11

Relations in the household swiftly deteriorated, and so did Streetwise. As the stand-off over the cat’s disposal dragged on, the last tatters of domestic decorum fell away, and the great structure of mutual hate that had always underlain them stood chillingly revealed. Acts of candid hostility and nocturnal intimidation became rife. One night Trixie and Tara removed all his stuff from the linen closet, on the grounds that none of it was linen. A morning or two later, an ominous set of padlocks appeared on the doors of their kitchen cupboards. That night they launched a series of provocative raids on his unsecured cereals and jams. Fenton countered, the following day, by annotating his every jar and carton with a horizontal slash of texta to mark its current level of contents. But that night the pilfering continued, Trixie and Tara making the appropriate adjustments with textas of their own.

At around this time, Fenton realized that there was nothing at all, apart from the fact that they hadn’t thought of it yet, to stop them from annexing his cupboards with some padlocks too. He vowed not to let this happen. He vowed to purchase some padlocks of his own without delay.

And he vowed that on the central issue, the issue of Streetwise’s disposal, he would stand firm.

As for his love life, the core facts of it remained unchanged. He loved her. She didn’t love him. She loved Gus instead. And Gus, presumably, loved her – frequently, rudimentarily, in a limited number of non-caring positions, and with a caveman’s regard for foreplay. There was nothing very complicated or ambiguous about these facts. And yet Fenton thought about them all the time, inspected them from every conceivable angle, as if they might contain some obvious loophole he had so far failed to spot. There was something marvellous, too, about the megaton flare of agony they never failed to yield whenever he thought about them square on. They were like an exposed dental nerve that he couldn’t stop probing. The pain defied common sense, and all known laws of the universe, by getting worse and worse all the time. It refused to fade or taper. It just kept going up, like a staircase drawn by a surrealist.

No humane observer could deny that this state of affairs was absurd, and objectively unjust. As things stood, absolutely all the suffering was being done by one party, and all the fun was being had by the other two. A situation so lopsided couldn’t possibly endure, or be endured, forever. The longer it prevailed, the clearer it became that something had to be done about it. And if Fenton didn’t do that something himself, who else was going to? Certainly it made no sense to leave it up to divine intervention. The fact that she loved Gus in the first place made the existence of some all-knowing deity in the sky a laughably dubious proposition.

So the intervention would have to come from Fenton himself.

Some day soon he would get her all alone, and tell her about her boyfriend’s commitment to revolutionary terror.

In fact he had been trying to do that for about a week now. But so far she had proved devilishly elusive. He had seen her on only three occasions during this period, and none of them had offered a suitable platform for the kind of chat he had in mind. One time she was sitting in the refectory with Gus: Fenton had stopped looking when she picked up a chip and started conveying it towards Gus’s mouth. The second sighting had taken place in a Lego Studies lecture: he’d tried tailing her out of it, but had lost her in the torrent of exiting backs. And one day in the library, he was certain he saw her slip into an alley between two rows of books.

But when he slipped into the same alley to follow her, she wasn’t there.

But she was never absent from the alleys of his mind. Some of these alleys were dark, and dank, and best not visited. Dreadful thoughts dwelt there, like malformed children kept in an attic. Sometimes, in the night, he was powerless to resist the call of these thoughts, and he moved back through the shadows to be with them. They were, after all, his children.

To what did these thoughts pertain? Some of them, most of them, pertained to the question of what she and Gus might get up to when alone. Strictly speaking, data of this sort was destined to remain forever unknowable to Fenton. It was the one insult he would always be spared. There was even a sense in which it was none of his business. But in another sense, a crucial sense, it damn well was his business. It was more his business than it was theirs. So: first she would reach for the edge of the curtain, and smilingly draw it shut – then Gus would move towards her – and she would reveal, quite voluntarily, her – and Gus would remove his – at which point she would offer him the full splendour of her – and then Gus would take his – and then she would take his – and he would … And so forth, like the dirtiest of dirty movies. Again, no sane God could possibly let such things happen. And yet – unbelievably – they were allowed. They were permitted. They broke no law. There was nothing to stop them from occurring. Almost certainly they occurred every day.

There were some things you were better off not thinking about, but kept thinking about anyway.

Such as the question of character – of her character. This too was a nasty issue, but it couldn’t be dodged. Every day it cropped up in some new form. To take just one instance: what sort of person would want to place a chip, or any other object for that matter, into the mouth of Gus? What did this action say about her moral fibre, about her capacity to distinguish between good and evil? What did it say that she let him put his filthy paws all over her? What sort of person would give the green light to that?

It filled Fenton with shame to be pondering such questions. But they had to be asked, given what he knew about the character of Gus. Look at him, this man whose hands she let rove all over her unconditionally, and didn’t push away. What manner of man was he? He was a cheat, a liar, a would-be multiple murderer. He was a boor, a scoundrel, a vulgarian, an oaf, a cad, a rowdy, a hooligan, a philistine, a blackguard, a lout, a yahoo. He was all the things that used to count against a chap in the game of love, but plainly no longer did. These days it was a squalid free-for-all: imprisoned psychopaths got marriage proposals through the mail; ninety-year-old tycoons in iron lungs had wives and mistresses; illiterate and disgraced ex-boxers had harems; and Gus had her.

But if their relationship was a crime – and that much surely was beyond debate – then Gus was not, alas, its sole perpetrator. He wasn’t even its principal one. All that Gus was guilty of, on close inspection, was wanting her, going after her, and getting her. And how in all conscience could Fenton condemn Gus for that, when he held precisely the same agenda himself? In reasonable moments – admittedly these didn’t occur often – but in reasonable moments, Fenton didn’t see how any of the blame could fairly be attached to Gus. For once in his life, the fat charlatan was entirely above reproach.

And so the finger of censure veered towards her. How could she not see what Gus was? What was she – an idiot? Or maybe she saw what he was but didn’t care – which made her every bit as morally vacuous as the bloated assassin himself. About the only thing you could say in her favour was that she wasn’t hung up on other people’s looks: superficial questions of hair-care, grooming and extreme fatness clearly didn’t trouble her. But that scarcely counted as a virtue in the case of Gus, where the inner man was every bit as monstrous as the outer one.

There was no getting around it, then. There was something deeply wrong with her, either mentally or morally or both. That was the conclusion Fenton kept coming to, whenever he thought this character question through.

But there was another conclusion he kept coming to, just after he came to that one.

He didn’t bloody well care. He still wanted her anyway.

And what sort of person did that make him?

He didn’t much care about that, either.

And all the while there was the other question, the main question, the question that wouldn’t go away. Was he, or was he not, a terrorist? Was he, or was he not, involved in a genuine conspiracy to take the life of a fellow man? How credible was the threat? Soon this Maoist barbecue would happen, and he would be forced to confront these questions anew. Gus kept ringing him up about the event, making minor revisions to scheduling and menu. In a few days now the afternoon would be upon him, and still he was no closer to working out whether or not the plot was real. Every time he thought about it, he finished up at the same logical impasse. Put crudely, it was a problem of evidence. He suspected – and he fervently prayed – that it wasn’t real, that Ivan Lego’s life was in no genuine danger. But how could he ever get hard proof of that? What circumstances could you even conceive of that would prove the threat unreal? It was easy enough to imagine circumstances that would prove it authentic: the death of Ivan Lego in a hail of bullets, say, would establish that beyond all doubt. But how was one to obtain equally clinching proof that there was nothing to worry about? The mere fact that Lego wasn’t dead did not suffice, obviously. A live body lacked the definitive properties of a dead one; in strict logical terms, all Lego could ever prove by remaining alive was that his murder hadn’t happened yet. The man could live to be ninety, and still not conclusively falsify the proposition that a Maoist hit squad was one day going to terminate him. Once on the table, then, a plot like Gus’s had an awful kind of tenacity. The best you would ever be able to say about it was that it hadn’t yet been carried out.

So the genie was out of the bottle, and it could never be crammed back in. Never again would Fenton be able to answer the question Am I a terrorist? with a hearty and indignant no. At best, his answer would have to remain forever uncertain, with proof of his innocence being deferred perpetually into the future. And that was at best. At worst, the uncertainty would end one day, in the only way it could: with a sudden and violent confirmation that Gus’s plan had been genuine all along. And that demonstration of the plot’s veracity could only come, by definition, at the very moment when it became too late to do anything about it.

It was a disturbing paradox. And once Fenton had absorbed it, he found it impossible to see how he could ever involve the police. After all, he could hardly go to them with what he had now. You didn’t go to the police with a threat so nebulous and improbable.

On the other hand, the threat would only stop being nebulous and improbable when there was corpse.

And that was something else you didn’t go to the police with.

Nevertheless, the time had clearly come to do something. Reminders of Lego’s existence were all around him, taunting him by the hour with the question of his possible or impending guilt. Every day he was obliged to write essays about the man, or read pieces of endless theoretical drivel by him, or go to lectures that were either about him or delivered by him or both.

When he came home and switched on the TV, Lego was on it.

When he switched the TV off and picked up a newspaper, Lego was in it.

If only for the sake of his own sanity, then, action of some kind was required. Accordingly, Fenton had written – or had assembled – a note. He had cut words and letters from a glossy magazine, and had pasted them down on a white sheet of paper. The sentence they formed indicated that Ivan Lego’s life was in danger. Fenton intended to drop this message into Ivan Lego’s assignment box, and let fate take care of the rest. It would allow him to feel that he’d struck a blow for common decency, in a world gone mad. It would allow him to believe, at least for the moment, that the situation remained thoroughly in hand.

The note was sitting in his bag right now, ready for delivery at the end of the workshop he presently sat in. Technically this was a Lego Studies II workshop, but in practical terms it was no kind of workshop at all, because no one had yet been assigned to teach it. The recent explosion in Ivan Lego’s enrolments had taken the department of socioliterology very much by surprise, and leaders for some of the newly formed workshop groups were still being sought. So for three Wednesdays in a row now Fenton’s class had come to this small and airless room, this windowless bunker in the socioliterology building’s core, and had sat here mutely round this circle of desks, waiting for someone to come in and take charge. Rumour had had it that today would be the day. There had even been speculation that Ivan Lego himself might fill the vacancy. Lego leading a workshop: it would be unprecedented, but not out of keeping with his flair for the assumption-challenging intervention.

Charmaine, inevitably, was enrolled in another class. Pamela Scratch, just as inevitably, wasn’t. She was currently over at the blackboard, setting out, with varicoloured sticks of chalk, the details of a forthcoming SNARBY day of action and protest. The proceedings, as far as Fenton could make out, would consist of a rally and some speeches, followed by a march, followed by a second rally and some more speeches where the march ended, followed by a second and final march back to the site of the original rally.

Save for the squeaking of Pamela’s chalk, the classroom was silent. The silence felt tense and wrong. You felt personally responsible for it, increasingly guilty for not filling it. Ten minutes ago, maybe fifteen, a rotund mature-aged lady had tried to get an informal discussion going about the book’s meaning, or – and here she had paused, and smiled – its lack of meaning. But her words had wilted in the air, had died in the crushing silence. They remained the last words spoken by anybody in the room.

The poor woman was still blushing about the incident even now. Fenton watched as she leafed self-consciously through her copy of Empty Pages, making diligent notes in an adjacent pad. And he experienced a pang of deep pity for her, even love. He sincerely wished he’d had the spine to back her up ten minutes ago, to say something to save her. But he simply hadn’t been adult enough. And anyway his mind had been elsewhere, as these days it generally was. Also, he seemed to recall having recently used this lady’s girth as a means of concealing himself from somebody in a crowd, probably Pamela Scratch. He regretted that too.

His eyes moved to the lady’s copy of Empty Pages. She held it upright in her pillowy red hands. From the back of the dust-jacket, the authorial photo of Ivan Lego stared out. Boldly Fenton met Lego’s eyes. As usual they seemed to be aimed straight back at him, glaring at him with accusatory heat. But today, with the note in his bag and its delivery imminent, Fenton felt comfortably able to return the thinker’s gaze. He could even have winked at the theory-mongering old bore, if called upon to do so.

His own copy of the book, purchased by mandate, was back at home. He found it useful as a kind of pad, or commonplace book: it was a handy place to jot down shopping lists, random observations, telephone numbers, ideas for good ways to fuck up Gus. Tara, wrongly supposing that Fenton would care, had comprehensively defaced the book’s dust-jacket, embellishing Lego’s photograph with sunglasses, a twirly moustache, two king-sized earrings, a swastika tattoo, and – subtlety having never been the keynote of Tara’s work – a speech bubble containing the following words:

If found, please return this book to:

The Cat Killer

3 Cat Killer Road

Cat Killer Land

But that had been a week ago, when it had still been permissible to acknowledge that the cat had lived, and was dead on the TV room floor, and urgently needed to be disposed of. In more recent days the stand-off had entered a new and disturbing phase. There was a new law of engagement now, a new cardinal rule. You didn’t mention the cat at all now. You spoke and acted as if it wasn’t there. You conducted yourself, these days, as if it simply wasn’t there.

At twenty-five minutes past the hour the door of the room swung open, and their workshop leader came in.

It was Robert Browning.

The room had been perfectly silent to begin with. But by a mysterious process it fell more silent still on Browning’s entry. Even Pamela Scratch was momentarily lost for words. Her chalk hand froze in disbelief, suspended over this half-finished word: innoce–.

Browning closed the door, and came round to a vacant desk. He seated himself there. He spotted Fenton, and favoured him with a humourless half-grin before Fenton could look away. He began to dig for things in his soft bead-covered bag.

“Someone,” he said conversationally to the class in general, while he dug, “has stolen my Selected Yeats. Yesterday it was sitting on my desk, down there in the former Chancellery. Today it’s disappeared. Nothing else is gone. Just my Yeats. Which is rather odd, wouldn’t you say? A Yeats-reading burglar. How could a person capable of appreciating ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ say, also be capable of common theft? Very strange …”

Fenton was watching Browning’s hands. A profusion of gingery hairs covered the backs of them, echoing the riot of loose fibres on the sleeves of his cardigan. By now he had removed a variety of teaching materials from his loose hippyish bag: including a copy, handled with mock reverence, of Empty Pages.

“Speaking of strange happenings,” Browning went on, “Professor Lego has asked me to ‘lead’ this class. Why? Well, he can’t come right out and sack me, you see. Not if I perform my duties diligently. But he can make me come here every week and talk about this ‘novel’ of his. The idea being, I would imagine, that after two or three weeks of that, I might be more than happy to offer him my resignation. He may well turn out to be right about that. We’ll have to wait and see. But for the moment, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you.”

“Aw this is a joke!” Pamela Scratch lamented rudely from the chalkboard. “What about us? What are we, like the meek little pawns in your power struggle, are we? We’ve got an exam to pass, man.”

Browning smiled. “Perhaps you could leave your papers blank as a tribute to the master,” he quipped. Nobody laughed. On a less flippant note he said: “But I do intend to do my job. Rest assured, we shall be covering all the key aspects of his book. All the groundbreaking bits. The department’s issued me with a rigid set of workshop guidelines. And I do intend to heed these. If I stray, feel free to pull me into line. If you catch me trying to make you think for yourselves, please don’t hesitate to report me to the relevant tribunal.”

Pamela Scratch, sinking reluctantly back into her chair, shook her head with contempt, as though her worst fears were already being vividly realized.

“Our task today” – Browning held up a thick stack of folded computer paper – “is to analyse some of the early critical response. I have here some early snippets of praise, hot off the departmental computer. The plan is this. I’ll read them out. You’ll listen to them. If you feel inclined to take notes, do so. I promise I won’t mock you. And then we shall discuss some of the ‘issues’ that have been ‘raised.’ Are we ready?”

Getting to his feet, he moved to a central position in front of the blackboard. His movements were eerily mild and slow, as if maybe he’d made some unnatural bargain with himself, some private vow to keep his foul temper in check. He released the tail of the great printout and let it softly unfold to the floor. Notepads were opened, pens uncapped. Then Browning, at a pace slow enough to permit note-taking, began to read the document’s contents out loud:

Terse, spare and apocalyptic … Lego’s wittiest, most audacious coup ever.

Part autobiography, part literary game, part philosophical detective story … Lego’s silence says more than mere words can say about the chaos that grips our dying millenium.

There is great art in it, and great wit too, and a surprising tenderness for the great lost virtue of literary silence … Read this book.

Browning fed the printout up and over his left hand as he spoke, sending the spent part back down towards his inexpensive sneakers, pulling the unread quotes upward for delivery: a conveyor belt of critical praise.

Extraordinary. A philosophical whodunnit in which language holds the key.

The pages turn as if sped by an invisible wind. No sooner are you through them than you want to begin again, and again, and again.

At last, a novel that is truly novel. If you read only one book this summer, let this book be it.

“Sterne put a few blank pages in Tristram Shandy, you know,” Browning commented idly, while people were still writing that last one down. “Did you know that? Just a couple of them, mind you. He wasn’t enough of a genius to throw out all the words. A stunning performance,” he abruptly said, returning his attention to the printout:

A dazzling tour de force … blurring the boundaries between fiction and philosophy, silence and literature, poetry and prose.

A Möbius strip, a Chinese box, a Fabergé egg, a Siberian doll … a mystery wrapped in an enigma clothed in a quadratic equation.

Browning repeated words or phrases when asked. A great weariness was starting to seep into his tone. The great bulk of the document still lay in wait for him, pooled on the floor like someone’s shed trousers.

A love letter to silence, delivered by a master postman in complete control of his bicycle.

If Empty Pages be the food of thought, play on.

A most goddamn wonderful book.

“I made that one up,” Browning added, flatly. He now began to skim ahead through the document in silence, as if seeking something that struck him as fit to be heard. “Bear with me,” he said after a while. “I’m looking for the one where the New York Review of Pornography gives him ‘Five cocks up!’ Or the one where the Nobel Committee salutes him for finally coming up with it. At last, the novel that offends no one at all. They’ll be calling him a poet next. You watch. Incidentally: when did we finally give up on the idea that the value of a writer had something to do with his ability to write? Can we put a time of death on it? I wonder. I wonder. Of course you could lose your job for even asking that. Come to think of it, I already have.”

Once more he forced himself back to the job at hand.

This huge and vital book … Philosophy’s heavyweight has finally delivered language the knockout punch.

A lethally po-faced performance … A savage and gleeful dance on the grave of the word.

“Do these people even care,” Browning now wondered aloud, “if what they say is true? Is language really dead? Is it? Granted, it isn’t very alive when people like this are using it. Or Lego, back when he used to try. I used to think: nobody who writes so badly can possibly have anything interesting to say. And now the point is proved. But in general, is it true, is it actually true, this notion that the written word has somehow had its day?” He spread his hands in enquiry, making the hanging printout noisily flap. “And if it is, is that really something we should be happy about? I wouldn’t have thought so. Then again, if language is nothing more than a mechanism for the giving and taking of offence … If that’s all it’s turned out to be, I suppose we should want it to die, shouldn’t we? Yes. Then we could really go back to the glory days, couldn’t we? The primate days, the days of grunting and fruit-gathering. The days before it all went wrong. Forget that we never got anything said or done. At least we weren’t constantly marginalising each other.”

A vent in the floor hummed ceaselessly, delivering tepid air.

“And what was ever so bad about getting offended, by the way? Why do we now consider this the grand taboo? To give offence. I’ve been offended, once or twice. It wasn’t the end of the world. I got over it. There are worse things, I think. Personally speaking, I would much rather be offended than be patronised. Treated like a child by some timid mediocrity in a university who decides on my behalf what I might and might not like to hear.”

The room was getting hotter. The air tasted as if it had been breathed several times before.

Pamela Scratch was provoked. “What is it about art like this,” she said into the stale silence, “that threatens you so much?”

“Oh it’s not art,” Browning replied.

“I see. And what is art in your opinion? Don’t tell me, let me guess. War and Peace, right?”

“Broadly speaking, yes,” Browning said tiredly. “Although I prefer Anna Karenin. But look, I’m ready to debate the merits of Tolstoy with people who’ve read him. If you haven’t – and I firmly suspect this is the case – then kindly keep your cretinous opinions to yourself. I won’t stand for this idea that his achievement can be just scoffed out of existence – ”

“Fucking elitist!” Pamela Scratch cried.

“Of course I’m a fucking elitist.” Browning frowned impatiently, as if this point scarcely needed putting. “I am when it comes to art, anyway. But I assure you, that’s got nothing to do with political elitism. Listen, little girl. Indulge me for a moment. I want you to imagine something, just for the sake of argument. I want you to imagine there’s such a thing as artistic talent. No, no, no, let’s not even go that far. Let’s be more modest. Let’s merely imagine, for the briefest of moments, that there’s such a thing as artistic competence. Shall we? Let’s imagine that it’s possible for a book to be something more than a window onto its author’s human rights credentials. Imagine that it’s possible for one book to be better, by virtue of its intrinsic qualities, than another book. Allow room for the hypothesis that art, real art, might involve certain specialised techniques of expression which decline to leap out of the work and announce themselves to you like a bumper sticker. And conceive of the possibility that some writers, like Tolstoy, might have a firmer grasp of these techniques than other writers. Am I losing you? Think of it like building a chair. Anyone can try and build a chair, can’t they? But it takes a competent carpenter to make one that won’t fall apart the moment you sit on it. And it takes an even better one to make a chair you’ll actually enjoy sitting in. This is the fellow I want to make my chairs. You want to call this elitism. Fine. Maybe it is. Me, I like to think of it as sticking up for an endangered species. Because that’s what proper artists have become now. A minority in peril, like all those other oppressed minorities that people like you generally get so worked up about. To praise the unworthy is to rob the deserving. Coleridge said that. Some drongo smashes up a piano with an axe and we agree to call it a sonata. Some witless opportunist throws a pile of used condoms together and we let him call it a sculpture. And everyone’s happy, and nobody gets oppressed or left out – except for those people who actually know how to sculpt, or care about the difference between good sculpture and bad. Except for those people who can make music that actually sounds good. I just don’t know where we got this idea that it’s progressive to tear down artists. Art is all we’ve got. While we’re on this, the topic of my elitism, let’s try another thought-experiment, shall we? Look at both of us – me and Lego.” He held up, for purposes of comparison, his personal copy of Empty Pages, authorial photo outward. “Look at him and look at me, and ask yourself this: which one of us looks like he’s the member of an elite? Which one of us – just off the top of your head – looks like he’s spent more time applying his lips to the arse of power? Which one of us looks like the oppressor here, and which one looks like he’s going against the grain? What do you think a real dissident looks like and gets treated like: Lego, or me?”

“Excuse me,” said the lady that Fenton had started to kind of love because he had once used her bulk to conceal himself from Pamela Scratch. Her felt pen still hung, slowly dehydrating, over her open lecture pad. “Are you going to keep reading those out, or … ?”

Browning looked at her for a long time. He smiled one of his mirthless smiles. And then with a mighty effort he rebowed his head to the computer paper, and read on:

Ivan Lego is a creator of new worlds, a fictional cartographer in uncharted universes. I went along for the voyage, and was enchanted …

The departmental assignment boxes stood at the dead end of a long corridor. Ivan Lego’s box was perfectly central. Fenton stood nervously before it, resting his death threat on the wooden lower lip of its impassive slot, waiting for the surge of resolve, or lunacy, that would allow him to despatch the document irrevocably into the locked void. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really a death threat at all. Threat was far too strong a term for it. It was more of a warning – and quite a friendly warning at that. The glued-down snippets of glossy magazine that made it up varied wildly in size and colour; they gave off a funky, carefree, almost hippyish vibe that sat oddly with their semantic content:

YOUR Life Izz in danger ! Sorry

It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. It would acquaint Lego with the nub of the situation, without divulging any details that might get people arrested. A pedant might have pointed out that the note in fact divulged no details at all, and was therefore likely to strike its recipient as a worse than useless communication – one that baldly advised him of his impending death, without giving him the slightest clue as to how that fate might be avoided. The same pedant might have concluded that Fenton’s only aim in writing the note was to salve his own conscience. In reply to such slurs, Fenton would have pointed out that the plot had no fucking details yet, and that he had every intention of conveying these to Lego in a further note the moment any came to hand. For the present, he was doing the man the simple courtesy of letting him know that a threat to his life was in play. What more could a person in his awkward position do? He honestly didn’t see what.

He had scissored the note’s text from one of the brash and sassy women’s magazines that Trixie and Tara bought innumerable issues of with the money they saved by never paying rent or bills and never feeding their late cat. The first word, your, he had assembled one letter at a time, raiding the headlines for a jumbo version of each constituent character. This had been a long and finicky process. Doing the whole note that way would have taken him a full night. So for the next word – Life – he’d tried a new approach. He had begun combing the headlines for a ready-made instance of the whole word. And within a minute or so he’d found one, nestled in the headline The Best Orgasm of Your Life! (And how he’d kicked himself when he saw that ready-made ‘Your’!) That ridiculous ‘Izz’ he had snipped from the semi-literate teaser Good Vibrations: Izz the Sex Toy Making a Cumback? (The accompanying article, festooned as it was with photos of about twenty assorted probes and plugs and would-be phalli, a particoloured prongfest resembling a coral reef or a jester’s head, seemed to take it for granted that the answer was an in-your-face yes.) The colossal ‘in’ he had hacked from the summit of a regular column about promiscuity called Living in Sin.

To that point the note was going swimmingly. The ready-made method was really delivering the goods. It saved time; it got the job done; and in Fenton’s view it made for a more handsome-looking final product than those old-style letter-at-a-time offerings favoured by blackmailers and death-threateners of yore. He was beginning to wonder, indeed, why other criminals hadn’t embraced the technique long ago. And then, after a long and fruitless search for a headline containing the word danger, he saw precisely why they hadn’t. The technique had a critical flaw. In any given magazine or newspaper, the stock of ready-made words furnished by the headlines was always going to be radically limited. Common words – in, life, is – cropped up frequently enough, more frequently than you really needed them to. But how often was a word like danger going to figure in the headline of an article in a brash and sassy women’s magazine? You could scour ten full issues and still not find it. If only he’d required the word orgasm!

He considered, very briefly, leaving the word danger out of the note altogether. But in the end he could see no reasonable way in which it could be omitted. Danger was the money word, the word the whole note had been building up to. And there was no thinkable substitute or synonym for it. The word itself simply had to be got down, in one form or another. Fenton baulked, however, at compiling it letter by letter. It was too long a word for that. He therefore adopted a third technique: he would seek out the whole word in the bodies of the articles themselves, down in the textual meat of them. And after an hour or so of searching he finally found it, the word danger, buried deep in the dildo piece, hiding away in a sentence that said: “contrary to all those old-wives’ tales about the ‘perils of self-abuse,’ your labia majora won’t be in danger of going grey or falling off.” By this stage he was so caught up in the creative process, was so deep in the note-making zone, that he found himself seriously wondering if the term “labia majora” could somehow be worked into the text of the threat as well. It seemed such a shame to leave it out.

But leave it out he did. He had a hard enough time scissoring out danger. It was squinty and delicate work. A scalpel would have been more in order. When he had finally cut the little sliver of text out, he tried gluing it down to the note. It kept coming away on the tip of his finger. Ultimately he was obliged to stick it down with a piece of clear tape. He then had cause to underline the runty word with a thick black marker, to counter the otherwise strong possibility that Lego would overlook it altogether. He also appended, on similar grounds, the giant exclamation mark from The Best Orgasm of Your Life!

At that point, the note was theoretically complete. But having sat back to admire it, Fenton became aware of a glaring tonal problem. Your life izz in danger! The phrase was too cold, too brusque. It allowed room for the possibility that he, the note’s author, didn’t really care that Lego’s was life in danger – that maybe he even wanted it to be in danger. It even permitted the conclusion that he was the person responsible for its being in danger! Certainly it failed, as it stood, to make clear his own utter lack of culpability in the thing. In an imperfect attempt to clear this question up, he had thrown in that final and prominent word of apology, sliced out of the troubling headline, Sorry Guys: Size DOES Matter!

Standing at the threshold of Lego’s assignment box, Fenton finally felt ready to make the delivery. He ran one last check on the area behind him. It remained clear. He opened his hand, and let the death threat descend gently into the box’s dark interior. And immediately he felt lightened. He felt the satisfaction of having shifted the ball to the other man’s court. He had that sense of temporary accomplishment, of having nothing left to do, that comes in that brief lull before the ball comes fizzing right back at you.

As he turned to go, his eye was caught by something unusual on the next assignment box down. He turned back for a closer look. The box was Robert Browning’s. Or rather it had been. In the space previously occupied by Browning’s name tag, there was now a name-tag-shaped residue of torn paper and old glue. Somebody had pencilled an arrow across this residue, pointing downward and to the left. Following the arrow’s trend, Fenton found that Browning’s name-tag was now affixed to a new box, located at the extreme left of the very bottom row. To get an essay into it, or out of it, you would have needed to assume the missionary position on the carpet, unless you were a master of yoga.

The sight of this outrage made Fenton do something entirely out of character. Spontaneously, racing against an incoming tide of second thoughts, he ripped a blank page from one of his lecture pads and scrawled on it: Don’t despair – Professor Lego will soon be taken care of. A last-moment scruple made him cross out the word “will” and substitute the more strictly accurate term “might.” Then he hit the floor and slid the note into Browning’s new box.

So the whole thing was over in fifteen seconds, before the spineless committee system of his better judgement could subject the notion to any kind of proper review. And already he could see that there was something quite odd about it, this second note. It totally contradicted the spirit of the other one, the one he’d just delivered to Lego. That first note had been aimed at keeping the situation firmly in hand. At ensuring that Lego would come to no harm. And now here he was implying, in this note to Browning, that Lego might soon be eliminated. There was a certain confusion in this, wasn’t there? A certain lack of consistency. But fuck it: at least one of them would turn out to be right.

He stood, brushing carpet fibres from his knees. He allowed himself one last peer into the mouth of Lego’s assignment box, just to assure himself that the threat was still fully in there, that it hadn’t got jammed or snagged on its way in, that it hadn’t somehow levitated back up to the level of the slot.

And while he was doing that, something interesting happened.

What happened was this. An open hand spanked him on the right buttock. Its impact was light, and playful in intent; but Fenton’s body, still all clenched and edgy from the death threat work, responded in a violent way. It jerked spastically forward, bringing his nose and upper teeth into ripe cracking contact with the timber of Ivan Lego’s assignment box.

Even as his face connected blindingly with the wood, Fenton was mentally running through the very short list of people he knew who might want to smack him on the behind – and was concluding that it could only be her, Charmaine. He therefore refrained from either clutching his nose or yelping out loud. Instead, with as much suavity as the situation permitted, he turned around and smiled. And it was indeed her. She apologetically gripped his arm. She looked up into his face with nurse-like concern. But there was amusement in her eyes too, as if she was contending with a rather callous urge to laugh out loud. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

He nodded, but the water in his eyes was making her image shake and blur. He was going to sneeze, explosively and repeatedly.

She said, “I never knew you were so jumpy!”

But already he was wheeling away from her to unleash a fusillade of crotch-jolting sneezes at the floor. Fuck! He sneezed in full down-hill ski-ing stance, hunched forward, hands on knees. It felt strangely like the fit of regurgitation that he’d always feared he would fall victim to at her side. And it went on for an amazingly long while. He had time to reflect, while he was down there, that she would almost certainly never slap him on the buttocks again, not after this. He also had time to reflect that the moment was sadly symbolic of their relations as a whole: him down here in the depths of a pain that was at once tragic and preposterous, and all her fault; and her up there not really caring. When the sneezing was over he remained in position for a moment or two, making extensive use of his hanky. Turning back to her, he was pleasantly surprised to find she was still there.

And now she actually was laughing, quite shamelessly. “Look at your poor nose!” she said. She wore a lemon-coloured cardigan with the top button undone. A knitted flower rode the swell of her right breast. But did you still call it a cardigan when it had nothing on underneath it, nothing but a pith-white bra? “It’s gone all red!”

“It’s fine,” he assured her.

“I was only smacking you because you’ve been a bad boy. You were supposed to tell me about that meeting last week, remember? ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ that’s what you said.”

“I’ve been trying to.” He quickly wiped his nose again. “I’ve been looking for you all week.”

“Oh sure,” she teased. “Well, now you’ve found me. So. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s a long story. Maybe I can tell you over some coffee.”

Her smile got wider. “Can’t you remember what Gus said? About you and me talking? If he saw us having coffee together, he’d freak!”

“Let him freak.”

It worked. Five minutes later they were sitting together in the coffee shop, and Fenton was wondering if her willingness to do this behind Gus’s back meant what he hoped it meant, and if her willingness to let him pay for her cappuccino and finger-bun meant the same thing. He himself had ordered no food. Nor had he sipped his coffee yet, and he doubted he was going to. It wasn’t that he felt like vomiting. In that respect he seemed to have made distinct progress. But he didn’t much feel like eating either. The day when he would be able to sit across from her and actually want to ingest something was still some way off.

He rubbed vigorously at his aching nose whenever she wasn’t looking. When she was, he marvelled at his luck. Here he was, sitting at a table with her, one on one! And it was all due to becoming a Maoist! This was an important point. It was a point to be filed away, a point to be revisited in those dark moments when being a Maoist began to feel like more trouble than it was worth. Because whatever else Maoism had brought him, and whatever else it might bring him in the future, it had brought him this. And this was all that mattered.

He led with his highest trump. He told her exactly what Gus was planning to do. He laid out every shabby facet of the plot so far, culminating in the target selection of Ivan Lego. He omitted no detail, however slight – with the following exceptions: details he considered irrelevant; details that might have raised distracting questions about his own conduct (the despatching of the notes to Lego and Browning, the misleading and purely technical point that he’d been the one to put forward Lego’s name); details so preposterous that they might have tended to foster doubt about the seriousness of Gus’s intentions.

Otherwise, his account was scrupulously accurate.

To corroborate it, he produced hard evidence from his pocket: the draft death list he’d salvaged from the last meeting. The one on which Warren had put her name by mistake. Fenton explicated this clownish error to her in advance, but stressed that it didn’t alter the essential point that Gus was a compiler of death lists. Then he handed the document over to her, and let her absorb it at her own pace.

Which proved to be frivolously brisk. She looked at the thing for maybe five seconds, then slid it back to him with an affectionate grin. “My Gussy,” she said. “He’s so cute!”

“Cute?” Under the circumstances, Fenton felt entitled to a far better response than that. “Did you read this thing? Look at the heading. It’s a death list!”

“You don’t actually believe that?” She spanked his forearm in chummy reproach. “Gus? Terrorism? It’s ridiculous.”

“I know it sounds ridiculous. I’m well aware of that. But it also happens to be true.”

“I’m not saying you’re lying.” She took a nonchalant munch of bun, and added through the mouthful: “Maybe he said all that stuff – ”

“He did say it.”

“Okay, so he did. But you know what he’s like. Or maybe you don’t. That’s just Gus. He says things he doesn’t mean. He does it all the time. He’s probably just trying to impress you. He just wants you to take him seriously.”

Was this going to be it, her whole response? The entire gambit was slipping away from him, dying in front of him on the table. In an effort to revive it he said: “He’s having a barbecue this Saturday. So we can – what was the phrase he used? – ‘Ratchet this thing up a notch.’”

“Oh yes. This barbecue. I’ve heard about this.”

“And let me guess: he didn’t invite you to it, did he? He fobbed you off with some lie.”

“Actually, he said he did want me to come. More than anything. But he said I couldn’t come because of you.” She jabbed a mischievous forefinger at his chest.

“What?”

“He said you don’t like having girls at barbecues.” Her eyes sparkled. There was a sliver of coconut on her upper lip. “He said you like to get drunk and tell dirty anecdotes.”

Fenton just looked at her, too outraged to formulate a reply. His face had gone involuntarily hot.

“So I don’t know who I should believe,” she went on with a grin. Then she laughed, and slapped his arm again. “I’m joking, you goofball. I know he’s lying. I’m not a total idiot, you know. I can see he doesn’t want me there.”

“And why,” Fenton said evenly, “do you think that is?” A huge childish tantrum was quivering inside him now, wildly signalling to be let out. He wanted to grab her cardigan and shake some sense into her. He wanted to thump the table and demand a more appropriate response, or give her a long and impassioned lecture about the ethics of homicide, a righteous harangue that would move drastically outside the realm of light banter.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe he wants it to be just the boys.”

“It’s because he wants to talk about the snuff, don’t you see? Snuff. That’s another word he keeps using.”

“Fenton, if he really was caught up in something like this, he wouldn’t keep it from me. I’d be the first person he’d come to.”

“‘Caught up in it’! He isn’t ‘caught up in it.’ He’s at the bloody helm of it! If anyone’s caught up in it, it’s me.”

She was starting to look at him in an odd way over the rim of her lifted cup. “I’ll tell you exactly what’ll happen at this barbecue,” she confidently said. “I guarantee you, this is what’ll happen. He’ll call the whole thing off. You watch. He’ll find some way of backing out of it. Especially when he sees how freaked out by it you are. I guarantee you, that’s what he’ll do. Why are you so freaked out by it, by the way? I thought you were supposed to be this big hardliner.”

“It’s possible to be a Maoist,” Fenton said, “and still have a bit of common decency. If ‘common’ is the right word,” he somewhat petulantly added, “for something that nobody except me seems to have.”

Now she was looking at him as if he was something between an uptight square and a paranoid fool.

“None of this disturbs you then?” he asked her. “Even if he isn’t serious. The fact that this is the kind of thing he likes talking about. You don’t find that a little … It doesn’t disturb you?”

She looked at him with puzzlement. “But this is what Maoists talk about, isn’t it?”

To that he had no answer. He stared down at the death list. His fingers toyed with it moodily.

“Do you want me to talk to him about it?” she asked suddenly, with a sternness he didn’t much care for. “Is that what you want, Fenton? I can, if that’s what you want. But if I do, he’s going to want to know who told me about it. And I’ll have to tell him it was you. Because if I didn’t, that wouldn’t be fair to the others, would it? So, is that what you want, or what?”

She awaited his answer. Her face had this look on it, this serious look, that was several worlds away from the kind of look he wanted to put there, from the kind of look that might do him any good. Clearly, the time had come to lay off the terrorist motif. It was getting him nowhere, except down an ever-deepening hole. Maybe he could resurrect it another day, when he had something more substantial to tell her. But if he kept hammering away at it now, there wasn’t going to be another day. Not bad going that, for ten minutes’ work.

With a humble and cowardly sigh, then, he let the theme drop. “You’re probably right,” he spinelessly said. “Probably I’m over-reacting. As you say, you know him better than I do. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens at this barbecue.”

“I guess we will,” she agreed, conceding him half a smile.

So now he was rudderless, with nothing to guide him but his own rather sketchy ideas about what a conversation like this should go like. And now – what was this? – now she was leaning forward over the table and reaching with both hands for his forearm. She took possession of his wrist, and twisted it towards her. She looked with mild panic at his watch.

“Shit. I’ve got to go.”

She stood up in a flurry, shouldering her bag.

“Wait on,” Fenton said. “Maybe you should give me your number. Your phone number. So I can tell you what happens at this barbecue.”

Without ceremony she bent over him, and with a biro she seemed to have produced from nowhere began to ink her sweet blue number onto the back of his left hand. “Not that anything will,” she said firmly, breathing close to his ear as she wrote. Her nearest breast was levitating perhaps eight inches from his right cheek. But the very nearness of it imposed a cruel embargo on his being able to look at it directly. It was categorically not to be turned towards. She pressed down hard on the biro, with a strange disregard for what it might feel like. It hurt, but not as much as it didn’t.

“Now if Gus answers,” she said, coming to the final digit, “he might sort of wonder – ”

“Hang on,” Fenton deviously intervened. “What’s this here, a six or an eight?”

“A six! Are you blind?”

“Well could you make it a little clearer? Thanks. And don’t worry. If he does answer – there, that’s much better – if he does answer, I’ll just hang up.”

In the slanting light of late afternoon he made for his bus-stop. Her phone number still hummed on the back of his hand. Their conversation had left him with mixed feelings. And that was good. That was a clear advance on all their previous encounters, which had never left him feeling anything other than unqualifiedly bad. From today’s encounter he had come away with this strange and novel impression that he might really be in with a shot. Until now, the idea that he might one day have her had been just that: an idea only, a weightless piece of theory. Today it suddenly felt concrete, plausible, as real as the singing ink on his flesh. If half of her eye-signs and body language told him he had absolutely no chance, the other half seemed to declare that she was gettable, willing to be won. And if she was, then the rest was up to him. The right approach from him, the right word or phrase or gesture, would do it. Somewhere in the endless web of all possible deeds and speech-acts it existed, the combination that would open the lock. This idea filled him with a heady blend of joy and terror. Maybe a more seasoned swordsman would know what the combination was already, and would already be over on the other side. In his own case the thing to do was to persist, just blindly persist, just keep fumbling semi-competently away till he cracked the code by accident.

He moved across Union Plaza, preceded by his own comically tall shadow. Its head was nearing the far side of the square already, sliding lankily towards the bank of concrete steps there. Standing at the base of these steps was a singularly unsettling figure. It was of indeterminate gender, this figure, and it was frozen in an attitude of inhuman stillness. An enormous white bedsheet swathed it from neck to toe, billowing out from the shoulders like a vast barber’s robe. The body beneath it was improbably tall, and bent oddly in the middle, as if it might consist of one person riding another person’s shoulders. Its head looked freakishly undersized. A black bandana or gag was tied around its mouth, obscuring the lower half of the face. A flaccid off-white object, possibly a juridical wig, was draped over the hair. A hand-lettered sign, illegible from this distance, hung from the neck. Fenton was giving very serious thought to not walking past this figure, to taking some hefty detour around it, even before he realized who it was. It was Pamela Scratch, standing on top of some hidden and inanimate object. But by the time he’d realized that, he no longer had a choice in the matter. Pamela had seen him, and there was no turning back.

“Fenton!” she cried, hailing him through the gag.

He raised a friendly hand and ambled on towards her, wondering if she might let him get away with not stopping, with just lobbing her a few brief pleasantries while continuing on his way. Unlikely, but it was now his only hope. Through a parting in the long sheet he perceived, as he neared, that she was standing on an inverted garbage bin. The sign around her neck said: NEVILLE CLAUDE AGGOT – JUSTICE IS DUMB. Fenton had no idea what that meant.

“Don’t let me distract you,” he called up to her.

But it was no good. Already she was stepping down from the garbage bin, and removing the gag from her mouth. The implications of this second act were clear, and damnable. Fenton came to an unhappy halt.

“Distract me!” Pamela scoffed. “Fenton, my life is all distraction at this point. SNARBY’s in peril. This is our darkest hour since the end of the nuclear arms race. The other faction, they’re out to roll me. The knives are out, Fenton. They’re fucking out. They’re gathering the numbers for a motion of no confidence in me. They’re looking to cut Neville loose and embrace a totally new cause. Something less ‘divisive.’ Something more ‘unifying.’ Hypocrites!” She removed the more unwieldy elements of her strange costume as she spoke, dropping them at her feet. “The truth is, they’ve been bitterly anti-Aggot from day one. All along they’ve just been looking for the right excuse to take me down. And now they’re saying the Aggot thing’s a liability. That it’s got too ‘controversial’.” She peeled off her fake judge’s wig. “Which again is just bullshit. The fact is, we always knew there was going to be controversy. I admitted that from day one. We always knew there’d be bad press. We always knew there’d be heat from the Baker family. Not the Baker family that’s dead, obviously,” she snapped, having caught Fenton’s involuntary look of puzzlement. “I’m talking about the surviving relatives: the grandmother, their cousins …”

“The extended family,” Fenton said helpfully.

“Exactly. The extended family. Did you see this press conference of theirs the other day? This ‘emotional plea’ of theirs for SNARBY to shut down our whole campaign? Out of quote-unquote respect for the dead. Frankly, I’m surprised at how much coverage they got. It’s not like they said anything new. It’s basically that they cried while they said it. Take away the waterworks, it was just another attempt to stake out the high moral ground. And this strange need they seem to have to keep repeating that Neville’s guilty. As if his innocence is all that SNARBY’s about! I mean, our stance on that couldn’t be clearer. I don’t know how many times I have to spell it out. This is a clear-cut case of a man being locked away for a crime he didn’t commit. Or it’s a clear-cut case of a man being locked away for a crime he did commit but is no more ‘guilty’ of, in any meaningful sense of that word, than you or me. Especially you,” she added, with sudden and uncalled-for heat.

Fenton scanned this as a possible sandpit allusion. He concluded that it probably wasn’t one. It lacked the telltale quality of deliberation, of meantness. No, it was clean. It was nothing more than an off-the-cuff affirmation of his general moral inferiority to Neville Claude Aggot.

“Right from the start,” Pamela was saying, “our stance on his innocence has been two-pronged. And look, the other faction knew that. They knew that full well. They agreed to it. And now they’re pretending they didn’t, so they can beat me with that fucking stick as well. But Pamela Scratch is a fighter, Fenton. I won’t let these boneheads cut Neville loose. Between you and me” – she looked swiftly to her left and right, then drastically lowered her voice – “between you and me, I’m this far away” – she held her fingers a chink apart – “from sealing a major TV deal. Not even my own people know about this, not yet. I’m talking about a major network special: one hour, prime-time, just fully devoted to Neville’s plight. I’m talking about exclusive footage of him inside Butterfly Lodge, getting interviewed. Plus a separate thirty minute interview with me. Imagine it, Fenton. Me in the living rooms of the nation, just laying out the whole case. So you can see why this no-confidence bullshit’s got to be stamped out. This TV thing is huge. And it’s fucking this close to fruition.”

“Why not just tell the other faction that?” Fenton suggested. “Let them know what you’re on the brink of delivering?” He sensed that it was crucial to go on appearing nice and helpful, for now. Because he had this terrible feeling she was building up to asking some hideous favour of him, some monster imposition he wouldn’t possibly be able to assent to.

Pamela snorted. “Fenton, how naive are you? Can’t you see what they’d do ? Can’t you see what they’d do, if they knew we had this TV thing in the pipeline? They’d roll me even quicker, so one of them could go on it instead. And then maybe if it went okay they’d suddenly decide to hang on to Aggot after all, and actually keep campaigning for his release! Believe me, their cynicism knows no bounds on this. It really doesn’t. But anyway, I’ve got no intention of letting that happen. The Neville thing, it’s personal for me now. He’s been writing me letters. Intimate letters. Look.”

Again she glanced swiftly left and right. Then she lifted the lower half of her tight black T-shirt. The revealed expanse of stomach was chalk-white and disarmingly scrawny. A fat manila envelope was stuck to it with two strips of gaffer tape. She ripped the top strip off; the envelope sagged open from her torso like a mail pouch. Inside it was a sloppy bunch of papers, ridiculously varied in size and shape and texture and hue. Fenton saw black ink in paranoid profusion; he saw the multiplicity of stains that only a madman is capable of imparting to a sheet of paper.

“He’s certainly prolific,” he cautiously said, eyeing the smudgy correspondence with unease. “You’ve only been campaigning for his release for – what? – a few weeks?”

“Most of it he’d already written. Basically he was just waiting for someone he could legally send it to. Look, read this.” At random she extracted a loose sheet from the middle of the wad. She thrust it towards him. “Read that, and tell me whether I can turn my back on him now.”

Fenton, not wanting to cause a scene, had no choice but to accept the putrid-looking page. He grasped it pincer-style between thumb and forefinger, minimising its points of contact with his skin. The paper had the brittle texture, and the corrugated topography, of a crinkle-cut chip. A teeming thicket of hand-printed text and crudely drawn shapes was crammed into every available millimetre of its surface area, as if it had been the last sheet of paper in existence. A tan discolouration shaped like a desert island sprawled acridly across the page’s core. At best this stain represented an ancient spillage of coffee or tea, but it also raised the possibility that Aggot had at some point subjected the document to spirited sexual abuse. His handwriting was characterised by a random, freewheeling alteration between big letters and small ones. In some places these had been set down with such kooky force that the pen had torn clean through the paper. His prose tended towards the baldly aphoristic. It said things like: “the SINNER ar the Ones that wil be PUnisD for there SINS” and “I aM the huntre OF Humen Meet”.

As he perused this hellish production, Fenton felt Pamela Scratch staring critically at his face, ready to pounce on the slightest sign that he found Aggot’s work to be in any way abnormal or unacceptable or wrong. He was therefore careful to rig his features, while he read, into an expression of solemn connoisseurship, an expression by which he hoped to make it clear that he considered Aggot to be at the very least his moral and intellectual peer, if not his out-and-out superior in every conceivable field of endeavour. “What’s this?” he innocently inquired, pointing to a large and cryptic hand-drawn shape. “Is it a clog? No – a skateboard?”

“Oh grow up, Fenton. It’s a dick.”

“So it is.”

“Relax, Fenton.” Snatching the page from his grasp, Pamela made haste to restash it in the open envelope. “It’s not going to jump off the page and land on you. This is how a brutalised person expresses himself. We can’t all have nice middle-class mummies and daddies like you.”

“Your parents run an antique shop!” Fenton cried in self-defence.

He regretted it at once. Pamela stared at him with icy aggression. “Tell me something, Fenton. Who are you to sit in judgement on this man? You stand there in your own little fantasy world wishing this sort of nonsense just didn’t go on. Wishing you didn’t have to put up with it. Well wake up, Fenton. It does go on. Whether you like it or not. Admit it though, Fenton – that would be your ideal little world wouldn’t it? A world without Neville Aggots in it? A world where everybody was as nice and law-abiding and conventional as you? And what a fascinating place that would be! Eh, Fenton? Seriously: what do you think the world’d be like, if everybody was just exactly like you?”

A fuck of a lot better than the shithole it is now, Fenton wanted to reply. But he was getting increasingly concerned by what Pamela, as she spoke, was doing with the wicked pouch of Aggot’s correspondence. First she had ripped away the remaining strap of gaffer tape, thus fully detaching the package from her midriff. And now she was thrusting it towards him and wiggling it urgently from side to side, for all the world as if she wanted him to take the whole thing.

“Go on,” she said now. “Stash it at your place somewhere. Somewhere accessible. I’ll come round some time and pick it up.”

Fenton took a step backwards, unsure which prospect troubled him more: taking hold of this rank testament to a killer’s perversions, or having Pamela Scratch come round to his house. “I couldn’t,” he said, politely but firmly.

“I’m not offering you a present, you moron! Take it! I can’t keep it, can I? These are stolen documents, man. Why do you think I had them taped to me? For jollies? For fun?”

Inevitably, then, Fenton found himself accepting the reeking envelope. He unzipped his bag to find a quarantined place for it.

“Now, if anyone asks you, you’ve never seen them, right. Technically they’re the property of SNARBY. Officially speaking that’s where they still are – sitting in a filing cabinet in our office. The other faction thinks it’s going to bust them out at the no-confidence debate. They think they’re going to hand them round as evidence that Neville’s a phallocentric sexist who doesn’t ‘deserve’ to be the focus of a major liberation campaign. And I swear to God, I can’t wait to see the look on their fucking faces when they open that drawer! And they won’t be getting any more letters from him either. I’ve seen to that. I’ve given him my home address now, so everything comes straight to me.”

Again Pamela looked defiantly into Fenton’s face, waiting for it to display shock, disapproval, or any other intimation that he considered it somehow unwise to supply one’s home address to a self-confessed hunter of human meat. But Fenton knew far better than that. He simply nodded, as if the move struck him as a frightfully sound one.

This response being acceptable, Pamela moved on: “So, when this spill happens, Fenton, expect a call. I’ll need to stack the floor with as many stooges as I can get. And when you turn up to vote, bear in mind I’ll have you registered you under a fake name. So if the other faction tries to catch you out by yelling out your real name or something, don’t turn around. And believe me, they’ll try it. There’s nothing these people won’t stoop to. If you can rustle up a few friends as well, so much the better. Also, bring along the names of some dead people.”

“Sorry?” Fenton looked at his own face, reflected twice in her sunglasses. Hadn’t she made him do enough for one day?

“Some dead people. To stack the vote with. Doesn’t matter who. It could be your grandparents, anybody. Just bring along their names. And their addresses. I’ll need their addresses too. Bring their addresses too.”

“The addresses of the dead people,” Fenton said, mechanically. He was damned if he would involve his late grandparents in this.

“Exactly.”

“The addresses they lived at when they were alive.”

Pamela frowned at him impatiently. “Do you read the newspapers, Fenton? This is how you fudge a vote. You stack the rolls with the names of dead people. The system thrives on it. Believe me, there are government ministers out there who’ve built their whole careers on the votes of dead stooges.”

“Why do they have to be dead, though?”

Now Pamela looked at him as if he were an imbecile. “The dead don’t talk back, Fenton.”

“Why not just make up some names? They wouldn’t talk back either.”

On the far side of her sunglasses, Pamela’s eyes flared in a telling way – a way that revealed she had no idea what the answer to this question was. And quite suddenly Fenton understood that Pamela, for all her bluster, didn’t really have a clue what she was talking about. Her knowledge of the mechanics of dead stooge voting was, in reality, no more advanced than his own. On another day he might have pressed this point further, had some private fun with it, made her suffer a lot more. Today he just wanted the conversation to end.

Pamela said: “Look. Fenton. None of this need concern you. Leave the technical aspects to me. All you need to do is be there on the night, right. Just show up, and bring along as many of your living friends as you can round up. Think you can manage that? Do that, Fenton, and I’m going to be very grateful. Very grateful.”

In the days that followed, Fenton thought a lot about that final phrase. And the more he thought about it, the better he liked the sound of it. Was it fantastic to believe that it might refer to the sandpit? Was it folly to imagine that if he participated in the stack, Pamela might repay him by cutting down on her constant evocations of that juvenile sex act? Maybe she was even offering to forget about it altogether. Maybe – or was this too far-fetched? – maybe she knew how little he liked talking to her, and planned to reward him by never talking to him again …

Fenton resolved to attend the stack and find these things out. When the phone call came, he would suppress his natural impulse to rebuff her with lies. He would attend, and he would vote for her embattled regime. And he would do more than just that. He would take some friends along, too.

He would deliver her the Maoist vote.