you either.

Rak pursed his lips. —So you hear it coming closer now?

—Yeah well. I never said you was wrong, did I? Stallo said. —How’s the cult? Rak laughed. —There’s no one else for me to ask about…Everything. What’s going on.

If you’d said to Stallo the day before Bowler went his way that he’d miss their interactions, that he’d been learning from the other man, that without that sour interlocutor his own thoughts would drift, Stallo would have asked you to toll for something by pulling the other one because it had bells on. Once, maybe, he’d have said, but not for a while. He’d have said that Bowler had been for ages now little more than a pain in his unmentionable.

—You want to ask me about the Hornet, Rak said.

—I do.

—Is closer. You hear the same in every church. Dragons with seven heads and such.

Look at those waves. As if something wasn’t coiling under there, wasn’t clenching with primordial strength. So they threw stones into the water for a bit.

—Will you tell me? Stallo said.

—So you can tell your bosses?

—I won’t be telling anyone about you. Between you, me and the gatepost, most of my bosses aren’t paying the right kind of attention. At all. Anyway I thought your whole deal was all, Do as You Will Leave Me Out of Your Petty Rotorless Squabbles.

Rak laughed. —What is coming, if it comes, it has rotors.

—For you, maybe.

—It has rotors, it has everything. So you want my help.

—I want anyone’s help. You’re just a name on a list. Sorry to disappoint. So who’s pulling for what?

Rak sat back on a throne of tufts and put his arms about his knees.

—These people, these Nergal, these Wran people…

—Yeah what are they doing? Stallo said. —To make it feel like this?

—Why do you think it’s them?

—You brought them up. Wherever I go I hear about them.

—Wherever they go they hear about you. Maybe they think it’s you, bringing this moment?

The voice in the square returned to Stallo, its carefully neutral urgency, its probing. —I deal with the dearly departed, not whatever this fucking—

—What do you think is the difference between the spirit of the dead and any other? Rak said.

—I don’t know, tell me.

—I don’t know either. What if there’s none?

Later Stallo said, —Whose do you think was the first ghost? When the first person died? Or did people die for a long while before any of them left anything behind? This prof, she’s forever telling me not to think of them like that. That they get born when people die. Maybe they’re playing a game: pretend we’re the dead.

—Playing isn’t pretend, Rak said. —Anyway, maybe they don’t get born, they’re already here waiting. But they drink death, and believe they’re what they drink. Until one of them remembers how old it really is. Maybe that’s what’s happening now.

—So what should we do? Stallo said.

—Who knows? Is it better to try to stop the end of things? Or to escape it? Everyone has a heaven. What’s your heaven? Rain? Snow? Empty city? Mountain? My heaven is me, not alone, I hold the collective and the air’s clear and we go fast, and keep going. I’m witness, okay, but to escape? Aftermath? I don’t know.

—What would it take? For you to help me?

Rak looked surprised. —Don’t I help you? I’m here. I told you what I want. Not for payment, but if you find it and you want to help me, you can give to me. I know you look for half things. I want them. A prop, engine, glass. From the old time. The wires from a PKZ…

—You can whistle for that. Nineteen eighteen?

—Oh ho. You know Petróczy and Kármán…

—I do my job, Stallo said. —So yes I do. If I’m dealing with a helicopter man, I read up on helicopters. That’s just good sense. That’s just polite. And I’m telling you that you won’t get any apports from their stuff.

Still, Stallo imagined Rak standing atop the conning tower of the PKZ2, its twin rotors screaming beneath him in that strange tethered design, swaying over the earth. John the Baptist for his later god.

—But even if I can’t get you that, Stallo said, —I do know from apports. I’ll make you a deal.

—Not everything is a deal.

—Alright, alright, you want mutual honour, that’s all very touching, but I’m offering you a deal anyway. Any copter-related apports I find, or hear about, they’re yours. And you can tell me everything you hear about what’s going on. And how to face off against whatever it is from underneath.

—From above too, Rak said. —I asked you a deal too, once.

—Look, I’m here. And you can tell me what you hear about Nergal’s lot, as well.

Rak considered. —There’s an exodus, he said. —Maybe you know. They say—

—I fucking love They say. You can get a lot done with They say.

—Okay, I say. A new place. Let my dead go! Something’s calling, and old dead are going. And not even dead only. They say.

—And this is to do with the Hornet, is it?

—To get away from the Hornet. Whatever name you give it, it’s been trying to come a long time. It’s not here yet but now people are helping it, pull it, so it’s coming quicker. You talk about Wran and General. And the other, the young one.

—Marco, Stallo said.

—Marco. A disappointment to them. He’s here.

—Here Britain?

—They say. He’s reaching.

—Wait, he’s going for your fucking Hornet?

—I only know he’s feeling for people who can call. A French woman. A fool but a strong one. And her man. That’s why I came. Yeah, because you ask me about him in your letter.

—Skully.

So they say there’s a handful of desolate Reds of esoteric bent doing as Stallo had suspected the rounds of hippies, freelancers, chancers, idiots savants, right-(or-wrong)-place-wrong-(or-right)-time bystanders, inadvertent experts. A piddling little gang but that doesn’t necessarily make it mere curio. So what if you’re the minority? Like Cromwell said, what if I put the sword in the tenth man’s hand? It’s about who they overlap with and what they’re up to, with what chance of what success. What if I put a vial, a knife, a certain book, what if I put graveyard dust and viscera in the tenth man’s hand?

—Stallo!

—Rak.

—Yes. Okay. Any copter things you find. And I’ll tell you what I hear. And you do what you must and I will get away.

—Is that it then?

—Come up with me. That astonished Stallo. Rak reached out his hand. —Come up. But you won’t, will you?

Stallo did not shake his head. He stood and walked away was all. Straight up to the ridge, where the grass shook, down to the pebbly sand.

A woman in a sari came out to put a tight-tied bag into her bin. She regarded Stallo paused outside his brother’s house. His nod of greeting did not soften her.

This was the last time Stallo would see his family.

When the conversation overcame him as he had known it would, he stood and began to shout. He was full of hate for himself that he was this man, fully in the thirties, trained into ruthlessness, to whom this could still happen. Not even at any particular word or words but at his mother’s tone, at how she looked at him, at her pauses and need. He interrupted his own raised voice after one word, —This. Then he almost whispered. —Is the last time.

—Go on then, yes, go on, get out—

—Mum, John said. —This is my house, you don’t tell people that. Steve, please, listen.

—I came didn’t I? Stallo said. —I came, I saw you, I saw her, I told you my news, that’s it.

—Done, yes, what have you gone and done, the army’s been good to you—

—Mum, please. Be quiet. Steve, what are you going to do? If you don’t want to tell me why you left that’s up to you but I thought you were doing well. It isn’t a good time to be out of work, you know.

—Don’t you worry about me. It ain’t your fucking concern.

—Mouth like that, his mother said.

—I’m done with their bullshit. I wanted to tell you and I don’t even know why. What’s up? You worried you’ll have to pay for her now?

—She lives in my house. Fair point, Stallo might have said. He could almost have laughed at his brother’s expression. Poor sod. Stallo knew this would not be the last time he helped pay.

—See? Stallo said. He reached out to pat his brother on the shoulder and was sad that John flinched. —See what she does? This is what happens. This is the last time.

As he stood to leave his brother held his mother back as if she would try to run for her older son. She did not move but she did call something after Stallo, it was incomprehensible, and she might have been bidding him to go or to come back.

—I’m off out of it, Rene, he said from his own bed into the quiet. —I told you I was done with the army before. Meant it too even if it turned out it wasn’t done with me. This time.

As he now even whispered to her a very little of what he had done for more than a decade, breaking the ultra-hush codicils of the Official Secrets Act, his eyes did fill a little bit apropos of no thought or memory of her in particular.

He still called himself Stallo. When asked the name’s source he would say Long story, or to some he might say Man of steel like Dzhugashvili and make them laugh. Mostly he said as little as feasible, still sat near the back of lectures at the Africa Centre, the Swedenborg Society. He worked on building sites. Attended street meetings. Might hear that this person or that was in town, a friend of a friend of thus-and-so, names he continued mentioning himself judiciously at the edge of conversations, Rais something, Katashi something, because he knew that like lost objects, like keys and coins, like found like, that the names would return to him. You know that French bird you were asking about? and so on. Waited.

He grew his beard and it was greyer than he had imagined it would be. He tied back his hair. He smoked outside reading groups in long light evenings with men and women a decade his junior then went back in to help clear up the chairs. He danced and drank faster than them. He spoke a little more quickly than he would by nature. Twice he brought women back to his flat, young women, big eyed and big coated, one shrewd, one dozy, and with neither could he get it up, and that had happened before on the odd occasion of course, plumbing’s plumbing, but he didn’t like it more than he had not liked it before.

—You don’t know some of the things I done when I was in the services. I can’t talk about what I done and what I seen.

As if this were not true.

—That stays with you, Stallo would say. —You don’t just walk away from that. Something stays with you.

Glance into the most shadowed corner in any room. Come to a sort of arrangement with what walked with him. If I were scared of you, it’d be like this.

—I’d give a lot for some release, he said to those who’d listen. —I feel like something out there’s straining, wants something, you know?

Alone in his flat Stallo might slide out from under the bed his locking safe and open it and haul out his patched-up oscilloscope and attach it to the mains and let it run. Turning the dial all one way, all the other, lit like a sailor lost in a storm.

[39]

Maur rises from the dawn hillside; she runs her hands in the threadlike roots where the ice fell, where her watcher was. She sees herself as if from outside herself, a pose like Stallo’s digging for treasure in the battlefield. That vision, of useless endeavours, brings her to a stop, and she squeezes mud through her fingers, leaving something hard and irregular in her left hand. A grey stone. That she examines and discards.

She trudges, quivering with cold, eyes down as if she might discern tracks of people walking together, piled up, pyramid or tower. She goes to where a man lies dead in dark and nondescript clothes.

He looks up with an expression of perfect misery, lips pulled back, teeth bared, cords tight in his neck. Where his heart is, the black parka and his body within are iced and stiff. She unzips it and feels in every pocket, not even flinching. Finds no phone, no identification, no money.

Maur piles up sticks upon him to hide him at least a short while. Sits by the mound and listens to occasional cars beyond the green. After a time she stands and goes back to where the frost covered her visitor and drops and pushes her hands back into the dirt and brings up every stone she finds. Examines them and throws them away until after many tries, though nothing like so many as she would have thought, here, not by the sea, what she holds is holed, all the way through. She wipes earth from it and drops it into her bag and does it up again, and it’s as if her ears stop up some.

She doesn’t know what route she ran through this tree place in the night. She steadies herself against trunks and makes for the traffic sounds and in such fashion finds herself—up down uneven ground and over a stream, remember that?—in a runnel where the density and height of the plant life ebbs. By the brick wall of a house. This is the edge of the slag heap’s thickets, so much smaller in area than it seemed in the dark. The sky is whitening. She waits while vehicles pass, west, into the town. Until shivering overcomes her and she stumbles into the day, heads for that bridge over the motorway, to run her route backwards as exactly as she can, to ask directions if she must, to keep going according to that tug within, to return to where, as she thought he must be, knowing for all his anxiety and anger what his least bad option is, Stallo is waiting for her.

He’s at the door when she reaches it at last. He takes hold of her and she tries to speak through the chattering of her teeth, to say We have to go right now.

They found me, a man and another man, or something like a man. But something else came and saved me. She tries to say all that, and she will, but first he draws her in into a functional warming embrace.

All Angles

—Sergeant Allardyce, if you please, Hook might say. —Once again. So, now word is out that you’ve, ahem, left, and as an ostentatiously disgruntled ostentatiously ex-soldier, you are, in the eyes of those who concern us, an object of even greater fascination than before. Who is it you’re speaking to? From where are you getting such hints as these you graciously pass on?

We’re all of us going through the motions eh sir? When you can’t shake the feeling that every time you try to communicate the trouble you feel ahead, you’re ignored. So not being as sure as I’d like to think that our superiors won’t squander ’em, you’ll forgive me if I keep a few of my secrets. Let’s keep Rak himself to, well, myself, for a start, eh? No point flagging a chap like him for the attention of the Ruperts.

—You know what it’s like, sir, Stallo said.

—Not really. I do take seriously your concerns, for all their vagueness. You don’t have to quote to me Dr. Croome on intuition in re your mutterings of storm clouds.

In what a shabby shed in what a trim little garden they met. Below these tools. By such old mugs still stained by tea, run through by spiders. In what dusty light and the smell of what peat. Whose place was this? What retired old soldier-medium or their child granted access? Stallo felt that now, clouds having been mentioned, Hook should say something of Myton and his eccentric informant. But Hook did not.

—You’ll never guess whose name’s cropped up again, Stallo said. —Marco.

—But when haven’t Marco and Wran and Nergal and the fleers from Léopoldville been held to be doing devilish work under the bed?

—I’m not sure we should put them all in one pot, though. And it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it.

—Nor indeed it does. We shall continue to keep our shell-likes down.

Which sent through Stallo a vivid sense of the press of the pavement to the side of his head, a wash of tides audible, the beach beneath.

There was something to admire in Hook’s commitment to his airy and unruffled tone no matter how his own power waned within his organisation, that organisation’s within the military, that military’s within the government it served, that state’s within the world.

—How worried are you? Stallo said.

—I’m always worried, Hook said. And to be fair he did seem to be trying to communicate a little something extra with his eyes. —Why after all this time can’t we get a mole in KH? Poor old Moscow’s an increasingly leaky ship, meanwhile. A good bit of what we know about Nergal’s crew comes from that side of the curtain.

—Yeah always was and I’m still not sure Kowalchuk doesn’t sign off on that.

—Well, said Hook. —I couldn’t possibly comment. Though it is hard to imagine the Russians enthralled by the state of the Left right now. Have you heard of the Peoples Temple? There’s quite the growing overlap between ITKO freelancers and that odd crew. Meanwhile KH, as you imply, keeps straining between the youth and the greybeards.

Such wards as they had here could not, circumstances had persuaded Stallo, successfully repel those dead which really wanted to listen. But it was so very impossible to imagine his aunt at the corners outside, pressing her non-face into the wall. He did not know why, alongside his mother and brother and whoever else would hear him out that he had quit, he had made the claim to Rene, alone of all across the border. Thoroughness? It was hardly foolish to consider the Summerlands a potential adversary, was it? Particularly now? And she wouldn’t ever set out to do him wrong but then that wasn’t how betrayal always worked. Still, it had felt strange to dissemble to the loved dead.

—I’m always worried, Hook was saying. —The thing is, though, if you ask me, whether the oppo know it or not, however long it takes for the insight to settle, we’ve won. At least for now. I’m not saying we’ve no reason to be wary. But you can’t tell me you’ve no confidence that things are going our way.

Some, perhaps, but not enough. Was it Stallo reached out to Myton or Myton Stallo? Silly question. Stallo had this number, Myton that, and an address. After his debriefs with Hook, Stallo might end up in call boxes, feeding in coins and muttering into the receiver.

—So you trust your source? Myton said.

—I mean, “trust,” Stallo said. —What’s that even mean? I don’t think he’s lying, put it that way.

—So our little rebel Marco may be here. Myton sounded as if he were at the end of a tunnel. —And Hook…

—He thinks we’ve won. Father Kelly was a big fuckup for KH.

—But? Myton said.

—But if you ask me that’s when things get most dangerous. Things are going wrong for them. Whether or not they know that we’ve had the odd snafu too. What might their desperate measures be?

—Do tell.

—They’re going to go for broke, aren’t they? They want to change the world. No time like the present. And they’re going to want help.

—Help doing what?

—Yeah and what help? From who, for what?

—Do you have answers to these excellent queries? And just precisely which “they” are you talking about anyway?

—I can’t stop thinking about your mate Benters and what he said….

—Oh for goodness’ sake.

—The usual “they,” of course, though if I’m reading the tea leaves the Gen’ral and Marco aren’t eye to eye. Intel has Marco in touch with the oddballs and bullshitters. Useful idiots at best. Which is why my ears are pricking up. He’s no idiot, so what does he want idiots for?

—Of course I agree with you on the precautionary principle, Myton said, —which is why you’re talking to me. You and I have a different take on things than do your brass. Speaking of which, what’s happening re Bowler?

—I don’t know, do I? No one does. He disappeared.

—Exactly my point, Myton said. —About which other missing, AWOL, mutinous, mysterious, disgruntled ex-soldier who falls off the map are there no rumours? About whom is it taboo to speculate? I’m all for breaking taboos, so let me tell you what little I’ve managed to source. He’s dead; he’s living in Surbiton, cue the joke about there being no distinction; he’s Roused; he’s working for the MOD; he’s a mercenary; he’s setting up his own town; he’s joined a cult; he’s in hiding; he’s a single father; he’s fighting for the other side.

—Which other side?

—The Red or the dead. It’s a shame. I always saw you two as a team. I’ve known a few good men go native before. A higher proportion of them than of the average soldier, in fact. I suppose you have to understand the enemy and the weaponry to do this job well, and perhaps it’s a short step from there to sympathy. Do we need to worry about you, Stallo?

—Not hardly.

—I daresay not.

—Stallo?

And he’d say the name of whichever old contact he as-if chanced into meeting. Daniel. Mira.

—How’ve you been, man? I heard about you and Maisie, I’m sorry.

—She was always too good for me.

He did think about Brighton, ice creams and fags and chips and Maisie amid the promenaders in some pretty number. Or some sort of housecoat over her swimming cozzie, stepping down onto the sand and pebbles.

—Stallo!

—Alison.

It was not too hard to fascinate.

—Hey, he might say. —Can I ask you…

—Maisie doesn’t talk to me, Stallo. I’m sorry.

—Stallo!

—Amy.

About time.

—It’s really really good to see you. I’ve been wondering where you’ve been.

Never mention the actual targets, of course. Instead get round to: —Where’s Jeff?

—Oh. Who knows?

Amy had cut her fringe to frame those remarkable eyes. She peeked out at him from behind her cigarette smoke.

—You not in touch?

—Why? Amy said. She laughed. —Aren’t I enough?

—More than, he said. —It’s just some of the stuff he was into, people he told me he knew. I miss my aunt, you know?

Among the questions Stallo might ask whomever he spoke to, was what Rak had asked of him. What’s your heaven? He sought in the answer permission to know his own.

—The northern lights, Amy said. —Forever and ever.

At that he felt his own heaven at the horizon of his attention, receding. A sense of a full-length mirror, a weighted cord dividing it in austere scission.

There was no dissembling when Stallo reached across the rickety sticky tables to grip Amy among other fellow drinkers and say, —I just feel like I want it all to come crashing down.

With each epoch comes its habitus. To see the bowed stances of walkers on London streets was for him to know that his own pose had folded too, that he was of that ilk now. On the lookout. Don’t rush. Just, you know, also chop chop. Stallo would let the right people find him closer to the spirituality sections of the bookshop than the politics now.

—This? Well it’s a perfume bottle if you must know. Yeah ho ho. No it was my aunt’s. She passed away. Yeah thanks. Yeah, I thought the world of her if you must know. Yeah, I’d give a lot to have a chinwag.

Days stretched out, then slopped abruptly. Viscous. He would have been glad of the old control fugue just then to be honest. He visited a few from his list of the subpar and not inclined to discretion. Some poor old boy up Tottenham way aimlessly threw chicken bones for him. A prim queeny man in a sumptuous Chelsea flat who regarded him with dislike. A young Portuguese woman in Ravenscourt Park sitting by Chico Xavier books ran a pencil over paper for several minutes in ugly spirals before telling him his aunt did not wish to speak.

—Thing is it ain’t just her. I done things I ain’t proud of, he recited. I feel like something’s waiting, for a reckoning. A tower. A jail made of them I…well. Come walking.

—Honestly I thought Maisie was kind of a cow to you.

Amy looked up at him, pouting around the fag end. He went home with her. A mean Willesden basement. She must have been nearly his age and this was student stuff still, batiks, piled-up books. Her bed unmade. After they were done he made sure to disappear from her circle for a few days, then return to her flat late with an air of unease.

—What is it? she said.

—Just dealing with stuff.

He saw her concern. They fucked. She cooked him eggs. She said, —You know me and Maisie fell out? I never felt like she was that serious, if you know what I mean. I mean, yeah, she was about her writing. Christ though, she could be…I mean, get over yourself, yeah? She gave me shit. You never know what’ll get to you. And then, I mean, her dropping out of touch with Alison. And…and with Sten too. I mean, I didn’t care that she didn’t want to talk to me, but it was shitty for her to drop them like that.

Stallo made sure not to look at her too hard.

—It was weird because the stuff she’d take the piss out of me for she’d been into herself. All of us were. She made spooky fingers. —Weejy boards at fourteen. Convent girl, what can I say? Some things stick. I mean, it’s not like I don’t know it’s a bit silly, but it’s interesting too, isn’t it?

He took his time.

—I don’t know, he said slowly. —Do the sort of things I’ve done, and a closed mind don’t help you. I wouldn’t take the piss.

She took him to the Spotted Dog. Back to Jeff Ogier at last. His face! Lemon-sucker. Jeff had put on weight.

—Stallo, he said. —Good to see you. The fucking state of things, eh?

—Stallo’s been in a bit of a way, Amy said.

—I’m sorry, mate.

Stallo said, —You never met Rene, did you? Maisie did, they liked each other. Rene kept me sane. She deserved a lot better in some ways. I mean who doesn’t? Look at me. Come on, Jeff, I’m not an idiot, I know what you lot were always saying when I was with Maisie. Having the odd pop at soldier boy? Oh calm down I don’t blame you. Queen and country my arse. Now where am I? In a bedsit missing my aunt and told thanks very much, now fuck off. What’s it all about? Do you still do any of that tarot and stuff? I’ll tell you the truth, I went to a—ah, it doesn’t matter, ignore me. It was Maisie told me about it and I thought, Well that’s bollocks. But you’ll try anything when you’re miserable, won’t you? You sit in a circle with those fucking losers though and think, Am I as bad as this lot? Kill me now. Only give me a chance to take a few of the brass with me, the fuckers up top. It was them taught me what to do, so I might as well give it back to them, eh? Be with you in a minute, Auntie Irene.

He drank a long draught. Listened to the pound and clattering bells of a fruit machine and someone’s delight.

—I wish I could make a few amends for some of what I’ve done, Stallo said. —But I don’t know how. For who.

—I get it, Jeff said. He and Amy looked at each other. —I heard you were asking around actually. You went to see Dougal about your aunt, didn’t you? Did he chuck those greasy bones? You’re wasting your time with him.

—Fuck you mate, Stallo said. Yes, that was how to do it, he made sure to get his voice cold. —It’s not your business who I talk to.

—I wasn’t taking the piss. The opposite: I might be able to help. And what you were saying about being angry with everything? Like you’ve been fucked over? He paused. —Have you heard of Victoria Woodhull?

You can start the clock when someone brings up Woodhull or Claflin. The trick now was to need to be persuaded. So Stallo said, —No, and showed cautious interest at Jeff’s description. Abolitionist free-loving spiritualist sort-of Communist.

—Thing is, some people reckon it’s all connected, Jeff said. —The politics and the other stuff.

That night Stallo called Myton and then Hook. To each of them he said: —Here we go.

Stallo came to Jeff and said with guarded excitement that he’d heard someone serious might be in London from abroad, Mark was it, Marcus?

—I don’t know about that, Jeff said. —What is it you’d want to say to your aunt?

What if she were here? There on the corner, hand on hip just so, that stance as if she passed out with pride, first class, from the School for Brassy Aunts. Steve-o, darling, what the bloody hell are you up to? Aren’t you ashamed? In the voice of an audience. To use your aunt like this? To flash her memory as part of this whole plan?

Stallo had to actually think out words to himself, in response. No, mate, not at all, and It isn’t as if I don’t mean it. There came the pride that comes from being perfectly professional. Using whatever you had. Stallo watched himself from within giving excellent Lost Soul.

He couldn’t just wait now Jeff was snared. Had to keep it up, still be seen, in both realms. Electric Avenue, a clamorous meeting against police assaults. Church hall in Southwark. The speaker a Swede from Chilekommittén, citing Allende in that singsong accent. Stallo stayed ready to slide notes over to more charlatans as necessary. Show them Rene’s photograph. From before she got sick. Or before it showed, who knew what it was he’d looked at beneath her skin while she’d said, —Oh, Steve-o? No. That’d been Maisie’s name for him, not his aunt’s, or was it both? Had Irene taken it from his wife? Why are we still married? Could you put your hand on your heart, Stallo, and say you fought for her to stay? Did you want to? Stallo do you know? Should he ask Irene to tell Maisie hello? Knock pictures off her wall Auntie Rene. Tangle up in her bedsheets, yeah especially if someone’s in there with her, look at them with a crumpled face.

A party in Peckham. To walk into the rich stink and raucousness of the flat was to know something would happen. Whispering below the droning rock, as if he were being taunted. Well fuck you, world, he knew better than to show anything at that but patience.

So he grew drunk enough but not too drunk, jigging slowly up and down, swigging and smoking what was given to him. A bit of up-down to the old reggae. Once when this Toots and Maytals tune came on Bowler had called it Reggie Music in a comic old-man voice. Stallo had laughed. He laughed again in the middle of the floor because Hook and Carpenter came into his head and it didn’t seem realistic that they should exist in the same world as this music. It couldn’t not take him back to parties with Maisie. If you were here you’d be one of the decrepit, like me, darling. Nothing more drably dull yet compelling than the strangeness of ageing. Someone pinched his bum. Someone who wanted some grizzled Mellors. Come on Stallo how old do you think you are? Snogging some bird who tasted of wine. A tone to her skin, as off she went, and he wondered if she had what his mum called a lick of the ahem brush, her words, Dean, you know I don’t care, just noticing is all, my job is to notice certain things.

A French woman was yammering to him though he could barely hear, so he let his mouth get on with answering her questions, she was a bit of alright, had a few years on him and a sort of annoyed curtness to her, big wavy hair, staring with that intense expression, full of, well, Frenchness, though he’d probably have thought it -ness about wherever she’d been from. Whatever it was she’d asked and of what his mouth was speaking, a few bits and bobs made his ears prick up, names he’d told Jeff or Jeff had said to him. Where was Jeff? Where was Amy? That was him asking that.

Anyway. How Stallo’s bones shook.

The woman said, —Who? and she was answering him, and what he heard himself say was, —Mark, is it, Marco? That’s all I heard, and she said, —Why? and he said, —I don’t know just sounds like someone with an interesting way of looking at the world.

It was late and the bricks vibrated with the bass, so neighbours must have been unable to sleep and too afraid to complain. It was not nice of him but for that minute that made him happy.

Stallo woke in a top-floor room, in—miracle of miracles—a bed. Asleep beside him tangled in dirty sheets, the French woman. Blimey yeah they had. What drunk enthusiasm. He pulled on his pants and trousers and wandered past dozers on sofas to the kitchen. A man naked by the fridge turned to regard him.

—Yes, he heard behind him. He blinked. The woman had followed him and it was not easy to do so without his knowing. She stood draped in his shirt. To the other man she said, —This is him.

The man nodded and drank a glass of water. He wiped his hand on a tea towel. He was about her age. His hair was greying brown and cut short. He’d been slimmer not long ago, you could see. His pale prick stubbed out below that belly like a thumb. The woman stood alongside him.

—Jeff said you might be here, the man said. —This is Isabella. You’re Stallo. I’m Jonno Skully.

[40]

Stallo and Maur go a long way into the lovely countryside, past twists of wire on posts and tire tracks that seem to mark edges of something, looking constantly around as if that might help against what wants them. Deep into landscape.

“You used to hear stories,” he says. “You name it you’d hear someone say it. A Shangri-la of revs and quick.” He lines up tins and empty glass bottles in a crooked row on a fallen tree. “Might as well stick to tradition. Ever done this before?”

“Of course not,” Maur says. From his bag he takes out a shotgun and gives it to her. Holds her arms and guides her. She cradles it and tries to follow his injunctions. Pulls the trigger and the bellow of it and the panic of the birds and the shove of the stock into her body stagger her.

Stallo laughs. “Didn’t think that was possible,” he says. There’s not a mark on the trunk and all the cans and bottles still stand. He shows Maur how to reload. She tries again. This time the howl of fire takes a bite from the log and makes what Stallo laid upon it fall. Maur’s heart goes hard and she feels as if she’s leaking. The wordless speech of the weapon pleases her. Stallo puts the targets back and walks behind her and says, “Off you go”; she fires and a brown bottle bursts and its pieces go high and a shard sends a neighbouring can dancing.

The heft of the pistol makes Maur clumsy. Stallo hesitates, then stands to show her how to, up, legs braced, arm extended at the shoulder. “Like this for you I think.” She grips it in both hands. “Gently. Breathe out.”

This recoil pushes her hands up. There are no birds to scream by now. Maur laughs with adrenaline and takes four more shots and hits a can on the last one. She imagines bullets haring through the air of the forest taking out animals in their passing.

“This is how you open it,” Stallo says. “Now you show me. This is how you load it. Show me.”

Those pursuers had hardly chanced on her. If they’ve found us there’ll be others coming, Stallo said. How the fuck? How the fuck?

They’ll go straight from this forest to get the papers, then to the border.

“Why’d you leave?” he said on her return. When she said nothing, Stallo went into his bag and sifted through the hagstones Maur had already found and felt she could not yet carry. He gave her two according to some criteria. She opened her handbag and dropped them in with what she’d gathered and closed it. “Give me your clothes.” He spent an hour stitching tiny angular marks into everything she had, in red thread, two overlapping Vs like a cross-topped W, a Y with a hooked tail. She could only say that she had had to leave. And tell him what she’d seen.

“There were two?” he said.

“Yes. But one was…it didn’t move like anything I’ve ever seen.”

“And then—”

“And then there was only one. The other, the one more like a real man. But dead now. And the other one was gone.”

“Shade Army,” he said. “Azeri’s soldiers.”

“How did they track us?” Maur said. Closed her hands on her bag and hesitated.

“I’ll do more defences,” he said. “But we really have to go.”

“Why did they come for me?” Maur said. “They would have got me. If not for. The revenant.” He stared. Now she hesitates at ghost. “I saw what it left behind. It wasn’t Ewan.” She struggled to speak. “But I think it protected…Whatever it did when it touched the one guy. But. And I don’t think it was Jules. If you told me they were watching too, I could maybe believe it. But it wasn’t them.” He waited. “It might have been…”

“You know who,” he said.

“It was too quick, I couldn’t make it out,” Maur said. Then: “But it”—and she left a curse-shaped gap of silence—“could’ve been her.” A little joke. Maur doesn’t know if she smiled. The way the mouth was. In the ice. As if it had just spoken. While Maur slept. The frost gave those lips a shape. As if the last thing they said was, Listen.

“I had this dream once.” Maur remembers the sense of the sun thudding constantly into the earth of the hill and the bricks of that shuttered house and the great slowly turning figure. She cannot find a way to say it that will invoke it with what it deserves—an old dream problem—and anyway she can’t make out why she’s moved to describe it to Stallo now. Her mouth opens and closes. So many ghosts in so many ghost stories fail to speak, in that moment her own ghostliness. It puts her in mind of how Ewan strained, even before he died, and how she struggled with that.

Stallo tells her about a haunted ghost that came to do its scare business while trying not to glance over its own spectral shoulder. He says, “There’s always logic to haunting.”

“Everything happens for a reason?” Maur says.

“Not what I said.”

To be haunted’s to be a vector—repeat it. Haunting is transferable.

Maur, finally, says, “You think it was her? That came?”

“It can’t have been sick. Still strong.”

Are you proselytising, Cybill? Being proselytised to? With what notions?

Maur can tell Stallo’s considering something. Maybe that Why did you fucking leave again? he’s still not given full throat to and which she can’t answer. She hasn’t clocked until now how she’s been learning him.

He says, “Did you ever read Dennis Wheatley?” Well of all he could have said. “Of course not, that’s…She’s of that thing. The Azeri. That’s what this is about. That’s why she wants what she wants. We’ve been talking about her calling it but you could say it’s the other way around, she’s its instrument.”

She doesn’t hear it of course but Maur knows now of a signal beyond sound. There can be no verb for her new sensing action any more than there can be a noun for what it apprehends. Amid the trees, holding a gun with fascination, Maur flexes the new organ within her, straining,      ing, believing that this clarion is not for her but for what wasn’t there again today, making her a scandal, an eavesdropper among the dead.

Edgehill, Chickamauga, Japanese officers stalking. Sailors coalescing out of spills on the Arizona, looking up from sunken decks. The huakaʻi pō marched through the night with torches and weapons. (You can make a gost out of nothing. Cut it from whole cloth, perform the mummery. Whisper to, call it Philip, call it Aylesford, give it a life, sing to it, hold hands, feel the table move. No such man ever lived. This is curio with no killing power.) The Phocians sent gypsum-covered men against Thessalians, mumming the umbra feralis exercitus, dead units; the Harii send their army of the gone; the Apturgöngur were those who once returned of their own will. They won’t help you. You need a necromancer to rouse the Uppvaknínkgar, other commanded dead who walk because of intercession. Who’ll upawaken the upawakened?

A thousand years ago, Walchelin saw demons goad a dead army through England. He called them the Black Battalion. He called them the Phalangelem Aethiopicum.

XXI

Spell and
Null

Women

Stallo met them as per their plan at a lockup under the brick arches of King’s Cross. Seven punters waited in the dark, Isabella and Jonno Skully among them. They did not acknowledge him. A fat woman sat back from the table. She was all rings and scarves. Stallo had been here in 1966, had judged her a fraud who didn’t know it. He waited out her wheezes and muttering but rose to go as soon as Madam Baraby opened her eyes. He let Skully and Isabella catch him up at the alley entrance. —That was a waste of my fucking time, he said. —This is all bullshit. He put sorrow in it.

—Hey, Jonno Skully said. —Had to know you can tell.

—We know some people who’d really like to hear from you, Isabella said.

—Yeah, Jonno said. —Ex-soldier and all. Real insight.

He liked to talk in that clipped way. Sometimes, with the cold generosity of an enemy, Stallo thought Jonno did it adequately well, other times that he sounded like a puppet in a Punch & Judy show. Mr. Spooky Left.

—What have I got to say? Stallo said. He took a punt. —With your lot it’s all anti-imperialism this and Nergal that….

They were good at showing no response if they did know the name.

—Come on, Skully said. —You could do real good. Britain’s role? Insider perspective?

Nothing to do with manifestation, just pure politics, not pure pure of course because they knew that talking about politics without talking about haunting meant not telling the truth, but the whole story as far as most in the room would be concerned.

—One reason I wish I could talk to my aunt, Stallo said, —is the stuff I never had out with her. She was too kind to me if you ask me. She never made me do nothing I didn’t want to, which would have included really telling her things. Maybe sometimes the best way to help someone is to get them to do stuff they don’t want to. I mean, who knows what they want anyway? Everyone’s always got the same question, he said. —If they know you been in the forces.

He saw their churchy respect.

—I’ll tell you this, he said.

It was as if the forest had delivered him, remember? Leaf parts coming up as that CT fell back with concentration. —So this bloke was— Stallo began. And then, surprising him, though he saw clearly again his old mate the First Time, and though he had intended to say more, no more came.

—There are people, Isabella said. —Here to try things. To make things happen. Make things better. We’ll talk.

Jeff said, —It’s cool. It really is. I was wanting to be the one to put you and them together, but what’s important is that it’s happened.

Yeah Stallo made sure to meet him, once every two or three times Jeff suggested it. Mention market outlets where crap either apport or adjacent might just possibly be obtained, the sort of intel a dogged newcomer might ascertain. If Jeff’d ever actually touched a rev or its leavings, could he really be this something-or-other, whatever the adjective was? Everyday? Okay it might not leave him glossolalic but you’d imagine something. What an indictment if not. Give him a tremor at least. Stallo came with pamphlets in his pockets. From groups that he chose from across a spectrum as if he were too naïve to discern the contradictions between their various positions, British Imperialism Out of Ireland, The European Community: A Trotskyist Critique. It seemed to him not likely Jeff could rigorously appreciate the minutiae either, but a) better always to over- than underestimate your contacts, and b) what if Jeff was describing to someone else less guileless the reading matter Stallo left by his pints? It wasn’t likely just Skully and Bella who had their eyes on him.

—Look after her, mate, Jeff said one time. —I miss her, you fucking…I don’t mean it, you’re alright, just tell her, oh, I don’t know. She won’t talk to me no more.

Stallo had not called nor seen Amy for many days and he ignored the messages she left on his machine. But a couple of nights after Stallo had pushed the lachrymose Jeff into a taxi and given the driver money (—When you kick him out tell that cunt he owes me a fiver), he heard a knock, and looking through the peephole he swore silently because it was neither Isabella nor Skully but Amy in glitzed-up clothes, makeup smudged.

When he came out her eyes took a minute to fix on his and she said, —Hey, and breathed wine on him and started to fall forwards into a sticky snog and he gave her a quick bit of tongue, then pushed her back out over the threshold and her stare went outraged.

—Who let you in downstairs?

—One of your neighbours, baby. Where’ve you been? I’ve been worried. Why are you being a dick?

—Amy.

—No no no. She held her hands up and shook her head. —I’m sorry. You just disappeared, that’s no way to, okay, sorry, I don’t…I’ve been worried about you. I’ve been dreaming about you.

—For fuck’s sake.

—You’re not listening. I feel bad. That French bitch wants to know what’s got your goat? Stallo, listen. She glanced over his shoulder. —Who’s in there with you?

—Amy. He went to close the door.

—I’m worried about you, she said. —There’s something bad!

—Go home, he said.

—Do you think I’m shit or something?

—Keep your voice down, it’s two in the morning.

—Where do you get off talking to me like that? Come on, I just want to talk to you….

Stallo said, —I said keep it the fuck down.

Amy took a step away and said, very loud, —I don’t care who hears.

Now he raised his hands and her eyes went wide and she was shouting, —Don’t you touch me, don’t you touch me! and she cried out as Stallo gripped her hair at the back of her neck and steered her for the stairs. She hit him ineffectually, calling him a fucker, then saying that he was scaring her, he blocked her blow and descended and she stumbled clawing at his fingers so on the floor below he turned her and slapped her face.

He said, —Oh give over, that was a fucking tap because you’re fucking hysterical.

The flat entrance by which they stood opened a tiny bit and Stallo looked at the old couple in their nightgowns and said, —Get back inside. They did, they closed the door.

He pulled her down the last two floors and Amy went from begging to calling him a cunt to, in the entrance hall, saying, —I just want to talk, I just want to see you, and he opened the main entrance into the cold and orange lamplight of the night and said, —Don’t come around here, and he pushed her and she tottered out onto the forecourt and almost fell.

—Go home, Amy.

He closed the door; she hammered on it. He waited. He ascended. The noise continued. From behind one of the ground-floor doors someone shouted, —I’m calling the police!

Stallo went up. Turned off the lights in his flat and opened his living room window and looked out. You could hear her, alternately knocking, quietly now, then bellowing his name. You could see her shadow by briar-tangled bins. She stamped her feet. It looked like cold not petulance. There came no sirens. She went to stand under the tree, then sat with her knees up leaning back against it and lit a cigarette and he watched that cherry in the black a minute, then sat with his own back to the wall. When he looked again a glow was still there, she must have lit another, go home Amy, by those brambles seeming to reach for her, predatory or protective, tender, almost, urgent.

Since when was Stallo in the bathroom? Since when had he been staring not at nothing nor down at the street and the plaintive sot but his own ghastly mug lit wrong in the grey of his toilet light, the bog gurgling, the taps too, look at that, water in and out of his cupped hands? No window in here so back out sharpish and it was a jot less of a dark sky out there, so how long?

Stallo clenched and unclenched his shaking hand. No Amy, but the thorns still swayed, for his attention, like a figure just taken leave of Stallo’s body. You, that he said without a sound, as if the bushes might catch it, as if any control that had taken his medium skin awhile, for whatever purpose, might linger enough in his mouth to taste that word.

He gripped the windowsill. Look it was not yet dawn. —What? he said.

I’ve been dreaming about you, she had said. Ah isn’t that fucking adorable? Yeah but no you clot, what if she didn’t mean it like that? Who’s in there with you?, and what if she didn’t mean it like that? The tangled vegetation nodded.

Stallo took his spear and a pistol from beneath the floorboards and ran down into the yard by those three crushed cigarette butts, could’ve been three minutes or two hours, if he could get his head straight he’d know from the sky. He ran into the glow of the main street, not quite deserted, made for the minicab dispatcher but thought she might have walked home though it was a mile and change, and how could he know? He couldn’t but here he was, running again, the most obvious route from his to hers, his breath easy, bamboo in his hand, what a sight, lucky it was still the night.

He stopped at the corner of Amy’s street in the lee of a high wall. By a wheelless bike he descended the curving steps to her basement where between closed curtains a potted plant struggled. He rang the bell. He took out his pocketknife and pressed the door and moved the blade into the gap by the lock and it came open and he entered and gently closed the door behind him. Stood in the fighting crouch. In the dark amid Amy’s scattered things. Kept his weapons up.

Whether it was he who started to walk or his body was nothing to consider now. Into her room. He pointed his gun into each corner. The breathing he heard was deep and steady but not that of sleep. A figure on the bed. Not lying, not beneath the covers, sitting facing him.

He aimed; his eyes did not adjust. His skin was tight on him. Stallo said, —Amy. Nothing changed. He dropped the staff and found the light switch. —Amy. He lowered the pistol.

She sat topless, very still. Her shirt and bra lay crumpled. A locket glinted between her breasts. She sat with her left shoe off and her right foot on her left knee and she was holding the right shoe in both hands. She stared.

—Amy. She stared. Not at him. She stared at the doorway and he did not recall ever seeing any human eyes so stretched with fear.

He moved and her eyes did not and there was nothing in them, her mouth was open in that dreadful dread and out of it dripped spit onto her lap. He kneeled before her. Saw the size of the pool of drool. Her body breathed. He did not want to touch that face.

[41]

Maur peels a pad from between her legs. She sees herself as Stallo, a way off in this car-park basement, must see her, her back against this pillar with its craquelure and exhaust, her bag closed beside her. She examines herself, her legs apart, skirt rucked up, fingers on her lips, a Paula Rego pose, without shame in Stallo’s view. Having come by chance into her privacy he won’t rush to extricate himself. She unfolds the rag; you can’t mistake the wet on it for blood, as if it weren’t too late for that. Maur touches, and what her fingertips shine with is a greasy slip nearly clear as snot.

“That’s not great for avoiding attention,” Stallo says. He doesn’t raise his voice.

“Any suggestions?” Maur says.

“Flush,” he says. “And chuck a hagstone down. And keep a bunch of others on you. And distance. And cross fingers.” He throws a chocolate bar. She keeps her hands on her cunt, and the food skitters into the space between her feet.

They pass through non-spaces. Border towns where Stallo has left caches in strongboxes in ask-no-questions electronics stores. Burner and satellite phones, digital cameras and euros. He drives them as quickly as he can while still following ward routes he shows her on the map. “No, no clue why it works. To the extent it does.”

In Namsos he hires a small motor home. The sky is low. They trace the intricacies of the coast and cross the wire-angled Brønnøysund Bridge. This freezing water is clear enough that you can see the sand beneath it.

“We’re here because I used to have mates here,” Stallo says. She can feel him growing more calm. “AFNORTH and whatnot. That was thirty-odd years ago, mind, so…But that’s why we’re here, always felt a connection. And the place we’re going—well, I had hopes. That’s why I dropped this stuff there. Just in case.”

Cruise ships navigate at the edge of things, and watching the water, Maur imagines dark flukes breaching. The buildup of town outskirts, modern concrete and fabular buildings in red-painted wood, birch and firs on half-barren slopes, the fantastic austerity of watching rocks. They take roads past those gingerbread-style houses. Stallo slows and by that stretching water and a rise of dark stone and in a flat field is the ugly white of other mobile homes below. Early morning, a squat isolate mountain shoulders up out of and of the stone of things to glare upon them. First light shines right in its belly. The wind pushes Maur’s hair across her face and she laughs.

“You see?” Stallo says. It’s brief, but what a look she sees on him: cynical but hoping against hope.

They sleep in the van and in the morning before anyone else comes they climb the staircase in the rock right into the Torghatten, right into the tunnel where the troll fired an arrow through the troll king’s hat, the bore all the way through the stone. Someone built a stair to the cleft. Within, beyond the path, the scatter of boulders. In the heart of the hill they are bookended by the world’s glow. From the sea, the mountain would stare at you with this very light in which Maur stands. The whole of Torghatten would be a beacon from old Sol.

A plane roared into its flank once, scattering dead. A sacrifice, if you like.

Stallo rubs a hand on the inner walls of the passage as if to feel vibrations within the largest hagstone in the world. Look at him, pilgrim to a nothing, a final-days acceleration.

“It’s not just a joke,” he says, whispers in the echoes. “Croome used to talk about squeezing something off of one thing onto another. Its nature. Worth a try. If you press hard enough. For long enough.”

Maur leans against the rock. She smiles at the thought of this mountain dangling from a celestial bathroom light-pull. It is beautiful here, even fearful and certain that you will be killed. Maur looks out from dark into light and it makes her think of dying.

Stallo is stepping off the path. He braces himself upon the wobbling underfoot and crosses to a big split stone. He crouches beside it and rummages and she hears the clack of smaller stones thrown aside. He grunts finally and hisses and returns with a satchel in his hand. He holds it up as if to check the weight, shoulders its filthy strap and climbs back to the path. “Buried treasure,” he says. Can’t keep his voice quite calm.

They pass through onto the inner side of the shaft, the granite now between them and the mass of the waters.

South through Grong. Beyond the town, while the clouds come down fast, Stallo takes the van off the road into woods as far as he can coax it. They disguise it with branches. They put on their rucksacks and go into the company of the trees. Maur braces on them as dark and cold draw in. She could not have walked anything like so long or hard scant weeks before. This is no path. They climb for a long time beneath spruce leaning like pillars in a broken hall. The air is clean but close. Stillness deepens, and it is that stillness that guides them—some sense of being expected or remembered. A small dark cabin in a clearing. The padlock keeping the hytte closed is old and looks rusted but Stallo’s key works.

The instant he enters, his body resettles, in relief. He breathes out. It’s viciously cold within but he’s smiling. Two bunks are built into the wall. Shelves on which are white sheets neatly piled and soft with age and dust and from which spiders scatter. A pump, a stove and gas canister. A tiny desk and chair. A wood burner with ancient split wood piled up.

Stallo dangles his thread snares and puts bottles in corners. He lays out his pebbles, holes towards the door. He rubs at marks already cut into the wood and waiting.

Maur starts the fire, Stallo makes soup.

“They keep finding us,” she says.

“Somehow. I know. Yeah, no complacency here. We are,” he says carefully, “a long way from them now, is all I can say. And when I set this place up I gave as good protection as I could.” Not that he sounds sure. She can see that they were tracked has shocked him.

“That’ll work?”

“What are we supposed to do?” he says. “It’s not like we’re trying to hide forever. I’m trying to track it, work out how to face it. That’s what all this is about. Plus, now.” He lifts the bag from the hill.

Maur flinches to find something pathetic in him in that moment.

Stallo unzips what he carries and draws out carefully and puts upon the chest items in oiled cloth and his face is clenched beyond reading. Coils of red beads. A fragile cord with littler strings dangling from it, tangled. He unwraps a rough and buckled tin lantern-looking thing, a crank on one side, disc at the front to slide three round lens cases into place before its opening. One is empty; the others contain crystal, one dark one milky. A small bowl-shape of black glass. A square of wood, a coil of copper wire wrapped around some cylinder pinned into place upon it. Its parts don’t match—an old razor blade anchored as connection, a chunk of pencil lead, a wooden dowel pale with age—but they obey some private geometry.

“What is this? Did you make these?”

“Fuck no. Not me.” He speaks cautiously. “This is a lot older than me. This stuff was put together by someone who supposedly faced down the same thing as us. Who says he dealt with it. I wouldn’t blame anyone doubting that. But he had a rep and they’ve been watched over a long time. Right in the middle of the eye. That sort of attention, well.

“That’s a qipu.” The string. “A way of writing messages. What it’s supposed to say I don’t know. You’d imagine a don’t-notice-me. These…” The necklaces are not of beads but seeds, bright red, each smaller than her finger joint and with one black spot like a staring eye. “Huayruro.” The bowl. “A sort of mirror.” The lens thing. “A fluorometer, even more bust than the rest unfortunately.” The coil. “And fuck me, this—” He can’t keep eagerness from his voice. “This could be our best bet. A transceiver. What do you know about crystal radios?” he says. “No power source. Only what it receives.”

“What does that mean?”

“Wouldn’t work everywhere. But we’ve got the altitude plus this thing’s storied. Plus whatever the eye did, maybe. Maybe I can get a bead on it. Work out where it is, maybe even what they’re doing. And because we’re not putting anything out, just listening in, they shouldn’t clock anything. Maybe this way we don’t even need whatever Rak had. As if he ever had anything. We can use this to stay ahead, turn and fire when ready.”

Comms

A thin and scuffed grey door by diminishing shops. Stallo pressed the top button.

—I’m here to see Carruthers.

Out of the static. —He’s in Copenhagen.

—I thought it was Rio.

The door buzzed and Stallo climbed uneven stairs. On the third floor, a burly man opened a door and gestured him into a room bare but for a corkboard of photographs and notes. Blinds drawn. A plain desk, papers and a tape recorder, a wooden chair at which sat Connor Long. Standing beside him, Hook. When did Hook get so diminished?

—Hullo, old man, Hook said.

—Sergeant Allardyce, Long said. He scratched his great beak of a nose to avoid meeting Stallo’s eye. If you asked Stallo.

The floors directly below were surely also owned by some branch of the government or lent out by some friendly party. Perhaps filled to the ceiling with egg boxes or foam. Long leafed through papers.

—You’re looking well, Stallo, Hook said. —How long has it been? I’m not an admirer of this season’s fashions but the hirsute look rather suits you. We’ve a lot to get through—

—Where is she? Stallo said.

—At a secure unit.

—What state’s she in?

—Much the same, Sergeant.

—What’s the plan? Stallo said. —What’s the idea? What’s the story? What’s the diagnosis? What’s the skinny? What’s going on, boss?

—Sergeant, Long said, and, —Steady on, Hook said.

Stallo went to the board. The smudgy faces of Jeff and Amy and Isabella and Skully. Other cards were points of a triangle, on each a question mark and name: Nergal/Gen./&c; Wran; Marco. Stallo plucked the picture of Amy and let the pin drop.

—She came to my place.

—You’ve made it very clear, Long said.

—She was a fucking mess but I think she was trying to tell me something.

—Sergeant, Long said, —I need you to focus.

—Physically, Hook said, —she seems…Sound. But she won’t wake up.

Stallo crumpled the picture and tossed it into the corner.

—I think the poor soppy tart was trying to warn me about something she didn’t have words for. And then this. Whatever happened it was about me, sirs, you can see. No one hears anything, no signs of entry? What is it? What sort of lespry could do that? Because it’s eyeing me, you understand?

The taste of bile. To be a focus of such attention. He was supposed to operate quietly on, not be, a situation.

—Did Bowler ever regale you with his ideas of the different nations of the Roused? Hook said. —This disputation?

—What? Stallo said.

—That’s enough, Long said.

—What’s that got to do with what’s going on with KH? Stallo said. —Fair point, though why does no one ever talk about Bowler? I know, he’s probably dead, but is he? What’s he up to either way? What was it he took, and what’s that got to do with…Why are you all still acting like we’re doing anything, like the Unit’s not a fucking irrelevance. Just when all hell…well…

—Allardyce! Long said.

He handed Stallo a file. At the top right-hand corner of a form within was stapled a black-and-white passport photograph. Amy, calm and formal against a plain background. Her hair was tied back, her makeup subtle.

—Sergeant, Long said, —not everything is about you.

The typing was Cyrillic. Stallo started to sound it out.

—You’re fucking joking, he said. He looked from Long to Hook. —Amy Farrow? Spetsotdel? You’ve had me chugging along like a prick and she’s fucking Special Section?

And if she was and she was onto him, he was blown.

—Stallo, Hook said. —Please bring it down.

And that meant Stallo’s radar was way off as well.

—Sergeant, Long said. —You know how this works.

—Yeah but the thing about need-to-know is that there are things I can’t do my job if I don’t know, so you might say I need to. Like that someone I’ve been fucking, which I told you because I thought you needed to know, is Spetsotdel.

Oh, that confrontation on the stairs! What was this Stallo felt? Embarrassment?

Long said, —There you are banging on about imaginary enemies and bugbears and bad times and meanwhile, you’re missing what’s in front of you. The main enemy remains Moscow. Do your bloody duty.

—Why didn’t you tell me?

—I’ve had enough of this, Long said, and Hook said, —For God’s sake, we didn’t…Long shot Hook a look.

—Oh, Stallo said. —You didn’t know.

Hook said, —With respect, it makes absolutely no sense not to tell him…, and Long said, —That’ll do. To Stallo Long said, —Here’s what we understand. No, we don’t know how long she’s been Spetsotdel, or about what her missions are.

—I can help with that last point, Stallo said. He pointed his thumb at his own chest.

—As I said, not everything is about you. We’ve no evidence she knows! And we don’t have particular reason to think she’s been targeting you….

—My cock begs to differ, sir.

—Isn’t that lovely? Hook said.

—Targeting you as a Unit member, Long said.

—So it’s just coincidence? Stallo said. —That she’s been trying it on?

—Not at all, Long said. —Think about what you’re doing. Who you’ve made contact with.

—What? You think she’s been using me to get to Skully and Iz?

Here, that embarrassment again. Nothing very familiar to him, but it came. A cringe, to know you’d been played. You had to give it to her, you had to clap, fair play—was she even drunk that night? Did she just swill a bit of vino around the mouth? And there he was thinking he’d turned her away when he was done with her, but after he’d gone AWOL, inconveniently pulling away her best route to her actual target, well, she wasn’t going to start again with some new candidate, not when she could pursue phase one of Via Stallo’s Pants and then, yes, now you think of it, that would’ve been it, a little after she’d cracked out the Needy Crazy Bint he’d been treated to he would’ve got a bit of the old Getting Herself Together & Remorse, a careful apology, hints at difficult times behind those histrionics, no expectations, enough sortedness to reassure and make you admire but just a glimmer somewhere still there of Mad Bitch behind the eyes because you know or anyway she’d know that you know what girls like that are like, oi oi, and next thing you know you’re spending a bit of time together again, all the while he’s spiralling closer to his endgame (and hers) and bringing her along as the dollybird no one pays attention to. And it would be just fine to think none of that had happened, not to Stallo, not on his watch, sunshine, but she’d played it well, and him, too.

—So what happened, Stallo said. —To her I mean…

—Yes, Long said. —It was aimed at her. Not everything. Is about. You. It seems someone wanted to stop her getting, via you perhaps, to Skully and Isabella, but more to the point, beyond that, into the orbit of, as we understand it, whatever KH connections they’re making.

—Why not just kill her? Stallo said.

—Maybe so when the civvies find her, Hook said, —there’s no reason to think it’s not a brain haemorrhage or some such. With this you’d have to know what you’re looking for to…well, to understand the ways in which you don’t understand it.

—Yeah or maybe she didn’t just get turned off, Stallo said. —Maybe she’s empty because everything in her head got drunk up. That’s one way of getting intel.

A pause.

—So there’s no reason to think anyone’s onto you, Long said. —On the other hand…

Stallo said, —Something’s out there doing whatever got done to her.

—Good thing you’re on the case already then, Hook said.

Long went to a window and clasped his hands behind his back.

—I understand he’s not as exciting as all these imaginary dramas you’ve cooked up, Long said. —But Kowalchuk should be quite enough of an enemy for us. Don’t underestimate him. Whatever this is, it could even be his handiwork, a change of plans, he’s perfectly ruthless enough to dispose of a liability on his own payroll.

If he can do that, thought Stallo, we’re fucked, and our intel’s fucked. And if he can’t, if it isn’t him, he’s fucked too.

He picked up the form, from which Amy watched him back with the severity of an old moment.

—Where did you get this? he said.

Date of birth, contact details, a handler number. His Russian was just about okay. Strings of numbers, clusters of spaced-out letters he did not think were words.

—What’s Uritsky got to say about this? he said.

—Now, there’s a name that’s lost currency, Hook said. —Agents were never Uritsky’s business. You leave him to us. By which I mean to whoever it is long ago spirited him away into whatever department.

Nothing was a surprise. That was a matter of survival; spend your time gasping and you’d be used up. But in this line of work you still had to be able to say Fuck me when circumstances demanded it. The trick was to never be surprised and to be amazed at everything all at the same time. So how surprising was this? Was Amy?

It was unexpected that it pleased Stallo to imagine the eyes that had gazed into his, shrouded by joint smoke, in a cam-smeared face, her mouth whispering not dirty talk but code into a microphone in her attic. Cranking up a Prizrak Usilitel, forgive his accent. Or she might be, have been, one of those whose work mostly involved little more dramatic than underlining a name or two on the list of college fellows and leaving it in the dean’s pigeonhole, or sending a thrice-yearly postcard to an “uncle,” its claim that Doris is doing well enough to keep the hidden peace. But Stallo was not displeased to suppose more kinetic interventions. Amy, Amoshka. What have you been and gone and done, solnyshka, sunshine?

The bottom half of the page was a list. Белка, Кошка, Заяц, Ежик, Ворона Собака, Муха. Stallo pointed. —Dunno, he said. —Cat. Dunno. Dunno. Crow. Dog. Dunno.

Hook said, —Squirrel. Hare. Hedgehog, if you please. Fly.

Sobaka, mukha, hound and fly, my oh my oh my. A belka goes between trunk and roots and canopy. A dog cries. Mukha the fly is a vector too. If you were to lift personnel files from the R Unit, what on earth would you make of the shorthands thereon? What would they be? Terms of cookery or gardening or the names of clouds to indicate his own areas of experience and expertise?

—How the fuck did you find out? Stallo said. —Let alone get this? It’s only been a couple of days. Enigma machine under her floorboards?

—Sir, Hook said. —It makes no sense not to tell—

—Enough. Long took the sheet from Stallo. —What do they think of you? Your new contacts.

—Is that seriously what we’re talking about now?

—I’m not suggesting this situation doesn’t make any difference, Long said. —Obviously there’s more going on than we thought, and obviously there are more dangers. But if anything this just underlines the importance of the goal, which has not changed. We want to get from these notorious mediums to whoever their contacts are. So what do Isabella and Skully make of you?

This newcomer—Long still qualified as that as far as Stallo was concerned—just out and saying such, asking questions like that.

—That I’m interested in what they do, Stallo said. —That I know certain things about certain things.

—Either of them told you anything more about themselves?

This was the heralded new mode? For this Hook had been sidelined? Poor old Hook, looking up at the ceiling. Must have been squirming. All that was left to him was his loudly silent approval of Stallo’s sulk.

Stallo went to the board. —Jeff you can leave up there if you want to for old times’ sake, poor silly sod. We’ve got everything we’re going to get out of him though. He flick-flicked Skully and Isabella. —What have you got on them?

—She’s a hippie. Crystals and ley lines. She’s playing at politics.

—Épatering les parents, Hook said. —They’re diplomats, don’t you know. If it wasn’t this it would be having it away with one of Fred Hampton’s pals, is my impression.

—He, Long said, —has been through the IMG. Seems like a bit of a chancer.

Stallo knew Skully had also been in the IS and the WRP. That he hung out with anarchists in Streatham. —There’s no justice, is there? Stallo said. —The worst bullshitters can get close to the best sources. So we reckon Kowalchuk’s also after KH? That’s Amy’s mission? Why?

—Marco’s the most restive, one hears.

—They were in touch before, Stallo said. —KH and the Russians. Or—wait—you reckon Amy was trying to recruit Marco? Against his comrades?

—If one only knew. Or what KH were actually planning. One doubts Moscow would see much chance of getting Marco, of all of them, onside, assuming we’ve not been too off-base about their relations, but these questions are why it’s so pressing that we get close enough to find out.

—That’s what I’m working on.

—And it’s taking its time. Is there a problem, do you think? With your past?

—They’ve known I’m a soldier for years, that’s why they’re interested. Of course they’re sus, they’ve pushed, but I’ve let slip that there’s nothing to let slip. That I’ve got nothing useful to tell them. They just think I’ve had it up to here with the army. Which, I mean…Stallo inclined his head. Long even smiled.

Hook preceded Stallo into the hall.

—Thanks ever so much for making it down, Hook said. —One can’t help feeling there are worse remits than yours. Intrepid agent Allardyce sets out on his mission to—forgive me if I oversimplify—prop up bars getting friendly with reprobates.

—Yeah, that’s about it.

The guard undid the latch.

—An extended pub crawl, Hook said. —Theirs not to make reply. Keep your chin up and your eyes open. Tell me, does this operation still involve you drinking at the Red Cow in Peckham? I was wondering whether you might have come to agree with me about its lack of merits?

Stallo looked at Hook a bit. —I still like it.

—Ah well, Hook said. —No accounting for taste. Cheerio.

Stallo emerged and looked at his watch and the sky. He turned up his collar. Headed briskly for South Ruislip, for the nearest bus stop that would take him towards, say, Shepherd’s Bush. Where, distant enough, he could disembark and do a bit of a turn and hail a taxi and direct the driver to take him south, to where he would find the Red Cow, a pub to which he had never been, of which he had first heard scant moments before.

He made his drink last. He claimed a corner table when it came free, near enough the machine for that electric blare. Packet of pork scratchings and another pint. Not a true villains’ pub. A little after ten, Hook came in. Bought two Guinnesses and sat.

—Hair on your chest. He fingered the foam from his mouth. —I expect you’re wondering, he said, and looked into the darkness of his glass. —None of this is provable and obviously this is between you and me. I’d never seen that paper until this morning. Amy Farrow’s form. That does seem to be her name, by the way. A true believer, CP since the upper sixth.

—Long doesn’t really think Kowalchuk’s behind what happened to her, does he? Stallo said.

—Oh, I doubt it. Just due diligence. Thing is, there aren’t any good candidates for this. Even Skully sounds to my ears more like a Saturday-afternoon revolutionary than Wran or Marco’s lot. But whatever it is they want to collaborate on—and I know you’ve been picking up snifters about calling things in—it’s at least interesting and at worst, very bad.

—Skully and Isabella might talk nothing but shite, but they’re good at what they do, Stallo said.

Hook nodded. —With which Marco seeks their aid, he said. —And they want you onside.

—My reputation precedes me.

—Let’s hope it’s the lightly curated version.

—How’s life under the new regime?

—Ha, Stallo, don’t you start. A chap in my position—whatever that might be, these days—a lot of stuff comes across my desk but I’m not privy to all the machinations of the backroom boys. Nor to all their lists, question-marked or ticked. But even if I weren’t clued up on a bit, you know what things are like, a colander’s a tighter ship than most departments, and I’d be lying if I said I was regularly shocked, shocked, to learn who we’re looking at as likely assets for the other side. But then I’d never heard Amy’s name before you started mentioning it, and it’s not as if it loomed then. Perhaps someone in the back office has just been waiting for the right time to put her name out there, but frankly…You saw the form. Hardly an old photograph. That paper looked pretty crisp to me. It’s hard to imagine it’s been mouldering in our archive. Get to the point, man! Sergeant Allardyce says! Yes indeed.

—My opposite number, or as close as dammit, is named Pavel, Hook said. —I know because I’ve a mole, obviously, as I’m sure he knows mine, from whoever in our office slips him bits and bobs. And yes, absolutely, I’ve considered that Pavel may in fact be that mole. We’ve been in the same room, he and I, twice. Once just before I met you. We were both members of, ahem, trade delegations. Then five years ago at an expo in Paris. That time I was secretary to a minister, I don’t recall of what. By then we’d been, so to speak, colleagues for some time. All but gave each other a cheery wave and asked after the families. Cordial enough, standing there with our respective groups, and I wish Pavel nothing but an uneventful tenure and happy retirement. Nothing unusual there.

—Alongside such eyebrows raised from the back of rooms, of course we have more formal, or informally formal, channels, deniable comms. And of course they overlap. And there are those moles, that will keep grubbing. My point is the I-don’t-doubt obvious one about mazes of mirrors and such. Long called me into the office early this morning, in quite the state. We were still metabolising the facts of how you found Amy, but he was in a particular to-do. Slung that ID sheet across the desk at me. What am I getting at here? Whatever differences I may or may not have with my CO’s methods, I don’t believe he’d withhold something as pertinent as that—One of your contacts is an oppo asset!—from a field operator or his point man.

—You’re saying he only just got it, Stallo said.

—You found her, Hook said, —you reported it, a civilian as it seemed in a very peculiar pickle, and then that file finds its way to his desk within a day.

The gambling machine blared scales.

—One of ours on the inside with Spetsotdel, Stallo said.

—Perhaps. Far be it from me to discount any possibilities. All I can say is that I’ve never known agents rendering intuition into certainty into proof at such speed, let alone delivering it. My point is it put me in mind of Pavel, whom over the years of shadowing I have come to know how to contact directly and very fast indeed, if I ever have to. And vice versa.

This form had come straight to Long, whose own Pavel was someone else, the corresponding top man.

Stallo whispered, —Kowalchuk. Jesus Christ. Kowalchuk outed one of his own? To us? Why?

Hook sat back.

—That file found its way lickety-split to my boss and yours. Right after you found its subject. In that state. Of which we might assume her bosses too were at least vaguely aware. Again, it’s only speculation, but a man can speculate, can’t he?

—And we know who she’s been trying to reach, Stallo said. —It was them done this to her, wasn’t it? Marco and his lot. She wasn’t just trying to find them, then. She was trying to stop them from doing something. He gets word Spetsotdel’s on his tail and he does…Stallo shook his head. —Whatever it is he does. To her. And now—Christ!

—Go on.

—Now Kowalchuk’s, what? Warning us?

—Knowing that she didn’t report in, that there’s no word of whereabouts, wondering if that means we may be trying to put two and two together, possibly even glancing at your own good self, though it still seems she was using you to get to KH rather than asking who pays your rent, but one way or another, issuing, yes, a minatory note. And, of course, hoping that we’re looking into this and that we might clock her eagerness to get in the way of whatever. Which would make this more than a warning.

Stallo said, —Kowalchuk’s asking for help.

When Jeff asked Stallo where Amy was, Stallo put surprise on his face.

—Search me.

—But you and her…

—I mean she’s a bit, no offense, but— Stallo touched the side of his head. —Time was that might’ve been my kind of trouble but who’s got the energy these days?

—She won’t answer me, no one’s…

—Mate. What do you want from me?

Keep at it. A hard untidy brightness made the children of the city curious. Let days pass, do your reading. He took cash-in-hand work, security at pubs where rock bands and strippers performed. He sparred with rangy kickboxers at a gym in Earlham Street which the right people knew was where tough men went to train. He loitered at the back of those meetings about “the situation” in Palestine or Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka. Stallo, leaning against walls. The fash got word sometimes, and there were less committed troublemakers, lost or derelict and disruptive, for whom such talks were curious havens.

—Not you, mate. Stallo implacable without belligerence. Those he barred might complain, even throw a slur, but who would try to push past him? The third time he appointed himself security, he blocked a large man arriving alone. Stallo, loud enough, said, —You make me nervous, mate. I don’t like your shoes. Too new. Who you reporting to?

He shoved him. For all the inches he had on Stallo the man had his hands up. Stallo counted to three in his head to give observers a chance, then said, —Fuck off back to Sarge, pig, and pushed him out.

That night he went to a call box on Harrow Road.

—Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Tell Danny Boy there’ll be bluebirds over Broadsword when he visits their mutual friend down south in two days’ time and it’s up to Danny Boy whether he wants to come with, but Broadsword is fucking going.

That was Thursday. Friday morning Stallo awoke to an envelope on the mat.

W Scrubs, it said. 10 am

Hook awaited him at the southern edge of the park with a dog lead in his hand. He stared at the houses to the south of the prison.

—Lost your dog? Stallo said.

—Lost my poor dog when I was eleven. Been looking ever since. Poor old Bingo. Hello, Stallo. You been making yourself trustworthy and indispensible? Special Branch have complained. One of their chaps manhandled.

—I just won a bet with myself.

—Congratulations. The Met are most displeased. As is Long.

—Try not to look too broken up.

—I shall dab my eyes dry. Shall we?

A scuffed little Saab, nippy enough. Hook took them south over the river and by feeder towns not made cheery by the watery sun. Listless picturesque.

—How did you know?

—Where she is? Stallo said. —Lucky guess. I mean how many places are there can deal with our sort of trouble?

—More than you might suspect, but I grant the logic. And you have the right of it. Long…, Hook said. He seemed to want that word alone to do all the work.

—Why’d you think I left a message for you? I don’t know what he’s got against me. Forgiveness not permission, and all that.

—They may tell him you’ve been. They may not. It’s a complicated time and various people seem to feel they owe me favours, and our CO is not the most favour-accruing sort.

Cows and seagulls waited for them to climb towards a castle encircled in outer walls, a little model on a hill. Few vehicles on the gravel. They took an incline to a door below ground level. Not hidden at all. Maintenance: Employees Only. Hook opened it onto a windowless vestibule where a man in his fifties in the green outdoorsy jumper of the park watched an ancient telly. He glanced at Hook’s pass and unlocked the door beyond to a younger guard in military uniform, by CCTV feeds, who looked at Hook’s document again and gestured them on into electric glare and a corrugated metal tunnel curving below the castle, like a Quonset hut all the way to Narnia.

A deflated old man waited for them, his white coat sagging.

—Hook, he said.

—Chop chop, said Hook. —Let’s get it done.

The tunnels brought to Stallo the chthonic drift of that fucking party. Nurses passed, doctors and the like, from doorways in the nation’s edge. Stallo was compelled under England, through barrow, to the dissecting chamber.

To Hook, their inner guide said, —This is the last time, do you hear me?

Stallo didn’t know how many beds were here, how many men and women smitten by proximity to / engagement with ITKO eyes only operations, clearance level If You Have to Ask Yours Ain’t High Enough, and how could it only be now, after what?, fifteen-odd years of little-fuss phantasmata soldiering, that here, trailing the fretful doctor, for the first time the possibility came to Stallo that his unit was one of several related such. Small as this hidden hospital was, you’d surely be hard-pressed to fill it with those wounded by dealings with spectrality only. On top of them, perhaps these nurses carried kidney-shaped bowls of fouled gauze from chupacabra bites, necrotic digits from Shambhala-bound expeditions, magma-burnt in hollow-earth hunts. R for the Rouse and for the Roused, R for many things, yes, but only now did it occur to Stallo that his might be the eighteenth department in a twenty-six-section special ops alphabet, fucking hell, Units Agartha through Zoology (Crypto-), and was that relief or resentment at the idea? If you didn’t laugh you’d cry. Stallo laughed in time to his own steps.

In a small strip-lit room, Amy waited. Eyes open, she was motionless on a bed in clean white pyjamas. Her urine gathered in a bag. Around her head, monitors told the room her vitals in a lovely sine curve of ill health.

Stallo could have said Hello girl, but meeting the hollows of her expression, he stayed quiet. He went and looked very closely at her skin, smelt her, and he knew it would look as if he were a husband kissing an injured wife.

—Still unresponsive, the doctor said. —To anything. He turned the pages of her chart. —You’d call it a coma. As a rule. According to standard. Although…Core temperature’s down and dropping. Slight, but it seems to be the tendency. I don’t know what that’s about. It’s not my job to say what did this, obviously, just what’s happening.

Yeah you’d see a bloke touched by the wrong presence lose a limb to the chill of it. You’d see a heart stop at a touch. Stallo placed himself in Amy’s line of sight. He thought of something that might have believed itself returned knelt like he was kneeling with the unending curiosity of the call-them-dead and stretching to overlap its edges so the equivalents of its thoughts snarled around the human thoughts of the human, terrible.

—You ever seen this? Stallo said.

—If you asked me in Charing Cross Hospital or St. Mary’s I’d say, Certainly, permanent vegetative state, dreadfully sorry, the doctor said. —But seeing as we’re here, no.

That face that Stallo had seen flushed under him, calmly smiling, shouting in drunken or pretended drunken upset, that he must now envisage with a whole other look, studied, a professional checking in with control. He’d never seen it on her and never would. He put his fingertips on Amy’s lips and spread them, and she stared on and he kept opening until her mouth was as wide as it could go.

—We’ve been using Gysinian techniques and some alpha-wave stuff, the doctor said. —A modified Lull wheel, Matla cylinders. You get the idea.

—Not my bailiwick, Stallo said. —I’m a grunt.

—That’s not what Croome says. We were already trying out some ITC sweeps.

—Getting anything?

—No. What’s telling about running this room since she came in isn’t that we’ve been getting any voices. And I speak off the record, and you understand EVP’s more of an art than a science—

—Get to it.

—Since she came in, this room’s been unusually silent. Not even as much conventional static as I’d expect.

Stallo leaned back. Looked closer at Amy’s teeth, into the sough of her breath, the dark at the back of her throat, braced as if something might rise out of her howling into the world, but the whole thing of it, of this visit, was that this would not happen.

[42]

For three mornings Stallo puts the radio and wire and a satellite phone in a pack and takes it and the shotgun and leaves for the highest ground he can reach, and Maur goes through his bag again. He makes no effort to secure what he leaves behind. Old aerial photographs of landscapes and of architecture. A battered black notebook, unused. Stapled pages, images of Norway, names: Hans Otto Meyer, Ingeborg Køber. Forsvarets etterretningstjeneste.

“Any luck?” she says on his return.

“Once upon a time I used to know more or less where the main signal out there was coming from. I mean direction. Not any more. I swear, though,” he says slowly, “I fucking swear I can make out something. It comes and goes but I swear I can.”

The first day she stays inside surrounded by the bagatelles of the hut and it’s as if days’ worth of fear comes for her at once for all that, for all the tradecraft items. When the shaking ebbs, all that she feels is claustrophobic and unfinished. She stares at her handbag and is confident that Stallo hasn’t realised she takes nothing out of it now, ever, only carries it, keeps it closed. Part of her thinks again that she should show him what is within if within it is but the strength of her resistance fascinates her, and that of her insistence to herself that it might be nothing, no longer there, never there. She doesn’t want to leave it where he might find it but she’s aware too that, possessing it, she was found, beyond his lines.

He might use it for what he’s doing.

But it was delivered to her.

She goes to the door-side shelf. Opens the bag very briefly and sweeps in a loop of those vivid red seeds alongside the three holed stones already within. Fastens it again. She picks up the qipu, puts it in her pocket. These are the rules, if you cross the boundaries.

When Stallo comes back she takes her own turn outside, takes the pistol, leaves the hytte and walks a long time.

She walks to exhaust herself. The trees thin as she climbs, their trunks silvered, branches brittle by her breath clouding her way ahead like a guide, over roots giving underfoot. Higher up, the wind has begun threading the trees with a sound like something spoken low and slow. She does not answer it. The intricacies of boughs, the layered shade, put her, to her shock, in mind of drawing. Again she makes silent promises to those who miss her, and whispers to her son. The farther she is from the cabin, the more she can hear spit in her throat, the more she sweats, the more her eyes and nose water.

Maur settles on a ledge of stone as if the mountain meant her to and feels for the huayruro and the qipu. The latter she brings out, to pick absently at the pellets where it’s tied. Until, the cord so worn, one of them comes off suddenly in her hand. She freezes.

I’m a frayed knot: the old punch line shoves into her head. She takes hold of another of the tangles and pulls at it as if experimentally, as if she doesn’t mean to do what she does, snap its tether, tear it free. Wait again and be no less unassaulted.

—

“I should’ve made Croome come with us,” Stallo says when she returns.

“You couldn’t have got her to do anything she didn’t want to.”

There is a ridge above the cabin that Maur climbs another night as if to meet the twilight coming down. Not a true clearing, but the vegetation is sparse enough that she can see over miles of swaying dark. Maur leans back against the biggest tree; it is alive and she wishes it were not, that it were white, a deciduous snag to climb as if she were a dead boy.

Jules? she tries. Like a mother might. The wind takes the word.

She hears a darting late bird or bat. Feels her stomach roil. There are stars behind the clouds.

Within her pack is her handbag. She takes it out and puts it on her knees and stares at it. She fingers it again as if she’ll open it, push her hand in, find the fucking letter. Or not find it. And because either would be impossible and because when it was unmuffled they found her, that man her protector stopped and that other man or whatever he was, she keeps it closed.

She was in a state that night, could she even now be sure? That it was there? Come on, you still doing that? She touches the clasp. Moves her feet as if she’ll dig a hole to bury what she carries. Those seeds’ll help though?

It seems to her that when she left that room in France, it was as if she was pushed out, as if something for which she was the bearer needed to be beyond wards. To arrive. Let such objects mask it now. Bag rattling like a charm. She can’t say why she doesn’t want to tell Stallo what she carries, if she does.

With her little folding knife, knot by knot, she cuts the qipu’s clotted message away. The action exhilarates her. She takes hold of the clasps of that absurd handbag she absurdly has and once more for one second opens it and drops in the silent string to be with the huayruro seeds and pebbles and, if it is still there if it was ever there or there again, that letter.

The eloquence of white space. Maur’s lips move.

Dear Jules,

Deario Julio your dad would say, you’re bad

If she held it she would turn it to the awe-ful second page. Something staring from the middle in the blank.

Last page. Opens empty and then a half line.

We are proud

Love

Mum x

Maur holds her breath under the wisha-washa. What’s your game? she asks the unseen paper. Who are you trying to fool? I saw you’ve changed. You’re changing. Meaning more and more.

There might be almost anything in it. Might be now. Might be nothing. Might be nothing. Might be a name.

Maur huddles into her fleece and waits but no epiphany comes. She rises, crests to look and make out the hillside hut, from this elevation, as the light goes.

She is still. She feels her heart. Her ears feel tickled, as if by a whisper—

—

She mouths, Cybill?

for the time of a closing opening eye,

figure out of the very gloom of the woodland, urgently spasming, waving its

Maur blinks and she is mouthing, You?, and she can see new movement farther down the hill. Around the cabin, illumination, motion. Shapes in the black are moving.

They come, they are coming, in quadruped motion. Four presences. They are crossing the uneven country, moving like nothing should move, they are gripping trees and are pushing off from them too fast. Bent-over people careering like that figure who hunted, who was hunting her amid the trees of France, moving as if motionlessness is damnation. Maur fumbles in her pocket for the pistol. She spits out spit and shouts, “Stallo! Stallo! Stallo!”

The things are incoming, and one of them is veering from the path to the hut and hurtling over rocks between trees right towards her, is rising right at her, is, is being a darker darkness than the night.

Maur hears shots, breaking glass. The face of what is rushing for her slack and expressionless, a black-clad man crawling for her much much faster than she can run. She cries out and raises the weapon, she tries to fire and her fingers freeze and she feels no percussion but, not from her own hands, she hears a sizzling crack, is that what death sounds like? Is this her death?

The continuous man that is drawing near is arcing and is shuddering and is falling now into a foetal stillness. A voice behind her says her name. She turns and light fills her eyes and Maur throws up her hands and behind that effacing white is a new dark figure.

The spirit of the dead father is no better than the spirit of epilepsy, the Chukchi shaman said. See him, you’ll suffer convulsions and die an early death. Not because it’s a father but because it’s returned. Pretas are cruel and love the unclean, they are in pain. There is no should about it but you might hate the dead and they might hate you. Keep your hatred right. It’s a resource and it is not to be wasted.

XXII

Adjurand

Atavist

—You’re up, Jeff said. —Come with me.

—It’s time to get serious, Jeff said on their journey. Ah look, they’d given him something to do. Stallo watched him negotiate his desire to show off with imperatives of secrecy. Waited for him to say something like I’ve said too much. —You can’t trust everyone in this game. I know you think you know where to go, where to pick up bits and pieces, that market you mentioned, but not everyone who talks the talk is trustworthy. Or politically onside. You’ll get tangled up with SPA Trots if you’re not careful. There’s a few of them go scouting around that place.

—What’s wrong with Trots? Stallo said.

—It’s complicated. Just stick with me. Jeff gestured at the bus conductor. —There’s one of that lot goes down there, real ultra, all over the shop. Not all there. It’s easy for his lot to complain about what the people at the sharp end are doing, Stallo. Easy to moan that they should go harder, faster. Steer clear and stay serious though. Stick with me.

He took Stallo to a basement by Covent Garden. Wooden table, rickety the better to tap, below the shaded bulb doing what it could. The shadows were blockier than they should have been. Jonno Skully and Isabella waited.

—Nice, Stallo said. The deep red witchy dress that Isabella wore. —Halloween? So you going to fuck me around again?

Jeff sat and took one of her hands and Jonno her other, and the two men reached out to that fourth space at the table and Stallo stalked all the way around them as if he were a visiting spirit, and only after that counterclockwise examination sat and grasped them.

—I’m not a mark, Stallo said.

Jonno said, —We all want the same thing. He looked a moment over Stallo’s shoulder.

—What’s that then? Stallo managed to say.

Isabella said, —Not this, comrade. Not this.

—There’s another way, Skully said.

—Living together with…, Stallo said, carefully hesitated.

—The “special place”? Isabella said. —Don’t believe everything you hear. Let’s focus on changing this world.

—There’s someone wants to meet you, Skully said. —History’s on our side, more than Karl and Fred ever knew. You can help. But as well as with what you know, soldier, you don’t walk alone. So you need help. How could you not be haunted? So we’re here.

Keep a straight face, Stallo.

—Aren’t you tired? Skully said.

Stallo was tired.

Skully rose and went and turned off the lights and returned by foot-feel through the vigorous darkness and took Stallo’s hand again.

Isabella’s breathing slowed. —Now, she said.

Breadcrumbs scattered, here Stallo was at last. But standard protocol for such a session mandated a four-way entente, Spirit, Control, Medium, Survivor—for all, that notwithstanding, not everyone had a control. How might that quadrumvirate tally here? Isabella was medium, so what was her control? If any? And in this room, he, Stallo, was the survivor, but of what? And what walked with him was what they said they sought, and control, too, and he too was medium, he had to suppose. So what happened to that prim little four-way cross the textbook demanded?

He wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t losing the odd second. Hard to tell in blackness like this when you had only a dark-to-dark transition. The job here was to get some trust going, get deeper into character, drift off as if in the back of a matinee, was ever a snooze so sweet? And here he was und-er-neath the ar-ches, no that was the last one, waking up and who could say how long he’d been out? Still she droned. Might have been hours

thud thud of something bouncing

here came Rene into his head and here lurched his heart as what he couldn’t see passed through the room, go on, entice me, go on, deploy her, go on, offer a crack at a last chat with her if I’ll only blah blah, and he’d expected nothing like this, and what if it was not Irene-shaped nothing which strove to whisper but one of that glum troupe of how many by now? shades for which Stallo himself had been, shall we say, preparatory?

He heard panting. The sound of a big-mouthed smile. A heavy warm hairy or grass-shaggy hand touched his neck.

—Alfuckingright.

He was up, grips broken, lighter out and flicked, Jeff and Skully looking at the flame and Jeff blathering and Skully not scrutable and behind Stallo there was no missing link, no ghost Australopithecus, of roots or undergrowth.

—The thing with you…, Isabella whispered. He could see she was shocked by the traces of presence, looking around, trying to compose herself. —It…wants to play. Did you hear? I know you’re afraid….

Stallo said, —Fuck this and fuck you, and he kicked his chair, at last some dancing furniture, and he went to the door and did not know if he was performing but his heart did hammer.

There was no guard to this unfamiliar safehouse, the underfurnished room. Myton pointed the stem of his unlit pipe. —Stallo! A tonic to see you.

Hook said, —We got your message. Inner sanctum finally. Hurrah.

Poor man his heart wasn’t in that bonhomie. It was trust or the liberation of defeat in his eyes. Stallo could tell Long of this meeting anytime. As if Stallo would.

—There are different ways of doing things, Myton said. —Long’s a good chap, he is, but, well. I’m here to put in a few hap’orth from my perspective. Let us put our heads together.

At the window Stallo pulled back a corner of gauze to look on grass and playground.

—She has something, he said. —She’s strong.

—We read the reports, Myton said.

—Who’s “we”? Stallo said. To Hook he said, —Should this civilian be here? He shook his head to show he didn’t mean it.

—How strong is strong? Myton said.

—I’ve not felt stronger.

—Do you think they understand what they have in her?

A child wrapped in a coat moved slowly back and forth upon a swing. Stallo could not make out much of the shadowy parent who pushed them. —She’s a physical medium, he said. —To answer your question, I think they think they do but they don’t. Her included. What you going to tell Long?

Myton said, —You let us worry about that.

—A bit of me still thinks they were fucking with me, Stallo said. Back and forth went the child. —Acting like I was the only one who could feel anything.

—Who was she trying to contact? Hook said.

—Well, I was the subject.

—Irene? Hook said.

—Not exactly. They were looking for something they said was with me. Like they were doing me a favour.

—If they’re after contact with your control, Hook said, —then good luck to them. Perhaps they can do a better job of it than we ever could.

—I think they were diagnosing, Stallo said. —I don’t think they knew what they’d find. They know something’s changing. Nineteen seventy-three. It feels like it’s all going too bloody fast and at the same time like it’s never going to end. They’re antsy and they want to get on top of…these days.

—This is indeed rather a big year, Myton said.

You’re getting that look in your eye, Stallo thought. You’ve got a bee in your bloody bonnet. You’ve got a maggot is what they used to call that. As have I.

So maybe I’ve a control, he might have said. It smells of sap I don’t know why I’ve got it. Maybe I should say, Oy I’m not your grandson, I just stared up into a downdraft. But there are those controls which say they were never born. Call it—do the list—moosleute leshy namahage basajaun shaggy crawling king. Raggety. Know that name? Got nephews? Read Rupert the Bear? Vegetal Enkidu. What sort of missing link? Between people and the trees. Perhaps they’d helped it trust him, he might have said, Skully and Bella. Snagged to him as it seemed to be like the wait-a-minute thorns that partly comprised it.

—What I’m pretty clear on, Myton said, —is that they’re here to build their forces. To find or recruit comrades for their groupuscule. Of course one only has a modicum of control over what if anything it is one touches when one probes the Summerlands. But, even if they were just testing you out, blow me if they don’t seem to have consolidated a companion with whom I’d love to have a connection. I know you’ve always had a degree of ambivalence about this, Stallo. But what a resource.

—What happened to this being a recce?

—Recced we have. And you are indeed more than observer. I’d ask to push this with her help. How often does one have such an opportunity? Worst case, nothing’s lost, we learn more about their methods, and you get into their circuit. Agreed? I suggest we find the most fertile ground possible. He had quite the eager look on him. —Let’s see what they can do if we pull out some stops. Get them the best conditions to have another go. Put some safety measures in place and see what they’re really made of, perhaps entice some of their shy international comrades to join them.

—Half a fucking mo, Stallo said. —It’s one thing to know it’s there, but you didn’t feel it. I’m not letting her go beckoning that thing again….

—No no, Myton said. —I see that trying to channel a control wouldn’t be appropriate.

—So who is it we’re asking her to talk to?

—You tell me! You’ve said yourself she’s quite the power. They seem committed to helping you, yes? As they see it to get you on-side. What was your cover story? Who do they think you want to talk to?

—I’m done with that from now, Stallo said. —I’m keeping Irene out of this.

He said that and meant it, but it felt inevitable to him that he’d reconsider.

—Hook, you’re with me on this, yes? Myton said. —We can gauge Isabella, and we might even chivvy her slippery comrade out of hiding, and whatever she does connect to, she’ll be getting hold of information about what’s over there. What’s going on. Which we’re agreed we need. All these signs of the times…

—You’ve been talking to Benters again, Stallo said.

—Benters is a silly old sod but you know as well as I do that he is right. Even if Long doesn’t want to admit it. Your contacts know too, and they’re trying to figure out what’s behind that sense, and we should help them so we can get the benefit. Intel from beyond. He gestured with his chin as if to someone behind Stallo. —What if she could actually get it to speak, though? Ask it questions? With the best will in the world, you’ve never had the best success in chatting to it. I think you want to know what’s happening at least as much as I do.

—What’s wanted, Myton said, —is a place of solitude and intensity.

—Borley? Hook said. They all laughed.

—You’re a soldier, Myton said to Stallo. —Your control will understand your language. We need military ties.

Where something might be predisposed to hear comradeship and commands. Stallo drove to Chillingham and Pluckley and all but sniffed the air. Berry Pomeroy. He stood with his arms out, felt what he could in places of which it was said, passive voice, that things walked.

—No cities, he said. Mill Street Barracks was out. In outskirts he exchanged briefing notes with command bods meandering out of crabgrass in jeans or parkas as if he’d caught them on their way back from a pee.

—I’m terribly sorry, they’d say.

—My uncle told me never to apologise, Stallo would say.

—What day is it, do you know?

—I left my calendar in my valise, he’d say, and they would reach into their coat and hand him the dossier of information about this locale.

A dip between fields and a warehouse south of Croydon. His contact came into view waving a flat cap.

—I’m terribly sorry, he said, —but aren’t you a bit old for all this?

—You know what my uncle told me? Stallo said. —Hello Jerry. Old? He lit a cigarette and offered one and Jerry took it in exchange for a folder. —Speak for yourself you cheeky git. Anyway they wouldn’t believe some callow little fucker.

—Your contacts?

—They want an inner voyager. Someone who’s been around the block.

—That’s quite enough of that, Sergeant, Jerry said. Pursed his terrific lips. —Need-to-know, and I don’t. Stallo leafed through the papers.

—How’s Awfulness? Stallo said.

—On we trundle. Keeping the country safe?

—Have we been invaded yet?

—Haven’t we, though? Very Jerry flicked the cigarette butt into the ditch.

—Oh very good.

—Really though, something’s up, isn’t it? Jerry shrugged and wandered back through the grassland. —Mind how you go.

—Give my regards, Stallo called. Oh Bowler, he thought. Are you? Dead yet?

Stallo hammered on Jeff’s door, all I wanted to keep away but couldn’t.

—Fuck. Stallo…

—You tell them we need to do it again. I want to know what it was that came. We have to go deeper. I’ll say where, I’ll tell you when I do and you can tell them where to be.

The right place would be a focus. Of course there wasn’t a handspan of the soil that should have been anything but; how often had Stallo been told, This is a storied land? That wasn’t helpful: everywhere was equally haunted but old news that some were more so.

What with intuition the unknown guest, it didn’t fuss Stallo not to know why he’d wanted to return to this particular North London back road. To stand by dried dog shit at a junction of two streets to watch light behind old curtains. The shapes of junk like fossils in a front yard. Walking its corridors and rooms in his memory, walled in by stuff settling post-use into its longer purer self.

Don’t romanticise the derelict? That ship had sailed. Anyway it wasn’t the dereliction it was the apports. Apport, singular, one. If it ever did visit it was likely only for the duration of an echo of a bounce. Stallo wasn’t there for anything but inspiration. He called the number Myton had given him.

—So? Myton said. —We don’t have forever….

—Your old mate should help, Stallo said. —He was RAF intel you said, and he’s got a knack. The nose.

—That, Myton said, —is a good idea.

The tarmac of Wickenby airfield buckled with weeds. Hangar and control tower continued in their coming solemnly apart. On what was once a runway, Myton and Benters waited. Benters shook Stallo’s hand with enthusiasm.

Where they walked might have been the ruins after London. A launching pad for a hecatomb. More than a thousand dead from this place, machines screaming across the sky. Benters kicked a stone.

—I was stationed here, he said. —12 and 626 squadrons. A callow young Penguin—that’s a non-flyer—to my unending chagrin, bloody useless peepers. The chaps weren’t sure what to make of me. Just before I arrived we’d lost a medic, a padre and another intelligence bod, not one of whom should have been in the sky. Crews did them a favour and then the next thing you know it’s not so bloody much fun. So they wouldn’t oblige me.

Dead leaves pushed past Stallo’s ankles. What would be left of a sky pilot to hit the ground, flaming as it fell? Dying and scattered in a single event.

—There were all sorts here, Benters said. —East Africans, Ozzies, and Canadians. A huge wing. Word got out that the shortsighted Peruvian arrival was a decent sort, if a bit of a nut. Out they’d go, those men. Babes in bloody arms. Four or five hours through tracer and flak, dropping the load and flying home with your dead on board often as not. Absolute slaughter of the innocents. And anyone who couldn’t face it got a stamp on their papers: LMF. “Lack of moral fibre.” Can you bloody believe it? The cruelty. That’s fascism, if you ask me. The Yanks were more humane. Every night I’d make it my business to go to the mess. Mostly to have a chinwag. About anything but the operation. Benters stared at men long gone. —So there I’d be, nattering with some young man or other, and again and again, again and again and again, I’d have to keep my composure because their skin would start to dry up and their eyes would shrivel and their lips thin while they told me about their dog or their sweetheart or their football team and I’d have to nod and smile at a bloody skull. Knowing that man would die that night.

—This wasn’t like subjective viewing; I couldn’t turn it off. And of course I couldn’t say a word. They wouldn’t have believed me and even if they had they wouldn’t have deserted their fellows. So all I could do was wait for them to be burnt in the sky. Our padre was a veteran of the Great War. I did tell him in the end. Bless him, he didn’t have me committed. We prayed together. Brought some relief. Gives you an idea of how young we were that one flight lieutenant in his thirties we called Pop.

—Like your dad? Stallo said.

Benters laughed. —That was with an S. This chap was singular, as it were. A navigator. Good man. I got back from London. It was winter, just shy of midnight. Snow all over the place. And the moon’s bloody bright. Here comes Pop towards me. So I give him a wave. Hi, Pop, quoth I. Had a good leave? Pop nods. Keeps going. I remember plain as day. Thirty years ago. The next morning when our batman brings me tea, he tells me what a bloody shame it is. Pop’d volunteered to show a new crew the ropes on a night cross-country and something had gone wrong and they pranged into the woods. And this a day and a half before I saw him waving, hello and goodbye.

Stallo confabulated with Myton where the weeds grew tall. Benters enjoyed performing respect for their secrecy, gave them more space than needed.

—Under the blather, Myton said, —he is a real sensitive. I think it’s worth a try.

They felt the air rolling around the structures left.

—This does seem like sacrificial ground, Myton said. —Not by design, but the cunning of history can be awfully cunning. I wouldn’t waste your time on a hunch, I’ve already run a few tests here. This is as good a place for a test as we’ll find.

In the safe house, Stallo listed for Hook, as if they were his own thoughts, the reasons Wickenby was suitable. Hook smiled and said, —Myton has many admirable qualities.

—Says the same of you, Stallo said finally.

—How nice. Hook spread out his fingers on the arm of the chair. —Alright then. Wickenby it is. We’ll prime the ground. This is an experiment, yes, but not merely observation. Also of shall-we-say nudging, if I know Myton, to see if we can help in their invocation, because we’ve reason to believe that’ll be to our benefit. I’ll have our lot wire up some generators, tactical amplification and containment. You never know.

—You never know.

—I respect Myton, but him and his friends will cause trouble.

—The world’s already in trouble, Stallo said. —Isn’t that what all this is about?

[43]

“Put that down.”

The man wears a balaclava. His pistol is pointed at Maur’s face. From downslope comes more percussion and a crack like teeth or stones. “Put it down.”

She drops it. Hears a volley of shots below.

“Good,” the man whispers. Grease is dark around his eyes. Keeping his gun up with one hand, he puts something like a box, a wallet, in a belt pouch, takes out zip ties. “I’m here to help you but until you understand that, this is how it has to be.” He turns her and pulls her wrists together and Maur looks down at the man who was crawling up towards her. His eyes are, are being open, she cannot see if he is, is being alive or dead. After that electric sound.

Maur’s captor pats her down and rummages in her pockets. He opens her bag and shines a light inside.

He gives a shaky breath. Closes the handbag and loops it on his arm. An image from a farce.

“Move,” he says.

Maur has no hands free should she fall. She walks. The sounds of fighting recede. A long ascent, shallowing into plateau. She feels the ground change under her booted feet and can hear the world opening out. The tree darkness falls away replaced by that of night, near the peak. In the man’s torchlight she sees ruts, curving. A Land Rover in scrub. He pulls open the door and pushes her into the back by a screwdriver and a wrench and a tyre iron and such. He sits in front and closes the doors against the wind. His body unstiffens just a tiny bit. He takes two deep breaths and keeps his pistol on her in the new quiet.

“Right,” he says. He pulls off his mask. With the dark still around his eyes, his skin pale white, his face is a skull. In this sign conquer. “Maur,” he says.

“Padre,” she says, to Strude.

No lights in the vehicle. Maur can see only the dull glint of his gun, the outline of his features, like a first draft.

“So,” he says. “The moment I believe you’re really hearing me, those cuffs come off, okay?”

“What are you doing to Stallo?” Maur says.

Strude inclines his head. The motion could mean anything.

“That man on the hill,” she manages. “What happened to him?”

“You’re lucky. I stopped him. We were just in time. We’ve been moving carefully, keeping watch.”

“On us?”

“But we just got word. About those things.”

“How do they move like that? What are they?”

“They’re coming for you,” Strude says. “That’s what you need to know right now.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” Strude says. “To help you. And your son.”

He narrows his eyes and looks away, a politeness, not to regard what takes her at that. Wind shakes the car.

“I don’t know what he’s told you, Stallo,” Strude says, “but you’re in so much danger. And so am I. And all of us. I’m here to get you home. Safe. Maur, what’s he got in the cabin? Has he explained his wards to you? We’ve had to be so fucking careful.”

“How did you find us?” she says.

“He likes to think all his little hideouts are secret but he set most of them up on the crown’s bloody shilling. Not to say it’s been easy. We would’ve moved in as soon as we realised what was coming, but we can’t get any REs in there, not with whatever he’s got up.” He gestures. “How much do you understand of what I’m saying? I am on your side. You’ve been lied to. Do you understand that you’re being rescued? No one’s denying that the man’s got skills. That’s the problem. I’d love to say it was us who got Jules’s attention, but let’s be honest, that was Stallo, working his stuff, outside the flat. You must’ve seen some things…. Maur, what do you think happened to Teller? Jules didn’t know him and she’s not that strong. It was Stallo. Because he was looking for something.”

What?

“And if he could unbottle her there, he must’ve had her in the first place. I need you to tell me everything you know about what’s going on.”

“You want Jules and you want Ewan,” Maur says. “You want to use them.” This man, she’s abruptly aware, is about the age Ewan would be if he’d lived.

“You’re upset because I lied?” Strude says. “Please grow up. Yes. And yes, I want to work with them. With Ewan. Don’t you? Don’t you want to speak to him?” He gestures in the direction of what was climbing for her. “Something’s spreading. Among the Roused. Bodiless functions are struggling, and now functionless bodies are rising. As if in their place. Maur, you don’t even know what you don’t know.”

“So tell me!”

“I’m trying. And you won’t like it. And you won’t thank me. But you should. Look…you’ve done amazingly. It’s incredible. I know what happened to Cybill.” He shakes his head. “This was never going to last, Maur.”

Is Stallo dead by now? Surely if he dies something will mark it. In the sky or something. Maur hates that she thinks such a thing. She wishes Stallo something, some strength or something. Get away, she thinks at him. Then slowly she says, “Those things down there. They were…So they’re what’s left behind. When a spirit goes. Is that what happens when you Rouse someone who’s alive?”

“Oh, if you could do that,” Strude says, “maybe you’d get the lespry—you know what that is?—and what you just saw. Certainly, those are what happens when something’s extracted. You leave a klipa like that.”

She marks the word. “Extracted how? By what?”

“Don’t tell me Stallo hasn’t told you.”

“He says…He thinks you don’t believe him.” She stares at Strude. “But you do.”

“I do. That’s what we’re trying to stop.”

Then Stallo’s wrong. How can he be so wrong?

“You’ve got company,” Strude says. Raises her bag.

“It— She saved me.”

“Maur, wake up. You think you’re safe in that attention? You think Stallo’s ever told anyone the truth? Including himself? He can’t help you. You’ve got skills. That’s why I’m here. You’re haunted.”

“That’s not a skill.”

“Says you. I’m not lying to you now. It’s not just that you’re haunted…. What’s…with you. It’s stronger than it should be. Like it’s not alone.” None of them are alone, she thinks. But he says, “You said it yourself. Jules and Ewan.” Maur’s heart jolts her and Strude stretches out his hands before her as if they hold a telescope. “Like two lenses.”

Miles off on the dark slope a fight continues or is done. Maur looks at Strude full on.

“Was it you?” she whispers. “We thought it was the void people but was it you? In France?” She feels like she’s setting out on a new journey.

“The person who killed Cybill is the person who lied to her about where she’d be safest,” Strude says. “We always wanted her onside. Alive. It’s a tragedy. And she wasn’t the only one who died that day.” She stares at the dark of him and feels shapes start to clarify within her. “Maur, if we weren’t trying hard to keep the two of you alive, we’d have gone in blazing when we found Stallo’s bolthole in London, but we didn’t. We stayed back to be careful. Look how that worked out.”

“She’d never have gone with you,” she says. “It was Stallo helped her speak to Jules.”

“I know I had to tell you things that weren’t true, but Maur, my intentions were good. This is my job. God knows it takes a lot to ease someone into what we do. I’ve seen how it can go wrong. When I talk about pastoral work, I mean it—”

“You want to deploy our kids. Like weapons.”

“Your son was a soldier,” Strude says. “He took an oath, and I do him the courtesy of taking that seriously.”

Was that Ewan’s vocation? If it wasn’t the best of his time in the world, was it his worst? She wouldn’t deny his gladness, the calm in his earlier years with the regiment, a new control in him, the ebbing of anxiety she’d swear had been there even as a child, that sunny day in the park, even protective of her and glad of her company, that preparedness in him to be unhappy, and that couldn’t have gone, and it waxed again later, yes, but that’s not to say it never waned. He found something in this work, his obedience.

“I’ve read his file,” Strude says. “I know how things went down between you.” She won’t look away. “You can help us and we can help you, for—and I make no apologies for saying this—the greater good. It’s your choice. It was Ewan’s choice. And if you trust me, maybe he can tell you that.” Oh. “But you have to get serious. Stallo says this, Stallo warned me that, Stallo explained the other. We’re not just talking about how your children came back. Let me ask you something. How do you think they died?”

In the instant before truth drops there is a still point. Maur is poised.

Strude says, “Stallo.”

And she is not surprised.

Friend

Stallo and Isabella and Jeff lounged in the van’s cushioned rear. Stallo passed joints and called out directions to Jonno. When they parked and walked through the night and undergrowth swinging sticks, Jeff turned on a torch and Stallo said, —Put that out, fuck’s sake.

Jonno cut the rusted wires that Stallo’s colleagues had replaced for them and pulled a splayed-edged way into flatter lands that, for all the years of planelessness, felt braced for something. Across a line. A grain-thin boundary of salt, as it might have been. Stallo’s ears took on a new tone, the cold was colder. The alteration was greater than he’d expected. Upon his shoulder the faintest soft tap, the courtesy of plant life, that he turned to see and that was not there. Without sound, he whispered, What’s up? to his compeer. We can’t just leave. There’s a mission.

Beyond the perimeter, he knew, was everything his unit and Myton had arranged, snagging traps, cat’s cradles, blue bottles, phylacteries, engines. At the thought of hagstones came an emotion partaking of safety and danger both. An image came to him. Came back to him, something he had seen in the hazed monochrome of his telly, some serial, the encroachment on dreamlands of standing stones with eyes, that whispered with radio murmurs. Enemies as well as friends from the standpoint of the Roused.

On the nearest wall remains, Jeff wrote in chalk. Free This, Against That. Stallo checked his watch and Jonno and Isabella unloaded drums and candles. They spread a blanket on the ground and, shivering in the blow, sat cross-legged. —Okay, Jonno said. —Okay okay okay.

—So who is it we’re calling again? Jeff said.

—Plenty of dead from here, Stallo said. —Pick a name.

—No, Isabella said. —You know what we’re looking for.

—Well, Stallo said. —We’ll see what we see.

Right then, from out of the dark behind a composite of blocks, a shape emerged. Stallo rose, what sort of returnee, etc., but these were the sounds of a living man.

Jeff jumped up. Jonno and Isabella rose slowly. The man who came wore dark glasses even in the night. His hair was cut short and had no colour and he was small and trim and you could make out next to nothing of his face because of the scarf around his neck and those specs. He put out his right hand and said, —You are Stallo? I am Mansah. Here to join in this endeavour.

Stallo filed the name for later. Add it to the pile. Keep your calm, Stallo. The glasses and hair were new but Stallo, trained, primed and briefed, knew the face from outdated photos. Could make out in the voice something of the quality of a whisper in a sunlit square. Not Marco, then, but his, one gathered, disapproving elder. The Gen’ral (secretary) himself. Fuck. Me. This was Nergal.

—Mansah? Stallo said. —If you say so.

The older man’s grip was firm and slow.

—Who, Jeff said. —What’s the…?

—Close your mouth, mate, Stallo said. —You’ll trap flies.

Isabella and Jonno embraced Nergal.

—Yes, Nergal said to Stallo. —They’ve said to me of you. You and I are comrades in struggle.

Was it glacier runoff in this old codger’s veins? —I don’t know you, Stallo said. Do you really not know me? he thought. —So I don’t know.

—Yes, good.

Good? Stallo’s breath didn’t shake. But it had not been so long since. What was this game, this non-outing, this merely polite suspicion? He never saw my face though, Stallo thought, and if his companions in the square had taken photographs, how washed out and different might they be? Could it be that this honoured visitor truly made no connection between that figure held in place in the piazza and this contact introduced by trusted fellow travellers?

Nergal gestured for everyone to sit again on the concrete. Stallo did not look into the blackness around, from where they were watched. He imagined his own motions as the gestures of a man of infrared, a spectral figure making semaphore in unknown code.

—No offence, mate, Jeff said to Nergal, —but who are you?

—Shh, Jonno said.

—Shh, Stallo said.

And none came running, no bullets passed above to put Jeff down, to leave Nergal and the others ready for delivery into the hands of the British state. This was a turn-up for the books. Nergal was saying to Stallo (to Stallo!), —Isabella tells me you felt something the last time she called, and even she wasn’t sure of what had happened, and Stallo made a show of listening and considered the calculations of his interlocutor and/or their observers, his comrades, Who is that and should we get him?, might be worth revisiting mission aims, but look where they were, what they were trying to do. Stick to the plan. And whether Stallo’s control or Benters’s pal Pop or any of the dead fliers or some weak and lonely wild remnant chirped up at the forthcoming or not, even if there was only a flat blank silence, you’d lose nothing by waiting, because Nergal was now in their sights, followable, and abruptly this little group was considerably more intriguing than even Stallo had thought it, and his own role even more central.

He nodded as Nergal said that he had come a long way, that he represented comrades from across the world. —And tell me, Nergal said, —why you came back. After the last time with Isabella, you said you were done.

—I got thinking. Stallo looked into the glass-fringed black windows around. —I dream of this place sometimes. I came here years ago.

That sort of thing should do.

—A lot of people here died, he said. —There’s power in that.

—There may be, Nergal said. Don’t pretend you’re not excited, mate, Stallo thought. Don’t pretend you came over here on the off chance. I’ve got you lot buzzing. Nergal touched his chest, where below his coat some amulet would likely swing. —We should see. Perhaps you can help us.

And Isabella gestured and everyone held each other’s hands and without battery or engine but for the oldest ones of all, their bodies and minds and whatever was within, Isabella breathed in and out and Stallo thought to his unseen R Unit comrades, Places, everyone.

New quiet.

—Are you there? Isabella said.

Oh, Stallo thought. You have no idea.

After a time she made animal sounds. Did no one else hear? Huff and splutter under a rolling sky. Stallo made out no night birds. He pressed his thighs cross-legged down into the runway and could make out the contours of every crack and pock, and Isabella’s breath was laboured in

awoke, into shock

Someone was tapping a little drum. He opened his eyes at the stupidity of the sound.

—Stop that, he said. He kicked to kick the drum away, there was no drum, all hands were connected. Jeff stared at him. Isabella crooned. Stallo’s neck itched, he pressed it down to his shoulder to scratch it without breaking the circle and he would have sworn, he would have sworn he felt a nub of hardness in his lobe. He imagined himself in the eye of a scope again, a light-enhancing machine. Like a glowing stone. Get ready, he thought. The breathing of—could it be a dog? Companion to Xolotl, a shuck whuffing on some outer reaches?

—Is anybody there? Isabella said.

He could see the glint, wetness in globs upon her. Not sweat or rain. Jesus, it dripped from her onto the ruins. —Is there anybody—, she began, and interrupted herself. —Yes.

That last word in the voice of a sad posh distant man.

Hold your breath. Oh for an oscilloscope or something. For Stallo to be able to tune in to and transform whispers, issue waveform orders, make sine pleas. He reached with skeins of feeling into a void behind, inside him for the forest man, he could not feel it watching. Isabella stood. Jonno’s hand and Stallo’s went up, tethering hers. She struggled to free her grip.

—Cheerio, she said, strangulated voice. Then with new delight she said, —I say! Stallo held her still. He too began to rise. Isabella walked her feet up and down in place.

A new noise rose and she yanked her hands free abruptly with shocking strength and an arc snapped and left Stallo’s ears ringing and in came dark.

And someone did not cease to scream. And Isabella spasmed and rose. And rose. And stood. Stood in the air. Her boots dangled. Stood in the air her boots dangling. Her toes six inches over the ground. Pointing down. Tada a trick. Her eyes were

She convulsed and seemed to grow, to be too close to Stallo, to be wrong angled. Her face twisted and a new voice came.

—Pardon me, her mouth said. A grating from her throat.

—Don’t mind if I do, she said. —Oh I don’t mind if I do.

She smiled a wide slow smile. Now, Stallo thought, now, now, now. And he gasped as if a hundred haint bottles or a single great one flipped open somewhere, to ensnare with blue light.

—You know me, Isabella said. Like metal across cement she spoke. She looked down at Stallo and he felt as if a lighthouse glare went through him. —Oh hello.

—Where is she then? she said to him. —How is she? Don’t mind me naughty naughty they always say and if you can’t laugh well there’s not much point is there?

—Only me, she said, —just me don’t you mind me hello.

—How

—is

—she

—then? the voice said. —I know how Rene is old Rene but how’s Maisie?

Babel from the mouth, a jibber-jabber of entities. Isabella reached for Stallo

—

another blip and he was yards back sprawling and Isabella eyeing him with interest holding her own hand like her fingers had been rapped and as if he’d been hauled away from her, here he was. Prone, he watched wet blurting, black blood from Isabella’s mouth, eyes, ears, gouts among words. A man tried to run. Someone was pleading. Lights at the edges of the world. The report of a shot. The rushing drag of a body on the ground screaming and wetness and the scrape of bone.

Hello, the voice said. Hello hello hello ello ello ello lo lo lo evenin all

She said, I’m not dead

She said, Look at me you bastards I’m alive I’m you know who I am you old see you enn tee I’m alive

it’s only me it’s only your

Old Pal

Isabella fell

leaving the stress of a regard upon Stallo from the air, points of attention where her eyes had been. He turned his head. Jeff shambling, shaking, like one not born to this body. Jonno lying still. Another shape. Someone shouted, —Traps are sprung but there’s anything….

A code in omissions. In the shadows, a dark square. No Isabella. Stallo closed his eyes, strained, for a last emission from that renegade, that Old Pal, that had sidled in past the faint and hopeless function Isabella had tapped into rueful presence, come all the way through like a hog, not suppletion not revenant, ex tenebris.

Stallo stumbled up like a drunk man. Lights came swinging over the runway and he continued with his eyes closed it made no difference. Myton shouted his name. And he paid no attention, was falling to his knees and crawling as men with weapons and EMF readers and thermometers and bottles of sand came running, he put his hands on Nergal and turned him over to see the splay of him, the opened-up belly and bones, the expression of great concentration, focus on his own death. Stallo put his hands down amid the spill of Nergal’s insides and left handprints in blood.

I’ll never know now, Stallo as-if heard his own thoughts. He stared at the sop and gush. Did you know me? Were you here for me or despite me? What was your game? Was that well played or were you a fool?

Nergal soaked into the ground. Stallo lay down upon his back in new remains and bad silence. No noise would be the same now.

[44]

Strude says, “Let me guess. He’s told you the Unit’s going to pot. Stupid new commanders. No idea what we’re doing. He’s got you riled up at the idea that we’re recruiting? Maur, what Stallo’s wanted for years is a better way to recruit. As far as he’s concerned, we’re AWOL from him. He’s trying to save us from ourselves and he’s using you as an experiment.”

Maur thinks, When did I start crying?

“But I feel it,” she says. “Something terrible, under everything.”

“Yes.”

“He says you don’t believe it.”

“He’s lying.”

“So why…? Why aren’t you fighting it?”

“Of course we are. We’re here, for Christ’s sake! We’re trying to do it without his monomania. And his…Maur, he killed your children. Because he’s trying to recruit.”

Maur’s nose runs. She salivates. She spits so she can breathe. “Yes,” Strude says. “Come with me. Help us. For your sake, for Jules’s, for Cybill’s, for yours. For Ewan’s.”

The sun is a long way off the edge of the world yet but she can make out the sky now. She can see Strude’s outlines. (Who is this who is coming?) Out of hollows she envisions a deeper gaze meeting hers, out of darker pits than those Strude has made of his own eyes. Jules? Is this Cybill Cybill is that you? You? Yoohoo? Is it you Ewan she as it were sees, silent, watching from behind Strude’s shoulder, as it were shaking as it were its head?

If it suits him, Maur is given to know, this man will kill me. Since when was there sanctuary in the state? The hole-eye of the gun watches her. Whatever Strude is saying, that darkness said, she will go with him on terms not hers. Maur pleads silently to whatever might have spoken speechlessly into her bones.

Please. Help me.

please please please

please?

, please, please,

It’s very cold. It is coldest when it is darkest.

“Time to go,” Strude says. “For Ewan.”

And Maur starts because in what he says and how he says it, for all it’s performance, is something that brings to her mind Yew’s own words. An army bloke I know. That’s what he said. Knows his onions. Amazing what we’re doing. I shouldn’t say too much.

“You knew him,” Maur says.

He says again, “Time to go.”

Maur gasps as below it all something reaches and is gone. Leaves the world without a sound. She knows it. An infinitely tiny thing. There’s no snap, no sough of air replacing something taken. She flexes her fingers. To the place from where the apports come, a matter goes. Where pens and coins have gone, where batteries and notebooks and notes and tickets and keys have gone, all those things you lose in your grief. She’s watched, and she clenches, and something else goes where they have gone. No plastic holds her. Her arms are free.

But she keeps her wrists together. She shifts, feels under her for the wrench on which she sits. Looks again past Strude to where shade eyes might watch. And at that flick of her attention, Strude’s own eyes widen and he turns. And he’s a soldier, and he keeps his weapon on her. But still in that moment he’s not looking at her, and her hands are free.

She swings the tool up as fast and hard as she can and he’s already turning back but the metal hits his fist. He cries out and she’s bringing the tool down again and he has dropped the pistol and they both lunge for it beneath the driver’s seat she letting out little screams of rage and he silent and trying to punch her but the angle is wrong he can only hurt and she has her hand on the weapon’s handle and is bringing it up and he is half raising his hands now like a vanquished man and even before she has it all the way ready, he lunges again right fist for her face left going for the gun itself and she pulls the trigger and in the aftermath of oily glare sees rage on Strude’s face.

spectre

respect

sceptre

certes

resect

secret

creep

peers

trees

ere

set

see

es

et

re

r

XXIII

The Calling

Let Go

Sometimes, in the days after the airfield,

Start again.

It had looked a decent bet, the ruin landscape and wetland surrounds, some knowing Gurney Slade shade turning with sullen certainty, mouthing You took your time. And if Benters’s story had been more than the twaddle of a sensitive man, if that conduit place for death in the skies had rubbed a raw spot which it looked like they could all agree on now, wasn’t that what they’d sought? One of Benters’s old mates gusted up into revenance as unthinking as a stone, enticeable into those blue bottles for the Croomes of the world to frequency modulate and such. But then Stallo had been gasping, hands tarry with blood.

Stallo, stumbling, whispering desperate thanks to his walker-alongside, solely by the intercession of and yanking away by which, he’d have laid money, he could still stumble and sway at all, not like, oh blimey, was that, that mound there, but hadn’t he been lying more like a regular corpse only a moment ago, since when had, was that Skully? Piled up like that? Slipping and spilling and wet? Were those coming out of Jeff’s throat, those noises, and where was he, and what was that, was it a dog, blimey Charlie, was that Jeff gone quadruped shuffling unclothed like Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar? And look again at this old man, this Nergal lying down dead, eyes absolutely glaring and awful.

And just where, amid all that residue of what they had invited in, had Isabella got to?

You couldn’t gainsay Benters’s anguish.

—I thought it would be…I had no idea! It was never like this! My God, I’m so sorry! What did it…Oh Christ, oh Pops, what did it say?

Myton, meanwhile, who’d prepped the venue, calmly not apologising at all. You had to give it to him: didn’t he have a nerve?

Stallo’s control stayed quiet. Perhaps it huddled in the deep parts of his undergrowth like something in pain.

Back on the island. Hook standing, Long sitting, saying to Stallo You know what this means? and Need I remind you and Stallo standing straight with his hands behind his back.

—Do what you want, he said.

—Do what you want, sir, Long said.

Stallo didn’t even laugh. —Do what you want sir.

—Need I remind you of your duty?

—Remind me of whatever you want sir. I’ve told you what happened. I’ve told you you should talk to Myton even if he won’t tell me any fucking thing. And I’ve told you I’m done.

—Sergeant Allardyce, fuck Myton. Do you know how many people we had there? Because of your friend Myton and his “hunches”?

—He’s not my friend.

—Well he’s certainly not mine! I doubt there’s ever been such attention on one spot, and yes there was a mess and some inexperienced too-powerful not-careful-enough medium got spiked by a very nasty surge. We’re looking into it. But we’ve dealt with such things before. And it’s bad enough to have Myton muttering—and whose ear does he have that we’re supposed to indulge him? Long interrupted himself. —Bad enough to have him muttering darkly, without one of my most experienced soldiers getting a fit of the vapours. What’s come over you?

—No idea, sir. So are you suggesting everything’s tickety-boo?

—That will do, Sergeant.

—I’m just telling you I’m done, sir. So fuck your missions and your unit.

Long stood and walked out and slammed the door.

—Why? Hook said. —Really?

If you really don’t feel what’s changed, I can’t tell you. If Stallo opened his mouth, perhaps the presence might do his speaking for him. But wasn’t that the issue? That his control was, what would you say—cowed? So he shook his head.

He tried to go one last time into the Black Beacon. But the guards had been told to turn him away.

And yes it was a mild surprise that here he was, stalking London, not in some dedicated brig for the ITKO among AWOL necromancers, disobedient karcists remonstrating through bars and salt-line barriers. That he wasn’t executed. A last favour from Hook, maybe.

In and out of awareness of himself went Stallo. Into some street or other, some time or other when daylight was waning or not yet risen. Generally in what you’d have called a strop. Channelling, a gift? Good or bad, you ask? Medium at best, boom boom.

Tough seasons. Aficionado of the small hours, Stallo knew who came when, on regular rounds. This lost man would appear at this time, that figure in a flat cap bidding him quiet good morning to let loose his dog. Which tore through the grassy waste with end-of-world enthusiasm. A day passed. A week passed. A month passed. A minute passed. London, Surrey, London, London, a top-floor room, an attic, a walk from one side of the city to the other over a single night. The time it took to breathe in, breathe out, passed. Stallo got on with being in a world into which he was sure something had entered. And wherein Isabella may or may not still have been.

Of course he asked. Put out feelers as they say, which made you sound like something insectile. Stallo couldn’t have said whether he was trying to stay hidden or trying to find something hidden.

The coughing of a motor made him jerk. A trash truck ridden by binmen hanging like Iceni from a chariot, rolling dustbins on their lower rims and hurling black-bags into the hindmouth, a harvest as if of urns of the dead, rejectamenta in shrouds. Stallo mocked himself for such imaginings, head turned as the hunt went by.

Am I a good soldier?

He went by shouting from windows, by boys and girls in white robes outside karate classes. Wet washing snapped at him. He had a fight in a pub, broke a younger man’s jaw without much effort. The relief that act brought him was too brief. He was one of those men now! Those dust-coloured men the city threw up in corners, clotted out of dirt and cigarette smoke, to emerge Mind how you go–ing and muttering. Landscape men, genii loci, genii tempori if that was the Latin. Maybe this was it for him now then.

A woman had spread old books across the pavement. He checked their spines and was back years to his first investigations. At the stalls’ southernmost fringes chancers without permits stood blinking as if the sun confused them behind their slicks of crap, asking random prices, as likely too low as madly high, for single shoes, costume jewels with broken clasps, paint sets without brushes. Among those elders, younger calmer vendors, though with merchandise seemingly no less ruined. Tramp-disguised hawkers of anomalies watching with calculating eyes. Especially for those like Stallo.

No apport-seller sold only the dead-shed. They might have one such piece, and low quality at that, among base items, but you couldn’t stand patiently with a single broken picture frame or spyglass too mean for the Unit in its good days, so they positioned any such amid unsnagged junk. And would gladly sell such sweepings from bins to any who knew there were prizes here but not how to distinguish dross and the extruded. The ITKO went shopping with loupes and magnifying glasses. Stallo watched a woman in a business suit turn an ivory hilt over and over. It was all poor stuff.

This stallholder was a young woman whose long hair was not well brushed. She regarded Stallo and he put his hand without looking or hesitation on the remains of a canteen. The one apport among her wares. He saw he’d intimidated her.

—How much?

—Two hundred, she said.

—Sixty and you’re still a thief.

She didn’t respond. He counted out notes.

—Tell you what, he said. —I’ll let you keep your tat but consider this a down payment for your ear to the ground. I’ll be around. Let me know any new sources or buyers. Teachers, council workers, bus conductors, whatever.

—Ooh, Mr. Mystery. It’s bringing them all out, isn’t it?

—Is it? He kept his face impassive. —What’s bringing what out?

—The shortage. The times.

—How long d’you think you’ve got left? Supply drying up, quality down? Where are they all going, d’you think?

—The apports? she said. —Might as well get on with it while we can. Before it all slips off to the Happy Valley. You stocking up? I heard about a woman over in Dalston, weekly séance, nothing to worry about, done it a million times. But it’s getting dangerous now.

—What happened? he said. —Dead is she?

—You tell me. Walking around but not the same.

—Let me know stuff like that, I’ll make it worth your while, Stallo said. He gave her his number with the money.

—People want toys now, she said. She gave a quizzical smile. —You never know what there’s going to be a rush on, do you? Right now it’s toys.

He paused at the entrance to his flat. From the lounge: —In here.

Very Jerry and Dean. Kingston, narrow across the shoulders, hair damp-looking as ever. Melissa Marks, who looked at Stallo without visible emotion.

—Alright, Sarge, Dean said.

—Alright? He went into the kitchen, made tea, ate biscuits, offered them none. They crowded around. —No Manning?

—He’s out too, Kingston said. —It’s contagious.

—And you? Stallo said. Kingston looked quizzical and it sat weird on his ratty face. —I don’t remember the last time we talked. Why the fuck are you here?

The surprise looked sincere. —Because you’re Stallo.

—Never thought I’d see you in a funk like this, Very Jerry said. —It’s a shocker.

—Will you ever get over it? Stallo said.

—You think we don’t get it?

—I have no clue nor do I give a tinker’s cuss, mate, Stallo said.

Kingston said they all understood his feelings and that everyone knew things had gone badly wrong.

—It’s fucking shite when it goes south, Kingston said. —None of us were there, so you tell us. Why’s this one got to you though? We’ve all had shitty ops. What was it about this one?

Stallo would not let his mind rest on what he’d felt that night and experienced almost no shame at not trying to articulate it, told himself he was done having people look at him like he was cuckoo. —I ain’t coming back.

—Like you can leave this business alone, Marks said.

—It was a too-many-cooks situation, Very Jerry said. —Brass are spitting tacks.

—You going to stew just because of a bad mission? Dean said.

—Shove it up your arse, eh? Stallo said.

So there they sat.

—I’m surprised we found you, Dean said. —I thought you might have done a Bowler, be off in the Dwell. With the lespries.

—I can hear the capital D, Stallo said. —You can stop trying to entice me, you were never good at the mystery bit of it. I’m not so NITKO already I don’t hear stories, so don’t dangle carrots, I’ve a fair idea what fairy tales you’re on about.

A magic kingdom. Of Roused and quick alongside each other, subject to a new theology. A new version of an old story, for frenetic days.

—Well done though, Stallo said, —for managing not to call it the Ghost Town.

—The thing is, Jerry said, —maybe you know it’s arse-over-tip. Apports not working like they used to. That was always your area, Sarge. Kowalchuk’s having a hell of a time of it now too, apparently. KH are—

—KH are fucked, Stallo said. —I saw them get fucked. I saw them get decapitated. I got their top man’s blood on my shoes.

—They’re more active than before, Marks said.

Stallo frowned. —Panicking maybe. I don’t care.

—You do, she said. —I heard you think it’s the end of the world.

He met her stare. —Give it a minute, he said. —Takes a foal a while to get its legs.

—But you don’t care?

—I don’t. Any other dramas you want to wave at me?

The Uniteers didn’t look at each other.

—The lespries, Dean said, —they’re…

—Waning? Stallo said. —How many you lost now? Still telling yourselves it’s just signal glitches? What does Croome think’s going on? When no one answered him he said, —You losing other things, too? Go on you lot, nice to see you, thanks ever so, good luck, off you fuck.

—You’re on leave, is all, Marks said. —Whatever you tell yourself.

—Is Bowler on leave and all? Stallo said.

—Don’t you think you’re being a bit of a baby?

You didn’t feel it. What was there in the air, what whispered and played.

—Go on, Stallo said. —Don’t wake my neighbours.

They’d likely bugged the flat before he got there. They’d hear nothing.

[45]

She calls herself Mary or Marie, Maria or Mariella or Mariana or whatever, with a careful expression that implies, Say again? She tries never to speak, to communicate only with motions of face and head. You can learn a lot of a language that way.

You wouldn’t recognise her forearms any more (she doesn’t). Learn a town’s angles, you can move through them invisibly, neither too present nor too absent, and over months they become iterations of some shared quality every dwelling must assert. So you’re somewhere and nowhere in particular, too. Town to town in bleaching heat. She cleans the offices of small companies and brokers and guides and dirty hotels, the subcontracted and outsourced, runs vacuum cleaners over worn carpet tiles. She scrubs toilets. She eats sandwiches in the small hours, swivelling on someone else’s chair, peering over dividers at screens festooned with sticky notes, mementos, passwords.

Many nights a floor is hers alone. Sometimes she’s sent to towers too tall for such middling cities, high enough to look down at clustered lights and late cars. Dry hills, dry streets, a curve of sea, dusty parks wherein are glints that bespeak those without homes. She looks across spaces into other offices, at other women and men silently at work. Slosh out buckets. Wipe windowpanes with chemicals or dilute vinegar. Night sweats make her slick. Pool in the hollows of her skin. That elbow grease. Lubricating her second shift. She decides she’ll channel it into vials. Stopper them up. Collect what drips from her.

At the end of a night she returns to a cramped chamber over a bar or in a half-dead industrial estate where (say) an anxious Romanian pays her cash.

For weeks she thinks as little as she can. As if thoughts would draw attention. There’s no way to know if the breathlessness of being pursued is paranoia or intuition or if that’s no kind of helpful distinction any more. Keeps her handbag with her, always closed. A new one, new old, that is, bartered for on the road, darker and more knackered and considerably larger than the last, that she still has, folded up with whatever is in it and carried within.

—

But she can’t go long without holding her fists closed against adrenaline and the memory that she has killed. She can never successfully pretend that she doesn’t have to decide something. She imagines marking paper automatically. Letting lines wander, eyes closed.

So now and then, unobserved, yes, she moves a mouse to unsleep a monitor, and if that sweat drips from her hand to the keyboard or the screen, let it dry there, a map mark. Feed in 1234 when prompted, or try some of the words written on some of those notes. There are times that’ll get you in. Make a quick cautious headline hunt on the browser. There are keywords not to be written, that might incur attention at another end of a network. She never types Azeri or Maur or Maureen Towns or her son’s name. Or certain other words.

Cross-refer hints discovered from such coffee-break searches, from hunts in internet cafés far from where she works or sleeps, from a few close-to-wordless interactions with someone recommended. Mary or Marie tracks the traces her son once left for her. She finds out where a person might seek a kind of blessing, speak to the dead.

A component of the city nocturne, she’s not without society. Whatever town she’s in, by now she does not have to always eat alone in her room, if she wants not to. Sometimes in a twenty-four-hour place she’s treated with brusque and offhand kindness, by other paperless workers. She pretends to confusion or disability to legitimate her silence. Someone, impatiently, will help her. She might rest amid some laughter and a polyglot chatter of half-understandings. She sits in churches and at the sides of the fountains in squares. She wears clear-lensed glasses with thick frames and keeps her hair in a scarf, wears a shapeless brown coat even in this warm, carrying that saggy bag.

Wherever she is she locates spiritists. Might follow. You don’t need to be in their rooms with them to pick up some acceleration sometimes. It’s not as if it doesn’t fear the attention of a dreadful underlier of what these people seek. But being sought’s not new to her and now merely hiding’s not enough. Intel’s still the thing, the first thing.

How could she sleep well? Lying on the mattress imagining unfolding the paper maybe in her bag within the bag, seeing the state of the message, now to a new recipient, as if doing so wouldn’t be a provocation she must not make. When she wakes she shakes in thin sheets, weeping, if she weeps, as quietly as she can, and lingering behind her eyes sometimes the eidolon of Strude bleeds and gasps at her. She stares into the corner of a tiny room she rents by the night, examines what she took from him. Boxy palm-sized thing, black metal, nine unmarked black buttons on it, three rows of three, like a remote control for some stygian TV. She presses each again, nothing happens again. She looks to where three lines intersect, wall wall floor, as if out of that lower angle will come a visitation.

—

Looking down on treeless streets she imagines herself seen from below, backlit by the strip lamps so she is a darkness, a woman-shape suspended. She points her finger like a gun down at an idea of Stallo. Night after night she shoots him for killing her son. Bang! Bang! A bucking of the hand.

It’s a sprawl of building sites out there, fingers of rebar reaching skyward. There’s still money around, it doesn’t seem too evident that this is a brink. She watches fights between drunken men and sees Stallo in such actions, for all she’s sure he would not engage in such drab and planless assaults. Stallo why would you kill Ewan? Jules? Yew? Is it a lie?

What did he do in the mountains? she wonders. If he is alive. He seems to her the kind of man who does not die when people come to kill him.

She never pretends to herself for long that she’s not pursued. She hones, narrows her searches.

She dragged the body from the vehicle. She was shaking so violently she had to fight to breathe. She took her bag. Searched him avoiding as best she could the wet and opened zone, found that mechanism in a pocket. She drove. Was a kind of machine. On instinct until after dawn. Stopping at last to beat the steering wheel and the sides of her own head. To press those buttons, effectlessly, the first time.

Drove on very carefully for hours to Trondheim.

She had taken from the vehicle what she could carry. Gone walking. She ate, she bought cheap clothes from a tourist shop. She took the IDs Stallo had given her and cut them into slivers and flushed them down a café toilet.

Maur found the right bars. Look, she knew how to tell which they were now. Asked questions with adequate flat-affect knowledge and insider calm. She was directed into a windowless back room to sell Strude’s watch and the second pistol she had found in the car to a plump grizzled man with a soft voice. He nodded at her and what she felt was not fear but the muted certainty of danger, that though she had her own—madness, again—gun within her pocket, she could probably not stop him hurting her if he wanted to. But he had looked at her appraisingly and given her a few hundred euros and asked her where she was going and if he could help.

The hold of a ship. She lived according to bargains. Men and women came in hunkered-down skulduggery to give her food in packets. Bottles of water. She arranged the empties. A philosophy. She travelled amid detritus. She had leaned against the metal below the surface of the sea, the inner walls of a lorry. Maybe a brine solvent might dissolve ties, threads back from her to the figures of the dark, to the army who came. To the Azeri? To Stallo himself?

Now she sits in another country with her bag, a communicating machine within. It isn’t for me, she thinks. Whispers the names of the dead and is not visited. Screens light her. Ewan sat too close to the television screen—children so eager to be bathed in that shifty glow—and she wanted him to laugh even at those awful sometimes nasty jokes the comics told, but he just stared as if in wonder, and she watched that instead. This is a new kind of loneliness. She imagines a life without the dead.

—

When is it allowed, to stay stricken and bereft, no one’s saying that would ever go away or that you’d want it to, and yet to be defined by other things? If I weren’t pursued, is what she thinks. If my life were just days and nights in London and slipping towards the end, what would I be? No room for resentment though; she’s a fugitive without forms.

She’s careful to have no friends but among her co-workers are those whose company pleases her. To one, a thin and tired Nigerian man, she says in Spanish, Do you dream?

Yes.

What?

Of my family. My mother. You?

She won’t let him into her room, although perhaps he wouldn’t think or say anything about the bottles of oil, the sandpile by the door.

I dream of me, she says to him.

Another office. Two chairs inclined as if unseen sitters attempt a difficult conversation. This computer without even a passcode. She looks up listings for performances, music and jokes, in the towns of this coast. Erases her searches and lets the screen sleep again. Among the sticky notes around it, Marie Mary Mariella Maria Maur sees one unwritten-upon. A prominent reminder. She stares at a point upon the wall as if attention is upon her. Dust drifts.

“Jules?”

She speaks it in a whisper. She thinks, Can it be? I haven’t unfolded the letter because if it is true if that’s for me now I don’t know if it’s your mum trying to talk to me or you or who, why, are you, here if you are, am I to thank you?, again?, and she’d find it if I opened it, she’d smell it, the queen of the dead, the Azeri, I mean, and what she brings, and I won’t look to see a spreading blank.

Say Jules this time so quietly you don’t make a sound. Don’t speak the name of your son; that’s not what this can be. That rustle could be a little foreign mouse. She stands between desks. This aisle is full of noises. Maur cannot know what it is that knocks against the bin. This time when her lips move they make the shape of the word Cybill, as if the faint perhaps sickly watchingness that Maur will not definitively decide is not present partakes of daughter and mother both. Others too, who knows?

She takes the unmarked scrap. Goes through bins and unfolds scrunched-up discards. Every few nights finds a prize, one thrown away unwritten upon—rejected silence. She knows she’s coming close to madness. There comes to her inner eye an image as of someone’s back, face obscured, alone after daytime’s workers have left, bent over and industrious, leaving such papers for her.

—

When she wakes her cunt is slick and she puts her fingers inside and when she smells them they do not smell to her of herself. When she thinks the names of her departed she does not believe the answerless quiet.

In Committee

He returned home to a letter, stampless, slipped under his door. Lionel Myton. Contact details and a message.

I hear you’ve quit. And really this time! I’d rather think of you as freelance. You may no longer be on the books but I consider you in reserve, which makes you Reserve Forces’ Association, RFA. Of which I am a committee member. Might I welcome you to the club? I think we might fruitfully have a chat about that night.

Above a Bayswater Turkish restaurant, a small, thickly carpeted flat with pictures hung upon its walls and books on its shelves. This was not Myton’s house, no way. The sofa swallowed Stallo too deep for dignity. Myton brought him a scotch and one for himself. He watched Stallo from a better chair where lamplight cut his face in half.

—What went wrong? Stallo said.

—I won’t pretend to you that I know. Long, and everyone associated with any clout, continue to insist that there’s nothing to know.

—I’m aware.

—Never underestimate the tenacity of steady-as-she-goes. One of various reasons I never flourished in officialdom. I will say this: I’m not Long’s greatest admirer, but what perhaps he told you, that there was no sign of anything in particular beyond a nasty spike? As far as it goes, that’s true. I have the charts.

—You didn’t fucking see it.

—My point is that given those readings, one needs a certain imagination to take seriously your report. The whole Unit should be predicated on being open to anomalies, I understand. Let this be a lesson in how even the strangest things become routine.

—So they’re going to do nothing.

—Long’s got the whip hand, but he’s only one man. Others are more open-minded.

—Croome.

—Dr. Croome has an interesting way of looking at the world, and her analysis might not sit well with her boss. Perhaps she might even have sought an unofficial outlet with whom to share concern. Myton coughed as if with wry modesty.

—Where’s Isabella?

—I’m keen to know.

—What Benters was talking about…, Stallo said. —The first time. The Dragon. You know that’s what this was?

Myton put his forefinger to his lips. Not shushing; contemplating.

—That’s what we’re here to find out. Thinking about Skully and Isabella, their contacts, and who you say was with them. I wonder if someone in their periphery might not have had a part in persuading them to go for this. Why would they, and why would their guest, not want access to something like what you describe? As a weapon?

—You think it was deliberate? You were the one who wanted them to try—

—Obviously the outcome wasn’t deliberate, but maybe they didn’t just get unlucky and have the fish they snared snaffled by one bigger. Seems a bit much for coincidence that Nergal was there, doesn’t it?

—You think he was running an experiment? Like us? What’s got you so excited?

—If he was, it didn’t go well. But perhaps he believed that Skully or Isabella might actually reach this thing—only to find that “contact” and “let in” aren’t the same as “control.” That that might take a whole other set of efforts.

—Please at least call it by its fucking name, Stallo said.

—Do tell…?

Consider the litany. Of familiars. Of the greatest of the dead. Or the never-alive. Of the greatest or worst of that which does not mislead itself that it was ever saddled by human meat. Of names of what watches and is hungry.

Myton answered himself. —Old Pal.

They let that have its moment.

—What was it? Stallo said.

Myton gave a faint smile and looked up at a corner of the ceiling like an embarrassed schoolteacher. —I can’t help but reflect on quite how many times throughout history that question has been asked. Of it, or like phenomena. And how many times an adequate answer has failed to come. What would you like me to say? I don’t think you have any less of an idea than do I. What can we come up with between us? Or are you looking less for clarity than permission?

—I don’t get you.

—Then ignore me. Let’s just say “a congelation of quite some power,” and consider this. Say it’s true that some comrade had an inkling of what risks Isabella and Skully ran from success, and perhaps they let them bash on anyway. All the biggest invocations need a sacrifice.

—Nice, Stallo said.

—Purely hypothetical.

—Push it farther, Stallo said. —What if Nergal was the target?

—Lefty splits do get very nasty, Myton said slowly.

—So we’re trying our plan, unknown to us Nergal’s trying his, maybe, and unknown to him, someone else is having a go at theirs. All at once.

In that moment Myton did not look jovial. —And it’s a problem for everyone now. Including those for whom I speak.

He reached down and picked up a folder from beside the chair.

—Not sure how much of this’ll come as a surprise to you.

He handed it to Stallo: Secret, and Your Eyes Only. Stallo drew out papers.

February 4, 1974, typed. Resistance And PsyOps Committee.

—Apologies for the cliché, Myton said. He put his fingertip three-quarters of the way down the page.

As Dean Acheson said, England has lost an empire, and failed to gain a cause.

—So your plan’s to offer a cause? Stallo said. —What? Nostalgia?

—Don’t knock nostalgia. Anyway nostalgia’s not the only phenomenon that abuts memory. There’s also revenance.

—That’s your cause?

—There are worse, Myton said.

—There are better.

—There are worse. But that’s supposed to be the Unit’s bailiwick, and—and here I fully agree with you—it’s past its best. New thinking’s necessary. For revenance. For us. Britain. I’ll be back in two or three hours. What I’m hoping is that you’ll be here when I return. Along with these papers. See how trusting I am?

He closed the door behind him and did not double-lock. Trusting, my eye; as if this flat wasn’t watched.

Stallo sifted through the pages. Outside the sky darkened and the shouts of London rose above the smell of warming rubbish.

Within the Reserve Forces’ Association, Lionel Myton had written on the 10th July that year, the name of his correspondent redacted in this fading reproduction, there are three committees; two are interested in horse-riding events and shooting; the third, the Resistance and Psyops Committee, in the exchange of information on such matters with wartime allied countries—in short, in keeping the boys together. And to the RFA of which it was an official subgroup, the Resistance and Psyops Committee, RPOC, would announce two vague remits: to study psychological operations; to exchange ideas with other European organisations.

To be precise, Stallo was not a reserve officer, so not within the RFA, but what the hell, here was an invitation to its inner circle, this RPOC within it. Under Lionel Myton, James Turnbull, Bernard Hanauer (Charterhouse), the legend to the many LMs and BHs and JTs and such-like throughout the documents revealed.

Our hope and intention is to counter subversive propaganda overtly, through established means of communications, though the gathering of information on such propaganda (sources, objectives, channels) may entail some covert activity.

Stallo did not read in order, nor one document at a time.

The Situation; CounterMeasures; The Organisation; Some Qualities Required of Members.

Democracy as we practice it allows freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of political choice. There are obvious dangers in this and, in the past, we have been safeguarded against these dangers less by vigilance than by a sense of order, of conservatism and of purpose, and by a belief in the superiority of our way of doing things. This amounted to patriotism often coupled with nationalism. There was little threat from subversion because our soil was not conducive to its growth.

During the ’39–’45 war the Auxiliary Units were created to combat the external, overt threat resulting from invasion. They were stood down at the end of the war because that threat no longer existed. However, it is now clear (and was perhaps clear to some at that time) that the organisations should have been kept alive,

Eh? As if they had not been! Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe’s what, “Special Plans” for “Clandestine Services” and “Clandestine Matters” and the “Principles for Unorthodox Warfare Planning” had been a source of amusement to the Uniteers, no less than had the Allied Clandestine Committee. Ooh, unorthodox! Ah, secret! But perhaps a certain decorum was required even in such internal documents as these.

and modified to meet new and equally dangerous threats such as that which has been growing over the last 25 years and with which we are all now faced.

Perhaps there is always the need for some such organisation in a democracy—a kind of national Watch Committee.

The strength and seriousness of this threat results from changes in soil conditions here. New values both good and bad, the search for a new national identity and purpose stemming from near-total disillusion with the past, spending power in the hands of the inexperienced and hedonistic, and now, roaring inflation have all combined to create an atmosphere of malaise and disorientation in which the constant search for some new thing and selfish self-preservation have become the most important goals for many sections of the community.

As Dean Acheson said,

Et cetera.

The purpose of our study group is to identify present threats to society and the state.

take countermeasures.

Members will probably be chosen from all walks of social and politically acceptable life, both men and women.

Necessary qualities?

Integrity

Dependability

Perseverance

Loyalty

Discretion. [Certainly let’s stress that.]

Sense of Fairness

Courage

Honest to God Stallo couldn’t say if it was better or worse that such guff was here even in most-secret docs. Shouldn’t this be where you let rip with unvarnished National Interest?

Officially the RPOC was accountable to the RFA. Through which, from the MOD, it received a few disbursements. However: it seems appropriate that our terms of reference should be agreed by a much higher authority.

And what of Stallo’s own particular and special skills?

A letter to another redacted. [It] occurred to the three of us that we should try to do something positive to counteract subversive propaganda…that our new activities must be kept quite distinct from those of our Committee within RFA. As distinct from and inner to the RPOC, that is, as that was from and to the RFA. We have dubbed our new venture and organisation Pickled Onions!

So. In the penumbra of the RFA, the darker circle of the RPOC. Within that, those clandestine armies; those focused on subversion and the new national malaise; and, most occult of all, this absurdly named core. Pickled Onions. PO. Within the remit of which, under the skin of the psyops, must be—why else would Myton seek him?—parapsyops.

When he heard the key, Stallo was still deep in the silly sofa, with his hands together, his elbows on his thighs. Myton reentered and watched him awhile.

—I doubt I’ll be able to pay what you were getting in the services.

—That was hardly the riches of Croesus, Stallo said.

—The rest of the committee would be sick if they knew I was considering offering anything at all. All our funds are diversions from a ministry friendly. The marvels of paperwork. I’ll do what I can.

—The Yanks are the pickle factory, Stallo said. —Is that why we’re Pickled Onions?

—What, Myton said, —could be more British? PO reverses Standard Operating Procedure, yes, and why does one pickle? You’re the one who brought up nostalgia and revenance and so on. What do you think pickling is? To what ends does one pickle? What pickles does one get oneself into? If you can’t laugh, what’s the point of anything?

Stallo could not but half admire the tenacity of English determination to snigger away all dread and ecstasy.

—So what are we doing? he said.

—It’s not just the Unit which is adrift, Myton said. —You’re not the only one to walk out, as I’m sure you know. The whole army’s rather lost. And similar problems seem to be afflicting the other side. I want to understand the relation between the business of internal subversion and this, shall we say, crisis, in the field of Rousing.

—If any, Stallo said.

—“Everything is connected to everything else,” Myton said. —Or words to that effect. As said one Friedrich Engels. The only question is the nature of the connection.

—And what it’s got to do with what happened at the airfield?

—Correlation, tediously, is not causality. The Unit insists it was an unexpected unusually strong rare wild spike, and see nothing out there feeding, as it were, on Roused, or siphoning off whatever makes an apport an apport. Which is what I’ve interpreted you to be suggesting. Nor, unlike some, do they find evidence of an increasingly summonsing call from some obscure Tír na nÓg, to the Roused themselves. But I’m a sceptic by nature. Of official stories.

—So what’s my job? Stallo said.

—As it ever was. You have skills and insights. That’s what I want. Do exactly what you’ve been doing, among the same people. But reporting now to someone actually interested. There’s no one I’d rather work with. And you have a high degree of freedom to operate on your own initiative.

—How ITKO is the rest of RPOC?

—Don’t you worry about them.

—Not at all then.

—They’re solid men, Myton said. —And a lady or two. All schooled in need-to-know and for the most part they don’t. You’ll report to me. It’ll be a step down from the equipment you’re used to, I’m afraid. We have contacts at The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Express, and we’re approaching industry for a few shillings. I should tell you something. I have contacts in the City. Myton’s good humour ebbed again. —And they feel we’re too late. I’m not talking about chancers like King and the naval buffoon, I mean serious people, who believe the situation calls for stern measures right now. We have to be open to the possibility that they’re correct.

Stallo said, —What about Bowler?

For the first and only time, he surprised Myton.

—What about him?

—I thought maybe you knew where he is. Thought maybe he was part of this.

—Why would I know that? Myton said. —Assuming he’s even alive. And why on earth would I want him for this? Croome once said to me she got the impression Bowler would be rather relieved to die. Do you agree?

Stallo did not show his shock. He did not answer, and he did not know his answer.

[46]

There is a tiredness like fog you can’t escape. Untethered, Maur watches nights. Like Melmoth. Melmotha. Remembers the cover of her old copy of that book, the cursed protagonist clutching his memento mori, leering, at least as invested as aghast. I need a memento, what, vivi? vivere? Death—she’s sour—she can hardly forget.

It makes you mad to live without a confidant. She counts out euros from her stash and dyes her hair again in a bathroom. Goes to a bar at the farthest end of the town from where she stays and in Spanish worse than that of which she’s capable tells some man who offers her a drink that she is Canadian, her name is May. He has a thoughtful face. She goes to his hotel. She makes him put on a condom, he rolls his eyes. The sex is quick, she does not come, she lets him hold on to her rather sweetly as he falls asleep, then she masturbates. She leaves before dawn. She sleeps most of the day. She dreams of giving birth, to someone dead, something cauled in ectoplasm.

A night creature now, she’s unused to the heat and light by the Salamanca Avenue bus station. She sits close to the back of the vehicle, sweating fiercely. The bus sways stinking along the coast. Maur keeps her mouth sullen. The gorge of the AP-7 a new vulgar geography, passing north of Cala Lanuza to the outlands of the town. Palms with their toilet-brush tops look down and towers come up on the splintering light of cars and Avenue Beniardá.

It is too late to turn away. Cross rails into the gorge of four- five- six-storey dwellings. Here you are, Maur. Not a walled city but an edged one, severely outlined. She’s left herself hours. Alights in the stupidity of the sun. Across a Styx of exhaust to alleys enclosed by corrugated iron and wire and more sallow high-rises. The streets are hardly empty. Ska Bar!, Lounge And Cabaret, Tattoo, English Pub, Bolsos Complementos, a sign in pictograms, backpacks and snacks, Mini-Market, burring fridges, Ciencia Visible En Tu Piel, Pizza, it’s so hot and she’s blatant in the brightness. Minigolf. Maur takes Calle Derramador. To her right, scrub and boulders. It doesn’t take much to believe it endless. Snake-flecked, hardy worms, the skeletons of dogs sucked at by flies. This is the line of division.

Maur waits for the dark.

Not high season but enough people walk hand-in-hand cheering and shouting and music is loud. Young women beckon. Maur wears a dress of forgettable florals. Past Chaplins, Steptoes, beyond neon stares, stands without speaking, acclimatising herself to company.

“You alright love don’t stand there like a wet blanket come and have a drink with us!”

Maur doesn’t meet the eyes of the speaker, a woman her age or older, fairy wings bobbing on her back on a bright shirt with a dirty joke upon it such as all her companions wear. Maur mums incomprehension and with an apologetic smile backs away, and the woman shouts, “Come back here, lovey, you’re not allowed to be lonely tonight!” and drunk as she is there’s a kindness of which Maur can’t afford to be the target. Once a man younger than her and corpulently muscular puts his arm around her and says, “Give us a kiss,” so she pushes him away and he and his mates make a “Whoa” noise. More than once more women ask if she is alright. Maur thinks, I’m not invisible enough.

In the Red Lion the performance area is less stage than arena and she stands by a pillar with a view over the crowd to where the compere shouts. The room cycles through lights in many colours. Rhythms change, pressure builds. Maur breathes quicker. She wants a drink very much.

There’s a shift, a skip and crackling segue to some new old tune, the MC mouthing to someone.

“Ladies and gents—”

A crest of laughter. Maur hears a long note, though she cannot yet see the singer. A frail voice but with echoes of richness and he hits the notes well. Sings that he’s a friendly stranger, sings an invitation. Takes a breath, misses a few words, picks up again midway through a line.

Maur remembers the song.

The man comes into view in vivid yellow glow. His skin loose against his fallen face, hair brushed back. He uses one foot to pull his shrunken self in his wheelchair to stay in the spotlight. He sings that he’s a vehicle and someone shouts over the music, “You’re weird!” and it’s loud enough that others laugh. The singer’s eyes are wide. He keeps going through that interruption and others. He holds the last note a good long time and the applause is real.

Someone shouts, “You’ll all be doing it tomorrow!” and everyone is happy.

“Alright alright,” the man calls. He leans into the microphone.

Maur can’t make out all the words but you can tell it’s a joke by cadences. Setup, pause, a few more words, long pause, a silence really, in which some cackles begin again even before boom tish. One in three in the hall perhaps are listening or can hear. And of them some laugh with the comfort of familiarity, they applaud a friend. Maur moves slowly closer, watching him work the room, not without skill, not without charm. The front rows will him to succeed. She can hear loving heckles—“Spook!” “You guys are weird!” “Slither!” “You’ll all be doing it tomorrow!”

—

He speaks for not quite ten minutes. The MC slaps him on the shoulder and calls him legendary and everyone applauds again. Maur applauds. “Now get ready for the main event, ladies and gentlemen, because coming onto the stage is the person you’ve all been waiting for.” Maur goes between the scattered tables and onto the stage surface itself. “And if there are any children present, I hope you’ve blindfolded them. And I’m calling social services!”

Maur goes to where the comic foot-pulls himself out of the light. Approaching him from another direction is a man in trim middle age in a dark suit and black shirt, his amiable face creasing to see Maur. He puts out his hand and says, “Hey now.”

“It’s alright,” she says, “I just…” She holds out a piece of folded paper to the comedian in the chair. He takes it.

“I ain’t got time, love…,” he says.

“You’ll want to come,” she says. She knows she can do something with that kind of gaze, the one she usually avoids letting anyone see now. “Trust me. You. Will. Want. To.” Walks away.

At the entrance his friend grabs her and turns her.

“Get your fucking hands off,” she says.

“So what’s your game? What are you playing at? He’s not a well man.”

“What’s it to you?”

“He’s my mate is what, and I don’t want him getting upset.” He speaks quickly with a northern English accent Maur can’t narrow down. “There I am thinking you’re a fan from the old days, and then this. Look, love, I’m not an idiot, he’s hardly a rock star and you’re hardly groupie material yourself, so what are you playing at?” New music is starting, slower and brassier than before. Cheers rise. “Have a heart,” he says, more gently. “You’ve seen him. He’s in no fit state. I’m begging you. You can’t spring any more kids on him now, it’ll fucking kill him.”

Another swell of joyful noise.

“That’s not it,” she says. “Why’d you jump to that? Just tell him to come. I saw you perform last time I was here.”

“Oh you did, did you?” he says. It’s that cold outside, he said, I saw a gypsy with his hands in his own pockets. He waits for Maur to say something more but she steps towards the lights of the exit sign and he retreats. Beyond him Maur can make out a woman dancing in the spot. A perfect high kick, and she is not young, she’s some way older than Maur, and naked. The woman shimmies, and how do you spread your legs like that and seem more coy than anything? The crowd are shouting and it’s such gentle music, and the silhouetted woman is pulling something out, some string of flowers or Ping-Pong balls or something, and it puts Maur in mind of photos Sonya showed her once, years ago, some provocation all blood or milk or meat-juice, a like extraction, Valie Export or Karen Finley or who?, in any case out come these toys in a string from this politely smiling woman and Maur puts a hand to the wall to hold herself up, so abrupt is the trembling that goes through her, to see this echo, this manifestation. Long strange emergence of and from the wet body.

In this second space are many Spanish teens in black clothes and black makeup smoking alongside more bumptious and brighter-clad Brits complaining in decent humour about the music. Maur with fizzy water alone at her cramped bench by the coffin table in the corner, bag on her lap, arm through the strap. By now, this late, the night’s taking care of her and no one bothers her.

The two men are bickering when at last they come in. The comedian sees her and points and his friend slides the wheelchair in by the table and goes to the bar. Maur tastes sweat above her lip.

The man says, “Good that you got a seat, bloody hell.”

She thinks, Time was I would have said fuck no if I came in and saw this seat just waiting for me. Maybe there’s an other side of this, when there won’t be a space ready, but we’re not there yet.

The man’s carer puts a double whiskey in front of him, still not looking at Maur. “Are you sure…?”

“Mate, stop fussing. I’ll call you, okay?” The seated man is slurring. His friend pats his back and picks his way away.

To Maur the comic says, “You got to put me out of my misery. Where do I know you from?” He puts his head on one side and takes a big drink. “Jem told me you’re not here for back pay in maintenance.” His grinding laugh notwithstanding, what crosses his face at that and is quickly buried is an anguish. “So what is it then? Don’t be offended, love, but you’re going to have to jog me memory. What’s the story? Did we, you and me? You ill? Are you on your way out and on a mission to say tara to all your old conquests?”

She says, “I came looking for you once before.”

“Is that right?”

“A few months back.” Maur can hear her own vatic focus. “You were booked as a double act but when I turned up it was just your mate. He sang a song or two and told us you weren’t well, so he’d tell the jokes for both of you.” There are some weird people about. He put on a sort of voice for his missing companion. My brother crossed a Rhode Island Red with a crystal ball now he’s got a chicken that gets in touch with the other side of the road. “Maybe it was for the best.” She never wanted to see his new act, if he had one. Only to see what she and Yew had seen before.

He’s at a threshold. She knows it, he may not. He says, “Get me another drink.”

She’s served quickly. Buys a whole bottle of the whiskey.

“Maybe this place is a bit much,” she says. “But when I heard about it…” She raises her hands to the Halloweenish decorations, raps the coffin as if to wake something. “How could I not? Do you ever perform here?”

“Where do I know you from?”

“You don’t. But you met my son. A long time ago. I’m glad he found you. I need you to tell me what he said to you and what you told him.”

He says, “Get me another drink.” She gestures at the bottle he’s forgotten. He fills his glass and says, “This place used to be…no one makes the effort these days, you know? This place used to be, like, proper scary…. That skeleton needs a wash.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” she says. Carefully she says, “I know they’re sick.”

He leans forward too. See how he holds those wavering eyes as steady as he can. Don’t look at me like that, she thinks. Like you don’t understand.

Oh, you don’t understand.

She knows, now, how to analyse data as if behind your own back. Put together fents and oddments overheard vouchsafed inferred guessed and not even widen eyes at the synthesis, any revelation. Not to draw attention. As blank as she can be, Maur knows things.

Then—You do understand! she thinks. Another jolt up into his eyes, up from under cheer, a stab of fear so profound it makes her gasp. Even as she settles back it’s gone from him, and she can see his own bewilderment at it.

“I don’t know who your son is, love.”

“It was more than ten years ago,” she says. “He said you know secrets.”

“Listen,” he says. “We all have our moment. I had mine. Sometimes you could get pissed off, couldn’t you, when it doesn’t work out, but this place has been good to me. You’ve got to be true to yourself, haven’t you? I mean, blimey, when I was on form.” She watches his surprise at where he is, has ended up. “And there’s a bunch of kids out there remember me. You heard them tonight. No one can take it away from me, what I am to them. They’re grown-ups now, they can pay their own way out here, and they come and shout my own stuff at me, get a photo and that, so it’s like, whatever you want to say, I’m right there in their heads.” He’s presenting a case to some other judge. “They’re shouting me own words back at me. It’s mad, that is, and I’ll take it, a bunch of grown men and women out there, who you say two words to and it’s me in their heads. I got inside their fucking language.” His breath washes over her. “May not be Lourdes, but they come here to me and fucking hell I’ll take it.”

She can see him trying to remember something. Maur says, “I’m not here to stroke your ego or thank you for making his day. I’m here to find out what you said to him.”

“Ask him, fuck’s sake!” He’s not so drunk he can’t see her stillness. “Oh fuck, sorry, I’m sorry.”

“His name was Yew,” she says. “Ewan. He was in the Unit.”

“I don’t remember their names,” he says, “I barely remember this morning, love.”

“Ewan,” she says. “Listen to me.” She raps the coffin once more for focus. “He was in the know. He’d been a fan since he was a little kid and then he came to find you. Said you had a secret. I need to understand. You say you get into their words. Why those words?”

Spook. The tiptoe jumping back. Toe-tap tippy-toe skullduggery of the newly unfamiliar body, forgottenness of limbs, the motion of the dead. Slither. Sinuous sibilance of peristaltic flesh. Of bonelessness, sacks of slime, flap and ooze. Hi weirdos. Maur’s heart is going fast. “Why those?” she says. “What do you know?”

Has that fear come back? Is he strobing in and out of it? He’s blinking. You get drunk to guard yourself against revelations you don’t want, admissions you’d rather not make. To forget.

“It’s just a film,” he says at last. “James Caan. I was looking for a catchphrase. I don’t bloody know. Not everything means anything.” Even he does not look sure of that.

Into the silence he abruptly says, “He was a good kid. Your boy. Tell me his name again.” His voice is calmer. “What did he look like? Oh yeah I remember. He was a good lad.” Oh, she thinks, he’s trying to do something nice for me. “What was his name?”

He sees her see his lies. Says “You and me know, don’t we? Being a parent’s the hardest job. They’re good kids. I would’ve been a terrible dad. Don’t judge, it weren’t my doing. I don’t blame their mothers. They were wrong to keep them from me. It’s not right.” Maur puts up her hands to calm him. Once, she almost says to him, someone said something about Yew having daddy issues and you know what I said, and I wasn’t even joking when I said it, I said, How can he have daddy issues he doesn’t have a daddy?, and at least I heard it as it was coming out and I laughed.

“I think he wanted something from you,” she says. “Information. It took me a long time, I’ve been trying to put together whatever I knew about him at the end. I’ve been girding myself to find you. I need to know whatever I can. I’m being hunted. By my son’s old lot.” Perhaps it doesn’t matter if he understands. Or if she’s even talking to him. “By the thing underneath. I think my son was trying to tell me something, or maybe to keep me from something, and I think he learnt it from you. And I need to know. I’m really tired. At least give me something I can tell them all so they’ll leave me alone.”

He does not respond.

She says, “Was he okay? How was he? Ewan? When he came?” She knows he has no idea. The man murmurs something.

Maur says, “There’s empty people. When I’m about to sleep I can hear the flies and dogs. I can’t tell if they’re getting farther away or closer. I know sometimes it feels like it would be easier to just let whatever’s coming come. Maybe you don’t even know what you know.”

He says, “You never know, do you? As a bloke. If you’ve got one out there.” The tip of his tongue is slipping from between his lips towards a creeping rill of snot from his nostrils. Maur’s stomach drops. I can hear worms chewing the earth, she says, aloud or not she doesn’t know.

“They’re not well,” she says. “The dead.”

He says, “I don’t feel well. That’s alright I suppose, I made my choices.” He turns the bottle over, it’s empty. “Your lad said to me sometimes me and my mum have troubles but she’s the best mum ever and I’m grateful to her for all the sacrifices and for how hard she tried, and she did her best. I remember he said that.”

Maur can’t be angry at the clumsy kindness. She stands. He’s watching her, watching the motion of her body, and his mouth hangs open and there spreads across his face befuddled concentration and surprise. That dread again, slower, deeper now. His eyes go wide.

He says, “The Rouse.”

Interference, and the dead counted verticals.

people say

of a heimat that never existed before the advent of the Rouse that now is necessary. Doctrinal mission verbs, colour sergeant, battle course in Wales. A nation like any other, scooped out of parings, the dead were clumsy

they say

and their motions break glass yards away, the dead exchanged propaganda. Take up the drop; slop and goo; make the rubble bounce. The dead tapped out code through the lids of their traps

people say

that goes on, and that the dead wrote their prophetic books. Ganzfeld hallucinations, EVP, laughing during firefights, ethnopsychiatry, minus probabilissimus, the sky over hell hot and the colour of old concrete, crammed with helicopters, they will never land. Stories about some messiah. A wraith manifested behind the same wraith bush every mission for twenty years, cut that grass!, certain sounds on a tape, primitive accumulation of the dead, MOD crank file, Wingate, epektasis, the brilliant clumsiness of the dead trying to fly, Welrod Mark IIA, Battle of Crécy, Leander Starr Jameson, flechette, Megiddo, orang mawas, human-shaped hole in the rain, Dialectical Society, Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, Henri Curiel, reports of certain events, Masao Adachi landscape theory, nefas, cenotaph, a kilometre-diameter metal sphere, Harry Price C.E.M. Joad France-Albert René, an aggression of atoms

people say

keep goofer dust, graveyard dust, in your pocket.

XXIV

Kenning

The Haze

Left to his own devices: the phrase invoked obscure machines. Go to the SPR library, meet no one’s eye, he’d have struggled to say if he was putting on a show or really researching, as if the world worked with either eithers or ors. Slip in again to those meetings characterised by increasingly uneasy anger, slip away. Say nothing to any rumours spread and spreading about the disappeared, the I always thought there was something off about Isabellas, Jeffs, Skullys. Wait for notes and instructions in the drop boxes, a swimming pool locker in Dalston, a left-luggage service in St Pancras.

Whatever if any Marco’s role in Nergal’s death, him and his ilk, the ultras, whispers implied, were eager to accelerate the contradictions. Would work with anyone who might further that. Had contacts with every cult going, discussions with Jim Jones, the followers of Dante Minazzoli, Heaven’s Gate leftists, Maoists in the OWFC, deployers of Bulgarian suggestology.

—KH is in chaos and Moscow’s at sixes and sevens, Myton said. —But even oppo chaos is chaos and I’m a man who likes certainties.

—You talk about using my skills…, Stallo said. He bought an ice cream. He liked how it must have looked, a tough man with a cone in his hand walking in the park. —Since the airfield. Whatever it was that I used to…

—Please don’t be coy, Myton said. —We’re discussing your control.

—Since the airfield it’s different. Weaker. No. Harder for me to reach.

For it to reach me.

—One might even say scared, Myton said.

Stallo inclined his head. It could have been agreement or dissent. —I know no one wants to be too definitive about what happened, he said. —But I’ve told you what I saw and heard and I always thought cui bono was a good place to start. If that thing…He noted his own disinclination to use the name it had used for itself. —Marco’s stock’s up, whether he just took advantage or actually set it loose. Summoned it.

A long quiet.

—It’s a hell of a weapon, he said.

—As I once said, Myton said, —control’s what it’s all about. Unless it’s about standing back and letting something rip and the devil take the hindmost. Those captains of industry. What they’re concerned about is the moral rot and degeneracy and political poison and treachery we see on all sides. Piles of bloody rubbish and hotheads in the pits and anarchy in the cities. Jesus Christ. I know you’re not overfond of considering it, but Stallo, you are, among other things, a medium. And the lunatics have overtaken the asylum in that field no less than in all the others. Those charged with…He smiled with the embarrassment that came with an ITKO failure to euphemise, —our spectral defences seem increasingly obtuse. I told you I can’t help wondering if the collapse of which my contacts are rightly fearful, and what you experienced at the airfield, aren’t intimately related. Two aspects of one moment. A struggle. For our way of life.

Myton leaned in, like someone who knew the building would fall and was only curious about how it would sound.

—It is a hell of a weapon. Pickled Onions can’t spring for much but a little European travel is in your future. Conference season. Keep your radar pinging. Chop chop! Let’s find it.

Stallo pretended to less German than he had and the landlady of the Euskirchen boardinghouse was delighted by his stumbling words.

—You, she said in English. —Ah, you keep to try.

She gave him sandwiches wrapped in oiled paper but every day he threw them away and ate at the conference hotel with other delegates. Almost all middle-aged white men. The Brits trying not to meet each other’s eyes.

—The MOD bods are embarrassed to have the likes of us here, Myton said. As if this is sensitive stuff.

In a grim inner room some muck-a-muck for the Bundeswehr School for Psychological Defence spoke on Communist ethics and taxonomised the Left in moderately accurate detail. A portly man rose to the podium: “Encirclement and Threat and the West.”

—They can be a tedious bunch, Myton whispered to Stallo. —“If we don’t encircle them, they’ll encircle us, and that’ll never do.” Bet you a fiver. On y va.

—Qui mal y pense, Stallo whispered back.

Shopfront to shopfront in pretty dusk. In London the gusts would have sent trash scuttling. Time was moving even more quickly than it had before; when, Stallo wondered, had that started? For a moment he was all the way out of himself, looking down at Myton and this Stallo-man playing hooky from a keynote. Such slippage had a new quality now.

—Any snifters? Myton was saying.

—One of the French blokes. The one with the hair.

An echo of something, a hint of ITKO.

—Pascal? I think I agree. I know a couple of chaps in the French group. I’ll sound them out.

—Maybe one of the Germans? The one with that pin on his lapel. The sword.

—That I had not clocked. The pin, yes, the aura, no.

—That would be my guess, Stallo said. —But what do I know?

—Come now.

At more than one session at more than one conference, presenters referred to the disappearance-possibly-death under mysterious/contested circumstances of some rumoured-to-be leading member of some eccentric offshoot of a tiny but celebrated cell and the shockwaves resulting in the Left. When your enemies die, what it provokes is a kind of anti-grief, not without loss. Stallo remembered washing Nergal off his boots.

Where did informants and freelancers go? Why were new apports so rare now, and what was it happened to extant ones sometimes, to efface the snags?

For every bore at these gatherings irritated into conspiracy by Long-Haired Layabouts, two or more present expertly ran numbers about strike days, limned links between groups. The serious and ITKO seemed intrigued by an intimation that, in the tightening of the weather and the brightness of days and the quickening of blood among walkers in graveyards and in horror and the breakdowns of civil servants tasked with calm management and in the rush of rumours and songs about the curdling of Aquarius and in the deaths of sages and the expressions on their cadavers’ faces when found and in the panicky violent infighting among allies and enemies, social shift to decadence and collapse and struggle resonated correlated changed with was caused by or caused upsurgence in afterlands.

Sometimes it seemed to Stallo that urgency was beyond him since the runway. Though he could feel it in others, as Ninefuckingteen seventy-fucking-three gave way to Fuck’s Sake Seventy-four, and on. By the banks of the Scheldt he drank with a young Belgian, watching for bats above the spire of Our Lady.

—You know who I am most angry with? Stallo knew what would follow. —Not the Reds. They are what they are.

—The scorpion and the frog, Stallo said.

—Why you would be angry with a Communist for being a Communist? Luc kept twitching his thin lips as if judging wine. —He says what he will do and he does it. The people I am angry with is us. What do we offer instead? It is us who is, you know…

—Complacent.

—Yes. And if we don’t win we don’t deserve to win. I shock you. Good, I want us to be shocked. My uncle is a Red. He played with me when I was a boy, we go fishing. Now he’s my enemy but I love him. If I have to, I will do what I must do. But I want us to be able to give to him something so he ends this stupidness. When he was young it was the Communist women who would fuck you.

In the water a boat strung with coloured lights.

—At least London has energy, Luc said. —Those are the people we need. It’s no good to say, you know, we need a Europe of little towns like this. This is why my classmates are Red.

He looked at Stallo with such overt lust, so calmly, Stallo laughed with the pleasure of surprise.

—You are a soldier, the young man said. —I think of what the soldiers faced. SOE—

—I’m not that bloody old.

—What are your stories then?

—Just war stories.

—I like war stories.

—So does everyone.

—Will you tell me some?

Why would all this make Stallo think of Maisie? Curious, he went back to Luc’s hotel.

—What do you think’s going on? Stallo said. —I have a feeling—don’t you have it? Everything is fucked up.

—Of course yes. This is why I’m here.

—What do you make of it?

—C’est le déclin de l’Occident. You know Spengler?

Stallo did not roll his eyes. He patted his lineless face but Luc did not redden or scowl.

—Maybe we slow things, Luc said. —Maybe not. Maybe we lose. Maybe the fellaheen win. His words came quicker and his stare fixed. —Maybe the world ends. Maybe it is too late now. Still. We never surrender.

Fuck me you want to die fighting, Stallo could have said. You want to be a warrior, to be right, and to lose.

Stallo let the young man suck him off. He felt no particular desire and could discern no difference in the feeling of shoving into a man’s mouth than a woman’s. He watched the bobbing head with cool interest and some vague excitement at Luc’s Iron Guard fervour for the end. The sight of that head sent Stallo back to, well, Maisie again, of all mouths he’d spunked in, her action neither better nor any worse than this young feller’s, and he would not say he had not thought of her for years, of course he had, but the thoughts had been of valedictory kind, and he could not have said he missed her though in a certain mood he wondered if what he missed was a path of possibility now foreclosed, an intimacy not sought, because he had not believed and still did not believe it possible, which did not batten down a sort of sadness that it wasn’t there. Was she writing? He let the man kneeling do most of the work, and the crisis of everything came up in Stallo, a loneliness and forces moving in it, in his body, a void in which this head pistoned like a machine, an instant’s dwell between each pull-back. Stallo came abruptly and much harder than he’d thought he would and the young man made a noise of amused triumph as he swallowed. Luc leaned back again when he was done and smiled in what seemed an effort to be catlike. He said, —Give me a cigarette.

Stallo had to step back from him and look away because a wash of hate went through him and he wanted to break something.

July. Norway. Dark slopes beyond the cafés. The people of the town paid the mountains no mind.

—Have you tried the lefse?

—I’ll give it a bash.

The rueful laugh of an Englishman proving he is game.

The twenty-seventh congress of the Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers, another low hotel. Stallo and Myton watched attendees. Stallo, God help them, was younger than most, though the Swedish students were convivial, tall and properly youthful men—a few women too—in, to English eyes, outrageous, indecent health. With that hair they might have been at a rock concert not that Stallo could say much about that.

—You are here from where? one asked Stallo. That hurdy-gurdy voice.

—Have a guess.

—You are English. What’s happening in England? I think things are going too quickly, you know? Everyone’s fracturing you know? Our side. Their side too.

Stallo felt the old something, saw knowledge in the guy’s eyes. He said, —I heard about someone called Nergal. The other man said nothing. So Stallo said, —Never know when you’re going to run into a gammal kompis, eh?

The Swede stretched his broad shoulders and said, —I don’t know about this except that I’m not supposed to know about this. He walked away.

That evening during the toasts, a man called Garlinski refused to drink vodka because it was Russian. He said, —To the right side winning. Myton lifted his whiskey glass and when everyone had sipped he called out, —Here’s to Eve, mother of our race, but a smatter of laughter from some unrelated interaction drowned him out. He started again. —Here’s to Eve, mother of our race, who wore a fig leaf in just the right place. Here’s to Adam, father of us all, who was Johnny-on-the-spot when the leaves began to fall. Everyone laughed with him this time and Stallo watched Myton fetch a blue-eyed Belgian woman in her twenties a drink.

He went outside. It was as if what Stallo felt was not cold but darkness itself shed by the mountains. He looked back and stepping towards him as if he had been waiting came that young Swede again. His face a secret. Stallo realised he hoped for a fugue, resented the uninterruptedness. The stars were bright and the sequelae—he knew it—distressed. The hall’s windows were like holes into a lighter universe.

—Viejo amigo, is what Stallo said to him as the young man approached. —Vecchio amico, стар приятел, старый приятель, starý přítel, gamle ven, oude maker, vanha kaveri, vieux pote, παλιόφιλε, alter Kumpel.

—What is this? said the man.

—Gammal kompis, Stallo said. —Like I was saying. Old Pal. Hello again. Changed your mind about talking to me?

—I have for you something I heard.

—Thought you might.

—A man who used to be Nergal’s contact. A go-between.

—Between what and what?

—Excuse me? Oh. IRA I think. He shook his head. —Nergal was never my business. What your business is, it’s not my business. He held up a hand. —But you remind me with that name, and I heard a name too.

He said it, just an Irish name.

—Okay, he said. —Good luck. He walked away and he put on a silly Hollywood voice and without turning his head he said, —May the right side win.

That night Stallo dreamt he was on a raft, knew he was dreaming, drifted towards a dark shore, and knew he was awaited on the dry land and in the water below him, and he thought there might be another person on the little craft but he could see no one but knowing he was dreaming he did not think that was the end of the question.

At breakfast Myton slid in opposite him. —Well, he said. In how he said it Stallo knew he had gone to bed with the young woman. Myton ate eggs and sausages and toast. —You never know. You simply never know, do you? He played with the little flowers on the table. —In one way at least this gathering’s been worth it, though in most it’s been a disappointment. It’s not been unedifying on a mundane level. All that stuff we give the ministry, international cooperation, networks of de-dah-de-dah-de-dum, it’s not untrue. It’s good to know what everyone’s up to, and I don’t just mean Kowalchuk. Do you know whose name’s come up more than once, here? Carpenter’s.

—She was good at what she did, Stallo said. —Did you see the Swedish bloke?

—I saw several.

—He gave me a name, too.

Stallo stood under murals of armed men and cats picked carefully between broken glass on wall tops and he lit his cigarettes and watched running boys and knew he was seen. An unfamiliar face, passing through. This place again. It so often seemed to come back to this place.

There was mud and there were fields and he walked on to a church outside of call it Derry. Circled twice until he knew it was only the weather that watched him now. He took a scarf and covered his face and worked at the lock and entered.

The man who came in the deepest part of the night had received a summons through networks he had no reason to doubt.

—I’m here, he said.

—You are indeed, said Stallo. —So am I. He approached without rush, pistol in his hand. The target did not cry out. He took two steps back, then was motionless, you could see the calculation, he was smart enough to know he couldn’t get away.

He was older than Stallo but not old. He had the rangy stringiness of this region, suspicion pinching his face, not suspicious enough, though. Eyes above his makeshift mask Stallo was made of shadows and knew it. There in the church Stallo beat the man awhile. When he was done he tied his hands behind him and covered his eyes and tied a rag around his mouth. Stallo pulled down his own scarf and put his pistol in the man’s back and led him out to where the trees were loud in the night and he opened the boot and without argument, almost gently, the erstwhile go-between got in. Stallo took a route he’d cleared in advance, and yes, no, he was neither stopped nor followed. He parked on a lay-by amid sedge and from beneath a tarpaulin on the rear seat took out a bergen and he opened the boot and pulled out the man, who was crying quietly now. Stallo push-pushed him through shoe-ruining mud to a copse and the centre of a rise. The black branches tapped for attention.

Stallo sat the man on a rock alongside the deep hole that he had dug in preparation. He did not remove the blindfold so that grave would not provoke resistance or dignity. A snag leaned over them. I don’t know what kind of tree it is, Stallo thought, that died. It looked like lightning frozen, it shone silver it shone grey and it said, Come up come up, and you knew the boughs would tear from the body in a wind, that these were the last days this psychopomp tree would keep watch.

—I know who you are, Stallo said. —I know what you’ve been doing. Stallo took no pleasure in the man’s fear nor did he dread it. —You ain’t made it easy to find you. Been a fair bit of baksheesh and bother. I want to know about what’s going on with Nergal’s lot. What you’re up to and what they’re up to.

The man moved his head like someone smelling for something. Stallo took equipment from his pack and a folding tripod. Thick rubber cables, like amphisbaenae with their clips at each end. Like worms at an entrance. He laid a car battery on the ground and an old-style army radio.

—I’m sure you could plead your case, he said, —and I believe you. This man was so quiet. No whining through the nose, no mewling. —You never set out to betray no one, you’re all about the auld cause. (Cod Irish.) —But intent only ever goes so far. You talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone and at the end of that you ended up talking to me.

He made the cables bite the battery. There came that sense that it was the tip of a vaster source of power.

—You don’t have a good reputation. Provos don’t want you. You’re politically unreliable. A kook. They’re serious people.

He wanted to smoke, so that he could blow smoke in the face of this man. He came close to his captive and lowered his voice.

—So why are any of that lot giving you any time of day at all? What does it take for hard men to indulge you?

Ratatoskr runs endlessly up and down the world tree with gossip from canopy to boughs to roots. You been squirrelling? Stallo asked in his mind. Strain went through his captive’s body. He was considering trying to run.

—I think once in a while a useful bit of information falls out of your gob, Stallo said. —Maybe you’re like a mascot mostly, they tell themselves off for keeping a nut job around, giving it all that dippy-hippie stuff, spiritual bollocks. But when it turns out some of your shit’s useful, or someone you’re talking to knows something worth knowing, peachy.

The blindfolded man was shivering.

—I’m going to take that gag, Stallo said. —So you can tell me what I want to know. But it always seems inefficient to me, the traditional way. I ask you a question, you say you don’t know, I have to persuade you, you have a rethink, and we go round and round like that. I haven’t got time for all that so let’s do it the other way and start with persuasion.

He put his scarf back around the lower half of his face because a tiny bit of hope had its uses and he pulled up the blindfold and picked up a rock, no need for hollows in it. He knew there was to the implacability of stone something that could call up terror more perfectly than any other tool. He saw that the man thought this was only a threat even as Stallo brought it down hard upon his cheek.

The man screamed into his gag and the scream broke off abruptly on the third strike and Stallo felt blood on him and the man’s head was lolling. But Stallo knew how to hit and though the man laboured to breathe and his cheekbone was unmoored, he was not unconscious. Stallo hit him again, this time on the ribs, and the man screamed again.

Stallo threw the stone into darkness. Sat on the rock. He held his pistol in his right hand. He watched his captive writhe.

—Here’s how I see matters, Stallo said. He pointed his gun into the man’s face. Pointed it at his left foot. His groin. —For the last little while nothing’s been going like it should. I’ll be candid, alright? Dealing with the stuff we deal with, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot. You never know what you’re looking at. How it’s going to work. If it’s going to work. But in the last while it’s been particularly haywire. They’re all over the fucking place. You know what I’m talking about.

The man wanted to speak.

—What do you think’s going on? Is something here? Making trouble with them? Building up its strength? What’s Nergal’s lot been doing about it? The dead are scared. Tell me something I don’t fucking know.

With a pocketknife Stallo cut the gag. The man spat it out and gasped and wheezed and looked up at him, strings of bloody spit descending.

—Poor old Nergal’s crew, or Wran’s now, Stallo said. —Careful what you wish for, eh?

—You’re joking, aren’t you? What they wished for? The man moaned at a wave of pain. —Mary Mother of God. It whispers, is what they say it does. It says it’s a friend. It laughs and plays. Why would they want that? They don’t have power over that thing. He shivered. —Not that they’re nothing. They might get past your guards with what they send. It might be true Wran’s already had a taibhse take some Russian spy’s soul and leave the body, God only knows how….

—Or why, Stallo said.

—To see if they could. To find out what he knew.

She. Hush Stallo don’t speak, let this man perform his last surrender.

—You think regroupment only happens on the side of liberation? the man said. Even this late in his life he still talked like that. You could almost admire it. —You think the fash aren’t gathering? As if you lot don’t fucking know that, as if you’re not right up there working with them. And they deal no less than you with cailleachs and stregas and witches. You think the Brujo’s not trying to control…Jesus, of course you know.

—So, Stallo said after a while. —There’s trouble among the comrades.

—Where’s there not? Your lot all getting on as well as ever you have? The man closed his eyes and Stallo saw some vestigial honour or bravery constrain him. —You can fuck yourself.

—I’d think carefully, mate, Stallo said.

—Jesus Christ. You think this shit means anything now? You think you can hurt me?

—Yeah.

—So what? Such angry crying. —What’s pain when the world’s over? We’re all on borrowed time.

—Some more than others. Who’s took over from Nergal?

—Lick shit off my balls. It’s all falling apart. It’s all crumbling! How’s your plans? What even are they? How you fixing to keep going? You talking about containment, is it? Deployment? How’re your séances going?

—I’ll break your hands, Stallo said. He did not raise his voice. —Tell me what the comrades are up to or I’ll break your fingers one by one. I’ll hammer your knuckles flat.

—Go on then. You could hear the terror, but a tough showing. —Go on, go on, do it, you fucker, go on then.

The man was crying again but for one whose reputation was as a causer of eyerolls, a lost boy, it was a good anger, and now he was even laying those two hands out in front of himself flat on the ground and spreading out fingers ready for the stone. You had to say well done. Part of Stallo’s job was to know when you could get a bit more out of someone. In my professional opinion, he reported to Myton in his head, we’ve reached the limits of the immediate usefulness of the asset. Not really learnt anything new yet, he allowed, but verification of a few suppositions.

Stallo wanted moths to settle on him as if he glowed, as if he were the moon. With his left hand put out his index finger at the side of his own head and imagined pulling a trigger, and whence came that? Lie here until summer. Make his dead self useful. Be a home for more hopeful insects. Does it count if you beg the bees to hive in the skull?

He put the real pistol to the base of the other’s skull. He picked up the crocodile clips and opened them and he pushed them onto the man’s hands, making him shout.

—Get up. List your points of access, Stallo said. —Hands obviously. Tongue? Cock? Arsehole? Your fucking eyes? He held another clip up close to the man’s face and opened and closed its dragon mouth. —Lucky for you that, A, your hands’ll do, and B, I’m in a hurry.

He turned him so his captive saw he was at one end of a pit. He let out a little sound though not so great as Stallo would have expected. In the hole’s dark you could hear the faintest sound. Out of it machine light glowed.

—Maybe you understand, the man said, —why I’m not afraid.

—Search me.

—I’m not the best Catholic but I have my faith. And that’s all to the good. But that’s not all, is it? You and me…we know, don’t we? We know it goes on. You know you can’t end me.

That beautiful harsh accent.

Stallo pointed his gun in the old iron-finger way. He turned dials on a speaker. For seconds it brought forth static like rain. That slowly rising surpeti C and E and C and G and C and E, it made the skin move, it made it hard to breathe.

—I’m not afraid, the man said. You can’t end me. I’ll see you around.

—You reckon? Stallo said. —We’re going to try something new. An experiment. You’ve got no fucking idea where you’re off to or if you’re even going anywhere. You don’t know what it is that’s going to be left or coming back when you toddle off, if anything. And if it were you, you don’t know that I don’t know how to end that. I’ve got my orders. If this goes according to plan you should fucking wish I could end you. And even if you’re right, what if that’s the worst thing of all? What if this is the last peace and quiet you ever get?

And Stallo reached up and shot the man in the head and

a quick mist of blood and

the dead man lay down directly in the waiting grave.

And Stallo looked up and listened for the crack of a light, another shot, feet through the muck, but there was only electric echo spit and fizz. And Stallo waited by the new grave to gather up the man he had shot dead, to take him in for further questioning.

[47]

Maur says, “What?” when she can.

“They were talking about a Rouse down there, do you know what that is?” the man says. “And then your boy was too. Did he say it to me first or did I tell it to him? I can’t remember.” Maur sits back down and puts her palms flat on the table as if to channel. “Oh fucking hell, I don’t like being put in mind of this.” The effort on him! To remember? To forget? “You, your boy, that woman, you won’t let it lie. It was a long time ago, I was young, it was just a gig! And I never, I just saw, I didn’t…”

“Hey,” Maur says.

“I don’t remember what he was called, your boy. Let’s have another drink, eh? I never knew what it was, a Rouse. There’s enough nutters in the world, eh?” His eyes say to her, Is this right?

“What did he say to you?” Maur says.

A new expression takes him. “It’s you again! We had a right old chinwag, he was a good lad with some beer in him. Loosened up a bit after he’d come out of his shell.”

“What did he say?”

“I felt bad for him. Seemed to really need it. Said he’d heard I played for his lot once, wanted to ask me about it. Christ, that was long before his time, I said.” Even now he’s pleased at the memory of being remembered, until he remembers more and a dreadful expression changes him. “He wasn’t making a lot of sense, just asking me what I knew, and I think I said to him like I said to you, I don’t like thinking about this, it were a long time ago and I was just new to this, it was just. A. Gig. And blimey, I was off me head. Christ, squaddies can drink, and it weren’t just that.” He mimes toking. “I don’t remember anything! I told him that too, what they were up to wasn’t my beeswax, I’m just the entertainment. Whatever I saw I saw wrong, well it was all go, yelling and that, things moving wrong, whatnot lying there and something watching, I wasn’t about to touch, was I, not properly, not if you mean that. Whatever happened after the room changed or I did. Shouldn’t hang on to that. What’s the point telling anyone? I never would and I never did, I don’t even know what I’d say. I’d not have remembered at all if you hadn’t come asking again. Why do that to me? Why’d you come back after all this time?”

Maur says, “Back?”

“You asked me this before,” he says. His voice slows. Then: “No, but, was that not you?”

“Who asked you?”

“Oh, it was another lass I think.” He frowns. “What am I like? Same sorts of questions though. She was younger but it was years ago. I don’t bloody remember what she looked like, do I? She was talking about him too though. Your son. She knew he’d come to see me too. But not just that. The way she was looking at me, I just knew. I just knew what she was, and what she wanted to know, and she kept asking me about that night but I said to her, I never did, down there, whatever was going on. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. I said I’m not your dad, love, I never touched it. She believed me. I think. I think she was glad and sad at once. When she’d got that straight she was asking, had I noticed what was going on? Was I sick? What had your lad wanted when he came? What had he said to me blah blah? Trouble’s on the way, she said. Warning me, like. Got to get ahead of it. I just, I had to tell her to fuck off, in the end. I remember she says to me, if I ever remember anything, to drop her a line, she’ll keep an ear out for me.”

Maur holds her handbag tight. “How are you supposed to drop her a line?”

“This was years ago, I don’t bloody remember. You won’t like what’s coming up, she said to me, but I’ll step in if you help me. We can stop it.”

Maur is very still.

“He said something…,” the man says. “Your lad. You ever feel like you’re being watched? That’s not what he said, that’s me right now.”

That could almost make you laugh. Maur puts her head low and whispers, “She said she’d stop it? Where did you meet her? She sounded foreign, didn’t she? How did she find you?” He says nothing. “Are you sure she didn’t say what her name was?”

She watches him shifting in his chair.

He doesn’t have any idea that he knows anything at all.

“You’ll be okay?” she says finally. “To get home?”

“Eh?”

“Are you going to be alright?” He snaps as if into wakefulness, looks up at her.

“I don’t know why the name stuck,” he says. “Slither. I mean, it was the film and that, but why I liked it? I’m not sure now. I changed my act after that night, don’t know exactly why but I had to. Now you put me in mind of it all again. Thanks very fucking much. I have to admit, though, it is always there. Like when I thought of that catchphrase. That’s daft, people said; that’s everything, I said.” He bewilders himself, you can see. “He sort of calmed down at the end,” he says. “Your lad.” Is he inventing again? “He hung about. Asked me to tell him a joke.” There’s that pleasure. “You know, after he got it in his head that I didn’t want to talk, about that bloody night, I told him I didn’t tell jokes for free, he said he’d tell me one instead. And he did and all. Occupational hazard. If they don’t want me to be funny, then they’re trying to make me laugh. I’ll give it to him, though, he managed it.”

“He told you a joke?” Ewan?

“Too right. I was hysterical. It killed me. I remember that.”

“What was it?” Ewan had told a joke.

“That’s the thing. It was dead good. But I’m damned if I can remember it. I do remember it was a scream.”

The Right Side

Myton drove Stallo through London in its night state, every car a secret. Stallo could feel Myton’s excitement. For the first time in some time.

—“To the right side winning,” Stallo said. —I don’t think that much about winning these days.

—Sensible.

—I’m not saying I don’t care, it’s just not the top of my mind. Do you consider it?

—Certainly.

—And?

—And I intend to. Win. Myton seemed distracted. —Not to say there aren’t questions about what that looks like. He remembered to smile.

North. By the backs of houses, their doorlessness making them faces with sewn-up mouths. Stallo followed Myton to one among a row of padlocked lockups. The light from some insomniac’s window came through trees. Myton unbolted a door.

—Sergeant.

Stallo showed no surprise. —Dr. Croome.

Three walls and the ceiling were grey and the fourth was black with bituminous stuff, and on the walls were shelves of tools and engine parts, a cassette player, a pile of books. One too-bright central light. Croome was not wearing the white coat but a dark blue dress.

—Quickly now, she said.

On a wooden table a pile of paper and pencils. A trap, its light glowing.

—We don’t have long, Myton said.

—And you don’t have me but this once, Croome said.

—You two go back then? Stallo said.

—Everyone knows Dr. Croome, Myton said.

—That’s the Mick? Stallo said, pointing at the bottle.

—Indeed.

—Do you understand the situation? Croome said to Stallo.

—No. But when the fuck did I understand anything?

—Listen. I’m not going over this again. You’re an intelligent chap, I don’t doubt you understand this isn’t official Unit business. I’m not in the habit of doing favours, and certainly not for the likes of him. She glanced at Myton, whistling by the table. —He came to me, and I told him I had no interest in aiding him with whatever squalid business he was pursuing or validating his unofficial access to sequelae or whatever. I won’t dissemble, I’ve more respect for you than that, Sergeant.

—Stallo.

—As I say, I won’t waste your time. You know I’ve had my disagreements with Long and remain concerned about the lack of attention to certain upheavals….

—If you weren’t scared, Doc, Stallo said, —I wouldn’t think much of you.

—I’m not here out of fear. Even if I agree that the official reports are too complacent.

—Which you do.

—About whatever happened, on which topic, by the way, Stallo, I’ve been denied more or less all knowledge. Now, you gave this trap to Myton.

—Yeah.

—Today he contacted me again. Before I could send him away with a flea in his ear he informed me of something. What reading were you getting on the meter when you closed the trap?

—Zero point oh two, oh three?

—Take a look.

He leaned over to see where by the closed lid a needle trembled. He looked at Croome and back at the dial and tapped it with his fingernail.

—One point fucking four?

—It was one point two a few hours ago, Croome said.

—He was just some bloke and I was not working with state-of-the-art lab shit, Doc….

—I’m aware. So you understand why I’m here? This sort of buildup simply should not happen. Hence a degree of urgency.

—It was zero point zero two and going down until yesterday, Myton called across the room.

—I’m not here because I’m interested in what your new boss is up to, Croome said to Stallo. —And it’s too late to work out what storage protocols he’s broken that might’ve led to this.

—Now now, Myton said.

—I’m here because if we don’t do something about this it’s going to get unstable.

—What’s happened?

—So far as I can tell it’s this one and this one alone. Something has a connection to and is amplifying this lespry. I don’t have the tools I need. I don’t have my assistants. I don’t have a medium who knows what he’s doing.

—Stallo’s a medium, Myton called.

—Forget it, Stallo said. —My control’s in and out. And it never did this kind of thing anyway.

—We’re going to have to make do. Get ready.

—For what?

—We can’t let this buildup continue. But you can’t just turn the bloody thing off, let this out in this state. We have to stabilise it first, to dampen it, and that means—

—So you have to Rouse it to properly banish it? Stallo said.

—It’s not quite that simple—

—Dr. Croome, Myton said. He was more animated even than usual.—If I might? Whatever the permeable membranes between the revenants and revenance more generally, there’s presumably some possibility of a connection—

—I have neither time nor inclination for this, Croome said.

—A connection between this chap here—Myton gestured at the bottle—and a larger, more boisterous new arrival. Finally come all the way through. For example. I’m suggesting, rather than merely invoke this just to siphon off its surplus, we could probe—

—Myton, Croome said. —Be quiet. Stallo, I need you to attract its attention and keep it calm.

She gestured to the books. M. R. James again, he saw. Vernon Lee. Stonier. Bernard Capes. Pendarves. Askew(s).

They worked in the deep blue glow of the bottle, the fluttering red, amber, red, white of the reel-to-reel and gauss meters. Illumination as if by swamp-gas presences. Croome finessed dials. Myton watched her and Stallo saw his dislike as he spilt salt from a bag into a circle. Scattered rice in corners. Stallo on a wooden chair, book in his hand. What a funny little family we are, he thought. He sat back like a man at his tea, like a parent at bedtime.

Sitting comfortably?

Myton’s scowl, though.

And Croome nodded, and did something so you could hear nothing for a time, not even your own breath, and there came those Rouse notes a thousand miles away. Don’t look, Stallo told himself. Don’t look in a corner, behind the rice lying there for a dead man to count, sand for a dead man to weave.

—Stallo!

He turned pages and turned on his penlight. Cleared his throat.

Then I’ll begin.

—“It was as far as I can ascertain in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up”—

—If we get anything, Croome said, —it’s not going to be stable, so just keep going.

—“The place on the east coast which the reader is asked to consider,” Stallo said. He turned pages. He heard the snick as the trap opened. Blue light shone upon the ceiling. —“When first I met Edmundson he seemed a good sort though always somewhat vague in his manner as if something had caught his attention just at the moment you hailed him.”

Pencils and paper waiting on the table. The hum filled Stallo’s bones. He switched books.

—“The writer of the uh gs should be a rational man otherwise he cannot build up the matter-of-fact framework which is so horrifyingly shattered by the incursion of the Impossible”

Wait

—“he must be one with chinks in his armour”

This was not a story but an introduction. But that did not seem to disengage the attention in the room so he kept on and again no small number of tales of this like concerned not revenance exactly but something slippery grubbing in clicking segments unshaped, something greisly that whispered in a sucking voice.

—“For some little while,” Stallo read, —“he seemed to have been half-conscious of a darkish shape that dodged behind the mast with the movement of the boat”—

Croome said something and Stallo heard Myton gasp not as if with surprise but in satisfaction and as if finally they were getting to it and Stallo heard or felt or helt or feard or feared a new silence, eager, really, and nothing shone in the light from the open bottle but motes, but it came to him that he had glimpsed something before that nothing settled there.

—“By now he understood the effect of this book on the others near it,” Stallo read aloud, and looked up again, and a head without a back to it and with a bloody expression of wonder looked at him like a rapt pupil.

—Keep going, he heard Croome say. Myton said, —One moment, and his hands were moving, he was whispering something, and Stallo his heart a burr read, —“He took fire at Omdurman with MacDonald’s 1st Egyptians and thereafter was invalided out,” and his voice faltered because Myton and Croome were tussling by the table, and Stallo heard signalling equipment going faster than a person could press it. Myton pushed Croome and Stallo heard a slap and gasp and the light up-pouring grew not lighter but darker somehow and stronger.

Myton said, —Stallo, finish the interrogation, do your bloody job, that’s an…

So Stallo dropped the torch and lifted a microphone but before he spoke he heard the voice of he whom he had killed.

the old boss he’s gone so it’s a war of all now

spit spit

—Stop this! shouted Croome.

all falling down it says it’s your friend

it came and drank everything away

Stallo heard Myton say a long way off, —My god these numbers, and Stallo into the microphone said, —What is it that’s come?

There came a great percussion that stopped up Stallo’s ears and the room went black.

Myton found the fuses and got the lights back up. The trap’s dial read 0. Its bulb was out.

At first Stallo thought the paper on the table had been scorched but the pencils were every one broken and he saw that the dark grey was not burn but layers of scrawl.

—Well, Myton said. —Dammit, he said. —Dammit! For Christ’s sake, Croome, you bloody…She stared at him and he blinked and shakily he tried to smile and nodded and said, —I must thank you, Doctor, though his voice quavered with frustration and something else. —There’ll be other opportunities….

Croome took the paper from Stallo. —Get out of my sight, the two of you, she said. —How dare you put me at risk like that? And for what? What is it you think you bloody learnt?

—You didn’t have to help him, Stallo said.

—Get out, Stallo.

From the window of his attic room Stallo looked onto slick darkness. For the first time in a long time he ran his fingers over the oscilloscope.

He sat the machine next to the window and looked from nightscape to green wave. Of what were these peaks and intervals? What was the silence his machine intercepted, call signs of emptiness?

Stallo whispered, —Bowler?

What shape would that voice be?

—What are you up to? Was that you? You got something to do with all this? Did you shuffle off the coil, mate? Got ways of turning up the dial?

He turned the calibrator (volts, peak to peak), the time base multiplier, and the scale illum, to make the glowing flexure the shape of saying, according to his intuition, Bowler. As if it were a broadcast. No, he was not answered, was he?

A letter came. Photocopies of that sheet on which something had scrawled. The reproductions had sensitivities set at various levels: one looked like a page of black; another almost unmarked; on others between this or that curlicue was picked out in red pen. At the bottom of the pile, Croome’s neat handwritten message.

For reasons unclear people appear to consider me matron of the Unit, including those who left a while ago. Lucky old me. It must be my warm personality. For example, beyond your friend Myton’s unexpected recent request, and, I might add, his insistent appeals for professional advice over the holding steady of anything capable of such amplification as we observed, I received, via intermediaries, a message telling me that Potter would like to ask my advice. I’ve not thought of him since his retirement party, have you? I took his call. He doesn’t sound as if he’s doing well. Told me his sister keeps waking him up. His dead sister. That he didn’t like it when she laughed. I agreed to meet with him but he rang off and hasn’t called me back. I think we can agree whatever contacted him is not his sister. Though it may be using her. On which point, and as to the enclosed, it took a while to discern at least a few of the words written. I’m not sure you didn’t get an answer after all. Though I find myself wondering if it adds to your store of knowledge anything that wasn’t already there.

Stallo saw what she had found amid the layered lines. Some words spiked and drunken, some in perfect cursive, some with letters bigger than his thumb, some barely large enough to see.

Bilé

Chemosh

Vinegar Tom

Holt

Jamara

Newes

Sacke and Sugar that is one name for one thing

The Gytrash

Goodman

hush you shouldnt say

Ragman

Old Scratch

Old Pal

Noun after noun is always incantation and this list was scripture. Hardly shocking, no, more validation of hunch, but in what a fashion. Croome and he were comrades now because she’d sent him the nasty litany. Was it that, or was he collating, or was it a certain caution, or what was it, behind why he did not speak of this to Myton?

[48]

Nothing comes to Des. He telephones Sonya and she doesn’t even pick up. Sonya writes in an epistolary diary to Maur, It’s not like him and me ever really knew each other, and I feel sorry for him, but you know. All this Maur imagines.

Thinks too of Sonya’s receipt of a letter. Airmail paper, her name and address printed on the envelope in block letters written by an intrigued passerby recruited to the task. The postmark Brussels, say.

Preparing it, Maur considered what she might say and every option seemed a provocation to providence, to leave a trail, and in the end she considered that it would surely be beyond anyone’s insight to tie two straight lines to a particular hand. So she had readied a pen over the sheet, to draw, in its very centre, an X. How could the world punish sender or recipient for that? But still, there was that warning; don’t contact those you love. She put the pen down and folded the paper unmarked and put it in the envelope.

This was the message that Sonya, Maur hopes, unfolds or unfolded or will unfold. To know what it means and who it is from. To hold it and maybe have a little boo. That can’t count as breach of that injunction.

Maur gave the letter to a thoughtful young New Zealander who did not know her name, whom she met in a village graveyard, by a copse with one snag, one tree with the courage to be dead. An exchange of favours in the backpacking economy: Maur asked the woman to send this, from another country, and she had said she would, and asked nothing about it, and Maur liked to imagine it was true.

It’s not a punishment that I’m not sending anything to you, Des. How can I? You let them use you. Unlike Sonya, the silence he’ll have to live with is that of no event. Maur cries a bit.

She turns over everything the spook man said. She’s not old. She might have twenty years or thirty or even forty, you never know. After how long does the state stop caring, mutter Bygones and ignore you? Do the dead, or does that beyond the dead, ever do so? When might she turn to other tables? Join conversations? Maur doesn’t know if it’s all hers, the resentment that rises in her.

In a toilet cubicle, with a certain conscious grit, she touches her tongue to the wetness come from her, it is without taste. Her body is churning at the growing proximity of something. Warnings. She wears pads most of the time now.

Maur won’t cease to take care. She rises early, jogs. Exercises in her tiny rooms. It was terrible at first but she’s improving. There is a climbing wall in an outdoors gym. She buys the cheapest training clothes she can and waits until the day is coming to a close.

She buys a phone card and carrying a heavy scarf she goes to a last street before the ochre rocks. A tobacconist with a booth at the back of it. She pulls the door to and perches on the stool, dials in the details of the card and the number she seeks to reach. At the sound of connection Maur drapes the cloth about her head to muffle any passerby.

Click click click.

Hello.

Maur says, “Croome.”

Hello.

“Croome. You know who this is.” She’s shrouded.

Hello. Croome’s voice is flat and faraway.

“I know it’s a big risk, this,” Maur says. “I wouldn’t be calling if I didn’t have to. But something’s happening and I remember how you…Hear me out.”

Hello.

“I thought after I was gone, if I just went quiet, that might be enough. That it wanted Stallo. But the quieter I got, the more I felt watched. Noted. I don’t know how long it’s been fixed on me but it is. I thought it was just the regular dead for a bit—that still feels mad—but there’s more. Of course I’ve thought about dropping what I think’s drawing it but…it’s the only thing I’ve got that touches back. If I didn’t have wards, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t know why it’s after me. But it is and if I just keep running it’ll find me. So at some point I have to turn around. Yeah, like Stallo said he’d do: get intel, then use it.”

Go on.

“I’ve spoken to someone who…Croome, what do you think Ewan knew about it all? Why are people looking for him? You said you’d been out of the loop for years but I saw the rig in your basement and I know it’s not that simple. Will you help me? I’ve been lied to. And I don’t know,” she says carefully, “where you are on that. But I want your help.” She finishes it. “The Azeri. Why would she be looking for Ewan? And saying…”

Hello. The question is always to an extent that of theology. It might seem tiresome to say that all questions are but I assure you I don’t say so as a believer.

Maur waits but no sense follows. She says, “I don’t understand.” Then: “I’ve been remembering how Stallo talked about her. That she’s behind what’s coming. But I don’t know what he really thought, about anything.” She notices the tense though she does not believe him dead. “If that is true, her connection to it, and she knows it and called it up…why would she go looking for her father?”

Another lass. The way she was looking at me. Asking me about that night but I said to her, I never did, down there, whatever was going on. I never touched it. The man’s slurred observations and assurances were hardly proof, of anything, of insight. But Maur believes his read of the encounter, and that he believes himself not to be lying.

She waits for Croome to answer.

Nor am I an unbeliever of course such terms have always been rather blunt instruments.

“What are you telling me?” Maur says. “I don’t want to be a fucking medium but I don’t think I have any choice and I need help, and I’m asking you.”

In this case the theologies in question because one should generally plural are those of quiet and dogs and flies and I daresay worms. You should come back.

Maur listens to the flat declamation.

Hello. Come back I will explain. There are doors of course not only the shuffled-off can make the journey depending where you are. Your son you say. Your son. I say that as a question as I do of she we know as the Azeri for whom I’ve always felt something of an auntly sense she is a woman of two natures no doubt though I’ve never understood the fascination for that.

“What natures?” Silence. “What about my son?”

Well what indeed you should return. Of projects mooted there were so many yet to be enacted. Posthumous sorties, the deploying of Roused as apport factory, amplification reduction multiplication indeed combination. Apport germs. Opportunities. What is the source of this resistance beyond

Resistance. Croome could be speaking of Maur’s son? Or—“Are you talking about Cybill?” Maur says. It’s hard for her imagine Yew a driver of a movement, conspiracy. Maybe now though. She closes her eyes in apology to him. “Sometimes they change when they’ve gone,” she says. “Was it you told me that? Is that what you’re getting at?”

we have gone through doors come now the stones are watching they will not let you I am glad it’s you you must come back or tell me where you are

Oh.

Maur takes the phone out from under the fabric and tries to slow her accelerating heart and goes to break the connection and still hears Croome’s flat voice, “Croome” ’s voice, “Croome” ’s “voice,” like a recording whispering on its way back into the machine, and then the end of contact and Maur sits awhile without removing her drapery. Without emerging back into light. In the box in her wrappings, as if, like Croome, she’s dead.

Children chant Petticoat Loose and the rope turns. Petticoat Loose was bad to her mother. Petticoat Loose was a sinful woman, strong as a man. A drunken dance and off came her clothes and everybody laughed. Petticoat Loose diluted the milk. Petticoat Loose’s husband was never seen again.

Petticoat Loose, near the Red Sea

Petticoat Loose hit her mother and was banished. If you’re bad, if you’re not good to your mother, Petticoat Loose will come for you, take you to the end of the world to spin ropes from sand

XXV

Go Between

Room Behind a Door

No change in Amy. Though Stallo was not official it was not hard for him to ascertain that.

As if aware of his temptation to return to the hidden hospital, offering something else, Myton came for him.

—Hello stranger, Stallo said. —How long’s it been?

—I do read all your reports. Myton drove south through sheeting rain. —Would you rather I fussed and micromanaged? Ciggies in the glove box. I said I’d only bother you when there was a point. Such as now. There are advantages to being semi-state, let me tell you.

—Like the East India Company? Stallo said.

—One can only dream of their budget. Did you ever see one of their soldiers, by the way? About your business? Would they count as British, according to whatever celestial referee judges our Rouse efforts, do you think?

—No clue.

—Well we’re far from that. We are a specklike bunch of has-beens plying for funding. However. I do have the ear and respect of a few specialists.

There had been times when Myton’s exuberance had felt rote, but not now.

—Who are even, he said, —up to a point, willing to indulge one’s presence off books.

—You do not fucking half love the sound of your own voice, Stallo said. He counted the metronome insistence of the wipers in the dark. —And what’s got you in such a good mood? You didn’t seem so fucking happy last time. What have you even been doing?

—My job, Stallo. I have responsibilities! We have word of a meeting. I’ve been looking into the breakdown of Nergal’s group since their setback—

—“Setback”?

—Collating information takes time.

Stallo considered that he might not be Myton’s only undercover PO operative, the only recipient of his orders.

—It seems, Myton was saying, —that Paddy was right and time is not healing all, it’s worsening relations between Wran and Marco. It’s always the heirs apparent, isn’t it?

—What are their tacks?

—Not entirely clear, though as you’d expect Wran is the continuity candidate, Marco the revisionist. I wouldn’t wish the gossip of this lot on my worst enemies.

That big laugh. His enthusiasm for the minutiae as obvious as that of Barbellion for his animals.

—Marco’s still staying right off the radar, though neither of them are exactly jumping up and down. But there’s to be a meeting. In Paris. Brokered by despairing pals through some spectrally inclined offshoot of the PFLP. Something of a last-chance-come-to-Jesus for all concerned. What with the state of the world, they’re probably feeling a certain urgency. Aren’t we all?

The car rocked.

—What’s in it for Marco? Stallo said. —What happened wasn’t exactly a strong endorsement of Nergal’s strategy. And I mean…If Marco was behind what happened, and he was—

—If indeed, Myton said.

—I seem to remember us having a whole conversation about this when you brought me on board, and you were fairly clear.

—Which was how long ago now? Who knows? I’ve been looking things over. You know Marco’s rep. If what came through was of the scale and type as you believed, and Marco did invoke and control it, don’t you think he’d have done something with it by now? The situation’s certainly pressing, I’m not suggesting everything’s chugging on nicely. But that particular worst-case scenario? I don’t know. He pursed his lips. —And Marco’s apparently no less keen for this meet than Wran. Which, as you say, why would he be if he was in charge of…something like that.

Stallo looked into a darkening world, discerned the slide of weights and gears, a tilt and imbalance.

—“If”? he said finally. —You can’t tell me nothing big happened that night. He did not like his plaintive tenor.

—No one’s disputing that.

Stallo saw Nergal seeming to offer his insides to the night. The old man’s face had held his secrets. Few could be Roused. Do you not know me? Stallo’s question would always be unanswered.

—So now you don’t think Marco did the calling up? Stallo said. —That thing?

—We have to consider all possibilities. Perhaps it was what you say it claimed—

—Old Pal.

—and it poked through but couldn’t make it all the way. Perhaps it got snatched back….

—By what?

—There’s always a bigger fish.

—If Benters is right there isn’t, though. Not than this. You were the one, what was it you said? A congelation? Something like that? You’ve always been careful to hedge your bets but come on, this wasn’t like any other….

—Perhaps it was an opportunist, some boisterous local fetch….

—Are you fucking around?

—I’ve told you there were no traces on any of the frequencies we were monitoring. Stallo, do calm down. All I’m suggesting is that when your expectations aren’t met, you tweak your theory. Perhaps it was a random flare-up, dramatic and damaging certainly, that tapped some of your ideas and bellowed them back at you. Perhaps Marco never had any interest in or knowledge of what happened. We don’t know where this goes, if anywhere. I’m just requesting an open mind.

Stallo swayed with the road. He said, —You don’t even have to be ITKO to feel it now. That night left something behind.

—You sound more and more like Benters in your old age, Myton said. —Orgone and the moon in the seventh house.

—Who you trying to fool? I heard what really happened when Armstrong retired. It’s not every day the head of the Civil Service strips bollock naked in the middle of Whitehall and starts ranting about the end of the world.

—Don’t start seeing patterns everywhere, Stallo, I beg you. He had been under a lot of pressure, no wonder the poor old chap had a breakdown.

Stallo stared at the older man, awaiting something, in vain. —I don’t understand you, he said. —You were Mr. fucking Time Is of the Essence.

—As it is. As is keeping a clear head. And thinking strategically.

After miles of silence Stallo said, —Where and when’s this meeting? I can start setting things in motion.

—Would that we had that luxury. This isn’t about intel.

—What is it then?

—An exfiltration.

—Are you serious? You’re not going to cross them off?

—My turn to ask if you’re joking, Myton said. —With everything in that noggin? What a waste! We might even get to the bottom of what happened that controversial night. He looked brightly at Stallo.

—I’ll tell you what’s a waste, Stallo said. —Having me build up months and years of cred, then pulling me out and pissing away my chances to find the new bosses on the scene. And which noggin are we talking about?

The bright glare from a lorry pinioned them in their seats. When it had passed Myton said, —Can’t a chap of your calibre do both?

—I can’t just be disappearing on unknown jobs. You think people aren’t going to be watching for that? They’re not completely stupid. It’s exactly when everything’s tits-up that I need to be there.

—You’ve made your feelings clear and I respect them and your expertise, Myton said. —I hope it’s also clear who works for whom, and that we have a common aim. I’d appreciate something more of a trusting spirit. This isn’t optional. Technically this is Increment business, and you know what that means if anything goes wrong.

—So it’ll be crawling with MI6. What do E Squadron want with Wran?

—Nothing in particular. It’s more the milieu, disrupting whichever particular little grouplet is brokering this face-to-face. Quite the prize. The Unit could never have been part of this, if they’ve even got wind of it; they’re too official, irony of ironies, to be nimble and invisible, and too unofficial to commandeer it. But who are we? Just some favour to a minister. I worked hard to get you in on it. I can neither confirm nor deny that this very op might have been suggested to them by a retired old ex-SOE buffer, giving us an opportunity to piggyback. We still don’t know where Marco is—Marco, you recall, variously described as tall, short, thin, overweight, balding, with flowing locks. A lady in some versions. We don’t know where they’re meeting. In answer to your question of which noggin: what we do have is intel on where Wran is waiting. And the decision’s been made to strike while the iron is et cetera and get him out.

—That’s completely fucking nuts, Stallo said. —Why the fuck would we not wait and get both of them?

—You do realise I’ve done a bit of this sort of thing before?

—Then why is it amateur hour?

—Stallo, do you think you could give this a rest? Do you not understand the stakes? We’re not just begging for money any more; we, PO, are on a mission. Off the books, but still. None of these decisions are taken lightly. Could you please assume I’m not a fool? I’ve a pretty relaxed attitude to need-to-know but there are aspects of this that are for very good reasons not available to you.

The S&D Flight C-130 took Stallo and four others very low across the black water. They looked so young to him. Could they believe their identical jeans, bomber jackets all done up, were nondescript civilian clothes? That walking together so dressed, with such moustaches, they would not look like a dance troupe or a kill squad? He was, distantly, surprised it was Increment, meaning as it would some official record somewhere, however buried, rather than Saladin or KMS or Control Risks or one of those concerns on the private side of the public/private nexus of security that chugged healthily away. This time, the crown still wanted immediate access.

An older officer eyed Stallo and drew arrows on a Paris map.

—Gallery. Tobacconist. Bookshop. Bakers.

One soldier said, —Bou-lonj-air-ree.

—Bring me back a croissant, the boss said. —It’s slipped our minds to inform our extremely good French pals from SDECE and RG that we’ve popped over, for which oversight I assure you heads will roll. In any case you’re on your own should things go pear-shaped.

A schematic of a flat.

—We’ve got this mocked up in the hangar so you can get the steps down. Sentries as far as we know here and here. Safe to assume some defences and traps here. Any documents, I want them. I don’t care if you think it’s a used tissue. Ditto munitions and comms. Ditto personal effects. I want this place looking like it’s being sold unfurnished when we’re done. We need to scrub it before les flics arrive, and even with all the cheese-and-wine breaks in the world that isn’t going to give us long. In, out. Weapons free. More: this is an abstersion. Got it? No singers. One exception, gentlemen.

A photo of a man’s face, blown up, as was typical, into a near abstraction. So that’s what he looked like.

—Special Case here is not, repeat not, to be neutralised.

One man said, —Everyone be sure not to fire at any inkblots.

—That’ll do. More intel and images in your packs, as good as it gets, and if it means holding off for a pos ID, tough shit. Here’s the decider. He gestured at Stallo. —Our guest’s here to escort target in for questioning, so if you need a ruling on who is and isn’t our chap, ask Sarge here.

Someone laughed. The officer looked at him in such a way that Stallo thought he might be, at least a little, ITKO.

They went in early. Two men with copied keys by the front door, Stallo and the others from the roof. They called him old but Stallo was first in through the window into the high-ceilinged white living room where by one of three doors an Increment man already stood, suppressed pistol pluming smoke by the bloody body of a young Arab woman on a darkening rug. Shouts in the flat.

—Non!

He’d had this before, Stallo, this simultaneity of speed and near-stasis, and he could take in the bare walls the paper piles the sound of running could track the figures moving not fast enough to repel and could almost be irritated with his own eyes for not lingering where he, the calm he inside, wanted to see. Two quick shots like pressurised bottles being burst. A tall man backed into the room and turned spraying blood from where his jaw was holed and fell to his knees.

Their diagram had shown only two doors in this room.

—Count off!

Some fucker shouting. No more slow now, everything came at once.

—What the shit…?

This third door. It was not as the others.

Stallo approached it amid the sounds of breaking. He kept his weapon up and with his left hand reached for the surface of what he would still have called a door though it was smaller and sort of less clear than the others and, well. Its base was above the floor and it was held to the wall and the cramped shape of it was not a panelled plane of white wood but a framework of wire and planks and bent metal as random in its lines as a network of cracks in glass, securing variegated shapes and sizes and colours, from a circle a few inches across to an irregularity the size of Stallo’s torso, the former he saw an antique beaten-flat tea tray, the latter a torn-off strip of faded and filthy yellow wallpaper stretched taut, and there the cover of two books, ceramic plates set in place with resin, the back of a picture frame, the blade of a bayonet, a lion-shaped ornament or toy made of tin, the distorted lines of a crushed kettle, all those metal parts flattened in some almighty hydraulic press and ghosted with the lines of the shapes they’d once been, that matter held together in the rectangular frame, unmatched rusted hinges to one side, a hooklike handle to the other. Door.

Stallo could feel that all the parts of it, and the integument that held them, were apport.

Didn’t know how long he’d been staring. He moved but one of the soldiers was before him and reaching for the handle already.

—Don’t, Stallo said, but he did not hear himself. He receded behind his own eyes. Pushed as if through vines. Bit down through his lip. He would not lose time. As the other man clenched the door handle he turned to look at Stallo and all you could see of him was his eyes but the shift in his expression was clear, bewilderment then stretched-wide sclera-displaying grue you never want to see.

Stallo barrelled into him and heard more shots from a far-off place and a wet exhalation and he yanked at the door as hard as he could

The door swung open onto

Out of the doorway came

dark

The darkness came out as if to wrap the Increment man in itself, and

Shots into the wall sending paint and plaster down

Stallo stood in Grant-Taylor’s stance. Bent knees, elbow by gut, outmoded by the sweep of his associates with their shoulder-high weapons. Pistol smoking, when had he pulled the trigger? Left-handed he thumbed open a trap and pressed the charge and threw it and heard

the dark ebbed. A shuttered stretching windowless chamber beyond, shored up by wooden timbers against uneven what looked like deep thick earth between these walls. In which, blocking a vertiginous black, a man shape moved.

and bleeding crawling to the doorway and falling through and sprawling at Stallo’s feet slamming that door shut behind and whispering to his own injury, as if he’d sing out the bullet shot by Stallo’s gun, a middle-aged man whose face was grey with pain and whose hair was grey and wiry and who looked at him with astonishment, Wran, the target.

[49]

The evening makes long shadows of the city and fills Maur’s little bedchamber with thick light. She dreams a long time in the stillness of an aftermath or premonition. Then at the fringes of some focus. It’s terrible, it makes her body a site of violence, as though unfolding dark breathed out upon her the sardonic spite of epochs.

Distantly, though, from outside her head, even in her wretched sleep she senses intercession. Against what tried to find and reach her and to cling (she feels its surprise, a promisethreat to return in just a mo). She knows then, pulled from bad attention by it, that this is not the first such custody granted her.

Maur, delivered, strains, makes sound, her body spasming to wake        and she opens her eyes and around her is mere and arrant emptiness.

She is still alone again.

Jules? Ewan?

Her breath and heart are fast. She waits, counting, to slow them.

It felt me. But you. Was it you, who got in the way?

Cybill? Was that you where are you? Keeping me out of it. Thank you. Where are you, though, where—

But Maur gasps at the quality of this new answerlessness. That will not temper. She has the sense of a last shout cut abruptly off.

—

She considers approaching one of the figures in the hostel where she rents a bed with cash, one of the women or men who speak with what sound to her like Russian or Polish accents, greeting them in her own accented Spanish—soy Mariella, hola—to commence some chain of eastward-going sociality, hanging out in particular cafés, making connections with others from other overlapping groups, ultimately to culminate with some halting connection with a refugee from Fizuli or Karabakh, out here pre-empting any trouble coming when the camps are finally closed, now Baku is backtracking on Aliyev’s promises. (In this new life she reads the news more closely than she ever has because what hems her in is the whole world. It always has been. So, her bag on her shoulder, she wipes down desks and scrubs urinals, knowing now through online search and Spanish newly fit to get through El País that Romania and Bulgaria are jostling with EU membership, and Hungary still reels in the wake of Gyurcsány’s leaked Őszöd speech. Such dramas and drudgeries have never been counterposed.) But there’s no cultural centre she can find and the Azerbaijani embassy’s in Madrid and what would she do, hover nearby to strike up a conversation just to get the right spelling? When the whole thing’s a game anyway?

She takes the bus to Xàbia, far enough, to another cybercafé shopfront stuck with posters puffing telephone cards and fax service alongside the cuneal segments of a Wi-Fi sigil. Maur goes between machines. On the seventh try she finds an account still logged in, for a further layer of camouflage. She searches out fora and writes down their names. She registers at Unilang.org on a throwaway email address and starts a new thread. Hi my boyfriend’s family’s from Azerbaijan and I want to surprise him with some old sayings in Azeri or Azerbaijani (are they the same language lol:) ). Can anyone show me how I’d write these phrases?

A stitch in time, too many cooks. Maur makes a list of five. And I heard someone say something what would this mean?

Quickly, then, two nights later she pauses between secretaries’ bins and moves mouses until one wakes a machine without a password. On that forum are already three responses, all with explanations of orthography and nuance. She writes down the slightly kinked script of the answers. Another two days, in the office of a hygiene equipment supplies firm, she logs in again. Typing. In her rubber gloves she registers on Tripadvisor, on Holiday Truths, on British Comedy Guide, on Cook’d and Bomb’d, on Benidorm for the Lads. She gives herself the same moniker on each: Mumofyou. On each she starts a thread, its title “Spook and Slither Secrets.”

son a big fan of s&s. came on pilgrimage. for the real stories. hear he’s not the only one. you keep an ear out? fun n fright. gorusmeliyik. eylence ve qorxu. benidorm. tarix adlandirin. dusmenimin dusmeni menim dostumdur.

Sound it out, run what you hear through translation software, you’ll come up with nothing.

Where this is leading has Maur trembling. What the comedian told her, not knowing that he did. The urgency of the Azeri’s own searches. What Strude

(she’d groped eyes averted around the mess of him, that she had made) (her heart is slamming)

said, showed her: that somewhere she’d known Stallo was a liar. About how much?

There’s no reason not to believe the Azeri hates the Unit, and Stallo. Who doesn’t? But after all this time of running from her, what do you really know of her? Or what she wants with you? Or your son? Why she sought information about him? Of course yes she’s not even Azeri or Azerbaijani, but she took and turned around that offhand designation and used it and the tongue. And of all those things she said to Jock, what had stuck but cone of dust. Stallo said she threatened Jock, but couldn’t it have been a warning?

On those language boards she’d asked what that might mean, that phrase she’d overheard, rendering it phonetically. She’d been offered, at last, “old friend.”

Köhnə dost. Old pal.

And after seeing death and revenance and after killing and grieving and running away, unendingly fearful, it’s no small thing now for her to turn, to seek out her from whom Maur was told flight was imperative. Here she is though.

So if this line or two that Maur’s left on the bulletin board makes no precise sense, squint at it, reinsert missing diacritics, replace the odd u with ü, invert some es and such, replace these letters with Azerbaijani equivalents they vaguely resemble, as one who recognises the script will she hopes think to do, as the Azeri will do, you’ll have words in that wrong-but-right nonexistent hybrid language, fucked and mangled but maybe just about out-makeable. Yes it was mad to think it would work, but she did say, the Azeri did, she’d told the comedian she’d watch out, look out for him and what was going on with him, and if she or her followers are doing so, where else would they go for info without actually being at risk here on the ground than such online venues? Where he was in fact mentioned, and not just by Maur.

Run these gibberish words—with which who else than her quarry would have any reason to be intrigued?—through a little transformation into the right script and translate that, and out, more or less, she hoped, would come:

We should meet. Benidorm. Name place date. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Maur can’t afford impatience. Especially since that intervention, now the intervener’s gone. She fades her frustration into more blankness.

Another venue, jangling Spanish pop bouncing off the walls. She logs on. On one forum her post has been removed. On Cook’d and Bomb’d someone has written below her words, They let anyone in here these days, and below them another, I remember my first beer. On another board one respondent has said, He’s a legend lol!

Maur knows there are soft cups that sit up inside you but she can find nothing like that in any pharmacy. A thin discharge leaks from her. From her eyes, her nose, as well as her vagina. A little from her arse. It is off clear and slippy and sometimes marked by passage. She sets her pads to soak, in pans with just a little water. She warms them roughly to the temperature of blood, speculating over parascience. Strains the suspension into plastic bottles.

On Tuesdays, in her wig and unlikely clothes, she travels hours south-west to wait by the faded zebra crossing at the corner of Calles Luis Gordillo and Nicolás de Bussi, watching the few seekers and curious at the flat-faced ochre of the Baker Foundation Spiritual Centre. Tan women and men a decade or more older than her, in dusty florals and light suits.

“Are you alright, love?” The first time, the warmth and eagerness of the woman. “It’s okay, we’re a friendly lot.” Maur shook her head. “I can give you this,” she said, carefully accented, and held up a vial. “You know what this is? Ectoplasm. You want?” “No,” the woman said, pressing her lips together. “No, lass, I don’t.” Maur comes again the next week and the next in sight of a restaurant like an ugly cake. The kind-eyed and brisk Baker staff come and say, “Look, love, we’ve talked about this,” and she won’t even look at them, and furtively enough, in ones and twos, rebels among the congregation do approach.

“Hola. What’s all this then, eh? We heard you was—”

They can do what they want with it, she doesn’t need to know, any more than she does how they gauge its efficacy. She could offer them egg white, but she has her needs and reputation matters. Hold up the glass. “Sólo en efectivo,” she says. Rubs her thumb and forefinger. “Doscientos euros. O…” She puts out her palm flat. Speaks slowly. “O ayúdame con información.”

On Thursdays she does the same outside the Spiritual Foundation in Alfàs del Pi. She won’t use names or too-specific descriptions in her questions, won’t let that temptation take her. Into Murcia. Over the railings by British Dental Practice. Enter Shaman’s Crystals and secrete silently among its stuffed toys and glinting skull-carved diodes a few tiny bottles of her own wet commodity with labels stuck thereon, Real Ectoplasm, and the number of a burner phone she’ll keep for a few more days. She’ll come back to change the labels when she has a new number.

From Alicante, paying from her cash store to sit near the back of the vehicle and sleep to Madrid. Five deep-night hours to Bilbao, an hour in the dismal stopping place for transfer to Santurtzi, to jetties and the industry of Zierbena. Watching ships. She counts her money. Accumulates scraps delivered to her in loud slow English and halting Spanish. Names, places, newcomers, rumours, fragile places, warnings. The tracks of a man, maybe. Circles on a map.

Her online caution is weaker now than her growing fear and the tightening of things. She wakes in fear. She checks the trails of arguments online about whether or not the performer was good or only strange, her initial query forgotten but for one call-back saying, Seems appropriate we’d be talking about him because of someone talking gibberish right?, and Maur Marianne Marlene cleans and lives alone, and speaks almost never, never opens her handbag, her wordless pleas to those who, had they?, had kept an eye and distracted a certain attention, a last time, unanswered, still, again, surrounds her bed with sand, watching pebbles, and knows they will not be enough forever.

—

Cleaning sick from a club floor. Emptying rubbish in the security closet. Well this computer is on, so take a look. Log in under her meaningless name.

She doesn’t shout, doesn’t make a sound, to see the post at the end of the thread. She holds her breath.

Username AZRI. It names a venue. It reads, OP: On your birthday.

Yes if you didn’t know who the original poster was, you would not know what that day would be, nor that it approaches.

This Buzzard God

Stallo wanted to discuss what had happened in Paris. And elsewhere. Alright, and Amy. So he imagined Croome.

If anything, Croome said, Amy is the opposite of a Roused.

—I didn’t know you could do that with apports, Stallo said. —That door in the flat.

None of us know what you can and can’t do with them, she said.

—I thought they’d want me to deal with it. I thought that’s why I was there. But they got me out almost as fast as they did Wran. Doubt he’s in for a nice time of it.

He had returned to Paris and four nights running had gone by the building. On the first he saw two men in a shabby Volvo watching. On the third, at the window of a corner café, a quiet priest studying his books. They were better than his erstwhile comrades when it came to disguise. He suspected it was French and English agencies, and likely the KH diaspora too. That, had he reentered that killing zone, that door of flattened apports would have been wrenched from the wall, and what tunnels into what too-deep striae behind it gone forever from that place.

Croome said, Perhaps their care suggests brass is not as sceptical about the troubles facing us right now as they seem to you.

—I wish I believed that.

Mud at his shoes brought back Nergal’s sticky blood. We never did sort out if you knew me, did we? Wran must have been holding back and holding forth in pained rhythms wherever Stallo’s ex-comrades had him. Marco recruiting, with whatever fight and resources were left him.

Stallo sought breadcrumbs. The tone of the most classified communications from ambassadorial assets pleased him. It was different from the arid tenor of less secret documents. Some authors (midranking diplomats, much higher on other scales), knowing that what they wrote would be read by perhaps twelve people in the world, nonetheless enjoyed style, references and homage. And where the Ruperts he had known might gravitate towards Kipling, here were David Jones and Bunting and other modernists, not even all spies. Maybe it had always been because it was hers, not because of how it was, that he’d not got on with Maisie’s stuff. Anyway here were wry asides, humour and well-wrought zeugma (“the cultural attaché generally wears a Savile Row suit and a look of vacant panic”). Cross-refer with the PO appendix on such Red matter, where Myton decried their boring theoretical minutiae. As if Stallo could not discern his fascination with details of state capitalism or a degenerated workers’ state, of decadence or steady-state capitalism, of homosexuality as a bourgeois deviation or as a legitimate even radical way of loving, and as if Myton did not know Stallo shared it.

Nothing much, hearsay notwithstanding, with regard to some secret Edenic gentle quarter for those breathing and not. But the more worldly dead and living? Here: Marco seemed, if Stallo decoded echoes right, to seek those who asserted the revolutionariness of death. If you were cast out from Hoxhaites, drifting to Rengo Sekigun and away again, when certain of your questions circumspectly implied familiarity with an esotericism, well, you might end up hearing a knock at the door. Marco, hand out. Even if you were—as Myton implied more than once in response to Stallo’s queries about some such lead—too crazy for the likes of Pickled Onions to worry about. Not least if you were one of those who claimed comradeship with this rather than another faction of the unquiet. If you thought splits on the so-far-alive Left were bad, Stallo said in his head, that’s nothing compared to (what some say are) those among the radical dead.

—I know I’ve recently left you hanging rather, Myton said as they descended Parliament Hill. —Marco may be in London again or on his way. Stallo did not say he knew this already. —Yes, I thought that might interest you. And if R Unit are on his trail, with the best will in the world, I’d rather we got our hands on him.

—Sure you want to bother?

—Are you sulking? Whatever disagreements we may or may not have about his role that night, of course he remains of interest.

—It’s a tricky time, Stallo said. Was anyone on this slope not in the business? —There’s not a lot of trust around.

The meetings of what in his reports he called SL—Spooky Left—grew smaller, more clandestine. Those present spoke in increasingly evasive terms. Guiding spirits, real or otherwise, pantomime once, if they came at all might mutter like something under slurry, like the song of mud itself. Everyone was ready to break connections right quick. Stallo did not tell Myton that sometimes he returned to himself as the evening wound up, companions perturbed at whatever he or his mouth had said.

Thanks, he directed inwards. And, You’re welcome, he never said to séance-mates. For keeping you safe.

Rak sent Stallo a postcard. An equal-armed cross, the wings of a helicopter, an exclamation mark. From Beirut. No name, but who else? If the point was to know, then what did Stallo know? That the dirt of the world meant something?

—“We don’t understand why you are making so much ado over your Buzzard God,” Stallo said.

Myton looked at him enquiringly.

—The Rev. Jim Jones, Stallo said.

—Ah, Myton said. —Silly of me not to guess.

—Marco or Wran’s people are in contact with him. Or both.

—I’m sure you’re right, there are assets in many temples. Bloody lunatic.

—We work with plenty of lunatics.

Myton even looked bashful at that.

—He’s a gnostic, too, Stallo said, —and that’s hard to resist in an end-times mode. Calls Yahweh a Sky Buzzard God. A tormentor. But he doesn’t say it’s a false god. People say they worship God because he made them. You know what he says to that? Buzzards are shitting on every hill, and you don’t owe them anything even if you’re buzzard shit.

—From the look of your face he has one recruit at least, Myton said.

Other aspects Stallo would not recite in this company. It made him shy, somehow, that the Temple claimed people want to stick with that Buzzard because it brought them where they were. As if that were a good reason for anything. Do you worship the honky? Jones said. He brought you here from Africa. He had power. Buzzards have power. They can tear your flesh off. You don’t have to like those who brought you here be they honkies or Buzzard Gods. The crowd loved that. And nor could Stallo get enough of this, with regard to the buzzard, anyway, and the chains and flesh-tearing of the non-honky by the honky he resiled from considering except to clarify his enemies’ motivation so he had no shame in—he glanced at his skin and could have laughed—his own honkiness, fuck it. Stallo wanted to talk about the numinousness of this vision rather than its skin-and-power echo, that’s what he worked with, so didn’t that make sense? To what tribunal was he making this case? He shook his head again. Myton was watching.

—More quittings from the R, Myton said. —So unhappy birds tell me. Would you serve at a time like this?

—It was a time like this when I packed it in, Stallo said. —Even harder to work with REs or apports these days. Why am I here?

Ducks eyed them but they had no bread to throw. They watched children who did and the old men who made such feeding their task.

—With me? To check in! Myton said. —As you’ve pointed out more than once, I’ve been a bit remiss, and I’m going to be a more assiduous interlocutor.

—Checking up on me?

Stallo listened to the liquid fury of a robin lunging for its opponent’s eye. Dimly he recalled Uniteers scrambling at the airfield, far too late, picking through Nergal, hauling Jeff Ogier away. To live out what days were allowed him in some classified lockup. You’d have to say you felt sorry for him.

—Long left his Unit role in a funk, I gather, Myton said. —A disappointment to everyone, and no one’s sure what prodded him out the door.

—It’s a hard job especially now, Stallo said.

Myton wouldn’t meet his eye. —I do think you might exaggerate recent difficulties, he said. When Stallo did not respond, he said, —The Reserve Forces Association continues to organise cricket matches. That should terrify the Russians.

Were the dead fungible? Equivalent? Is every dead equal to every other? If so what was the third thing each shared, the mediating term? Death, the heart of every metaphor. And the missingness of what is missing, too, every absent corpse equal to, interchangeable with, every other.

—Stallo?

—I was thinking about Isabella, Stallo said. —About missing bodies.

A letter reached him from Alison Purdey. The addresses of his residences since last she had known where he lived were crossed out and overwritten in the Samaritan hands of those who’d come after. Stallo held the envelope against the skin of his face.

The letter told him that Maisie had drowned.

—Maisie. Alison raised her glass.

—Maisie, Stallo said. Not a new chapter, then: still here. They drank. They were not alone but the pub was quiet.

—How did you find out? he said.

—I hadn’t spoken to her for a long while. Her landlady went through her address book is what happened. She kept to herself the last few years.

He nodded. —You and her, though. I thought you were like that. He crossed his fingers.

—We’d had loads of ideas together. Maybe one day we’d have got it together to do one of them.

—I’m surprised you lost touch though.

—I’m surprised you did, she said. —I know after you and her broke up…But even then there was always something when she talked about you. And Sten was always a drip. Not that I know how long she stuck him out. I’m sure you pissed her off something rotten, of course. She smiled. —But she never stopped liking you. Or liking not-liking you. At least while we were talking.

—When did that stop?

—About three years ago. She got really negative. I went to visit her and she wasn’t in a good way. She bummed me out. And pissed me off, to be honest. I wasn’t sure what had got into her. But you know Maisie. The way she got depressed, you know? Stallo did not show his surprise. —When she’d go from high to low, the lows were low. Stallo said nothing. —So I suppose I was…I was shocked. I was shocked by what happened. But I wasn’t completely blindsided.

—What? he said.

—Come on. She wouldn’t look at him. —You never wondered? You hadn’t thought?

—When did she change?

—I said, three years…

—When exactly? Nineteen seventy-three? Whenabouts?

Alison looked at him carefully. —I don’t know, do I? I didn’t see her much by then anyway.

That year in which there might have come a turning, when something might have gotten into the woman he had never divorced, his wife then, this widower’s wife. Stallo flattened his hands against the table as he had against the steaming runways.

—Tell me how she was, he said. —The last time you saw her.

—Don’t torture yourself, she said.

Her gentleness moved him. Oh Alison darling, that’s not it at all. I’m not beating myself up, am I? Am I?

—She was…hard work, Stallo. She got paranoid and difficult and, and blue. Go easy, man.

He worked to slow his heart. The thing about this business, the apport business the Roused business the undercover business, is it never stops. This was true sadness in his belly, he would have sworn on Rene’s life, bit late for that but you get the idea, real grief, and also why would that stop you getting intel?

Stallo scanned his room: bed, beige curtains, cheap prints, chest of drawers the doorway to the bathroom black and white TV, the radio with its half-extended antennae. The room was as still as any empty chamber ever is. He made beans and egg on toast and ate it and halfway through the eating of it watched the forkful dripping slime slop and he could not tell whether he had frozen or chosen to freeze. He watched some nothing on the television and was like stone. He turned it off and then the lights. Readied himself. Whispered a name and turned. But he was alone. The oblong of the telly screen glowed black. Stallo kneeled before it. Pressed his palm to it and where his skin touched the glass haze traced his outstretched fingers.

No voice whispered, no salt-sea water dripped black from any mouth. He cried and thought it was for Maisie. When he was done the room remained empty but that certainty of company abided. He was a haunted house. He drank cheap whiskey. Considered the fact of Maisie’s body. She had swum every day. That was why she lived in Brighton. Well why she went there. She’d been in an odd way. Everyone said. There were cramps and colds and undertows off the coast. Stallo turned on the oscilloscope and watched it measure nothing in deep-sea glow.

He pulled at his prick.

Come on then haunt me.

That word was its own pornography no less than the tarty clothes and makeup in his head.

Rattle your chains. Moan.

He got himself hard in homage.

Stallo overlaid onto the night planes of London Maisie hanging in the dark, and lost all track of moments in his dogged strokes. Pushed through the repeated intervention of Melissa bloody Marks in his visions, when had he last really wanted her?, he wouldn’t let her put him off. Brought Maisie back. Was interrupted by inner sight of Sten fucking her, and Stallo could not dispel that, nor other eidolons who now came to push into her, and he remembered when he’d been God how young walking into a dance hall to see the upturned face and closed eyes of some girl he’d earlier fingered and whose name he could not now recall pushing her tongue into another boy’s mouth, and he’d wanted to break a bottle on the lad’s head but had felt himself grow hard too at what he saw, and whatever effort he made he’d not been able to efface that image for a while, it too had haunted him, and when he went home he learnt that what brought him relief was not to try and fail to banish but to exaggerate it, to leer, as if he were a watcher of the whole uncensored occurrence, those fingers on those tits, those lips on that prick not his own, never thinking it without pain, those haunted wanks terminating with him on the edge of his bed spunk dripping from tip and hand and the sound of his mother in the kitchen not knowing what he had done, and even for the desultoriness of such aftermaths he had found in them something like a calm. Now when he tried, tough old soldier like him, to think away from Maisie’s dead flesh, and could not, all he could do with the incapacitating sadness that fact of her body and its mortification roused in him was to dwell, to think it, sitting motionless, dream the worst of it.

moment, just as he had thought/hoped, Stallo felt his room inhabited. There we go. Something behind him watching. So he imagined Maisie bloated and the colour of bruises. Sagging in too-late rescue, naked arse dragging on the beach, water streaming from hair. He tugged and did not come or detumesce. She leaving a brine trail from her mouth, her eyes gone.

He was picked out by the jags of the ’scope line.

One up-down as if heh heh. Nothing would choose to come here. If it did though, and spoke cold water?

Once more up and down, at very last, as prickles rose upon his skin, and if it were translated he knew how that shape might sound

Stallo

in a woman’s voice

On the cathode-ray tube then, three peaks. Heh heh heh. A new voice. Heh heh hello, mate, such lines might say.

[50]

A man walks into a bar.

The faux coffins are just silly in the day. The man searches and Maur can see he believes himself inscrutable but his shock and admiration, yes, at the sight of her are not so hidden as he thinks. He comes to her table. He’s young and dark-complexioned and he regards her with caution. Says something rapidly. She keeps her hands in her pockets.

“I have a gun,” she says.

With slow care, he sits.

“Happy birthday,” he says in accented English.

“Thank you.” She feels calm but tell her body that, her heart. She glances into the corners where all the bits are placed, where whatever might discourage the entry of the dead, which she has brought in over the weeks, is hidden. “Listen.” She has not spoken in her own voice for so long. Her accent and timbre astonish her. She looks at the man without the flitting cringe and avoidance she has made normal.

“Don’t look at me like I’m threatening you, I’m scared, don’t you get it?” she says. “We don’t have time to waste so listen. I’m the one set the word in motion. Who left the notes that got you here. Obviously you’re not the Azeri. I know she’s been looking for information, and so’ve I. I’m here in good faith. It was me asked for this.”

“Why you are here?” the man says.

“Because you represent her. I’ve been waiting for you. But I can’t wait any more because I’m in trouble. We all are. I’ve got something to show her. For a while something was looking out for me. On the quiet. Getting between me and harm. But I think—it’s gone.” Her lack of terror fascinates her. Maur leans in. When you can trust no one ever again, a new option occurs: agency through guileless act, the Promethean surrender. That touch of the fuckits.

“I need to talk to the Azeri. And she needs to talk to me.”

Even his friends said he was burnable. Charles Williams, inkling, Rosicrucian Anglican Cabbalist. Striving for co-inherence, and if you’re living in London, what you’re doing like it or not is urban perichoresis, sharing duties not just with the living, exchange and substitution in his terms, bearing each other up. Laugh if you want but it’s something. All Hallows’ Eve, it’s in there. That book of London, full of the dead. This matters.

Say that again? From Barnsley? I don’t think he was from Barnsley.

Charles Williams wrote that Pan is dying.

Me old flower? No I don’t think he called people that.

Attuned to the slide of the formless and to the Holy(ness of) Ghost(s). Pretending, including to himself, to choose the latter; he can be allowed that. He said, Many gods vanish in the wrappings of the cephalopods. There is only one salvation then that counts, and that is unreachable. You will be free to say on that day, if you can, This is the not so.

He asked, You prefer the not so of the octopus?

During the power cuts I had no trouble, I just had to roll me eyes.

Did he say that? He claimed to illuminate with his own gaze?

If you don’t shut up I’ll come and move in next door to you? He said that? From and to whom would that be a threat? That wasn’t where his gaze went. Yes the book in which he has Africa for the Africans and a Britain invaded by it says Africans, airships over London, a world shaken, as it had been shaken a hundred times before, but that something loomed now in half-fancied forms of alien powers, of Negroes flying through the air and Jews withdrawing their gold. A dreadful vision described with yearning. And if it’s less invested in being aghast than Waugh’s in “Out of Depth,” less dreamlike and more horrified than Gray’s in Park, that’s because Williams is concerned with the soul, whatever the furniture of the story, it’s about spirit and why must you read politics into everything

That’s what I should’ve said. That was his creed, the spirit on the staircase. Not the tears of a clown, maybe, but at least rueful too-late knowledge, an owl at dusk.

Oh the comedian. From Yorkshire. Doncaster Rovers. Father from Barbados. That’s a different man. His are other doctrines. Is what I’d say to you. Black lad went for a job said to foreman I need a job I’ve got a wife and fourteen kids foreman says That’s fine, owd flower, what else can you do? Gentle and nasty common sense from the lantern. Ding the bus bell ringing, ding ding, hold tight please, you’re supposed to say it in a post-imperial way, mocking, it’s just a joke. Thing thing.

Charles Williams ≠ Charles Williams. Such theses would have to just be the opposite, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?

Won’t you answer me?

XXVI

The New
Inquiry

Pier Glass

It was all the more stories of medium fails out there, of unknown signals, apports and the dead going missing. No rumour mill to which Stallo had access, though, threw up anything about Bowler.

He met Myton in a louchely sumptuous basement restaurant. Myton made great show of greeting the maître d’, asking how long it had been, asking after his wife and daughters.

—I know you’re still feeling neglected, Myton said to Stallo. —No no, I’m serious. I understand. There are people I want you to meet.

They were awaited in the farthermost room.

—Mon Capitaine, Myton said to the stooped and worried-looking elderly man. The woman was dark and a bit younger and jolie-laide and Myton called her cara mia. —This is Stallo, he said. —Sergeant Steven Allardyce. The best of us here by a long shot. A chap who gets his hands dirty. Stallo: Michel and Agathe, who, nomen est omen, is honourable indeed. I’ve known these two since Force 136.

Stallo prodded his meat with his knife and no blood emerged. The four of them went between English and French and German and Myton threw in Italian now and then. Agathe asked how fared the RPOC and Myton said it had performed its role, disguising Pickled Onions.

—Why you Brits should have this, Michel said. —This trick. He sighed and forked one of Myton’s potatoes.

—Not that we really do, these days, Myton said.

—I heard, Michel said. —Trouble? What has Kowalchuk done?

—That’s not it, Stallo said. Michel and Agathe watched him with polite ruthless appraisal. For years nabobs in Langley and Whitehall had enjoyed tales of useless Russki research but there’d always been those in the remnants of SOE who had known not to laugh.

—I thought this must be the Russians, Michel said. —No? You are still in touch with the witch? he said to Myton.

—Bien sûr, Myton said, and waved away that line of enquiry. —I speak with many witches in my line.

—Dirty business, Agathe said. —Lionel, how good help can El Brujo be? I know his reputation but his star goes down, no? Again. A mess after Ezeiza….

—Yes yes, Myton said. —Si si. He did not look at Stallo. —But always keep your hand in with every contact.

—Kowalchuk’s having his own trouble, Stallo said. —Worse than us.

—Bad people behind this, Agathe said. —Maybe only they can really Rouse now.

—More bloody freelancers, you mean? Myton said. —Is that what you mean?

—No, she said. —I hear what I hear.

Myton said, —Agathe, my darling, you know what soldiers are like, what nonsense has someone spun you?

—You hear too? she said to Stallo. —Of this hid place, signalling? These problems come from there. Everyone mixed together. Revenants and living from all places. No tradition. No honour. A mixing. They send signals. Temptation. It is the rootless people, again, who have done this. She described a big hooked nose with her finger and Michel laughed and Myton smiled and shook his head. —Maybe if you have no nation you can provoke any bad memory. Any revenance at all.

—Agathe, you are a dear soul and a font of gossip, Myton said. —Even if you do have certain bees in your bonnet.

In the next room the band finished the song and there was clapping. Stallo considered newcomers, rumoured organisations. From what new philosophies of battle and history might such as Agathe mooted derive?

When they parted, Myton walked with Stallo. —Cold as a witch’s whatnot out here, he said. —Cold enough to freeze the hoohahs off a brass monkey. I hope Agathe and Michel didn’t bore you, I’m very fond of them, for all their little ways. As with Benters, as with anyone in this business, when she goes at it you have to learn how to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Stallo was not sure of the nature of this audition.

—I wanted you to meet them, Myton said. —We might end up working with them and others like them. We always knew there might have to be some Bulldog Drummond business. “In which the German Nation”—or the whichever—“decreases by one.” I suppose then no less than now a degree of sangfroid was necessary to get a chap through the day.

—What was that about the signal she was on about? Stallo said.

Myton sighed. —Just chirps on the arrays.

—The aerials up the end of the spit?

—There’s nothing new about that, Stallo. The same old stories more tenaciously told. Will you be voting? Exciting times. Yes, she’s a bit infra dig but rather remarkable nonetheless. What one hopes is that soon we needn’t worry too much about any of this, this Sturm and Drang. One would love to learn that one was only a caretaker during a few bad years. I’m still hopeful about that. Though one should never be without contingency plans.

Even in the city a bird made a long high sound.

—So you’re seriously still not worried? Stallo said. —After the airfield…

—You’re as bad as Agathe with your teeth into something! It was years ago. We’ve been over this. That wasn’t the first time something troublesome’s pushed through and it won’t be the last. If it’s even still here where is this catastrophe?…It’s perfectly clear that Rousing and spectrology aren’t in a great state at the moment, but again, there are always cycles, I don’t see panic as warranted.

Stallo could tell Myton wanted something of him but not what it was.

—No one’s denying these are dangerous times, Myton said. —Only that the end of the world is nigh. One of the things you get paid to do is make it a little less dangerous.

—What do you think happened with Bowler? Stallo said.

Myton looked at him quite a long time. —What an odd question. Given his nose for trouble, I suspect he’s dead. Don’t you?

—No.

—Your faith is touching.

—It’s not faith. He’s a canny cunt, is all.

—It was self-indulgent of him to have a midlife crisis.

—If it’s a midlife then he’s still around. Aren’t you curious?

—Not very. I’ve seen this sort of thing before and very little is less interesting to me than chaps going native. It’s so self-important.

—He told me I wasn’t curious enough, Stallo said.

—What nonsense. It’s your job to ferret out information. On which topic, I have a job for you.

Stallo’s Neapolitan counterpart was older than he, still athletic, with well-cut hair you could call silver. —Will you have water? He glanced without curiosity at Stallo’s cane with its hidden point.

—Water would be good thanks, Stallo said. Thought, I am an aficionado of the safe house and dirty white walls. Here the desquamation of paint seemed like some disease of heat and the sounds from streets away had its distinct lilt. —It’s a strange time back home.

—Is always a strange time, the Gladio man said, staring into old Sol, against the injunction. When he looked back, Stallo’s head must have been a sun-shaped burn. —You, I heard you catch Wran. Stallo said nothing. —They don’t like him no more, his comrades, I heard.

—Bit harsh, Stallo said. —Just because we got him?

The man shrugged. —Like the Japanese maybe. La morte prima del disonore.

They descended. A windowless cellar. A gas canister with a mouth mask attached. A chair facing a corner, a muscled young man strapped to it, T-shirt and jeans stained, straps around legs and belly, hands cuffed behind. In his mouth a gag, over his eyes a blindfold. Headphones on.

—What are you playing him? Stallo said.

—I don’t know how to say it. The sound between stations.

He removed the earpieces. Stallo could hear the hiss.

—I will take off the blind, the tall man said in Italian. —Look straight ahead. You know the dead are everywhere. Look at the corner. You know they like corners. Perhaps they will greet you.

Stallo said, —Let me?

His host gestured.

—I know you and your comrades have to be careful, Stallo said gently to the captive. —You fight with each other, almost more than with us. And you who work with…Stallo paused, then said fantasmi and spettri. —You have to be even more careful who you trust. We know Nergal is gone and we know Wran is gone and we know Marco is on his own. Where is Marco?

—I don’t know.

—Where is he?

—I don’t know.

—What will he do?

—I don’t know anything. All I know is there is a child of the dark loose.

—I took your apports that you use to touch your dead comrades, Stallo’s Italian counterpart said. —I have burned them. I have the smoke. It will choke you and them too. By the time you die you’ll think you already died.

The interrogator slipped the mask over his mouth and nose and the man thrashed but Stallo’s host turned the control on the canister and there came a sound of gas and the man retched and smoke leaked from the seal. He convulsed and vomit came out too. When they pulled the mask off and dropped it to the floor the captive wheezed and dripped. Stallo felt no great surprise that that streaked face was familiar. Someone from a warm and crowded room. Factor out lunatics and the dissenting ITKO Reds were not so many, and so yes, he, Stallo, had, in another guise, years back, sat cross-legged discussing was it Gerda Walther? among the fierce-faced cadre of autonomia, and this man, thinner then and tough and ready, had nodded at the challenges to reformism and to the fascism of complacency or some such. Stallo had never needed to know his name. The captive looked at him with streaming eyes and no recognition. It would have been a sadism to remind him.

Probably a lie, Stallo thought, what his counterpart had said. Who would burn apports just for smoke?

Under sky like a drum skin, spiral wind pushing out from or pulling into the heart of such dim kingdom where the dead tumbled random as weed, souls mute and entombed in bodies remembered without purpose, spines circles like hoop snakes, limbs snagging limbs, orifices stopped up, mouths spitless and speechless and filling with dirt. Monad until they emerged out of angles, revenant.

—Hey, the tall man said to Stallo. —You okay?

Stallo nodded.

—What do you want? the captive pleaded.

—I told you, Stallo said.

—Come on, let me out, you won’t, oh mother, it changed, it’s only been five years, six years, since the change, you feel the new freedom for the new things now?, oh God, no, fuck God, I won’t beg for a master, you know what they believe, the dead?, there are worms and dogs beyond us [Stallo thought, And flies] and the worms are coming. And the missionaries among the ghosts, the quiet they pray to, why should it be enough to stop that? Help me. There’s a child. The child of it. There are times of worms and monsters and times of the dead and memories, only this is a time of both, how is that possible? Was it always the way? The ill remembered and the other [altro]? It takes years to know how to move, and now how do we move two ways at once? What is that motion?

He looked from the corner to Stallo and shouted and the first term Stallo knew and the second he did not, and though the first was a noun Stallo heard it in that moment as instruction, a verb, demanded, as was the second.

—Lo spettro! Lo spettro striscia!

They put the earphones back on their charge, who kept shouting. The dead have their cults, he shouted. Silence their Christ.

—You see? Stallo’s host said. —There is nothing. He can’t help us.

—No that was something, Stallo said.

The other shrugged. —I can bring in a cockerel and ask it questions, you’ll get something from it too. He patted Stallo’s shoulder. —You tell Myton ciao from me, he said, in English.

—I’ll kiss him on his cheeks.

—Good. Better if you are a girl though. Always he likes them.

—Hey, Stallo said. —I know what spettro is, obviously, but what’s striscia?

—Is…The other moved his hand sinuously. —Move, like a snake moves.

He looked then at the seated man and inclined his shoulders at Stallo in a question. Stallo said nothing. The man took out a hundred-lire piece and tossed it.

—Heads, Stallo said.

The Italian showed him. Repubblica, heads. —So this means you do it.

—Fuck you, Stallo said. —It means I win.

—Okay, okay. The man held up his hands in joking surrender. He brought a Beretta 92 out from his jacket and stood behind the captive and shot him. The sound hemmed them in. With his chin down the dead looked as if he slept but for the new shape of his head.

—Andiamo, Gladio man said. —I bidelli lo puliranno.

Stallo opened his bag. —Tu vai. Non ho finito.

—Oh, davvero?

—Si. Non interrompermi per favore, Stallo said. —Verrò quando ho finito.

Stallo brought a trap and wire and a speaker and his oscilloscope and connected them to the cable in the corner. The bulb above pendulumed and he recalled the bob of his head and the lights in Camp Awfulness in the jungle. He placed the bottle and turned the dials and watched the line. Put his bamboo close.

The Rouse was not a bugle, but what he brought up in that barrow was to a bugle as hyena is to dog.

—Riesci a sentirmi? he whispered. —Sei qui?

In the corner where the man had stared the darkness was darker and solider again and blocky and square.

Stallo said, —Tell me what you know. The night turned.

—Can you hear me?

but he woke, his mouth spitty. Unspoken to, unanswered, in the company of the body. How knowing, how rueful, it was. So the ghillie had come, had ridden awhile and spoken to the dead if the dead was speaking, and in the room above Stallo’s counterpart waited and they would eat breakfast together when he was done and the light pressed down upon Earth.

In front of Hackney town hall a group of punks spat at an Asian man who drew his jacket about himself and hurried by and Stallo watched the young men and women in their leather so they jeered at him too, and when he did not look away they moved on.

—Don’t know what the country’s coming to.

Stallo turned. Joseph Manning from R Unit was stood by him.

—You sound like a right old codger, Stallo said.

—I am. So are you. I heard about Maisie. That’s a terrible thing.

—Thanks.

They walked the downs. Alongside Stallo Maisie drifted in dark water.

—You’re a teacher, Stallo was able to say. —You look good.

In fact Manning looked shrunken, by more than age.

—A nasty little public school in the Midlands, yes.

—Why does everyone out of the unit become a teacher? Stallo said finally.

—They don’t. I don’t doubt you heard about John Banks’s freelance shambles.

—Some of our lot are in with him?

—Growth industry, Manning said. —Maybe you should get into that. You were SAS. Your old lot are right up in this.

He wasn’t wrong. They even called the sector 24 SAS—cheeky!—so cozy were his erstwhile crew with Watchguard, Plan-A-War and their ilk.

Stallo said, —So the options once you’re out are teach perishers or get paid by wogs to shoot other wogs. No offence.

Manning looked at him levelly.

—Who do you keep up with from the Unit? Stallo said.

Uneven pathways. Inches below the soil was broken masonry, city trash. The sky was like grey plastic.

—What about Marks? Stallo said.

—I’d think you’d be in touch with her, Manning said. —I heard she left too. You know who I do have a drink with once in a while? Cynthia Caygill. One of the NAAFI lot? He held out his hands to cup a large imagined bosom.

—I didn’t really know the civvies.

—They all thought they knew what we were doing. Hardly. She has a few garbled ideas is all. She’s sweet but loopy. It’s all water divining and so on.

—Doesn’t mean she’s loopy.

—No, but she is. She says Nazis are trying to call up devils. What, man? he said, when Stallo stopped walking. —Just ask me why I left, Manning said then. —I know that’s why you’re here. Everyone who leaves wants to know why everyone who leaves leaves.

—I’ve been asking around and your name came up, which means you’ve been asking around too. About what’s going on. Do you ever think, Stallo said, —that whatever started to go wrong with the Unit—with everything—began after Bowler fucked off?

—I think he’d say you got that the wrong way around.

They let the silence sit.

—Go on then, Stallo said after a time. —Why did you leave?

—Because of my last mission.

—What happened? I heard—this can’t be right—you lost an apport.

Manning’s voice, when it came, was flat and practiced, so Stallo knew he was not the first to hear this, and that he would not report to Myton what he heard. Manning’s voice brought to Stallo’s mind visions in a square of hazy colour, with that indescribable televisual insideness or close-up-ness.

—It wasn’t long after you went. Looking for some soucouyant. I had Haley. At least that’s what it said on the bottle.

—I deployed Haley once.

—I know, Manning said. —Dean told me. Your first time, right? In Cyprus?

—Second, Stallo said. —First was the pilot.

—That so? I didn’t lose anything. But it’s true it hasn’t been apport since that night. It was Haley they’ll tell you I lost. Stallo stared. —But something took it. What we were there to check up on.

Manning stared into remembered trees within, and whispered.

—Haley tried to get back to us. That’s what the dials said. I was remembering what happened with Watkinson and I was that scared of another mutiny like that. But Haley was running from something. Didn’t make it. It got…

He closed his teeth slowly, to show what had befallen it.

—That’s why you left, Stallo said, at last.

—Right. And they say I lost things.

—And did they tell you there was nothing to worry about?

Manning laughed. —A river in Egypt, he said. —I wouldn’t stick around after what I felt. Stallo, what took Haley, it was playing.

—Taunting you?

—Playing like a kid. A dog doesn’t hate the stick it’s playing with but the stick’s still fucked.

—Will you help me? Stallo said.

—Hello and goodbye, Stallo. I teach geography.

The dark came down.

—I will tell you this, Manning said. —Talking about Bowler. I asked Cynthia about Sheila. Remember Sheila?

—Another civvy, yeah?

—She told me Sheila just left one day. Suddenly. Didn’t even say goodbye. Just before Bowler did his bunk.

Stallo waited but there came no epiphany, only more unease.

Stallo wouldn’t call them dreams, what came to him, was not sure he was quite asleep for them. In any case, in those accelerating nights such swevens visited. Green face, the CT Stallo had shot, shadows on him, vegetation, Auntie Irene pouting her lipstick, his mother who asked you?, a figure mouthing cold-water words.

On trees and bushes that would not be overlooked, Stallo placed rinsed blue bottles. Cool summer. In Ravenscourt Park a man shouted at his dog for frightening a young boy now comforted by a kind young woman in grotesque black eyeliner. What country, friends, is this? Community halls and the top floors of old flats. Back in character. Disgusting spliffs, drifters and the mad, booksellers, tarot readers, refugees from leftist outfits.

Unclear on his own status after months of neither briefing nor debriefing, Stallo believed he could tell the more official agents than he, those paid directly by the state, in such gatherings: an enthusiastic man who went by Bren “like the gun” arguing for a British Rote Armee Fraktion, a young woman called Debbie who paid close attention to all the debates and said little. But remember Amy—have humility. And listen, and seek names. He spoke in his mind to Sten, of all people. Hello Sten. I’m jealous of you I think. Easier, he understood, to imagine this than to talk to Maisie even within, because she was unknown to him, which desolated him, to his own shock, made him feel adrift, which was a bad word to attach to the feeling bringing as it did—like a ghost net with the motion of a sped-up cloud and a cargo of rot—an image of a drifting presence. Turning slowly arms up above the city.

Back in the market most of the sellers of nonsense were gone. He found the stallholder he’d spoken to all that while before. Everything she had was quotidian now.

—Sixty quid I gave you and I never heard a peep, he said.

—Never anything to tell.

—What happened here?

—It all dried up.

Her name was Theresa, she went by Tree. Light picked them out. Tree would smoke in bed after sex and run her hands along Stallo’s scars, then continue her looping touch beyond them as if taking it on herself to finish the keloid writing.

—This is a good one.

—That’s my favourite.

—Have you given it a name?

—Bertha. They laughed.

She asked him nothing, ever, about what he did in the world, and he was grateful. Once, racing skies to get back before rains, a parkside bramble snagged Stallo’s shoulder as if someone who had sought him for years took hold of him. He turned fast and he saw how afraid she was of him when he moved so.

He found nothing in his bottles. Still it made him feel better to hunt.

—I’m curious about your line of work, Stallo said. —As was.

—I kept a couple of apports for myself, Tree said after a bit. —When I clocked the market was ending. A handle from a bread knife and a drop cloth. They’re in the attic. The last time I looked, they were still snagged. I can’t bear to check again.

With something between excitement and unease she told him names and what she could recall of those who had been in her supply chain before the drought. He knew then that he would not share the list, or the fact of her, with Myton.

When she was out he went to the bureau and pulled out the notebooks he’d seen her stash. You couldn’t really call the one a book of receipts—it was too scattered for that. Still, the underlinings, the scrawled stars, gave a sense of what she thought she had sold, to whom. Just initials, mostly. But with what she’d told him already it helped.

One name was that of a woman at the Spanish church off Portobello Road, who told him it would soon be the harrowing by hell. In Leeds he followed another of the customers, a big glum bloke in his late sixties, into a sunken toilet to find him kneeling on a square of newspaper tossing off a mod in his clobber. Stallo pushed the young man out and astounded the older, resigned to a beating, by asking him about the Summerlands. The man told him the Dragon’s kid was out there, the son of perdition.

—We’ve all read Thessalonians, Stallo said.

It came to Stallo as he sat there not mentioning The Omen that yes it must be the inspiration for this sort of gabble, but transmission works in more than one direction. What if this was a seeping into the culture industry of counterculture’s whispers, the heads and freaks of the West Coast whispering to the producers to whom they sold weed and pills that a certain child had been born, so in the addled way of that town anxiety became commodity.

Dalston. Stallo followed one of Tree’s customers, a man, white, craggy, grey at the jaw, in a bus conductor’s uniform that looked more inherited than chosen. Stallo let himself recede into his own head, entering that inner state, that watchfulness room. Followed. The man unlocked a door between a café and a pawnshop and Stallo sat with tea in the former. The man came out again a couple of hours later, out of uniform, and headed off. Stallo went and took from his pocket a fold-out tool and clickety-click, he was ascending. Did the same at the door above and entered a tiny flat without a picture on a wall and with shelves chock with books and papers. On the kitchen table too, The Mirror, a yellow pamphlet, Down with the New Tsars!, a caricature upon it of Brezhnev as a tank, “Marxist-Leninists Intensify the Struggle Against Social-Imperialism.” He sifted. Took his time. The night came.

There are those moments when everything fits so exactly, when the run of things is so how it should be that you feel like you’re in all bits of time at once, in the hand throwing the stone and the apex of the arc and the point of impact among ducklings all at once, living in the of course, the it could not be other. Stallo learnt that he believed that nothing could stand in the way of these his now private investigations to help him understand the epoch. When he heard the key he put down the papers and had no plan. His heart did not speed up. He folded his arms. The man he’d followed came into the kitchen and stopped and almost fell back through the doorway to see him. And Stallo thought, Oh well. They stared at each other.

—You’ve got wide-ranging interests, Stallo said. —Apports, and then all this. Sit down mate.

The man sat. His mouth worked.

—Tell me about this final struggle, Stallo said. —Tell me about your comrades.

—What do you want?

—Where’s Marco got to?

—How should I know? I’m just a reader….

Fair. Were he really close to the source he wouldn’t live so, with such evidence on display. This unfortunate was only just ITKO. At the same time look at him batting not an eyelid, knowing that name.

—Tell me what it’s all about, Stallo said.

—You know.

—Tell me anyway.

—Life against death, he said at last. —It’s the hour. Now or never. Life versus death. Fascist witches calling up devils. We can’t stand by.

—We?

—Them. They.

—So you don’t want to fight fascism? Stallo said.

—I’m old.

—But Marco’s fighting fascist witches and their devils and devils’ children? The man nodded. —With witches and devils of their own?

The man looked confused. —What? he said. Stallo saw a thought go through his mind, a desperate hope, something to offer. —You saw in Guyana?

Fuck me yes Stallo’d seen it. Had been trying, it occurred to him, not to think overmuch about it, which was not like him. Whither your war on the Buzzard now? Stallo asked the dead reverend and his lieutenants.

—That was something, the man said. —You think that wasn’t done to them? You think that wasn’t a sign?

Oh these people. Everything was a sign.

—Why would Marco do that? Stallo said.

—What? No, they’re on the same side. That’s what I’m saying, that’s the stakes. Please, mate. Please. I just read.

Stallo tied him to the chair with twine for drying clothes above the bathtub. Stallo had always found gladness in his expertise. The way his body moved in darkness. That he knew how to hunch under the weight of his equipment, to raise a weapon without sound. Wasn’t to say—he felt himself put his case—that he liked killing, it was an old nostrum that sadists were bad soldiers and not necessarily untrue, and he’d have sworn on any book you like that he took no pleasure in ending anyone. But it turned out there was a difference between never putting such actions aside, being visited every day by those he’d nudged across the final brook, and being bothered by that. Which was very interesting. And it was his job and his duty and if Thanatos did walk with him and he was in some way determined by it, as Croome and Freud asserted, he was no more but no less so than were those blubberers who couldn’t hack it, than had been the shell-shocked. And neither he nor they were victims of their own obedience to orders, you’d have to allow, anything like as much as were their targets. It was very interesting. If you must know, it isn’t difficult, it occurred to Stallo, to do what you’re told, and kvetching about it was part of it.

Watching Stallo run his fingers over everything his captive could not but glance at a jam jar on the windowsill in which grew cress. Stallo saw and emptied the dirt and seedlings on the floor and he rubbed the jar as if to rub its glassness off on him.

—This used to be an apport, didn’t it? he said, and the weeping man nodded.

Stallo noticed wryly that he couldn’t focus his eyes as close as once he could. Here he was forty-cough, in a city that was shabby and shining and ready for something. He threatened the man again but did not torture him because he believed that he knew nothing of use beyond this garbled surprise, the belief that Marco was not hankering to use but trying to face down whatever presence might have entered the world.

Stallo would have preferred to leave him alive but he had seen his face so when he could not put it off he killed the man as quickly and painlessly as, without a gun, he could.

[51]

Maur is sitting in a tall and narrow chamber with a window high above. She can only see the sky. Noises without. She sits on a cheap wooden chair facing a table of the same like and another, empty, chair. She hears birds.

It was a mistake to have sent that letter. It was not a mistake. Through Maur’s mind goes, I know where I am and I don’t. Such contraries have travelled through her many times over her journey. Maur flaps the neck of her dress against the heat. It is very dirty. Her dress. It is very dirty. The heat is dirty too.

It isn’t safe to go back to where you live, the man said to her, now you’ve contacted us. Maur said, No, I know that. Turns out it was never safe, it wasn’t safe to be there in the first place. She saw him make his decision after a time and his look at her became calculating. She said to him, No I don’t need anything. She put her pack on her lap. Her handbag on her shoulder. She said, I’m ready now.

Maur wonders what her hostel-mates and coworkers made of what she left behind. The signs and the sand. To a few of them she’d whispered without sound, Take care.

Sleeping on the floor of his cheap hotel. Similar charms: tangle, spirit jar. Distinct designs she’d not seen before and of which she took note. He did not try to take her little pistol. She’d seen he had his own. Through the next day and the next night he drove them on the south-west road. Sleep, he said, indicated the mattress in the rear of the van. She did not. They awaited the ferry beyond Motril, between a children’s playground and a line of depressing restaurants. In Melilla they ate in the portside McDonald’s and walked to the Hotel Nacional through cars’ blares and motorbikes and Riffian and Spanish. In the darkest part of the next but one night the man shook her awake and they went to where the risen aliens of cranes got about their busyness. His hidden route opened onto a neon-washed loading bay overmatched by clifflike ships. Into a labyrinth of rectangular containers. He sought markings on corrugations. Maur heard the sea. The box he sought was not locked. Here, he said. Pallets stacked taller than Maur. Beyond the industrial wrap a tiny dark space, a sleeping bag, a bucket and plastic bags.

Maur said, How long? Three weeks, he said. She stared. He pointed. MREs, he said. Water. Maur still did not say, Where am I going? She regarded the bucket. That’s too small. Empty it, he said. Jesus, she said. No light? she said. No room service either, he said, and shrugged. As slowly as she could, she said, It’s this or nothing. She made sure not to make it a question.

You’ll be met, he said. Don’t get out until then.

I’m not a fucking fool, she said. Give me your torch. She took it and he said, I don’t know what you want and I don’t know what she wants with you but if she wants you she wants you. Good luck.

—

Throughout the long heat and stink and dim, upness, swaying like Gulliver in his box, downsetting, the move, the sea pitch, Maur rarely used the light. To ensure she did not smear herself when she defecated into the bags. To check if what she wiped from herself was blood or clear. When the battery went she performed her tasks in darkness. She moved, little exercises, as best she could. As she knew it would be, the line between reality and the internal was weak. She lived in a momentless duration. She tried to dream—awake or asleep, staring into the black of the inside of her body or of the chamber, shaking with the metal and her skin—of her son, mother, friends. Sonn. Her son. Of a giant figure behind an empty house. If she was mad awhile, it was gently so.

Finally finally after sway and the lurch against gravity as if she would be dropped among great seagulls, shocking motionlessness, a long time on earth. Aching, she tried to tidy herself up and laughed at that. She brushed down her stinking dress in the dark, poured bottled water into her hands to wipe her face. She had to shut her eyes when the doors screamed and light came in so she didn’t see her new contact, and anyway he said that she must put on a blindfold, and she objected but not hard. Here, wherever here was, at last.

So she spent more hours in the dark, of cloth this time, and whoever met her took her with almost courtly hospitality into the clatter and clang of port noises, shouts too brief and distant to identify the language. It might have been neon that shone on her, not daylight. Hours in a car, again. An open window. She smelt rich vegetation. She trembled. With the path. With her weak legs, when she was walked out.

And now here she is. The blind off. She kept her eyes closed until after the off-taker was gone and echoes told her she was alone. To discover this room. A shapeless floral dress and sandals, and water and soap and a pail. She changed and piled up her reeking ship-wear.

This chamber is small and taller than it is wide. It feels to her like the foundation of something unfinished. The walls are white-painted metal and show dust and insect investigations. The door is closed. A desk, drawers containing more old clean clothes. Three shelves: atlases, a lockbox. Ashtrays.

Everything has been left her but the pistol. All the money in dollars and euros that she had she still does. Her bag and its contents that she’s held all the way here. The smaller bag within that she won’t open, though this place above all others must be protected. No, she will, just one second though, to reach, not look in, and bring out the string and close the bag again and finger the cord as if it still bore knots and they were worry beads.

Sometimes all there is left to do is trust. That’s not naïvete but decision, when things are coming to their end. She wants to speak to her son. No, speaking was never the best of them. She wants to sit unspeaking with him. She waits in what is like a costume. The clothes of another woman. Maur fills the room, with Ewanlessness. Maur is a new mother with eyes as clear as glass. She shifts and it’s as if she has a wooden tail and it drags behind her. The door opens. A woman comes in.

Summerdown

Stallo grew a beard and dyed his hair black. In Eastbourne, he put his thumb to a spyhole. Myton showed no surprise when he opened the door. He leaned back over his shoulder into a smell of cooking.

—A gentleman about a watchtower, he called. —I’m trying to break it to the poor chap that we’re all damned here. To Stallo he said, —Bingham’s Café. An hour.

When Myton arrived, Stallo watched him and then the bluster of the sky.

—Your tea looks cold, Myton said.

—It was hot when you said you’d get here.

—I’d apologise but who the bloody hell do you think you are? You’ve made your point. You know how to track people down. Applause.

He did look older. He was not smiling as much as he used to.

Stallo said, —How long’s it been? I don’t even get a gold watch and a cheerio? What happened? Why’s it over?

Myton beamed at the waitress across the room and made a capital T with his hands, then put them in an attitude of prayerful thanks. —Over? he said.

—I haven’t heard from you since Naples, and that was—

—And it? It Pickled Onions? Who says that’s done? My dear, he said then to the waitress. —You are more beautiful than ever. Tread softly, for you carry my heart. He gazed at her as she set down the tea and the young woman smiled quickly back.

—What a charmer, Myton said when she was gone. —She looks good enough to tie to the post.

—Jesus.

—Stallo, this isn’t very like you, turning up like this. I’d never doubted your nous or dignity. You know the drill. Await further orders.

—I been awaiting a long fucking time. What if I don’t get any?

—Then go about your days. Aren’t you still being paid? Every penny wrested from a tight Whitehall fist, think nothing of it, though true you won’t be retiring to Monaco. I never got a bean, do you know that? They bunged me a bit to cover train fares, but mostly it was my gift to the crown and I was happy to do it. Not that they were ever particularly grateful, but you don’t do these things for the thanks.

—Who’s past tense–ing now?

Myton regarded him. —If RPOC is quiet, it’s because PO is quiet, not the other way about.

—So we have been closed down? Or was it you finished it?

Myton met his stare.

—Why? Stallo said.

—Stallo, my job’s always been to evaluate threats.

—It’s not as if I’ve been idle, Stallo said. —I even tried to trap some revs. Worth a punt.

—To do what with them? Myton spoke carefully.

—Save them.

Myton closed his eyes in a God-give-me-strength sort of way. —I take it you’ve not had much success. Which must mean that your bogeyman has eaten them all, and that these are the last days, yes? It couldn’t possibly mean that they’ve always been bloody hard to get, let alone with whatever equipment you’ve jury-rigged.

—When I was in Italy, Stallo said, —I heard about a kid. Not the first time. Got me thinking.

—I see where this is going, Myton said. —Can you imagine how many children are born every year who someone or other declares to be the seed of, drumroll please, or chosen for, fill in your preferred prophecy here.

—If…Old Pal…has a child…

Myton raised his hands to gesture around him. —The world seems surprisingly undestroyed given your devil’s putative rampage, doesn’t it? Let alone that of any progeny.

Stallo said, —Are you still in the game?

Myton said, —It would be a little craven to stop arguing one’s corner just because one’s star has waned.

Stallo was practiced enough to see the snarl beneath the smile. Lionel Myton looked out at a group of schoolgirls passing and screaming happily as the wind yanked their clothes. —Mostly this place is the antechamber to a morgue, Myton said. —A chap like me is a stripling here. I’ve a daughter, you know. That waitress’s age or thereabouts. I’m a grandfather twice over.

He looked with a hunger at the young woman who had served him.

—I shall have a cake, Myton said. —One of the few upsides about time’s onward march is giving less of a tinker’s cuss about the waistline. Among other things. Stallo, let’s say that your imaginary bugaboo were in fact racing around doing its worst. Why do you care? Your face! Let all the poison that lurks in the mud hatch out. They’re not there, but were they, would letting things hatch be so very bad?

Myton poured sugar into his dregs to make an island of grit and sludge eroding into surrounding murk.

—What was the point of PO then? Stallo said. Myton rolled his eyes. —You thought the Reds had that much clout we should be worried?

—Whatever I thought or feared, time moves on. Neither the Russkies nor China nor the bickering remnants of the rest inspire terror now. One would be a fool to think that fight’s finished and done, but there is a direction of travel. The Unit, you, me, we’re remnants. Will you have a cake? He called the waitress. —I’d like one of your wonderful-looking éclairs, please, my dear. When she was gone he said to Stallo, —Lunch is on the way and Susan will not forgive me, so I shan’t tell her. My daughter is not Susan’s. Susan and she aren’t overfond of each other. My daughter, like so many, is raising her children without the help of the chap whose they are. Well. Done. Her.

Myton clapped softly at symptoms of the maelstrom. Stallo blinked at Myton’s expression as if he had vinegar in his eyes.

—Failing is never fun, Myton said, distant and cool, —but one has to wonder if fixing it would feel worse now than leaving it to bloody break. One wouldn’t call it hope exactly, but there’s a certain peace in thinking we’re nearly done.

The cake came and Myton ate it. —You’re still on call, he said to Stallo. —Technically. But don’t come back.

New builds on the spit, thrown up quickly and already battered. The Black Beacon shed its fluence. Hook paused in his note-taking, put the lid back on his pen. Look at him. They were all growing old.

—Stallo.

Stallo came out of the shadows.

—How are you? Hook said.

—Don’t really know. It’s a funny old time.

—You’re not the only old Uniteer who’s dropped in. Though others aren’t usually quite as skulking and unannounced. They’ve been more I happen to be nearby next week, et cetera. Marks. Anthon. They bask in the sense that for old times’ sake an exception has been made. Little do they know that in the bottom-but-one drawer of Evelyn’s desk out there, the chit for their visit is one of several marked FI: “Friendly Informal.”

—FI means “Fourth International” to me, Stallo said.

—It’s been, what, six years? Hook said. —Seven? What are you, forty?

—Up a bit. You’ve still got troopers my age.

—True, but not many. No mean escapade for you to get in here. Well done, I’ll make sure the guards are suitably chastised. Are you auditioning for something? I do wonder what it is about proximity to our sort of thing that causes a certain longevity and relative vigour.

—I’m sick of that kind of question, Stallo said.

—Then you’re in the wrong business.

They stalked through the blocky abstractions of Camp Awfulness. Stallo saw more clearly into the dark now than he could when he was a younger man.

—So it’s true you’re winding up? Stallo said.

—Oh, they won’t call it that. One gathers they’re doing some deep excavations somewhere where they’ll secrete a storage facility and the vestigial stump of the Unit.

—Where?

—I don’t know, but I’m minded to say that’s not the point, that the point is it might be anywhere, if you dig deep enough. Anywhere in England, that is to say, but of course it’s my job to add that sort of bosh.

—And the Roused?

—There’ll be no shortage of takers.

—You’re joking, Stallo said.

—Well, exaggerating. Some they’ll keep down there for when military fashions change. But if they can’t or won’t store them all, I’m not entirely unserious: they’re valuable resources and this sort of thing—selling and buying, I mean—isn’t going to get less common in this business.

—Jesus fucking Christ, Stallo said. —What’s the Milkman going to do? What about Wran? Uritsky? What other detainees we got?

—Wran? We never had Wran here.

Stallo let nothing show at that.

—Being partial to a mystery is an excellent quality in our line, but requiring a solution is a liability, Hook said. —Uritsky was never a captive and I’ve no idea where he ended up. I daresay Cunningham will continue to enjoy his sedate gardening.

—But you’re still here.

—What else am I going to do?

No riding of Britain without erstwhile operators. People who waved at the postie had clamped explosives to girders, shot young men in the face, raised revenance.

—So what will you do? Stallo said.

—As I say, they won’t shutter the Unit. Perhaps they’ll let me stay on as archivist or curator or some such.

Hook walked to where the water could slap his toes. —Myton’s a clever bugger, he said. He did not look at Stallo. —I never doubted that. But trouble. A bit of a fanatic under the hail-fellow-well-met. Don’t tell me if you’re still with him, I don’t want to know.

A black mass on the shore. An overturned boat, starlight on its slime. —The sea’s generous, Hook said. —Chucks all sorts of stuff at us. How rotten does that have to be before it stops being a boat? We have a sweepstake going on for when it falls apart completely.

—What’s the prize?

—You get to be king or queen of the dead. These days if I were to have a go at that, Hook said of the shape, —in charcoal or ink or what have you, and you were to take a peek, you’d see no sign of anything. I’m losing my touch in my dotage.

—You might be as good as ever, Stallo said. —They might’ve just stopped visiting. It’s not safe for them. Have you lost apports?

—You too? Hook said. When Stallo said nothing, he said, —Some objects remain but now snagless. Those still snagged we’ve moved on the blind guess that this might be like a disease. Others have just gone altogether. As have a few things I don’t think ever were apports. Can you still put your hands on all your bits and bobs? You came because you heard we’re winding down. So you’re not immune to nostalgia.

—I’m not immune to anything. I’m here to ask for something.

—Not merely old times’ sake…, Hook began.

—I want the Venom engine.

—I rather want a luxury yacht.

—No you don’t.

—True. You weren’t to know it but that was the best I ever did my job. Finding that. Recruiting you like that. Why do you want it?

—Give it to me and I’ll tell you.

For seconds it seemed that Hook in the spirit of some mischief considered it. When he said, —It is more than whatever’s left of my job’s worth, Sergeant, it was not without regret. —As I say, some of our resources are spoken for.

—Worth a try, Stallo said. —Alright then listen. I was on a job. I put down all the details about where and when…well. He took from his pocket a folded piece of paper and held it out. —I want to know what transpired.

—I thought you were there.

—Not fully. And this wasn’t on the books, but there was a Gladio guy there. ITKO. Which means there’s probably a record in some file somewhere. I’ve not got access, but while you still do, maybe you can help me out? Anything you can find. Appreciate it.

—Why would I help?

—Because I’m not asking Myton. Because he wouldn’t want me getting my hands on anything you might find.

Hook even smiled. —I make no promises, he said.

Another unmarked envelope slipped under Stallo’s door. Reading what it contained he did not know if it was translated from Italian directly or via other languages, what point he was in a chain of leaks. If it was from a recording or from shorthand made in a hidden adjoining room. Or if it was invention.

—Will you have water? He remembered moments. The cellar. Corner-facing chair. They had made the man breathe smoke. That other landscape where darkness became quality. Kingdom of gusted souls. I must interrogate him. Waveform rendering. —C’è qualcuno? Can you hear me? The night had turned. —Answer me.

The silence had given its response.

Stallo read.

Si.

Adjusts machine.

S: Answer me answer me.

Yes.

No.

Had the voice come in noise out of the throat of the dead man, from way behind the motionless lips? Or in memory, recalled, without all the fuss of having actually been, always its own wake?

S: Listen you must tell me where is Marco.

Change in S voice.

S: Oh.

S: [unclear]

He can’t help you.

S: [No response]

Gone now.

Stallo.

S: [unclear]

Stallo.

S: [unclear]

Hello Stallo.

S: Not Stallo. Nergal?

[laughter]

No. Not Nergal. Hello not-Stallo. Tell Stallo when he comes back.

S: [unclear] here. [unclear] Behind.

Tell him. Listen. Nergal’s not…Tell Stallo. Forget Nergal. Stallo needs. He need to know what is. Old. Pal. What happens. From where. Who opens. The door.

S: [unclear] Stallo opened [unclear].

Yes but why?

[silence]

Had the room been full of silence for a long time then?

S: Bowler? Is that you?

Had that been Stallo come back enough to speak past his control?

[laughter]

[unclear]

he says hello.

Stallo wrote to Hook, Thanks re transcript. He stood nude and connected his oscilloscope to power and directed the pullers-in of signals of whatever kind he had at the bottles he had gathered for all their emptiness. Closed his eyes and turned dials. Listened, for a baby, crying, a young girl or boy, whispering. A wind from nowhere.

Stallo.

He opened his eyes and saw the afterimage of that name’s shape in green glow.

Ascent-descent, he imagined of what sound it was the shape.

hear me?

you hear…?…told you. In the cellar.

Not the voice of a child.

—Maisie? he said.

A new interruption, hooks and chitin on the inside of the box.

flat up down

Hello

up down up down up down

Are You Looking For Me

until Stallo was lying crawling bruised on the floor and the oscilloscope was split onto pure dark. It stank of carbon. Something cold and viscous seeped from it, from cracks in the glass.

He wrote to Benters via the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), which Benters had agreed to figurehead. They met amid the warm wood and gypsy-knicker curtains of Benters’s club.

—I bet they’ve warned you off me, Stallo said.

—All I heard is that you’ve gone off reservation.

—I want to talk to you.

—About Lionel?

—Among other things. I need your word this is between us. Benters frowned. —He never bought it. The Overmind.

—Oh, I know that, Benters said. He blew a raspberry. —It’s all about the Commies for him, always was. Which I don’t gainsay, it is a doctrine of evil. Not a word I use lightly. Did he tell you to burn any apports you have?

—What?

—Contacted me—first time for a long time—when things kicked off in Port Stanley. Said it was past the time of stuff. That stuff is the problem. That we should be burning it all for fuel.

—For Dragon energy? Stallo said.

—Are you teasing me or him? Benters said. —I’m not Catholic, though I have the greatest respect for Catholicism, as I do for all the faiths. There’s one thing Rome has very wrong though: what came first, the fall or our fall. You know I walked the soil of Germany in ’45. I’ve walked in the Dragon’s hoofprints while they were fresh. Evil and our fall were both first and all at once. I’ve seen what the Marxists’ precious collective can do. It’s just another version of tribal energies. A sort of blood music. That’s the secret: there isn’t a devil. It’s a collective. Old Pal is us. Fuck’s sake, Stallo thought. —That was something I could never get Lionel to understand. I was always a little surprised he gave me the time of day at all. I’m a clown, not a fool, I know how he considers me. It’s such a tragedy. This lack of discipline today. I can’t be angry with the young, I feel for them, I do. No one wants the Age of Aquarius more than I. And it’s trying to come. But Kali Yuga’s coming too. And what’s here now—because that’s why you’re speaking to me, isn’t it? This thing that, that devours, is the effort to stop the former.

Stallo could have said a countervailing tendency.

—My son died, Benters said. —Do you know? The pain of that. You can’t help the hurt even though you know there’s a door marked summer. We chat, my son and I. So I have my own informant, you might say.

Stallo waited as if that might be appropriate courtesy, comfort.

—There are other doors, he said. —And things at them.

—Yes. All of us, living and dead, have good in us and its other.

—You been following this war? Stallo said. —You know what soldiers are like. And mediums: all stories. According to which brass are doing it all wrong, looking in the wrong place. The real stuff’s going on in the Southern Thule. They’re keeping us busy in the east while a bunch of Argie specialists on the west, or on Saunders, are doing something with some ley line or I don’t know. A secret project, some major, called X because these cunts have no imagination, South African intelligence help maybe, up to something. All this got me thinking. Putting together other stuff I heard. You’ve known Myton a long time. Who does he respect? Who’s he worked with? What do you know about an Argie witch?

—A or the? Benters said. He considered. —Out of favour now, though apparently he still has his network. López Rega.

—Tell me.

—I know very little, I’m glad to say. He and Myton go back. Lionel knows all sorts of unsavoury types, though to be fair so do I. There’s a cost to doing anything in the depths that people like the Brujo plumb, but one reason I keep my distance is that for rather too many of them that becomes the appeal. A sacrifice. No other way to put it. And if you absolutely have to do something like that, it’s one thing I suppose, but it’s not very edifying when you make necessity a virtue, or means ends. Seeing the eagerness with which “tough decisions” are sometimes made doesn’t sit well with me. Are you alright? You look—

—Fuck me, Stallo whispered.

All this man’s stories, why wouldn’t Myton be his mate? This is what Myton wanted. War the perfect ground for the grandest plans. Die in a war and they always call it sacrifice. In Stallo’s mind arose a sudden sense of a hostia bolted, a mass of souls trapped and ready in hopeless retreat.

—War’s a time machine, Stallo said, fast. —With the right contacts, a bit of expertise, a line of comms to the briefing room, you could get some retrocausality going. Take the result of some battlefield decision you might have had fuck all to do with and make it have been payment. For something already done. Oblation.

—You’ve lost me.

—I mean if they’ve laid it on, be a shame to waste it.

The kind of thinning such a thing might effect, have effected, the calling, a dreadful epiclesis. You’d only need patience, for the right conjuncture of numbers, pace, signs of what’s to come. Drawing, when it did, what it had, before its becoming event, birthed.

It was the politics of Myton’s associations that set Stallo tracking threads. Of course, you did what you had to do, think of Paperclip, Aginter Press, Rauti and CSON’s courteous pas de deuxs with the secret services of Europe. For a quarter of a century Ordine Nuovo had stood ready to defend, quote, the traditional remains that survived after the blast of the 1789 bubo spread plebeian pus all over the world, unquote. Still, though, some of this was unexpected.

He recalled Agathe’s words. Stared into the microfiche glow. Ezeiza. A chilly day years before, the Buenos Aires outskirts. Three, four million thronging to halloo Perón’s return. Security had aimed for the long-haired youth of the Left. A thousand white doves for each year of Perón’s exile swirled free ahead of schedule over the screams and rained down shit. “Shoot-out,” per the press, for all the careful lynchings, torn-off balls. And we reckon Thatcher and her wets bicker! Stallo thought. We say Labour’s split! The killer and up-stringers were Perónists too. Nineteen seventy-three, the end of the impossible alliance of Guevarists and Iron Guard and the in-between.

Behind that victory, José López Rega. Once insurgent, co-ruler with Perón at least—the forty-second (depending how you count), Isabel. Hammer of the Left, now on the run since the junta and infighting on the Right. How embattled and embittered he must have been. Which was likely relevant. The bitter and the sour would likely stick together. Stallo read. Rega’s politics seemed standard enough in this realm, if on the hard end, not backwards in enthusiasms for permanent solutions. Well would you look at that? Rega’s son-in-law was in our old friend the P2 lodge, talking of which who was there at Ezeiza but fash bomber Delle Chiaie, of meeting whom Stallo hadn’t had your actual pleasure but of whom in the context of Gladio he’d certainly heard, et cetera. Rega: Rosicrucian, diviner. A quarter century ago Ezeiza’s architect had watched a candle melt into the shape of a dove, such as those for which the firing would pause, and had set out for knowledge.

Stallo was perfectly familiar with such spiritual maundering on the Right. All the blah-blah Evola-enthralled warriors of the sun. López Rega, hawk-eyed channeler, of Eva from her windowed casket. Stallo squinted at Alpha y Omega, written by Rega (along, sez here, with one intangible Gabriel (hmmm)) twenty years before.

Ah WORLD, that you are sowing everywhere terrible seeds of destructive germs, remember that you will only reap storms that will sweep away your false pride and your decadent social philosophies!

And if the divinity decided to collapse the edifice created by humans in our blasphemous aggrandisement?

Just before his quasi-exile, he wrote of “a terrible and extraordinary platform” emerging from its “dark conventicles of the famous secret caves.” Feel the hankering in that, the readiness to use any such power, at any cost, against degeneracy, decadence. From this friend of Myton, el Brujo.

Tree would not answer her door or phone to him. Stallo was curious at his own shame and relief and that. He posted the keys she had given him through her door.

He received a note from Hook.

I did say no promises. Transcript? Actually ? I don’t care or want to know. Cheerio. C

Well holy hell.

April. Calling in favours.

—Rak remember me? Where the fuck are you? Stallo said into the receiver. —Pick the fuck up. Are you in the country? I’ll tell you where I’ll be, Thursdays, sundown. Don’t make me wait.

At wooden pub tables roadside at the edge of an ugly town. Only the second time Stallo was watched by uneasy locals, Rak came, marked by age. He wore a new scar on his jawline and his skin had grown darker in what could not have been English sun.

—Where you been? Stallo said. Rak smiled. To Stallo he seemed uneasy in a new way. Rak came in for an embrace, and though he was surprised, Stallo met it.

—I’m sorry, Rak said. —I’ve been…all over. He spoke quickly. —Anyway I’m here.

Stallo said, —We don’t have much time.

Rak did not ask For what? —You alone? he said. Stallo gestured at himself. Rak shook his head. —Where’s Esau? The shaggy man?

—Don’t know don’t care, Stallo said. —He comes and goes. Are you alone?

—I am never alone! I have my god. Why did you call me?

—Look I know you, Stallo said. —You’re not a fool. You got me on this road in the first place, telling me about your Hornet. You knew something was coming before anyone else. So you know why I called.

—You trust me now? Rak tried to smile. —Ha ha.

—Rak. This ain’t a joke. I know I’m not going crazy no matter how many people tell me I am. It’s just fucking you and me who understand. Don’t tell me it isn’t getting to you—you wouldn’t have come. Your devil’s here, isn’t it?

The way Rak gestured, Stallo knew he would say something about the devil always being with us, and he put out his hand.

—Please stop, he said. —You came to me. Years ago. Now I’m coming to you. There’s a fucking war on.

—You call this a war? Rak said. —This whining over these islands?

—That’s not what I mean and you know it. I’m talking about what’s behind all that.

Rak looked away and you could see his fear.

—Some of my lot have been cozying up to some questionables, Stallo said.

—Yeah I don’t like some of your friends’ friends.

—La-di-fucking-da, Stallo said. —Like I said, your saintly Richet loved his eugenics, not a big fan of the blacks, so that’s in your engine too, don’t get all prim. Let’s talk Argentina. Because yeah it might be a bit weird that we’ve gone to war in the middle of nowhere just because some rag-and-bone men waved a flag on a rock. I’m here to talk to you—you—because you can’t tell me you have no thoughts about choppers and death flights. Free skydives out of the Lynxes we flogged them? First blood was small arms from the ground, helicopter. They made a temple for you. Then, sauce for the gander, two Wessexes go down. Then a Sea King. It’s helicopters all the way. Your saints inaugurating everything. So don’t tell me you haven’t been paying attention. I bet you knew what this whole shitshow was before I did.

—Choppers go down all the time, Rak said.

—It’s long past when you and I get to have things not mean anything except themselves, Stallo said. —Especially helicopterous, or spectral. You opted out of coincidence theory when you became a prophet, and if you didn’t know that and if you weren’t scared you wouldn’t be here. You and I both know what we’re watching, whatever else, is a fucking ritual.

A beckoning after a fact.

—And I don’t know what to do about it. So help me.

Rak sat back. The last of his smile left him. He looked shy. —I’m leaving for good, he said. —This country. I met a woman. Maybe I don’t see you again.

—Maybe. But first we have a job to do.

—You heard about this new signal, too? Calling, you know, the dead. To gather. Those cults among them. Yes this is a ritual.

[52]

Before the door closes Maur glimpses bright light and green. The woman sits. When her heart slows, Maur gives her all her focus.

The woman’s eyes are narrowed and her mouth pursed and her face is very still. Her skin is more grey than brown, and she’s not made up at all. Her dark hair is pulled hard into a ponytail. She leans her head back. This woman is probably twenty years younger than Maur, but it’s hard to be precise; she looks like an abstraction. Every movement is careful, as if she isn’t used to being seen. She’s thickset and heavy breasted and broad shouldered, and she wears a loose blue dress. Her face is half in shade, though cast by what? No shadow should be there. From her pocket she takes a box of Spanish cigarettes and lights one with a cheap yellow lighter without taking her eyes from Maur’s. That stare, it might undo you.

What language will she speak? Her mouth is crooked. Her implacability brings to Maur’s mind old photographs, intellectuals, militants. (Khaled, Shakur, Bernawi.) The woman props the elbow of her cigarette arm on the other folded beneath her chest. A pose that, Maur learns to see it, she has always loved. That she herself has struck. The smoke is a guttering bonsai. The woman pushes the cigarettes and lighter across the table.

Maur’s throat is dry and she has to try twice to speak.

“I feel like I’ve been looking for you forever,” someone says.

Maur looks at the packet and the lighter. “You’re doing well to hang on to them,” she says. “Things just disappear these days. Getting scatty in my old age. I’d given up. I haven’t had one for months.” She takes a cigarette and examines it as if she has never seen such a thing. “When I started to— When everything happened and I was on my own, everything had to change. I made a list. Things I thought people would think of when they thought of me. To change them all.” She raises the lighter. “Hair’s always been variable, and I don’t know I’ve got the most memorable face. Cigarettes, though, they were near the top. Plus I thought it couldn’t hurt to give up in case I have to run. Literally I mean.”

“Don’t then,” the woman says.

“Don’t what? Don’t smoke again? Or don’t run?” Maur sighs and puts the cigarette back in the box and tucks the lighter in alongside it.

The woman gestures for permission and Maur looks down at what she indicates and hands her the knot-shorn qipu. The woman runs it through her fingers.

“This is good,” she says finally. “You don’t need this here. But this is good.” Again requesting permission, this time with her eyes, receiving it, she puts the cord in her pocket. “Your clothes,” she says, carefully enough. “Don’t keep them right-way out if you’re worried about jumbies.” She meets Maur’s eyes and Maur, with a jolt of surprise, senses fear in her.

The woman says, “Your name is Maur.”

Maur says, “When I tracked down your gopher and told him we needed to meet, I thought I’d at least get to see your…town.”

“No town.” Maur can’t identify her accent.

“You’re not saying you’re on your own….”

“No. A—” The woman shrugs. “Settlement. Stallo said there was a town?”

“Sort of. But the better I get at putting my own ear to the ground, the more I pick up too.”

The woman takes a draw without removing the cigarette from her lips and lets the ash fall. “He lies to you,” she says. “I was surprised you wanted to see me.”

“Lied,” Maur says. “Past tense. Yes. He lied. He might be dead.” The woman only gives a nasty small smile. “You understand that I came here on my own? I’ve been doing a lot of work. A lot of research. Working hard. Between what Stallo told me, lies and all, and what I’ve found out since, I know you have a place. Or had one. A country. Stallo told me you were looking for him.”

“Yes.”

“He told me you were his enemy,” Maur says.

“Yes.”

“He told me that you’ve been behind what’s pushing to get in. That you’re…He implied…”

The woman waits.

“But then I heard about the questions you were asking,” Maur says. “Who you’ve asked. You were trying to work out who your father was.”

“Or mother.”

“What?”

“Go on.”

“Well if I’ve been lied to like I say about that, what else? Are you my enemy? I don’t think you are. And I don’t think…Do you remember a man called Jock? You weren’t threatening him, were you? You were trying to help him.”

“So Stallo said I was the devil’s daughter.” The woman gestures. “You can still call it devil, if you want. That thing. Not everything Stallo said is lies.”

“He never exactly called it that—”

“He’s right to be afraid of it,” the woman says. “I think sometimes he believes some of his lies. Maybe even that I’m its—its creature. But.” Shakes her head. “He knew the man who raised me.”

“I couldn’t find out much about you,” Maur says. “People talk about your cult.” She holds up her hands in apology. “Your people. But I know you’ve been looking for Stallo. And asking about my boy. You thought Jock knew something, didn’t you? He didn’t. You were trying to get information from him—”

“Not only.”

Maur says, “That’s part of why I want to talk to you, because you tried to warn him.”

“You can call it what you want. I call it Old Pal.”

—

“The number of times,” Maur says, “the number of ways I’ve asked about it. What it is. I can’t keep—”

“No you can’t. You know, by now, anyway. You know what anyone can know. An old thing that doesn’t remember what it was and is too big now, out of shape, not like—the dead it used to be. Or too old ever to have been alive. It likes to play. With what’s left of the dead and us too. Cruel how something strong is cruel without meaning to be. Maybe. Or meaning it, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s what happens when the world is sick of itself.” The woman sends up more smoke. “He’s dead now, yes?” she says. “Jock? He tried to listen to me, but it’s hard when you first—”

“He did try, yeah,” Maur says.

“I went to his place. I was looking for anything about Köhnə Dost.” Through Maur’s head, eidolons go searching Jock’s deserted office, disturbing dust for Stallo later to sense. “But he didn’t know anything. Not even without knowing it, like some people. So. Now? What do you want from me? Why you here?” The woman transfers her cigarette to her left hand and puts the fingers of her right into devil horns and points them at Maur and mimes spitting at her down the V they make. “Contra! Zafa! Te faccio na fica. Malocchio non ce pozzano! Okay? I give you protection.”

“I mean—yes. Yes it’s still coming so yes I need to know how to stop it. Stallo was right about that. But that’s not the only thing. I think something was looking out for me for a while. I think it might be gone, now, though.”

“So you look for me instead.”

Maur holds out her hand. “I’m Maur. Who are you?”

The woman extends her forefinger and prods Maur’s hand, then shakes it. Maur feels warmth beneath skin. She can make out humour in the curl of the woman’s mouth.

“If you want, you can call me Fez,” she says. “Or you can call me Lith. I am not from Azerbaijan.” The careful plucking of that accent. “I can speak it some now though. Why not?”

“I know. Like Lilith?”

“No. Like Ferelith, if you want. It’s the name of a book my parent said made him think of me. A story of two people, Ferelith and Jean. But if you read it, Jean should be my name. Jean is the child, Ferelith the mother. Maybe he called me for the whole book. Or maybe after my other parent.” Her smile withholds.

“Your dad—” Maur says.

“My parent,” Fez says. “You can call him my father if you want, but he was always careful about that.”

“He knew Stallo,” Maur says.

Fez nods. “Of course. What do you know about me?”

I can touch you—can you touch them? Maur wants to ask. Does your skin work like an apport? She gasps because into her head comes an unbidden image of a baby in apport cloth making effortful fists and foot motions and suckling with neonate voracity at a shadowed breast even Maur’s mind’s eye cannot see.

“You went looking for that poor sod in Spain and I know what you asked him, like I said,” Maur says. “About yourself. I know what—little—I’ve found out. People say you’re—” She stops. What formulation does she have? What can she say that’s not ugly as well as impossible? Even after everything. In any case, even if it’s true, the hints at such lineage, why would that make her, what, magical? “What you asked him, the spook-slither man…”

“He thought I was asking if he was my father.” Fez smiles and shakes her head. “I couldn’t make him understand. I know he saw: I asked him who was my parent.”

“It was with Stallo’s old crew, wasn’t it,” Maur says. “Your—other parent…?”

“ ‘With.’ ” Fez raises her eyebrow.

Another vision. A child emerging from and/or into the cold care and embrace of one not there. How would that not kill? What would such flesh as this woman’s be? Fez looks to Maur like someone living. Smiles with what Maur sees is recognition of the grue spreading on Maur’s face. Fez lightly touches her hand again and her own hand is still not cold and does not burn or sicken.

Maur says at last, “Now, what do you know about me?”

“A few things,” Fez says.

“You asked that man about Ewan, too. My son.”

Maur has not seen Fez show surprise before. “He knew nothing,” Fez says. “I kept hearing your son’s name. And the people he was asking about, I wanted to know why them. What they knew. What your son knew.” Me too, me too. If anything. And if he knew that he knew it. “He had an apport not like the others.”

“Ewan?”

“Is what some people said. Something special. Him or someone with him maybe. Stories tangle. He had something, maybe inside him. I still hear about him.”

“What?”

“His name. A mystery of him. They argue on that side, you know.” She gestures Over there. “I pick up some little. Maybe he’s part of that talk.”

When Maur can: “What do they say about him?”

Fez smiles and gestures at her ear and shakes her head. “I don’t know. Yet. Sorry.”

They’re silent together.

“And me?” Maur says finally. “Why’ve you been looking for me?”

“I know what I am,” Fez says. “Do you know what you are?”

“No.”

“The man who raised me—”

“Will you tell me, was it Old Pal, or this guy, was he your actual—?”

Fez interrupts, a hiss of disappointment. “Yes or no, he brought me up. I wasn’t a little child but I wasn’t grown when I heard him die. The last thing he ever told me was to run. It was your friend Stallo who did it. I’m sorry you lost your boy.”

“I’m sorry.” Everything’s always about grief. “Stallo isn’t my        friend, you know.” The curse pause.

Fez says, “He was there, Stallo. At the start. I wanted to find out what your son knew about the Unit. Because they were doing something. Their fucking work. But he died and I never found out.”

Maur says, “He died.”

Yew climbing trees she’d seen him ascend in life, or some imagined stump jutting from dark water, travelling endlessly in a snag canopy. Maur brings her attention back. She says, “Like I said, something else was trying to talk to me, to help me. I wanted it to be my son but I don’t think it was. Jules, maybe. Or Cybill. Or something—else? I think it was trying to protect me. So now…Old Pal and its people will find me again. Why? You can see why I’m here for your help; and yeah, I think I can help you too. I have something to show you.”

“I was looking for you to warn you,” Fez says. “About Old Pal. And Stallo.”

“Yeah and I was hiding from you, I thought it was you who…Why is the army looking for you?” Maur says. “They are, aren’t they?”

“Maybe they think I’m a bad messiah.” Fez smiles. Then: “No they aren’t so romantic. It isn’t okay by them to have your own place, do things your own way. A different way than they control. If I won’t be one of the ones who tells them secrets—my parent’s secrets, my secrets—then we can’t be allowed. That’s their bargain: work with us or for us or you don’t get to be. And they think I’m their property. An experiment escaped.” She raises her brows. “You know, sometimes what they say about you, your enemies, can give you ideas. Ways they say you have of being together.”

“Jesus,” Maur whispers. “They must want you even more than they wanted Marco and Wran.”

“Marco? He’s like me—would never turn. Like me. And Wran, where do you think Wran is? Yes they want to find us, still. As if we’re a threat. You know the history? Marco and Wran and the General? I’ll tell you what I know. I worked with Marco once, for a moment, and the Unit won’t forgive that. But they could never find—you called it our country? Okay, our country. Just Stallo could do that.”

Only then, only for one moment, Maur wonders if Fez is mad. And what that might mean now. She says, “How? Why?”

Fez shakes her head. “Those are his secrets.” Her patience seems immense. “I think he thought he wanted something. That he thought we had. One thing— He was sure—maybe still is—that we have special things. Like no one else. Impossible things. Maybe apports from the Great War.” It jars, that old name out of this mouth. “Or apports not like any other. Legends the dead tell.”

“Do you?”

“We have…Maybe not like that, but…” Fez’s voice ebbs a moment. “I heard it was Stallo who had one though,” she says. “The Recruiter.” She looks levelly at Maur. “Your son. What did he know? What did he want? Do you know what it was started your son on this?” Maur keeps her face blank. Beyond the metal walls, birds are always calling. “Make a door in the wall. Open. What corridors do you see? The cube is there. You know that, so you’re haunted. You say Cybill, Jules, Ewan, about what was with you. This one or that one.” She shakes her head. “It’s always one, only aspects change. Maybe we can try to let it be what it is. Forget to pretend it’s these body memories. You’ve been hiding from me and I never wished you ill.”

“I thought I had to.” Maur reaches into her larger bag and brings out that handheld machine, with the buttons, she took from Strude. She holds it out and Fez takes it and examines it.

“I killed a man,” Maur says. The words astound but it’s okay just then. “He had this. The empty people? The opposite of ghosts.” Fez’s eyes widen. “This man was from the army and he had that. It stopped them. It was like a weapon. Stallo told me his old comrades aren’t taking seriously what’s happening. But they have those. So they must know something. Maybe it can help you.”

Fez turns it over and over.

“You don’t wish me ill,” Maur says. “What do you wish me?”

Fez tilts her head. “Peace, maybe?”

—

“Old Pal,” Maur says. “It got stronger, quickly, recently. All of a sudden. Takes a lot more effort to stay hidden these days. If it found us…”

“Yes,” Fez says. “Or those shells after it’s eaten. If they found you. Or me. And it brings sickness in the dead. Or its people. The void army. Where there are wars they come with their own.”

“Stallo told me they were yours. Why would anyone follow something like that?”

“They think they can use it. They think they understand it. That it’s a tool. There’s no power someone won’t follow.”

“How do we fucking stop it?” Maur says at last. “That’s what Stallo was trying to find out…” Her voice dries up; it’s just as if Fez has been waiting for this.

“We can’t,” Fez says. Her voice is flat, so how can Maur hear her sorrow?

“You can’t stop it,” Fez says. “You can’t—” Fez breathes deeply and reaches for her cigarettes as if ashamed.

If Maur waits long enough in that hot metal room that might make sense, or Fez might take it back. “What?” she says, because neither happens. “You told the comedian, you said you could help….”

“Only one, two people ever broke it.” Fez is making sure now not to look away from her. “Beat it away. When it came through. And even though he’s still trying, wants to have another go, even Stallo, even the fucking Stallo couldn’t do that, now. It’s too much stronger.”

“What do you mean, he’s trying?”

Fez considered. “We’re used to him hiding, and good at it. Burns his trail. But things started turning up. He wouldn’t’ve let them slip before. When did you leave him? I think this is since you left. Like something broke. I know he’s asking questions, about Old Pal. I shouldn’t know that.”

“He was always trying to find it….”

“Not like this. He was looking for how to fight it, yes? When you were with him. We didn’t hear. I mean, it’s what I would think, but we didn’t know. Now he’s not careful.”

“Maybe he found what he was looking for,” Maur says at last. “Maybe he’s ready to face it.”

Fez shrugs her doubt. “This is Old Pal. If he’s looking for it he’ll find it or it’ll find him.” She shakes her head.

“But you don’t think he can face it? Then what?”

Another moment. “Be with us.” There’s something furtive to Fez’s expression, that fear again. “Come. Hide.”

You’re the Azeri though and I had you all wrong, that’s why I’m here. You’ll help me won’t you? Why won’t you fight? Why won’t you look at me, not really, not with what’s behind your eyes?

It’s a long quiet.

—

There’s still no good way to induct into mysteries, even for one who knows things now, who crawled amid soughing shed debris, was raised into attention in apport swaddling, who might have been dandled by other than the living, played peekaboo with terrors. But slowly Fez will pass on what she can, of Nergal and Wran and the erstwhile comrade Marco, of Stallo’s spite and fury, his pining, his regret at being a leftover and at the outsourcing of war—where did that knowledge of him come from?—and the loss of that post-imperial monopoly in revenance. Fez and Maur will consider. Here in this hidden room, all this will come.

Now Maur unclasps her bag within the bag for the first time in a long time.

“So you have protections here,” she says.

“Oh yes.”

Maur reaches in holding her breath, unsure if among stones and seeds and scraps she’ll find—yes. She takes out and unfolds the paper upon the table.

Fez half-stands.

Deario Julio your dad would say you shouldn’t tell me things I don’t want to know, what you said I don’t know don’t tell we have to must make way. I’m sorry. You’ve been in a way but you soldier and you don’t want

An empty bottom half of a page.

At the top of the second page, one careful line:

end herr ut no ho s bu ma ryl hu or o d e h b f r

At the lowest edge:

v k h a m a m q ur vu o alb lo lk worry

The third page.

happen here look see look after call get can’t wait come asking after you

We are proud love

Mum

“It wasn’t always like this,” Maur says. Would touch her tongue to the paper, lick the ink if she were alone. She feels it within her again but it’s different now. She says, “I never see it change.”

“Maybe this is clear to them,” Fez whispers.

“To who?”

“To who sent it.”

“…Jules? Cybill?”

“I said, stop thinking, ‘This one, that one.’ All of them.” Fez puts her finger down on the second page. “Trying to talk.”

That quiet seems to Maur Yew’s no less than any other’s.

Fez touches the empty heart of the page. “This is the truth. They want this.” Her voice is stronger now. “You can’t go. This is ours. Yes, you can help. It, okay, Old Pal, it makes them weak and sick, the revenants, to eat and control them. Turn them. Make them do its work. But in my country we stay safe. All of us.”

In that moment, though she does not respond, Maur knows, not how, that they will disappoint each other. She couldn’t say if the memories she imagines behind Fez’s eyes, of her parent, are grieving or matter-of-fact, dutiful, resentful, or a usual coagulum of all such. Imagine her lessons. In reading, writing, ’rithmetic, resonance, revenance, restitution, resistance.

“Jules,” Fez says. “She was brought in. Off the books. Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that? So they come. They want to know more so they want her so they want her mother who she spoke to and they want Stallo because of his engines, all connected.” She is speaking quickly now, as if someone will try to stop her. “But you’re the last one. Connected to all of them and to your son too. So to whatever he talks to, too. Where he is. Ever since we invented them, they talk. No wonder they want you, Maur.”

“ ‘They’?”

“Everyone. So you can’t go.”

She won’t look at Maur.

“Stallo killed Jules,” Maur says. Fez breathes deep and Maur can’t tell if she already knew.

“Do you know why?” Fez says. “Because he loves the Unit. My parent told me that.”

“Loved.”

“No.” Fez, whose spies and emissaries assets and sympathists are a small cautious diaspora, whose secretive nomadic polity depends upon know-how and fear, says, “I told you, yes he is alive, saying he has some big plan, looking for Old Pal. I’m sorry, Maur, you can’t go. He’s looking for you, too. Stallo’s looking for you.”

With the Secretary’s Compliments

Institute of High Energy Physics

Peking

The People’s Republic of China

Dear                  ,

Your letter of 4th July 1980 and the copies of your journal sending to are of our interest. Our group would like to get it though we are not able to pay for it today.

The Paraphysics Group in the Academy of Sciences is set up to research the nature of the psi signal and        with advanced methods. I think                    . I will devote all my effort to pursue this research in our country.

More and more individuals with intense psi functioning,          , have been found and proven to be valid throughout our large country, in recent years, which constitutes a very fertile resource to be studied.

Several experiments are performed in our laboratories and in those of my associates. Some ancient Chinese books are new valued, in which there seem to be the answer to our new question. The relation between                    is rediscovered.

But I am sorry to say all these are of very beginning to us, lacking in the reference books information data and the experiences in these new explorations, your kind assistance will be appreciated. Some of my research colleagues

.

Thank you very much,

Sincerely,

Paraphysics Group, IHEP, Academia Sinica

XXVII

Gudgeons

In the Camp

On Avenida Independencia he waited a long time taking bites of gritty ice cream. The sky pressed down over the concrete deco of the heladeria. The contact came in, a tough young American in jeans and white shirt, younger than the last. He unfolded a handkerchief and mopped his face like some out-of-date dandy and jerked his chin for Stallo to follow to the side street where his VW was parked and a bony dog ran from them.

Three days south through cooling country, Bahía Blanca, skirting the coast. The driver said to call him Hans, and that was almost all. They reached Comodoro Rivadavia by evening and stopped at an unearthly low-skylined place on Calle José Álvarez where the air tasted of industry and brine, and from somewhere beyond the drooping wires came martial music. The man gave Stallo a heavy case and shook his hand and drove away.

At crosswalks in a dark broken by ageing neons Stallo passed men and women tending to scuffed vehicles and they watched him. It was an unlikely and stained fishing trawler that awaited him portside, in swells coloured by runoff. The captain, a bowed man, spoke the code words and brought him abroad.

This vessel’s crew of ten hard and bony polyglots did not so much ignore Stallo as unsee him, so far as it was practicable, as if he and all five passengers, of which he was the last, were figurines of ill fortune. Mostly he stayed in one cramped berth with his fellows, farting and swearing and smoking for the four days of the journey south and east, into the exclusion zone.

Rak?

Checking documents that Stallo believed his erstwhile (?) employers no longer knew or cared he retained. He had chosen his target zone by considering the rush of STUFT vessels en route to the islands, hastily en-weaponed.

Rak, fuck’s sake. You said you’d read this sitch for me.

Stallo was still networked enough that queries had garnered him information about Pumas and Hirundo gunships destroyed in the frozen air. But still fucking Rakless and out of time, he had decided, decided to decide, that this Shag Cove choppercide, spill of rotors and metal flesh and flesh, he, Stallo, would decree a site of offering. A counter-invocation, a place of banishment. All to play for. Rak you fucker. Things are bad. Why aren’t you answering me? Where are you?

He couldn’t wait.

He had woken Jackson Brantley and barked the number of the call box at him, waited for the call back.

—Just shut up. Keep this to yourself. I have a lead on something about what’s going on.

—Stallo, what are you getting me into? You mean these pissant little islands?

That American voice. Stallo had looked down at the trash in which he stood, the seediness of it. Even American rubbish was glamorous. He’d read that once.

—Brantley don’t interrupt. Someone’s let me down and you’re going to help me instead. I’m going to tell you what I want, and when I want it, and I’m going to tell you again to keep this to yourself, and you’re going to give me what I ask for, and be glad you did.

It wasn’t about trusting a person, but the mirrored maze itself.

From London he had crossed to the continent. From there to Brazil, thence Uruguay, where overwatched by the Palacio Salvo a thickset American man in aviator shades had nodded and said, —Brantley’s pal, and handed him an envelope. New papers and details for a rendezvous. Two hours by bus to Colonia del Sacramento. Everything careering breakneck towards—what? Where he’d decided he must go. Counterbeckon.

If the thing Stallo sought, if what, as he must for diligence suspect it was, Myton had strained, for was spectrophage and hungry for carnage, why not at this moment, say, Hama? Why not the mass remains of SWAPO men by an Angolan ghost town? Why not the south of Lebanon? Why this place?

Because. He considered what in the matter of Britain would draw this hungry old pal. Once the vision of this greater reverse causation had come, all else in that theatre became annexe and addenda. Absurd maybe, but what wasn’t? In the context of the Brujo, of everything Benters had said, of these strange rocks, nothing else could work so well parlayed into sacrifice, a Moloch zone to feed the abyss, as the engulfed Belgrano. Everything was metaphor, Stallo had been taught that well. These islands weren’t pure Britannia, whatever work that might, absurdly, do, but they partook of it. And overlapped with another dreaming, of tragic weeks and taquara lances not unlike Stallo’s own weapon, the Andinia Plan, “against such evil good.” The Brujo’s own Triple A had it clear, as did Stallo’s lot: Argentina is God / God Save the Queen.

That overlap, this among all other bloody zones, was omphalos, where, less than a decade after a new dispensation, the hungry power now of age and/or anyone determined to bring matters to a final head might do so. And small as these islets were maybe there’d be a way—this was literally his job—to make sure he’d find any such visitor. Or be found by it. Even without the help he’d—

(—What’s it like? After he’d heard himself whisper that, Stallo had known it a question to Maisie, its subject the down there, where broken ships lay.)

Of course he wondered too if this was all just his rambling. Past outdated loyalties as he thought he was, was it he, only he who was drawn by all this rather than his quarry? And even so, might he find it there because that was where he chose to find it?

Ah well. Out he had set.

The US retained such channels as meant this ship of fools, informed by intel, took a route between Argentine vessels with orders to ignore it, as if it were the black-ops-masquerading-as-errant-trawler their captains must have believed.

Two of Stallo’s temporary companions he could see were fantasists recruited in a rush (back-page ads in Soldier of Fortune), young lost boys not long out of unexciting military service veering now between wonder—How did I get up here?—and a fear too great to metabolise, the growing certainty that they would shortly die. This judgement seemed accurate to him and he did not pay them attention. The others surprised him mildly because they were more serious. Perhaps they would have chartered some rogue crew without his intercession: certainly because of his request and mission and the whisper trail it raised, American mercenaries would find their way to the Argie Seventh Infantry.

When one evening a black line appeared in the sea, the crew let two motorboats down and the hired guns climbed in to the foremost, one man wide-eyed and seeming to wish to wake. Another shook his young head, saying he had changed his mind. The captain himself levelled a shotgun, shouted something like Get the fuck off. Stallo went to the unoccupied boat.

His erstwhile companions were close enough to regard him over the chop and he could see them wonder where he was going. He was not indifferent to their expertise nor to the possibility of their bullets opening British heads. He considered shooting every one of them but did not know his own shots would come fast enough. There’s always calculation. The mission was the mission and of greater stakes. What loyalty he’d had had always been above all to his mates, as the state knew, and he had worked alone a long time and, if you must, what the fuck was Britain? He peeled away in spray.

He found a hollow for the boat in the littoral zone. For days he heard and saw no one but he camouflaged his bivouacs and kept his lines of sight clear and long and his weapon up. This was rumoured ground, no reason to disbelieve that a meeting was to occur here beyond Stanley, insignia-less enemies inadvertently herding sheep and corralling curious flightless birds with their arcane manoeuvres. Stallo ate sparingly from rations.

To wake and be, sometimes, in a new place. You have control. He let himself be led. By what accompanied.

Across the sound, war continued. Why was this his charge? Stallo’s urgency or that of his control perhaps less (he had to wonder) a function of salvational drama than of intense curiosity. Vast skies above and you would swear into the barrel of a gun that they were accelerating.

How do you rise in me, comrade? It must make itself from thick grass, perhaps. It must be weak. He said to it, —Buck up. He said to it, —You’ve got a job to do. With no trees perhaps Stallo must himself become shaggy. He found himself on all fours and his new beard matting. His own outline might have its uses.

He crawled towards the centre of the island.

What are you even going to do? he thought. If you do find it?

Hush, Stallo thought to Stallo.

Circumnavigating at a certain radius. At each of the five pentacular points about—no need to measure, not with the whispers of the unseen guest—the nodes of an electric cage. Sometimes when he placed his cold fingers upon the ground it seemed that he could feel counterscratching, the nails of buried men commencing an eternity of faint complaint. As if he went quadruped upon dead offered up in a place of lustration. He said words to Maisie again. The pain in his knees and hands part of it. On through twilight, watched by sheep roaming stupid and hungry and uninterested towards where the ground was a bowl for shadows.

A strange ragged stone was a helicopter turned half inside out. You see, Rak, you see? You cowardly fuck. What do I make of this fucking rune? I need you, what we could’ve done. Pieces scattered like Saxon treasure: rotor for a broadsword, engine piece a king’s torque. The ruin-ring of standing metal. War-henge. Stand within the focus it described and ask for what? He made for it. There the giant gazes of the debris would be turned to him.

Rak—have you got something to do with this? After all? Because it’s quite the focus—

Was it a woman there now at which he looked? Was it a figure he had seen before? He could not see her face.

Did she, it, back to him, prepare its own ceremony, in that centre point? Performing something. For its own apotheosis.

Stallo. He saw himself as if from a helicopter’s beetle eyes, as if from above, he a knight, doleful, crawling by choice towards the point of attack. Placing his trap as close as he could come. Opening it and charging it.

Gaps, a staccato sense. Preparation to vacate, temporarily, the tenancy. As if he had the choice to do other. He made sounds.

Hello again, the woman said.

She turned to him. As she looked at him and he at her at what he would have said was a dress he’d last seen dangling above an airfield, she, its face, was obscure. The last light was behind it, the body unclear.

Hello it said and the voice was not Isabella’s and it made him stop his dogged crawl and recall his fear that death made all things specie.

It said Hello and he went on considering his traps and bottles and circuits all laid out, and insisting to himself within himself that it was not another she whose voice it now sounded like, that it had not reached up from under, pulled back up what was lost and journeying with eddies, knitting eaten cartilage, firming up sloughed-off stuff onto coral made of bones, just to fuck with him, and that even if by some atrocious miracle that had been so, it was still not her.

Hello young pal.

They were not alone.

Stallo felt, or his control felt, and watched. Ready to intercede in what could only

—Hello, Stallo said. —What are you up to?

Oh you know me, the figure said in that voice he knew moving its arms no holding them in unnatural resting pose, I’m just your

old pal

and

so

At the limits of his vision one of the staring sheep shuddered. The standing woman seemed to stand more. The sheep too, how?, seemed to stand. Crick-crack. Limbs bending against their own shapes, tottering and newly biped, deep wet snaps, spreading out forelimbs making hinges of breaks, supplicating motion, insect worship, mantis, pelt trembling. Oh Stallo’s gun was raised, look. From the ovine mouth spilt darkness. Another beast rose with that same sound of sticks. Something went from the woman quickly around the land, borrowing eyes. More dank white bodies struggling to get up and stumbling with dead-wood parodies of pain, the woman figure straight and too tall. All the sheep so touched looked up at Stallo with their horizon eyes and all called to him with tongues unsuited to the language for which they strove.

He or the visitor to his body shot out the head of one and it fell. Another quivered in his direction until its own motion ruined its limbs and Stallo shot it too.

Now the woman came for him. Its legs dangling.

—Quickly, Stallo said to he-could-not-have-told-you-what.

The woman-thing sped.

Stallo had in his hands the spear and out he held it, the head shining with polish and age and the remains of fire. He blinked quickly to grant moments for what he called on to come in, to see and operate.

—Come on, he said. —Why won’t you come?

And from beyond he felt, in the thickets of him, despair, fear. And knew it was not his own but that of what he pled with. And he too was afraid.

felt the aegis of the helicopter barrow a beacon, and himself a focal point, and it, and him within it, object of sudden intense plural aftermath attention, clarity, sharpening his edges and the textures of the crumpled metal with advertency, moving through the stress of that regard in cuts behind the world together like breath, many-nameless, a new agency, partaking of something familiar to him yet unlike what he had felt before, incoming,

not what walked with and in him, not only, but silent voices, a medley transmitted and received, of course legion, unfinished business unanimous and enough to make the worst presence draw back

Who is this who are coming

when he opened them again it was day, the ground around him a carnage of animal dead and no figure was there save him.

Early daylight. Stallo’s head was clear. He looked in all directions. Breathed the terrible cold. He felt watched but from without now. As he must have been by the smallest of their kind, witchstone pebbles. Like enemies or observers, too ambiguous to say.

The standing figure was gone.

Stallo went through all the sheep blood to his trap. The diodes said it was full.

He read its meter and it took no great strain or intuition to know that it contained something but what it was not.

Though Old Pal too was gone

Was that the whole of it? How long had they fought?

How much ectoplasm soaked the ground? How close had Stallo’s body come to death—he had no great pain—while he lay curled and quiet within and the others did what it was and they were there to do?

By the ruin of the helicopter he mouthed Thank you into the sky in every direction. One must have been right.

So Stallo and his control, only with that unexpected company, the intervention of some sudden gust of Rousedness sent from somewhere, along whatever channels, had performed the task.

Banished Old Pal.

And all that was left now was aftermath and the interceders were gone and the world continued. But his trap was full yet Old Pal–less. And what Stallo felt, in that island depression, amid grass flattened down in appalling patterns, whispering to and unanswered by what had fought while he receded, that control, was empty.

[53]

After dusk a woman emerges from forest to a roadside where a bulb dips on bowing wires by a whitewashed dwelling. She’s a thin and dirty-faced white woman in shorts with the pockets flaring and a T-shirt with Pink Floyd’s prism on it visible in print in reverse through the cotton, the clothes the wrong way around and very faded and coated in the muck of trees, trainers ill-suited to the undergrowth. Over her shoulder is the strap of a bag which she holds close as if it’s a child to protect. This is Maur.

Even now on the packed dirt of the track she takes high strides as if roots still reach for her. The last of the sun is behind her. A boar might watch her from among the trees. She might walk on stones marked by the paws of dogs: goblin country. There’s lower vegetation east and a blue-roofed shack opposite. A dented speedboat lolls in a trackside tributary, the water sheened with oil. The woman, Maur, stands in the roadway as if inviting injury, squinting at the constellation of electric lights north, the shallow roofs they illuminate, junctions where that road splits. She walks.

From behind her comes a car; she never did know makes. The young driver looks at her curiously through the wiper-cut arches in dust, and he does not stop. Maur goes on. More vehicles. A quad bike. Men and women watch her on their way, in truth not as astounded or fascinated as she expected. She cannot see through the vegetation roadside to make out clearings or other rooms in old silos or upended shipping containers. She does not run, though she goes briskly enough. An ill-lit kinked four-way cross and there are larger buildings and forecourts, red metal eaves. A young man sits in vest and flip-flops on the step of his home. He squints.

“Town this way?” Her voice sounds absurd to her.

He nods. She goes by warehouses in the bad white of streetlamps. A switchbacking route past corrugated roofs We Buy Gold and Coke glowing beneath, and smoking in that shine men and women before windows festooned with faded commodity signs.

“Hey.”

Maur knows she is a sight and that’s why she’s here, to be seen. Though some have come here straight from dirtier work and nor, though she is it seems to her the only white person here, is she by much the lightest of skin. Yes, she notes herself noting, even now after everything, trying and failing to decode half-lit faces (black, Indian I mean Asian?, black?, mixed race?) and stores up a bit of shame for later. For now the whiteness she thought would bring attention, pulling it with her out of the interior like Livingstone, they may think us spirits, or gods, if it’s even visible to those in the bubble of electric light is not of interest enough to provoke conversation. Their surprise is more likely due to her being stranger in a tiny town.

Past lit-up sandwich stalls where the bass and treble tracks of sound systems overlap and she’s one of many out, pull the bag to you, Maur, for safety, not, it’s not that, it’s just it has everything I own in it she says to the universe. Gold Bought, Gold Bought. Rasta colours and Union Jacks, alleys, boards upon the ground. “What you looking for?” Shelves of biscuits and fruit and pots and detergent overlook the dark river and flat-bottomed rowboats by a larger vessel. A kind guarded woman comes to Maur from the doorway of the International Guesthouse (the sign says). She’s shrewd looking and you can see she won’t ask of what this is the result but that she knows a situation to see it.

“You need a room?” She pulls Maur inside. “What do you need?”

“To get to the city.”

It’s quiet in here, it’s not so very decorated, the heat is muted.

“Which city?”

“The main one,” Maur says. “I have some money. I don’t know why they left it. I’ll pay. Can you help me? There are people…I think people might be looking for me, and I have to…I want to go as quickly as possible.” These may not be all or exactly the words she says.

“Okay,” the woman says. “Lady Northcote coming to dock in a while. Then a day’s journey…You’ll be okay.”

Maur brings her attention to bear and tells the woman that she’ll do anything to get away. Sometimes all there is left to you is to trust. Call in hope like a wager.

Somewhere in the jungle a little clutch of rooms is hidden, from within one of which it took only a failure to lock a door, or something to go missing, metal silent where once it met resistance, for a captive to emerge. Now Maur might be saying, I don’t know if you know them. The ones who had me. What date is it?, though even if she’s answered she will not know how many days she was in that gentle unremitting enclosure, questioned, questioning, polite, collaborative, almost, but imprisoned.

You can’t leave, it isn’t safe. Fez had said that, never well.

Let me meet the rest of your people, Maur had said. Not now, Fez had said. You’re not ready. They’re not ready.

Never any voices raised—no, that’s not so, Maur shouted, once, her voice coming right back at her inside of that metal, as if her “Why won’t you fucking fight?” were aimed at herself. Fez didn’t respond, did not shout in turn nor explain herself beyond, again, We can’t, you can’t, and then just that quiet and the chamber filling, Maur filling it, with competing dramas of the end.

You think it’ll leave you? she said. You think it’ll let you be?

Even the General and even Marco knew they could only…, Fez said. They wanted to stop it, of course they did, they wanted to try, they tried, but…And that was a long time ago. There was a time, once, maybe, when you could face it. But not now. And never alone.

You’re not fucking alone, Maur said.

But neither is it. It has an army now. It plays in new ways.

In that moment it’s as if Maur’s on a dream hillside amid the whisper of bees, and there in that guesthouse and recalling more vividly than she experienced it her desolate confusion at Fez’s refusal and flat-voiced refusal to explain, the quietude the warden of Apportville could surely not cleave to—

After all those injunctions to stay, Fez’s half-harsh half-apologetic insistence that she could not go, that it was for her own good, came Maur’s escape journey, that night. The drawers always full of dollars and clothes. That door unlocked as it never was before. Opening to her push as it should not have. A flight both secretive and brazen.

—

I am here on what authority? Maur thinks.

The woman takes Maur’s bag and counts out the money within and keeps some and puts the rest back. Leads her to the dockside. Time has a soft oiled feel to it. Through lights and puddles and laughing drinkers, picking what could be a cat’s way, a Spanish call, another, above the Caribbean English, to where steps descend to boats and bobbing filth. At a bar her guide calls several names and there begins a discussion from which Maur remains distant enough to make out only the up-down of negotiation. The woman comes back to her and tells her Teddy will take her upriver.

—

A clean and flimsy guesthouse in Mabaruma. Maur goes to the ferry when it comes. Hours to the Atlantic coast. Two days in the capital, blinking at crowds. Seeking maps and making plans and counting her notes and still moving her body as she’s learned to. Be ready. A taxi the hours to Skeldon where backtrack routes still play. Katydids sing. Travellers mill at the wide riverside. Customs officials too, examining loads and paperwork, though this is not the sanctioned way. Maur stays away from them. She climbs into a speedboat with a mass of others and is delivered across the border.

The money dwindles. Staying in cheap places, insinuating with her new expertise illicit needs and willingness to pay. The captain on the freighter from Paramaribo to Sint Maarten seems motivated as much by intrigue as money, and though Maur expected he would want sex, too, and decided she would provide it if necessary, he does not. He helps her off into the port district and in a coffee place under cranes introduces her to others who might take an interest. It takes Maur many drinks and hours and most of the cash left to her to persuade the foreman to sneak her into prohibited parts of the terminal. She proves to him that she is serious by citing certain routes she’s found that suit her needs. He says there’s only so much he can do. She shows him how strong she can be now. Days. She gathers what she needs. Stays hidden amid the storage. By, rising with the banal enormity of office blocks, the flanks of container ships.

She won’t let herself wonder if she can do this.

He’s still looking. Stallo. For Old Pal and maybe for her too, if she understood Fez. Less careful even than before.

The man says this is the night and Maur waits until the darkest time and letting the idiot slap of waves on concrete mask her sounds she crosses to the great lines and pulls on the climbing gloves she’s bought, the leather stiff and already damp, and she takes hold of a rope, it’s even thicker than she expected. She swings a leg over, then the other, feels her weight and that of her tugging bag, begins the so-slow crawl angling up limb over limb breathing as steadily as she can, moving when the rope slackens its faint and living pull, still when it strains. Her forearms heat then burn. Remember how to regroup suspended gripping in the vessel’s overhang, cheek pressed on tar, weave and salt, counting breaths until her hands know how to move again. The vessel shifts against fenders and the rope tries to work her loose. Rise finally to where the line enters a recess in the steel, her fingers faltering, and a hand drops into view already impatient, closing on her wrist and hauling so she breaks that rope’s pull and takes hold of the mooring station’s railing, scraping herself on rust, gasping, over. She lies shuddering amid grind and coils, not looking at the foreman’s friend who would not bring her aboard but would only wait here watching as if to test her and does not speak, until she hears his footsteps retreat and sits up to find supplies he’s left and the ship takes no notice of her at all.

Shaking, arms aching, quickly behind the fairleads, a way down, a corridor, a hatch, under the deck, beyond motors. Recall the diagrams and what she’s bought! Her heart shakes her like those chains, the terrible links of anchors, will slam the water. Here is close enough to toilets, water.

And here is Ewan, behind her eyes. Give him his time. She watches his past. Actually laughs at one of the moments of his toddler dignity.

Weeks. It is a tiny crawl space just big enough to hold her. The vessel, its yaw, great metal under strain; the sea lulls. The sailor leaves food. For a second time in not long she makes her life as small and dark as possible. Moves only to stay ready. It’s hard, then much easier than she would think it would be. Than before.

You took artefacts, Maur thinks, to Fez. My letter. That was the one thing. I brought it to you.

—

When the ship stops and her long drift in the nose is done, she waits for night. She feels like a new and different animal now. Keeps herself calm. Rises silently. Retraces her steps. Ready for a shout any moment but she doesn’t even see a crew member. Emerges into dark and shivers. The ropes. This time it’s down but she’s very weakened and would fall were this not of course, this moment not the terminus of a thrown stone.

Maur drops, at last, by choice, to land on new concrete, new oil stains, her arms violently trembling, on the edge of England.

The Winding Sheet

Beyond the windows of an Esher house, dimness advanced, and the walls went darker. A man in a V-necked jumper sat in an armchair, his back to the panes and the open curtains. Nothing in the room was old and the design of nothing allowed that it was new. He turned on the television and muted the set and did not attend to what the figures on the screen were doing. He closed his eyes as if so later he could say to himself, —Goodness me, and tell people that he had fallen asleep in front of the telly. But sleep did not take him.

He turned his head. Behind him a dark figure raised its right arm without haste.

—Jesus Christ! Benters said.

The man wore black. He was thin and the lines of his face were deep and strange.

—Stallo. My god.

—Yes.

—It’s been a while, Benters said at last. —I asked after you. You don’t sound well. Excuse me for saying so, but. He looked around as if there might be something in the room to help him. —Last I heard you were…Well, I lost track.

—Did you speak to Myton about me?

—Absolutely not. I keep my word.

—I’ve been all over, Stallo said. —You felt the change?

—Oh my, yes.

—That was me. Sort of me, I mean.

—Is it what I…?

—Yeah. Your old pal’s gone.

Benters’s eyes grew very wide. —I can’t believe it, he said. —I can’t believe it.

The silence stretched.

—You don’t seem that glad, Stallo said.

—My goodness, no, I am. It…This is remarkable. I’m extremely glad. Pops, it’s done!

—You’re welcome. Anyway I think it was me. In part. Me et al., let’s say.

—Clem might be—

—I know she won’t be back tonight.

—Of course you do, Benters said. —You’re a professional.

—Why aren’t you happier?

Eventually Benters said, —Perhaps it’s hard to credit. I can feel the change of course but…At my age I do feel some caution. They don’t call this sort of presence the Lord of Lies for no reason.

—I know you’re going through it too, Stallo said. —I heard your daughter’s not well.

—Oh. She has great fortitude. Aha. I can’t tell you what strength. No matter that one knows the difference between an ending and a transformation, it’s still bloody hard not to feel it as a tragedy.

When he was calm he spoke again.

—I despise the condescension from the metropole towards places like this, he said. —If one opens the doors of one’s mind, nowhere’s unhaunted. Have you heard of the Phantom Sniper? Yes, right here! Thirty years ago motorists had to beware spectral gunshots! I don’t know the truth of that story of course, but how can one avoid the sense of being guarded by the dearly undeparted? He looked deep into the mute TV. —About that time I made a program. You’d have been a stripling. One episode was about Armageddon. Mars smashing into the Earth. A comedy of course: I know my place. In the end everyone blew at it and the spectre of war veered off. If I were to make it now I think I’d have the world end. Even if cheerily enough. What I was proudest of was the title. It changed. Every week we knocked off a word. The last week, it was just called Yes!

—If you made it now…

—Quite, I’d call it No. You seem very different, Stallo.

—Same river twice. Are you afraid of me?

—Yes.

—Where did it go, d’you think? Stallo said. —Old Pal?

—If any of us knew that…

—We all end up there.

—We end up somewhere, Benters said. —I hope it’s not where that thing’s from. Or went.

—I lost something, Stallo said. —Left it behind.

—Yes I think I see that.

—That’s not quite right though, Stallo said. —I think it left me. And I brought something back, too. Tell me about Myton.

—I don’t see him any more, Benters said. —There’s come to be something to him I don’t much like. As you know I do believe we’re entering a new age and should be glad of that, whatever the birth pangs. I think he’s very out in the cold these days. Who isn’t?

Stallo said, —He has been for a while. Him and the Unit.

After a silence, Benters said, —Look, Stallo. One reason I’m not…bouncing. Is this partly why you’re here? One had thought—I had thought—that whatever that call is that one sensed shaking up the Summerlands in the last years stemmed from this intruder. But it seems not. If anything I’d suggest it’s stronger since you…intervened.

—Yeah. It’s getting on a year now and whatever it is is still sounding and the suppletions are still following it. Ebbing.

—Isn’t that good? Perhaps, might you not have cleared a way? So they can move on.

—What if moving on’s the last thing they want to do?

—Well it may be the last thing some of us want for them.

Back to himself amidst the ruin of sheep, Stallo had investigated a star-shape of slime and blood and bone and it was an exploded human.

He was sodden and cold and there had been great strangeness to his body. The light on the trap had glowed, a faint soul weight within.

He had walked. Who was he to wake?

He had called noiselessly to the dead. Well now, what had happened to all the haints? Days and nights he had felt himself alone, empty king of the island.

He had found his boat. He had been a figure hollow-cast. Physically he was unweakened for all he did not know what that he was now, if Stallo was still the best name for him. His hunger had confused him, he had conflated it with his new emptiness.

By Pebble Island at night. Near Port San Carlos to leave the boat again. Scarecrows amid the green. He had gathered a fallen helmet, a poncho, a boot, much of an Argie uniform, discarded, more. He had whispered to the dead.

I am of your company.

The fighting ended. The edges of everything reappeared.

Attention. I’m of your company.

He had stolen money from a house in Port Stanley and hidden in neglected rooms, and logistics were chaos and it had not been hard for him in his pieced-together outfit to meander mute amid the miserable conscripts on the dock and even so old as he was to go with them silently onto a ship. In Argentina he had evaded processing. Bottle in his pack he had slipped into the city.

Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, up to Mérida to recoup and for the first time in weeks connect with networks of alter-information. Everything was, well, up in the air, said those he asked. He had crossed the Rio Grande.

It was only his body that was moving. He had hitched, to Hub City. Speaking almost never, a mute relic, holing in the low zone east of Harrell like a town unfinished, sharing houses with prostitutes, or in the cemetery. Where he’d walked the markers and when twilight came had made speeches to the dead. Aloud or not he’d asked whether they would obey him. Whether it was safe. A living man had approached him once and said, —Hey, brother. He’d had a knife in his hand but had run when Stallo turned to him.

A trestle spindled wood and metal over the gulch at Dunbar Park. Stallo had crossed the razor wire; of all places called Hell’s Gate or some variant, this structure was where he had first sought passage. Looked upon the lights of Lubbock and the dark of the sixty thousand dead unmoved by his oratory and he had picked a way across the bridge but had not reached the farther realm as believers believed.

He’d sought understanding and those with reputations. A notorious man with an old pistol he’d said could kill a ghost. The pistol was no apport and it fired nothing. At crossroads Stallo had asked questions and not known if the silences were answers or their lack. He had fought a man who waved burning sage at him. Had held up the bottle to an oracle, a tall and fleshy woman about his age. She had done a passable job of smothering her fear and the effort had made her look obstinate.

—Why ain’t you open it and find out? she’d said.

Her room had been crammed with trankums of mediumship as if they were protection. He said he’d heard she had something, even after the famine, something she’d retained.

—Here, she had said. Yes, a sheet. Dirty and frayed.

Stallo had taken it from her and she had watched him and considered resisting—he saw it—and had not.

—You a child of God? she’d said instead. —I am. The dead ain’t faithless neither. Ghost dance was always theirs, that’s why it ain’t work, for us anyhow, but that ain’t stop them dancing. Dance away the devil.

—It was me got rid of the devil, Stallo had said.

—Your doing? All this? They’s still creeds on the other side, that ain’t gone, more’n before, even, but this was you?

—I had help. He had rattled the bottle. —A friend helped.

—Hold on now, the woman had said. —Not just one friend. Someone told you you’re welcome, someone knows you well, but…I don’t know as it’s a dead man but I can sure feel him telling you.

They’d watched each other without words a long time and a smile went across Stallo’s face.

—Well fuck me, he’d said. Set his face again. —Why couldn’t I get over the bridge?

—Dunbar? You tried?

—That’s where they cross, right? Why couldn’t I? I want you to tell me a story. A local ghost story.

Failing to keep her voice steady, she had said, —What kind of dead are you, do you think?

—You tell me.

—No, you tell me. The dead are still fixing to go somewhere. They been hiding, but since what you did, now they come out and plenty of them’s looking to go. If you’re dead, how come you here? I believe I heard tell of you. You a long way from home. Go on home now. If you are dead indeed I believe you the king of the dead.

Maybe the wind that had picked at him and sent dry weed bones rolling was from the hereafter.

He had sat in her dead company awhile. To hear her new perspective. Maybe in case a startled, newborn function would be less likely to keep whatever secrets that woman had died with. Stallo remembered the shot but could not have said for sure that he’d ushered her across. Which should have frightened him perhaps but had not and did not.

England, then. Day labour for hauliers, small-scale thieves peripheral to the lorry gangsters of Essex. In London he had begged. Squatted. Do you understand that this is a new moment? is what he might have asked. That something that was ushered in a decade ago in that airfield to be paid for later had been sent packing. Here’s to putting off slow decline.

Stallo said, —Spirits are back out but they’re still en route somewhere. And I think there’s more apports again too. I don’t know where I fit in. I couldn’t’ve got rid of it on my own. And I don’t know what to make of that. I was supposed to be there with a mate but he didn’t show. Someone put a hex on the islands—that’s where I was—all to bring you-know-who all the way in, focus it, charge it up. Given what happened, I think wherever he was he did do something, my mate. Maybe he felt guilty. Focused on his temple out there; there’s not much he doesn’t know how to do with a helicopter. That was his energy. I don’t know exactly but I think he called that thing there that night. And me. And yeah I wanted that. But that wasn’t all. That wouldn’t have been enough. Someone else helped too. An older mate. Remember Bowler?

Benters blinked.

Stallo said, —Since I woke up I’m missing two things. My control. Yeah it always ebbed and flowed but one way or the other it’s been back there since Telok Anson and now…He shook his head. —And also I think maybe I’m missing me.

Benters said, —I’m not sure I understand.

—Whatever’s in my bottle. Stallo tapped his bag. —What I caught. I don’t kid myself it’s what we were fighting. A little trap like this couldn’t hold that. I think Old Pal got pulled back, you know, whence it came. And I don’t think this is whatever came sluicing in to help me get rid of it. That was too—mushed together. This is solo. So what is it? I can’t help wondering if it’s not one of them things I’m missing. Might be me I’m carrying around. Not that it’s me doing the carrying if so.

He waited a long time and Benters watched him but said nothing of this.

Instead when he spoke again—it was almost shy—Benters said, —Well, you have something in common with Pops, now. You and you alone. Other than Solomon, perhaps. A quick smile. He licked his lips. —I still have some oddments in storage. Stallo, you might think this silly but if you’d allow it I’d be honoured if you’d be the steward of Pops’s bits and pieces.

Now Stallo did not speak.

—I can’t think of anyone better, Benters said. —Just in case, I suppose. And as a thank you. I think you might have stopped the end of the world.

Still Stallo said nothing.

At night at the sight of any lit-up window or the road, Stallo opened his bag and wordlessly invited inside whatever haints there were. As if his old army knapsack were from some Andersen tale.

Three days on, a roundabout way. Esher, pesher, he said. Esher pesher.

He considered going to Eastbourne to talk to Myton. About using Stallo to pursue his plan, steering him to that séance at the thinned place, where Myton had suspected KH emissaries would take on more than they knew, perhaps, Myton’s own engines and gauges set in motion particular supplication.

It was not for the sake of the world that Stallo had saved it. Why then? For the sake of the dead? For himself? No matter. You kill to certain ends, and Myton had already failed in his efforts. Of course, age was no reason not to off a bloke whose day had gone, there was such a thing as revenge and just deserts.

But there was also that absence, wasn’t there? His control had taken leave and if that control had gone somewhere by virtue of the tussle with Old Pal, and if Old Pal was function of an effort by Lionel Myton and his comrade López Rega to usher in some end more congenial to their bleak assessments, might not Myton’s end foreclose all knowledge of how the shag might be coaxed back?

He prepared caches. The scruff and gubbins Benters had given him Stallo considered jettisoning but the desire to keep moving fast and far and the you never know and thoughts of Croome’s yearning for transference/compression techniques took him with it north, and back without it. Worlds turned and years. In his city Stallo had his rounds. To certain dwellings where plant pots piled up in certain outsider towers, bags of trash, to give him an inkling. The tenants thereof seemed always a step farther away than they could be. The hue on them, a televisual glow turned too far down, so they were notional. On the street passersby did not collide with but adroitly sidestepped them without regard. Such ignorable figures might come to the door at Stallo’s knock.

—Do you have anything for me?

They’d never answer and were rarely clear to the eye.

You can fade into the background when you have no soul and no control. It was easy for him to watch that old man come and go silently from the dark house. The children at raucous games, which took Stallo back to his own playtimes. The pud-pud of their ball which they used as an excuse to get close to the house, running while the light went down. A night full of wetness, you couldn’t call it rain. He’d been there many times. Waiting for who knew what? He’d know it when he saw it. It lulled you. You could see in the body language of the boys, it was all boys that night, which liked which, which wanted to be liked but was not, which was not even sure how to want to be liked.

He lost track a tick, returned to shouts, the fugue not his control of course, but of that night’s geas. The street was boyless. Stallo watched the shadows of the mothers spread out across dim asphalt and call their sons’ names. He listened to their panic.

It broke. As four children seemed to coalesce out of the house’s shadow. The waiting women scolded with relief. Run run boys! To your mothers. Slapped bums and shakings and hugs. And

at the edge of the search party a young woman made silhouette, her unruly hair a halo. He saw the turning of her head, the darker darkness of her mouth, he could not hear her call. She with arms spread out and no one running for her, a mother unreturned-to, turning, and as the light fell across it he saw the deep complexity of her expression,

And

he looked, as if he had been warned, to the house, to make out a last child, walking, not running, from where the formlessness was, into the street, still unseen by any but him. A heavy dark ball skidded and thumped into and out of view of the disciplinary love of families, and behind it the small squat final boy, and the youngest woman came for him, and Stallo saw her take him.

A long time after everyone had gone inside, the mother of the last boy came out again, to look, at something or nothing.

Stallo entered the unlit house and waited amid the stuff piles. When the old man came in he did not register shock. He trudged past to tinker with the gas fire with fingers that, if you did not look too closely, might have appeared to be doing other than scratching vaguely at surfaces.

—What was that with them kids? Stallo said.

The old man did not answer. Nothing he did made a sound.

—Look at you, Stallo said. —All change here then. Time caught up with you. When did that happen?

Stallo spoke quicker.

—What do you believe in now? I hear all manner of stuff about that. I wasn’t sure why I came here. Now I’m wondering if you heard anything from my old control. Where’d it go? Follow the signal everyone’s on about? And why have you not done that, eh?

The old man went up the stairs.

I did, didn’t I? Stallo thought. Like old Pops. Got rid of OP. Hurray for us. Then Christmas, that Christmas, was back again in his head, and he was dismissing images of that room and the remembered later sounds of a baby.

If I’m not king of the dead I’m king of the RPOC, Stallo thought. King of Pickled Onions. Which, being dead itself, might make him king of the dead. What’s lonelier than an unhaunted city?

The sheer one-thing-after-another-ness of it all. He couldn’t have said what year it was. In the cellar of his own house Stallo watched the trap. All the moods of its contents in its flicker.

He connected five nodes with insulated cable and a backup generator and skeins of sand that he fashioned with the edge of his shoe. —Make a rope if you want, he said. In the pentacle’s centre he placed the trap. He spoke to it, the glow of it, every day. He drew signs on the walls. He did not know how to sound out all those symbols he had copied so he made various noises and ultimately none. That was the chant.

At the edges of the room he added to the omnium-gatherum of apotropaica. Cheap cloths, mirrors to fascinate. Pins. Efficacious herbs for the smouldering. Salvia, ready to kick off α-thujone, 1,8-cineole, camphor. An empty notebook. The oscilloscope bust but a memory. From the ceiling he suspended threads. There were no windows here in which to place stones so he ringed the room with them. In some of their cavities nestled smaller pebbles like children. All this for one captive of a diminishing regiment.

Stallo missed thuds against wall. It had been a time. When he felt his preparations as complete as he could make them and that a new urgency of the world pressed too hard on what might be his empty skin, he tripped the power and stepped into the cable star. Knelt amid the current cage and set the timer to open the box. He jumped

out of the constraints into the wider room. Well. If he was dead he was powerful.

The box’s lid clicked open and from it shone grey to make the counterroom when the surrounding bulbs went out.

Somewhere, an echo at the edge, impatient. In the register of the dead it signed

here, here, here,

come here, be here, we are here, I am here.

Stallo would not say the name of she who had gone, or of his own lost self. He unfolded the sheet he had taken from the medium. He held two corners of its stained white cotton. He put it to his face and did not find a snag with his tongue. He shook it and the sheet billowed and sent sand scurrying and he guided its descent, cloth come down amid cunning lore, settling on the uneven floor, bunched up atop the trap.

He retreated and sat in his chair in the corner. The fabric glowed from below.

The way it had fallen you just couldn’t tell could you? Yes it was bunched up. You could not tell if it was only the bottle beneath.

[54]

It’s not nothing for Maur to keep herself together on this soil again.

With what’s been building up in her the place is full of motions previously hidden: a moving-shadow pest at the base of a wall; an alarmed and furtive motion, something startled by itself; a glint of temporary blood on a floor. She tries not to pay visible attention to anything so sensed. Never glimpses the figures she wishes to; one perhaps devoured, one never arrived.

It takes effort to consider her interactions with Fez. A few come simply enough to mind, and it’s not as if she shies from any, or as if there are blackouts in her recollection, nothing so neat—only a haze if she lingers. She stalks streets and keeps her eyes down and hears Fez’s voice in that hot metal room. Do you know what you’re doing? That was what Fez had said at the sight of Maur’s pupils. You’re catching sight of them now—did you know that? Do you know why? They want your help.

But you won’t help, Maur had said. That’s what you’re telling me?

One dawn shortly after her return she opens the half-hidden door to her temporary dwelling—a boarded-up shop, she broke in carefully—and on the pavement before her was a man whose hand was raised as if he would knock. It stood hand up. Maur trembles. It turned. Quivered in and out of focus. To see the dead is like being very tired. Maur whispers, “Wait,” and it stumbled. A long fall, slow enough that as it went down it turned its head to watch. She puts her hand to her mouth as it hit the cobbles and scrabbled as if the ground is the edge of a pit and was gone.

Maur breathes through that diligent and rote I’m losing my mind.

She changes her appearance again. Moves through this economy of cash and theft and trust and suspicion in which everyone has their reasons. The man in the refurb shop sells her two used phones. In the library she logs on, searches 4chan, /r9k/, for keywords and, finding none, posts herself. A new thread—such as she told them to look for on the note she left—for Fez and her people.

spookslither don’t come for me

As if they will.

spookslither get another copy atlas ill do what has to be done

spookslither you should have said where he is if you wanted me to do this

Would they take that last bait? One of those recollections: Fez narrowing her eyes, saying No no no, quietly, to Maur’s question, in a way that communicated that she knew the answer.

spookslither where is he?

I could go to London. She looks at the phones. I could call Sonn. She mustn’t of course. She’s used now to living without being seen but doing so here is much harder. You wouldn’t know—she’s grown adept at containing herself—but she’s full of impatience. Not sure if it is hers or the world’s.

—

The answer, two days after her post.

slitherhither dont do this come back you need to be here

Maur writes: youguysareweird tell me what youve found out about him where he might be i know where i was where you are found way home

She adds:

youllallbedoingittomorrow i will put myself out there if you dont help you made your position clear but i made mine clear too and i dont forgive you for not fighting this

Not so long before a response comes, amid blather and observers’ foul-mouthed mockery of their exchange.

hiweirdos no certainty more to come

Maur posts: spook tell me now where is he i need his knowledge

She has her own data with which to triangulate anything they might pass on, from the spiritists of the Spanish coast. She spends hours travelling from terminal to terminal, to check boards devoted to these matters and to hoaxes and secret agencies. But you can’t post on such and stay shaded and there’s a unique frustration to watching mute while excurses spark and spit off in various directions and this or that glimmer that promises goes instantly cold and furious discourse on some bullshit arises from its ashes while she, seeking to save everything in the world, cannot say a word. She scrapes what data she can from the asides of those who know more and less than they think, are wrong or righter than they know. Builds up a picture, slow.

She jogs. Stretches in the rooms where she stays. She writes, hiweirdos dont tell me you cant feel that it is close if the sickness doesnt come the va will find you.

tell me how did i get out?

spookslither, Maur wrote, its you isn’t it daughter of parents let me try to do what your afraid to.

But that Fez won’t answer.

in your book, Fez writes, or her people do, p75 p77 p83 2x3:5 3x7 4x4-5 nothing certain

Maur opens the 2005 Atlas del Mundo she took from the jungle room. Takes a plastic ruler and on each mentioned page measures two centimetres across and three and a half down, three across and seven down, four and four to five. Places in England. Yes all limens where the veil’s thin you know. Two are not so very far. Maur plots a route. Casts for more rumours and readies herself.

Turn over your perch

kweff you

Slip the wind

slot you

Hop the twig

light you up

Make a die of it

Click it

grease you

Push clouds

duppy you

Snuff your glim

smoke you

Cop your packet

napoo you

Pass

XXVIII

Spoorings

This Attestation

Stallo considered his childhood; he and his brother climbing over ruins. Whatever days these were it was a time of tasks. He grew out his beard again and put a grey mackintosh over his drabbest clothes. In Hackney, an alleyway, he broke into a small blue Ford. The dirty wet of the city gave glamour to its lights. In the early dark children gathered amid the shrill sounds of arcades. Stallo parked off Cricklewood Broadway as close to such a place as he could. Funland. He stood beneath a plane tree at the corner and ignored the rain that made it through the leaves.

The first child who came by alone was a short pale white boy, ten, eleven. He wore an A-Team jacket.

—Hey can I ask you a favour? Stallo said.

The child looked at him uneasily and went on.

Children in groups Stallo ignored. A girl of twelve or so approached but a woman passed from the other direction just at the moment and Stallo said nothing. The next girl ignored his call and the next boy smiled nervously and said that he was sorry but he was late.

A child left the arcade, a short plump black boy with close-cut hair and an anxious face.

—Hey can I ask you a favour?

The boy stared wordlessly at him.

—I got two kittens, Stallo said, —and I’m going to give one to my nephew and I don’t know which one so I’m asking kids which they like more. Want a sweet? He held out a bag.

The boy said, —What colours?

—One’s ginger, one’s tabby. They’re still really little. They’re in the car. What’s your name?

He went the few steps and made little finger gestures through the rear windows at the imagined animals.

—Donald.

The child came to him and Stallo put his arm around him and covered his mouth, the boy going stiff with fear, not fighting, so when Stallo opened the boot he could put him in quickly under the cover of the rain and when he slammed it shut no one hurrying home looked in his direction.

Stallo waited in the car in the forecourt of the house until deep night. He got out and opened the boot and the rain still came down upon the child who blinked up at him tear- and piss-wet. Stallo extracted him not ungently and carried him inside and the boy began to howl.

—I want to go home! I want my mum!

The boy would not stop sobbing and shouting. So Stallo, tutting, gagged him with a tea towel. The boy hummed and snotted into it and Stallo leaned down to him, hands on knees.

—Oy. Listen. I’m not going to hurt you. In just a bit, shhh, listen, I’m going to take you home. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to show you something.

He knew that this was what someone would say who intended to hurt a child. He picked the boy up again and carried him towards the cellar door.

—Come on now, I just want to show you something, you’ll be alright.

At the base of the stairs Stallo put the boy down and crouched behind him and whispered encouragement into his ear like a father, like an uncle telling him to be brave. He saw the room from the boy’s low vantage in the faint light of the electric cage. The dirt and shadows filling every cavity of unsmooth walls, the sputtering generator. The rumple of the cloth.

—Better to know, isn’t it, he said, Stallo said. He wiped the boy’s nose with a tissue and undid the gag and the boy did not make a sound but stared up at Stallo. Then past him, behind and beyond him into the chamber, and there was to the perplexedness of his expression something new and shocking. Stallo turned.

Something had risen beneath the cloth.

In the centre of the room, it peaked like a dust sheet over a mannequin in some shuttered tailor’s, as tall as Stallo, puddled out beyond the steep wrinkles into the pentacle that surrounded it.

It was not lit from below now, at all. The dim covered thing was absolutely still.

—Oh, Stallo said. —Oh there you are.

Stallo said to it, —You wanted to be clocked by someone alive, didn’t you? That’s what you all want. I know.

The fabric was heavy but there exactly at the level of his own face he saw in it folds as if of other eyes.

—Did you see it? Stallo said. —Did you see it stand up?

The boy said nothing and the thing did not move. The boy twisted in Stallo’s hands. Stallo held him.

—Look.

The child went as still as what Stallo had brought him to see.

Stallo went on to his knees and leaned, keeping hold of the boy, reached the line of sand.

—Look, he said.

The boy made no sound. His mouth was open. On his face now a new expression alongside fear, what it was Stallo could not say.

—I said I wasn’t going to hurt you. This is more important than kittens eh? Stallo swayed. —What do you see? I’m going to tell a story.

He turned his back to the shroud and faced the child. He opened his mouth and moved his jaw up and down silently, watching the boy as if for approval.

To see him stare at what was behind Stallo’s back. Stallo groped backwards, his fingers crossing the line above the mussed sand and the wire between diodes, feeling a prickling, in a danger zone, stretching, pincering his fingers open and shut until, ah, there, they touched, yes, the weave, and Stallo adjusted his balance and those fingertips took good hold of the sheet upon the floor, that old snag feeling in the skin, and he made sure he had it and not turning, not looking back, watching the boy, he tugged, and heard it slip away.

The boy stared at what was uncovered.

And the edges of his young face seemed etched in new grey. He stood looking at what was shown to him for a long time.

Stallo felt such compassion. He felt awe at his own tenderness. To gift this. To witness those eyes widen. To make this company. That child. Full of emotions too great for anyone, child or no.

Stallo said, What do you see?

He did not speak it aloud. To a boy who kept staring at that which was behind and cried out at last and did not close his eyes.

Stallo stood and closed his eyes and turned, took hold of the sheet with his other hand too, and threw up his arms to hear it billow and snap, and come down again, felt it settle with gravity and find its configuration and be still.

He stepped back, looked, and there it was, unmoving, a covered person-shape again. It might have been that every contour was the same as it had been. It and what was beneath it were absolutely still.

The boy’s eyes streamed. Stallo took hold of him, hugged him close and hushed him as if he’d skinned his knee, cradled his head.

—Hey now, he whispered. —Hey now, shhh, you’re alright, you’ll be alright. It’s okay. I just need someone to see.

When he stopped crying the child’s dense little body was so still Stallo wondered if he was asleep. He hefted him. Swept the sand back into ridges with his shoe.

Not looking back at the columnar figure he carried the boy up the stairs and cleaned him up. He put a blindfold on him, saying, —So you don’t have to go back in the old boot, and the child was silent. He lay on the back seat as Stallo told him to. At the corner where he had found him Stallo, watching for late walkers, released him.

—Home now, he said. —You’ll be alright. You’ll remember. This is where we all live now. You’re in the know.

He took off the blindfold and shook the boy a bit, friendly enough. He put a tenner in his damp pocket. The boy stumbled towards the light of shops. When Stallo saw adults come running he drove awhile, abandoned the car, took a long way home.

Some days Stallo did not descend at all. Some he went to the top of the stairs. Sometimes he came down to look at the figure motionless beneath the material.

—Where you off to? Stallo said to it. —Where you wanting to get off to?

Sometimes he whispered, —Maisie?

Then, —Rene?

—I mean it could be, right? Could be any little part of what was there?

After a while he said, —No, I know who you are. We both do, don’t we, eh? You know me and I know you.

Later. A girl this time. Stallo gestured towards the imagined enticement, ushered her into the car with reassurances, drove her to his rooms. She was frightened and combative for all she was young. Hammered him with her little fists and called him a bastard and a bugger and a shithead. He told her hush and took her down the stairs and held her at the entrance and stared into her eyes before showing her. Facing her, pulling the sheet from that which waited. Stared at her staring and at what went across her.

He covered it again without looking.

Another gap, another girl, of Chinese parentage. She begged him to let her go. He showed her what waited under the swaddling. A pugnacious boy of twelve or so. Stallo disrobed what waited. Replaced the cloth with his own eyes closed. Returned the children to London, having seen.

When he was alone sometimes Stallo would sit and smoke on a kitchen chair, before the motionless sheet.

—How’m I doing in there? he said.

Autumn, then winter, then other years. A bomb made the face of the Grand Hotel slump like something palsied. Stallo did not go to see it. He was committed to this place. And he wouldn’t tread on Maisie’s toes as it were, Brighton and that. He watched on television. The leader of the country came away dusty. Five new births in that cracked rubble, five new revenants (maybe) to follow that still-declaiming silent signal.

—Where to? he said to the figure under the cloth.

Should he drive north to add to his cadre? Offer epiphany to the kid of, say, some striking miner? But this was a city matter.

How could he not feel for them? The boys and girls who would either tell or not tell those to whom they ran home, would disclose or not what they had been shown, under a house they did not know where, by a man they could not identify. They might batten down, make themselves forget. But such a sight couldn’t stay quiet. He’d created new kinds of men and women. Recruited comrades. Whatever you are, whatever you do, you’ll have seen that. If you’re a copper you’ll have that in you. If you’re an accountant you’ll be an accountant who saw that. Stallo smiled. To every one of them he wanted to say, You’re welcome.

He returned to the corner of that Neasden house. One dusk as he’d known he would, he witnessed, recognised, for all the two, three years, that last boy out of the darkness.

Yes he was taller but still not tall and messy haired and white and with an expression of guardedness that did not soften as Stallo approached. He was a little older than most of the chosen but seeing him Stallo was not afraid of being informed upon.

Everything was as it should be, and as exact and as of course as stone through the air. This was urgent, these were late days. Stallo stepped out of shade and opened the rear door of his car. Said, —I’ve got something to show you. This child did not struggle or complain. They entered the basement. The boy stood still with his school bag on his shoulder. Beyond him the shroud.

—You see? Stallo said.

He put his hand like a protector on the child’s shoulder. The boy’s face glowed.

—You seen something before? Stallo said.

He stood and faced him. Stallo’s ears began to ring, no, to register the vibration sound of insect wings as if it were a summer day. A distant cur. He went onto his knees.

—I wish I could play football with you, he said to the boy. —Maybe another time. A mate helped and out I got. Out it got. It wants to leave, he said, jerked his thumb behind him, —I think. I think you should see it, he said.

He reached back in the motion at which he’d become expert. In the boy’s glinting sclerae Stallo saw the creep of something slow. The reflection of motion.

Stallo snatched his hand out of the pentacle the sheet untouched and turned.

The cloth-draped shape turned, was turning, with a slowness as if of geography, pulling the heavy cloth into a new configuration as what waited in the basement turned its head under its hood, as the double hollows came to face Stallo and the boy, and now beneath them a third cavity sucking in its covering, a muffled mouth opening.

Stallo grabbed the boy and put him under his arm and ran up the stairs and turned out the light behind him and closed the door and put the boy down and let out a shaking breath. The child kept his face expressionless. Though his breath too came quicker, he said nothing.

In the car’s mirror the boy returned Stallo’s reflected stare and then looked out into London. And though his face remained inscrutable, if Stallo had had to say what sense there was about him beyond a certain puzzlement and anxiety and yes fear, he would have said that it was disappointment.

Another night. He had no consciousness of having come out of sleep. Two twenty-one, his clock said. Somewhere a dog was desperate. He made out echoes of trains he never heard in daylight. Stallo sat up. From the drawer by his head he took out a pistol.

Is that you?

He directed the thought at the figure in his cellar.

What do you want? You been shouting? Have you? Have you been calling out?

The doorbell sounded.

Chemicals of shock could still go through him, then! He took his weapon and went to the door in his underpants in the cold. He opened the door on its chain.

A man on the doorstep with streetlights behind him and his features unclear. His eyes were shade. He was an old man it looked like. It was the old man.

—You again?

The old man from that corner house opened his mouth. From the pitch within came a straining whisper.

Stallo.

—Well, Stallo said. —What are you doing here?

The watcher moved. There was nothing right about it.

Stallo said, —This is the first time for a long time I heard you say anything. How’d you find me? How’s life with you? So to speak?

He did not continue because the old man worked his lips with such remarkable effort and abstraction that, an unexpected sensation, Stallo felt for him.

—You alright? Stallo said. —I mean, obviously not. I know a kid you know. I talked to him.

The noise that came out of the bloke, though. It was awful. And then his face changed and the agitation left it and he said, Stallo, and this time it was as if he was not a man at all but some intelligent strange thing given instructions on how to move a mouth. He moved. Too quick for his age, for physics. A motion Stallo couldn’t parse.

A message. The voice was no good. To see you. Tell you. You know there’s still a signal. For you here. Come. Our country. Apport. Ville.

—

Something had whispered that name to Stallo before hadn’t it? He knew it to hear it. Something had said it at its departure from a cold island.

He put the pistol at that old waist-high killing level.

—Tell me about Apportville then, he said. —Is that where they’re all off to? What’s there?

Apportville, the Dwell.

—I wondered if Bowler was still alive. I still do I suppose. Whose side is he on? Or is “who” the right word? Did you hear that Old Pal had a baby, supposedly? Is Bowler worried about that?

With those words out in a world still shaking minutely with their vibrations, Stallo widened his eyes and counted out dates, years, in his head. He breathed in sharply and almost smiled, a bad smile.

—Who’s in my basement? Stallo said. —I know it’s never Old Pal. I’d love to think it might be one part of what came to help. That could make it anyone. Maisie? He shook his head, ashamed. —Is it no one in particular? Is it you? Go on tell me. I bet I know. It’s me, isn’t it?

The old man moved again, was abruptly in the corridor, the door swinging off its chain and more cold coming in and a miasma of rot, and Stallo staggering. He pointed with the pointing sense.

—Fuck you, he said.

A rush of ghastly air. The intruder was past him and moving backwards towards the cellar looking right at Stallo, his gait against the grain of the body. His eyes pure pits.

Message, the man said. Come, the thing, the islands, still thin places, could return. The old man barely moved his lips and from down in his throat came out: Come.

—Where’s my control? Stallo said. —I think my shaggy man heard that signal. Bowler? Can you hear me through this thing you sent? You listening? This an invitation? You know it’s just me, yeah? Maybe once it was a bit your gramps, but it’s been something older than that for a long time. I’m a bit hurt it left honestly. Tell the truth—is it with you already?

Toes at the basement threshold the old man pitched backwards like a diver from a boat down to what waited. Stallo fired. He took the stairs after it, the lights in the vault out, no burr of engine, the current-cage shut off, God help him. A blowing and grind of sand and ricochet of stones.

Stallo squeezed the orange. The shot remade the cell in blast and clamouring sulphur. That old man, mid-leap, right there in the air, face placid, the white-flecked bruise colours of corruption. He held the trap. The trap was open. Behind him in the flare the sheet ripped away, from what, Stallo could not make out.

The dark grabbed everything again.

Oh Stallo remember do you remember?

Said I’d fetch your hostage. Let my people go.

Bad laughter.

The old voice said, He said come. Your friend did. For the I Am. Redeemer. Child.

—Tell Bowler, Stallo said. —Thanks for the help on the islands. That signal.

He wishes you all the best. The sound of cracking bones. I possess myself, the voice said. It’s me riding me.

A hand found Stallo’s, a horrible soft-skinned dry hand that took away his gun.

Can see in the dark? I’m past seeing. Can hear the signal too. Promised land me now.

—You give him my best, eh? Stallo managed to say.

He will take your best.

It, something, the thought of something, passed over Stallo, and in its departure it turned to him, so he imagined, and spoke, and noiseless as that cheerio was, it was, to Stallo, perhaps the silent voice of foliage or perhaps his own.

[55]

Stand on the western side of Whitestone Road and look out across shallow-slanting slates to a field patchwork, wind drubbing the rear of your coat. Two boys come running, shouting swear words and laughing at the downpour. One carries a plastic football. An old woman in a rust-coloured cardigan keeps on with slow steps where Treningle View narrows past washing getting wet again on drying racks. The houses are like children’s charmless drawings. Then the moors.

A man goes past pebbledash cul-de-sacs. He is not a tall nor a young man, and he takes long strides bowed a little under the pack on his shoulders and with his hands pushed into the pockets of a black bomber jacket. An ownerless dog crosses his path and cringes and watches him go. He opens the door to one of the houses and takes the stairs to the first-floor and before he has closed the inner entrance his head comes up.

Maur stands before him in the corridor. She has a long gun in her hands aimed and steady. “Leave the lights off,” she says. “Shut the door.”

He does.

“You might have twenty years on me, but I know you,” she says. “That’s why this is a shotgun.”

“Cheeky cow. Fifteen tops. I’m going to put my bag down, alright?” She says nothing and he lets it fall. “Where’d you get a shotgun then?”

“You can get anything.”

“Listen to you.” He shows her that his hands are empty. “Haven’t you come a long way? What you going to do? You going to shoot? Here? Think you’ll get away with that?”

“No. But I don’t care about getting away.”

“That’s a lie for a start. How’d you even find me? Well done. What d’you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” she says.

“You can do better than that. If you don’t want anything why you even here?” He gestures past her at the lounge, raises his eyebrows to ask permission.

She says, “Walk with me. Step for step.”

“You don’t want to be moving backwards….”

“Shut up.”

He comes after her, keeping his arms half up. She stands between the room’s bare walls and closed plain curtains before a beige sofa. Glances at the deep cushions, in which what might be secreted? “On the floor,” she says. “Cross-legged.”

“Fuck’s sake.”

“In the middle of the room. Do it.”

He scoots forwards on his bum.

“You’ll do my back in,” he says.

“How did you get off the mountain?” she says.

“By being a soldier.”

“What’ve you been doing? No, don’t tell me—from what I gather the same but more so; you’ve really been straining to get intel on this thing. Not as careful as you used to be.”

“Well it’s a bit fucking urgent. So what was the trail?”

“You’re not so mysterious as you think,” she says. “It’s hardly a surprise you want to be near portals.” She sneers after she says the word.

“No shortage of the limens. Better word. So go on, who told you where I was?”

“You were never going to stay away from this country. Ilchester, Cranmere, alright, it’s a long list but not infinite. Dozmary? Where the bad spirits go? You scoping it out? Feeling ready to face it at last? Or just not caring about not being ready? What’s your plan…?”

“I’m glad to see you believe it or not. It’s been a long time. It isn’t often I’m surprised, and I like it.”

Maur says, “I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to think carefully before you answer.” She lifts the shotgun up, braces as she’s learnt, points it at his face. “Why did you kill my son?”

—

“I wondered if someone had told you that,” Stallo says. “I didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t know what you believe. That’s why you’re here.” Darkness is already starting to thicken in the room. Stallo looks her up and down. “Did you tread in something?”

“Yes,” she says. “Ghost.” He looks away. “Ghoooooooost. They’re asking for help. All they want—”

“They don’t want anything,” he says. “They don’t want to be anything.”

“You were never consistent about that. Certainly feels like they’re asking for help. You know what’s ailing them….”

“Maybe,” he says. “Although I’ve come to think the timing’s off,” he says. Surprising her. “I think they’ve been in a way since before this thing came back. Old Pal.” He looks her up and down. “So you reckon they’re crying to you now. Why are you on at me about it?”

“Croome said there’s no one alive who knows more about them than you,” Maur says. “She isn’t alive herself any more, by the way, I’m pretty sure. Or not in a way that it would mean anything much to either of us.”

“Do tell.”

“I think Old Pal, and its crew, the void army…I think they took her. Did something.”

“It can do all sorts,” Stallo says at last. “Still doesn’t mean it’s behind everything.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve changed your tune.”

“Got to be flexible.”

“I heard,” Maur says, “you’ve been getting less flexible. That you seem a bit desperate. Fixated. So I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Those things on the mountain—you know what Old Pal eats, what it might leave behind. We were looking for Old Pal and the VA, and they found us. And now here you are, running away and still looking at the same time.”

“I still wasn’t ready,” Stallo says. A few blinks is the only agitation he shows.

“So you’re ready now?”

He considers. “Readier,” he says. “I remembered someone burning apports for the smoke once. Got me thinking, that’s how you’d get anti-haint gas. My point is if you’re prepared to do anything, spare no expense, you’d find ways to fight them. And what if it’s not Old Pal making them sick, what if something else leaked? Maybe some experiment from my old boss’s fucking greenhouse. He’d be nearly ninety now, old cunt. I never killed your boy.”

If she sees that he’s lying, she might, for all her plans, pull the trigger. She does not see a lie. Not to say she sees the truth.

“He was looking for something too,” Stallo says. “Your lad. Got on some trail. He told me.” The air goes out of Maur but she stays standing. “When my mum died someone said to me there’s always liberation in being an orphan. She was a nightmare, my mum, but they meant for everyone, no matter how much you get on with them. You only turn all the way into yourself when they’re gone. What about the other way round? Where does that leave someone like you?”

Maur strains to open her mouth. It feels wired shut or made of wire. Her other end, all flesh and liquid: that familiar slime builds up.

“You were trying to recruit Ewan and Jules,” she says. “So you killed them.”

“Ewan wanted to end this thing as much as I do,” he says, which makes Maur jerk.

“What did he know about it?”

“I was never very clear about that, other than that it had to go. You know what he was like. Look, you loved your boy. But did you love him in a way that sends you shotgun shopping like you’re Charles Bronson? Takes a very specific person to do that and that’s not you. You’re angry and you miss him and you want to know what happened and you’re ashamed and you think you can make up for that like this. But you’re not a killer.”

“You’re wrong,” she says instantly.

“Oh fuck off I’m not talking about some accidental bang-bang or a whack too hard, that can happen to anyone.” Maur starts at his indecency and Strude’s bloody cooling weight. “You’re not here to kill me and you’re not even really here because you think you can find out the truth. I’m not saying you don’t want to know, but on its own that wouldn’t have got you here. That’s no criticism. It’s not necessarily the most dogged who love the best.”

“Fuck you,” she says. “Tell me what happened to him.”

“I don’t know. Yeah we talked. I’ll tell you about it. But I don’t know what happened to him.” He tilts his head back as if to present his throat. The room is quite dark now. “He came to me. Days before he died.”

“What did he want?” The image of him in the company of this man, Jesus Christ.

“It was him got me back into it, in a way. I was a bit lost you could say. Didn’t stop him finding me. There he was.” There he was. There he had been. “He’d been in the Unit—”

“What?”

“So he said. That was mysterious circumstances right there. Maur, you know he wasn’t the easiest to talk to. I liked him for fuck’s sake but I’m just saying. He told me he’d left but something going on felt wrong to him. He wanted my help finding out what was going on. It was him woke me up to what was coming back. So I owe him. We all do.”

Yew sitting at the kitchen table, deep concern in his eyes, right there, staring at Maur. She remembers. Fearful for her. Strange questions. Attention is a door and borders are permeable: if he knew of it, how could he not fear that it had noticed him? And her?

“He told me there was trouble. That we needed to go in and find out whatever the Unit knew, figure out what was happening. Needed my help.”

“Why you?”

“Because I’m Stallo. He told me where they were based now—my lot had long hung up the traps. And we went in.”

“And?” she says when she can.

“And that was that. We got—” An uncertainty. “And then—” He shakes his head. “They must’ve clocked us. We got separated. That was the last I saw of him.”

“You left him?”

“Fuck off.”

“How could you get separated—?”

“Yeah I’m sure you’d have done better breaking into a high-sec base. Maur—” He holds up his hands and she is startled to see beseeching in it. “Maur it was—it was like he wanted to. As if he lost me deliberately.” A weird uncertainty takes him. “We were down there in these corridors and he kept running, and I was telling him, ‘Wait!’ but he didn’t slow down he sped up. He lost me, I didn’t lose him. When I got out I waited for him to contact me. Then I got the news. Who was it told you it was me did him?” he says quietly. “One of them? How convenient.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d met him?”

“Because I didn’t fucking know you, Maur. I still don’t. I don’t know if you remember you were all over the place. You didn’t trust me, fair enough, and you didn’t know what you were doing. Neither of you. None of you. And because I knew you’d ask me about it and fair play but I didn’t know anything. Still don’t.”

“Why would he go without you?” Maur says at last.

“He had a mission. And I don’t know why but I think he wanted to do it alone. I hope you’re proud of him. Sometimes I even think he wanted to spare me something, poor sod.”

Another long quiet.

“This isn’t why you’re here.” He’s gentle now. “Like I say, it’s part of it. I’m not trying to be a dick. But I think I know why you’re here. You want to stop running too. Let’s not put too fine a point on it—you’re scared. You can’t outrun this thing forever and running’s what you’ll have to do because let’s face it, let’s face who it’s fucking after.” He glares, then calms. “And you think I’m the best person to help and you’re right. You’re here because it’s still out there. Look at you with names. Old Pal. I don’t know how garbled his intel was. But like I say, that was what he wanted, too. Your boy. To stop it.”

“There are people,” Maur says with faint surprise at her recollected conversation. “When they said they tracked you and I said I wanted to find you to fight it, they told me no.” Pauses. “They want to watch from the sidelines. No, that’s not fair—they—they’re afraid. While Old Pal closes in on you. Or you close in on it.”

“Who? What people?” Maur can feel a buildup of energies. “You fucking went to see her, didn’t you?”

“Hey.” Maur jerks the gun.

“What’s she got you doing?”

“Sit still.” Stallo obeys but his eyes are hard. “It wasn’t true. She’s not the spawn of that thing. But you know that.”

“What’s she got you believing?”

“Don’t bullshit me, you knew her…parent.”

“I can’t know who the fuck her dad is. Or her mum. You weren’t there. But I have my fucking suspicions.” His fury is real. She waits as if he’ll confess something.

“She’s certain it’ll kill you, Stallo, and she doesn’t care about you. But she’s scared of it winning, too. It’s just getting stronger. She wants to stay out of its way. But I think it’ll be worse than just you dying.”

He puts on a smile.

“And she’s not ready to help,” he says. “You or the rest of the world. That it?” Maur says nothing. She’s recalling Fez bringing vegetation bundled with her into the room, telling Maur formally what each was—bright spiky coucou and soursop, guinea-hen weed, holy basil, what were their uses, not food. Stallo’s smile is nasty but honestly he looks uncertain, too, like he can’t put something together. “So you’re here because of what happens if it ends me? To help? Ahhh. Lucky us. Lucky world. You hero.”

Outside black birds proceed on their business in sky as dark as their feathers.

“So selfless,” Stallo says. “Saint Maur. Not because you think Old Pal’s coming for you as well as for me.”

“I think it’s coming for everything. I didn’t ask to leak and feel like I feel now and have fucking visitations, I didn’t ask for the letter to come to me.”

He stares at her and they wait awhile.

“But it did,” she says. “So there we are. And now I’ve got things whispering in my ear and they’re scared too. You talk as if fear was a bad thing. You know I’m not here because I trust you. I’m here because you know I’m part of this too. I know you’ve been looking for me, Stallo. As well as Old Pal. Like I said, you haven’t been careful. Did you think I’d died? I’m a bit surprised I didn’t too. Although maybe I’d be part of it if I had.”

She watches him, he is inscrutable.

“You’ve been too loud and too sloppy, and maybe you’ve completely lost it or maybe you think you have some sort of plan. Still got your tools?” She has the seeds in her pocket. “Did you get them to work? Is that what it is? You put it out there that you can deal with this thing but you want me. Why?”

“You’re here,” he says at last, “because—she fucking filled you in, didn’t she?—you know I stopped it before.”

It wouldn’t be hard to pull those triggers, and would it matter? She knows she won’t shoot. Not yet, not knowing if there is a yet, what her role is, her duty, to be good enough.

Riddle Me

La Anglaise came to town on her twice-weekly run for bread and meat and vegetables which she requested in French formally expert and heavily accented. She took her shopping to the square, not the main square but the other, the smaller and less well-kept, wherein no one would sit, surely, but to court a sense of elegy. She placed before her on the café table a mother-of-pearl comb discoloured by age and missing three teeth. She drank black coffee and sipped water and watched some old boy curled over his stick making slow progress.

A man sat opposite her.

—Bonjour Doc.

His hands were below the level of the table and slowly she dropped her own out of sight also and took him in.

She said, —Hello, Stallo.

Neither spoke awhile. She unclipped the handbag in her lap, holding his gaze, and found the handle of her Astra Cub and still staring at him drew it out and let him see it before dropping it below the table again, and she did not show any reaction when he said to her companionably, —That’s it, you’re doing well. Can you shoot?

—I can pull a trigger.

—Lot of people think that and it turns out they can’t.

He held up his hands to show he was no threat; reached slowly out for and picked up the comb; ran his thumbnail along its teeth, a tic tic music irregular where tines were missing.

—I’m sure that’s a good vintage. I’m sure that could tell some stories. What’s the snag? Don’t tell me, those missing teeth were never there. You’re doing well having one at all these days. But I’m not getting a big ping. You sure it does whatever it used to?

—Are you sure you do? she said. —What would you still know about what is and isn’t apport?

—Well ouch. Still I thought you might have something extra special. If anyone would it’d be you, wouldn’t it? So, what, you can goad a lespry with that? Spike it in its spectral bum?

—What are you here for?

—What do you think?

—I think you’re here for information. How did you find me?

—By spending a fair old fucking time looking, Stallo said. —It’s almost as if I was trained, eh?

—You still have the mien of a soldier. Croome lifted her hands into view—left her little gun on her lap—and lit a cigarette. She busied herself with her cup and cutlery and with the comb. She hesitated then said, —I gather we may owe you a debt of gratitude.

—Don’t know what you mean.

—My god, you don’t make things easy, Stallo. I’m serious. I’m not entirely dim nor quite divorced from old networks, I do hear things….

—And you all these years out of action. Still can’t leave it alone?

—And I’m not entirely without resources or sensitivities, I do have a sense of when things are out of whack. If something particularly powerful and ghastly were to make its presence felt. She spoke quickly, as if to get to the end. —If it’s true, and I’m certain it is, that it was you who intervened against and—and for the life of me I can’t imagine how—drove out whatever was abroad and seemingly preparing itself to cause merry hell, then that was quite a thing. And I’m glad of it. And grateful. For all that I could have done without the exodus of suppletions that followed. Though I’m minded to call it, rather, an inodus. Technically the Greek would give us eisodos but this is a better pun.

—You always did like your jargon, Stallo said.

—I did, it’s true. Jargon is always poetry.

—Inodus is fucking horrible poetry, though.

—It’s ugly and it brings one up short, yes. But might not poetry do that? The efficacy of words is wildly overstated, most especially by those who work with them. Unusual terms have such a bad reputation. But the ill-favoured sound of inodus makes you think about it, doesn’t it? And has the advantage of half-punning on nidus. Is it true? Did you kill it, Stallo? The interloper?

—That’s at least three questions. There’s Did you get rid of it? There’s Did you kill it? Plus there’s And did you send the Roused scarpering?

—Not only the Roused. She shook her comb, —Apports.

—I had help, Stallo said, —from a couple of old mates, as I figure. You might say air support from one. None of us are at our best any more.

—What’s left of the Unit is a joke, certainly, she said.

—Not the only one. KH is fucked. Scattered even worse since their pal Jones got impatient and staged his own apocalypse. Half of them have gone freelance now, justifying it with some bullshit about only working for the underdog. That’s hardly going to last.

—I have some sympathy. Retirement is overrated. One knows, when one signs up to what you and I’ve done, that there’s unlikely to be simplicity or safety in our future.

—That’s why I’m here. Because we can’t properly retire. I’m looking for one of those mates I mentioned.

They let the subdued sounds of the square drift past them awhile.

—You know I didn’t start the lespries leaving. I’d thought it was our, you know, visitor, doing for them. But no.

—I believe I know why you’re here, Croome said.

—You were never slow. You saying things like inodus, that gets round. It implies a destination.

—With regard to one of your helpers that day…

—If help he did.

—You believe he did, don’t you? Croome said. —That Bowler helped you.

—Not just me, Stallo said. —As you pointed out.

—My thanks to him, then, too. Croome stubbed out her cigarette.

—What’s Bowler done? Stallo said. —What’s Apportville?

—I have no idea. What I suspect, as do you, is that it’s where the suppletions have gone. You knew Bowler better than I.

—Not for want of trying, he said. —You used to get him to work with you. Before me. Why’d you ditch him?

—He ditched me, she said. —Back in his dissenting days. Before he was his own authority.

—In Apportville. So why did he ditch you?

—I suspect a combination of factors. And by the by, by ditched I don’t mean he wasn’t still willing to come along and do as I asked. That was rather the problem: I came to suspect that what had started out of eagerness and interest—he was always very interested in things—had become an opportunity for him to glean information, which is not quite the same thing.

—You saying he was a traitor?

—What would that even mean? As I say, you knew him better than I. You’ve seen how it all started. Traitor to what, for what? I always wondered if it would be you who’d go rogue. Or native. You were always kicking about among the Reds, more than he. And you took to it so well. I remember thinking that most people would have overdone it, theatrical denunciations, burnings of uniforms and such, but I gathered you had an excellent line in Troubled Duty & the Ambivalences Thereof. Much cleverer. Even let them suspect you were spying on them, at least at first, so long as you communicated carefully enough that you weren’t happy about it.

—We’re not talking about me.

—We are not. We’re talking about Bowler. In whose whereabouts, with whom and what, I’m given to understand what’s left of our old employers are also interested.

—I spoke to him, Stallo said. —The night he went AWOL.

She inclined her head. —And?

—And he sounded sad. And something else, too. Apportville, it does exist?

—If anything’s to be gleaned from chatter, it’s even been growing. Stallo, let me ask you this. What do you know about a child?

Ah well now that. He took a breath. —Yeah. I hear about a kid time to time.

She watched him levelly. —Do you think you’re hunting an antichrist?

He looked up sharply enough and she said, —You know what I mean. Whatever you want to call it. You heard that our recent visitor, which you somehow found and confronted, seeded its herald. That your apparent success in banishment was only the first phase of operations. Perhaps even part of its plan. To distract you. Is that it?

—Who’s the kid’s mum then?

—Who could possibly know? If this is even remotely accurate, about which I’m entirely unconvinced. Whatever or whoever is its father, you know how mothers tend to be recruited in such stories. What would it matter who she was? You were looking for help to stand against it. Hence—again—Bowler.

Stallo had to draw his attention back to her because she’d returned him to that Christmas yet abloodygain with Sheila, was it?, and Marks maybe and a couple of other birds by that table as well.

Croome said, —You know Simmons is in charge of what’s left now? May I have a cigarette? That was my last.

He took a packet from his pocket and they both took one.

—I ain’t here on behalf of anyone but me, he said. —I’m not here to do you in.

—One couldn’t help wondering. One never knows who might end up freelancing for whom, to what ends.

—They used to pay us to not be too curious, Stallo said. —I got curious in the end. Whatever Bowler said. I was never that interested in your infighting to be honest. Simmons outplayed you; that’s office politics. I barely knew the bloke, he had the sense to be a backroom boy, and aren’t they always the ones you have to watch out for? Que sera and that. Where’s Apportville?

—I don’t know.

The way the light fell, Stallo could not see where she was looking. He said, —I had one kept in my cellar.

Her eyes widened. —Sprung from what poor soul?

He laughed. —That is the six-million-dollar question. It got away in the end. Got rescued, busted out. To go you know where I think. And the old bloke who did it? Something was riding him.

—The departures continue, Croome said. —If anything, as you say, it’s sped up. The inodus. Following the signal. And what’s left of our lot twiddle thumbs. They talked a good game, didn’t they, when we joined? The nature of the threat is ever-changing and so is the nature of our response.

—I heard Simmons started doing better’n you because you got loose on standards, Stallo said. He hesitated. —Remember that party?

—The causality is the other way around, Sergeant, she said immediately. —Certain blind eyes were the results of how I felt I was being treated. There was no regret in her gaze.

—Respect to you, then. You were a move or two ahead. The first time I heard the word Apportville, Stallo said, —I knew I knew it already. Something had already said it to me—told me where it was going. Something in me. The bloke who came, Stallo said. —To liberate my specimen, on Bowler’s say-so. What was inside his body was his own haint. It possessed itself. I didn’t know you could do that. Maybe this…Stallo hit his own chest, —is just investigating the rest of me’s journey.

Croome spoke carefully. —I think…, she said. —You’re not dead. Of that I’m almost sure. Metaphors aren’t stable. All we’ve done with the Rouse is cobble together a sense of the suppletions. But sauce for the goose. She looked into the sky as if at some overwatcher and spoke with bleak resolve. —There’s nothing to suggest that they or some other coagula of some underlying pre-meaning mulch, or some byproduct of our distillation, might not learn us too. And if they did that, they might translate their own natures, formless or not, into something that would let them play with us, as from one point of view we do with them. Why would that play be anything we welcome?

Stallo wrapped his coat around him.

—No wonder you were worried about what came through, he said. Paused once more. —I think Myton had something to do with it.

—You may recall I never did much like him.

—Recall I do. You said formless? What about the opposite? You ever see an engine?

—The opposite? she said. —Ah, I see what you mean. Formlessness and too-formedness are perhaps the same. Too many angles.

Stallo entertained, or tried to, a revision of instinct, that out of some shuddering cube an after was revenanced up, and of that the Roused were functions, and Old Pal excrescence.

He said, —What’s all this got to do with Apportville?

—I’m tempted to say that if one loses a place high up in an organisation and didn’t suspect it was coming, one probably deserves it. I am many things but I’m not a fool. And Simmons is many things, but he’s a symptom. The man doesn’t have it in him to be a cause. It had been clear for a while which way the wind was blowing.

Stallo stared at her. —You helped him. Bowler. You helped him go.

—Oh, that’s too strong a verb. If he spoke to me about his unhappiness and if I had a sense of what he might do—well.

—So what’s he doing?

—We certainly don’t talk any more. Not since he fled the coop. With his prizes.

—You sound pissed off.

—Any favour is a gamble. You know your quid may not be pro quoed, but that doesn’t mean you’ve no right to irritation if it isn’t.

—What quo didn’t you get?

—You’re better placed than most to have seen the upheavals in apports and haunting. And, what, now possession, you imply? While you were playing silly buggers with Myton’s boys’-own gang, and R Unit’s been not-to-reason-why-ing, the most sophisticated work ever conducted in our field appears to be in the hands of someone not unlike yourself. Someone AWOL in a secret bloody hideaway whom I suspect of being a mystic.

—Sending a signal, he said. —You wanted Bowler’s reports. Apportville research. That was the quo. You were outsourcing too!

—Simmons’s Chorleywood methods never left much room for experimentation, Croome said. —Which leaves Bowler and his lot in this Apportville up to whatever startling stuff they are and me none the wiser with my hands in my pockets.

—What is it you want now? said Stallo. —Do you know?

—Not to die for a while. Because there’s nothing after that. Not for us.

—You don’t know that.

—I know enough.

—What I want is to know where Bowler is. Before anyone else finds him and fucks it all up again. So you know what you can do for me: tell me everything you ever said to him and everything he ever said to you and every rumour you ever heard about him or Apportville.

—Which is hardly without dangers. And not only those with which you’re familiar. Do you have protection?

—This is my job.

—Yes but still. As we’re saying, technology moves on. I might have certain objets— She drawled the French, —and a battery or technique or two of which you might be glad.

—Why would you help me?

—Why wouldn’t I? I’m too old to go myself but I don’t wish you failure.

In that moment it looked as if she asked herself a question: if what thought itself Stallo was a Stallo shell containing a confused newborn, what then?

[56]

I don’t know what you are to me, Fez had said to her in the tall metal room.

You think I’m your enemy? Maur had said.

You can’t be sure of anything when you’re on a war footing. And there’s no warlessness, that’s the last secret and everybody in the world knows it.

Maur stands above Stallo, the shotgun ever heavier. She moves backwards and finds the sofa with her legs and sits. He watches like they’re old friends or survivors of some shared battle.

“Of course I wanted to recruit,” he says. “Anyone. Still do. I can’t fucking take it how stupid brass is, bobbing along while the world burns. Yeah I want soldiers. But I didn’t do what you’ve been told.”

“Why does Fez hate you?” Maur says.

“Fucking Fez? First-name terms? Her dad talked trash about me her whole life.”

She hesitates. “You said her father was that—”

“No, I said she was its kid.” He glowers. “I’m still not sure she isn’t. Anyway. Adopted dad if you like. Him and me used to run together but he went right off me. It was her told you Ewan was looking for me back then? She’s had her ear out?” He shakes his head, as at a comrade who has failed him.

What is this gunpoint collaboration? She sends out some assurance and apology, to Ewan. To Fez, to whom she feels, among other things, indebted.

“How did you get out?” she says. “Away from the empty people?”

“Told you. Did my job. Those things—I thought they’d got you. What happened?”

“Luck.” She closes her eyes. “I think maybe Old Pal—took Jules. Or something that was watching me. I can’t feel her any more.”

“Any more?”

“But now it’s like I’m never alone anyway”—she hadn’t meant to say that—“and I’m dripping, I’m—”

“Sweetheart you been medium for ages, it’s just easier for you to see now all that attention’s got to go somewhere.”

Maur doesn’t want to die. “How did you stop it before?”

“With help,” he says. “Want to help?”

—

Stallo waits while she recalls what she’s seen and done, everything she and Fez said to each other, as best she can, as much as she’s able or willing to bring up, through that gauze.

“I need this,” Fez saying, holding up the letter. Staring at it with hunger. “We can learn from it. It’s an engine. This is what they want, too, your enemies. Why they come after you.”

“Listen,” Fez saying, “I don’t know why it came back so strong, stronger now. What brought it back. I don’t know why Stallo thinks he can…We were going to attack it, my people. I was getting ready. Hearing all the old stories again.” She looked ashamed. “But it’s different now. It has that army. We have to stay safe. Apportville—I can’t risk it.

“I hate that,” Fez said when Maur told her of the days in France. Of Stallo scrabbling in the dirt. “How they love that they can’t find apports from then. They love it eludes them. They fawn and they want and it’s disgusting.”

Now, in England, Maur will help Stallo. Find Old Pal. She knows it and knows he does too.

It is four in the morning. She looks at him, gun loose. His face all lines. It should be momentous to her, to say, “Yes I know you faced it before. She told me you used to have a control. That helped you against it.” He says nothing. “Not that you did the job, obviously. You wouldn’t have kept me with you if you didn’t think you needed me. Let alone look for me since.”

“You’re a battery,” he says after seconds of silence. “If I was still a medium, maybe I wouldn’t.”

“What’ll you do different this time?”

“I have some ideas. Why do you think I’m here? In a place with this sort of energy? And after all, now you’re here too.”

—

He looks truly excited, abruptly certain. I don’t forgive him anything, she thinks. What happens after is for after.

“You did for Teller,” Maur says.

“He did for himself.”

“You know what I mean. How did you—?”

“Jules was hanging around. I just gave her a push. Partly to get her out of the way of what was eyeing her. Already on its way back.”

“The letter…”

“Yeah she must’ve shed that. Teller was part of, you know, what killed all of them. The whole set-up. I admit I was surprised she went for him—”

“Stallo.” Her words speed up. “You’ve been all but baiting it, after all that time with me, going on about how careful we had to be, running, stones and barriers and all. What happened to that? It’s because it’s been looking for me instead, isn’t it?” She ignores his expression. “I didn’t ask for that and I don’t know why. But here we are. And you may have got less careful but you’re not crazy. And you do…hate it. And if you beat it once before, I’m ready to hope, even if Fez isn’t. That you can do it again. I do think you’ve got a plan, or half of one. So tell me.”

—

“It’s had its eye on you,” he says finally. “Cybill and you. How’ve you stayed out of its eyes since you left Her Maj? Left the apport with her and keep more charms in your pockets? That won’t work for long. Yes—I can use you for this. Not because I want to, no offence, but because it’s what we’ve got. Do you have any idea how frustrating it’s been? I get the kit, real stuff, I get to test it, I have to, not in circumstances of my own choosing shall we say, I realise I’ve got a chance, and then you disappear, and—” He makes a puff-of-air motion and an exaggerated Where is it? face. “And I’m old news. While it circles you like I don’t know what. Alright then. Let it. You keep it looking at you, and I hit it with what I’ve built. Right in the eye. You don’t have to like it. I don’t like it. But have you got anything better? Of course, you could always walk away. And wait for it to find you.”

—

They let the silence go on a long time.

“I’ll be coming back,” Maur says. “Be ready to do better this time.”

He looks wild for a moment, as if he’ll protest, then shrewd again, and calm.

“Well righto, boss,” he says, “I’ll get on it. Don’t be too long, though.” He’s saying something else. He does not stand. He watches her, and he’s all but gabbling, and it’s all Lucky old me this, he’ll get his gear together that, Christ’s sake keep her blocks up the other.

He does not follow her out.

On the second day in the hidden room, Maur gave Fez a bottle of her wetness. Some kind of offering—a token to buy out, one way or another. Maur makes herself not shy from the memories. Of the dressers of clothes. The atlas on a shelf, paper, dictionary, strongbox. Fez watching her. This is the stopping place, Fez said. We come here for what we need before we go to town. I know it’s small. I’m sorry…Fez put the letter in her pocket. Maur imagined it glowing within.

You will come with us, Fez said. Maur said, I want you to help me. I’m not coming with you. We have to stop it.

Fez said, When I was a child my parent talked to me. About what he used to do, and how he changed. He said to me, Why should we fight? The quick and the after? He walked away from his work because of me. He said to me I’m proof of something. Come with us. We can protect you. Be with us. It’s not just Old Pal. I tell you, Stallo is hunting you too. I thought that’s why you came to us. You can’t fight Old Pal.

Beyond the wall a frenzy, maybe a buzzard in the sun. For the sun oh for the sun.

Maur said, You think it won’t come for you?

Still the hardest time for Maur to bring to mind is that night of her emergence. After all the hours that Fez—and Fez alone—visited her with water and food and questions and information imparted in that dogged unhappy way like medicine doled out to a child who hates it, and with a sense of something not said, and the hours of Maur’s frustration, turning on the tiny bed, the movements of her body in the ways she’d made herself learn, gripping the lower rim of that window and pulling herself up to stare, as long as she could hold herself, at the sky, Maur slapped upon that door, and for all those metal walls the sound was flat and dead, strangely so, and it unnerved her, thinking of it heard from outside, from the jungle. She believes it was the tiny sound—how she heard it—if it was there—under that forest gibbering—of a snapping that brought the door back to her attention one night. And pulling or pushing at it then it did not resist at all.

—

Outside air was remarkable. A smell of smoulder. Twilight was waiting. The intricate listening and calling of the trees gleaming with the last of the day patrolled by insects. This place, she, couldn’t be unguarded, and she waited for the ricochet of a warning shot or a searchlight eye, but nothing greeted her except that greying air and the path dusted with clay and fallen flowers. She took a step, still waiting for some censure or command and saw cut lime halves at the corners of the door and heard the murmur of the generator and saw the coils of copper wound all the way about the metal room. The thread figures dangling above her, suspended bottles, the last light going through them. Her heart going loud.

—

It was so small, that cell, from the outside. Little char piles around it—half-burnt hen weed leaves.

No, there was not one path but two. She was on the threshold of a threshold, the hut between somewhere and somewhere else, beyond a boundary, as if for the safety of both destinations. She had no doubt to see them that the narrower darker of the trails would take her—after however many miles—to Apportville. And she stared at it awhile, as if her body would make a decision.

Gathered things, turned her clothes inside out.

Maur walks now tor to barrow. A wind without remorse. Maur you fugitive soul. Come so far on kindness and solidarity and day-old food in ugly halls. You walk so close to those you once loved. Now you speak languages, move with new strength and the grace of terror. Gauze is ripped. The Roused pleaded. She walks beside a young boy and his grown dead self in her mind. When does it stop? These moorland pilings-up are mine country. When you’re in the forces you write a letter for safekeeping, to be sent if you die. You’ll never write a more important document or hope so hard that no one will read it.

Dear Sonn, Maur thinks. Dear Yew. She received no such message when her son died. She hopes he wrote her one when in his war zone and burnt it on his return. She considers his ending. Why would he fear death? With what he’d come to know?

She returns to the car to sleep with a pistol in her hand.

“How fast you believed it all,” she whispers to Cybill. “The Roused.”

Well there’s believed and there’s believed.

“Still.”

And now you’re the one doing everything for the sake of something you didn’t want to believe, Cybill says within her. Bit much.

“It is a bit.”

I never thought she wasn’t Jules, that it was just something that thought it used to be.

“It’s a bit academic, isn’t it? Is she with you now?”

That goes unanswered. Maur considers stone tapes. Theories of ghosts.

And now here you are. With him. I can’t even look at you. You know what he did.

“No I don’t. Only what I’ve been told.”

Do you actually believe him?

“I don’t know.”

And you just let him go.

“I could hardly keep him captive. There’s no point me trying to tell him what to do. I don’t know how to kill it, and it’s chasing me.”

And you trust him.

“Of course not. But if he wanted to hurt me or worse he could’ve done it a million times by now. What am I supposed to do? We need him to stop this. Afterwards though.” After a silence she says, “I was so jealous of Jules.”

I know.

“That you had her. I’d hear you muttering.”

Well there are conversations and there are conversations.

“Don’t act like you weren’t given something that I’d—”

You should stop, Maur. That’s enough.

It is impossible to know if the silence is rebuke or if it is just that Cybill was never there.

You must not imagine me only as this creature of starry collapse.

To fill the silence I stepped forward looking at the old barometer on the wall. When she said nothing I said, It’ll rain, and tapped the glass face with the nail of my right forefinger.

She startled me with a laugh.

She said, I don’t know how you can tell that from a clock.

I blinked in confusion and it was a clock at which I stared, framed in that dark wood. Two hands, twelve numbers, serif font. I heard myself stutter something unrelated, quickly so she would laugh again and forget.

What time is it? she called, another time.

I looked and the wall was bare. I was about to say that the clock was gone but I stayed silent examining the texture of the plaster, in close detail, a moonscape, into which you could almost fall, there was no outline of countershadow where a clock or barometer had been, so why did I not speak?

She came out of the room and did not glance at me in irritation or query at my silence, only looked from me to the wall at which I stared and raised her eyebrows and said, Oof, yes, we’d best hurry, and went out again.

I could hear her dressing. What am I to make of such mistakes? Mistakes with such order in them? If my eyes are dead, what is the nature of what they see?

I considered running my hands up the wall to see what they would encounter.

XXIX

Meshes of the
Afternoon

Cold City

In a corrugated shack in which animals called without energy, Stallo cornered a man whose name was on the list Croome had put down. He’d come through mining villages where men regarded him before ziggurats of ash like old gods watching them in turn; in delta retreats, in the better bars of cities, seeking formulations. He did not move or fight like a man half a century old and he felt more curiosity than pride in that. Stallo cuffed the man and put a Bren Ten to his head and asked for information.

In Brazilian jungle his muscles remembered Malaya, the green intensity. He switched to another trail, through Mexican towns. He was for months among hucksters and cataclysm-grifters, old soldiers, alumni of the most speculative and self-styled black of ops. State-backed illuminati.

From Istanbul he hiked to Akhalkalaki. A new zone. He carried a map of caches, time-capsule directions secreted by assets of the other side now collapsing, bearing X’s Stallo could not explain. An archaeology of treachery.

In Târgu Mureș he was certain he was followed, and not by anything he understood. The weight of time seemed always behind him. Stallo tracked a woman to a small apartment and threatened to reveal to her neighbours that she was or had been Securitate. She laughed and raised her hands to say there was no one anywhere without secrets in this collapse. When she could see he believed she was not afraid she gave him a chart scrawled on in Cyrillic, a map of the ZATOs, closed cities of the north.

Border towns, industries curtailed, thin-faced women and men making livings at the interstice hustle. You couldn’t call it smuggling any more, just packing suitcases and walking from one place to another. Was this even a country? Alongside calm and everyday civic pride now a panicked readiness, not for anything to come but for that already-come to notice you, to notice the tobacconists, schoolteachers, in up-sprung markets of heartbreaking bits and pieces, corner-pavement conversations, to descend with an air of rueful end-times amusement at its own absent-mindedness at having missed them, What am I like? Я рассеянный дурак, and to bring the void.

Stallo headed for Noyabrsk because it was a place born of helicopter.

In a small city young men tried to mug him with incompetence and resentment so great he pitied them as he beat them. We’ve been through worse, a veterinarian told him. The man was selling his mother’s things. Book piles, repeated scree of Lenin, clocks and gimcracks at their terrible prices on stalls beyond the square where a pedestal bore two ragged-ankled iron feet. A woman of Stallo’s age or more he surprised a little by saying, —Go on then, to her unenthusiastic suggestion. He paid her and they fucked in the lodgings, it was quick and for the rest of the night she smoked his cigarettes and spoke of her life as if in a hypnotised monologue.

Stallo could make himself understood but with his accent he spoke as little as possible because the place was overrun by giddy spies. He met a young, hard, competent DGSE woman; if you knew what to listen for beneath her Russian you could hear the French of her birth. After some hours of the usual import-export bullshit she said to him, in English, —It’s too much, no? and offered a handshake. She thought him SIS, that they were jostling pointlessly for leverage while there was enough to go around. Stallo would not indulge her. He knew that, granted professional camaraderie, she would turn the conversation to the Company and adjacent-agency Americans tearing up every corner of this de- or recomposing empire—the cultural attachés and management consultants and PhD students and retirees taking photos and notes, ingenuous as owls—and that she would berate them to him, this imagined Old World colleague.

Fissile matter went unaccounted. Bouncing along decaying roads in the steppes, other secrets must have been on their way out too. Stallo mouthed questions to Kowalchuk. Where’d you disappear to? Where’s the Section? He felt affronted by the silence, wanted better for the designated nemesis than to be one of scores of bureaucrats swept away by the hinging of the epoch.

He drove an antique UAZ-469 miles into the white zone. The heater was not adequate for nights. After that tough engine began its death rattle he took the vehicle off the road amid abandoned derricks and black fringes of firs. The snow would hide its trail.

East. No insect eyes of god upon him, the wind incurious. He walked and leaned upon his ol’ bamboo. Dead branches obliged him with silence. He settled at an overlook. Ate what he had brought. With daylight, the air was louder. Before him tundra and, squat in that declination, cliffs beyond, a town behind walls and wire. Half a mile by half a mile.

Through his scopes he made out mean housing, bowed civic spaces perhaps. Squares where gardens were all white, a factory zone of chimneyed cubes and warehouses crumpled and blocks distorted in lines of collapse. The marks of demolition. What cars remained were humps below the crowning snow. A roadway suggestion. He dug in. For a day and a night Stallo saw no motion but the slap and flap of old cloth in remains. An unsecured door opening and closing to let in the currents and let them out again. Birds, and the obscured skitter of some small animal in its everyday terror.

In the afternoon of the second day, yards inside the wire, came a gust. A snow vortex taller than he, a column rising in the interference and going against the blow. It did not dissipate. It traced the fence line, pierced by the cold rays of Sol.

Stallo gripped his sights to see it go back the way it had come and pass out of his sight.

He waited another hour. His stillness became that old occult martial ecstasy.

Clouds freed up light and he watched a sprawling hangar complex and runnels not made by chance. Satellite dishes on girders. A great antenna. Huddled in his fleece, he plotted.

More than a decade older than the oldest of those old-timers with whom he’d yomped in Malaya, in he went through drifts, carbine in his arms, bamboo strapped to him, clenching his teeth for his right knee to buckle, deep-bruise pain in his left shoulder, wondering again at his own stamina. He took cutters to the strands. Crawled in. From his pack he took an object about cricket-bat sized muffled in white cloth and he depressed a switch and felt a current go through his bones. A swaddled biped figurine with spread-wide wooden wings, the fierce face of a kareau Croome had given him two years so many months before. She’d made him wait at the entrance of her house. I got it from a menluana from Car Nicobar. She had hollowed it, she said, put within it circuitry, which he had adjusted, a hold for a battery. Augmented the spirit-shocking wood. He thrust it into the snow so its upthrust right hand, curved around a hole as if in a stone, protruded.

More waiting. Through gloaming. Stallo did not stiffen to see eddies gust into view again from beyond a low shed according to whatever schedule. The cold wind-walker did its rounds. The pillar of frigid air

swept itself

up in itself

towards the fence again.

and careered as it came to where the scare-devil was secreted, skidding as if hit by crosswind, out of that zone into the shade. When it was gone, Stallo ran.

He went low by a route of smothered cars, in to where a wall had fallen. The corridors within were silent. He found the stairs. He climbed above a loading yard where forklifts raised their prongs like supplicants’ hands.

He spent the first hours of the night finding a way to the top of the building. The quiet declaimed. He kept his rifle up. Passages, side rooms unlit. No legends, no Russian You Are Here. This had been a secure concern in a closed city.

From beyond one hall’s-end door he heard sounds. Not the tap and tink of wind or monuments to industry contracting in winter. An engine’s putter. Footsteps and voices. He opened the door a slit onto warmth. He came onto a walkway, the enormous space of a windowless hangar.

He stood forty feet above the concrete floor and the shadowed ceiling must have been thirty feet again above or more. At the edges of the space some doors were open, shedding illumination, but most came from lanterns on poles, ersatz streetlights in imperfect line, making by their placement a sort of byway of huts and caravans and camper vans and teepees and wooden sheds. The lamps and jury-rigged habitations made alleys, all interlinked with sags of wire that swayed according to foundry pounding.

Women and men moved at obscure stations, dressed for warmth. The space heaters he saw and heard were not adequate to this cavern.

In the enclosed shadow sky he made out dangling rope: interwoven sigils of greater scale than he had ever seen, entanglements for the curiosity of the dead. He lifted his right hand, pointed a pointing-sense directive, a warding. His index finger shook in time to his heart and he felt old annoyance at the corporeal reaction to spectrality, not fear any more than boiling water was afraid. Though who should say that water was unafraid?

This hidden town kept clockless time. Stallo heard the laugh of children. He smelt diesel and hot metal and food cooking and chemical cleaners. Locals on their business. At the farthest edges of the village-room, between dwellings, were lumpen, misshapen constructs. Junk patched, bolted, clenched together, buttressed into shapes atop plinths. Rising over the low skyline, intricate weighted and counterweighted contraptions like children’s illustrations, better mousetraps, poised. Between them, shapes motionless under dustcovers.

I have sought this for years, Stallo thought. He might have been reading someone else’s words. This is what I have been looking for.

Hours. He looked into the darkest zone with his scope and made out enigmatic shapes in faintly glowing green.

People came between the tumbledowns under smoke from hammered-in chimneys. Some were older than he. Most were ten or twenty years his junior, or more. Not all carried weapons. He heard dogs. He saw two donkeys in a paddock. Communal kitchens. From behind a wheel-less military truck came the greasy red light of welding sparks. A prefab shack, an armoury. A medical station where a tired young woman with an Afro waited. Another in her twenties with cropped red hair he decided was a quartermaster. A man his own age, Pakistani he thought, moving without urgency. A this, a that. Music from radios. Children again; there might be a crèche with poster-paint pictures. A room decreed to be a church. Stallo saw in the grey and green of signal-boosted shade the plastic-sheet curtain at a lit-up entrance and judging from the papers brought out by those who emerged, this was a library, in the remains of something with another function.

He watched the levered machines and those shrouded pillar things. Cold air tugged at their cloth.

Later there sounded the percussion of slow steps, and out of the black at the chamber’s edge emerged a big slow-walking hound, and behind it a larger shape that passed behind walls so Stallo saw it only in instants and what he made out was something like a tall figure, draped, inclining and veering as it came.

People went to it, so it gathered companions over whom it towered. Stallo tracked its sway past lights the shade of the electric cage in his basement almost a decade back, and supposed that even this particular promised land could not dispense with all coercion.

By girders wrapped with gauze and cloth and pitch, pulleys from which on extending arms were tools and rags, snagged matter, Stallo would bet. What followed the dog was, he could make it out, a man or a woman swaying in equestrian motion, riding the air, on nothing.

At last the rider dismounted. Dismounted the nothing. Dropped from nothing. Came through those who waited, and someone attending took hold of reins, and Stallo saw a saddle at horseback-height in the air.

The big dog raised its muzzle and let out a melancholy call. A sad I am. Which was answered by dog voices and other animals.

The dismounted man came into light; words passed between him and those around him. Far from the hangar town’s centre, he headed for a chamber by the wall. A brick room. Charms at its lintel.

Stallo moved very fast.

The door was not locked. The man entered and pulled the door to. It was warm within, a two-bar heater running, the chamber illuminated by its red leam.

Stallo, in the dim within, said, —Hello mate.

[57]

The light comes up at the edges of the world and Maur’s car glows. She shakes her arms and legs. She tells the huayruro seeds in her pockets.

She passes the necessary time within the town. The world feels impatient. At the hour listed in the letter she left for Stallo she returns to the moor.

Here again ahead of her runs that image of Ewan as a boy, the happiness in his body as he plays alone, outside. She runs over and over the scant story of when Yew met Stallo. She has her pistol.

Stallo waits for her at Rough Tor. She approaches him in the sweeping stonescape and he reads from the low plaque. He is tense with energy.

“ ‘Blah blah given to the nation in memory of those who lost their lives while serving in the 43rd (Wessex).’ You see?” He indicates the pluton. “Ta very much, fallen.” Stallo and his court of the ruined!

“Are you ready?” she says. “I told you I’d be here. Are you ready to talk through it?”

“I’ll show you,” he says. “Come with me.”

He leads her to his van.

“Alright,” he says, and leans on the metal and takes a big breath. “So here it is. I’ve not been idle. Here’s what we’re doing. Look, since we split—well. Let’s just say I’ve had time, and I’ve used it. I’ve got a base. Rigged up six ways to Sunday, nothing gets in without invitation and nothing gets out. I’ve got that crystal radio. Remember? I’ve been getting better at tuning it. Triangulating the source. So I know where to aim. You stand just outside the circle—I’ll get it strong enough, you know I can do it—and instead of you hiding I can amplify what’s already happening with you, but bend it, just a hair. You remember you saw those lenses? So it’ll be off—it won’t be coming at you, but right into the cage.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sniff you, and in it comes. I crank you up, it won’t wait for its DA, VA people. That’s the bet. Because it can’t. We drop the weight of fucking knowledge on Old Pal like stone on glass. With it held there like that. And when it breaks—when it really breaks—then we’ll see what the world turns into. Don’t look at me like that, you know the cost of waiting. And it was you came looking for me. Good on you. You’re scared and I am too. But listen. This might be the last time we can do this before it figures itself out completely. And really comes into its own. And when it’s done, if it’s done, you and I’ve got whatever our business is to deal with. We won’t be thanked but we’ll know. We owe this. You do. To Ewan too.”

—

He drives. “I could give a speech,” he says.

“You just did.”

“Another one. A pep talk. This place is absofuckinglutely chock-full of the dead. Some of them are bound to listen.” He punched the dash with his free hand. “I am excited. Excited.”

“You’ve dealt with it before. What’s different?”

“Apart from you?” He laughs. “This time we need, and have, containment, measurement, and antiphase.”

This land could be on repeat. Waves made manifest in stone and old tree.

“That’ll work?” Maur says. She keeps her pistol on her lap, aimed at him. “Tell me what happened,” she says. “The last time.”

“The last time. I tracked it down. It was called right into place to put a stop to the world. I think it had been out there waiting a very long time and it wanted to play, and that’s the worst thing you can imagine. I think the person who invited it in to play was a very grumpy old sod who did not want to play. Anyway I found it, that was the hardest bit. And with a bit of help, did the business. Up to a point. Not entirely, as we now know. This time, we can switch that around. Bring it to us.”

She gestures for him to go on.

“What calls itself Old Pal is a vector of interspersal, yeah?” Stallo says. “It’s manifesting at frequencies way out of usual range. No surprise you might say, it’s always done that, but now the phase shift between intervals is an even sharper ɣ-coefficient than before. That’s a different spread of energetics. Null point and vertex period amped up. You can slip the S-peak as much as you want but in this state there’s no real distinction between distortion and sig, and the whole time you’re getting bogged down in that the duty cycle’s going haywire. Is it any wonder I’ve been staying down below the noise threshold? Once I clocked APD wasn’t doing a fucking thing, I admit it, I lost my nerve. But with you here, it changes what I’m seeing. I was making progress on that mountain, you know. Bi- and tri- and even quadpolar stuff that’s fritzing with the BEF. It’s about the rate of decay now. We can push that.” He does not meet Maur’s eyes. “Which is all to say, with a bit of modulation at the discontinuities, there’s a shift. The possibility of deflection.”

Clouds have come, so they proceed through new dark.

“Okay, so we have a chance?” Maur says. “What does all that stuff mean?”

“I was wondering if you’d ask,” Stallo says. “I just won a bet with myself. It doesn’t mean a fucking thing.” He brings up his elbow fast and expert above Maur’s eyes.

Light explodes in her head. Maur comes blinking back to herself and tries to raise her hand with the pistol to pull the trigger though a dead man at the wheel doesn’t sound good but too late the weapon’s gone. He steers with his right hand pushing his left into each of her pockets as she rocks, searching her while he drives, pulling out her strings of red seeds, and he hits her again and she’s gone at least a few seconds and when she opens her eyes he has her pistol or another pointing at her, still steering with his other hand.

“You stupid fuck,” she struggles to say. Her voice slurs and every syllable hurts. “You stupid bastard, what the fuck are you doing?”

“I told you,” he says, “I had company, for a long while. It left for the last time when your lad shuffled off. I never wanted it but it’s the principle. Maybe it runs in the family, eh, whatever it is about you that Old Pal likes. Think you know about Fez?” he says. “Why do you think you’re here? Saint fucking Fez wouldn’t do you but she was never stupid, of course she was scared of you. Of what you brought. Kept you away from her place but she might still get you to do the business. How’d you think you got out? She outsourced her hunting. I tell a lie, you know, that wasn’t all cobblers, what I said. It’s true it’s about the rate of decay. I was never running. I was looking for you. Whatever it is with you, I can use it. Again.” Out and in and out, in she comes and goes. “As to Old Pal. Like I said, Maur,” Stallo says. “Ever since you’ve been gone I haven’t been able to get its attention. Finding it’s still the hardest part. And it’s ignoring me.” That he bellows.

Then: “Since you fucked off I’ve started to think it never was after me. Whatever. Anyway. Now we can get its attention, like we agreed.”

Old Time

Bowler did not even look at first in Stallo’s direction. When he did his face was thinner than ever, and hard and all-over lines. He laughed a very little and nodded and took off his coat and hat and hung them on hooks by the flimsy door and turned in the cramped space to the table where he was awaited.

—Alright? he said. —Alright, Stallo?

From an icebox by the primly made camp bed he took a bottle and from a sideboard two plastic cups. He pulled a chair over and sat across from where Stallo waited with his pistol rested on the table.

—Hello, mate, Bowler said.

—Been a while, Stallo said.

Bowler poured two measures. He pushed one to Stallo, who flicked it with the index finger of his left hand. Lifted it and sniffed it and watched the rings move across its surface. He drank it and it was only water.

—You got my messages then? Bowler said.

—Yeah. Thanks. Terrific. And it was good to work together in the islands. A lot of people should be very grateful to you for sending…He paused. —A what, division? Even if they don’t know they are. Couldn’t have done it without you. Stallo gave a theatrical shudder and looked around. —Couldn’t you have hidden out somewhere warm? For a while I thought you was in the jungle.

—We were. At one point. We move about.

—Yeah well I know now, don’t I?

—Been all over.

—I know.

—It’s good to see you.

The heater glowed orange at them.

—What you been up to then? Stallo said.

—Oh, you know. This and that.

—This is quite a thing you’ve got going. Stallo gestured to the town outside yet inside. You could hear it through the window. —What’s with those strung-together things? The sculpture things. All pointy.

Bowler said, —I call them apport-pourris.

—Very nice. Not just apport though, I saw the hagstones and bottles and whatever else too. Can’t fool me.

—Anything we can use. Back in the Unit, we never thought creatively enough about mixing things up.

—Is this the new wisdom?

—Call it what you want.

—I take it you’re the reason behind the apport shortage for the rest of us? How d’you do that? Siphon ’em off?

—Stallo, it’s been, what, nearly twenty years? We’re old men, mate. D’you think I’ve been sitting still all that time? Or my people? Any more than you have? What is it you want to ask?

—Why do you think I want to ask you anything?

Bowler clasped his hands together. —Well you’re here. I never, ever thought you’d actually come.

—You invited me didn’t you?

—And like I say, I never thought you’d come.

They were companionable and quiet awhile. Listening to a clattering and mournful percussion somewhere.

—I do owe you, Stallo said. —It’s not like I’d have walked off the Malvinas without your help. Very impressive. Could hardly believe it. Not that I remember much.

Bowler did not look at him. —Wasn’t just me. Your mate Rak got me word.

—Thought so. But really he just provided the target, didn’t he? The actual forces were yours.

—You know…

—And you got me the transcript from Naples?

Bowler didn’t reply.

—Why’d you help me? Stallo said.

—In the Falklands? What sort of question’s that? As if I wouldn’t. As if I’d hear about you getting tangled up with something like that and not try to lend a hand. Come on.

—Even with me stealing something so precious from your family?

—Come on, mate, I know it wasn’t like that. You’re talking years-old shit.

—So was it for my sake or the world’s sake?

Bowler looked quizzical. He looked around at the clutter of his room and the dark window and he put the cup to his mouth and took tiny sips as if they were of strong spirit.

—Well, he said. —We knew something was happening but it was when Rak told us all your stuff…There was a fair bit riding on it all. More to worry about than just you. No offence.

—And if I’d fucked up, you’d still have dealt with it, would you?

Bowler inclined his head. —If we could’ve, without you. As if we could even have found the fucking thing, let alone got its attention. All we knew was it was spooking around, eating us up. Our lot. It was you it was circling. Like you don’t know. It wanted you there.

—Fuck you talking about?

—I could never tell, Bowler said, —how much you believed your own gor blimey.

—Why would it want me? Stallo said.

—I’ve never been quite sure. Honestly it’s mixed messages out there.

—You’d know, would you?

—I don’t say I know everything but I bet we can read it better than you can. And we know it’s there and admit it, which is more than you can say for some. It did want you, the way I figure it. And yet and yet. Sometimes it was more like it wanted something that just happened to be where you were.

—And what am I supposed to do with that?

—Mate, I have no clue. Don’t shoot the messenger.

—I’ll shoot who I want.

They smiled, not kindly and not for long.

—I saw things, Stallo said slowly. —Out there. You couldn’t tell from that whether he meant the streets of Apportville or the world beyond. —What was that on patrol?

—You want me to come up with another name for them? Bowler said. —Didn’t we have enough?

—That, mate, was never a lespry. What else you got? You got revs doing the pyramid? Is there a fucking tower on patrol stamping around?

—Don’t believe everything you hear, Bowler said.

—No anti-imperialist conspiracy of architecture, then? Stallo put on the prim voice of a pretend intellectual. —No revenant-edifice insurgent nexus?

—Look, you can take the piss all you want. But nothing’s impossible. The Reds can do what they want, just leave me out of it. And as regards things like that, like those pyramids, well. Might be that’s a load of cobblers made up by screaming settlers, but don’t be too proud to steal ideas. Use your enemies’ nightmares against them. Stallo, we always had way too narrow an idea of what the lespries were and how they worked. Fuck’s sake, you were on the islands, you saw that thing….

—That’s the same as a Roused, is it?

—In the way that a minnow and a pike are the same.

—A minnow and a pike and Tiamat, Stallo said.

And Bowler did not say a thing.

—Don’t act like this is some magic kingdom, Stallo said. —Ebony and Ivory. Deadony and live-ery. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, I seen the traps outside the doors. You’re as bad as the Unit.

—I’ve never said it was easy. We’re still figuring it out. Of course we have protections and prods and that, to make it work. On both sides.

—The revs got traps for you too?

—If you like, Bowler said. —There’s a way to go. We don’t understand everything about each other. We’re trying, though. Croome’s wrong. You can get to know their stories. Although to be fair I was never sure how much she actually believed all the stuff she said.

Stallo spoke again. It took him two tries. —Who was it in my cellar? From the island?

Bowler let out a hiss of exasperation and there was affection in it, and Stallo’s stomach tensed.

—“Who”? Bowler said.

—Bowler drop the raggedy prophet thing for a minute. I’ve seen you shitfaced with crisps down your front. You sent help to the islands. Was it part of that in my trap? If so, who?

—You’re right to have got past “what” to “who,” Bowler said, —but you’ve got to get all the way through that and out again into a new “what.” A different one.

—I swear you didn’t used to be this irritating.

—I’m trying to help you, Stallo. “Who was it?” ain’t the question.

—What do you mean? Just a random, was it?

—I can’t answer that because there’s no simple single answer. If you insist, yeah, I mean you could say that, “just any old ghost.” That’s not exactly wrong, but you’re missing a lot if you say that….

—What about the cube? Stallo said.

Bowler took his time. —You’re still not thinking different enough. Why would anything work for them like it does for us? A cube like what you’ve seen, that’s a compromise idea, something like that.

—You don’t know what you’re fucking with, Stallo said.

—No. That’s true at least. Worth a punt, though, eh? I’ve got responsibilities now.

How Bowler said that, how he glanced away. There came to Stallo the click-click of half-heard notions, a recollection of the cheerio in the wetlands. The sounds that night.

—Have you now? Stallo said. —Well congratulations. Dad.

Bowler said nothing.

—This whole time, Stallo said, —I’ve been hearing about a kid. Warned about it. One reason I started looking for you was to ask for your help again. To do whatever you did before. Because I thought it must be Old Pal had left a baby somewhere. I even thought maybe it was attracting attention to itself as part of a plan, so we wouldn’t notice its fucking scion in the background. But that’s not it, is it? It was never Old Pal’s. Fuck me Bowler. I’m impressed. I can’t even imagine…to raise something like that all those years…

—No you can’t, Bowler said.

—It was never Old Pal’s, Stallo said. —It wasn’t…Sheila disappearing. She was down there that night. He had to pause. —Is she still? In some cell? Did she get herself in trouble? With that thing? Or did you? You both were there, you both—

—So did a few of us, Bowler said. Then what was waiting. —So did you, mate. What if the kid’s got your eyes?

When he could, Stallo said, —Don’t try that.

—Does it matter? Bowler said. —What matters is this place.

—Not the kid?

—Listen to you. What about kids plural? Don’t they all matter? He seemed to hear how that sounded and simperingly added, —I believe the children are our future.

Stallo laughed. —Do you even know whose it is?

But he saw that Bowler didn’t care, that the child was his whatever.

—You don’t think it’s a bit sick-making? Stallo said. —This Mr. Spock merging of two worlds blah blah. Is that what you’re going for? Even if it was possible, why the fuck would it help? I never thought you were sentimental.

—You always thought I was sentimental, Bowler said.

—Yeah, alright, I did. You were sentimental about everything. Including your grandad.

—Fuck’s sake! This hasn’t had a fucking shit-smear to do with fucking grandads or thievery for two decades, you prick. You know that. What’s your game? I’m not even saying he wasn’t part of whatever that thing was, any more than O’Leary wasn’t, or forest hantus. But if it was, it long afuckinggo started being part of something more important. It walks with you. And the kid is proof that it can work, us and them. Like there even is an us and them. Bowler brought his fingers together. —Get out of brass’s plans, Stallo. As if O’Leary wasn’t chosen to be on that patrol—as if they didn’t know what he was like. Like a pilot with something about him just happens to forget how to fly over a djebel where someone with the right kind of ITKO to fuck with him just happens to be waiting. He was a sacrifice. And then Hook brings you there…you, with whatever was already in you. It was you helped Rouse him!

Finally Stallo said, —If you see patterns everywhere—

—I don’t understand you, Stallo, I really don’t. What are you doing here?

Stallo looked out through the hut’s window because he didn’t want to consider that question yet.

—Like I say, Stallo said, —nice place you’ve got here.

Beyond the crack of the heater, he heard the clatter of Apportville.

—In a shabby sort of way, Bowler said.

—Don’t do yourself down. All the lespries want to come. Like I say, I just thought they were shitting themselves or getting eaten by Old Pal—

—Enough were.

—Even before the islands, though, some found their way here. Like I did.

—No matter what you do, Bowler said, —eventually people get sloppy.

—That they do. Listen to us old soldiers!

—Look at you, Bowler said. —Look at me! When did we get old?

—Time’ll do that.

—It will, the cunt.

Bowler reached over the top of the pistol and gave Stallo’s wrist a quick and friendly squeeze.

—How did you find us?

—Croome gave me a start. If you ask me she misses you.

Stallo looked around again as if at a child, here. Raised by snow and dust, playing with the rubble and the quiet, with the cold angels it made. Suckled on shadows. This in him, Stallo understood, was yearning.

—Fuck off, she misses fuck, Bowler said. —She misses opportunities is what she misses.

—She told me you helped her.

—Enemy’s enemy is all, although she was too much of a coward to be anyone’s enemy, really. The shit they were doing down there. He stared into the past. —Rusty apport blades, cultivating apport lockjaw. Apport gas, so if it kills you and you come back it kills you again now you can’t die any more.

—Literally her job, R&D, Stallo said. —And they ain’t the dead—

—Teacher’s pet, Bowler said. —I say they are.

—She told me about your signal, Stallo said. —Your call.

—Wondering where I learnt that? Don’t need to if you can nick the basics. Adder Fog. Like I said, for a smart bloke you’re not that interested, Stallo. Do you even know why you’re here? I invited you here even though I thought you’d tell yourself you hated it, because maybe that would convince you it matters. Sometimes the way you took the piss…I always got the impression you wanted something.

This last Bowler said with care. Then, quickly: —Seriously, mate, come on.

—You think I’d join you? it took Stallo moments to say. —Is this your welcome speech?

—Well, you came, didn’t you? You fucking made it. You tell me my people messed up, but it’s not like we didn’t leave word out there for you. I fucking invited you. And here you are. Why?

—Told you, Stallo said. —I came looking because I thought there was another end of the world on its way. Old Pal’s kid. Look how that turned out.

—Bollocks, Bowler said. —You realise after all that that you’ve got the wrong end of the stick and you barely bat an eyelid? Stallo, why are you here?

—Curiosity.

—Stallo got curious? I think if you find us, you were supposed to.

Stallo knocked his pistol butt against the table. —People don’t think what they think they think, he said. —That’s why it’s pointless to ask why someone thinks something. Or even what they think.

He watched Bowler rehearse things in his head.

—I reckon Maisie talked to me, Stallo said.

His own words made him gasp.

—Old Pal made her, I swear to God, Stallo said. —Just a word or two. He would not blink. —I don’t know if it was her I heard, really, her rev, whatever. It was her voice. Maybe it was Old Pal putting it on. Maybe he Roused her and made her talk just to fuck with me. Maybe there’s no difference between the two of them now. I’ll go you one better. I think it was Old Pal killed her in the first place. To play with me.

Cold fingers of the sea, from beneath. Stallo looked away from Bowler’s sympathy.

—You’ve been waiting for me, you say. Why?

—Are you joking? Bowler said. —You’re Stallo.

—

—You know when I started hearing rumours about you going rogue I thought fair play to you. I thought you’d gone full Patty Hearst, off your rocker, but I respected it. I mean, an actual idea. Taking a stand. For the blah blah wretched of the earth. A load of shite but each to their own. I was proud of you. But this? Stallo pointed in a big circle in the air. —This? What are you even doing? What are you trying to prove? What even is this?

—Will you stop? Bowler said. —You know what? Fuck the living, alright? Fuck them. They had a go. Look how that panned out.

—“They.”

Bowler smiled. —I’m not self-hating and I’m not a racialist. I shouldn’t generalise. Fuck most of the living. Stallo, listen. It might not’ve been OP spoke to you at all. It might’ve been Maisie, on her own. Will you let me tell you what you’re here for? That’s what I think you want. We know we can’t stay here forever. I know how good you are, but if you’ve found us someone else will. So we’ll have to start packing up again. We could use you. And I think that’s what you want.

—You going to make me a citoyen? Stallo said when he could. —Like what was in my cellar? Which your messenger came and took?

Into the cold chamber came from outside a brief bestial sound. Bringing other animals to Stallo’s mind. Sleek-stroke horses from Chauvet caves, Widow-Maker, Deimos and her ravenous sisters, dogs grim and faithful, Black Shuck, Moddey Dhoo, watchers of the dead even in so infra dig, so make-do-and-mend a borderland as this, These are two dogs that stand in the purgatory of Mars and alarm souls of the Twelve Gates, black images of that chained duo of the Diwan Abatur. The hounds snarled on the late road.

Bowler said, —Maybe it was Maisie.

Maisie maybe maybe Maisie. 1 John 4:1, well that’s all well and good but easier said than done. And when, Stallo wondered of himself, had he got so biblical?

—Old Pal was there though, Stallo said.

—Even so. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t her. I know I know, not your dead, newly born. But even if they are giddim, what if we just listen for once? You don’t think they’re trying to get us a message? Stop listening for something in the quiet and listen to it. It’s embarrassing is what it is, how we carry on.

Vade mecum. A small smile took Stallo. —You John the Baptist?

—You always were too clever, Bowler said. —Even now you still aren’t curious, you just want to be. You wish you were. Which isn’t nothing, but it isn’t enough. So you tell me: which bit of you’s going to win?

—Nice, Stallo said. —Nice that little bit just then. Good cop then bad cop all on your tod. How’s it going, d’you think?

Bowler licked his lips. —Sometimes I feel like you do understand everything, more than any of us. More than Croome. Way more than me. Then other times it’s like you’re an idiot or you don’t care. Do you think you want to know? You know the dead have—

—Cults, Stallo said.

—Beliefs.

—And what’s your little messiah got to say about these murmuring years? Stallo said. —I’m not one of your dozy little fans all starstruck and lost, and I’m not one of your dead neither. I’m not interested in your mangy little Cockaigne. What kind of soppy cunt do you take me for? What’s your angle?

—Stallo, you came here.

—Talk about coming in. I saw you in your apport saddle, big man. Quite the entrance.

—Stallo.

—I see them machines outside. You trying to make your own cube? You remember Mardell, that we snared in Russia? That was haunted itself? I think they cut it and its own haint apart. Talk about fission power—

—That’s not what we’re doing—

—Oh I know, you wouldn’t do that, it’s all apports with you. How did you get so many? Digging in a thing dump? I think maybe they come first. So you found a seam?

—I wish, Bowler said. —Give us a tick. We wouldn’t be the only ones trying.

Making friendship machines? However the components were obtained. Squeeze a lever and a ball rolls and a spring twangs and sticks hinge and at the other end, an apport stick rubs a haunt’s back? Is that the plan? —You making friends? Stallo said. —Is that how you get to get cozy without them fucking withering you? Without joining them? Are they your pets now? Are you theirs?

—Calm down.

—And why should your little hybrid be a fucking Chosen One you grandiose cunt?

Bowler looked into the mouth of the gun and up at Stallo’s eyes. Stallo saw him make judgements.

—What did you do to me? Stallo said.

—I haven’t done anything to you.

—Your messenger, Stallo said. —The old man. I’ve known him for years and I’ve never seen him like that. It was an ugly mess but it was something new. If you’ve lost your soul and you can’t be alive maybe that’s the next best thing.

Bowler spoke very carefully. —The world doesn’t have to be like it is.

—It doesn’t have to be, no, Stallo said. —But it is, though, isn’t it?

He had not known he was here to make a decision, for a decision to occur.

—Why are you so angry? Bowler said. —Why did you come?

—I’ll tell you why. There was a ringing in Stallo’s ears. —To ask you a question. We both know what really happened on the island, don’t we? Up against Old Pal. You can be honest. So here it is, here’s my question. I didn’t make it, did I?

He heard Bowler through the thrum of his own blood, across an infinite distance. —What do you think happened? Bowler was saying.

—I came by some of your storehouses, Stallo said. —I bet you’ve got stuff of mine in there.

Stallo could pre-hear all Bowler’s arguments, If it came here it’s nothing to do with me, I don’t make their decisions.

—I didn’t wake up on Gran Isla. I sent Old Pal packing, or we did if you like, and I was at the sharp end of your bloody signal, and I didn’t make it out. There was a Roused in the trap when muggins here woke up. Not my control. You sent that poor old codger to get it. Where is it? I think we both know who it was. What it was. What got Roused. What was under that sheet in my house. It was me, wasn’t it?

I am the king of the dead.

—

Stallo heard Bowler saying, —You’re here because you wanted to come, and he said, —Bowler, I don’t know where I am.

Bowler’s fingers closed upon the edge of the table. And though it was not as if Stallo felt anger, despair, that still-not-quite-final decision, but as if he observed them, he allowed that such energies passed through him. He saw Bowler tense. Saw a certain last plea rise in Bowler and a rejection in himself.

—What is this? Stallo said, put his hand against his chest.

A sound came then. The touch of a small hand upon the door.

And Bowler was shouting.

—No, he shouted, —no, Fez, get out, go! and Bowler was rising and surprising Stallo by not going for him but flipping that table, and there came a high cry of fear from outside and a child running, Bowler sending everything crashing, and Stallo trying to match his old friend for speed but as if he were in muddy sable water at the bottom of the void, thrashing in the reflection of what hung over him, an emanation from a God unknown, and he Stallo floating away from himself as if he Stallo too were drowning, drowned, alone and not alone at once, dangling above a hadal zone, like you-know-who he knew well, had known, blind, come back, speaking silent water.

Stallo hauled himself back into the body. Moved as Bowler came for him. Stallo squeezed that old tool, the gun.

Bowler spun. Blood, an outstretch, mouth open, a look on his face of such everything, such anger and sadness and loss and disappointment as he fell.

He killed his old comrade, and Stallo learnt as he did that it had not been his plan to do so, that no he did not know why he had come to this place, that he had had no intentions to which he could give words, that for all that now as Bowler collapsed pumping out blood he Stallo would find that fleeing child because it seemed that he would end this, that what Stallo did now he too did full of disappointment.

[58]

Out and in and out, in, to come back, in pain, Maur, shaking on the dusty floor of some shithole boarded-up building in an industrial estate abutting the moor. Tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth. She is not beside as he said but in the centre of a pentacle of wire. She shakes with the beat in her skull and with rage and shame at herself. Things watch from beyond the five points. A dark football. A desiccated insect on a spike. The rafters of this big bare room. Stallo stands by batteries and a generator in green light.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m sorry about all this. Still pretty much the plan as discussed. Pretty much. Only it’s now. And a couple of other tweaks. What do you know about what your boy was doing in the Unit? Looking for apports. Including the fairy-story ones. He wanted to talk about it. And they can’t have that. So they cut him loose.”

Maur remembers that look on her son, that night in London. Biting her lip because she sensed she’d got in the way of him telling her something. He hadn’t said anything but had wanted to.

Mmmm mmmm mmmm, she says. Oh the things she would say to Stallo. When she shakes she feels the drag of wires.

“Oh yeah?” he says. “Well I’m sorry about some of it.”

Mmmmm, Maur says.

“I agree,” he says.

Mmm.

Stallo turns to her. “Is that right?” He puts his hands on his hips. “What did she say about me, eh? Fez? Don’t worry I know you ain’t going to tell. My other question is, what did she say about you? Why are you here, Maur, not her and her merry lot? Tell me how you found her and then got out and back here. What it is she wants? What’s in this for her?”

He waits as if for an answer.

“I went back and forth on it,” he says, “but in the end Croome’s right, you can’t learn individual Rouseds. Right their bloody tedious wrongs. No matter what your mate and her dad might say. There’s something about you, Maur. It’s how we got here. And like I said, we can use that. But I lied, I can’t deflect a signal like yours. And you always have to be ready to actually pay something for a summons. If I’ve learnt anything it’s that. Jesus, listen to me going on.

“It couldn’t stay away if it sniffs you, and then maybe I can get its attention. I want to ask it a question.”

He pulls a lever and Maur’s ears sing. She aims a furious distress signal into the sky. From within herself. These blue lights at the junction points, these five angles, glow.

“What I want to know is, do I just not exist, then? We’ve got unfinished business, me and it. But it just ignores me?”

Maur strains.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” Stallo says. “Since you went. Thing is it was no effort to keep away from it with you gone. Couldn’t do anything else.” He turns from his work to meet her eye. “I swear to god it did used to come after me. But you disappear and I think you’re dead and there am I girded for it to come, take me like it never did, have the fucking courtesy to eat me, what kind of necrophage are you, what kind of terrible spirit eh? Call yourself a devil and you don’t even damn me? And does it come? Does it fuck. I’m not enough for it? Alright then. Give it what it wants. I need to know why I never got took.”

Maur is more afraid than she has ever been, even with everything, because she looks at Stallo and sees that he’s not insane, that there’s a pellet at the core of him that is absolute zero, fearful and cold and curious, but that he has decided to behave as if he disbelieves that anyone else is real simply because he has decided that that is what is expected. That these are his orders. As if it cost nothing to believe in nothing, as if he liked the symmetry.

Mmm mmm mmm. Now is the time when something will happen. Intercession. The snick of disappearance. As in the car, with Strude. It does not come. She feels the crackling of Stallo’s current; the glow shifts as he cranks up power. Amplifies her baiting signal.

“There’s only so long I could be pleased with myself for getting away. Nothing like realising you’re not being chased for completely losing your patience with running. So I started to think—yeah—maybe I should go find you, if you’re not dead and you’re what it wants. But I thought finding you would be tricky.” He gives her a smile. “You getting all this?” he says suddenly to the air. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. Where the fuck’d you go? What about me? Why’d you fucking leave me?”

—

wet with her leakage, look at the darkness around you, Maur. The light has moved. Stallo cannot banish all apology nor all fear from his face at the scale of what comes.

“He’s part of what got us here,” he says. “Your boy. I think you know that.” He shouts again. “No blocks now—let’s fucking have it! You’ll take Towns but not me?” Maur’s eyes open wide and she rocks.

A rattle. Not engines but something deeper. The chair bucks and glass chatters in its panes like teeth in a dying mouth. Outside something sounded. A wall of air slams the room and the floor cracks. And she feels the nearness of presences with backward faces and war-skins of ash outriding a deep laugh. As if this place was built for this moment. A doorway bangs open onto dark and spreading like leaves, like a canopy, darklight gushed in, and Maur screams into the cotton as this new thing rose, wind tips her, where’s Stallo where’s Stallo?, she can’t see him as she hinges back, her head goes back and down and hits and the returned light and pain go white inside her leaving no other space as if they have always been waiting

from beneath the sheet, a voice called

boo | bheaa | hou | ibú
baf |  | hoho-hahahuehuehue | kekeke
pöö | hihihi | nyihihi | yooh
hueueue | boe | hu huu | byaa
möähöhäoo | pshshsh | nyihihihi | tot-tot-tot
hú | ŵŵŵ | buuu | wooo

and then comes silence.

XXX

Miss in Abysm

Into the Down

Once outside a noisy town beyond Kabul Stallo squatted in what had been the dwelling of a seer. He found folded-paper amulets of Quranic verses, and the whole room retained a sense of apportation, but he was uncertain of the nature of the lamb skull, wheel, rifle handle that he found in the earth of the floor. Stallo told local taweez naweez that he sought a child. That she or he had come from—and then he might say Apportville or some local euphemism. And would make a sign.

There were more wild revs out there now, weren’t there? In Sofia a trace of old-man energy probed at him in his half-sleep, too weak to do more than tickle his nostrils. —I may be empty, he said, —but you can’t come in. On the coast of Germany the barking of his dog woke him to unseeable off-scrape of a once-child blowing into his face. Stallo scattered turmeric but this was not the one he sought, this whisper was all suppletion, poltergeist-wild, hyperactive with the traumas of unlife. He could not see it but he sent it away.

Lead after pointless lead. Maybe his bones knew why he had to track the child but they did not give him the reason, so, throughout his long complex journey from the north, grew his sense that Fuck his bones and this for a game of soldiers.

England as always a letdown. He wanted to mark a moment. In the second half of things, having kicked more than one man to death, he stood in a big stationery shop near Goodge Street amid pink pens and spiral-patterned glittered diaries, erasers shaped like animals, faux-leather-covered journals on each of the 192 lined pages of which he might not bring down a pen.

The city didn’t tie him now. He lived quietly with the dog in market towns through off-book efforts and money left years back in strongboxes in the basements of banks and wrapped in oilcloth in the hollows of trees. Amid tools and weapons he checked, cleaned, set down again for another long rest. Such as children in the Aurisina woods had found, and ramblers near Velp. Gladio oversights! They never would, but Lord knows what anyone would make of what they’d turn up in Stallo’s wake if they dug: a pocket pistol, bundled notes, mendacious documents with his own young face upon them. Gauss multidetectors, hygrometers, thermometers, a unit extrapolated from Cornell and Gauld’s designs, the clacking child’s toy they called a Jacob’s Ladder.

Stallo passed through bedsits he’d secreted into the system for his use alone with requisitioned funds. Short-term lets. His dog had no name and it loved him with uncanine quiet intensity. He watched it investigate whenever wherever it seemed moved to.

He did manual labour. Worked farms and found something in the frankness of animals’ stares. He would call to them in their languages. Well that’s that then, he thought. That’s the call done and everything back to normal. He thought that as if he believed it. When silence became too much he found people with whom to speak, in bars or cafés, at work in public gardens (cash in hand or through an agency according to forgery), in bed before or after sex.

—You know when you incorporate real sounds into your dreams? he said.

—Yeah it always fits perfectly, the woman said.

He had not thought she was listening. Mostly he might as well speak to the accidental faces carved in architecture by acid rain. This one not yet thirty. She looked at the scars on him. The room in a shared flat was decked out with posters and creased books. Stallo decided in her stare to decide something. That he was back in himself. Keeping soul and body together.

That night the minutes and days of the previous twenty years were hazier than the dreams of which he spoke. There had been food, words, sex, skies, feeling his skin, shitting, laughing, watching. Deaths, standings at the foot of beds, crawlings through snow, cold islands.

—It never interrupts it, the woman said. —The dream.

She was nothing like Maisie. Her name was Lora. She was from Crawley; she mocked herself as suburban. Her parents were Chagossian and she was glad he’d heard of the islanders and their exile, and said to him that he only liked her out of dispossession porn. He said, —Yeah, I love it, and she laughed.

He had come to care for her little ginger cat for how bravely it investigated him, picking across the cover ready to bolt, sniffing, for how it kept watch on but did not flee his dog. Nineteen ninety-something, this must have been. When he looked back. Early in that ten stretch for sure. And everything was waiting, another trench between then and now. You’d think that newly refilled, having abdicated uncertain kingship, Stallo would be present. But like memory time itself came in blurts for him now even as it occurred.

—You’ve had your fingers in your cunt, he said. That subtle pungence put him in mind of his wife. The cat strained into a voluptuous curve of alarm and stared at the corner.

The woman said, —Yeah, and drew a line under Stallo’s nose in it. —Hey. Pay attention to me. So Stallo looked away from the cat.

These were the last days of some old time, not the start of a new, it would turn out.

His sodden cig end in the toilet was everything wrong. He could not flush it. It was as if it had been waiting for him always. When Lora went to piss Stallo examined the spot the cat mistrusted. Ninety-nine per cent of the time it was an insect or something.

Old Pal was gone. The signal was gone. Stallo was probably Stallo, and if he had no green-man companion, well, he had a dog. He passed his old poking stick through space.

Lora had approached him on Castlemorton Common. He had walked among the young people in their world’s-end chic. He had seen himself as they saw him, ageing gangrel in dirty clothes, to be eyed with suspicion or clapped on the back in ostentatious welcome. He had tied up the animal. It had been a long time since he smoked weed. How long did he dance? Took him back to parties on the spit, the pleasures of Beefheart and Zappa, shared with those on whom he’d spy. This new music was textureless to him at first, but in for a penny, and feeling the speakers’ push, there was no room left in you for any silent voice. Lora invited him back to London.

—I’m too old, he said.

—You’re not for me, she said, —so how can you be too old for me?

—I didn’t say too old for you, did I? I don’t know how I ended up here.

—Isn’t that how getting older works?

Lora and her friends danced in the parking lot of Brent Cross.

—I used to be married. You and her you’re like different species.

—Thanks very much.

—I don’t mean anything bad.

So why did he think of Maisie as often as he did? I’ll choose this, Stallo thought. Not only the circumstance but the he the circumstance elicited. I’ll be this man, he decided, sincerely enough.

Years since Russia. Yes, sometimes he would wake, cat hiding, dog looking in dog fear at some line not for Stallo to see. He would take up his stick. Lora would reach for him, you could see her fear. Stallo appraised her youth and those idiot clothes and he saw the blackness of her and he could not have given a name to his upswell of feelings, thoughts, something like See?, but to whom was he showing anything? A certain lustfulness but had he not lusted after everyone he had fucked? A memory of Dean, which was silly. A thought about a boy in his basement. Almost a wheedling, as if to Bowler, and he had to stop that strand in its tangled tracks. And think, I’m done, it’s done, I did it, this is what happens after.

No news that there’d always be violence in him. He was practiced in not giving self-reflection space, when he felt his fists clench. It didn’t surprise him that he knew the location of every person in any room he entered who looked as if they knew how to fight. Drinking with Lora and Spider and Shaun and Sharon in whatever pub or someone’s creaking camper van, yes, he listened to whatever sounds approached. It did not trouble him too much that that was so and he let those routines run while he focused on the drugs and blather.

This’ll do.

A dance party on the fifth floor of a condemned garage far south of London. Stallo near the centre between oil-stained pillars, hands on Lora, who shook her glow tubes, Stallo wry to learn he knew some pounding tracks (“The Bouncer” by Kicks Like a Mule, “R Type” by Jo, he liked this one). On his same old automatic, yes, listening for police, watching those young people who shyly excitedly quickly slowly ascended from the stairwells in their skimpy best despite the weather to join them. Maybe stare at him as if he were a mascot.

He danced spliff smoke in his mouth and lungs and one man came through that fire door in the same sort of clobber as the others and stood still and that was when Stallo’s attention came to his forebrain and nodding to the beat still he itemised the man as best he could at this distance in this light.

White early thirties cropped hair tracksuit that looked black in the blacklight, hands in pockets maybe as if they held something, sweeping his eyes across the dance floor, and it wasn’t much for Stallo to turn away, do a little shimmy to one of those columns, watch while the eight-bit vocals shook him. To see the newcomer coming forwards not looking into the crowd like someone excited but as if seeking. So Stallo guided Lora with his dancing of which she always made fun farther into the darkness and the man stopped again and you could see his uncertainty. He turned without taking his hand from his pocket and unnoted by any save Stallo went back to the door.

Count to five. Listen as if he might hear a child’s voice in the beat. Stallo smacked Lora on the bum and walked as if to the designated latrine-spot on the opposite end of the floor to turn beyond her sight and go very quickly and quietly towards far doors through which no arrivals came. He went down the steps in leaps. He hurtled out right across a bay-marked flatland empty of cars past workers’ tools to the main stairway, past teenage women who screamed as he came past and whose relieved giggles he heard behind him. He ran out past Bav and Derren manning the door and switchbacked when it closed to flatten himself against the brick.

Out after him a young man and woman. They were still visible at the edge of the forecourt when the door opened again and Stallo saw emerging the visitor he had overtaken, had come for.

He got his right arm around his neck from behind and locked it with the other and hauled him backwards into the darkness. The man was younger and quick, and he grabbed for Stallo’s fingers and Stallo pulled his arm the tighter and twisted, and when his quarry started slamming his elbow into Stallo’s left side it hurt but meant the guy knew he’d failed to get out of the choke and was going to pass out so it was just a question of seconds which Stallo helped along by yanking the held head hard into the brick until he felt his burden go limp. Dragged him around the corner while partygoers came out yards away. Heard the breath come back but not sound good.

Went through his pockets. A lock knife and a .22 Colt Cobra. When you’re putting the muzzle up against the head that’ll do. No apotropays; was this bloke even ITKO? No ID or car keys so this was a professional which was a shame because that meant there was no point Stallo waking him, because he would tell him nothing, would not even know who’d hired him. Or confess of quite what fucking sect of Stallo-hate and penitence he was a devotee.

Stallo said he wanted to get out of London. For months he fixed walls and windows in Gloucestershire barns.

Lora did not tell Stallo to leave when he got in fights with others in the crew, when he broke the nose of some boy in his twenties who called himself What?man, question mark and all, because she said he deserved it for that name alone, but you could see how she looked at Stallo now.

What had transpired outside the rave brought him no relief or sense of an ending. He’d had a hope that the out-of-jointness of the world might ease but his sleep was no better. Sometimes the dog bared its teeth at night and Lora shouted at him to control his fucking animal.

Perhaps because it seemed to him to be what he was supposed to do, Stallo found that he came close to Lora after one such moment and raised his fist and began to punch it into the side of his own head, wondering why do that rather than hit her or the wall or whatever. She cried and told him he was crazy and he said he was sorry. He woke up and, as he had known would be the case, she was gone.

He was fifty-four. He sought and found one of those depressions he’d made years ago, then hesitated. Walked on a mile through undergrowth to another hollow that looked plausible enough and dug there instead, sitting like a child, an orphan taken to the beach by adequate foster parents. The dog watched. Stallo was smiling inside. Because what if? What if he were to turn up some other renegade’s secret, left in other times, before this slow fall into national nothing. That’s the thing about the soil. Under every square foot is a grab-bag for some mystery or other.

In the end he stopped trying to speak.

Elephant and Castle, the Heygate Estate of course. Seventh floor, kept to himself. He was one of those old men, he supposed. Not old, but you know. If he went hunting for every apport he could still track down by any means at all and piled up and drove over them with a steamroller and hammered them together, attach that to the wall, as an entrance. But. This, like all houses in which he had stopped since his return from the closed city, seemed unhaunted in specifics and nonetheless haunted.

On it rolled. These were the months he woke to the whimpering of the dog.

He missed the pretence that he was done. Resented the return of the unfinished.

So?

So he went to the coast town. Should have done this ages ago. Stallo shadowed Lionel Myton.

Behind him to a bookshop, to the café where they’d met, past a sixth-form college where girls chatted at the gate and giggled when Myton offered them cigarettes.

Myton did not once turn around to look but then would an old SOE cove? This man posting letters (to the editor, Stallo had to imagine), watching television till late with his wife beside him on the sofa her hands flittering over some task (Stallo behind bushes with the cold TV light shining), this man whispering in phone calls to some indulgent mid-level bureaucrat (so Stallo suspected), this old man’s promenades along the shore. With his wife sometimes. Myton did not hold her hand but put her arm in his, steered her a little quicker (you could tell) than she would otherwise have gone. See her careful makeup and hair done right, her wide eyes and unease.

Without her he was slower, flirting in every shop, as if he did not see the twists in the mouths of his good-sport young interlocutors, or was unmoved by it—no, in fact, Stallo saw the smile on Myton’s face continue after the visible flinch of one. You dirty old man, Stallo thought, in a Steptoe voice. You fucking cunt, Stallo thought.

One night he broke into the house. Silently he walked cramped hallways. At the under-stair cupboard or closet, he braced himself, opened the door and pushed his spear into the dark. Cladding and plaster all in place, rooms with dimensions exactly as blueprints would imply, no matter how hard Stallo’s yearning, geometries doggedly Euclidian.

He stood by Myton’s bed.

What was his old boss, seventy-five? Not so ancient. He slept while his wife stared at Stallo. Her eyes had opened when he came in and she had looked at him with exactly that guarded look he knew from her walks. He lifted his finger to his lips and she did not respond. Her expression did not alter.

Stallo imagined his own body. Raising the spear spike-down. It was you, he thought at Myton. Might as well admit it was still ultimately a question. It was you? This botherer of Whitehall secretaries. His grandest plans come to nothing, his trajectory from in- to outsider speeding up. A sour retiree with out-of-date notions doing the shopping. You could see it. Myton might remain a curiosity, a phenomenon out of time, renaissance bloke dropping references to Poetry London and sprung rhythm into ruminations on the strategy of tension, all on his way to becoming ever less. Shoved from pillar to post, granted only enough time of day to keep him from disclosing anything embarrassing.

Stallo shook Myton’s foot. The man murmured and moved and Stallo shook him again and Myton said something and raised himself on his elbows and saw and was very still.

After a while he reached for the light and Stallo said, —Don’t, and Myton pulled his arm back.

—May I at least sit up?

When Stallo did not refuse, he propped his back against the headboard. His wife stayed flat beside him, the covers to her chin.

Stallo said, —You know for a while I told myself that whatever’d happened, I was a soldier, and proud of it, and that means priorities. Revenge isn’t important. Let alone when you’re not one hundred per cent sure what it might be revenge for.

Myton sat and the woman lay, dark in the dark.

But the worst cliché would be trying to avoid the cliché. And anyway fuck’s sake who isn’t predictable? I bet I could tell you exactly what you’re going to say now.

—What do you want? Myton said.

—Ding ding! I was bang on. But then I would say that wouldn’t I?

The woman’s fingers moved on the blanket.

—I saw your charms and No Entrys on my way in, Stallo said. —Well oops because here I am. So how’ve you been? What have you been up to? Since your plans went tits-up?

Myton said nothing.

—That’s it, isn’t it? Stallo said. —I spent ages thinking, First I thought you were worried, then lackadaisical about this fucking thing out there? And all the while it’s not that you didn’t believe me. The opposite. What was my job in all this? I mean, I didn’t really help you and Brujo bring it in, even if I could’ve done or would’ve done. Was everything I did make-work?

Myton said nothing.

—Did you change your mind? Stallo said. —Did we start off on the same side, and then you…well, you tell me. What happened? I know it’s years now but cast your mind back.

—“The same side,” Myton said. —Don’t be a child.

—What’s it all about?

—Don’t you have contingency plans? Myton said.

—What is it you want?

Myton said, —What do you want?

—You’re not the first to ask, and I’ve been asking myself, Stallo said. —And also why I never had this conversation with you before. When I got back from the islands I thought about it enough times. Hand on heart, I do not know why I never. But for all that, I probably would’ve kept not bothering with you if you hadn’t sent that freelancer after me. So me being here is on you.

—What rubbish are you talking? Myton said.

Stallo turned on his torch and shone it at Myton. Who blinked and stuck his chin into the light. Stallo wondered at Myton’s uncombed hair, the creases of his face.

—I don’t know what you’re on about, Myton said.

—Sure? Stallo said. —I nicked a car. Drove around London. I tipped him into a canal in the end. If you were wondering what happened to him.

Myton said nothing.

—You telling me he was nothing to do with you? Stallo said.

—Why, Myton said, —would I bother with you?

—Ouch! Come on, who else am I a loose end for?

To ask that was to hear the world answer: Take your pick.

—Look, Myton said. —Whoever this chap was—

—You know nothing about it, yeah?

Stallo learnt that he did not disbelieve the claim. He had come here to judge. Mrs. Myton watched him. Was that fear in her husband’s eyes? Was that a curse of resistance that he swallowed down?

—What do you know about a kid, then? Stallo said. He was angry with himself for that, but having asked, he continued. —Where might you go looking for a kid?

Myton said nothing.

—More than a decade since I fucked up your plans, Stallo said. —You going to try again?

Myton said nothing. No, he spoke. He folded his arms. He looked foolish doing it in bed like that. He said, —If you think you put paid to whatever you think you put paid to—and I’m not signing off on anything you say—but if you think you faced down and battened down some bogeyman, then why the bloody hell are you here? And don’t tell me it’s because you think I sent trouble your way. As if I’d operate like that. You’re here because you know something’s not right. Maybe you had a few good years after you sent the monster under the bed packing, but now something feels rather off about everything again. Yes? Even worse than before? Isn’t that so? Why don’t you ask me what you want to ask me?

—What’s happening? Stallo said.

Immediately Myton said, —Wouldn’t you like to know?

He sounded not triumphant but rageful and Stallo did not think he knew the answer. As Stallo had thought he would Myton spoke again, and devil-may-care as he tried to make it, the valedictory, the declamation, was palpable.

—I’m a reasonable man. Wouldn’t you say there are times the reasonable thing to do after a concerted effort at stalling the self-destruction of what you hold dear and fought for might not be to start a fire and let things bloody well burn?

Stallo heard a ruinous quality in the man’s voice, dressed up in fury. It was grotesque and it was small.

After a bit Stallo said, —Like I say maybe part of the reason I never did the obvious is because it would be the obvious. But life’s too short, you know? To try and second-guess what you should and shouldn’t do. I mean, a minute ago I was twenty-five, and now look at me. I don’t care what’s obvious or not any more.

Mrs. Myton did not move as he came closer. Myton stayed sitting up, all bedtime dignity.

Myton said, —What do you think you’ll achieve?

Mrs. Myton blinked. Stallo reached and Myton flinched and steeled himself and Stallo pulled a pillow from behind the man’s back and Myton slumped. Stallo looked again at Mrs. Myton and put his finger to his lips again.

Imagine it, with the spear. Ensure Myton’s silence with a left hand, sock in the gob, don’t look into those open eyes, nothing to do with angst or dread but because you want to get the point of entry sorted so shove down with the right like you’re driving pegs into tough ground. Or with the blade. Bleed him out, get blood on your own trousers, whisper to him on his way out, whisper what?, with what spite?, questions he can’t answer what with him being in the middle of dying what with you killing him Stallo.

Stallo laid his spear down. He took hold of the pillow in both hands. Myton reached for the mattress edge and with his left hand brought it back up with a pistol in it. Stallo kicked his arm. Myton gasped and dropped the weapon. Stallo put his foot upon it and slid it to the wall.

They watched each other.

Slowly enough and so deliberately that Myton’s motionlessness might be collaboration, Stallo brought the pillow down. Myton glanced at his wife once and Stallo expected him to plead for her but he said nothing.

As the cloth pressed on him, he resisted. He bucked but Stallo leaned up on his forearms and pressed and climbed onto the bed and straddled the writhing body with his knees. Myton did not scream into the down but thrashed and he began to shake and pivot on his core with his arms crooked to pummel Stallo’s kidneys with body hooks, and for all his age and position they hurt but grew weaker with each impact. His shouts were swallowed, curses that grew less comprehensible but never less than full of a hate for which Stallo admired him.

Mrs. Myton lay beside the two men in their nasty final embrace and shook as the bed shook, and kept her eyes on Stallo and her mouth closed, her expression of muted unending shock. She kept watching when the bed stopped moving. She kept her eyes on him while he leaned there, all the minutes (he knew how resilient life was).

When he was done, Stallo breathed in deeply. He was about to remove the pillow but it came to him that whether he did or not, whether he looked at the last snarl of his erstwhile boss or not, he was in a story, to which either ending fit, and there was no point trying to outthink it.

Instantly Melissa Marks saw Stallo, the years notwithstanding, and even from a distance, you could see her swear and shake her head. She had come into a kind of stoutness he associated with an earlier epoch, a tough rural femininity from books. Stallo jogged over cheerful as you like and did not lower his voice and said, —Marks! You reckon with these kids around I won’t stick a knife in your throat?

The pupils who heard him gasped. Without shock Marks went to him and took hold of his lapels and steered him away from the staring eyes and shouts of —Miss!—Miss!—Miss? She pushed him into an empty classroom and stood with her back against the door and said, —You think I’m scared of you, Stallo?

—You look scared.

—Not of you.

—Someone came for me, he said. —I’m auditioning suspects.

—Am I supposed to be flattered?

—I swear blind I tried to let it go. I thought, let them have one pop, they’ll see it’s not worth their bother, that’ll be that. But it isn’t, is it? Because I don’t feel safe. And when I hear Melissa Marks has retired and she’s another fucking teacher, that’s a very ratty smell. Once a Uniteer, you more than anyone. So—why would the Unit want me out of commission?

—Stallo, she said. —You are years out of date. He did not like how she spoke. Not scared, without urgency. —Don’t bring your shit into my life. I’ll say this once: if someone came for you, I don’t know who.

He wished he’d brought the dog. He put his hands up as if towards Marks’s neck and she fucking sneered and he put them down again.

—Are you serious? he said after a time. —This is what you do now? I swear to God I’d rather you had been behind it than this. You? Walked away? I had you down as a lifer. At least.

—That’s just the point, she said. —Why would you come back into view now? Stupid question: of course it would be now. You get wind of trouble, so here you are.

—Get wind? Someone tried to top me—

—So get your head down and keep it down. It wasn’t the Unit. If it was I wouldn’t know, but it wasn’t. You think you’re the only one?

—The only one what?

—Worley? A stroke? You think that’s what did for him? Let it sink in. You’re not the only one pushing at these doors and it doesn’t go well for any of you. Whoever it was did come for you—and not just you—they’re bad news. Worse even than you, if you can believe it. So, yes. With them out there, and all the shifts in revenance, I retired. Ostentatiously. I don’t want to be anywhere near it. And neither do you. We’re old. We had our time.

He saw himself as she did. Left behind, flotsam like so many. This isn’t me, he could have said, this is a disguise. But he knew what happened with masks and faces.

—Who are they? he said.

—I told you I don’t know.

—You must have an idea….

—Lots. But haven’t you heard? It’s the end of history. We won. So most of my ideas don’t make any sense because I’m out of date. Not that these newcomers make sense either. Does it seem like coincidence that they’d crop up just as, after a few years of stability, things start bubbling in the Summerland again? That’s what they’ve been waiting for. I think they’re fanatics. Same as always.

—You talking about Marco? Stallo said. —That doesn’t…That’s what I thought the first time, but he wasn’t—

—Enough. I don’t know and don’t want to know. I. Am. A. Teacher. Precisely so I don’t have to hear about this. What the fanatics wanted is on its way.

He staked out her house after that, just in case. She lived off Turnpike Lane with a woman some years her junior—well well—who went out to work in an office. Stallo secreted himself in the roofscape of garages overlooking the scrubby garden with which Marks wrestled. She pruned, and he remembered her whispering commands to the dead in the havering light of machines. Through his scopes, he saw that she seemed to speak to the air. She mouthed again and this time her stare seemed so exactly into his own that he froze. She knew a hide space no less than did he. What she mouthed, three times, with exaggerated motions of her lips so there could be no doubt, was Fuck off, Stallo.

It was all happening without him. The world, the shift. More months. When he spoke to shopkeepers and waitresses in cafés he felt the tug of society in little courtesies: cheers; ta. When he noted the caution with which his dog was walking, he paid a young woman in his estate to let his dog fuck hers, bought the single pup resulting. He tended his increasingly sick still young animal then let it die, with great gentleness and care. He buried it in woods and whispered to it while its daughter watched. She was more boisterous and stared carefully at empty air somewhat less often than had her father, no matter how long Stallo stood in the dark and invited visitation.

Not that he sensed nothing, but what he did feel emerged from a nothing whose parameters were his own. Face after crumpled-linen face, after through-net-curtains face, from within him, poor Maisie, Rene, the man in Malaya, the first one, Myton, Bowler, too. What does it mean if the heart races but the you doesn’t care? Is it weeping if the eyes stream and behind them a bloke just waits it out?

He wrote to Rak.

I was pissed off with you but you did sort of come through back then.

Tell me about your bird. She’s helping you with your god-bothering?

You know sometimes I catch a glimpse just a glimpse

His bathroom was small and windowless. He shat and showered in darkness. One wall kinked midway up off vertical, and watching his ablutions from the crease of its vectors Stallo saw a small motionless spider. He nodded to it. Stood naked at last in his scrawn and muscle, weather-coloured self. Touched the dark with, look, the remains of that old bamboo spear. The spider was not alive and he did not know how many times he had greeted its vacated carapace.

Mr. Stallo, he read. A typewritten response.

Mr. Stallo I want to say to you to please not write to us again.

The careful English was not Rak the godbuilder’s.

He has me now and I cannot let him be with you any more sorry and goodbye.

Well! Mazel tov, mate.

He did write back, You’re scared, Rak. Regretted it after he sent it. Because didn’t a person have a right to be afraid? Anyway no one responded.

Aim a pistol out of the top-floor window at shoppers, turn the weapon around and put the barrel in your mouth and the taste was familiar.

Late autumn. Stallo woke. This place had no curtains and the night pressed in. His skin was chill. The room glowed in the sodium from below. He heard the whimper of his dog.

Stood against the wall, a man watched him. Arms out, braced against the black.

All the air went out of him and Stallo cried out. Draped in shade, the intruder swept towards him. As well as whatever else, Stallo’s was a cry of welcome.

[59]

When he was eight, Ewan, sitting astride the gate to the front yard, tipped backwards, and his head hit pebble-embedded mortar. He summoned Maur with a moan that terrified her because it was not shrill. She held him and probed his skin to see the injury. Mum, he said, you’ve cut yourself, and she saw on his face the moment he knew the blood on her was his.

The doctor was a young perhaps Nigerian man who told Ewan he was a soldier who had forgotten his helmet. He said, No more fighting stones, Mr. Tough Man. Maur began at last to tremble watching people care for her son. Think of a hospital, even now, it’s no more likely to be the hush of her mother’s last room that comes first than kind nurses telling Ewan he’s a silly sausage while Maur closes her eyes.

—

On a table is a sandwich on a paper plate and water in a labelless plastic bottle. A lidless metal toilet in a corner. A wooden chair. A closed door. She’s in a patient’s bed. No sign on any white wall. No window. Grey all-in-ones on a rack. Glowing white fluorescence.

Maur closes her eyes again. She’s in pain, then sometimes painless and adrift. She imagines expert fingers touching her skull.

You’ve had a shock. Hush now, just relax.

Think back.

Someone said her name. Someone dragged her out of the ruins of the wire-and-dark star in the Stallo-less room, however much later, a room emptied also of the fizzing darkness and the stuttering othernesses echoed and thralled to it when she hauled herself back into herself or was so hauled. Someone put a hood upon her. After his injury Maur had found that cement jag in the garden darkened with her son’s blood. From where Stallo had placed her, she took a long journey. Swaying. Sedated, in and out. Indoor air, outdoor air, hallways, keys, electronics, all the way to this chamber. Maur pulls the covers over her head. An old claustrophilia. The relief of the shroud.

In the centre of the door there is a shelf. Sometimes it has a tray of simple food upon it. She does not know when to sleep. Lights stay on. But sleep she does.

The first times people come in, the first times of many of which she knows, she does not (will not, can’t, isn’t clear) open her eyes for the touches.

What sort of place is this?

She has eyes open for later visits. The walls are very clean and there’s a humming from somewhere. Nurses in pale green and grey who don’t look at her, and to whom she can’t speak even when she tries, as if her voice is forgotten. If this is a cult it has forgotten how to look like one. It all hurts. They leave bowls for her. She gets up and almost falls the first time, lies down again. Eats, refuses to, eats again.

She shouts, wordless words, anger, anguish

She hears a key. Maur stands, better prepared for the weakness, holds the bed, braces against pain and drugs haze. A man comes in. He’s in a doctor’s coat. He glowers. With curious patience. Like someone used to watching experiments fail. He is a white man some years older than her though his face is not so creased as it seems to her it should be. He looks at her as if she is a label. Her insides pitch. A vein moves in his neck and she exhales in relief because she’s not visited by the dead.

“Where am I?” she says.

He glances at, look, a camera, above.

“You’re where you should be.”

She can’t identify that accent.

“I didn’t—” she says. She stops. “What happened?”

He gestures for her to sit back down on the bed but she won’t.

“What happened?” she says. “Where’s Stallo?”

“It’s not for you to worry about.”

“He got away from you, didn’t he?” She hears triumph in her voice.

“It’s not for you to worry about. Why do you think we’d care where he went? Why do you think you’re here?” I am where you’ve wanted me to be since the beginning. Whoever you are. She says nothing. “This doesn’t need to be bad,” he says. “I promise. This situation is not so complicated.”

“What do you want with me?”

“You have to help us.”

“I don’t have to do anything.” She’s proud of that.

“You do,” he says. “For the sake of everything.” She focuses; it hurts her head. “You know what’s coming, you know the stakes. Do you know what you are? You have resources. You’ve changed. Cybill couldn’t reach her daughter until you were there.”

Maur can’t think her own thoughts well.

“Where’s the letter?” When she doesn’t answer he says, “Whether you want it or not you have a responsibility. And you’re alive because we got to you in time. Turned it off.”

“I know your name,” Maur says. Memories of Fez’s stories in that jungle room, a tightening of threads. “You’re Wran. This is the Unit.”

You can see he didn’t expect that. “Is it?” he says.

“What did they say to you when they took you away?”

“You have to help us.”

Unclear if he’s telling her what they said or is saying those words to her.

“Stallo,” she says, slowly, with wonder. “He calls that thing up, using me as bait…and you’d been waiting for that. You were there. Ready.”

“His plans rarely seem to come off,” the man says. “His recruitment drive, this…”

Maur says, “But he got away, didn’t he? It was you who came? Is it still out there? Old Pal?” Her voice is steadier than her thoughts, she’s glad. “It is, isn’t it?”

He’s gone, though.

There’s still no dark here.

She still shakes when she stands. Starts to do squats and lunges, very slowly.

Two men come in. Dark grey uniforms, unmarked. With rifles. The first people she has seen for, it must be, days. She won’t let them see fear. Christ, that cliché. She puts on the rubber shoes they bring. They walk her out. She feels drifty. A concrete corridor lit by strips.

“This way.” They’re so young.

One opens a door with a key-card reader and gestures her into where more such young fighters wait. Women and men in lab coats before what’s like a dentist’s chair facing an internal window into a further chamber, where technicians are at computers. Maur looks at the youngest woman. Barely blah blah years old. Nothing make-do or guerrilla here.

“Please sit,” someone says. Look, there’s Wran beyond the glass.

“I know about you,” she calls out to him. “Nergal dying. Marco.” That makes him raise his head. “What are you trying to do?”

Guards put Maur in the chair, she struggles but they strap her in. The young woman puts electrodes on her. A new voice from a speaker. “Where is Fez? What did she tell you? What did you see?”

Maur says, “I didn’t see anything.”

“Where is she? Where’s the letter, Maureen?”

“No one calls me Maureen. You want it to communicate, don’t you? With them? Tough.”

In the room in the forest Fez said, We have our ways. They aren’t the only ones with know-how. There are signals but our blocks are very good. Maur says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.” She feels neither brave nor afraid. “I gave the letter away.” They’ve done something to the glass, when?, she can’t see through it now, it’s like flat shining light. She pictures the questioners watching the wavering lines that her answers draw. What resistance is left to her? Against whom?

She calls out, “Fuck you. What are you doing?”

The voice says, “Please summon your control.”

“Jesus Christ. You think I can summon anything? Jules is gone. Old Pal took her.” Silence. The pads on her temples itch.

“Summon your control.”

“He was never…You mean Yew?” Let that sit a moment. “He was never my anything. I mean, of course he was.” A wracking breath. “I just mean he was never here. Afterwards. And if I could…”

“Your control who wrote the letter.”

Maur gives what could be the ghost of a laugh. “If you want to talk to Cybill,” she says, “you’d better call her.” The air grows dry, as if something reaches into the room.

In bed she closes her eyes and pretends she’s in moonlight. Under the cover she reaches inside herself. Maur probes her mouth and her nose and splays her fingers, as if flicking water. You never know.

Wakes up with fresh food and water by her. Very thirsty.

“Did you kill him?” she shouts. “Stallo wouldn’t work with you. Did you kill him?”

“Who killed Ewan?”

Maur shouts for someone to come to talk to her.

She sits on the floor. So many pens, so many lighters and bits, have gone from her purse. There’s never only one direction, so she tries to grab something, reaches motionlessly for an apport. For any passing remnant to moult in her hand. The touch of which paring might ease her way. No such half-world thing comes.

She knows she’s drugged, to feel like this. She whispers. No it’s not her whispering, it was from behind her

more

Wran returns. Is returned. Is by her. He’s saying something about Cybill.

Maur says, “You used to be with Marco and Nergal. The Unit caught you. Fez…” Careful what you say, Maur. “Is caught the word, though?”

Wran says, “Where is this letter?”

“I don’t have it.”

“No,” he says. “You gave it to her.” He actually smiles. “Can you make another?”

Somewhere within her it’s as if this question makes sense.

“Stallo got away.” Has she said this before? “So you’re not safe.”

“How did you know?”

Old trick, I didn’t. “Why am I here?”

“We’re on the same side: you want to stop the end. You’re not stupid, you can feel what wants to play….”

“So it got away from you then.”

“Think about a world that’s that thing’s playground. That’s no world for living or dead.”

Maur says, “Old Pal killed Jock…but it came in behind a rev that was Unit once. Controlling it, Stallo said.”

“It can do things like that,” Wran says. “Take them.”

Maur tries to organise her thoughts. Consider the Roused. Apports. Stallo runs from and hunts and searches for Old Pal, and these people hear it. Turn up with no insignia. These unmarked people in these tunnels, this Wran. “I thought you were just a traitor,” she whispers. “That’s not it though, is it? You’re not army. Stallo told me about the infighting between you and Nergal and Marco. Over Old Pal. But you didn’t want to block or use it, did you? You wanted to follow it. You’re not the Unit. You’re not out to stop Old Pal…you’re with it. You killed Jock.” Her breath wracks here. “You are a fucking cult. You’re the VA. The void army. You want it to rise.”

Same Old

but the man rushing towards him stamped hard on Stallo’s wrist, and Stallo cried out, in pain and in surprise and then in great regret, to feel it. The man kicked the pistol away. The dog came racing in but though it howled and went in circles, the young man grabbed its collar and Stallo shouted, —Hey!

What a manifestation, eh? He crooked numb fingers. Could Stallo hear himself? Laughing? The attacker pointed his own handgun. Stallo heard himself, and yes, he was laughing.

—Give me the dog, he said. The intruder let him take it. The animal strained.

—How long you been standing there? Stallo said. —Oh ha ha ha. The old nocturnal observer ha yeah. The old lowering-from-the-shadows. Done it myself a few times. Done it to my aunt once bless her. Turnabout’s fair play.

—You’re famous, the intruder said. —You’re Stallo.

Time to think about Apportville again.

That little room had reverberated with Stallo’s shot. Tin and brick walls had shaken.

Stallo had stood over Bowler’s body. Looked as deep as he could into Bowler’s eyes, through the gloomy accusation into the jelly in which no last picture was imprinted. A door had shut, Stallo had shut a door, a door he had come to see, perhaps to open.

Quickly he had searched. He took papers and oddments. A tin cup with chipped enamel, a jumper unravelling, a battery with lime. What poor treasure to die with if he was to die. Fighting under such piddling burdens, likely not even dead-shed. He heard voices. He left the cabin by a window. Passed through blackness between huts with noises of investigation behind him and then of mourning. Some young man’s wail. Another voice in no language Stallo knew, the cadence of a sobbed homily. He isn’t gone, something like that, he’ll always be here. Well that was up for debate.

Where was the child?

None of us get to avoid the end of the world. It would have been better, if he was going to kill Bowler, to have done it silently with a knife, say, so that he might have waited within for that kid he’d heard, to whom Stallo had not had the opportunity to open his arms, keeping his face ready and implacable.

What was to be done? He needed to find that offspring. Then we could see. But it must still have been running, or have reached some foster parent or caretaker or whatever, some kith. How could Stallo have found her?

—I can’t be Stallo, Stallo said to the intruder. —Didn’t you hear? Stallo’s dead.

—Yeah, I did hear. A lot. I’ve been looking for you.

Stallo said, —I thought you was something else. First I thought you might be—well you know what I thought you might be. Or maybe an operator. On a hit. For love or money. They tried that once before, the VA.

He watched the young man open and close his mouth a few times. —Sorry to disappoint you. What’ve you heard about a jewel?

—Come again? Stallo said.

The visitor swallowed. —Bad-luck jewels. Hope Diamond. Black Orlov. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to…Maybe there’s something to it?

—What are you on about?

The darkness did not thin but Stallo could see now that his visitor was thickset and trained and calm enough though he struggled to find every word as if language was a curiosity to him. His eyes were open wider than you might have thought. He said, —I’ve got some questions.

Lying on a prefab roof between the walls that were the borders of this secret country, patrols below with rifles raised, Stallo, looking up as if to gain strength from stars, had had to take it instead from the hangar vault. His pockets had been heavy with those objects grabbed. He might have given thanks to a god of old soldiers because what noise had come was a way off, amid panicked shouts in English and Russian and Swahili and was that Hungarian?, stop, shoot. He’d had sympathy for those trained men and women among his pursuers trying to command enthusiasts and the lost.

Down he had come. Who knew his face? It was always about being brazen, that was basic. So though he did not seek them when he encountered the tail-ends of patrols he just altered by a fraction the affect of his franticness and became an Apportville local getting away from trouble. Heading for that wheelless caravan he’d seen wherein were stored traps.

Check that yes the guard to this place had fled in terror of his own and Stallo broke the lock and went in and tugged at padlocked drawers and most did not shift but a few came open in splinters and he grabbed lit-up blue-glass bricks. Dogs were whooping and he felt the cabin shake and he hurled two traps to the floor and one might have withstood it but one at least cracked and his ears rang. He had kicked the cabinet twice, hard, hoping for more breakages, and run.

A boarded walkway between the backs of thrown-up rooms. In a quiet zone Stallo had come face-to-face with one of the amateurs in the Apportville forces. Young man as pretty as an actor, blinking, holding his gun wrong. Stallo had seen on his face that familiar civilian doubt, Some mistake, surely. That’s what gets you killed, that disbelief, that uncertain certainty that this situation could not be what it seemed. Poor boy. Stallo shot him.

—Tell me about Apportville, said the intruder, years later.

—What do I call you? Stallo said.

The man said, —Towns.

—Apportville, Stallo said after a while. —You read War of the Worlds? Remember a bloke in it digging? Artilleryman. You’re something, what are you?

—RAF Regiment.

—Dear oh dear. Gunner Towns. Rock Ape? Dear oh dear.

—I like climbing, Towns said, as if those words or that abrupt dreamlike tone answered Stallo. Who gave him a moment.

—Anyway this bloke says he’s going to rebuild civilisation in the tunnels. “What’s so bad about living underground?”

Stallo shushed the dog. There was another pistol under the mattress. A knife in his wardrobe. Stallo was ready for Towns to try to do him when he’d extracted what intel he was here for if that was it. He’d fight when it came to it, on principle and because you do. But he could live with it if he died, so to speak, ha.

He said, —But when he sees what this bloke’s taken a week to dig, our hero says he could have done it in a day. Says that’s the difference between dreams and powers. That’s not strictly fair, Apportville was a lot more than just a ditch. Plus it was probably the third they’d had, at least. But you could see it weren’t what Bowler thought it should be. Nothing like what it thought it was.

Stallo had followed the groan of a generator and had found it in its trench and into it had dropped a grenade then turned a corner and braced and the howl of shrapnel went down the streetlet and around him lamps went out. He had started fires. People had run carrying extinguishers and bolt cutters. A woman guarding an armoury. He had seen her see him, night-sights a devil mask making him officiant of obscure ceremonies. Her eyes widened, she thought him a spirit. He was angry and he shot her dead.

In the black-on-black above Apportville Stallo saw unfolding. Motions, insectile in their this-then-that articulation. Leather flaps, oiled joints and welded oddments tripped like snares, concatenating moving pieces. They swung in ways that made no gravitational sense, a decline stopped, an artefact left hanging where it should not or rebounding against nothing. These many-part machines contained or touched or intervened on spectrality, roused the Roused now in their own ways.

Stallo ran. He wished for tar and fire. Tie oil-soaked rags to the tails of cats and set them alight, you could clear favelas.

Stallo sat his back against the wall and watched Towns watching him.

He had found no boots seven-league or other, nothing but trash. Amid the ruckus he had come to the apport storehouse he had scoped. But people had approached. So Stallo had taken his last explosive and thrown it at the window. The combustion came with static, or howling. Apport orts, shreds, apport smoke. Into which new clouds he stalked, Christ Jesus that went deep, he could taste it even with his mouth shut, and a vile lungful had him sputtering and if it hit him like that

so probably that was why the

accelerating through the schmutz a sweeping emptiness. Stallo stumbled, went down, and turned and thrust and did not know until he felt the clench of his fingers that he had hold of his bamboo spear. He stood, alone in the particulate.

—Why did you shoot Bowler?

—Like I told you, Stallo said. —He tried to shoot me first.

—Right, said Gunner Towns. —But you didn’t get any apports? Because, you know. The last few years—

—I did get something.

—

Stallo had flailed to provoke superstitions, Roused panic, and succeeded, maybe, because if he had been grasped by wintry unseen digits they had not pushed through his skin to freeze his fat and bones or kill him with dread. Kicking through a hole into a wriggling mass that was warm and terrified young dogs. Squeak squeak and the half barks of pleas for safety. He’d wiped dog shit from his palm. Lain silent amid their yelping and picked up a little mongrel. Utter foolishness, but there had been that slippery something to Stallo’s fingertips at the touch, so his caress had been half comfort half investigation, and what with that saddle and the mute animal observers to that Christmas party on the spit, his intuition of the puppies’ attention to fleeting coherences beyond his senses told him this was an experiment in heterosis.

In the outskirts. The last dwellings, behind him fires and screams and dogs and flies, now, humming as if above dead. Ricochets against the false sky. The end of the corridor street, then walls. A passing place.

At that Apportville exit, something had moved in a quite wrong way. Swaying and stiltwalking and stretching out the spindliest extrusions to block him.

Stallo had switched to CQB stance. Pistol in hand he had let the puppy fall to yowl. Had squeezed. Had seen the bullets make dance the surface of the shroud of what had come for him, was all. He aimed again. The hem of the cloth had trailed in the dirt. Linen beneath which it was ten feet high and had marionette-stepped for him on its how-many? limbs, had reached for him with pliers, twigs or nails or loops of metal cord or gloves. Slime had stretched from them and left a trail. Drape-lines twisting around the rubbish of its body, and unseen at the heart of it whatever presence, presences had steered this amalgam of apport extensions, beyond any metaphor of human or decoding. A shape less untrue than arm leg leg arm head. Sinuous as what had never breathed and clumsy as revenance. Gytrash mammet, coming in spook-slither way.

Bang bang, Stallo’s gun had added more little shots to the sound of the end of Apportville. He could not remember then if it held apport bullets. It did not stop what came anyway. He had put out his hand (his spear was in it now) and said charms in junk Sumerian, Zizig nu’edaš saggiš luabdaš. He had said Sentilach numelach nu’udlach sidlach, and had tried to clench muscles he had been trained to. Had he had sand he’d have scattered it. He had not known he hoped to cede his body to control until he was desolate at still being where he had been.

—Come on then, he’d said.

The puppy had approached in the lolloping young-dog way. Yelp yowl. Lowering on its forelegs, rear legs up, angled down before the obscure guardian. Stallo had thought the little thing snarling. Then had understood that it played.

It knew this thing from games. It had fallen over and picked itself up and shaken itself again.

The apport-revenant-untold thing had swayed to a stop. The little dog had bounced and nipped and stepped back and flattened its body and looked up at the shrouded warden and wagged its tail.

And there had been a crescent upcurve to the hollow in the sheet, the front-facing part.

Then.

—Then? Towns said.

—Then boom, Stallo said.

Timing like that? Sometimes it happens.

The charges Stallo, having scaled the upsides of the Apportville roomscape, had set, over freezing hours, in preparation, at the bottom of the roof antenna.

A Ragnarok report. Stallo enjoyed telling it. And he could see that whatever mission Towns was on, for whoever, he was listening, not just gathering intel. And with a Sehnsucht Stallo felt echoed in his own body.

The explosions had opened the metal sky. Down had come debris, screaming louder than all those on whom it fell, upon that thing before the dog, and the spike and death of the fucking signal from the tower ending its summoning and sending every haint there haywire, surely, if not away.

And Stallo had risen slowly, spitting out dust and grit and a bit or two of tooth. No breaks, no haemorrhages. The sky had looked down upon the ruin, stars, helixes of snow and oily smoke, and the gusting urgency of presences to which this world has always been allergic.

The dog too had emerged from dust and upthrust stuff. Wheezing, whimpering, looking to Stallo. Who had picked it up and said to it, —Hush now.

Stallo, slipping with survivors out of the rent walls into the cold, the continent and all points of the compass.

—What I’m saying, Towns said, —is that in the last few years—

—Since I finished it.

—Since you were in Apportville—I mean, we did hear something had happened.

—Probably a good number of ITKO thought it was the Unit did it, Stallo said. He watched Towns arrange his thoughts. —You. You’re Unit, ain’t you? I’m surprised to see you. I thought you were pretty much mothballed.

So was Marks lying, or wrong? Was whoever had come for him before Unit, too?

—Who the fuck am I? Stallo said. —I’m surprised I’m worth the time.

Shameless. Fishing like that. But what had he got to lose?

Towns said, —Do you know someone called Fez? In charge of Apportville-in-exile?

—I don’t know anything about that, Stallo said carefully enough. —How did they recruit you?

Towns blinked and thought it over.

—A guy. A padre. He’s young though. Out of this barracks. A shake of the head. —Not the best. Place. They’re hidden there. He said, the padre, he could sense—they had these weird tests, he said he sort of detected something about how I could, what I can, sort of do or sense.

—Takes me back. Don’t suppose you ever met an older bloke? Artist? Never mind. Well I was going to say no one works for the Unit forever, but what do I know? Go on, mate.

—There’s a regroupment, Towns said finally. Obviously a phrase he’d heard. —A recruitment. When we heard Apportville was done, some of us thought it was a raid. Smash and grab.

—By who?

Towns shrugged. —We thought it would mean there’d be more apports out there. But no. And what there is isn’t as stable as it used to be. The older lads say. But there are supposed to be new ones out there. They’re still excavating, it doesn’t stop. Special ones, apports I mean. An apport that makes you one of them, Towns said. —The Roused.

—Oh this again, the Recruiter, Stallo said. —That’s your starter for ten. Let me know if you ever find it.

—And the TCT, Towns said.

—What’s that do?

—It’s…It lets you talk to them.

—You can do that now.

—No but properly.

—TCT?

—Tin-can telephone.

—Very good. You won’t find it.

Stallo almost said, They don’t exist.

—The Roused…, Towns said. —CO says, Towns said. —They’re ailing. The equipment we’ve got isn’t very, and…You could see it excruciated this young man to try to communicate things. —And Apportville’s gone. So there are more haints now, the lads say, but, like I said. They’re not good. And they’re not alone. There’s people…. Other things. I thought you’d know about this stuff.

They sat in the dark like ghosts themselves.

—It might sound stupid, Towns said. —But one reason—I mean, before I joined. The padre, I know he was testing me out now. But he told me stories. Unit stories. Nothing classified. Just hinting at stuff. Mostly from way before his time. He was saying about some of the people who’d come through. Guests, talks and that. And this’ll sound stupid but one I’d heard of, from when I was a kid. I never in a million years would have thought. That stuck with me.

—Why you here Gunner Towns? What’s going on in the Unit?

Towns’s grip on his pistol was loose and if Stallo leaned over, he saw, he might take hold of it, pluck it like a flower, look at the lad, raising his head now sort of trusting and glum. I mean oh look at him.

—You don’t know what’s happening in the Unit, Stallo said. —You’re AWOL.

Towns laid the pistol down between his feet.

—We’ve only just met and here am I feeling sorry for you, Stallo said.

What sound do worms make? A trituration.

And Stallo stretched his arm so the dog nnn-nnning licked Towns’s hand.

—Not AWOL, Towns said. —Not in but not AWOL.

—You got RTUed?

—I don’t know what I did. I hadn’t been in the Unit that long. I haven’t been doing too well. Towns wiped his nose with the sleeve of his hoodie. —I think I was trying to tell someone something about stuff without really telling them. You know?

—Ah.

—I think I wanted to, you know, give them something and warn them….

—That wouldn’t have gone down well, Stallo said. —You either end up telling them or not telling them and either way it’s no good. What did you try to say? Who to?

Stallo thought Towns might weep. Instead he whispered something about his mother, it sounded like, and it was Stallo whose throat closed up.

Towns said, —They still talk about you, you know. How you’d take rooms. How you held your weapon. The way you used apports. Will you teach me?

Stallo saw the two of them as if from outside. —I ain’t your fucking dad, he said. —Don’t start that, that’s not the secret to anything. He couldn’t be doing with a prentice.

—Hey, Towns said.

But then you don’t always get to choose not to be followed.

—Hey, Towns said.

—That’s not how you deal with ghosts, Stallo said. —Don’t look at me like that it’s not shitting in church and you don’t need to play their games any more. Have a go.

It could have been coast that the young man mouthed.

—When I joined, Towns said, —Simmons said the lespries are just symptoms. He’s got us focusing on the apports. That’s the real secret. It’s what we’re looking for. Strude’s better at explaining this than me.

Stallo knew when not to talk. Towns had about him the shyness of a boy who says what he says to see if he’s got it wrong.

—There was a few of us, Towns said. —New in. They said the Unit was coming back, on the QT. Told us the history. A lot of stuff from your day. But there are new stories. Guerillas and stuff.

Towns, electrodes on his temples, needles in his blood.

—I remember that sort of thing, Stallo said.

You had to let Towns get his stories out in lumps and piece them together yourself. Towns described a hide at the edge of a wood. Sifting through satellite images.

—We were learning the ropes. But I picked up something.

A spike of quiet too utter for dead airwaves. Stallo leaned in at that as if towards all haunts everywhere, heads intersecting, an infinite empty set. Towards a world of new assets, a change not quite named, already owned.

—Sort of a trace, Towns said. —Like I said, there’s new people out there now. We don’t know who.

—I’m aware, Stallo said. New presences, alive (one such who’d come for him?) and Roused, spread out perhaps from the redoubt they once called Apportville, or fritzed into presence anew, or returning from a newly blocked beyond. Stallo considered the Apportville ruins, snow invading made streets and rigged dwellings while the new power in Moscow got on with things, weather and animals investigating ex-apports like potlatch remains.

Towns tried to talk of proliferating events. Escorting scientist half-colleagues cranking up old radios, twiddling old dials, waving old antennae, sound wheezing from speakers not apport any more, healed into mundanity. Tracking the Apportville diaspora or the dregs of KH.

—It was Strude who…We were working out of that army base. It wasn’t, you know. I wouldn’t want to have trained there. The CO was…But that’s what made it…He rubbed his fingers and thumb together to indicate texture. —I don’t know if we were there because of that or if it was like that because we were there.

—Or both or neither. Go on mate.

—Some of their guys liaised with us. We briefed the CO. Not properly, it was need-to-know. There was chatter about a kid. After Apportville.

Stallo thought, Yeah it might’ve been me started that chatter to be honest. —You heard I was looking, didn’t you? Stallo said. —That’s how you ended up here? I was, but not any more. So what’s your plan? You hoping to, what, cozy back up to the Ruperts? By getting a lead on the kid? I can’t help with that.

Stallo went to the window and stood with London before him. Presented Towns his back, it didn’t even itch.

—If that kid’s out there, Stallo said, —I say good luck to her.

—Sierra Leone, Towns said.

Well alright, that was not what he expected, so Stallo turned.

—We were there, Towns said.

Someone high up in Executive Outcomes was ITKO enough to loop the Unit in to rumours of a bush devil. Who’d care? Except that this was in a region where the Unit had word this child might have gone to ground.

Stallo listened.

So a Unit guy had gone in with a couple of EO freelancers: not reported at check-in time. The Mil Mi-24 pilot (course it would be a chopper) ready for evac reported—stuttering—some sense of something, terrible air snarling the craft around that zone. Towns focused, recalling another’s story. He had been on the follow-up mission.

—We found a base. Old concrete. In the jungle. His hands sketched it. —A few rooms. And.

And.

Towns said. —Me and Strude this time and a couple more EO guys. We went in and—

The preceding Unit man, and mercenaries, splayed in that place they had uncovered, skin stretched back, eyes open as if obeying a final imperative to see. Corridors bloody.

—Dangerous place, Stallo said.

—Yeah, but. It wasn’t rebels.

Towns reached into his inside pocket. He proffered a photograph, no, a black and white photocopy of one. Dark corpse, beyond recognition, not lying on the floor but smeared across a wall. Curling into the ceiling. Refusing to fall.

—We scraped him up as best we could.

To Stallo’s head came visions of a force eager for the roughest play.

—This is the kid doing that?

—You were in Apportville, Towns said. —You tell me. Her dad went native? Maybe she’s angry? He did not look at Stallo when he said that. —If it was her, she’d gone by the time we got there. I’ve told you one story, he said with a new authority. —I’ll tell you two more. I was in Algeria.

Chasing stories of soldiers you couldn’t see properly. Not all war stories were lies. Here’s one of a rajul farigh, an empty man. His sister had spooned in soup and massaged it down his neck. She had smoked and regarded Towns with sullen interest and the remnants of a kinder look and told him her brother had heard forces were coming, been ready to fight with local militia, petrol-pump attendants, bakers and tailors, butchers and teachers and street-sweepers, old rifles set up behind trash barricades. But who had approached in the small hours had not been state or any familiar group—Maybe the Rebels Against God, she’d said, self-mutilated schism from the GIA, cutters-off of their own right pointing fingers to preclude shahada, so full of hate were they for the great sadist that brought catastrophe.

If he wasn’t in front of him, Stallo would not have believed the teller of this story could be the same who’d earlier struggled to speak.

Towns said,

The woman said,

The attackers did not emerge from darkness but brought it with them, living and not together. They moved wrong. They towered, dark architecture, walking.

Oh, Stallo might have said, pyramids, a burr of traces.

And the dark had gone into the woman’s brother. And the dark had come out again. And when it came out it was bigger than before and it had left him emptied.

What terrible punishment, the not-dead extradited to the company of dead and of the eager never-alive.

Stallo must be dark to Towns, framed against the window like that.

—Why are you here?

—Because you’re Stallo, Towns said. —And no one would listen to me. Or talk to me. And no one seemed…fussed enough. Before I got RTUed.

If I was tragedy, Stallo thought, that makes you farce.

—They kept telling us it was about the apports now, Towns said. —That it doesn’t matter what they are, any of them, the Roused.

This country could not be dragged back. A lesson from Stallo’s wandering years. You couldn’t help what won’t be helped. But there were better and worse ways to slip towards senescence.

—Even if brass are dumb as ever, you and me know there’s movement out there, Stallo said, properly gently. —New hands, who’ve got the kid, or who the kid’s got.

And, he thought, they’ve marked me.

Stallo wouldn’t denounce any quest out of hand, even if the hankering was for nihil; whatever got you up in the morning. But that was no excuse for John Bullshit. Just as there was sentimentality in dreams of resurgence so too was there in their obverse. A kitsch of melancholia. Doleful look, blah blah, lost an empire, blah blah, failed blah blah to gain a cause: the armed patriot partisans of decline management did so enjoy their threnodies. Myton and his Spenglerian simpers. The problem had never been that Myton wanted to draw it to whatever close he dreamt of but how he’d dreamt it. If collapse you must, you might as well do it with skill and honour and guile and without surrender and as slowly as possible.

—They don’t deserve you, Towns, Stallo said. He might’ve come here of his own accord, but Stallo saw the kid needed it all very softly-softly. —You said you had another story.

—Bosnia, Towns said. —That was a mess. Militias, jihadis, Mitties, plenty of PMCs. Nasty stuff.

R Unit and its co-opetition chasing leads, rumours, apports, medium-questioning, boning up on the history of witches, zduhaći and faladžije, on Gustav Gaj and Novo Sonce.

They’d interviewed a soldier in the field hospital. Towns showed Stallo how the man’s eyes had spasmed. There was a bomb-making factory, the man had said. They’d gone in. The thing wasn’t just that the people inside had fought, it was how. The man said maybe there was gas or something made him loopy. Movement out of nowhere. A dark room, full of rushing, sounds he couldn’t pin down, glass bottles. Maps and charts. And then he said that he’d been, oh God. Moving in ways that made no sense. To him. Raising his weapon. Something making him aim it at his own comrades, watching with languid horror.

An escort of marines had taken Towns and his crew to the ambush site. Shacks on a steep hill where the soil was black. The corridors were pocked and glass cracked with each step.

—There was, Towns said. Gestured. On the walls, plasm. —I don’t know who’d been there. But you could tell they’d been trying to channel. Something went wrong. They attracted attention. Something had come. I took a reading. Strude. I think he understands it all better. Only…There was pride on his face. —He’s jealous. Of me. I don’t know how I know. He was there, he kept saying someone was trying to get into the silence. I don’t know what that means. I thought maybe you would.

Find what you want? a marine had asked them. Told them the man they’d interviewed had died, of sudden convulsions. Back at the hospital a nurse attended the body. The eyes were tight shut, hands clutching the top of the blanket with the desiccate dignity of a days-dead mouse.

—It was the nurse who said to me about a jewel, Towns said. —That’s why I asked you. Charms and amulets. She waited until Strude was gone. Come to me. I don’t know why. Said that as he went the bloke was trying to say something. Said he was…Towns made a strangulated sound to show Stallo. —Said he was talking about an opal.

Stallo laughed. The dog watched him. Towns watched him and looked like a boy. The sky lightened. When he was done laughing Stallo put his hands together and they trembled.

—Not opal, he said. —It’s come back. I knew it would. Maybe she’s helping it, wants everything to end. Maybe it’s making her do it, I don’t know. But I knew, I knew it would come back.

Old Pal Old Pal Old Pal Old Pal Old Pal

—Old Pal.

[60]

“What kind of fucking lunatics are you?” Maur shouts. Wran is motionless. “You think I’d help you? You worship that thing? You think it’ll spare you? You’re insane!”

The way Wran stands, the shade is in his face and though she seeks and braces for it she can’t see the glassy certainty that must be in his eyes, Heaven’s Gate stare from that old video.

“All I will say,” Wran says, calmly, after a long time, “is that you have no idea.”

“Why does it want me?” she wheezes. “What is it?”

“What you’ve done is really impressive,” he says. “And then you say this and I see you don’t understand at all.”

“You obey it? You think if you help it, it won’t play with you, like with the rest of us?”

“Be helpful.”

“Fuck you!”

He goes to the door and she shouts again, alone where the light is bright enough, “I’m not scared of you!” It could be true. “I found that machine,” she shouts. “On the hill. I took it from Strude. I killed him. And took it. He pointed it at that empty man and it stopped. I thought it was a defence. Against the VA, against you. But he didn’t press it just in time.” Yes this is what Maur knows. “He didn’t rescue me from anything, he was VA too. He was controlling it.”

The room’s too small to give her even an echo. “I killed him, you can’t scare me.”

Maur wants to dream of her son but goes instead to the shuttered house on the hillside, not a dream but a memory of a dream.

No matter how light-headed she grows Maur strives to keep tight, her body from leaking. But whether because of wires or drugs or touchless interventions of watchers she cannot see or internal tides, she can’t stop herself releasing gouts, sometimes, what could be piss, or the other stuff, whatever comes.

Dimly she hears Wran. There are the moments of greeting and a throng, and

—

once a little figure falls in outline through the sky of her thoughts, below silk

and once with sudden clarity, as light as if she’s leaked out almost everything in her, she’s calling, “Cybill Cybill You Ew,” and reflected in blast glass in the glare of the spotlight the motes pick out an outline reflection, a figure behind her

—

“My gosh yes.” Wran.

“I’m calling that a…,” someone says.

“Well.” Wran again. Excited voices. Fuck you. Maur’s not sure if she says that aloud.

out of my cunt? she tries to shout.

“It’s not your plumbing,” Wran says. “That’s not why you’re leaking. Plenty of dicks drip ectoplasm. But not many mediums drip like you at all.”

She must have been shouting something about motherness, and is that womanness?, but not about this mediumness, in which she swears she has no interest, but here it is, interested in her.

“Where’s Fez?” Wran says. Maur looks away. “She has things we need. Information. Expertise. Items.”

Looking at him brings to mind that faceless face of dust and light of which she’d caught sight behind her, when she leaked. The anguish of it.

She comes back to herself in the interrogation room midway through questioning and moaning nothing comprehensible, faces and question question question that she would strive not to answer if she could. She sicks up black fluid.

Someone says, “Can we get that to the lab?”

A steadier instant. There have been—it comes—to what she’s said, and thought, aspects that seem wrong now.

Maur bites the inside of her mouth for focus and realises she’s been considering data, a long while.

“I was wrong,” she calls now. “You’re not VA.” She feels scraped dry inside. She stands, sways, walks to the door and hollers through the food hole, “You don’t have the fucking spine to be a cult.”

Maur jerks back because there comes a crackling in the air. She hears footsteps. Stumbling, retreats. The door opens. Wran enters and looks at her and steps aside. A man comes in behind him, a dreadful gait, he stares at Maur and stares and his mouth is open.

Strude.

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up

The place on the east coast which the reader is asked to consider

XXXI

A Voidance

Call Back

—Stallo.

Towns stared at him. —You okay?

—Don’t worry about me, Stallo said. He could feel his grin. Opal indeed. Do you know so little? Has even that memory gone? Although it was never really a Unit concern of course, that was rather my point. You don’t seem shrewd enough to be in on some game, in any case, and what would it even be? Is that why they kicked you out? Because bless you you kept missing points?

Take it as a compliment, Towns, he thought. I’ll err on the side of discretion until I’m one hundred per cent sure you’re not playing me somehow.

And he thought, Old Pal!

What was Towns saying now?

—Marco, Towns said again. —After Apportville—when it collapsed. Seems like some of them found Marco. He used to be KH, yeah?

—One wing, anyway. Apportville refugees joined him?

Towns nodded. —Marco’s been digging for apports too. Literally as it goes apparently. He gets it, that it’s not the lespries, it’s apports. That’s what he’s after.

Who isn’t? Stallo thought. The estate hummed beyond the window. Talk about unforeseen consequences: all you do is blow up a single secret city of the living and the dead side by side, and the next thing you know it’s bloody chaos.

—What are you laughing at? Towns said.

—Nothing.

—Tell me, Towns said. —What’s happening? Is it true ex-Unit people are in danger?

—The short version is it looks like something’s come back. Stallo smiled. —If it ever went away I suppose. After Apportville.

—What is it?

—That’s the question. As to danger, I thought you were here to kill me, did you know that? You wouldn’t be the first. I’ve not been able to find out who it is, after me, or why. These void people. But with what you’re saying…I think I know what they’re working with. Keep the name Old Pal to mind, Gunner Towns. It’s no surprise that would want me gone. It was me got rid of it before.

He told Towns some, slowly. Not so much, as if he knew very much himself, but he sketched out what had got him here. The unchanging anxious attention on Towns’s face left Stallo unclear how much he understood. Not that Stallo understood, but you know.

Still, after a long time of that inscrutability, he was almost charmed when Towns said, —We should get ahead of it.

Stallo let the silence settle. Not out of doubt but calculation. Why should we?—that was the line, but he’d hold it a moment longer. For Stallo to see what he had to work with.

—Go on then, Stallo said. His heart was still pounding like a hand at a door. —What are you thinking?

—To go in, Towns said. —To the base.

—You not listening? I could never get them to pay attention, that’s what I’ve been saying….

—I want to know what they really think is happening. The young man worked to say more. —They weren’t, there was always stuff they weren’t saying. I think. What if they already started paying attention? Like you said.

—Go on.

—There’s something there. That’s where we have to go.

—You been in?

—No but when I joined he told me, I was waiting to, to go in, I know. After a time Towns said, —They had us looking for Fez. The kid. Connected to Marco. And it sounds like they’re both connected to whatever you’re talking about. We might find stuff. What they really think, the brass.

—You asking me or telling me, boy?

—A lead, Towns said. —And to prep. Against it.

—Now that is the kind of fucking stupid I like, Stallo said. More than anything this lad wanted to know. Stallo smiled. Could the Unit, or the new stub of it, be as clueless and unbothered as it appeared?

—I did things sometimes and I never knew why, Towns said. —As if it might help. There was this lake and tree—. Did something used to walk with you?

—How did you know? Bit of a sore point.

—I don’t know.

So. As if there were a decision to be made. As if Stallo didn’t know that he was back in service. Ten shun. That they would drive together to that base where Towns believed waited whatever had been gathered on the ahem opal mission. From where he was now banished. Stallo knew they would slowly surround the secret place hidden among the new recruits with what equipment they could scrabble together, a field, a set of lines against what was within. Was it time to get Benters’s dad’s bits— No, too urgent. If they were even anything. Because this lost boy needed to know, now, and Stallo too.

If it had come back, Stallo thought, why else but—he its exiler—for him surely. To punish, to play with him.

—Tell me everything about the Unit, he said. —Since I left.

—I don’t know much.

—More’n me.

He couldn’t have known how fast it would all unfold, how quickly the floor would tilt. How little he’d manage to gather of real knowledge—had he really tried? Even had he known, even if he’d seen Towns’s disappearance in advance like a flare going up, Stallo would still have set things into motion. That part never changed, no matter what happened later or any regret. They had prepared. Maps without borders. Building something, between them, not many words, the outlines of what they called a plan. Gravity pulling them in the same direction. Too much time then not enough. Days sagging under their own weight then gone like eroding cliffs. A list left unfinished. The moment abruptly there, not waiting for their readiness. Stallo would always have done this, no matter what he’d known.

later, not awakening but, in the way of such stuttering time, the first such for a long time, returning to a consciousness that he was conscious again. Everything doing its somatic duty, body in this car in diminished green lanes with a barracks, yes, behind it. A mission attempted. Stallo drove, was driving, had been driving, there were the clouds, there his hands, bruised and scuffed and with dirt on them and a bit of blood nothing to worry about so drive on past the trees and such.

This state came with slow and growing wondering, What happened what has happened?

New sense of return. Of familiar company long lost, behind him. Hello again. Where you been? He gripped the wheel.

And Towns! Where’d you go what did you do to bring this back?

By the time of the outlier buildings of the city Stallo knew for certain they had been inside the wire. That a night had passed there, yes that came back, for their task, the task with Towns. Who had been with him no not on the drive down but by the time arranged by the rendezvous by the lay-by by the junction by the road by the base by the numbers, bye-bye baby. For the infiltration and investigation. They had spent their hours going over and over the maps.

And here he was for the first time in ever so many years returning to his body after a while away.

Last night he and Towns had sought the parts of that shoddy barracks that Towns had said were R Unit or its offshoot or subcontractee adjacent. He’d been there more than once, he’d said. Reporting back from this or that excursion, sometimes to NITKO new recruits, then in camera to the true researchers. It being hidden in a regular base meant special security was discreet. The place was always crawling with soldiers and visitors. Gave the breakers-in a bit of leeway. Towns had had two army uniforms for them.

Stallo would find out soon enough what they had done. Things came back in bits. In dribs. For now he trembled.

Oh my god you!

—Peekaboo, Stallo whispered, speeding on his way away from where it had all happened, and he could hear the shaking of his voice. He mouthed Grundle and Lovat Scout and Enkidu and the rest. Why’ve you come back? Did you recognise me through the young man’s eyes? Was it you found him his way to me?

Stallo’s body was taking itself and him a scenic way. Through cramped pastoral. Back to where his dog waited. But go back, so after planning and confabulating over days and working out their maximum and minimum plans he and Towns had been ready, yes.

—So you’re after specific information? Stallo remembered saying to Towns. —Simmons’s notebooks? Thin places? Maps of apport sources?

Stallo had known that he could not have put into words what he wanted. Anyway he, Stallo, was a legend was he not?, that was enough, that was why he was there, legends had no need of inner lives and it would be a minor cruelty to deny this boy his legendary comrade. Shouldn’t think him a boy but he did.

—Strude said to me, Towns had said, —the dregs of the oppo still know stuff you lot never got out of them.

—I don’t doubt it, Stallo had said.

—He told me some civilians ended up being part of this, Strude did. Years ago. Saw stuff in the base.

Stallo remembered staring at him until Towns had looked away, while Stallo tried to work out datelines and timings. —I went looking for him, Towns had quietly said. —Spain. He was in a way. I thought he didn’t remember, or Strude was full of shit, but then he did. Or sort of. I think it did something to him, seeing whatever. He told me a joke…. His face had creased in consternation. —I can’t remember it now. Strude said we need to find the seam.

This Strude had seemed to Stallo to have been saying too little and too much.

Within that base, intel. And this time, and Stallo had not shared this thought, when I find it, and I will find it and I will do what I have to, this time I won’t be denied.

Stallo remembered he’d looked in the waning light at his companion in the car’s front seat, and had not been able to shuck off a duty of care.

—You sure about this? he’d said.

Towns had started some stuttering answer about the fact of the danger he was in like other ex-Uniteers apparently and Stallo had stopped him.

—Even if you’re a target this isn’t going to lessen that. There are other ways of trying to keep safe.

He’d seen the bewilderment in this lad’s desire. When he strained to speak Towns was learning what he thought and that he would be just as happy not to thank you very much. I’ve a certain sympathy there, lad.

—When I—

—When we—

—I was—

—My mum—

—I—

Towns had auditioned them all. Then shut up and looked in the direction of the base.

Then, —I just want to know. Something. I want to know something.

Good enough for Stallo. Towns might not know it himself, he thought, but Stallo thought Towns wanted to touch the dead.

Stallo drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He remembered Towns had surprised him by speaking one more time, before they began. And what it was he’d said, Stallo could not recall.

And now he was driving back alone.

There was little for him to do but wait it out so he got on with waiting. Towns had his plans and skills. Would be doing what he must, he supposed. Not that he wasn’t nervous for him. But Stallo, midwife to the young man’s terrible curiosity, and his own, would wait. As he neared the capital he put his fist to his chest as if to hear a hollow sound.

In the city he awaited memories of the infiltration and they did not come.

He went as he’d never expected he would back to the botanical gardens. With his spear. And below the usual gloomy pleasures of return what else was there to this?

Yes he was Stallo. He gave the world a wave at the thought because there’d been times he’d not been sure of it, but here he certainly was. Still though. He pushed his hands into exotic bushes and the green paid him no mind. Oy, he mouthed. Not again! I’ve lost control. Ha ha. What was that then? Back there? A goodbye? Are you taking the piss?

A last moment, before keeping other company? What other company? Where else could it be, or be going? Why the fuck come back now that one last time?

Stallo believed he knew.

Of course he’d not been present in the body, had no memories to hide, but still he could not forbear striving to see himself in those corridors with the tough young lad in his dark clothes and greasepaint alongside him or drawing farther away on some specific secreter quest.

Now in a solitary postscript that he had not expected, postponed questions of Towns’s own motivations came back to frustrate him, unanswerable now, so he chastised his own impatience.

Towns what was all that? He did not state even to himself the suspicion that began to grow in him but it did. He pictured himself and Towns in hidden rooms. Awaited Towns’s message, the stories of his escape. Knowing now that none would come.

Yes. By the time word reached him it was no surprise. It was as he expected, though he’d still not spoken it to himself, the word was, to the wise, he had, he supposed, given his, in any case what he heard, girded, it turned out, heard through channels, two days after the journey, to the base, two days before it was in any newspaper, what Stallo heard, grapevine gripper, clenching his hands and teeth and eyes opening wide for all that he’d been readying, was that Towns was dead.

Word was Towns was dead. Word was he had shot himself, word was. There where Stallo had left him.

You did what, Towns? Really? Who’s lying? Who lied?

Towns we hardly knew you. Climbed to a last place. In company. Bye then to him, and to you and all, said Stallo to what had visited. Off with him then, eh? That’s your pick?

[61]

Strude—

Maur steps back, closes her mouth against her fear and revulsion.

Strude wears a grey all-in-one. It is clean and pressed and he inhabits it like something alien. It hangs off his chest as if nothing went through those bones. He stares at Maur and his mouth is wide. He steps towards her not like someone hurt but with unwholesome energy, balancing as if unused to his own legs, arms out. His skin is pallid and creased wrong, and his eyes sag in their sockets.

“You,” he says. His voice is clotted.

“Oh God,” Maur says.

Strude says, “You you you.” The voice comes from deep. His lips twitch and do not move with his words.

“I shot him,” Maur says. “I shot you!”

“You.” Strude approaches. For an instant Maur hopes—!—to be taken by that out-of-jointness of time, the fugues that come with revenance, but Strude keeps walking, Strude is walking, in that enthusiast inexpert way, hands out and his poached-egg eyes sliding. She can smell him, he smells of bleach.

“Get away from me!” she shouts.

“Still not afraid?” Wran says. Maur feels the wall against her back.

“Son boy gun follow don’t sky sorry stupid done me unit,” Strude says. His lips barely move at all. “Forgiveness do bad duty exorcise open empty what? you’re who rev Stallo beat apport me you kill you.”

He sways and slap-slaps his feet with toddler’s enthusiasm towards her and opens his mouth so far his eyes look up at the ceiling and out of the dark of his throat speaks again.

“Kill you,” his voice says. “Done me to me. Kill you.” He reaches, she can’t move, his grey hand comes for her.

and goes still. Strude’s face remains a predatory blankness.

Wran holds a machine, pointed at Strude. A control such as Maur found on dead Strude, on the mountain.

“No,” Strude says. Strude’s throat says. His eyes seek her.

Wran says, “Will you help us?”

“No I,” Strude says.

“I killed him,” Maur says.

“Life is tenacious,” Wran says. “Just do what we need you to.”

“Or you’ll set him off? On me?”

“Let let no stop,” Strude says.

“What do you want?” she screams.

“You,” Wran says, “Jules, Cybill. Whatever else is around. You’ve always had a connection. Can you still touch it? Your control? You know what that is? That’s why Stallo was jealous of you.” Is that a smile? “We don’t need you. But you open that link, you let energy through. That’s helpful. And you should want to help us.”

Maur stumbles so the bed is between her and the men. She watches Strude. His fingers tremble.

“He’s not as still as the climbing one was,” she hears herself say. When it was still. Was being still.

“No move who end,” Strude’s insides say through his mouth.

“He’s not empty,” Wran says.

She manages to say, “You put him back inside himself.”

“Early days. You can see.” Wran is cool. “We keep working. It’s the big one when we get it right.”

“No you let I hurt stop kill I you,” Strude is saying, or he’s saying her son’s name.

“Do what we say, Maur,” Wran says.

He presses buttons. You can see Strude wants to look at Maur. But Wran prods the console and Strude is stalking like some scarecrow granted motion into the corridor and his voice is complaining, “No no no.”

“Best to help us,” Wran says.

“Why did you kill them?” Maur says. “The Shackingham kids.” He watches her. “For that thing? Old Pal?”

“I understand,” he says. In his stare Maur feels clearer than she has for a long time. “I see it would be a comfort. For them to have been victims. Conspiracy.” He shakes his head. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Oh, it’s all just a coincidence—?” she starts, but he interrupts.

“Stallo did Rouse Jules. I don’t know how. We didn’t do anything to her. Why would we? To any of them? Why would we do anything to your son? In fact he’s the biggest mystery. He worked very hard to get in where the others ended up dying. By their own hands, too.” He nods as if correcting her. “And Stallo was with him and Stallo deserted him and Ewan did what he did. I think he did it because he thought that’s where the Unit was, and he wanted to rejoin. If not one way then another.”

Maur doesn’t know when she started crying.

“What we’re doing isn’t wrong,” Wran says. “Help us help you. If you’ve lost your control, get another. Or another apport? Tell us about Fez.”

Of course they want Fez. She and Apportville with that hybrid vigour have resisted Roused reconnaissance.

“Fuck you,” Maur says. “I don’t have it!” She thinks, Who is my control? Jules, Cybill? Some gloop of others?

I don’t have the letter—

In France, some need, to be reached, spoken to, had sent her from that room to where beyond wards the letter had been received. So unwarded, had been sensed, too, by those of this faction, racing over the hours of her night walk to where that apport had blared its blank message, in registers only tracked by such as they. There were moments when she had opened her bag again, though to weigh down the newcome thing with watching stones, old seeds the better to keep it quiet. Might such threshold instants have been enough? For the army of the void to find her—not Stallo—upon the mountain.

“You already helped us,” Wran says. “You answered our questions. You don’t have to be awake or remember it to do what we need. Of course you don’t have the letter. We want it—which is why we don’t want you to have it. That one leaves a trail, if you know how to pick it up. Through you. It’s yours, after all, wherever it is. If you still had the letter, how would we use it, and you, to lead us to where it is now?”

Salvor

found with a pattern of wounds

disturbed in the balance of his mind

disappointed in the loss of a new role in which he had taken great pride, and rightly or wrongly blaming himself for that

The way Stallo lit out for territories and the off-grid life again, if he did feel whatever emotions journeyed through his body, he’d have been excited, and afraid.

His dog was pregnant. Stallo shaved his head and changed how he walked. Let that be the end of it. He spent months in a tent in Wales trying not to wonder if Towns would visit, or to consider the man’s last moments of murder or suicide. Same jobs as ever for cash, look at papers, look at computers in this or that small library. You can go a long time without speaking. He pretended to himself that he did not know what year it was. That he felt no urgency, that what information Towns had brought didn’t matter, that this wasn’t his business, that this was how he might see out the life of his body.

Which was full again, he felt sure, with something he’d once thought gone—but not that previous companion. An other, recompense?

You could only dissemble so long. Yes Stallo would wish to evade the question poor Towns had perhaps answered. Of what was occurring in that place. But he couldn’t not ask.

He strove though to not consider how he had got out. It was not grief, he’d barely known him, but Towns’s death provoked in him something like shame.

Back in London—it was inevitable—he was a memento mori under bridges. A part of him conjured a Stallo with a garden and a tiny home living out his remainder. But he had to allow that he was a patriot after his fashion. One of those queen’s beasts. With responsibilities. The ingratitude/stupidity of the nation would not deter him. There was a nobility in such abnegation. It’s in my nature. So long-suffering he sought streetcorner intelligence.

He wouldn’t name it loneliness for God’s sake but yes he felt the lack. Lamented the loss of leafy hand—remember how he had once resented it?

—It’s harder to track anything now, one man told him. —There are exports, a few, hush-hush. Not the goods no but the plasm. Marked Oil or Solvent. Low-grade stuff. And yeah containers go missing. Traced to Pakistan, SIS, Mossad, for all I know the Pickle Factory, why would they tell us? The man masked his disdain as High Toryism, to ennoble his banal despair. —Beware the excellent pillars, he said. —That’s where the enemy resides, one hears.

That name put Stallo in mind of a moaning architecture of the dead. New, dark, magnificent towers.

a pattern

disturbed in the balance

disappointed

Though he listened and hoped for them he heard no rumours that Shackingham Barracks was newly haunted.

Suited men and women emerged from the concrete intersections of the South Bank holding conference handouts. Amid his entourage the minister did up his coat, turned and looked straight at Stallo.

Who had his hands in the pockets of his best clothes, they were not of high moment. He looked like what he was, a man who could still kill you. The minister muttered to his assistants. They remonstrated. Two bodyguards came a few half steps behind him as he approached Stallo.

—Hello, he said. He stuck out his hand. —You have to forgive me.

—You’ve done well, Stallo said. —You were a little undersecretary when we met. I was with Myton. Ring a bell?

—Yes, of course. The man hesitated and pointed. —Allardyce.

—Long time since anyone called me that.

—How can I help you? This is rather…That is—

—I have something to ask you, Stallo said.

—Listen, the minister said. —What is this? You can’t really just buttonhole me like this, you know. Please forgive me if I seem rude.

Stallo kept his voice quiet. —I’m not sure what’s going on. I don’t know why no one seems to admit that we’re at war. Or acts like it. I’m retired, I’ve been wrong before, but I’m not wrong about this. I know all about the new priorities, I’m all in, you do what you have to. But as well as all that, we’re under attack. Again, from fucking…He shook his head. He let his voice peter out.

—I understand, the minister said.

—I don’t think so. From certain quarters.

—I understand, the minister said.

—Don’t patronise me, Stallo said. —Don’t have a clue, do you? Always this fucking myopia. I’m hardly flavour of the decade for your department. So ask yourself how bad it’s got to be for me to be here. How can you go on acting like it’s business as usual? You have no idea how much I’ve given up for you lot.

The minister was no coward. Even squared up a bit, good on him. —I understand you’re concerned. I commend you for that.

—Here’s what I want, Stallo said. —Tell your people that I’m not the problem. Because I’m still not convinced it’s not them on my tail. Alongside Old Pal.

The name provoked no recognition Stallo could see.

—I shouldn’t fucking have to stop this on my own again, he said. —I’m putting myself in harm’s way. Oaths matter. Think what you want about me but call off your people and have them do their jobs. Do yours.

—Respectfully, why would anyone be after you? the minister said.

Stallo counted down the seconds he had left at this. Fewer than twelve now.

—Mr. Allardyce, if you come near me again you won’t be able to talk like this. This was a courtesy.

—This fucking country, Stallo said, —doesn’t deserve to survive.

He turned and went into the riverside crowds. Heard running steps behind and took a bit of pride in moving like someone his pursuers’ age, sliding between buildings out of sight and hauling himself to the low roof of an entryway, to lie flat like a man on the downs on a summer day.

He was still fucked then. As was England, and/or the living.

Here he was thinking about Towns again. And asking himself why he’d not tried harder to find Marco. Easy enough to say that now. Still though. He might even have been in that market square, watching Nergal and Stallo both. What he had once suspected of Marco and Old Pal, that can’t have been right, can it? Marco was not so nihilist as all that.

His dog made friends with another in the park and he interviewed its walker without her knowing that’s what he was doing, vetted her to look after his animal. But a certain thought of the single-stone-double-avian variety came to him and he walked his dog by gathering places for the intrigued about the after and once again he tracked faces, impatiently now.

It was anomalies he was after: those too young, too trendy, too sharp to fit, keeping to the edges of these groups. These he hoped were intrigued despite themselves, there because of data overwhelming the armour of the everyday. They would, per paradox, be the more serious and thoughtful and committed than those eager for such solace. So he looked for embarrassment.

Found it in a well-dressed man, a very pale white man in a tight shiny suit who slid fast away from every get-together; a heavily made-up teenager (he’d put her at); a gay couple, young men, one disdainful in expensive T-shirts, his lover apologetic and snide. Over weeks he followed them all home. Another set of recces, hours to get their comings and goings.

The couple were all but shut-ins, the clobber of the one notwithstanding. No way to circle closer. The young woman spent time in a pocket park, smoking, listening to and sometimes muttering at her phone. The real-estate-agent-looking cunt walked a nervous little dog every day which was the obvious way forwards, but he was indeed a cunt, which wasn’t a problem in and of itself but he was a wary one, too, gave him a look once of such instant suspicion that Stallo pulled harder at his own lead, and let all those cheerful ready phrases—Look at these two making friends! What’s yours called?—die unsaid.

That girl though—alright, young woman—seemed no less sus, if he was honest, but in her it was as curious as cautious, and that he could work with.

—What do you fucking want? was the first thing she said to him as he approached.

—My dog likes you, he said, and that looked true, thankfully. —And I want to ask you about your meetings at the library.

She stood and said, —Fuck you, dipshit, and Stallo smiled and sat and patted the bench beside him.

He knew he was good at this. And it helped that she was shrewd, this Heiko, quite disdainful of the prim schmaltz of those she’d found her way to. On the edges of which groups she stayed. To make sense, she told him, of something that had happened to her once. He was surprised that she did not tell him what. He rewarded his dog, it was sweet to her.

Stallo didn’t have to work as hard as he’d thought he might to prime her as sounding board, dogsitter, assistant. A few pointers at a few better texts than those she knew. She didn’t trust him but that was okay. When he knew she would say yes and mean it, he asked her to take care of his animal because he had to leave the country for a while, and he gave her money.

—Where are you going? she said. —What are you doing?

—Trying to learn more, he said. —About all this stuff.

—You going to tell me what you find out? she said.

—Course.

She smiled without pleasure or belief but with great want.

Brantley walked naked into his kitchen to see Stallo at the table.

—Jesus Christ, Brantley said. —You trying to get shot in the face?

—With what?

—You challenging me to a draw? We’re both old. Jesus. You want coffee?

—Go on then.

Brantley went back to his bedroom and returned with underpants and a vest on and put a kettle on the stove. —I know, you people don’t understand what we have against electric kettles. Do the shopping, maths not math, herb urb, diaper nappy. Yakkety yak. He spooned freeze-dried grounds into two cups and stirred the water in and slid one to Stallo. Brantley scratched his paunch. —So, he said. He pulled the curtain back a little and leaned as if you could see the Potomac from there.

—I heard you got promoted, Stallo said.

—More of a sideways move. But they treat me fine. It’s a lot quieter.

—Quieter.

—Nothing wrong with that. Why would I want to be fucking around like a thirty-year-old?

—Especially now, Stallo said. —Good to be safer now I mean.

Carefully Brantley said, —Sure.

Stallo looked into the ugly American light, an unlit dome at the centre of a fan. Above the switch, photographs. Brantley laughing in a wood, Brantley holding a baby, Brantley with hunter’s gun amid reeds.

—Who are the new people? Stallo said. —Out there?

—Shit, man, I get it, Brantley said. —Once ITKO, always ITKO, right? I ever tell you, by the way, I tried to import that word to my guys? It’s so fucking quaint. With us it’s all, Be advised subject is not apprised of PMU. And don’t start with me that you don’t approve of PMU because the units aren’t postmortem. Croome did a number on you, didn’t she? Like I could give a shit.

—You still deal with the Unit? It’s back apparently.

—I’m on a parallel beat now. Now that you guys don’t rule the waves. He raised his eyebrows.

—How’s Simmons then? Stallo said after a time.

—Last I heard, pissed, what do you think? You ask me, he’s losing it. Occupational hazard. He’s changed, got his prophet on now. Strude’s doing a lot of the day-to-day stuff. Heard of him? He’ll go far.

—How far can you go if the Unit’s still a joke?

—Jokes can be pretty serious.

—You nervous to see me, Brantley?

—Shove it up your ass. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, of all people, to have a dead man come into my house.

Stallo drew a nail across his forearm. It was too short and blunt to do more than leave a white line but he said, —I bleed.

—You think they don’t?

—I hear they do little else these days. All’s not well.

Brantley shrugged. —“Worms are as painful to the dead as a needle in the flesh of the living,” he said. —I don’t know what to tell you. So they’re sick. So? That Talmud quote? It’s pretty much the only one I can find about sick revs. Spirits of the sick, sure, everywhere. But them ill? Not much in the lore about that. Which should sound alarms.

—Why?

—You not listening? Because if something like this is new, why is it new? Sickness goes through populations, which means now there’s a population. Since when’s that been true? We, by which I mean you, start Rousing seriously what, forty, fifty years ago? Before that it’s all outliers and the odd wild fucking wisp. But since then you’ve been building an ecosystem. An ectosystem. So why would you think you’re not going to see bugs? Parasites? We know they give each other ideas; why not infect each other in other ways?

—And this is where the mystery men come in, Stallo said.

—Really? Brantley said. —You going full void army on me? You scared of the men in black?

—Since when were you too good to listen to stories?

—Oh, you’ve got me all wrong. I believe stories. On goddamn principle. I’m not saying there are no men wearing black. Or that there aren’t new mystery organisations around trying to raise the dead. I’m not even saying they might not worship the fucking devil. I’m not saying none of them hate us. I’m not saying none of them have power….

—So what are you saying?

—I’m saying there’s no one secret cabal or whatever the fuck. Everyone’s jostling. This is the age of the entrepreneur. There’s no conspiracy….

—Fuck’s sake, Brantley, I worked for a conspiracy.

Brantley, it occurred to him, was sort of like a friend.

—I didn’t say there are no conspiracies. I’m saying the, whatever, the Dark is Rising, the Time of the Dragon, the Soldiers of the Void, whatever, I’m saying that is horseshit.

—One of them tried to kill me.

—One of who? This new Illuminati? What did you expect? You’re Stallo. Plenty of people want to do that.

Stallo said, —You are scared.

—Sure. I never had my finger on the pulse—excuse that analogy—but I knew a bit. If you’re here, not only are you not dead, but you can’t talk to your own people. You out in the cold again? Are they in line to kill you too? We always wonder what everyone else knows that we don’t. Even you guys, kings of shade, always suspicious we had intel you were missing. I told you most of our budget was spent on trying to figure out why you has-beens were so much better at that shit than us. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and your allies in a bear hug to pick their pockets. I don’t know anything you don’t. You want a coffee, I can help you out. You want to know what’s going on with the duendes, you tell me. By which I mean don’t.

—So it’s not your lot? Stallo said.

—Holy shit, is that why you’re here? You had a hunch? Stallo, are you not hearing me? A, what the fuck is “it”? B, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. C, if it were us behind “it”—and please see A and B—I wouldn’t know. D, if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. And E, you mean this VA you’re so scared of? You think it’s my guys in disguise? Brantley enjoyed making a long rude noise. —You people always had such an inferiority complex. Don’t get me wrong, you should. But seeing as you ask, F, no it isn’t. Look, the Russians are toast, the ’Sixty-eighters are toast, years ago you guys got hold of that Carlos the Jackal motherfucker from the last of those fucked-up Maoist crews, so whatever you think is going on, it isn’t any of them either. Wasn’t there another one?

—Marco. I thought he was after, well, call it OP, but I had the wrong end of—

—Okay. That’s already more than I want to know. So maybe it’s his people. Jesus, again with the “it,” now you’ve got me doing it. Are we done?

—You’ve heard he’s going for apports now. He’s working with a woman from—

—I said I don’t want to know.

Stallo leaned back. —D’s a lie, he said. —You would tell me if you knew.

Brantley smiled. —Well then, see A through C. And F.

Stallo rose and drew back the curtain himself and looked to the gridline streets and the haze of dawn. —ABC, he said. —I don’t like DC very much.

Brantley said, —I’ll try to get over that.

—So far as I can work out, Stallo said, —some of the old crew don’t give any of it much of a thought any more. They just get on with whatever comes next. After the Unit. Selling time-shares or teaching geography. Do you remember Sapers? Did you ever know him? He went into local politics. Councillor. Liberal Democrat. I know you don’t know what that means, but fuck me. You’ve seen what we’ve seen and then you go and do that?

—What’s your point?

—Don’t they care any more? Don’t they want to know? How can you just—

—The world’s full of people who’ve seen things. People who’ve done things worse than anything you and me know about. They still have to take a shit. Whatever’s happening to you…That’s not automatic.

—It isn’t my fault if no other fucker has the bollocks to do it properly.

—Well like I said, you’re Stallo.

—What do you know about me?

—I heard you fought a devil. But then there’s no liar like a soldier. Apports drying up again. I hear that too. And I try my best not to hear anything.

—Thought you didn’t want to talk about it, Stallo said.

—You got me. I always thought the idea to milk the Roused for apports was the best one. When Stallo did not reply, Brantley said, —Croome didn’t loop you into that? It never worked. Maybe they never did produce the apports, just directed them, whatever she thought. Hence the hunt for the mother lode. If science fails you, try myths. Go home, Stallo. Watch TV.

—If it’s not the age of angels, Stallo said, —maybe it’s the age of angles. He drew a square with his fingers. —I been seeing that everywhere, for years. I think it might be a cross-section. Of a tower.

—Whatever you say. Just enjoy the ride while you can.

—How long’s that?

—You got me. Okay, I’ll tell you what I think’s maybe going on, even though you know a whole goddamn lot more about it than I do. I think we invented—

—Who’s “we,” kemosabi? Stallo said.

—Heh. We invented an afterlife. I don’t mean our idea of it was wrong, I mean we made the thing. And then we invented what was in it, so we could rip ’em out of it.

Stallo said, —“Invent”? Not “invoke”? Okay—you get the steam engine when it’s steam-engine time.

—Karl Marx say that?

—Close enough.

—Not that we planned for this, Brantley said. —How could we have?

—If science fails, he says, Stallo said, —go for myths. But I never heard anything about what?, apport seams….

—Not our myths, Brantley said. —Come on, man. The revs’.

—How am I supposed to find out about that?

—Jesus, I never had you down as a whiner. Talk to them? Brantley said with a little laugh. —Get hold of one and ask it? Good luck. If anyone could, you could, the way Croome and Hook used to talk about you.

—I never, Stallo said. —No one could—

He stopped then, at thoughts and memories.

—You know what kemosabi actually means? Brantley said finally. —“Looks out in secret.” It should be me calling you that.

wounds

mind

role

Stallo drove to the coast. He checked his GPS. Dragged a dinghy out of the back and over the stones through blackness. What a way to kill yourself. Out onto the face of the waters.

South. Remised to long-trained hunch. Cold animals moved under his passage. He watched light specks upon the coast, nothing on the other side. The kicking boat drew closer to the welcome-warning on-off-on-off gaze of the spit lighthouse. He checked coordinates again and consulted memory put by. He dropped a little anchor on a long line.

This dark, such silty freezing waters. Yes this was madness. Grimly he swung his arms in the dry suit. It was hardly just lack of practice, though, was it?, behind why he’d hesitate.

You go backwards like an angel over the edge of the boat. Still alone.

By Christ the cold.

He descended to a pounding within. A luminous darkness. He gripped the rope. Spare tanks, oiled-up bamboo, accoutrements of survival dangling. Pressure embraced him as he went down, following the torchlight cone, swallowing Valsava, his head filling with the close-up noise of his breath and body, visitations, the CT in the jungle, a man strapped to a chair in a kitchen, Towns looking back at him from hidden halls. Let’s get those over with.

He was poised deep in the night of the sea beyond his glass, silt fingering the beam, showing nothing behind him or beneath him or closing in on his sinking self out of pitch with the grim grace of the dead and eddying.

Come on then if you’re going to.

Shaking forty metres below the air his torch lit up the coils of his guyline on pale sand, the plough-shaped anchor pointing at a stone. He came to neutral buoyancy and picked out scant inches of rocks and fronds of kelp.

To search, you spiral. The moon-pull tugged him. Laver caressed his light. Stallo did not start at the furtive investigations of whiting and shanny; he was braced for some heavier slippery touch. He wound outwards from the zero point.

After how long? he came to the dregs of his dry air. Stallo switched regulators and uncoupled the empty tank and let it go.

His torch lit the spread hand of a starfish. He grew ever more numb. Counting breath and heartbeats. Nothing appeared before him but the sparse sea-bottom chaos.

Close to done, the gauges said, with his second tank, and stirred by new anxieties he closed his eyes and turned his light off and struck out unseeing. Blind for one long exhalation. Controlless, he could still bloody well do something, let’s see.

Light on again. He glimpsed the too-sharp edge of something not natural.

It might have been a cube. No, there; it had a curve to it.

There rose within the pit of Stallo awe. A dread, an exultation, as he approached the age-mottled artefact between sand and weeded stones. He could not stop silt billowing from his motions, and he fought to slow his breathing.

A figure waited.

Look away.

In the black sea waited a metal pail scabbed and askew and holed through by years of water and algal investigations. His torchlight shone on cracked cement remains within, wedged tight around something. Leather ageing away. A boot.

The boot was being worn.

An ankle. Protruded. A leg.

Amid the storm of sand and murk, the hazy guttering of a man.

Stallo shook with his heart.

The man shape reached endlessly for a steering device. For control that was not there. The dark-shrouded legs were bent, that one foot tethered, it flexed its knees sitting in a chair not there. The eyes were larger eyes of metal and glass melting into him. The mouth was full of explosion. In the blur, a new sooty dark red light. The man looked at Stallo in the cold water, the man was on fire.

—

Stallo took the regulator from his mouth and let out a long silent scream of bubbles. When he was done he mouthed, You again. Up went his breath. The skin of his face, the thick fabric of the suit, glowed in the pilot’s frozen immolation.

What you did, Stallo said with his lips. Betrayed the Unit. Your unit. Why?

Water came in the edges of Stallo’s mask. And what might observe from behind him, down here? If only. With limbs of what carrageen, what swaying wrack? He did not turn his head but thought, Are you there? again to what had once been his or of which he had once been its. Nothing answered. This was down to Stallo.

So he swam for that old endless death. He looked through the flame caul into the eyes of this thing’s sense of itself as Watkinson, the terrible interest of such long interment in this water, and he saw in the eyeholes recognition, hello stallo

What’s happening? Stallo said. What’s going on? He put the regulator back to breathe again. He could hear only the rockfall thump of his heart. Its sputtering made the figure a great candle. Everything’s off and everything’s happening and all my leads are drying up, Stallo said. You remember me? Yeah we were always close. Was it me, he said, who woke you up? I was there. Yeah I understand you could say vice versa, couldn’t you?

Pretty please? Help me?

Stallo unhooked his spear. Let the rolling glow of the light over the djebel wash over him. He pointed with the bamboo tip.

You going to tell me? he said. I’ll fucking do you, don’t think I won’t. What was it the Kenyan said to you? What did you do? Why did you do it? What’s the source?

The cold wracked him. He made to thrust his weapon

but the silence of that figure, no, it knew he could not, you could not to an old comrade was that it? He put his weapon away. Reached down and took hold of the bucket. Braced his fins against the bottom of the sea and strained.

I’ve a trap on the boat. Is that what you want?

The metal moved and Stallo felt its rust through his gloves. The handle came off in his hand and he sat down hard into a new cloud as the burning watched.

Help me and I’ll let you free, Stallo said.

He closed his eyes, followed his fingertips. Felt again, felt, oh god, the edge of the boot emerging from, encased in the cement. Tried not to let his fingers slip into it, the hole of the revenant leg itself held by that embedded apport leather. A clever deathless gangster execution.

What do you want? I’ll do it!

He sent a sour thanks to Brantley. If I die it was you sent me here. I had no better idea.

Stallo pulled his hands away.

If I am marked to die, Stallo recited, and closed his eyes and took a deep breath in and out and leaned his forehead towards the ruin and simile of the Roused’s own skull, ready to overlap

rumbling of pressure beneath, in caverns underground, voices, unclear but insistent, whispers in many languages, all dead, and too far to grip and draw strength from or give to it but palpable, he felt the pull, the keen of a connection across endless distance, voices he knew, urging

back and he was not dead. Stallo lived. Though his head hurt and his breath hauled. He opened his eyes and they were right up close to the fire in the sea, and he jerked back.

He was close to the end of the tank, had lost he did not know how many minutes, and memories and impressions stained his insides, he could not yet make sense of them, but he knew they mattered and swore he would let them take their shape, and he opened his mouth to scream this time in something like triumph.

The freezing burn of the Roused on him. Quid pro quo, he said silently, and turned, to his own surprise. Knelt again in the muck by the pail.

He chipped with his knife at the concrete which began to come apart after the sea’s long efforts to crumble it and Stallo kept hold of the leather rim as he ground on and as the ruins of the boot loosened he felt something within him very terrible so he could not breathe.

Stallo tried to look up, could not, held from above, as if that to the feet of which he had lowered himself touched him, pushed that uncertain memory of flesh into his own and if it did not end him it did hold him down. His mouth working around the regulator, he was all I’m fucking helping you! but what held him held him.

He reached and swung with his spear but it slammed into the murk just as if a second free-floating foot not encased in anything had trodden it down. Stallo would not let go of it, could not pull it free.

His air would run out in these thickening clouds, he a wrestling Jacob in the black.

Until he felt a slap, almost playful, all the way through what held him. He could not see in what new struggle he was caught up but

what had taken hold of what held him overpowered it and Stallo was released

And he lurched up, faster than he should, faster than he could, under some new power, as what had come and broken the punished thing’s grip hurled him up and he clutched his spear and remembered to exhale as he ascended. Stared down. At the instants of rolling flame, the pilot spasming between states. Stallo went up and the darkness rushed in to obscure that cement-shoed spectral light too fast and totally to be sure of detail, of whether he did for a splinter of time glimpse it wresting at a backandforth-eddying bathingsuited cold white womanshape of known and wifely cast, its their limbs in spasming combine and contestation, swimming woman on-fire man.

The dark receded. Fuck you, Stallo said, pulled up as if by an inflated ball. Did something shout from below in rage or did it need wait only a little longer for time to finish its work on leather and fragments? Some other part of the doubling figure wish him wry godspeed?

Fuck you, he said. And clenched against memories, Thank you, he said, in bubbles, to what delivered him, and for a moment felt mad.

And sorrow enough to choke him.

Decompress! came to him from somewhere within, he’d heed it, but just then his attention was directed down. He could not say whether it was with compassion that anything regarded him from below, nor what the compassion of the dead might be, and as his heart tattooed and he thought perhaps it mouthed, somewhere, that swimmer, what might have been the start of answers, that it mouthed silence

[62]

And hours or days after that, while she lies on the floor her back to the camera, Maur hears the door open. Two guards take her and she growls at them, a literal growl. They pull her up and out of her room in her thin gown, she’s in and out of time again in the striplight light. Now to new parts beyond. Feet dangling to slip shoeless as she is hauled. Long way. Struggling some. Unpassing anyone.

A stretching chamber windowless like all here, big screens in a row and chairs before them, operators at their stations, a table to which the guards take her, soldiers, rifles ready. And those with pistols at their belts and a stance that says they’re officers. In an alcove fronted in blast glass, an engine. A shuddering rough cube what four feet to an edge, of wires, piping and chrome and diodes, with, in two, three niches, filthy old matter in shapes that make no sense protruding. One compels her; a clot clamped in circuit, that she blinks to make out. It is a tangle. A knot of fibres so snarled and old they could be earth. Rope, a rope end, split, split like an old tether, pulled apart, as by a straining.

Oh—

On one wall is the first sigil she has seen here. The four black lines of a printed square.

And for all the drugs-exhaustion-fear-spectrality combine the points of insight and memory in her gather in new constellation: the upsurge in the enemy’s power, and when, and Wran’s sour knowingness, and old remarks of Stallo about the byways of his life, and Fez’s resentful reports, Rak’s hunt, Strude and what he said, and of the time, this time, and of new dispensations of violence and money come back to her from her grieving research. The LEDs and stain-resistant off-white of these corridors, the lack of incense or throat-sung chanting. Maur mouths, My god. Her eyes go wide.

Below the square whitecoats cluster. Faces she now knows. One is Wran.

And

Strude.

In his own corner.

His edges are too sharp. The grey overalls from which, it comes to Maur, perhaps they have to clean his shit? Does return affect your bowels or does the body take its own care, leaving what’s there of the mind to wonder about itself, as his seems to? How he stands, don’t ever stand like that, such angles. Staring at the hard chair towards which she’s pulled so it’s as if his gaze awaits her, and she’s made to enter it. Focus, Maur.

A guard closes thongs attached to the tabletop around her wrists and straps her grips around metal handles from which extend wires down to she supposes the generator and machines. She faces those two rows of three blank screens. Smaller displays below show boxy rooms and corridors, these interiors.

“Wran!” she says.

He looks at her and then at Strude, so she knows Strude is there to cow her, because she killed him that other time. Wran might have him come spying sidling sighing signing up upon her drooling as if in envy of her weepage, to touch her with the fingertips of the incompetently dead.

“Wran.” She sounds steady to herself. “Is that your company logo?” She jerks her head towards the square. “I know what you are.” Her words come easily enough now, from the distance of her. Only Wran and Strude pay her attention.

“You didn’t catch Strude; he worked with you. And you still work for the Brits. Just in a new way.”

One of Kardec’s types comes to her even then. Wran watches her and his colleagues type turn dials murmur readings. Maur keeps going.

“Stallo thinks you’re the void. A void army.”

Mercenary mediums        who make their faculty a source of pecuniary gain

“I know what you are.”

“One time I emptied out a spy,” he says. “I could do that. That once.” A shade of regret. “Not for them, not then. But it helped them too. And they begged me.”

Yes. “Arm’s-length and subcontracting,” Maur makes herself say. “I read.” She reaches for details she has known. “QinetiQ and DERA and PMCs. R&D.”

“Towers,” Strude’s voice says. That sends a landscape of stony dolmens through her.

“De-risk,” Strude says. “Towers. Of Excellence.”

“MOD-industry collaboration,” Wran says.

Behind her Strude must extend an arm because his cold corpsey fist appears by her face. One by one the fingers flick out, enumerating excellent towers.

“Radar,” Wran says. Strude’s fingers count off. “Electronic warfare. COTS/HMI. Synthetic ops. Underwater.” Strude closes all fingers but the index. He points it right at her.

“The invisible tower,” Wran says.

“Rouse,” Strude says.

“State, nation, private,” Wran says. “That kind of thinking always tangled Stallo. It never did the job he wanted. Especially now. It doesn’t matter who laid the first brick, it’s who signs contracts for what. With whom. The direction of travel’s clear.” He looks as if he’s assembling a sentence in his head and not liking its shape. When he speaks again it sounds like some formal declaration. Speaking through him. “Challenge, opportunity.” Raises one hand in a gun-shape, then one with finger rubbing thumb. “New times. Offers you can’t refuse. You know we found Stallo once? Came for him. He got away and it didn’t matter. We stopped looking. Because he doesn’t matter.” A moment, then almost kindly: “Maur, I told you you should be useful.”

—

“Cybill’s gone,” Maur says. “She’s the one you wanted.”

“She isn’t.”

“Isn’t gone or isn’t who you wanted?” Maur says. “Jules is gone anyway.”

“Maybe. That was always an interference pattern. One function rises, the other falls.”

“What?” Maur says.

“Ewan.”

Shock goes all down through her.

“We’re still learning to control resources,” Wran is saying. “Mistakes are regretted.”

Look where you are, look at what’s happening now.

“You rent yourselves out,” Maur says. “And you want to rent out that thing.”

Strude is mouthing. He’s silent but sharing something with her, like a whispered joke, that she can’t make out.

“I’d rather not gag you,” Wran says. He won’t. Whatever he wants her for, he’ll want to hear if she speaks. Whatever speaks through her mouth.

Maur seeks something, pride in him. Of an adopted country. Of the rental of revenance, seeking bids on a specialist exchange, this marketised Albion. She feels mad. She hardly mourns that pro patria service, that marked and (among other napalms) ended her son. And is this iteration of national interest more disreputable? No either/or between the head of state and their accumulating portrait in miniature—maybe there’s splendour, infernal if you like, in such abstraction, a hand vast and cool and invisible exchanging piece for piece, for the sake of queen and?

Stop, Maur thinks. As if she cares. Neither of the above.

Wran shows no particular feelings. This void army that was never there was and is a testing project in a new paradigm, the inheritance, not enemy, of Stallo’s unit. A private workplace.

For Maur’s uses as medium, channeller against will of something-or-other and of bottlable glair that will drip soon (she knows it), Wran might keep her around. As he keeps Strude around since her intervention, as proof of concept. It’s a kind of inspirational story, Wran’s, whose recruitment was so secret and shamefaced as to need the plausible deniability of snatch and grab. A British dream, that even the despisedest traitor could end up high in a lioned-and-unicorned mercenary institution. Hands push headphones onto Maur’s head. The Unit’s not blind—it’s a secret front for this secret business.

Look the big screens are coming up, and whatever operation this is, whatever you’re here for, begins. Grey light goes across everything, across the whirring block-shaped engine, and Maur sees that knot again.

How did you find it, Rak? Something so begotten.

For army soldiers to find in turn, below a dead parent, and bring here, as if under black water. Old Pal made stronger. My god, what fulcrum energies are you using? Maur opens her mouth as if to say. But it’s starting. Get ready.

Visual noise and the grey-green distress of night vision wax into view on-screen, static resolving into up-close foliage, an overload of signal.

The officers? issue commands and the operators at their desks mouth responses, though Maur can hear nothing and waits for whatever is her own role. Camera points of view shift, the jerks of strides, the turns of heads—instants of overlap, a glanced shape in a corner of one, up close dramatic in another screen—and what emerge into visibility are figures. This is what the infiltrators see. Soldiers in dark on dark.

She knows the negative forest, and Maur can’t hear her own distress. For all her anger at Fez, she would not choose to give her up. But the voice told her there is a connection between her and the letter—a channel. And here she is, wired up again. She watches with the eyes of the soldiers of this nameless concern. Having come for Stallo and failed and her and succeeded, they are moving now with her unwitting intel and according to the signal opened by her letter in that keep, New Apportville.

Secluded hours from the frontier town and an epoch out of reach, an echo of two echoes, of Fez’s father’s-sorry-parent’s township above all and, in nasty callback or out of conviction or solidarity of opaque kind or some ruthless siphoning from the memory near (days of hard jungle trudging but fingertips apart in an atlas) that site where the war against the Buzzard God ended in revolutionary suicide and less willing sacrifice.

Maur’s insides lurch. Could she bring the apport back? Into her mouth. Break their link. Shout all the way down the lines to where Fez, the Azeri, the child, waits, not knowing who comes to end the scandal of her.

Amid digital shade Maur with the infiltrators discerns angles and motions, of targets, the living on patrol from shack to just-seen shack.

Anyway and so a man and woman in lab coats take rough hold of her trapped hands in séance. She jolts. Now with the focus of a medium. Now with all their machines to control that. To call something. A circuit opens and energies do come through. Here there is an absence now by Maur’s side. A hole like somebody’s child.

cybiljuleswho?

you?

fezcanyouhearme

you?

but you are

—

“Yes, that’s clear,” someone is saying, “yes, she’s locked on, it’s strong—”

I am. That comes up in her. She doesn’t know what to do with it but it is there.

The on-screen visuals warp. It is as

if that is the moment when what’s tapped around and through and of her and what

is released from the haint traps laid out in that hot forest connect, spookily, at a distance, one bolstering this other, and ahead of the infiltrators in tactical precision stuttered figures abruptly vanguard, arrived moving in ways their invokers can’t.

—

Through Maur pours the connection to the paper, its articulate urgent quiet, and newcomers sputtered and regrouped and moved faster, targets sensed.

Whiteness blooms, an explosion that wracks the hidden town, digital smoke from different angles in four of six screens, light-pulses of rapid fire. Orders resonate in the bunker where Maur’s hands unwillingly grip. Those with whose eyes she sees go weapons up to where their invoked functions skirmished with those of Apportville in wuthering distortion. It’s so fast. On the screens Maur sees

a soldier outline, much too big | a soldier outlined | the hands and rifle of the viewer firing and a living man dying
a momentarily dead screen, signalless | a hanged soldier swung below gallows mouth eyes open hating and a woman falls dying as he screamed a slur at her | the outlines of a vibrating mass of a mournful young man in antique uniform snowed upon years ago and looking for a missing face not circling him as he touched walls and walls collapse beneath his touch

and a flicker and the eyelines on-screen change and Maur sees

a soldier run vastly forward behind where a man swayed in a noose screaming at a woman as she dies | a route clear into this village | the viewpoint lurch as the shooter drops to his knees to reload and look to his side at a comrade pulling gas mask on then forward again as a local presence not alive came rolling for him but veered violently as if afraid of what is flanking its target

the screen snaps back into a glow and a look right up into the sky at the strong lines of a towering gibbet in the jungle at the end of which a towerman of this dwell howled and flailed with limbs in and out of existence at the shaking strut of a pylon at another leg of which a frostbitten pale young man of everyday size but out of time shook his head and touched his fingers spreading ice in the jungle heat

a hanged soldier gallows mouth eyes

another burst of white, an explosion coming into the fuzz of aftermath

and Maur knows the repeats are not lag or impossibly fast manifestation of the dead but the simultaneous enactment by Rouse engine of the same revenant function in many places, and their amplification, and seeing the morasses of kicked-up dirt and dying animals as gas choked the Roused of Apportville, that fell in confusions of ontology, so Maur knows burnt apports are this poison, gas gas quick boys, alongside infection, too, the pall around the thing of the void, to weaken them, manipulate them make them food, that is experimental Rousing, extrapolated maybe from leavings of technologies salvaged from an earlier Apportville in the snow. To be rendered back. That this invasion, whatever else, is product testing, this footage, advertising.

Maur appals herself because she is looking for Stallo. As if the reason he has not come for her is because he has gone against Old Pal again. This is not, she screams at herself, such a story.

But with a new flow through her Maur hears too the cries of those who hold her, and the rise of something in the channel.

—

What’s she straining at the screens to see? It’s the motion of those empty people, that’s it, because she gave Fez that machine and you’d just bet they could reverse-engineer it in Apportville, what a thrill it would be to see those is moving is running husks halted by such hijacked energies but no, they knew, they’d known what she passed on, hence this torqued revenance they’re deploying only instead, the juddering call-them-dead, all moments one way or another of something greater in the sequencing of their echoed limbs, all here components of the conjuration of that—

And the view on every screen swivels so all cameras take in the centre of New Apportville, beyond figures scrambling to flee, beyond the distress where Roused strove against Roused, or where they strove to so to speak breathe and failed and persuaded themselves into a death beyond death, the heart of the township in sextuplicate, the rise of a glowing columnar darklight out of nothing, fuelled by among other sources what pours out of Maur and her control question mark and the hidden-message letter a channel, and in the pillar’s heart

was a wrongness, howling, so happy, ready, ready to play,

was

Maur closes her eyes. She cannot watch what it did to Fez’s town. She will not observe as it played.

And with her eyes closed it comes to her that now is when she must consider her own escape from that betweenplace New Apportville prison.

They left you alone so many hours. They did not take your money. Hidden yes but hardly out of reach of the town. Consider now how it was that door came open, quietly, unlocked as you sat and mourned, taking your time to finish even after you heard the whisper of metal as if something in the lock had slid away out of space amid your straining leaving nothing to catch on nothing and the door simply opening onto those tracks.

How long Fez kept her there, neither bringing her against her will into Apportville nor releasing her. Like a bet, an each-way wager that if someone will not be of your party they will come to be fully of their own. Or out of fear let’s be honest.

The letter departed, returned, departed again. Makes Maur wonder what else she might receive if she wants, and what else might go.

Much more has gone than has ever arrived. From her pockets her surfaces her bag her memories, since her son went. A wire piece in Stallo’s basement. A dog she fascinated. Plastic from wrist clasps. She considers a component that holds a door bolt closed, all ceasing to be there.

Ewan did you flee?

She opens her eyes and looks again at that unclear presence on every screen on the brink of dreadful games. She considers the things that pass away from the world. An apport arrives, what departs is an asport, a deport. All Maur’s life things have so departed.

—

Whoever is cranking whatever cranks it up, more control energy goes through her to

Old Pal

but Maur strains again, not to summon what might remain, to revenant, some apport shed or channelled by the Roused, but to push away. To banish matter, let it on its way to where the dead go. Make it a memory.

Let the letter go? Too late? What else is there to disappear? Of what does the world need imago more than thing? What locks are not needed? If the apport’s dead’s memory, what is the deport?

Maur’s done. As if dead. Donne. As if wrapped. As if draped in a grave cloth, delivering a sermon in a shroud. Like a hooded man, standing raised wires trailing, arms out. On the screens Old Pal moved as Maur strives to remember what covered her eyes and mouth once, when she was young. The press of cloth upon her face, hankered and dreaded. This matters. It is that cloth which must be asported, sent to the after.

Quite suddenly and calmly she feels ready. So, then, a memory.

Maur in her bed. Jaw clenched like metal. Nothing soft about her. You, Ew, close. Too much noise. Stop she said stop. He was so little. He was so young. She told him he was too loud. She was so young. She said that if he would not stop then something. She said that if he would not stop the noise she would something. Go on, Maur.

She has no memory of saying it, but now, now, she remembers hearing it. Her voice. The exhausted hot teary furious young shouted warning that that child too heard,

that she could not take any more and if he didn’t stop she would lie back and cover herself up and

that if he didn’t stop she’d lie down and cover herself with the covers and cover up her face and

if you don’t stop that noise then you will see

and he would see then that she would be lying there still and covered and that meant she would be

dead.

And Ewan is not quiet and Maur lies down and holds her breath and pulls the sheet up over her eyes.

Lay and listened to her weeping son. Took a few moments being dead.

And the cloth of that moment, God knows what happened to it, how long ago it rotted, however spread out across the world are the atoms of what once pressed down upon her peaceful features while her child cried, let there now be no remnants of that terrible blessing, anointed by his crying, time for it to go now, let all those particles depart. Asport. Deport.

Maur wishes it. Insists upon it.

There is never certainty. But in that winking of screen lights comes an upswell of silence, and she believes that history has spat the fibres and dispersed threads of the enshrouding cloth away. To where apports come from. That the world is lighter now.

That that matter on its way opens a door through which to exit. Maur pushes open a door. Hold the fringes, the threads of what asports, what goes. Maur let it take you, let it pull you with it, towards the waiting dead.

The fact that all mothers are made of wire.

The fact that why the doglike skull head on the metal feeder, watched by the disapproving bike-reflector eyes of the terry cloth mother’s cartoon pacific face, the fact that headless mothers serve just as well to comfort, and that within the softness of the soft one is wire, too, which is a snare, which is the mover of the puppet, which is a scourge, which is communication, hello central, which is the decisive moment, down to that, which is the being on edge, which is the stealer from the pocket, which is the private message, which is the mournful alien song of wind, which is the ancient drawn filigrees of adornment, for centuries the shape forced by the muscle of the maker through the too-small space, the squeeze and haul to alter quiddity, only later to be swaged, which is wound about the scabbard of a creature made for fighting, old riddle of the riddle book, which adorns sword and cock the answer, which provokes the fury of a woman not by what it is alone but Oft ic wirum dol, being all dolled around in wires, as if that’s not for the weapon, as if it should be other things, basketwork current cage fence, the fact that that’s what little girls are made of.

XXXII

Close

The Fountainhead

Towards the last time.

For years, on and off, Stallo had shared space with and grown attuned to the oozing around within the brainpan of qualia not his own. Perhaps that was why he stayed not only calm but clear enough to let new flame-flecked images and emotions flit through him like fish lights and fireflies, limn them, as far as he could: hard ground roaring up to take him; a remembered body gusting on an infinite plain; a tug of attention. Whispered exhortations. A certainty of argument and urgency beyond. Other glimpses, vouchsafed or snagged, from other points of light, watching him from the cool of afterwards, as well as those too skittish not to be of the alive.

Messages not extracted by the crushed and burning djebel man himself and those with which it had connected but offered to it, in something like comradeship—of which now Stallo, escaped from the undrowned, retained glents.

Sights, through it must have been Bowler’s kid’s or Marco’s eyes, of maps, of dreams of mining, of baked lands.

A new mission, then, seeing as he had to do everything around here. Seek out intel foregrounding apports themselves. Stallo sat through yet more tellings of ghost stories.

When is too late to change? He was sixty-something. No, like it or not this was what Stallo would ever do.

At night he returned to Watkinson’s eyeless stare. His hunt focused though the days drifted again.

When he came back and rang her bell, Heiko opened the door and gave a huffy exhalation. Her look was very knowing. The dog came up behind her and whimpered with pleasure and nuzzled shyly at his hand.

—You didn’t leave enough money, she said.

It was time to tell her he’d been in the forces dealing with these phenomena. Kept it evasive. Told her it was down to the likes of him and her, now. She said she’d guessed he’d been a soldier. And he believed her. He tried to take her to bed but she was not charmed enough by the sheer cheek of it (what with his forty years on her) to acquiesce. But she told him to behave and did not banish him from her company.

He was impressed by how much she had taught herself about all this.

—You never told me what was it got you into this, he said. His interest surprised him.

The story moved behind her eyes, and he saw her curiosity at herself. She opened her mouth then gave the curtest laugh and said, —Oh, you fucking know, leaving the moment of a rising haze or a lost friend or lover much too young, some teenage accident, to slip back down her throat. Leaving her guarded again, no regret. She returned to apport talk.

—Your magical objects from mythology? she said. —Kave’s apron, Liahona, God Nails, alkahest, Tizona. Is that the kind of thing you’ve been talking about, these one of a kinds?

He did not say to her what had seeped into his head beneath the sea. He would not put his thoughts to Maisie into words, but he thought thanks in her direction, as it were. I did a fair job smashing up the cement, he thought, too. Did it get you free? Should I be watching my back, you sneaky cunt? That last almost with affection. But no he could not convince himself that the pilot did not still light up the cold life where he’d found it.

—Where would you find that sort of thing then, you reckon? he said to Heiko.

He evaluated rumours against the visions he carried. Everything was going faster, he had to go faster too. —That sounds like Marco, he always said, at word of unsanctioned explorations at Hierapolis and Fengdu, whether it did to him or not. Was it Marco, seeking netherworld entrances? I mean we’ve all done that. But if Marco, too, was apport-focused now, why probe walkways of the dead?

Okay, so what if psychopomps weren’t charged to lead the newly dead anywhere, what if they and their charges, thrown up however, sought places to squeeze by the true disturbances, zones not thinned by or for revenants but apport presence.

He looked back into Watkinson’s level stare for caves and caverns. Sand, wind, light thick as poured milk. Clay turning in the ground. Ur-stuff, yes, where signs of memory remain: handprints in a wall, the edges of what might once have been pillars beneath cracked hills by salt basins—

He left the dog with Heiko again. She barely pretended to mind.

Adventurers and mercenaries beyond the dustline. In border town cafés televisions shouted. Stallo was not the oldest man ready to go to war. A Montenegrin came and found him and laughed at the size of his backpack and said, —How long you stay is good I think.

—There’ll be fighting soon, Stallo said.

—Yes, we go quick.

Seven men. Hours, shaking in the flatbed.

—Why you come?

Stallo rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and most of the men smiled. When the sky was all but dark their convoy veered onto flatland by a deserted concrete tower.

Stallo said, —You said we’d be going by Hillah.

—You know, the Montenegrin said. —Always must make changes because is not always safe.

Stallo said their routes diverged. The Montenegrin said he would not pay him for that day.

Old Sol seemed hotter than it should have been.

Two days alone out of sight of any road. Stallo fell under the stupid sun and a spine of wire went into him. He swore and hobbled to where farms had been. In a cinder block shack he poured antiseptic on his wound. On the third day he saw the dust of someone’s travel. He called, held his hands high. A group of armed men on foot. They took him miles to another clutch of low buildings and a thoughtful man half Stallo’s age.

British?

Not a mercenary. A hunter.

What do you hunt?

That Stallo wouldn’t say. But he named places of which he’d heard in this quest, described visions, not his, he’d seen. His host narrowed his eyes. Something about the man’s look. Stallo told him he was looking for someone else, on the same route.

The man fed him and dressed his wound and Stallo paid him and the man gave him a horse and a square of paper torn from a map with a circle drawn upon it. Stallo poured sand from his bag at the entrance of the room to sleep in and in the early hours he looked and the sand was scored through as if by sticks. Not for the first time he made a little laugh motion at the thought I have lost control.

A day of travel thence Stallo dismounted by remnants of a wall dividing two vastnesses of earth. He turned like a lighthouse lens. Looked at the horse and put his finger to his lips. Had he his oscilloscope still, he might have sought to run it, but it was worldly trash now and he had only himself and Watkinson’s leavings. Towards dawn he rode in a new direction.

Midmorning he looked through binoculars at figures at the edge of things. He skirted a watercourse and dismounted and let the horse drink and he left it and continued towards the travellers. Five of them, on foot. He tracked them. Too far to see details, though it would not shock him if some were known to him. He spent two nights a mile behind them amid tough grass. They came into a rockier zone. The stones talked to him.

Under dimming sky one man put a pack on his back and embraced his companions and set out alone.

Stallo came after. Yeah it’s hard, isn’t it? he thought. Comrades or not, some secrets you want to keep, right?

Two more days. Stallo chewing biltong and finding in his light-headedness and muscle memory of scout work a certain pleasure. The man did not see him but it was impossible for Stallo not to relate to this as a collaboration. He let the other lead. It’s about time, wouldn’t you say? he thought.

When the man set up camp Stallo crept closer. Ascended to where above his quarry he should not be framed against the dusk. Stallo’s heart was going, enjoying this. He breathed slowly. Unclipped his PSG 90 and lay with it braced upon its stand and let that heartbeat slow and watched through the scope.

Slim. Bit younger than him. Too far to make out any expression. Too far to make out what he was doing exactly, checking on equipment, preparing for something.

Here’s hoping, Stallo said silently. Are you ready? I’ll be with you in a minute. Let’s not draw this to a close just yet. It’s been a time, hasn’t it?

Breathed in, breathed out, thought, Alright then, alright. Had a moment of Towns smiling at him in the car. Had a moment of Maisie if you please. Alright. Pulled the trigger.

Kicking stones in the cooling air to watch them patter down, bracing himself, and when he had his balance he went through a cleft. The sounds of straining breath. The man sat sprawled with his back against an angle of earth. He was tan and very lined and his hair was short and grey and if he’d walked by him in the street Stallo would not have looked at him. The side of his chest was a map of blood. He watched Stallo and pushed with his legs and tried to straighten up and raised a pistol and Stallo passed the spill of baggage and took the weapon out of his hand. The man made a fist and it shook and Stallo saw that he had no forefinger, an old wound, so his fist was his pointing sense, too, a pointing with a ghost of flesh. Stallo knelt and took hold of a little bottle on a thong around the man’s neck and snapped it free and swung it on the leather like a sling and let it go far. Took from him a knife and another small pistol, papers, another bottle with oil and gimcracks in it stoppered in wax.

All signs of pain left the man’s face.

Stallo said, —Hello Marco.

Marco watched him and whispered.

—I was hoping you’d stick around. From Marco’s pack Stallo took out a notepad and a map. —No radio? When are you supposed to check in with your lot?

—Cosa vuoi? Marco said.

—Do you remember me? Stallo said. —I bet you do. I think you’ve seen me before. It’s been a long time, granted.

—Mi ricordo, fottuto fascista.

—Why did you come alone?

—Alzatevi, prigionieri del bisogno, Marco said. He was not looking at Stallo now but as if at a black sun, and he whispered to something coming for him across a great distance.

—Here we are, Stallo said. —Both rejects of history, eh?

—Sento i cani, Marco whispered. —Li sente? Sente i vermi? Sento il digrignare dei vermi.

—Was it your lot brought down the Venom? Before your time, I know. When I got wind you might be here…I wondered what you were after. You know I’ve got a connection with this place? Uruk’s supposed to be around here, and I always thought it was near where Gilgamesh played. Lost his ball. Standing there sobbing until Enkidu says, Don’t worry, boss, I’ll get it! All a bit convenient if you ask me. And then I hear you might be looking for something around here where it’s thin as net curtains…. That gets me thinking. What might that be? It’s all about games, is what I’ve come to reckon. Play can be murder. Was the first apport a lost ball?

Marco’s mouth worked.

—Ah, mate, Stallo said. —Look at us. Prophets without honour. I always did like that. Nergal dead. Wran caught, he said.

Marco coughed abruptly enough at that name and spat with blood.

—Well, Stallo said. —Bit harsh.

Marco whispered, —Si fotta quel voltagabbana.

—What’s got your goat? Stallo said. —I wish we could’ve talked more. I’d like to know what you’re doing with that Fez. Fuck her, to be honest. And what you’ve got to do with, well. You know. Old Pal.

Marco looked at him with what seemed anger still and yearning and a deep bewilderment. He said, —What? Cosa?

—After Nergal was done, we should’ve sat down and talked, Stallo said. —I respect you and we both knew how this was going to go. You’re the last of them and now it’s ending.

—Questa non è la fine della storia.

—If you say so. It’s the end of yours though.

This time Marco spat at Stallo.

—Alright, Stallo said. He wiped his face. He unfolded Marco’s maps but Marco was too dying to see them now. So Stallo gave Marco the courtesy of his attention while the blood went out of him into the dirt and Marco did not close his eyes and you could see him setting out, as if he had any alternative, without dignity or indignity, concentrating hard.

—There was this bloke, Stallo whispered. How funny what came back to you when. Towns had tried to tell him a joke. In the car on the way you-knew-where. Stallo remembered now and remembered how unlikely it had been. Had tried to—hadn’t exactly managed it, so far as Stallo could recall.

Stallo accepted the responsibility to watch and he watched and Marco died. And Stallo sat with the empty body.

On the slope of a hard valley, a slide of wall fragments explored by tough weeds. A compound disgorged, what was once a hidden chamber protruding. He climbed. The perspective and scale of the remains were strange and they were where lizards went. The sun could not reach him in the shadow wedge but he sweated unendingly and watched his water. He shone his torch through gaps where bombs had taken this redoubt within the hill apart. No way through. Before the light was all gone he did another spiral search. Angled walk down, up again, down, like a wavering line on a console. Below the ridge another entrance, this one made by nature, disguised by surrounds, unattacked and ignorable, into the cool of which he stumbled. There might have been footprints, once, before all these days of nothing.

Stallo waited according to a protocol of invocation he neither understood nor doubted. Soon the only light was from the glimmer of his equipment. Stones must have watched with emptiness eyes, neither enemy nor comrade.

—I’m coming, he said.

Deep. He held his torch in his mouth. A roll of colder air. At the lip to a hollow, his descent accelerated, a slide, the light fell from his lips and bounced manically and went out. He landed on his bad leg and hissed. He felt himself and he was hurt but whole.

He put his hands to the stone floor. There was to it a slickness. He took a lighter from his pocket. The cavern was egglike, rock spurs drew shadows at his flame. He stood on rubble that confused him. It was not only stone.

Amid the pulverised remnants of the hill, an infinity of objects. Broken parts. A black split in the rock at its core.

Stallo stood on the remains of shoes and broken glass; pens and spurs of metal again, a bicycle wheel contorted quite wonderfully, a typewriter its keys bent like insect limbs. Strewn rubbish from what could not be counted. PLC webbing, inner tubes, eyeliners, tin bowls, ceramic bowls, the broken ends of sticks of chalk, water bottles, ticket stubs, glasses broken and unbroken, pencil-top erasers piano keys screws and nails balled-up foil and chocolate wrappers slippers socks pistols paintbrushes empty tissue boxes shards of vases dusty fake flowers pilchard tins wire hangers plastic hangers wooden hangers sandpaper sheets fizzy drink cans ugly bracelets mouldy flannels ration boxes

It was apport dirt on which he stood. His flame went out.

He finger-sifted. Like a harvester of ruin he pulled up anything that was not stone.

There came a certainty that he was watched. He turned towards the darkest of the dark where the hole was. Without light but with such sureness of the lines of this place it was as if he could see.

It rose. The very dark.

No did not rise

But as if rubbed or extruded into place by the apports, was there. Keeping him

in view.

Whoisthiswhoiscoming

So Stallo was not immune. It could be nothing but fear that made that sound in his mouth behind his teeth. Why this of all of them? Why was this the one to stop up his blood? Oh it was cruel. Such implacability. Come, was what it might have said. He whispered to say a banishing.

Here then its attention. To the hole. Wherein were apport remains turning to thread and pulled in and swirling out unending. Shifting ground. He felt a tugging from his bag, from apport or not within howbeit towards the whirlpool of the dust. The shadows that were apports descended. The maelstrom beneath took them. And the dark figure was beside him, its attention on that plugholing of the items that awaited

so Stallo swung his spear, there it was in his hand, stabbing right through the nothing risen, down, the point of it right into that place out of which came and from which might go apports, smearing it with the apportness of it, deep, all the way in

then as he was running, what Stallo felt was a tug and the whistling of shed items on their way, a bottle with a cord around it hurtling into the shaft and the shade into the split, into the hole forced in the world by the spillage of objects, and his weapon was dripping and beyond the terror of being at that endless slip it nauseated him, that place bubbling and crusting with the pus of thingness, and he pulled from his pack a grenade and did not turn to look just threw it backwards at the cornucopaseptic ooze.

Climbed as fast as he could no matter his injuries while the focus of the dark was on stuff’s valedictarrival, its self-exile, apports becoming deports becoming, a lack and loss to remain. He found a place to wedge and wedge he did. And braced.

The explosion shook him and filled his ears and stones fell down upon him. Stallo whispered to himself comforting sounds. There was blood in his mouth. Let’s fucking finish it! It was him who’d shouted that, who was all pumped up and exultant though afraid.

He looked down as if his eyes might have found light, and as if he had in fact seen it he knew that turn of his head had brought attention. That he was the object of curiosity, of what waited and the abyss that pulled at it with apports cast off and reclaimed and over which the roof of stone quaked. In that poised moment before the closing of the source in rock, he was again observed from below.

[63]

Close your eyes.

Maur recedes, careens with the tug and gravity of what she clings to, that antique shroud in which she’d taken leave of motherhood a moment in the little relief of death, now deport, still stained with the sweat of her face as it goes, ousted by her from the world, not abjuration but apology,

and in solidarity, gripping with the tip of her mind fraying threads on their way forever out of life and matter.

Maur cannot feel her tongue, her lips, her eyes, her fingertips, as it pulls her, as she is pulled, enveloped, into the becoming shade.

—

She gasps without a body.

—

Canting into starlessness, dark become light become dark become, she a meteor in this infinity,

—

grey in the light or dim approaching, this flight, endura, the deport hauling her to where she banished it, an edge, a shore, the fringe of a keep within this allness, she comes close, feels, beyond the momentum that brings her, a new tug into this make-do hereafter cobbled out of what you will by the traumata born at and of a death.

—

Maur speeds toward that absolute edge.

passed the line of division and fell towards the plane.

She descended over the skerry shoreline and eyeless saw the grey sand of it, the trash and crumb of millennia of objects. Apport sand. She

—

denizens, diakka, half-ghosts, figures made from sticks and shadows, clacking arms like mechanical scares as they called out and

—

never it said, she knew without ceasing the tragedy of the as-if ground on which she stamped with her not-foot, the tenuous promise of this unsanctuary, time it was with the

—

voice of agonies and lack

story over centuries, shades without recognition, wanting the touch of

and never knowing

her own voice sounded, banshee and

—

dogs, and a familiar dog. The murmur of bees and flies, oh those chitin vectors,

figure coaxed, root, bramble

the shade of a true engine, that cube unlike

my son? my son! all of

weeping dust, speaking dust, pissing dust, exhaustedly turned their dust attention in her dust direction

voice, voices familiar, a beat left for a curse, urgent, declaiming and declaimed to, disputation.

this channel, the burning, and she bent and

handfuls, smiling,

no one or two or all, here, that was not

streetlamps, and from each bowl a corona of darkness

figure,

you

sorry, so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry, I am sorry,

runnel between now and this permanent late post, her unhands to her unbody, channel and link, she

him

at him, and he at

a bone-road

matter

child

to help, chooses, they choose

and Maur crosses back into the vastness accelerating along her own trajectory unanchored any more by the discard she released to let it clot eager amid the tatterdemalion rejectamenta tumbling in the squares and stretches, drawing the way, keeping that path open long enough, staring back with infinite yearning at the figure in the gloom, oh you that would not turn, that had its back to her again or still, not rejection but rapt at a new direction, and she buoyant with surprise and if not joy not desolation either at a memory without particulars but that left her light that he had spoken, and said to the others there, those of his ilk now, she, she racing back towards herself with the storm of wings of what came back with her.

Gasped to return to the flesh, opens her altered eyes already crying.

Press Into

Heiko lived in a garden flat so it was easy for Stallo to come in. Give her credit, she didn’t scream when she found him waiting.

—Fuck’s sake, she said.

—The dog’s outside, he said. —I’m going to fetch her in, okay?

When he did, Heiko said, —Where’d you get her?

—Daughter of the one you looked after.

—She looks a bit wobbly.

—Yeah she’s a funny one.

—Did you get rid of the phone I gave you, when you came for her mum? Heiko said. —I’ve been trying to call you for months.

—I know. He sat at the table. —Any coffee going?

—Fuck’s sake, she said, but she filled the kettle. When she sat down she looked at him with her head crooked and said, —You look really fucking weird.

—You didn’t leave any messages, he said at last.

—I’m not an idiot. You look really—are you alright?

He felt then that he had been preparing for this and that she was ready. He felt distant pride in her. Good to feel something.

—Anyway, he said, —I know what you wanted to say. You were going to tell me the spirits still aren’t doing what they should. Heiko said nothing. —Even after I came back.

She gave him the coffee and the dog water.

—I thought the whole point of you going away was to sort it, she said. —That’s what you said when you came back. If you’re going to keep your fucking secrets at least you should do something with them. I thought that was the idea.

—Yeah. It was. I was looking for something…. I had a lead and something to take care of. And I did. I absolutely thought I’d nailed it. I really did. I wasn’t lying. I thought that would be the end of it.

The flatness to how he spoke. This declaration he’d made to himself many times. He could still hear in his voice, though, for all his straining over many months, the remains of what he’d call the awe, or the dread, it had picked up under the desert.

—And, Heiko said. —Turns out not.

Been a time he’d had few doubts that, with Fez maybe, Marco was convenor of that void army. Lone and late and honourable in his way, striving to tap whatever those forces were that others had sought before him. There was more than one way to hate and if you could say, The world’s beyond repair, then rupture and change and end might overlap, deliverance and Dragon be the same.

End Marco and that project would end, he had truly thought. He still believed that he had, in some part, helped wreak change—but not as he’d expected.

—It’s worse than it was before, he said to Heiko, and a little of that anguish made it through.

The sealing of that fissure, the end of Marco, had if anything accelerated certain dynamics. As if Marco had been not cause of trouble but bulwark.

Consider that moment and he was back there in the dim, exultant, thinking something along the lines of I’ll close down your fucking Aquarius, your Old Pal, mate, I’ll get my control back when it knows there’s nowhere else to go, and hauling himself up and reaching for the sting and vigour of sunlit wounds and shouting as the stone infolded slowly and with violence and finality beneath him like an epoch’s closing mouth.

But still he’d been alone coming out.

Stallo rubbed his chin.

—A while back, he said. He hesitated to tell her everything about Towns, abruptly not sure what he had already said. Which shocked him. —Anyway, he said. —I have a favour to ask.

—Another.

—I used to want to understand. These days I’d settle for quiet.

He had to close his eyes a moment against the silence that was all that came with him now.

—I don’t believe you.

—Well you might have a point but that’s what I’m telling myself. Somehow things are worse and I still need to put a stop to that. I think I know where the truth is, though, he said slowly. —I know I was wrong before but not this time, I don’t think. I was looking the wrong way. The right way for something, but not that. Look, I don’t know how to put all this. What if it’s not about where you go digging—no that can definitely make a difference. But maybe it’s not the most important thing. Maybe what matters is that you go digging and how you do it. Might bring stuff up all over the place.

—You’re not making any sense.

—Sense? Come on, you know how this goes. I’m saying I have to get back in somewhere.

—Why do you think I care, Stallo?

—Heiko, he said. He almost looked kind. —We both know you won’t give this up.

—One day, she said. —But okay, not now. Where are you talking about?

—I’ve been there before. Sort of. But this time I’m well and truly on my own. So this time I’ll remember. But I do need help. Something I thought was gone, I don’t think is.

I’m too old for despair, he thought.

—So tell me, Heiko said.

He’d hardly spoken to her, last time. He’d returned to a London in the early days of upheaval, the reconfiguring of eastern streets with great bombast. He walked them with the dog ahead, nothing following behind him. Feeling at first as if a very long way away from himself. Scanning as if objects skittered under him though all that was on the ground was rubbish.

It had settled some. Some. He was still but for his animal alone for the corporate shindig of 2000. To Stallo the sky was bigger and brighter and shallower now. The vault did not extend as far as it had. The wall, as it were, between it and the void was hardened. Which, he’d supposed, fit. He would live now, he’d thought, in a world closer to his eyes. And there’d be no percentage in denying that that brought with it yearning, that what success he had wrought with as he had thought the ending of Old Pal’s old pal and the slide into the funhole pit was a loss, too. So this is it, is it? he’d thought. The world?

When the police had arrested Pinochet, that was interesting.

He’d tried to believe the beyond was empty. He had read books and shot the shit with people and gone to bed with women he met in pubs. He’d known he was waiting, to die, for something, for the end. He resented era by fiat. But proclamations of a national new epoch were not without traction, whether an age of gilt or otherwise. He had read the latest under those new shallow skies. This mutual obligation forms the Military Covenant between the Nation, the Army and each individual soldier; an unbreakable common bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility. He awaited Armistice Day.

But he had worried at connections. If he’d been wrong—and look, you’d have to say it did seem he had been, one way or another, whatever he had done or the relief of a sort in finally getting to what he was supposed to with Marco, a bit silly to have a nemesis but there you go, that was finished—if he’d been wrong then what had Marco been doing? Seeking? For what end, that he, Stallo, had foreclosed?

The dog died on the floor, its new child playing anxiously near it. In its last minutes he put his right hand under its head and felt tears at his own kindness. The animal had made a sound he’d never heard before. He’d buried it and played with its puppy. The Apportville heritage was diminishing, blood and sebum and spit and gall with ectenic force. Even the remaining dribble, though—one drop, eh?—seemed to impact its behaviour. With relief or anxiety Stallo’s heart beat faster to see it show its belly to nothing in the corners of his rooms.

And Old Pal. Still there then. How’m I supposed to deal with that on my tod?

And then what with. That DA or VA still there too.

—Attadog, he murmured. —Find it! Find it!

He’d stared into its eyes and flinched a little as he always must from the gulf of his own failure. The bathos of so biblical a journey, into the desert, pilgrimage, sacrifice, descent, a near-hesychastic state, and then the what-had-happened-down-there, and then—no new times.

What exactly did I actually exactly do?

He considered branching shafts, antique fissures reopened by new earthworks, in quite other places.

Towns, he’d thought. Towns, Towns. Alright, mate, leave off. I’ll give it another go.

He had bought a fucked Renault Trafic and gone north, according to the whuffling and whimpers of his animal. Driven beyond Vickerstown. He used himself as bait.

He had sought violence of mundane kind, too.

Why had he not ditched the phone? Only one person had the number but that was one more than should. So he had known who rang.

Newcastle. McNulty’s was not McNulty’s any more but it still had internet and he’d spent hours on bulletin boards. Through Pendle. By Eyam. Boughton. Skirrid. Mistley.

The soldiers of the base in the nasty little town were his characters. Stallo had followed the story. No sense of return, no familiarity. No volume control on this TV-set world, he’d lip-read as best he could from other tables where the off-duty squaddies went, from the dark by the kebab shop. Had read body language: young men and women draping arms about each other, laughing or threatening. Most days Stallo had felt untethered enough to be invulnerable, of limitless licence. It had been a while ago now though and had they moved on, since Towns’s day? he had wondered.

He had given monikers to those he watched—Tater, Shabbyman, Big Boy, another Gloom. He was party to their secrets without ever hearing a word. Had deduced affairs and bullying and secret queer fucking and regretted hookups and abuse from their unwitting semaphore.

Sangster. Real name. A sly-looking rangy man in his thirties whose nose had once been broken. You’d glimpse him, fists shoved into his pockets, and when there were young privates (uniformed or otherwise) close enough Stallo had seen them veer away. A light-skinned mixed-race black woman, very young, rapidly blinking and eager in company, as he usually saw her, but the first time he’d clocked her alone her anxiety had fascinated him. She was important. He called her Mope in his head and had followed her.

Twice she had gone in civvies to a wine bar farther out. Her clothes had not been smart enough. He had waited leaning on a skip smoking roll-ups watching the entrance. The second time, a man had come in to meet her. Stallo had seen him before and all. He held himself differently than other soldiers. He had that officer bearing but was more—how d’you say it?—inward. Did not project swagger. Mope had looked up as he’d come in and there’d been gladness on her face, but not only that.

—I’ll talk you through them all, he said to Heiko. —Everyone there I think might be relevant. I want you to dig.

—Oh yeah?

—Yeah, he said. —Do your computer stuff and anything else you can. I know it’s fucking cheeky of me, of course I do. But the stakes. You know. I can see you believe me.

He was grateful to her for not making him say more. About the sense of speeding up. He did not say that he saw the want in her to understand.

—One thing I always respected about you, he said. —You don’t go on with questions about what we did in the Unit.

She did not respond.

—Wouldn’t know what to say, Stallo said. —You’re no idiot, you get it, old habits and that. They don’t even train you into it, it’s not an order, I mean it is but that’s not why you do it, we all disobey orders, it’s more just from the first minute, no one can talk straight. Everyone goes all round the houses, wink nudge, evade. You’re so busy avoiding giving straight answers that it takes a while to realise you couldn’t if you wanted to. Even to yourself.

She’d look after his dog but would not let him come to her flat again. As if she could have stopped him. But he met as she asked, in a park, a café.

—Not that many of the privates are on the boards, Heiko told him. —That I can find. Those that are bitch and moan. They’re kids, it’s what you’d expect.

She was scant years older than most.

—No one complains like a soldier, Stallo said.

—I thought they didn’t complain.

—Both. They do and they don’t. What about?

—The food. The exhaustion. The drills. The homesickness. The brass. Sergeant Sangster (Jekyll and fucking Hyde!). The boredom. Army bullshit. Some of them enjoy complaining at first, Heiko said. —If you ask me, it makes them feel grown-up. Then suddenly it’s all just shitty.

—Anything else?

—If any of them do think there’s black ops stuff going on they’re keeping it very very quiet.

—Alright, Stallo said. —Let’s talk about Mope.

Of course Heiko had remonstrated when Stallo asked her to go to a bar in the right kind of clothes, but not hard, and he knew that even without having been infected by his apocalypse alarm she wanted this mission, chatting to and getting drunk with—though not as drunk as they thought—a group of women soldiers excited by the few years between them and her and her air of knowing.

—She didn’t talk much, she told him.

When she told him Mope’s name it was as if the world said it. As if things began to converge. You know.

Mope’s mother and father visited. Stallo walked behind the three of them. He could see her parents were concerned. Her father too shy to ask about his daughter’s mood, gesticulating gently at his wife’s probing, telling her to leave the girl be, and she slapped his hand as if playfully but snapped at him, and that expression on Mope’s face! From who else but a child to their mother would you see that irritation and gratitude comingled.

Funny to think of you here, Towns, he thought. I should know more, he thought. Under exactly what circumstances and to perform what tasks you came. Certainly he had asked. It was not so long ago. Had he been answered? You were never the best at answering questions, Towns, and it was all a mad rush with us. I bet you went all around the houses umming and ahhing and at the end of it I was none the wiser.

We can’t have got very far in though, can we? I can’t have, anyway. Not to get out again.

Funny to think of us here.

He walked his dog all the way around the barracks, as close as possible to the wire, by whatever routes he could. Obviously confirmation bias was a danger. So all caveats. But alongside the sense he had of being in darkness beneath a stage, he would have said with his hand on whatever you liked that his nameless beast never took its attention from something within.

Hooky! he thought. Did they let you shuffle papers? See you in a bit maybe.

—Her mates are teasing her about a secret boyfriend, Heiko told him. —She was pretending to laugh but, you know.

—Sangster?

—Oh, I don’t fucking think so.

—White bloke in his thirties, I’ve seen her with, Stallo said. —Bit generic, I’ll try to get a photo.

—No, they all complain about Sangster, Heiko said. —Except her. She clams up. But not in a girlfriend way. The way some of them look at her when they’re talking about him, I think they’re worried about her.

The room felt crowded to Stallo just then, with the emptiness of those gone. —She doesn’t have to trust you, remember, he said. —She doesn’t have to think anything about you. Most people aren’t careful. Will you take the dog for a while?

This work took him back. The fourth week of this campaign Stallo whispered something to Bowler about the honour of his grandad as he spent hours in the trees by the camp entrance. He dared the world to discover him. I’m right here!

Through binoculars he watched soldiers on foot in uniforms and mufti and he saw cars coming and going. Hours in Stallo saw him that Mope had met in town, walking the pathway, talking on a mobile phone. He wore a civilian suit with a black shirt. White dog collar. To see that, for all the sky pilots in the army, was to know that this was Strude.

The padre did not sit apart from others in the mess, was what you might hear.

—Other than that, none of the kids talk about him much, Heiko said.

Sometimes Stallo could not find Strude anywhere. Sometimes the man sat at ugly tables in pubs and cafés in the town doing paperwork and ministry. He did come and go.

There was no still point to the night within the base, something always clattered somewhere. Get close, scale the fences, it wouldn’t be that hard. The most muffled hours were after two, before five. Stallo could sit in the undergrowth with his stick—trusty stick—and watch the lit-up windows of low buildings. Wherein the padre might sit and write his letters or lie or do whatever secret work he did or listen compassionately to this or that young visitor. And walk out into the yard through the glow of the lights, above what striae?

You watched him did you not? Stallo? You asked after him in your deniable ways. You listened and followed.

Stallo circled the barracks again with wire of his own, twisting ends together, sealing them to ceramic diodes in the woods. The generator he hid in its own place. All techniques he could not say he’d ever understood, but he could use. He approximated a great pentagram.

Set that running. How could Stallo face them unaccompanied?

—Make of this what you will, Heiko said to him. —Some of them reckon Sangster’s scared. Of Strude! As is Jervis, the CO. Outranks him obviously but still.

—They don’t know what he’s doing, Stallo said.

—And we do?

—No but we know we don’t know.

—Mope’s been looking for help. With Sangster.

—And Strude’s all, “You can always knock on my door,” Stallo said.

—It is his job.

—And, Stallo said. —Are they…He whistled.

—I don’t think so but…She wants to please people, if you ask me. Something’s definitely up with her. It’s even more than whatever with Sangster I think.

Why here, Unit, in this training ground? Stallo considered Towns, struggling with that mystery. If the Unit sought apports, now, the storied in particular, what for? What was their part in the, what? battle?, against these void armies and the rising thing/s? While ghosts grew sick?

I liked Towns, thought Stallo. In his way. Funny kid. He wasn’t sure about you, he said to Strude in his head. What do you want with that girl? What can she do for you? We’re going to have to have it out, aren’t we, you and me? If I want to know what’s going on and I do I so do, we’re going to have to talk.

Get your traps ready. The snip of secateurs on barrier wire a fairy-tale sound like the snap of a comb’s teeth. Stallo made a way. Entered the holt within. Stayed low in the night. Made his hide between ugly buildings. To watch the coming and going. Strude shall you and me have those words? Took out his weapon. He watched guards’ movements, their schedules. His life had been such motionlessness for so long. The light in the window he knew now to watch did not go out. Plans always change. He waited. Followed at last when the man for whom he had come emerged. How could his quarry not turn? You made no sound Stallo, but how could he not know this part of this narrative, that he was followed? He did not.

The priest went beyond the architecture, Stallo behind him, beyond where lights dwindled so the wrecks of engines glowered like great faces in workshops’ dark. Go on, Stallo thought. Go into the shadows, very kind of you, makes it easier for me. This is better ta very much. The priest did not pause. The trees thinned out some and from between boles barbed wire stretched into perspective. The padre slowed and Stallo slowed and lowered and watched.

Am I going to have to slot you? Stallo thought. Are we going to end up collaborating? You going to tell me what you’re up to?

He prepared. Amid those energies, newly made ley line, readying for revenance. He iron-fingered pointed at the priest but did not fire. Because what was the man waiting for?

Stallo did not want to be curious, he was eager to get this done, but you can no more choose incuriosity than belief. It was a long long time. Until a figure came. Young soldier, rifle in hand.

Well hello Mope, Stallo thought. Her skills delighted him. Fancy seeing you here. Look at your face. He saw that if this was a tryst it was troubled. That whether it was or not there was something more.

Is that what it is, Moper? He recruiting you then? What have you told him?

Which brought to Stallo’s mind Hook and his images. Being bullied’s not enough, Mope. What’s keeping you up?

Towns?

Stallo could hear nothing of what they said. The way they hunched he could not even see if they kissed. Strude’s hands chopped the air. An urgent conversation now. The woman tried to touch him and Strude backed away. He was angry. She was angry back. She told him something. He pointed into the world. She shone in light from the moon. Strude put his hands on her shoulders at last, neither embrace nor censure, and it had about it a finality. He turned. He walked away into the woodland.

Now was the time to come forward.

Stallo should step forward and he did not know why he was still. Sounds of commotion. There must be lights. The priest was gone and the woman moved and Stallo sensed an engine, cross-section of a tower of excellence, and its energy, the Rouse.

Stallo, man-shaped darkness, came into the clearing. It was time for him to go after the man and say: Someone’s lying, maybe there’s a mole I don’t know and we’re being fucked over and you’re a soldier and you have a job to do and that might mean doing things you don’t want to, sometimes it’s your job to do things you’re being told not to by the people whose job it is to tell you yours, chain of command isn’t always simple, mate, here am I a sergeant telling you what to do, you’re lucky or unlucky depending on how you see it because you’re coming with me, get up at once, I’m impressing, this is an impressment, you’re going to do what I need you to I’ve spent forty years at this and I’ll do what I have to. Old Sol is shining somewhere. Stallo ran and did not know what made him hesitate. It might have been momentary late-night laughter that paused him, it might have been the years slowing his limbs, he heard a sound, a step in his direction. He twisted and raised his hand and it was not the pistol he held it was his stick. A figure approached. Impended in the dark. Thrust

Was that true? Did he know what emerged from shade? Whose head he struck so hard with such a sound?

I thought it was him! I thought it was Strude!

Buckling, she blinked, dark eyes looking into his, Mope did.

I didn’t mean—

All around him, unheard and amplified, the Rouse. Stallo’s weapon dripped. No he did not have it all he had was a piece of it, it was broken, it was cracked apart and some still within her, the remnants in his hand, beyond this its last use.

Even before his knees touched the ground Stallo sought her rifle. To obscure what he had done. He knew how a person would hold the weapon, he knew he would have to position it so, so when he used her dead hands to fire it would blow away the marks of intercession, the debris of a spear. Oh Mope I never meant.

He put his forefinger upon hers, hurry up now, get past this, no need to linger with this. I’ll kill Sangster for you, he thought, whatever he’s done. I’m really sorry. I will.

She looked at him, she looked at his fingertips, he could see the thinking going out.

Stallo. He had his pointing sense.

[64]

The room is full of shouting and the beat of running. The sounds are a dream. Maur comes back into herself, having chosen. Takes the moments she needs. Her heart is slow. She can’t, won’t, not now, consider from where she has returned—

—

Opens her eyes.

—

Bodies on the floor, terrible and dead. Uniformed women and men scatter in terror. There, a soldier brings up his weapon, firing in a strobing arc up at nothing. Maur huddles at the jackhammer noise. She sees the man scream but hears nothing. He lets the rifle fall and turns spasming to face the corner and snaps to his knees as if shoved and bows his head. A scientist takes a stumbling step and there was once a shadow and it touched the woman in a white coat and her eyes and mouth widen and her skin rots. A young man in grey crawling across the floor rises pulled by force unseeable, his face shrinking in sped-up sarcopenia and the floor below him cracking like a thousand-year-old tomb.

And here is Maur amid it all, amid the curiosity of visitors from the other shore.

Dark smoke drifts from the machine behind the glass. It is not humming now. Its lights are out. Where artefacts were integrated, a knot of old rope, is now scorch and emptiness.

I kept that way open. They followed me back.

Maur strains against her shackles. Strude is gone. One screen shows the jungle still, sideways; another is dark, the camera eye of a soldier pressed into the earth. On the others, in multiplicate, Old Pal.

—

It vibrated. Maur sees from its motion its agitation, distress, the pull back across the world, the signal changed and jammed, no longer ramping up, energies not aimed to boost that playful Old Pal function or its thralls but sluicing this way what followed from where Maur went and still now in her wake, of her return to her body, channelled here, bringing those from another island who investigated the burrow with lifeless fascination to desiccate or freeze or alter or cease whom they examined whose blood moved.

They followed me back. And flow from me to the letter.

Operatives still work frantic at their stations and the shaking images show Old Pal rose strobing in and out of itself as on other screens Maur sees other functions winked out, called away, dampened, the retinue of remixed and altered Roused that announced and outrode it disappeared one by frozen interference one, fritzed and overwhelmed by other travellers and the silence of their speech, to leave Old Pal with a choke now in its laugh alone again, and ebbing. But for what reached along the fibres’ path, not of its game, and but for—

In the smaller monitors with their rotation of interiors and hallways here, Maur sees new presences faded up. Some engine room, and behind workers attending to machines came a falling woman in WRAF clothes that billowed in her last descent like a predator’s tentacles towards the living who do not sense them. In a site of interrogations waxed a fussing darkness.

One by one the screens go out. As approaching Old Pal, alone now, visible in the last sideways picture, came another disturbance. A fritz in which most viewers might make out nothing at all but that to Maur was, in outline and gesture, a wall of dead.

It walked in multiple motion. Newly resolute with the weakening of its enemy.

At the clearing’s edge, gesturing at and with those unbodied, the women and men of the camp. At their head, Fez. Pointing at Old Pal.

A collective had faced down the oldest joker once before, when it was solitary, as it was again, cut off and turning and no longer laughing. Maur wishes Fez something, and watches a moment as what walked with Fez bore down on the diminishing invader.

Yes, Maur thinks. Do it.

The collective ruin wuthered its weight into gesture, made war.

Maur looks away. She has her own tasks.

Her séance partners are gone but her arms are still shackled. She yanks and wonders about deports again, but after agonies and weapon fire continuing and pulling harder than she ever has, even at a fence in a sunken garage, Maur feels something give. Not the chain but the stud connecting it to the table. Just the force of her body. She hauls again and it goes.

Maur stands.

She knows before she sees that a figure watched her.

Maur looks again, not at that last great display whereon Old Pal faced the architecture of the Roused. She knows what the outcome of that will be. And that there is no forever.

No, in one small screen, Maur sees her own cell. She sees shadows in the room moving wrong, the sheets upon the bed mounded. A shape beneath. She sees that figure sat up. Still covered. Maur cries out, Oh, oh, oh. Watches words muffled by cloth, a last message, and mouths her own parting.

Maur’s wrists are still connected, trailing metal. No one in the room amid those terrified and still alive looks at her. She takes a key card from the fingers of a dead. One of those who sat her. He is days-cold. Maur steps out of the room.

She goes slowly for a long time. Mostly she’s alone in these corridors full of bleating alarms. When she hears footsteps she flattens herself against walls, stays very still and closes her eyes. To breathe shakily when the sounds move on. Impossibly undetained.

Her presence brings up striplights in a quiet zone. She walks like a child from a fairy tale, leaving warning sounds behind. Into a small empty office, another door beyond. By the skirting board here is shade. She waits. There’s nothing in that shadow. There is a glasses case in that shadow on the floor. There is a case for glasses and a C90 cassette in that shadow. There is something else and. Apports are spilling through. Maur greets them with a nod and continues.

To where goggles and lab coats wait on hooks. Chambers of equipment, closed cabinets with warnings upon them, signs for electric shock, for caustic to flesh, for caustic to fleshlessness. Skulls and crossbones, a cartoon draped figure crossed through and choking and another with crosses for its eyes and the rainbow curve of a sad mouth, necrohazard. The ailing dead a testing ground.

Croome? Surely it was this tower company which came for her, firing up her function after, to whisper down the line to Maur. Maybe Croome was only in the wires now.

Lights announce Maur to no one. She’s doing her best. She’s barely in time.

Something on the wall of which she can’t at first sight make sense, a flattened mass of objects pressed together into a rectangle. China shards, old leather, the vectors of tin and plastic. She stands before it. Reaches for the handle. Changes the trajectory of her hand at the last instance and raps upon that door.

Whatever piece her knuckles touch makes her skin tingle like nettles and the sound of her knocking is resonant and very deep and it echoes as if beyond it travels down unseen passageways like lightless veins towards compacted ore.

Now

Maur is looking down at her hand lit in red, as if by a glowing exit sign. No door before her. Knows she has not gone in, has chosen, to go out, is past it, doesn’t look back.

Footsteps come after her again and she knows fear again. Closing her eyes and believing her own aftermath nature won’t help her now.

Into a great dim chamber. She stares at ranked containers. On all sides tanks and wire-mesh cages. Rectangles in all sizes. In every one, a shadow. All noise ends here. She stares into the boxes and feels seen in turn. From within, eyes appeared, fixed upon her.

Here a scraggly cat, its teeth bared, clotted into presence. Here a big mongrel dog turned in its too-small cage. A rat gnawed at the metal that holds it. A fat iguana. A rabbit strapped and held in place its ears pressed against plastic housing. A jackdaw opened its beak as if it sang for her and still she hears nothing at all. Behind mottled glass a carp jackknifed with mighty grace. A little glowing pig. A monkey, staring, its face shimmering, as if seen across green tea.

They watched her, all unblinking, and for a shared instant all much too still. Through their bodies Maur makes out the texture of the walls behind. Every specimen called out to her, she sees it in their gaping mouths. She does not even hear her own cry at their distress. She starts as all the animals crackled and reshaped. Maur hears now not the screaming specimens but soldiers.

She turns. Figures in the doorway, looking right at her. Weapons up. At the front, pointing at her as if he has never been taught how, Strude.

“She,” he says. “Promise forces son brew tea duty honour you no yes sign.” For all the wrongness of his expression, she cannot mistake among the emotions on the dreadful face a gladness of revenge.

“Sine,” he says, he says, “conker.” And in the soldiers come.

Maur swings her hands and brings the chain down on the glass before her and the cat within the cage did not retreat but arched and spat without sound and leapt forward as she swings. Scintillas spray the animal and go through it and it reared.

A soldier shouts. Maur grabs a retort and twists it in mesh and a rat came through the hole. She breaks open the lizard’s house. A shot sounds and she ducks and smashes and rends and fumbles at catches and little bodies filled the dark. They jumped and snarled without noise and stuttered and rushed and broke on the intruders. Maur flails again and the aquarium explodes. Water, base and apport mixed, pours/ed into the room, swirling wrong, and the carp moved in it and in the air, as if it swam and bobbed dead both. The pig stared with malice at those who come for her.

Soldiers crying out behind her she passes between animals, a dog phasing clumsily through the legs of a stool, that poor cat falling in the wrong direction scratching.

Maur heads for a hall beyond. She throws open one more great door she passes and her innards pitch as through them came a muscle mass and twitched a rough tail. The squad fights, Strude at their head, still bellowing in a hollow voice using left-behind words, and she cannot see him properly now through equine disturbance that nickered silently and kicked. Maur looks away.

She closes the door behind her. The building trembles. Yes, Maur thinks. Urges the generator to be deport, the fire extinguishers, magnetic drives, to pass beyond all use. She clenches all her asport muscles, begs motherboards, pistols and fail-safe backup drives everywhere to quit, be replaced by apport newcomers, washing token, old cloth, dried-up pens.

—

The hallway slants up a long time. Exhaustion hypnotises her. At last another door. A tall room, tables and chairs. Maur sees new darkness above. A skylight. She climbs onto the table, swaying. She swings her metal at the glass overhead, shields herself from shard-rain. Reaches carefully at the sawtooth edge with gown sleeves over her fingers, strains. It’s very hard to climb but she works and works. Hauls, pleading with, threatening the world, cajoling it, she spits and hisses, kicks up with what remains of her strength, falls back, kicks off again yowling, scrabbling, to slip at very last like a slow birth out into a night.

Have you done it? She sends up and out the question. Is Old Pal gone?

—

When she’s lain still for many minutes sucking in air and letting her heart slow she turns over and crawls to the edge of concrete, on the roof of a storehouse annex, by woodland, in Shackingham Barracks.

—

Maur is very cold. Somewhere she hears the confused rush of young soldiers. Who know nothing of what has been below.

She’ll reach the edge of the roof where the wall is angled and a rusted ladder fire escape or something descends. When her feet touch the earth she’ll run. She knows, though she has no right to, that she will make it into the trees and stay low and away from where the panic is, and will reach the wire, and will climb over it or find a slit in it or burrow beneath it in the roots and earth. That she will make her way.

R

s .. a

Allonge

The Fall could be upwards; knowledge delivered as revelation, significance like that of the muscular wind which hurled the red sand across continents. I look at nature, my fingers poke my mind, conscientiously checking, “Am I in ecstasy? Is this an epiphany? Can I learn to fall upwards?”

Laura Del-Rivo, “Notes on Time”

There was a man everyone said seemed ageless. They knew him in several cities, by a different name in each. It’s a new world. A year went by very quickly and another and more. Money stopped up, rerouted. Crisis and an austere regime. The man travelled. Wherever he went now, he said I’m looking for something, someone. He said it in many languages. People said you should never fight him.

They say ageless but you might also say old, as strong and quick and frightening as someone much younger, but old, and pausing now sometimes as if to take stock, investigating that strength and, if you knew how to look, stoically considering its waning.

There’s a woman, he would say.

A woman?

Let me describe her. She’s got spirit you could say. You might have heard. I used to know her. I hadn’t thought I needed to think about her but all of a sudden you hear about things you thought you were done with. She might be here or she might pass through.

I heard.

People had always heard but nothing of which the man could make use. Nothing that would help him find her first or go on faster ahead. I thought she’d gone, he would say. That she’d died along with the rest of it.

Why do you want her? Do you want her?

She knows things. She can help me. Or she might be trouble. An outstanding question.

Is she in trouble?

Summer, light late. He walked this city. Among the rubbish tipped at the base of towers a dog pulled at what spilt out. The man wished it luck and continued. By his block two boys subjected a third to desultory violence. The man paid them no mind. He stood in the elevator smells and in its ugly light and looked out watching the dusk approach. Watched the walkway and the stairs and where the dog struggled. He saw the pillars of these tower blocks in the illumination of basketball-court lights and a sky glowing as if it decayed from within. As the doors shut he saw that he was observed. A figure backlit.

The man hit the button and the doors opened again and now he saw no one.

Floors up he went fast along the hallway to his door and to the bare living room where he kept his equipment.

He was awaited.

—

Hello, Stallo.

You could see in him a kind of relief.

You, he said.

The woman pointed a pistol at him. She kept a torch shining in his face. He would not blink for her.

Long time, he said. Mind if I sit? Takes me back. How’d you find me? Suppose we’ve got a lot to talk about.

He put his hand to his pocket and the woman said, No, and he was still. His eyes did not even twitch sideways but there was care to how they didn’t, and, behind her weapon, the woman glanced for him. To see in a cup on a sideboard a beetle impaled upon a stick. She shook her head.

Worth a try, he said.

She said, You were so angry when Old Pal was there, and it didn’t care. About you. Has that been better or worse since it’s gone?

The man said nothing.

You see me get taken, don’t hear anything. Until you start hearing things again.

I’m here, she said, because I want you to know that you were wrong about everything. None of it happened like you thought. Or hoped. Or whatever it was. You tricked me, that’s true, but you didn’t outsmart the world.

Have you been scrabbling in graves again? She took in everything she could see in these rooms. Finding some new lost thing? From those years? I don’t think so. If there were any. Whatever they did down there, it’s done.

And Apportville’s still there. Even I don’t know where.

He said nothing. She watched him want to kill her.

There are questions I don’t know the answers to but I don’t know if you know they’re even questions. I’m not saying what you did is small, I’m really not. But even there, you don’t know.

Old Pal is gone, she said. That’s true. But not because you gave it what it wanted. Which, yeah, was me. It didn’t care you were there. And now it’s gone because I helped give it what it didn’t want. She watched him consider. An opponent. A collective.

I’m not going to kill you, she said.

As if you could, he said. But he was shrewd and afraid. Go on then what is this? he said. What fucking is this? What are you here for? You going to tell me the rest then?

No, she said. I know you’d like that. Even if it’s the last thing. But that’s not why I’m here.

Then what—

Then nothing, she said. It’s not me who wants to see you.

Ghost stories don’t work that fucking way, the man said. They’re not about justice.

She said, They’re about everything.

—

And the man looked into the darkness behind her and his eyes went wide and he said, You.

You.

a silence.

The woman came to where the man lay quivering.

He looked not at her but into the dim of the corner above her, which she would not turn to face. He mouthed, You, You, You.

She leaned in and he shook as if in the coldest place in the world and she pushed his trembling hands almost gently away and took his pistol from his pocket and opened it efficiently and emptied it and put it back and one by one she threw the bullets into the corners of the room, holding up the last before him. She put it in his other pocket. She watched his gaze through tears in her own. She closed her eyes, began to work at something, inner techniques. Sometimes, she said, I can still do what I used to. Not often but.

The woman clenched and opened her lips and let out a cry. Gasped, and there came a shift and an echo of a shout.

—

She opened her eyes. The man was gone.

The woman was alone.

She said, to the empty room, I didn’t want to come. I wasn’t going to. But I know I was never going to stop hearing that you were looking for me. What should I have done? What would you have done?

You did this, she said. Do you understand? I didn’t kill you. Remember that. Are you there? Remember I could have killed you.

That rang in the room. She listened as if to a faint descent of slapping impacts.

Was it you who— Did you recruit him? she said. Did you try? I never killed you. Where are you? Are you where things go?

Point by point the textures in the greying walls came into sharpness and she too was more and more there.

He died, she said. That poor old sod in Alicante. Not long ago. Just for a minute there I thought that was your doing. But then I thought, you didn’t even know he was still alive, I bet. You were never history, whatever you thought, she said.

Is it Maisie you’re with? Is it Cybill? Is it Jules? Is it my boy?

I don’t need revenge, she said. Not even if you, if you did what, if you, you know. If you did. I’ll never know. But my control? I think it— She shook her head. They wanted something that felt to them like justice. What walks with me won’t forgive you.

Is it Old Pal you’re with?

She said to the room, I hope not. For what it’s worth. If it is, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. If it is, if that’s where you’ve arrived, check your pockets. Maybe there’s a way out for you. If it works like that. Over there.

—

Was there a walker, then, an asported man? Living and lost amid the dead. Do the living die where the dead are? It might be he walked a place made for him alone. An eternal jungle of guerillas made tree.

I believe you, she said finally, with or without sound. Not that you didn’t do it. Ewan I mean. That you don’t know.

—

In the morning she spoke. She said last things to all the dead who might be there. To the walls and shadows of the room and all rooms, to herself, a woman wishing a good journey, even in that moment to Stallo, with a terminal kindness. And her last and most important words, soundlessly. Said to her child what she needed to with her whole shaking body.

After everything else she said, when she was calm, she said to him, I’m going home.

Maur returned to London.

It took another long while that went quickly enough. Maur made ready. It was hard but not so hard as she had thought it might be, after everything, to pick up, and to set down, what she must.

—

Knowing how to move, how not to be seen, out of sight she watched a woman in a north-west London street lug shopping in fifty-foot bursts to the steps by her grubby front doors. The woman swore amiably at her plastic bags and smiled because a child was watching her, holding its parent’s hand. Maur whispered Sonn’s name.

There in the city Maur held her breath and when she formed words with her lips they were a goodbye to herself, and a London greeting, of the early century, of hard years. But caught up with gladness. She watched her friend.

So I heard this story.

There’s these kids, twenty, twenty-two, a young couple, it’s Valentine’s Day and they get engaged. This is a year or two ago, ’09 I think. Yeah, after it all started. So they’re up in Knowsley. They want to celebrate obviously so they go to this club, this cabaret club, real throwback place, like a film set, the bar’s pure ’70s, low stage over there, red satin curtains, the lot. Anyway they get there and the steward says they’ve only gone and turned up an hour before they open. But they tell him they’re celebrating and she flashes him the ring and he lets them in says congratulations serves them a drink tells them to keep it to themselves and out he goes and gets on with whatever. And the lovebirds are sitting there and there’s not a soul about but them and the lights go out. They’re sitting in the dark.

A spot comes up and this low slow noodly music starts and out steps this bloke from behind the curtains. He’s got on a white suit and white gloves and a pair of white shoes with black crepe soles, and all over his jacket and trousers there’s black arrows. Like a cartoon convict, yeah. Arrows up, yeah, like fingers pointing at the sky. And this bloke’s got hair in a well outdated style, and he’s getting on, and to be honest he looks a bit knackered and knocked about, and he’s staring and grinning, and these two kids are nudging each other because the girl sees he’s got makeup on. These big arched eyebrows and eyeliner. And all the while that music is carrying on and it’s sleazy, and this guy starts walking around the stage. The spot’s following him and he’s moving in this unnatural way, silly but creepy too, wobbling his head like his neck’s a bit loose and making these padding motions the whole time with his hands and these big woozy steps, and he never lets up, he’s never still for a second.

He sings a song. And he’s a got a decent set of pipes. He’s not bad. And after he’s crooned a verse or two, the music doesn’t stop but it gets quieter and he starts talking over the top of it. Telling jokes.

And mate they’re fucking pure cheese. Make a cracker blush. They’re not old-fashioned, they’re antique. Real groanworthy stuff, but this bloke’s telling them in all his weird clobber, and with the maddest accent. Half Vegas half Wigan. And sometimes, after a punch line or whatever, or just random like, he suddenly says Spook!, and he jumps backwards into a cartoon startled pose. Then carries on. Back to his creeping around. Other times in the middle of nothing in particular he’ll whisper Slither and sort of beckon at the audience. Like to tell a secret. Like everyone listening is in on something.

So this guy’s practicing his act, the lad and lass watching think. And the lad, he’s laughing even though it’s decades out of date, not that it would have been top-drawer even in its prime, but now it’s just plain odd, partly because it’s such a strange delivery. But by now his girlfriend’s getting a bit uncomfortable to be honest. She doesn’t really like it. It feels off to her, and she’s holding on to her bloke’s hand hard. The guy finishes his act and the two of them applaud and he gives a little bow and a smile, still not looking at them but into the lights like they remind him of something. And he goes behind the curtains.

The main lights come on again, and after a bit other people start coming in, and a band gets onstage and begins setting up. When the steward comes back the young lad asks him who the comic was.

Comic? What comic?

The one who was practicing, the lad says. And he describes him and of course it sounds ridiculous and it ends up with this couple both sort of trying to do the bloke’s act, trying to imitate him, trying out those motions. And the steward’s shaking his head and he says he’s booked no one who sounds anything like that, that night or ever. And he’s being polite enough but you can tell he thinks this is some sort of wind-up.

Anyway in the end they have one more drink and then they go on to their local. And when they get there, the lad’s telling the landlord about this nutter they’ve just seen up at the club, who must’ve wandered in off the streets or something. And the barman’s frowning and he says that reminds him of something. They tell the story to a few more people, and it seems to ring a few more bells, and someone says, I’m sure I saw something like that on tv once.

Long story short. They’re intrigued, so when they get home, they have a poke around online, don’t they? Put in a few of the obvious keywords, and after a bit they find footage of the guy on YouTube, and he’s doing the exact same act. But it’s old footage. And they look around a bit more and it turns he did perform at that club. But years ago.

And then they find an obituary. He died a year before that very night.

He’d had his demons. Struggled with the booze. He’d been doing the clubs in Spain for a bit, not doing that great to be honest, and in the end his body just gave up. No one even claimed it, poor sod. And he’d been a proper talent once. He could sing, he’d put out records, he’d done an ad, telly and everything, but he just couldn’t keep it together.

But the show must go on as they say. He never changed his act, weird as it was, and maybe what it is is you can’t let a little thing like death stop you.

When they find all this stuff, this couple, you can imagine, they don’t know what to make of it. They’re proper freaked out. They try to remember everything they can that he said, every stupid joke. And mostly they put it together and it’s nothing worth repeating, and most of it’s what you’ll find online. But there’s a funny thing. Right at the end, they’re both sure they heard him whispering a last joke, the best thing they heard all night. And they can’t remember what it was.

Anyway so now, you go to that club, if you’re lucky, and if it’s your night, you might get a private performance from the Spook and Slither man.

You guys are weird, he says. There’s some weird people about. It’s the craziest thing to see. Like I say, it’s the cheesiest load of cobblers, with one stupid gimmick, and that’s it. It’s absurd. But if you see it you can’t get it out of your head. It should be excruciating, but it’s too strange. You can’t take your eyes off him. Which is what you’d say about a virtuoso, no? The whole thing’s so odd you feel like it must mean more than you’re clocking, like it’s a code and it’s you failing if you can’t crack it. With him there, black around his eyes, grinning like some mad prophet. Like all the while he’s doing his puns and his sliding around and his I wouldn’t say this girl was ugly and that, he’s there to give you a warning or a promise.

Everything’s there in him. He’s of the age, you’d have to say, spooked and spooking you and slithering and slithered, it’s exactly as it has to be, he’s the hinge of something. Lounge culture, workingmen’s clubs, the special relationship, all in one boom-tish delivery, something battened down, it’s getting lairy out there, a too-bright smile and too-wide eyes, light entertainment they call it like it’s not the gabbling of an escapee from some pit, gags and hoary haunted badinage but not only haunted, not just wound around by the chain of the chain-clanking dead you know but by some ichorous appendage, ghostly and formless at once, spooking and slithering, him speaking for the thing, the words of the greisly itself, everyday, unsayable. You’ll all be doing it tomorrow! is what he’d say, Spook!, Slither!, and we used to take the piss out of him for that. But he wasn’t wrong, was he? It’s decades on, it’s tomorrow, it’s today now, and I am doing it, I’m saying those words now, because so is he, still, again, after the crashing down, a warning or a promise that death hasn’t stopped him giving or making, now he says it with even more authority than before. Spook, he says, Slither, he says. And you will all be doing it tomorrow.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful beyond all words to Season Butler, Mic Cheetham, Tessa McWatt, Mary Mount, Tricia Narwani, Aja Pollock, Susan Powell, Lewis Russell, Max Schaefer, Rosie Warren.

For indispensable generosity, help and inspiration, thank you so much to Lisa Appignanesi, Nick Blake, Emily Bromfield, Michael Burke, Evan Camfield, Tree Carr, Keith Clayton, Julie Crisp, Meehan Crist, Lucy Ellman, Regina Flath, Elle Gibbons, Paul Gilbert, Debbie Glasserman, Kate Green, Maria Dahvana Headley, Tori Henson, Helen Hughes, Alicia Hyman, Marcelle Iten Busto, Ellie Kyrke-Smith, Alex Larned, Julie Leung, Clive Lewis, Jemima Miéville, Ravi Mirchandani, David Moench, Loretta Monaco, Lindsay Nash, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Rory O’Brien, Jacob Rety, Christopher Ross, Chrys Salt, Erich Schoeneweiss, Scott Shannon, Ayesha Shibli, Pamela Stewart (for “the napalm of experience”), Stuart Wilson, Hannah Zeavin, and an anonymous accuracy/authenticity reader. And thank you to all at Picador and Del Rey.

My sincere thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for their support for this book.

An emerging mainstream norm is to always capitalise “Black” when writing about people. This practice is not uncontested, including by radical thinkers of colour. This book uses the lowercase, in part for historic reasons, and in part swayed by the arguments of, among others, Emma Dabiri, Samuel Delany, Minna Salami, and Nicholas Whittaker, and in fidelity to and memory of Lionel Morrison, who taught me much.

As ever, I am deeply indebted to countless writers and artists, some of them mentioned here and in the preceding pages. In addition, with regard to this book, I’m particularly conscious of and grateful to William Golding, Shirley Hazzard, D. G. Leahy, Rozsika Parker, Ann Quin, and Emma Tennant.

About the Author

China Miéville is a New York Times bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction. His novels include The City & The City, Embassytown, and Perdido Street Station. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, he has won the World Fantasy, the Hugo, and the Arthur C. Clarke awards, among others. His nonfiction includes a study of international law and a history of the Russian Revolution.

chinamieville.net

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