Chapter 1

Mrs. Brindle lay on her living-room floor, watching her ceiling billow and blink with the cold, cold colours and the shadows of British Broadcast light. A presumably educative conversation washed across her and she was much too tired to sleep or listen, but that was okay, that was really quite all right.

“What about the etiquette of masturbation? Because everything runs to rules, you know, even the bad old sin of Onan. So what are the rules in this case? About whom may we masturbate?

“Someone we have only ever seen and never met?

“Quite common, almost a norm—we feel we are offending no one, we superimpose a personality on a picture, in as far as our dreadful needs must when that particular devil drives, and that’s that.”

Harold Wilson’s baby, friend to the lonely, the Open University.

“How about a casual acquaintance? Someone with whom we have never been intimate and with whom we never will? Someone our attentions would only ever shock?

“Actually, that’s much more rare. We imagine their, shall we say disgust, and find it inhibits us. We steer our thoughts another way.”

Mrs. Brindle rolled onto her stomach, noticing vaguely how stiffened and tender her muscles had grown. Women of her age were not intended to rest on floors. Beside her head, the moving picture of a man with too much hair grinned clear across the screen. Video recorders were catching his every detail in who could tell how many homes where students and other interested parties were now sensibly unconscious in their beds, their learning postponed to coincide with convenience. Mrs. Brindle didn’t care about education, she cared about company. She was here and almost watching, almost listening, because she could not be asleep. Other people studied at their leisure and worked towards degrees, Mrs. Brindle avoided the presence of night.

“On the other hand, we are highly likely to make imaginary use,” the voice was soft, jovially clandestine, deep in the way that speech heard under water might be, “of someone with whom we intend to be intimate.”

She tried to concentrate.

“The closer the two of us get, the more acceptable our fantasies become, until they grow up into facts and instead of the dreams that kept us company, we have memories—to say nothing of a real live partner with whom we may have decided to be in love.

“And here is where we reach my point, because this is all one huge demonstration of how the mind affects reality and reality affects the mind. I indulge in a spot of libidinous mental cartooning and what happens? A very demonstrable physical result. Not to mention a monumental slew of moral and emotional dilemmas, all of which may very well feed back to those realities I first drew upon to stimulate my mind, and around and around and around we go and where we’ll stop, we do not know.

“That around and around is what I mean by Cybernetics. Don’t believe a soul who tells you different—particularly if they’re engineers. This is Cybernetics—literally, it means nothing more than steering. The way I steer me, the way you steer you. From the inside. Our interior lives have seismic effects on our exterior world. We have to wake up and think about that if we want to be really alive.”

Something about the man was becoming persistent. Mrs. Brindle felt herself approach the slope of a blackout, the final acceleration into nowhere she needed to worry about, a well of extinguished responsibilities. It seemed not unlikely that his voice might follow her in.

She counted herself down the list of things still undone through her own deliberate fault: breakfast not prepared for, low milk not replaced, her surrender to the pointlessness inherent in ironing socks.

Dawn was up before her, but still not entirely established, just a touch delicate. The television was dark and dumb in the corner. She must have remembered to turn it off. Her left hip throbbed alive, commemorating another night spent bearing her weight against a less than forgiving carpet. Not for the first time, she pushed herself up to her knees with thoughts of how much more convenient she might find a padded cell. The idea didn’t crack a smile, not this morning.

Furious, humid rain was banging at the windows. Its noise must have roused her. She relished downpours, their atmosphere of release. Stepping gently through to the kitchen, she knew this particular pleasure came mainly from the air pressure falls that could accompany lavish rain. The harmless impacts of water on glass were among the small, domesticated sounds that Mrs. Brindle loved. Like the first whispers from a kettle when it clears its throat before a boil, they made her feel at home and peaceful in ways that many other things did not.

She steeped real coffee in the miniature cafetière that held exactly enough for one and tried not to remember the space in her morning routine. Mrs. Brindle tried not to think, “This is when you would have prayed. This is when you would have started your day by knowing the shape of your life.”

While she sat and waited for the time when she could set the bacon to the grill, Mrs. Brindle remembered the programme she’d slept with last night. It had been about steering. A long-boned man who spoke about steering and wanking. That didn’t seem exactly likely, now she thought, but the man who’d spoken seemed too coherent and unfamiliar and just too tall to be someone her imagination had simply conjured up and slipped inside her sleep. She hadn’t exactly dreamed about him, but something of him had been constantly there, like the ticking of a clock, leaked in from another room.

Having completed her coffee, she worked her way through yesterday’s paper and considered she might even try to find out his name.

“Edward E. Gluck. Edward E. Gluck. Edward E. Gluck. You hear that? I have a wonderfully rhythmical name. My mother gave it me. She played semi-professional oboe when she was young and I think this meant that she always approached things as if they were some kind of score: arguments, gas bills, christenings; anything. I could be wrong on this, but I like to believe it anyway, you know?”

Radio Two, Mrs. Brindle’s favourite; it didn’t pretend to be better than it was. She was mixing a batter for Yorkshire pudding, properly in advance so that it would settle and mature and make something which would taste well and be sympathetic with gravy. She was nowhere near the time for gravy yet.

As Edward E. Gluck repeated and repeated his own name, she recognised his voice. On the television, he had sounded just the same—he made very ordinary words seem dark and close. Now, beneath his enthusiasm, she could hear a harder type of consistent energy, unidentifiable, but engaging. She put the batter bowl into the fridge and sat to concentrate on Gluck.

“She was a lady, my mother. A remarkable woman. On the night I’m referring to, I was maybe four years old and unable to sleep because freight trains ran close by the back of our flat almost continuously. And I was restless because my parents had separated not long before and I’d been moved from my home and money was tight and sleeping seemed too much like dropping my guard. Anything could have happened while I was out.

“Now I remember this clearly. I’m sitting up, right inside the dark with the blankets neat in to my waist and the rest of me cold. I’m concentrating. But there’s no way to know what I’m concentrating on—I only know I’ve been thinking when my mother opens up my door. She snaps me back from a place in my mind that is smooth and big and nowhere I’ve been before. I’ve liked it. I want to go there again, to the place that’s only thoughts and me thinking them.

“Mother, she sat by my bed. I can still picture her beautiful shape and know she smelt all powdery and breakable and sweet. She waited with me for the next of the trains to pass. She made me listen to the carriages—listen to them, not just hear.

“And they were saying my name. All of them, all of the time, for all of their journeys, were saying my name. Edward E. Gluck, Edward E. Gluck, Edward E. Gluck. Every train on every railway in the world can’t help saying my name.

“That night, my mother taught me two things I have never forgotten since. That she loved me enough to offer me her time. And that my fundamental egomania will always cheer me up. I indulge it as often as I can.”

Gluck talked a great deal about himself—he put his inside on his outside with a kind of clinical delight. Mrs. Brindle rolled cubes of pork in egg yolk and then salt and black pepper and flour and listened to someone with ridiculous personal confidence and a small but happy laugh. Whatever his life was doing, he seemed to understand it perfectly, because that was his job, his Cybernetics. Within the few minutes of his talk, he ricocheted from essential freedom to creative individuality and his new collection of accessible and entertaining essays which dealt with these and many other subjects. Available in larger bookshops now.

Mrs. Brindle knew about bookshops. For a while she had thought they might help her. Publishers were, after all, always bringing out books intended as guides to life and all-purpose inspirations. She had scoured an exhaustive number of first- and second-hand suppliers without finding a single volume of any use. She had also discovered since, that the fungi which thrived upon elderly books—even of the self-improving type—could cause hallucinations and psychosis and were, in short, a genuine threat to mental health. This did not surprise her.

The amount of time and hope she must have wasted in that particular search for enlightenment threatened to make her feel discontented now, so she decided to focus her mind on Gluck. She would like to read Gluck. This would do no more harm or good than the reading of anything else and would allow someone entertaining inside her head.

Her previous experiences had taught her that she could reach the closest sizeable bookshop, buy herself a book, and be home again in time to preserve the success of her evening meal. So she left the kitchen and then entirely abandoned the house with the radio still singing and murmuring to itself behind the locked front door.

She hadn’t forgotten where to go. Through the side entrance and downstairs for RELIGION, SELF-HELP and PSYCHOLOGY. Those three sections always seemed to cling together, perhaps for mutual support. She was familiar with many of the titles they still displayed. She was equally familiar with sidling across the broad face of SELF-HELP in the hope that she would appear to be very much on the way to somewhere else—perhaps towards HELPING OTHERS, or GENERAL FICTION—and not a person in need of assistance from any source. SELF-HELP was, in itself, an unhelpful title—Mrs. Brindle was unable to help herself, that was why she had bought so many books and found them so unsatisfactory. Their titles winked out at her now like the business cards of cheerful, alphabetical frauds.

Today, as always, there were no sections assigned to FEAR OF DYING, or ABSOLUTE LOSS. This was presumably due to a lack of demand. Or else the low spending power of readers overly obsessed with The Beyond.

Gluck’s essays were piled on a table to one side of PSYCHOLOGY—twenty or so copies of a cream-coloured hardback with the author’s name and title marked in hard, red type. She could also make out the cream image of a cleanly opened skull, still cradling the hemispheres of a brain, very slightly embossed. Lifting one copy, she ran her forefinger quietly over the curves and edges of the paper skull. It felt good. She allowed herself a pause. Finally, she split the fresh pages, smelt the bitterness of new print and gave the opening a skim.

For many decades an unholy alliance of neurophysiologists and engineers has sought to produce mechanical imitations of the human brain. In a few limited areas, they have succeeded. One might wonder why they persist in their attempts, when two sexually compatible and fertile human beings can develop the real McCoy and the perfect system for its support in a matter of months and at relatively little cost.

On the back of the dust-jacket there was a grainy photograph of Gluck—unsmiling and against a background of dramatic cloud. She could only see his head and shoulders, so it was impossible to tell if he was standing on a roof, or a cliff-top, or, indeed, the upper deck of an empty bus. Something about the light on his face suggested he had taken up a stance in front of a very large window. Perhaps he could afford a house where such things were available.

Meanwhile computerised technology has become increasingly sophisticated. We have witnessed the irresistible rise of successive generations of machines which add one to one to one, at ever more stupefying speeds. The computer has simultaneously come to represent, not an imitation of the human mind, but an emotionless goal to which it might, one day, aspire.

Half a dozen stops on the underground and she would be walking back home and no one need ever know she had run away. The book was a small thing, it could be put in a great many places. Not hidden, only put in a place that was safe.

Tunnel lights and stations roared and arched around her while she held Gluck—The New Cybernetics gently and privately against her coat. The firmness of the book’s construction was reassuring and that was pleasant in itself; she shouldn’t build up expectations for its contents. She should just occupy a little of her time with Professor Gluck’s writing and maybe not actually understand a word, but that wouldn’t matter. A dose of mild confusion would be nice, it wouldn’t hurt. And she would be reading someone who really did know the mind: his own and other people’s. He understood things and she could be there in his book while he was understanding.

As the train shivered and shook her, Mrs. Brindle recalled how much she had once looked for that, for understanding. She’d never wanted spirit guides, or dietary healing, aura manipulation, or the chance to be woken up sexually. She’d never wished to be a qualified stranger’s second guess. She had never sought the temporary comfort of childhood hymns, of absolution, or even of very lovely Mysteries. Mrs. Brindle had only wanted someone who understood, a person who would tell her what was wrong and how to right it.

Somewhere in our science the original and the template have become confused. The limited, mechanical model is now used to analyse and find fault with the shamefully underexplored, biochemical original. The computer’s admirable ability to store information and its rather more plodding efforts to draw conclusions from available facts are held up as the pinnacle of possible intelligence. Lack of flexibility and, above all, lack of emotional content in the storage and retrieval of information are regarded as essential. Already, in certain spheres, Reality and the hideously impoverished Virtual Reality are held to be completely interchangeable.

Political and social theories pursued on the basis of Numerical rather than Completed Facts, cannot be influenced by human joys or human pains. Is, for example, a death only a negative number in our combat readiness or population totals? Or is it a major intellectual and emotional loss? How will our species prosper if we treat ourselves, according to Numerical Facts, as no more than arithmetic? Humanity, its potential and inherent strengths as expressed in the human brain, are being systematically erased.

The New Cybernetics represents an effort to reverse this erasure. The following essays deal with its applications in the treatment of disease, information technology, the development of personality, learning and—more speculatively—in the fields of history, philosophy and ethics.

That night she re-ironed the collars and cuffs on fourteen shirts and then sat on the carpet with a black-and-white movie splaying out across the shadows of the room while she read Gluck.

At first she was afraid. She didn’t want him to tell out every part of Mrs. Brindle into emptiness. Some things, she hoped, could never be wholly explained: how she laughed, the way she peeled oranges like her mother, what made her upset. She didn’t want to learn that all of her was only atoms joining other atoms and cells joining cells and charges balancing up and down a wiring system that happened to bleed. Otherwise, all she’d have left of herself would be a type of biochemical legerdemain. She was afraid that Gluck might have the power to slip her apart and break her in the space left between nothing and nothing more.

But Gluck reassured. He wound her slowly through the glistening darkness she began to imagine was her mind. He personally assured her that she was the miracle which makes itself.

This was a start, a nice thing to know, but rather lonely. Before, Something Else had made her and looked upon her and seen that she was good.

Somewhere within her ten thousand million cells of thinking, she remembered when loneliness had been only an easily remedied misunderstanding of nature, because there had always been Something Else there, just out of reach. He had, at times, been more or less revealed, but had been always, absolutely, perpetually there: God. Her God. Infinitely accessible and a comfort in her flesh, He’d been her best kind of love. He’d willingly been a companion, a parent, a friend and He’d given her something she discovered other people rarely had: an utterly confident soul. Because Mrs. Brindle had never known an unanswered prayer. For decades, she had knelt and closed her eyes and then felt her head turn in to lean against the hot Heart of it all. The Heart had given round her, given her everything, lifted her, rocked her, drawn off unease and left her beautiful. Mrs. Brindle had been beautiful with faultless regularity.

Now she was no more than a bundle of preoccupations. She avoided the onset of despair with motiveless shopping and cleaning, improving her grasp of good cuisine and abandoning any trust in Self-Help books.

She had been told that her life in its current form represented normality. Existence in the real world was both repetitive and meaningless; these facts were absolute, no one could change them. Ecstasy was neither usual nor useful because of its tendency to distract, or even to produce dependency. Her original bliss had meant she was unbalanced, but now she had the chance to be steady and properly well.

Mrs. Brindle tried to seem contented in her suddenly normal life and to be adaptable for her new world, no matter how hard and cold this made every part of every thing she touched. She allowed herself to betray what she had lost by ceasing to long for it. But when her betrayal became too unbearable and she began to believe she was fatally alone, she tried to pray again.

At first her efforts felt like respectably articulated thought. No more than that. She found she had lost the power of reaching out. Now and again she could force up what felt like a shout, but then know it had fallen back against her face. Finally the phrases she attempted dwindled until they were only a background mumbling mashed in with the timeless times she had asked for help.

So Mrs. Brindle withdrew for consolation into the patterns of her day. She sought out small fulfilments actively. There were check-out assistants to be smiled for, chance encounters with cultivated or random flowers and overheard melodies to appreciate and, every week, she would do her utmost to find at least one new and stimulating, low-cost recipe. It was all bloody and bloody and then more bloody again, but faultlessly polite and inoffensive and there were no other bloody options she could take, but in her case, the path of least resistance was the one that she most wanted to resist.

Now another bloody year was grinding its way into June with hardly a protest or a sign of life.

Mrs. Brindle encouraged habit to initiate and regulate her movements in the absence of her interest and will. Friday morning’s habit was the recipe trawl: twice round the local newsagents with a fall-back position provided by the library.

On the third Friday of June Mrs. Brindle found what she needed at only her second high-street stop. A belligerently cheerful magazine winked out at her, shamelessly covered with posing and pouting fruit flans: almond paste, cherries, apricots, vanilla cream and appropriate liqueurs; each of their possible elements boded well. She could explore a good dessert theme for weeks. This would be today’s encouraging victory of the positive.

When she saw the article, the magazine’s other article, the article which was not about transformative accessories, or any kind of flan, she was standing by her sink, holding a new cup of tea and half-looking out at signs of neglect in the window box. Somewhere beneath her breastbone she felt the warmth, not of surprise, but of familiarity and she may even have smiled down at the photograph of the prominent and fast becoming really rather fashionable Professor Edward E. Gluck. A small article mentioned his theories, his controversial Process and its undeniable results and she knew about these things already and in much more detail from his book. She was able to cast a knowing eye across the journalistic summary of his ideas and find it wanting. They didn’t understand him the way she did.

Equally, they knew something she did not. They were able to point out that Gluck would soon attend a meeting of high-powered minds in Germany. Professor Gluck would be resident in Stuttgart for at least the week that ran from one plainly given date in July up to another.

It seemed right that Mrs. Brindle should know where Gluck would be for the whole of one summer week. It seemed right that she should think of Gluck and Stuttgart and be happy and happiness is a considerable thing, a person should never underestimate what a person might do for it. Foreign travel might be seen as no more than a necessary inconvenience along the way. No matter how much justification and expenditure a trip—perhaps to Germany—would demand, it might seem possible, reasonable, worth it.

Having read Gluck as thoroughly as she could, Mrs. Brindle knew about obsession, its causes and signs. She was well equipped to consider whether she was currently obsessing over Gluck.

Certainly she was close to his mind, which might cause her to assume other kinds of proximity. Obsessive behaviour would read almost any meaning into even the most random collision of objects and incidents. Chance could be mistaken for Providence. Fortunately, her Self-Help reading meant that she knew her thinking very well and could be sure she was a person most unlikely to obsess. She had never intended to seek out Gluck, she had simply kept turning on through her life and finding he was there.

“Were you ever happy? Tell me, were you ever truly happy, that you can recall? The right-now, red-flesh and bone-marrow variety of happy—yards and yards of it? Hm?”

He had a tan. Professor Gluck was standing and talking like a real live person, right over there and with a tan.

And there was so much of him. Every shift of his shoulders, every weight change at his hips, gave her three dimensions of unnerving reality. She had guessed he was photogenic, that he made conscious efforts to shine, but she had not anticipated how very well-presented he might actually be.

“Happy so there’s nothing to do except smile and smile and smile and then again, well, you could always smile.”

Professor Gluck smiled luminously down about himself, as if to demonstrate. His little audience seemed to flinch gently, perhaps distressed by so much personality, all at once.

“Oh, the first time or two, you’ll try to cough it up and maybe you’ll shake your head about it, but in the end you’ll just have to grit your teeth and grin it out. This is an inescapable thing you’re dealing with. If you want to be happy—for example—it is highly likely that you will. The Process works. Naturally one can’t infallibly predict the minutiae of its results, but speaking very strictly from my own experience I can say you may end up so contented you frighten strangers. Hold that thought. Now . . .” He paused and looked directly across to fix on Mrs. Brindle and she realised how completely she must appear to be out of her place. With only one glance he could tell who she was—the crazy woman who had written to him and said she would be on her way. “I am about to be late for an appointment. Thank you all.”

The circle around him found its hands shaken and its shoulders patted aside as Gluck sleeked his way precisely to meet her. His attention withdrawn, the group shuffled and broke away.

“Mrs. um, Brindle?”

Something in her letter had persuaded him to meet her, which was good because it had taken her weeks to write. Her problem now would be that she couldn’t make herself that clear again; not out loud where he could hear her. She was also too nervous to breathe. The uneasiness under her skin made her hands twitch while she tried not to gulp for air. She wanted to start this all over again at another, better time when she could feel more ready and less like a recently landed and naturally aquatic form of life.

Gluck’s voice was unmistakable, dipping now and then into an octave below the norm, and holding that constant dry rumble beneath the rhythm of the words, his personal melody. “Mrs. Brindle. I am right?” His face waited, appraising.

He was said to be quite a singer. She had done her research. God, it was not fair or reasonable that she should be this afraid.

“Mrs. Brindle?”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Professor Gluck.”

“My favourite sentence. ‘You’re right, Professor Gluck.’ Well done. There’s a table over by the wall where no one will bother us and I have asked for coffee, although it may well never come. Are you staying here?”

She felt herself propelled by something very like his will, or the sheer force of his words, or maybe just his hand, lightly settled at her back. She made a kind of answer without thinking, while her throat panicked tight. “Me? No. No, I’m not.”

“Wise choice—I think this is the worst hotel I’ve never paid for.” He nodded in passing at a young man with a briefcase, flapped his hand to a couple by the door, then inclined his head very slightly towards hers. “We may have to make a run for the last few yards, I feel the pack is closing fast.” His mouth barely avoided a smile. “Oh, don’t mind me, Mrs. Brindle—I’ve had to be charming all morning and it never agrees with me.”

She didn’t know if she minded him or not. She wasn’t sure about the charming part, either, but he was undoubtedly something, a very great deal of something that was definitely Gluck. She walked on as carefully as she could, her awareness of his shape beside her threatening to distract her so much that she would fall. His hand continued to propel her with a useful and disinterested force.

Safely installed in their corner, Gluck lounged one leg out over the armrest of his chair, allowing it to be clear that he was both remarkably long-limbed and indisputably at ease with his surroundings. He seemed delighted that he might be adding creases to a suit, already expensively distressed. Now and then he spired his fingers, or bit his brown thumbs with his white incisors while he watched and grinned and watched, his interest held flawlessly at shoulder height. Once he had seen his fill beyond her, he angled round again to catch Mrs. Brindle whole and finish with one slow blink dropping down over eyes the colour of blue milk.

“Now we shall get to know each other, shan’t we? But do relax first, it will save so much time.”

She had already eased herself back in her seat and now tried not to move her arms in case they proved unreliable. Her limbs felt slightly less anxious now, but also strangely insubstantial. Still, it did seem she could trust both her hands not to shake. That was good, she could build on that. She just wished she didn’t know she was pale and that there were obvious shadows around her eyes. Red was prickling on her cheeks and nose after yesterday’s unaccustomed sun and she felt visibly sticky, despite the extremely efficient air conditioning at work on every side. Her physical condition should have been irrelevant— Gluck would hardly be concerned with how she looked—but she did wish she could have seemed slightly less hideous, for the sake of her pride. A person was unlikely to enjoy asking favours from a position of grotesque inferiority.

“Tchick, tchick, fffop. Zippo.” Gluck winked at her and indicated a bullish man in his shirt sleeves who was straining at a fresh cigar. “Zippo lighters, they always sound the same. When I was younger, I wanted to smoke, just so I could use one.” The white of his eyes blared a little too loudly over his grin.

“You never considered pyromania? Better for your health.”

He sat round to stare at her squarely, his face shining briefly with a peculiar kind of appetite. “That’s certainly true, certainly true. Remind me of what I can do for you, Mrs. Brindle. Now that we’re really speaking.”

She liked that she could sometimes change how people thought of her, just by saying out some little surprise. This didn’t work in crowds because quite often no one heard her—she seemed often to be an inaudible person—but undoubtedly the good professor was now offering her a further chance to shine. He was trying to work her out, hoping to uncover just exactly who she was. She came very close to admitting she knew how he felt.

Gluck leaned in. “Don’t be alarmed, by the way, if we never get our coffee. They used to send it over with a very attractive young waitress—now she no longer comes and I often get nothing. You’re in bad company with me, I do admit that, but I also wonder what precisely I did wrong. It is a shame, she was a nice girl.”

She knew he was watching for a reaction, to check which offence she would take, and she tried to maintain a correct indifference. He drove on with his stare, unconvinced, and then exhaled into a kind of shrug. “Ah, well. I don’t have your letter here with me . . . but . . . might I say first of all how impressed I am that you should have travelled so far. I do hope your journey will be adequately rewarded.”

“I needed a holiday.”

“And this is almost as good a location as any. Quite true. Do talk to me, Mrs. Brindle, I’m beginning to feel alone.” Gluck pulled away, his eyes leaving first, cooling, their light closing down.

“You know about the brain. You . . . when you write—”

“I know about me, thank you. Tell me about you and your problem and I don’t intend to rush you, but I must be in the Conference Room by 2:25 at the latest. You’re attending the lectures?”

“Yes, I am.”

“All of them?”

“Yes. Most of them, at least. Some aren’t open to the public.”

“So it isn’t only my work that interests you?”

“Your work interests me the most. That’s why I’m here. Please, if your time is so limited . . .”

She gathered a stiff breath and forced out something she hoped might be what she believed she thought, or hoped she thought, or hoped he thought, or just something someone might have thought at some time when they were trying to make sense of something. “Religious experience, spiritual feelings . . . do you know if it’s only chemistry . . . electrical spasms. Can you tell if . . . ? Is it likely . . . anything . . . from descriptions. Do you know that process? Possibly it never occurred to you—why should it . . . I mean . . .” She tried not to sigh. “I have a problem.”

“Obviously. One you currently seem quite unable to describe. Have you had a religious experience?”

“No, at least that’s—”

“Would you like a religious experience?” He failed to hide the glint of a smirk.

“Spiritual.”

“You would like a spiritual experience, or you would like a definition of a spiritual experience?”

“Either.”

“I think you might be a little more specific about your requests—it’s the only way to get what you want.”

“I’m sorry.” But she didn’t feel sorry. Humiliated, that’s what she felt.

“I certainly can’t give you a spiritual experience.”

Gluck’s eyes were enjoying her unease, raising an unpleasant shine. He had decided to treat her as an interlude, a joke, and she wanted to be angry about that, but there was no room in her mind now to do anything but listen for what he might say. She was too hungry for any trace of help to be dignified. Their gazes crossed and locked and broke. Gluck’s voice almost disappeared in a resonant rumble. “As far as definitions go . . . I could give you a roomful—chemistry, electricity, extremity, psychosis, psychotropics, trauma . . . If that all seems distressingly un-supernatural then you must simply remember that an answer is only true until it’s been discredited. I don’t work in a field of absolutes. Even a Completed Fact isn’t really complete, it’s just our current best attempt—a healthy admission of constant defeat. Sometimes a definition is no more than a convincingly detailed guess. Or are we talking about God? Faith? About which I know little or nothing.”

“I’m sorry, I’m wasting your time. But there was something about your work, your understanding . . . there was a quality about it, perhaps not the theories themselves, but perhaps in the theories . . .”

The foyer, she knew, was quietly noting their every exchange: gestures, pauses, glances. She was using up time they wanted, wasting away the moments they could spend near their favourite: hoping for a trophy, a token, a moment of recognised intimacy; anxious to figure, even badly, in one of his famous anecdotes. If Gluck himself registered their attention, he was keeping it tightly at bay.

“A quality. A spiritual quality in my theories? Hhum, well, that’s natural—any genuine exploration will touch the boundaries of our experience, will press forward into what is unknown and possibly unknowable and there we will experience humility. Humility is, I believe, something somewhat on the spiritual side.”

“You’re humble? Even when you say you’re an egomaniac?”

He licked away a sudden grin. “Remember when you quote from interviews, that they are very often works of fiction and should be treated as such. But yes, I am possessed of a considerable ego. I use the word in a strictly un-Freudian sense, no need to drag him in. But I still experience humility. I personally can be completely in awe of myself—humbled. I am, after all, working at the forefront of a field I single-handedly created. Good trick if you can do it.” She watched as his face paused, relaxed, betrayed that it was frighteningly tired. “Mrs. Brindle, the size of the work and the beauty of it—not my part in it, the work itself—that is something humbling.” He stopped again and might almost have sighed while he swept back a droop of his over-long hair. “I’m not helping you, am I? I can tell.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you are now frowning far more than when we first met and looking truly distressed. And we’ve had no coffee—I couldn’t even offer you that. I have failed and, I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I am no longer used to failing.”

“No, I suppose not.” She tried not to sound impatient. “Look, I didn’t mean to . . . I think it’s being here, this bloody foyer and all the people. I’m too tired now. And this heat is killing me. It was so hard to arrange a meeting and the hotel people here wasted so much time and I thought . . . I know you’re leaving tomorrow and . . . Do you think I could speak to you? . . . later?” She dwindled to a quizzical whine and felt stupidly close to crying.

Gluck’s head dipped forward, his voice emerging in a low, solid growl, unpleasantly patient. “Mrs. Brindle, as we speak, I am being considered for a Nobel Prize. Again. My lectures this week are relayed from the theatre to a hall that will barely accommodate my audience overspill. I have only recently declined the offer of an interview with a major—if mildly sleazy—gentleman’s magazine. To be blunt, there are quite a few people, besides yourself, who would like to speak to me.”

With her head lowered, he wouldn’t notice that her eyes were closed, sealing in any sign of unsuitable emotion. “I quite understand. As I said, I came for a holiday. Thank you for . . . for your time.”

He was standing over her, frowning her down, almost before she could reach for her bag.

“Mrs. Brindle, don’t be so impulsive. You really are a one for that, aren’t you? All the way to Stuttgart with no guarantees . . . of any kind. No stopping you, is there, hn? It would be impossible for me to talk to everyone. That’s what the lectures are for. But outside the lectures, I choose who I like.”

His face cleared into a portrait of benevolence and she tried not to think of what he might mean and who he might like and how she might like to reach up and shake him by the shoulders so that Gluck could understand she was relying on what he could do to set her right.

He slowly sat and faced her and Mrs. Brindle thought she could see a change: a large, cool stillness in his eyes. Inside the mechanism, the metal, oil and cordite Gluck exercised each day—a little to butter his toast with, a little to light the world—he had decided about her.

“Could you tell me my position, Professor. I have to say, I think I’ll miss your lecture. I’m sorry, but I need to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.”

Gluck hunched his shoulders and pocketed his hands. This seemed to be a sign of real concentration, if not actual doubt.

“Professor? Your audience is waiting.”

“Mm?”

“I don’t think there’s one person in this foyer who isn’t watching us.”

“No. There is one, if you check, by the windows. Her name is Frink . . . no, Frisch and she doesn’t like me for reasons which are quite unscientific. I think we might be kind and summarise them as disappointment.” Gluck took care to appear both modest and bemused. “She hasn’t looked at me once all week which is some trick. Takes a lot of arranging. Anyway, what I was thinking was: there’s an Italian place opposite the cathedral which you can’t miss. Even when you’re tired.” A note in his voice cleared and his eyes dodged away. “You do, I beg your pardon, look tired. Go and get untired and . . . the best time would be about seven. Tonight. I’ll be early, so you needn’t bother. You look the early type. Is that all right.” One straight glance, as if he was fixing her now for later use. “Mrs. Brindle?”

“Well. Yes. My hotel is . . . I’m not far from there.”

“Fine.” He was already standing, coughing, changing himself into something public. “That’s fine then. We can shake hands now. Oh, and don’t tell anyone.” He smiled oddly. “If you don’t want my audience, that is. Now, what looks like goodbye forever? Oh yes, I know.” He pressed her hand lightly between both of his, the touch warm but dry. Although she was almost accustomed to something of his scent, his sudden approach left her breathing a pleasant mixture of soap, fabric, lotion. He smelt clean and mild and probably expensive with only the faintest undertaste of sweat. “And what about a Germanic bow?”

“I don’t—”

“Customs of the country.”

“You have . . . too much hair. I mean, I mean, I didn’t mean to . . . mean anything. It would flop. That’s all.” She scrambled to smile intelligently while sounding entirely inane. Gluck remained unreadable.

“Well, in that case, I’ll just have to leave. Seven o’clock. Ta ta.”

He turned away and moved through the foyer with a kind of studied grace, head and slightly tensed shoulders above the general height.

In her hotel room, Mrs. Brindle went to bed. There she lay perfectly still and listened to American Forces Radio while it happily sang the praises of the wily Confederate J. G. Rains who invented fine bombs and lovely torpedoes and that all-time family favourite, the anti-personnel device—another first for the American Civil War. She listened to AP Network News. She listened to the excellent prospects awaiting in the US Postal Service for all those choosing to leave the Military. Finally she listened to the daytime murmur of the hotel surrounding her and the super-heated, orderly silence of Stuttgart beyond. She couldn’t sleep for the ache of listening, her ears wouldn’t fill.

The bath was clean and deep, if slightly too short to lie down in. The complimentary foaming body gel was not unpleasant; nor, for all it could matter, was the complimentary sewing kit. The towels were in good condition, neither overly soft nor harsh.

Clean carpet.

Bedsheet fresh and white.

She settled back beneath the quilt.

This wasn’t going to work.

Mrs. Brindle’s skin, even under the covers, felt impossibly naked—the touch of herself, alone with herself, the brush of her arm on her stomach, of her legs against her legs, tugged her awake. There was something unnatural about her. She felt her limbs cold. The sky that raked between the flimsy curtains was screaming with heat above ninety degrees and her room seemed hardly cooler, but she knew she had a shiver in her blood and whenever she lay down it showed.

The Konigsplatz was bending under the sun while a courteous electronic billboard noted the doggedly blistering temperature in degrees Celsius. She sat downwind of a fountain, trying to concentrate on its regular drifts of spray and the heat that lifted each droplet back up from her skin, almost before it fell. She was still tired and perhaps Gluck had only been joking, perhaps he wouldn’t come. It would only be reasonable for him not to come—she was not famous and he was.

Mrs. Brindle knew she was wearing the wrong things, lifeless things, their colours insubstantial in the merciless light. A scrabble of panic touched her and faded again, leaving an airless tension in her chest. Gluck was making her frightened already, even though he wouldn’t come. She would go to the restaurant and wait for him stupidly until she was too embarrassed not to go away.

Or he would come and then she would be too stupid with fear to make any sense and she would waste all the time she was going to get with him.

But that wouldn’t happen, because he wouldn’t come.

Beyond the flying water were parapets and cliffs of concrete. The whole city was boxed and canyoned in searing concrete and palely mountainous heat. British bombing had left only tiny islands of the past to stand: a church here, a municipal building there. The evidence of violence didn’t disturb her, only the lack of a tangible past. She felt she had been lost in one vast, white amnesia.

“Amnesia?” Gluck’s really very large hands killed another breadstick. The table that filled the space between them seemed strangely insufficient. Gluck was of a size to be invasive, effortlessly. “You’re only abroad, Mrs. Brindle. That’s not so bad, people do it all the time—it’s called going on holiday.”

“Well, I know that.” She failed to sound anything other than abrupt.

“But even so?”

“But, even so, I didn’t expect that when I left my country, everything else would leave me. I mean, if the people and the buildings are different—the churches—then I seem to stop believing in anything. I don’t even believe in me.”

“You are very tired, remember.”

“Professor, it really isn’t because I’m tired.” He might be an expert on most things, but he wasn’t an expert on her. “This started years ago, in Scotland, and now it’s finished here. I am a person who has no faith. I’m over. That’s that.” Mrs. Brindle was the only expert on Mrs. Brindle that she knew. As a field of study she was more than specialised.

Gluck softly shook his head and rubbed at his fringe with one hand. A little shower of stubble fell to the tablecloth. For a moment, she couldn’t think why and then she noticed. “You’ve cut your hair.”

“Yes. About five hours ago. I’ve just spent most of one of them with you.” He was trying to seem aggrieved and managing very well.

“All right. I didn’t pay attention. I’m sorry. But I came here to talk to you seriously and I’ve now stared at three different courses that I couldn’t eat because I have no appetite and because . . . because, to be honest, I’m nervous—”

“You don’t say.”

She thought of giving him a cold look, but then couldn’t. He smiled gently and then she couldn’t look at him at all. “Yes, okay. I know that you know that. But all that we’ve done for one hour is discuss all the people you don’t like at the conference and your favourite type of car and nothing. Now you want to discuss your hair?”

“I had it cut.”

“I know you had it cut, that’s why it’s shorter.”

“You didn’t like the way it was, so I had it cut.”

This made no sense. Gluck sat, his head seeming slightly larger, more plainly capable of holding all that thinking and more obviously grey. She wanted to be extremely angry with him, but nothing was coming out right and Gluck was being oddly tentative, tense. She could think of nothing to say but the truth.

“Professor, I don’t know what’s going on here.”

“Nothing too out of the way, I assure you. I wanted to do something that would be pleasing, make you relax. Something like that.” He coughed his way into a mumble. “Obviously I haven’t been successful. But that’s what I was trying to do. Small talk. And that kind of thing. I don’t do it very often—work too much.” Another, more forceful clearing of the throat. “Actually, it’s the same with my hair. I usually cut it at home in my mirror to save time. The way it is doesn’t bother me—I don’t have to look at it, after all. So I get it damp, sellotape it down around my face—to keep it even—cut it a bit. Suits me. Suited me.”

“That’s nonsense.” Still, it was drawing her in, however nonsensically.

“No it’s not.” Gluck registered a mild degree of hurt. “That’s how I do it. And I liked it long because I knew I was going grey, as you can see; or white. I thought of trimming back my sideburns where they’re white.” He turned his head to show her and rasp at one with his thumb. “But that could go on forever; I’d end up with a kind of bridle path cut over the top of my head and I wouldn’t like that. I am vain.”

He might have been stating his nationality, rather than a character defect. Gluck’s vanity was part of Gluck and therefore could not be a fault.

“Professor, you don’t need to talk to me, or to make me relax.” A moment of irritation or alarm seemed to shadow across his eyes, but she continued anyway. “I don’t relax any more. I don’t expect to. Just tell me, can you help?”

He tapped at his glass and watched the red surface of the wine sway and settle. “I don’t know.”

She’d tried to be prepared in case he gave a sore answer, but what he said still hurt. Within the plainness of it, there was nowhere to fix a hope. He seemed to understand she needed more and went on.

“I would like to know. And to help. Very much. I feel for you. But I do not know. And now it’s time for us to leave.” He patted his jacket to find his wallet out and looked about him for their waiter; Edward E. Gluck, someone used to restaurants and being served.

Mrs. Brindle studied her dessert fork and tried to understand that this was all the time she would be given, finished and over with. She would have to go back to the dark in her hotel room and the night that was already waiting for her outside. Gluck had made her used to the pressure of his mind, his presence. It wasn’t fair that he should make her so alone now and so fast.

“No—”

“Mrs. Brindle?”

She fumbled towards what she could tell him, now that she’d started to speak, and a broad, familiar sadness smeared all her words away. Why bother?

But to make him understand—only to try and make him understand—she lifted one of his hands—brown, healthy, heavy, warm—and pressed his fingers to the open face of her wrist. Her pulse overwhelmed itself while he held it, running dark and high with only her skin between him and her fear.

Gluck winced, but kept his hold. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” His voice smaller, close. “Mrs. Brindle?”

“That’s the way it is. You feel that?” His face said that he did. “I’m scared. That’s what’s wrong. That’s what’s always wrong. I’m scared.”

He smoothed his grip forward to cup her hand, whole inside his, and keep it as if she might be pulled away suddenly, against both their wills.

“Mrs. Brindle, there’s no reason to be scared. Nothing will happen to you. We’re leaving because I’m taking you somewhere else—a place where I’ll be able to think and you can be distracted. Nothing bad will happen. Do you understand that.”

“Of course not.”

“Listen.” The waiter hovered, courteously embarrassed by the way they were clutched together. “You say you’ve lost everything. Well then, how much worse can it get?”

Gluck passed over his credit card, while setting his focus firmly on her face. The waiter stalked away. “We are here now, in this moment, and nothing is anything other than it should be. We are both equipped with minds to perceive and alter all possible worlds—we will be fine.”

She wouldn’t have thought Gluck would be good at reassurance, but as he led her away to a taxi she felt something approaching safe. Mrs. Brindle did not wish to feel safe because of Gluck the man—she found that intellectually alarming—she would have preferred to find comfort in his thinking, his advice. Then again, any help should be appreciated and if she was feeling relief, it was her feeling so she would have it and like it, no matter who or what was responsible.

Gluck sat away from her in the back seat of the car, folded uneasily into the possible space. “This won’t be a long journey. So we needn’t talk. Unless you would like to. What do you think?”

Mrs. Brindle would have preferred not to think. Thinking at night was unsafe.

He reached over and found her wrist faultlessly, no doubt in the evaluation of his touch. “You’re not so frightened now.”

It wasn’t as if he was actually holding her hand. If he’d been holding her hand, she would have told him to stop. This was taking her pulse which was different, scientific. Still, she felt the uneasy snag of something: a cautionary chill tugging her back.

Gluck continued, touching, talking, “Not that I can tell anything except that your heart’s going slower. I’m glad I’m not that kind of doctor.” He released her back to herself.

“You don’t like touching people?”

“Oh, I don’t think that would be true, no. I just would have been no good—diagnosing and all that. So tell me how you are and then I won’t have to guess.” The bars and splashes of light from the windows made him seem to advance and retreat arbitrarily. “Mrs. Brindle?”

“It doesn’t go away, the feeling, it only goes to sleep, so I can’t. That’s how I think about it. As soon as I’m not doing something, as soon as it gets dark, the thing wakes up and gets me. It always knows where I am.”

“But what is the thing that wakes up?”

“Did anyone you cared about ever leave you?”

“Yes.” He answered immediately, as if she had a perfect right to know. “My mother. She died while I was in America studying. I was twenty-two. We’d never been more than a few hours apart until that autumn. Not to bore you; she had looked after me before her divorce. My father didn’t . . . I was too tall for him to like me. I stood out, annoyed him, made him want to knock me down. And she saved me. Always. When they separated she worked very hard and was very ashamed of herself so that I could be very educated and she could be very proud of me—from a suitable distance, of course.

“Blood clot on the brain. Killed her.”

“I’m sorry.” That sounded completely inadequate, even though it was true.

“Sorry? Oh, yes, so was I, but people adjust. Who did you lose?”

“God.”

“Not a person?” He didn’t understand.

But she might make him. “More than a person. Someone that was Everything, in everything. There wasn’t a piece of the world that I could touch and not find Him inside it. All created things—I could see, I could smell that they’d been created. I could taste where He’d touched. He was that size of love. Can you imagine what might happen if a love so large simply left you for no reason you ever knew. One morning, you’re looking through the window and you can’t make any sense of the sky. It’s like dying. Except it can’t be, because dying ends up being what you want, but haven’t got.”

That was such a melodramatic thing to say, she hoped he could tell it was only a fact now and something she was used to—not some kind of female, hysterical threat.

Instead of making any comment, he reached for where her hand rested on the seat and pushed his knuckles against hers with a light, slightly varying pressure that could not cause offence. They were driven on together quietly.

“Mrs. Brindle?” She had been letting her fingers relax against his so that their contact would not mean more than it should inadvertently. “Mrs. Brindle, I would rather not keep on calling you Mrs. Brindle. I would be quite happy to be Edward. Would you be happy to be something else? Something other than Mrs. Brindle?”

“Helen.”

“Is that your name?”

“No, I just made it up. Of course it’s my name. Helen. I’ve always been Helen.”

“Not always Mrs. Brindle, though?”

“My maiden name was Howard. Helen Howard. Too many H’s, really, for one person.”

“So there was a Mr. Brindle?”

“There still is.”

“Oh.”

Helen realised she hadn’t thought to mention Mr. Brindle before, because she hadn’t thought of him, not for several days. She had forgotten him and never felt the difference. Astonishing. “He’s at home. Didn’t want to come. But, yes, he is at home.”

“Why doesn’t he . . .”

“Why doesn’t he what?”

Gluck rubbed at the back of her hand and drew away, aligning his balance with a turn in the road. He set his fingers near his mouth and she realised without intending to that he was breathing in the scent of her skin from his hand while he thought of whatever it was that he couldn’t quite say.

“What? Why doesn’t he what?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Well . . . I don’t mean to presume, but I’m surprised he doesn’t help you with this . . . your problem. Does he try? Does he know you’re so upset?”

“Not all the time. There’s no reason why he should. Not if I don’t want him to. He’s, um . . . he works, he’s busy, and he’s not, I don’t know . . . religious. He didn’t like it when I was. But the way I am—my problem—isn’t his fault. This isn’t his fault.” She did think she was being accurate to say that—she wasn’t defending him.

“Still, maybe it would be better if you were more alike.” Gluck coughed, rubbed his neck.

“Maybe. But we’re not. There’s no point in thinking otherwise.”

Inside the car, around them, Helen was sure she could smell or feel a trace of Mr. Brindle: something at the edge of acrid and much too familiar.

“That’s a shame.”

“No, it’s not.” Helen knew she shouldn’t let Gluck know this. “That’s not a shame. I’ll tell you what’s a shame . . . But it’ll sound stupid.”

“I’m sure not.”

“It is stupid. It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever known, but it’s how I feel, it’s how I’ve always felt.

“I can’t stand his hair. Not the hair on his head—all his hair. He has so much hair. It doesn’t stop. From the back of his skull and right the way down on his neck it stays thick, in fact it gets thicker and then it curls up into wool, black wool. I can feel it under his shirt, springy, as if he was already wearing something else. When he sweats, it stays with him. I imagine it running and sticking on him and then he doesn’t seem clean. I don’t think Mr. Brindle is clean. When he showers, the water kind of combs the hair out flat, but then it looks worse; like fur. Animals have fur. People don’t have fur. Well, do they?”

“I . . . some men . . . I don’t . . . have fur. Only the usual. Not that it’s . . . relevant. Not fur, no.”

“It makes me panic sometimes when he wants to touch me.” Edward had turned to his window, away from her. “I don’t mind that, though. The first time I ever had . . . had a sexual . . . I mean, fear seems to be good for me, for that kind of thing. It can make you more aware—because of the adrenalin, I suppose. I’m sorry, this has nothing to do with anything.” Her breathing felt light-headed, strange.

“I would have thought it was to do with you.”

“Yes, but if I was working correctly I wouldn’t mind about him. He would be my husband and that would be all right.”

“I see. I think I see. We’re here, by the way.”

Helen realised the car had stopped.

As they walked into what appeared to be an ageing warehouse, Edward moved around her, near but never touching, opening doors and clearing a path through the orderly crowd inside. He was keeping her insulated. She couldn’t tell who was in need of protection and who was being dangerous, but began to step tight in beside Gluck, as if she might indeed be incorrectly wired in some way and pose a potential risk.

The tiny auditorium filled and manoeuvred beyond her while she let herself be eased in ahead of Gluck. Somewhere a smoke machine began to spit and bluster enthusiastically.

“Now.” Edward sidled close between the rows of seats and put himself next to her. She was reminded again that public spaces seemed never to be designed for men of his proportions.

“What is this?”

“Nothing at the moment.” Gluck smiled quickly, then stopped himself. “But it will be modern dance. It always helps me think. I have no idea why and not the vaguest desire to find out. I go with the flow and watch. After I met you, I booked the seats.”

“Modern dance.”

“It’s just what we need now, trust me. They’re from Finland, apparently.”

“Finnish modern dance.”

“It’ll be a distraction. And it really will help my mind to clear. I use it a lot. How are you feeling? Be specific.”

“I—” She took a moment to check. “All right. I feel all right.”

“Good. You see, people don’t feel bad constantly. Not always. They simply don’t bother to monitor how they are with any accuracy. When we’re un-selfconscious, we actually get relief. But we don’t notice or remember, because it happens when we’re not being conscious of ourselves.”

A heavy chord of electronic sound beat up through their long bones and their chairs and jarred at the gathering smoke.

Edward inclined towards her knowledgeably, “Ah, that’ll be us starting, then. The music is usually a clue.” He fed his legs forward under the seat ahead of him and let his chin slump to his chest. Helen watched while a huddle of slender young women circled each other out from the wings and stood. They shuddered as a mass. Then stood. The smoke banked and thickened round them. A man in the front row began to cough.

For thirty-eight minutes, Helen was aware of the movement in Edward’s breath and careful not to answer the rhythm of pressure where their shoulders couldn’t help but meet as they sat. Synthesised music shuddered her ribs, or screamed in her teeth and the seven women twitched towards and away from each other across the stage. The obscuring influence of the smoke became a blessing, albeit mixed. Helen couldn’t tell if Edward was enjoying this. She only knew he was trying not to choke on the chemical mist.

Green lights arced through the fog as one and then another and then all of the dancers tugged at the lengths of muslin which had been keeping them more or less wrapped. The cue for their closing blackout was apparently the unveiling of the final pair of breasts. Helen felt a crawl in the skin beside her jaw. She didn’t mind the nudity, it was hardly offensive. She minded that half-naked women were happening now, while Edward was here. They made her position seem odd.

“Come on now, interval.” Edward sneezed. “Excuse me. That smoke.” And then grinned.

Helen waited, surrounded by closed German conversation, while Edward slipped his way back from the bar. Naturally, his height gave him a clear view across the room to her. He was trying to catch her eye, but she couldn’t let him.

“There you are.”

She gripped the damp of the glass, avoiding his hand. “Thanks. So this is the interval, then.”

“Yes. But another two sections to go . . .” He laughed suddenly, as if someone had shoved the sound through him. His head tilted back and to the side and he unsteadied his feet in a kind of private confusion that seemed peculiarly young. “Oh, I am sorry. You can’t stand it, can you?”

“Well—”

“Of course, you can’t. Because it was total crap: so bad it was almost hypnotic. That’s what I love about bad dance, it’s utterly, utterly meaningless and wonderful to think against.” He was checking her face to see how upset she was, trying to say what she would agree with, trying too hard. “And there we had a perfect example. Not one redeeming feature. Bad music, bad dancing and, Jesus Christ, bad smoke.”

“But on interesting themes.”

“Hm?” She’d made him puzzled. She’d made him stop.

“Themes—constipation and electrocution. That’s what it looked like, anyway.” He bent into another sudden yelp. She’d made him laugh. She liked him laughing. “From Finland? Seven dancers?”

“Mm.” He wiped his eyes.

“You know what that would make them?” The last word came out as a squawk, but she couldn’t laugh yet because that would stop her speaking.

“What?”

“The Seven Deadly Finns.”

Edward wheezed and then whimpered while he shook his head and she couldn’t help doing much the same. He patted her shoulder and buckled again. The other dance connoisseurs edged away from them, unimpressed.

Edward took a long moment to lean on her arm. “That’s dreadful. That is the worst thing I’ve heard in years. Oh God, I can’t breathe.” He smothered a giggle. “Can I take it we won’t be going inside for instalments two and three.”

“Not unless you want me to swallow my own arms in despair.”

“Dear me, no. And maybe they’d make us look at more breasts. That was too many breasts.”

Her answer was overly fast, “Only the usual number.”

“What, two each? Yes, but fourteen, all together and with bandages . . . I’m not used to that.” He pondered the floor. “They didn’t . . .”

“Bother me? No. Not at all.”

“Good. I wouldn’t have liked them to.”

Once the warehouse bar had emptied, they found seats and Edward bought her another drink.

“Only soda water, this time.”

“Yes, I quite understand.” He squinted down at her contentedly. “Don’t want to get carried away. Clear head.” And, having turned away, “Nice to see you laughing.”

“Hm?”

“I won’t be a minute. You take a seat.”

When he came to sit beside her in the still of the room, free from obstacles or constrictions, he began to take his own scale again. His movements became more fluid, graceful.

“Do you know how tall I am, Helen?”

“No. I suppose, really quite tall . . .”

“Quite. Six foot three-and-three-quarter inches. Observers may not be clear on the detail—those extra three quarters—but I’m not exactly a secret I can keep. Helen, I can change my mind, I can turn the inside of myself into absolutely anything. I’ve taken Quantum Field Theory—the maps it makes for the universe and matter and time—and I’ve turned it back in to chart the brain that thought it. I’ve taught myself how to know the answer and let the question find itself. I’ve made me a genius. But I can’t be any smaller than I am. It used to annoy the hell out of me.”

“You look good tall.”

“Haven’t got much choice, have I? Thanks, though.” He rubbed at his neck. “And I’m used to it now. At school I was taller than my teachers, I stood out in crowds at my universities. I stood out. Jesus, I had to be a genius so people wouldn’t go on about my height. And you know what I actually wanted? Hm?”

“No.”

“To be good.”

“Good?”

“Well, don’t sound quite so surprised—it could have been possible. At one point. I wanted to be a good man—the way that James Stewart was good. You know—James Stewart? I think I’ve seen most of the films that he made, maybe all. Even the one with Lassie.

“Nobody ever noticed he was tall and skinny. They didn’t look down Main Street after Destry rode again and say, ‘Bloody hell, he’s a bit tall, isn’t he? Spidery. Clumsy, too.’ No, they all said, ‘What a nice man.’ ‘What a good man.’ Because he was.

“People loved Jimmy. I did. I do. Like when he’s George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life? Good old George. And aaaw, the good old Building and Loan.” He let out an impressively recognisable crackling drawl, then couldn’t help a grin.

“That’s the only impression I do—practised it for years. That character Bailey, you stick with him, like you do all the time with Jimmy. You want the best things to happen to him, nothing but happiness. When he’s down, you stay with him because he might need company and when he’s up again you’re glad to see it because he makes you feel generous and you believe he could have a guardian angel to keep him from suicide and perhaps it’ll notice you. Jimmy’s special.”

Edward beamed, unashamed.

“You stay with him in that story to the end and it’s all good—even the badness is good. Even when he makes mistakes, they’re good mistakes and he can mend them.

“I do tend to wonder—if I’m not careful—just how well I would measure up if my guardian angel delivered me into one of Jimmy’s lives. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t come off well. I’m not good—only tall.”

He was fishing for a compliment, so Helen thought he might as well get one. “You’ve been good to me.”

Edward shook his head solemnly, “Doesn’t count.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wanted to.”

She nudged his forearm and found that she was grinning and frowning without those actions being contradictory. “All right then, your work does good. When people use the Process, they needn’t be hospitalised all the time, or drugged. You let people be happy. And you refused to work for the army.”

“You’ve been doing your research.”

“Only now and then.”

“That’s okay, they can’t touch you for it.” He allowed himself a strange, quiet smile. “And you’re right, I couldn’t work for the army. But then nobody sane ever could. My God, you can’t imagine what they wanted me to do. I mean, they would have loved our Finnish friends—deafening noise, chemical smoke, a sealed white box full of threatening figures— just the thing to soften you up before they ask your life away.

“Seriously—they would try anything. Because they do understand that the enemy they most have to conquer is in between their ears. We all face the same puzzle with that—except that some of us are explorers and some of us are bombers and some of us are speculators on property we do not own.”

“You explore.”

“Yes. But not because I’m good—just because it’s the loveliest thing to do.”

Their hands were already loose amongst the glasses on the table-top, it was very easy for them to find each other and fasten, hand over hand over hand over hand while Helen felt a rattle of alarm, like a stick drawn fast along a hard fence. Very far away, her Old Love was observing. Her Maker. She watched her fingers, pale and small in comparison to Edward’s.

“Edward, I don’t mean anything by this. It’s only reall—”

He was nodding before she could finish, “I know.” He began to lift her hands, “I don’t mean anything by it either.” Steering her up and apart from their table to a point where they could stand, hands now in a knot between them. “Of course I don’t.”

Helen moved through her thinking and was almost certain that she was nothing but concentration and memory and the possession of an open, hopeful mind. He was a good man, despite what he said, and he would give her an answer and that would be all. First the trust to touch each other, that relaxation, and then the answer when she was sure to be listening. That made perfect sense.

“I mainly wanted to make it clear,” he unfastened her hands, only to slip inside them and hold her by the shoulders, “that you are an extremely good person and in here,” leaning forward now, cautiously, “in here,” he kissed her forehead, with a moment’s release of static energy. “In here, you have everything you need to get better. In this part of a part of a second, you have it all. That’s reality, not wishful thinking.

“Not that I don’t like . . .”

Helen, because of a small discomfort she had in her arms, an idea that things should be other than they were,

“. . . wishful . . .”

pulled him in to rest against her,

“. . . thinking.”

A button of his shirt was at her cheek along with the slow heat of him. “In fact I like wishful thinking a lot. Hello, there.” She could feel his voice, burrowing through him.

“Hello, sorry.”

“Don’t mention it. Are you scared again?”

“No. I don’t think so.” While her heart lunged against her, amoral and unlikely.

“Good.”

When the audience straggled out from the auditorium again, she and Gluck stepped away from each other smartly and then stood, uneasy within their new distances. Helen thought they should speak, but they didn’t.

In the dim interior rock of another cab, Helen was quite aware she was returning to her hotel, but she seemed able to face her arrival and the way time would then press on. The thought of her life, outside and waiting, was no longer impossible. She tried to imagine turning off the light in her room and letting the nothing fall into her head where it could hurt her, but she couldn’t believe that as her future now.

Edward nudged her shoulder, “All right?”

“Mm hm.”

“I’ve had a good evening, by the way. Thank you. I don’t do this very much. Socialising.”

“I would have thought you did it all the time.”

“Then you would have thought wrong. Public faces for public places—not really me. As you might have noticed, I sometimes just want to be offensive when I’ve had too much handshaking stuff. It makes me grumpy. But of course, I’m such a hound for the limelight, I couldn’t walk away and be private—I’d pine.”

“That would be awful.”

“Yes, I pine extremely badly.” He coughed tidily and, when he raised his head again, was serious. “But that isn’t what I want to talk about.”

So now he would tell her, he would give her help. That would be fine, what she came for. All the way to Stuttgart and no stopping her, like he’d said. She would get what she came for and she would be fine.

She turned for his shape in the dark. “What do you want to talk about, then?”

She could feel the press of him looking, holding the look.

“What do you want? Edward?”

“Want? To say the things I already should have. I’ve spent all night, telling you nothing of any particular use. Partly to have your company . . .” He flinched his head a little. “But mainly because I don’t know what to offer for the best. You should have the best—you’re the kind of person who always should. Do remember that, won’t you?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t have much I can tell you.”

“That’s all right.” It was easy to listen in the dark without having to worry how her face might change as she heard what he had to say.

“When my mother died, I was over at UCLA. There was no warning and nothing meaningful that I could do. I flew back home and did my funeral duty for other people, but not for her. My father wasn’t there—he’d committed suicide maybe seven years before. Had Parkinson’s Disease and he couldn’t face the way he’d go. Now I could have helped him with that. If I’d wanted to.”

Helen hadn’t heard that edge in his voice before.

“When I went back to the States, all my mourning performances done, there was no one there. No one for me. Before, no matter what happened—right or wrong—my mother was around. I didn’t worry her for most of the time, but she was always a possibility of help. I could call her and not really talk about anything, only hear her being herself and that would be enough. I’d put down the phone, sure of what I should do.

“You have to remember, she was the woman who saved my life. Often. My father would have killed me, but he didn’t. She got in his way. We both know about losing things, hm?”

As if her presence was part of his thinking, he didn’t seem to expect an answer, but she spoke because he sounded lonely. “That’s right.”

“I’m not upsetting you?” His voice sharpened in concern.

“No. Unless you’re upsetting yourself.”

“No.” He twisted slightly to face her through the dark. “For a long time after her death, I was numb; absent but functioning.” Helen nodded without thinking—she knew about that one. “So I started to talk to my mother in my head. I began to live—far more than I had while she was with me—according to what I imagined might be her wishes. I have to say, we’ve parted company since. And it was my loss. But that way of thinking about her and getting myself through is still available to me and would still work, I’m sure.”

“And you think I could do the same with God.”

“You can’t have faith if you need evidence. You used to have evidence—that’s very unusual—God touching you. Now He doesn’t do it. Perhaps that’s about faith. Do you call your God Him?”

“Yes.”

“Her would sound odd? It?”

“I know God’s not a person, but He has always suited me.”

“So you do still believe in something about Him. Start with that. Not that I know anything about this.”

“You’re making sense. And I will try.”

“But don’t sound like that.” He caught at her elbow, then released her just as suddenly.

“Like what?”

“As if I’ve volunteered you to walk across hot coals. You’re not on your own, you know.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow.”

A little silence blundered between them after she said that, as if his absence drew in closer when they mentioned it. She wouldn’t miss him, she hadn’t known him long enough. He would be leaving her what he’d said, what she wanted; what she’d been looking for. Helen couldn’t think how many years had passed now, since she’d last got what she’d looked for. Nobody could just step up and cure her, but he’d done his best and, in this field, Edward’s best was the best there could be.

He stretched and then folded his arms. “Yes. Yes I am going tomorrow, but I’m not ceasing to exist.”

“No, you’re not.” Helen was sounding ridiculously glum which was bad of her—Gluck was doing all he could.

“What do you want? Should I promise I’ll write?” Now he sounded uncomfortable, which was her fault.

“You don’t have my address.”

“You put it on top of your letter. I’m a genius—I notice that kind of stuff. Listen . . .” She found her hand taking his, recognising the heat and depth of the fingers. “Mm hm, hello again.” They both smiled, their mouths invisible. “Listen, I saw my mother hurt, physically, by someone else and that wasn’t the worst thing. I couldn’t bear the ways she hurt herself inside. Every year beyond the divorce, I’d see her cry while I opened my Christmas presents because, yes, she was happy about our being there together and safe—all of that—but she’d also convinced herself that anything she gave me wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to be married for me and make a good family. She robbed herself of joy. All the time. Like he had.”

Edward nudged in beside her as his voice fell soft. “It wouldn’t take a Jung or a Freud to work out that I’m never going to like a woman I respect and care for being in emotional pain. I’m going to want to help.”

Helen listened to his breathing and tried to remember the way she would be at home and the proper order of her life. She shivered with a small belief in the disapproval of Something other than herself. Edward shouldn’t write to her. It would be bad if he did: good, but bad. She loosed his fingers and rested her palms across her lap.

“You needn’t write.”

“I know I needn’t. I don’t need to do anything. I’ve worked for decades to reach the point where I can have that degree of choice. So I do what I want to and I want to write. Okay?”

“Okay. But there can’t be . . . I should explain . . .”

The cab slowed into the pedestrian precinct where her hotel hid itself. The coloured illumination from silent shop-fronts swept them both.

“Ah, you see that?” Edward pressed to her side of the seat.

“What?”

“Welt Der Erotik. A chain of popular Bavarian sex shops. See them all over the place. I’m sorry, I’m changing the subject very badly because we’re nearly home. For you. You didn’t want to know about sex shops.”

“I suppose I might have—”

“No. I think you might not. Is this where you are?”

“Oh.” She recognised the entrance. “Yes. This is it. Let me—”

“No. You don’t pay for anything. Because this way you’ve had a nice time and you haven’t had to pay for it later. We’ve established that principle, which I think is good. I’m guessing you had a nice time, of course.”

“Thank you. I did.”

“Good.” He spoke a few words of German to the driver, who turned his engine off. “Now, Mrs. Brindle, we don’t have to make this look like goodbye forever.”

“But it will be goodbye for a very long time.”

“I should think that would look pretty much like forever, though, wouldn’t you?”

“Then can I do something I want?”

Something fluttered in the air between them, rocked.

“Absolutely. Do your worst.”

Helen did nothing bad, or worse, or worst. She rested a hand to his shoulder for balance and then executed motions that could be summarised as a kiss, the mildest relaxation of his lips leaving her with a sense of somewhere extraordinarily soft.

Edward scratched his throat thoughtfully. “Well. I was going to do something I wanted as well, but now I’d just be kissing you back and I hate to be repetitive. Thanks.” He searched for something else to say and couldn’t find it. “Good night.” Eyes slightly taken aback by his ending so abruptly, he presented his hand, angled for shaking, and she accepted its weight.

“Yes. Good night. And goodbye for a very long time.”

“That’s right, but I won’t say so, because I do dislike goodbyes. So. Good night.”

They let each other go.

Helen walked herself across the hotel foyer and into the tight, brass lift with the porthole window that periscoped its way up to her floor and to her room and to her self.

Her self wasn’t bad to be with tonight, not unpleasant company. She removed her sandals and her skirt, seeing how the heat and sitting had creased it and wondering when she’d begun to get so dishevelled: at the start of the evening, or later when it would have mattered less. Not that it actually mattered, either way.

She took off her blouse. Several available mirrors told her there was too much contrast between her usual colour and the places on her body she’d allowed to see the sun. She didn’t look healthy, overall.

With a little more attention, she watched as she unfastened her bra. Her breasts were not like a dancer’s, they lacked that kind of discipline, and they were larger. They had what she thought of as a better roundness. In spite of gravity. Probably not to everyone’s taste, but then they didn’t have to be.

The bra was nice, too—she supposed, a sort of favourite, if she had such a thing—swapped at Marks and Spencer’s for one Mr. Brindle gave her on a birthday. He’d never noticed the change.

Her knickers were the ones she’d bought at the airport because the airport was where she’d remembered that she’d packed none of her own. If a person has been very tired for a very long time, she will tend to forget things like that—essential items.

When she was naked, the mirror stared back at her until she realised she was thinking of the Seven Deadly Finns and of laughing. The mirror smiled and then looked away. Surely to God she hadn’t been smiling like that all evening? That wasn’t how she’d meant to be. The mirror slipped back to its grin, it didn’t mind.

In bed, she turned the light out and this wasn’t a problem.

This wasn’t a problem.

Somewhere, a door muttered closed, but there seemed to be nothing dreadful in the quiet between the building’s minor sounds. There was nothing like death in the dark. Helen was not tempted to lie and listen to the buzz of blood round her brain and wait for something bad to go wrong. Tonight she did not think forever would come and tell her how large it could be and how quickly she would disappear inside it. Forever would not make her alone, it would just remind her of Edward and saying goodbye forever with him which was sad but not frightening. She was determined within herself that there would be no more harm in darkness, only sleep.

There was no harm in Edward, either; no harm in her choosing to not bath now, to not wash him away before she went to bed. Edward was an influence for good, because he wanted to be and because keeping a trace of him with her tonight was bringing her up against the force of Law. She was doing a little wrong, and finding Someone there who would object. A touch of her God was back. His disapproval set a charge in the air, a palpable gift.

Perhaps because of this, she tucked her thoughts in under her eyelids and discovered she had the security she needed to reach for sleep. She rolled close up in the dark, pulled it round her skin and, for one soft second, knew she was all underway, about to be snuffed like a lazy light.

Helen bumped and drifted down through a loosening awareness, before she stepped out and into a fully-formed dream. It was one she’d seen before, but not recently.

Above her was the high, grubby ceiling of her old school’s Assembly Hall and everywhere was the sound of the tick of the loudest clock in the world. The invigilator paced. Helen had lifted her head and was resting inside the familiar discomfort of her school uniform—tight waistband, lots of black and blue.

She was sitting her Chemistry Higher, the final paper, the one with long answers that had to be written out. She’d chosen her questions, managed the topics, been finished in good time.

Fifteen minutes left. She was cautiously aware of other heads bowing, shaking, being scratched at with biro-ends.

Twelve minutes left and there was no more anxiety. This hadn’t been so bad. She should just check things over now, take it easy and make sure she’d done her best. Her experimental drawings were lousy, but that shouldn’t matter much: they would work and they were clear and she wasn’t expected to be artistic, anyway.

Eight minutes left and it hit. A tangible, audible, battering terror that coiled and span and folded round and round itself down from her collarbone, to mesh cold through her body and then push an inside ache along her thighs. Eight minutes left.

She absolutely knew. She’d done it wrong. Helen had done it wrong. She was meant to check how many questions she should pick and get that absolutely right; it wasn’t very difficult after all: it was printed at the top of the paper for anyone but an idiot to read and one too many answers was almost as bad as one too few, but she had one too few which was the worst. Everything had been fine—now it was the worst.

During her dream, time condensed as it did when she had been, in wide-awake reality, sitting and feeling the sweat from her hands beginning to distort her papers. Trying to avoid any sign of flurry, or any irregularity of breath, she had searched for a question she could possibly answer in not enough time—something even halfway likely. Organic, possibly.

Even with so many years between her and the examination, even deep asleep, her mind could reproduce the horrible wordings of 14a, and 14b, through to 14e.

Part of her then had locked into problem-solving, while her hands had twitched themselves towards legibility. Part of her had been otherwise concerned. Five minutes left and the lick of fear inside her swam into place and fixed her flat to something she had never known before. With the fifth and final section of question 14 still undone, her eyes closed without her consent and the proper force of panic began to penetrate. Rolling smoothly in from the small of her back, she had the clearest sensation of rapid descent, of wonderful relaxation and then monumental tension holding in and reaching in and pressing in for something of her own that wasn’t there, but would be soon.

Helen tried not to smile or frown. She steadied herself against an insistent pressure breaking out between her hips and sucking and diving and sucking and diving and sucking her fast away. Four minutes, three minutes, two. A shudder was visible at her jaw.

And then her breathing seemed much freer and she was perhaps warm, or actually hot, but oddly easy in her mind. She slipped in her final answer, just under the given time, before sitting back and watching the man who was her Chemistry teacher collect in what he needed from them all. She wondered briefly what he was like when he went back home beyond the school where both of them did the work they were expected to.

He was a man. She’d been told about men. Men had necessary orgasms which allowed them to ejaculate and have children. Women’s orgasms, on the other hand, had been hinted around in Biology as a relatively pointless sexual extravagance.

Helen had very recently decided she was quite in favour of pointless sexual extravagance.

She’d felt strange walking out of the hall, secret, and barely curious about her marks for Chemistry.

Helen’s night-time mind was able to observe while the door through which her younger self was leaving gently tipped and shivered and folded down into a small horizon, out of her way. She was alone in a sunlit space now, with something like a fountain for company and a figure far off, but walking towards her and holding yellow papers in his hand. Helen couldn’t think why he seemed familiar—he had no tell-tale points to give a clue—still, she knew him. She recognised him in her sleep.

Helen twisted from her side on to her back, one unconscious hand still resting near her waist. Her dream dipped closer, licked at her ear, hard and dark, and said, “Do not look at the man. Do not look at him unless you have to and sometimes you will have to because he will be there. Then you can look, but you must never for a moment think that you want to fuck him, to fuck him whole, to fuck him until all his bones are opened up and he can’t think and you’ve loosened away his identity like rusty paint. Don’t think you want to blaze right over him like sin. Don’t think you want to fuck him and fuck him and then start up and fuck him all over again. Do not think about fucking him. Think of your intentions and he will see, because they will leak out in the colour of your eyes and what do you think will happen then?”

Helen, warm in her dream, began to smile and the man and the sunlight across him began to sink and slur away. Thinking of nothing at all, or nothing harmful, she moved towards a very pleasant rest.

“Mrs. Brindle? Helen? Hello?”

Her hand had reached for the telephone without the ring of it having fully woken her.

“Mrs. Brindle?”

“Uh, yes.”

“You sound groggy, that’s wonderful.”

“Who is this?”

“Edward. Edward Gluck. You were asleep, weren’t you? And I thought you would be out by now and seeing sights . . . I suppose Stuttgart does have sights— has anyone said? You’ve slept.”

“Yes, I . . . Professor, Edward—I suppose I must have been asleep.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Time?”

“The time of day. No, don’t bother looking I’ll tell you—two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“What?”

“Two o’clock. Do you feel better? No, you won’t be feeling anything, yet. Wonderful. You slept. I’m so glad, really I am. First time in a while, hm? Good. The reason I was calling: I thought we might discuss your diet.” He seemed to be hurrying over a catalogue of topics he might wish to hit. “The timing of your meals and their composition; there isn’t too much available about the dietary requirements of the Process in the public domain. I mean, you won’t have read about it. So have lunch with me. How do you feel? Did I ask that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t—Is it really two o’clock?”

“Ten past the hour. You’ll be hungry soon.”

“You’re leaving today. You don’t have time.”

“Always have time for your interests, Helen, you never know what they’ll give you, if you let them have their head. I’ll meet you by Reception at three, no three fifteen.”

“Reception here?”

“Yes, Reception here. Your hotel. Three fifteen. You slept. Well done. Oh, and goodbye. Bye.”

For some time, she kept the receiver by her head and listened to the tone on the line. When she felt sure that Edward’s call had happened and that she was awake, she began to feel happy. Happy was the first emotion of her day and a person couldn’t ask much more than that. She got up.

Helen stood in the bath and opened the shower, let it roll down her body, nicely cool and good to lift her arms in and turn underneath.

Past two o’clock in the afternoon; that meant she’d been out for more than twelve hours and she felt like it, too, extremely relaxed. She didn’t dwell too deeply on her excursions into Stuttgart the night before, but she was glad to admit that the miniature Process she and Edward made together must have set to work. She had been right to come here and had been rewarded with sleep. She tried to think of something thankful she might say to God.

The clean flow of the shower washed her free of any after-taste her dreams could have been tempted to leave. Now she deserved a celebration with the man who had helped her begin to be put right.

Gluck was sitting at the side of the Reception desk, dressed down in blue jeans and a grey shirt. He was more obviously slim today and it occurred to Helen that he might well be quite physically fit, not only active in the brain. He unfolded himself upwards and offered his hand.

“Ah, Helen.”

“Edward.”

“Yes, Edward, you remembered.” He said that in a way that made sure she could tell he was pleased to be Edward with her. Edward would be what he preferred, not Professor Gluck. “So, good afternoon. You look well. Terrific.”

They went and ate beef with onion gravy and little noodles and extra bread and then something with hot cherries in and Helen was hungry for all of it. Edward observed her appetite and talked seriously, almost formally, about the chemical implications of his work. If he knew enough about her—purely factually—he could work out a programme of general nutrition and supplements that would definitely help her to at least feel more contented for more of the time.

“Are you suggesting anti-depressants?”

“Helen, do I look insane? You know my opinions on that. Those things don’t make you happy. They just mean you can’t remember you’re depressed. Anyway, you’re not depressed.”

He looked at her for too long.

“Then what am I?”

“If it wouldn’t make you sad to hear it, I think you’re bereaved.”

So that was it. Now she could understand how he thought of her. That was good. His phone call, his attentiveness, new gentleness, his eagerness to offer her whatever came into his mind were all because she was God’s widow and that deserved respect.

Helen was relieved, definitely mainly relieved. She could now accept Edward’s kindness without reservation because what they were to each other had been made quite clear. This was all good, entirely good; in no way disappointing.

He strolled her back towards her hotel through a chain of pedestrian precincts and underpasses, not taking her arm when the crowds seemed to threaten, but somehow suggesting in his stance that he would be ready to do so, if required. Helen reassured him about her enjoyment of the heat, her lack of fatigue and the pleasantness of the lunch they’d shared. He submitted to each of her statements with a steady and caretaking smile.

Edward would go away after this and she would have another rest until the evening and perhaps some room-service sandwiches. He had seen her through the end of her crisis, apparently, and there would be no need for her to bother him any more. No need for her even to write. Today she could think there was mercy beyond her in a place she couldn’t see and that her time would pass and she would be content. She would apply herself and look forward to that.

“Here we are, then, home.”

Edward nodded and held the hotel door out wide for her while she stepped inside. He followed and she turned to him.

“That was . . . I do appreciate your letting me have such a lot of your time. When is your flight?”

He shifted his weight very gently towards one hip and glanced away. “I had to leave the Summit— enough is enough—and I did intend to leave Stuttgart, yes. Then I changed my mind.”

“Why?” Having asked this, she found she didn’t want to know.

“I’m not sure. I think I needed a rest. You’ll know all about that. When I go back to London, I’ll be rushing straight into something. The sooner I get there, the sooner it starts and I want another two or three days to be on my own.”

“I’m sorry you’ve had to spend so long with me.”

“Oh no, that was just like being alone.” He flinched at himself. “I do apologise. That isn’t at all what I meant.” She let him pat at one of her shoulders. “I mean you were an absolute relief to be with. Very educated people—no—very educated academics are not always very intelligent and certainly not always good company.” He shook his head in almost serious despair at himself. “And all of this only proves what I said before—James Stewart would have told you the right thing there: that you are intelligent and good company. Of course, I managed to mess it up.”

“Oh, I don’t know. From what I remember, James could be quite charmingly embarrassed. When he did mess up.”

Edward looked out over her head and then let himself examine her, while she examined him. “Like I said—intelligent. I think I’d better get up to my room.”

She let herself giggle. “No, wrong hotel. This is where I get up to my room.”

“I didn’t say? I’m staying here now.”

“You’re what?”

“Well, I could hardly claim to be leaving Stuttgart if I didn’t even check out of my hotel.” He was taking pains to sound plausible. “Now I’m in hiding. Will you give me away?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Good.”

They rode the lift together in silence, Helen thinking her way through a mainly numb surprise. Edward had chosen to stay here. He must have thought it might suit him—couldn’t be bothered to try somewhere else. That must have been it. That made sense.

Edward’s floor slid down around them and together they jolted into place. He nodded to himself as he set off away from her, inclining his head round to say, “Obviously, this isn’t the last time we’ll meet, but I won’t impose. I have a lot here to keep me occupied. I promise.” He seemed keen to be reassuring—she must have appeared more concerned than she wanted to.

“Goodbye, then, Edward.”

He nodded to himself. “I hope not completely goodbye.” The lift door began to glide shut. “But I definitely won’t impose. See you.”

She didn’t reply, the lift having closed against her before she could usefully speak.

For two breakfasts, Helen approached the dining-room with a tick of anxiety in her chest. She couldn’t be sure if he would be there, already picking through the buffet, or if he might emerge while she drank her coffee and gathered her concentration for the day. Nothing would be more normal, people tended to eat their breakfasts at breakfast time, and he would probably come to sit with her because that would be the civil thing to do, but early-morning conversation usually left her in a state of unconditional defeat. She didn’t look forward to failing to impress.

As an exercise, she tried to imagine the way she ate breakfasts at home. At home; that other place. She made an effort to think of what happened there. Did Mr. Brindle ever compliment her bacon, ask her to pass the jam? Helen found it difficult to remember. There was also something mildly irrelevant about that house, that kitchen, that tired stumble through tea-making and toast and being sure to put the milk in the fridge and the bread in the bread bin and not the reverse, even if you are crying tired, because you don’t want to excuse and explain yourself again; when the whole point to your situation is that it does not change and Mr. Brindle, you already know, hates explanations.

But now her situation had changed. Helen was falling faster and faster and faster asleep. She had unreasonable energy and appetite. When she flew back to Scotland, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself looking different. Mr. Brindle might not like her different.

“My husband doesn’t understand me.”

She practically did say that out loud. As if the snugly breakfasting couples and tidy families would have the remotest interest in the way that her life had been melted down into an unconvincing sexual cliché.

Of course, she needn’t have worried, not as far as being joined for breakfast went. Edward either didn’t like food in the mornings, or ate it in his room. He was true to his word and did not impose. Edward neither purposely disturbed her nor crossed her path accidentally when she slipped out to visit the gallery, or to buy Mr. Brindle a present from the specialist hologram shop.

Helen was aware that if a person was expecting someone, even in an uneasy way, and that someone did not then arrive, a person might feel disappointed. That person might miss the opportunity of finding that someone inconvenient.

Added to which, Helen had a very good reason for speaking to Edward again. She wanted to say how much better she was. She could not do anything but delight in walking for hours without feeling faint, or buying and eating two whole pretzels on impulse and then a slice of apple cake, because the food was there and she was there and she wanted to eat very much. When strangers looked at her, their eyes did not pause for an instant too long, clouding with concern or embarrassment. She was smiling out and other people were smiling in. If there was still only minor comfort from the world beyond this one, she was at least finding a compensation in things present and tangible. It would only be fair to thank Edward for his part in that.

By her third unattended breakfast, Helen began to wonder how long Gluck would be in Stuttgart. Maybe he’d already left and not told her. This seemed unlikely but not completely out of the way. More to the point, she was only staying for two more days herself. Then she would have to go home.

People went home all the time, it was something they liked to do, because home was a comfortable feeling and not just a building they’d lived in before. Helen knew this in theory, but not in experience.

“Edward?”

“Hello?” His voice was slightly cautious and faint along the line as she sat on her bed and wondered about the best things to say in the call.

“Edward?”

Now she could hear him being happy. “Oh. Hello. It’s Helen, isn’t it?” He was happy to hear her. “How nice. What day is it?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“That’s precisely what I mean. When I’m very involved in something, I lose track.” He sounded more preoccupied than brusque, but she was sorry she’d disturbed him.

“No, no. You haven’t disturbed me. Thursday already . . . I wouldn’t have guessed that. And you’re leaving me when?”

“I’m leaving you—I’m leaving Stuttgart on Saturday morning.”

“Then, if you’ll forgive me, I won’t suggest that I take you for dinner. There are things I have to finish with here.” Helen felt a blunt disappointment nudging in. “But if you wouldn’t mind, if you’re not doing anything else, I would really appreciate if we had a drink together in the first-floor bar at something like nine. Or half past. That would do me a monstrous favour, actually.” He was trying too hard again, being too studiously polite. “I need a break. And I want to say cheerio. And see how you are. Of course. How are you?”

“Well. Very. Nine would be good.”

“That’s splendid. I shall aim towards you then.”

“Nine it is.” As she spoke, the hot metal smell of prohibition breezed in about her—a signal that something of God might not be too far away, because even if He was a He, God disapproved of men. Helen had always been taught that, and told not to meddle with them.

But she didn’t intend to meddle, so all she had to do was appreciate the clearer trace of Presence in her room.

“Helen, don’t go.”

His voice snatched her back to the receiver.

“I wasn’t. What’s the matter?”

“Well, no, there’s nothing the matter. Do I sound as if there is?”

“A bit.”

“Oh. No, I’m only tired. Don’t worry. I . . . I wanted to thank you for calling. That’s all. I needed this, really.” He did sound tired. “One of the hazards of the Process, or of the powers it will release, is an increase in one’s capacity to focus on an activity for very long periods. This can be extremely useful, but it can also be extremely like going to jail. I forget I own the pass key. Um, listen, my room is 307, could you knock on my door and come to get me? I’d hate to lose the place again. Help me with that, could you? Hm?”

So at a touch before nine o’clock—it does no harm to be prompt—Helen rode the lift to Edward’s floor and walked along a hallway he must have been quite familiar with by now and reached his door and waited. She realised she had no ideas about what to do next.

“Edward? Edward.”

She could hear movement and then a shout. “Hello. Yes.”

“Well, should I knock, or should I tell you who it is?”

“Never called on a gentleman in his hotel room, hm?” The shout was nearer.

“No.”

“I don’t know if,” a lock turned, “gentleman is exactly accurate . . .” and the door eased open. “Anyway, never mind knocking, just come in. Oh, yes, and maybe tell me who you are.” His gaze slithered below her face.

“Me.”

He shook his head slightly as if trying to clear his mind, offered her a nod, a grin. “Oh. Hello, me. Hello, you. Good. Good.”

307 was not untidy, more like dishevelled. The furniture and fittings made a left-handed copy of her own room, two floors above, but there was a smell of human warmth here, not unpleasant but slightly unexpected, intimate. Edward, who was not dishevelled, more like untidy, waved her towards a seat as he struck out purposefully for the bathroom.

“I am ready and I was expecting you, all I need to do is shave. Obviously. Sorry. Sit down. Won’t be long.”

Sure enough, the abrasive buzz of an electric razor worried into life and Helen waited, glanced around. Edward’s desk was mountainous with papers, articles, folders and what she assumed were his hand-written notes. In the same way she tended to look through other people’s windows when they left them bared at night, Helen had never been able to resist the attractions of a working table-top.

She slipped over to stand above his papers while Edward continued shaving with what sounded like considerable force. This was where he worked— where he was a genius for real, pacing his mind against itself with no one ahead to stop him and no one behind him to fear.

While taps ran in the bathroom, she had enough time to scan diagrams in heavy black ink, sheets of dense typing and a stack of photographs. She could have examined all the pictures, but the first one stopped her. Initially, Helen tried to understand it and was pausing simply to do that, but then its meaning decoded completely in a rush and she stood and looked and stood and looked because the image wouldn’t let her remember that she could do anything else.

The girl had shockingly white skin and made a remarkable background for her hair which shone, oil-black and long enough to rest on her shoulders. A dark stubble showed at her underarms and a fuller shadow glistened between her legs. Her mouth was pursed in something like concentration. Beneath the girl was a man, also stripped but almost hidden, and beneath him was a chair, hardly visible. The girl’s weight seemed borne almost entirely on her braced calves and arched feet. There was visible tension in her thighs. Also there was the other thing: what they were doing.

After an indeterminate time, Helen stepped back and to the side and paused, avoiding an opinion of any kind. Gluck emerged: tie neat, cuffs buttoned, cheeks thoroughly cleaned and smoothed. The combination of fresh aftershave and laundered cloth made her think instantly of home and good evenings she could remember having a while ago. This was the scent of being close and then going out to move among strangers and get closer still. Edward smiled and she didn’t join him.

When he asked her, they were in the lift. “You saw those photos, didn’t you? On my desk.”

“Yes. No. Only one.” Her left side was against the safely carpeted wall, her right side towards him.

“I thought you had. I’m sorry they upset you. They are upsetting.” He rubbed at one of his eyes. “I am . . . ahm . . . conducting research into paraphilia, Helen. And a group I advise is trying to treat men who have an addictive use of pornography. They are people who deserve our sympathy, our help.”

“I’m sure.”

“Don’t say that, if you aren’t going to mean it.” He spoke softly without facing her.

“I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

“That’s all right. Understandable.”

The lift doors opened and she tried not to step out too fast. Edward hung back, eventually being forced on to the landing to save being shut back inside and dropped away. Then he stood and watched her until he seemed satisfied she would hear him out.

“I wouldn’t have shocked you for anything. I’m sorry. I was too tired to think straight; I should have cleared the damn things away. They’re not even necessary. But please understand, these people need help. We’re not talking about recreational use—that kind of relaxation—whatever you happen to think of it. We’re looking at a group of men who make themselves almost incapable of sustaining relationships with other human beings in the real world. If they ever have intimate partners, they can’t cope. Their jobs come under threat, they lose interest in their surroundings, they don’t eat, their lives are centred around a satisfaction they find harder and harder to achieve. De-conditioning can help them to an extent, but they need something better than that. I hope to find that better something.” He rested his palms at both of her shoulders and let her study his face. “I am sorry. Please. Helen.”

“Please what? I don’t know what you’re asking me for.”

“Help me not to spoil our night.”

As he dipped his head forward, she understood she should kiss his cheek and that made them fine again, sorted out.

Edward shut his eyes and released a breath. “Come into the bar and talk to me—so I don’t think about all of that pain.” He looked sad tonight and there was a hesitancy, a light hurt laid across the way he moved. “Will you do that?”

“Yes. I can do that. Anyway, I’ll try.”

Edward’s third wheat beer was mostly done when Jimmy Stewart decided to put an appearance in. “Aaaw, you know, I think we should drink a toast to good old Bailey Park.” Edward was trying to please her, to joke her out of the stillness that fell whenever she thought of leaving Stuttgart and goodbyes. “Whadaya think?”

“Bailey Park? You’ll have to tell me, I don’t know it.”

Genuinely amazed, Edward let Jimmy’s drawl desert him. “Bailey Park. You really don’t know? Don’t remember? But you’re such a clever woman with everything else.”

She felt pleased out of all proportion, but muffled her smile.

“Everybody has blind spots. How are you at choux pastry?”

“Okay, you’ve got me there.” He couldn’t suppress a type of grin. “Pastry, though, I don’t mean to . . . but I can’t imagine you. You standing in a kitchen, making pastry.”

“I did try standing in the garden, but the flour kept blowing away.”

“Should have tried the flour bed, hm?” He sipped his drink, trying out an expression that she hadn’t seen before. He was being careful until he could tell if she’d let him be daft. For the first time, she realised he was wary of what she might think.

“Go on, less of your nonsense.”

He peered down at his feet, apparently on the verge of being happy. She tapped at his hand.

“Tell me about Bailey Park. Complete my education.”

“Well, Bailey Park was the housing estate that George Bailey built in It’s A Wonderful Life. People left their overpriced, rented slums—you never had to see them, you could imagine—and they went to live in the houses that George had built them with the money they’d invested in the good old Building and Loan. It was like a possible Promised Land. Good houses and good people, doing good things—the whole place made the way that George would like it. Good old George. So here’s to Bailey Park.”

“You want me to drink to a housing estate.”

“Not any estate. The estate. All put together with dignity and love. George built it for people. How many things are really for people? Can I tell you a secret?”

There was no possible answer but yes.

“I mean it, I want to tell you a secret, Helen. So what you have to do is think if you should allow a man you don’t know too well, a man in a bar in a foreign country, to confide in you.” He watched his glass closely, as if it might run away.

“Confide away. It’s nice to be confided in.”

“You’ll think I’m odd.”

“I think you’re a genius.”

“That’s very . . .” Gluck gulped at the last of his beer in lieu of finishing the sentence.

“What’s your secret. I won’t tell.”

“Oh, I know that. Absolutely.” He softened his voice and spoke as if he was describing a sleeping child. “It’s only an idea, not really a secret. Once upon a time, I was trying to say what I wanted to open up within the brain. I could have said that I’d found a way to chart the Field of Thought and to evade both time and circumstance, and explore all the solutions of the world. I’ve uncovered what makes me. I am a leap of faith, I am a flight. To steal from the language of physics, I am a constant singularity—a perpetual process of massive change. You, too—naturally.”

He lifted his gaze from the table. She didn’t know how best to look back at him: an absolutely self-made man.

“I’d been asked to explain myself and the Process, yet again, and I’d even begun to reel off the usual guff when I stopped because something else made much more sense. To me, it made more sense. I wanted to say that our minds were made to give everyone the chance of Bailey Park. The place we take with us, wherever we go—the place that is us—we can build it into Bailey Park, we can live in bliss. We have a chance at it, anyway. I have found out a tiny amount about how this can be and I call that the Process, but I know I’ve hardly begun.”

“Did you say that? About Bailey Park?”

“No. No, the man I was speaking to represented the Pentagon. He wanted me to work within their Advanced Research Projects Agency and—apart from many other terrible things—he was keen that I should teach young men and women how to do terrible things terribly well and without thinking. They wanted to take the pain from the records of war—no more emotional memories, just objectives achieved, rates of success. I don’t think the Pentagon understands about Bailey Park. Or bliss.”

“You didn’t work for them.”

“Of course I didn’t. You know me; I couldn’t have. And I’m not an American. That made it easier to refuse.”

“Were they difficult?”

“Well, these NSA hit-men keep trying to shoot me . . .”

“What?” She hadn’t meant to sound worried, but it happened anyway, even though he was obviously joking.

“No. I don’t do work in America now, that’s all. Which is a shame, because I made some good friends there. But Bailey Park, that’s the place.” He raised his glass and she brought hers to meet it. His hand wavered as he set it down. “I’m so tired. You know, I’ve just noticed. Tired, tired, tired.”

So they talked nonsense about the Finnish dancers and gently enjoyed each other. Helen tried to frame what she wanted to say—a thorough goodbye and thank you.

“Edward?”

“Helen.”

“I think, it really is time—”

“I know. I was trying to gather my thoughts for a half-way coherent farewell and I couldn’t think of anything adequate. Tonight I’m no good.”

“No, well, yes, there is that. Which is . . . it’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I would rather not start saying out loud how much I’ve enjoyed, well—you, basically. Us. If I mention that, I’m admitting we’re about to stop.”

“I know. But I want to say thank you. I mean I’m slee—”

His eyes snapped alight. “I know. You’re sleeping. You’re coming back to yourself.”

“That’s right. Ever since the night with the Finns. I did enjoy that.”

“Except for not eating the meal and loathing the dancers and hating me.”

“I didn’t hate you.”

“At the start.”

“I possibly didn’t like you very much.”

They began to stand, preparing to finish the evening.

“But you do like me now?”

“Obviously.” They walked carefully.

“Very much?” His words tried to be as weightless as they could—no pressure, no threat.

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“It would go to your head.” She paused and a beat later, he did, too. “Thank you for your help, Professor Gluck.”

“Thank you for yours, Mrs. Brindle.”

Instead of moving outside the bar and towards the lift, they stood for a little together, not speaking, Helen thinking about her full name and what it meant. Mrs. Brindle, married to Mr. Brindle and about to go home. Slowly, Helen became aware of a pale, metallic sensation in her limbs. Her face began to feel clumsy and unpredictable.

Edward cleared his throat. “Come on then.”

Helen reached into her bag, fumbled for her door-key and picked it out, although she had no immediate need for it. They began to walk again.

Staring softly ahead, Edward waited for the lift to arrive and take them in. “This is horrible.”

“Yes.” She touched him on the arm, quite close to his shoulder. For perhaps the better part of one second, her palm and fingers rested against cloth and she felt him, she absolutely felt him, like a flash photograph taken in skin and expanding around her skull, around her mouth, around her waist and in. She felt him. Here was the curve and dip and warmness of his arm, the muscle and the mind moving lightly beneath his shirt. Here was the way he would look: the smoothness, the colour, the climb to his collarbone, the closeness of his torso and the speed of his blood. Here was the scent of the taste of him. He would taste good, because a good man would. Before she could finish her breath and lift her hand away again, she knew precisely how a kiss or a lick at his naked arm would taste. Good.

“That’s us, then.”

“Hm?” She watched the lift doors split apart. “Oh, yes.”

And they rode up together. Two floors. Twelve seconds. Helen counted them.

“Goodbye, then.”

Helen intended to tell him “goodbye” back, but he kissed her on the mouth, suddenly, dryly, and stopped her telling him anything. Then the doors began to move and he was moving too, leaving, gone.

In her room that night, Helen bathed and thought of nothing at all. She dried her body slowly and looked in her mirror and she kept on thinking of nothing at all.

At a touch past midnight, her phone rang. She knew who it would be.

“Edward?”

“Oh, you knew.” There was a broad pause. “I’m sorry it’s so late. I’ve just noticed.” His tone seemed less substantial than usual.

“That’s all right. Is something the matter? Edward? Is there something wrong?” She listened while he breathed quietly, but enough for her to hear. “Edward, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bother you. It’s simply . . . I was looking through this material again and it makes me so depressed. It makes me so unhappy, Helen, to think of it.”

“You mean those men? The photographs?”

“It’s all so awful.”

“Yes, but you’re going to help them and you know the Process works. They’ll be fine. It’s normal to be disturbed by other people’s pain.”

“Yes, I suppose. Other people’s. But it makes me feel lonely, you know? Something about it makes me lonely and I thought that calling you would help. It was a silly idea.” His articulation sharpened. “I mean, speaking to you does make me feel less lonely, but it’s silly of me to impose, to let this stuff get to me.” He began to sound angry with himself. “I’ve seen worse. I should just say that I really did enjoy meeting you and that I would be very happy to receive a letter from you now and again. I would like to know how you’re sleeping. Hm?”

Helen was growing more awake and able to appreciate his thinking of her—even if it was rather late. “I will write to you. I . . . do you need? . . . Edward, are you all right now? Is there anything I can do?” There were things she could offer him, naturally, but it was late and her suggestions might be inappropriate.

“I’m fine, really. I’ve been working too long on one thing, that’s all. I’ll wish you goodnight.”

Helen didn’t answer, knowing he intended to go on.

“Oh but, Helen, it’s all such dreadful stuff. I apologise for talking about this, but it really is such dreadful stuff. If I can’t talk about it, the things don’t seem real. If I can’t tell you . . . I look at this and the life it has seems . . . I don’t know, more than mine.”

She heard him change his grip on the receiver.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this. I shouldn’t, but I will.”

His voice was nearer now.

“I am sorry, but, I have a picture here of a woman with two men inside her. That’s what I’m looking at. A picture in a magazine. Her with the two men. Her lips don’t really hide the first guy’s shaft—the shaft of his prick, which is really quite a size. I’d guess she couldn’t take it all in her throat, but this is her ideal position in any case, because these photographs are meant to help us understand the whole of her truth. We have to see the suck and the prick. And the fuck. Her second companion fucks her anally and, of course, we can see most of him—the part that counts—as well as the lift of her arse, her willingness, openness. He’s wearing dark-coloured socks, the second man, he has varicose veins—not bad, but noticeable.

“Have you ever seen two pricks in a woman, up close? I’ve got pictures of that, too—fucking the arse and the cunt?—it doesn’t look like anything you could think of. The penises make one, fat kind of rope that greases and sews right through her. On video, they pulse in and out of time, like something feeding, a fuck’s parasite.

“Helen, everything is so clear, far clearer than life. They’re here for me to watch them, the two men shoving themselves into pleasure, and the woman having none. She’s there to make them come, to make whoever’s looking come; that’s the entire reason for her, no need to add a single thing. The men can touch all of her, inside and out, but they needn’t make her come, they needn’t even use her cunt if they don’t want to. She’s just there to get it where it’s put. No pleasure, no fun. Unless, of course, she can take solace from ejaculation for ejaculation’s sake. If she does that, then she’s a dirty bitch, a slut who deserves every bad thing she gets, even if that includes gang rape at the hands of her camera crew which I know will happen if I turn on a couple of pages, or so. I have looked at this booklet before. She will be used and humiliated by seven men while her mouth has the wrong emotions and her eyes shut down.

“Any sane and normal person would see her condition and wish only to be usefully compassionate. That’s the way to be, Helen, that’s the way to be. The Bailey Park way to be. Anybody good and with a heart would be afraid to imagine how she must feel. You can understand that, can’t you. Helen?”

She was able to say yes.

“I am making sense. I know that. I’m not too drunk to make sense, only drunk enough to let me tell you this. Helen, listen to me. You should listen. Are you listening?”

“Yes.” She can hear an uneasiness, a movement, shaking his breath.

“I want you to find me out . . . You would be bound to and I can’t wait. Helen, the girl in this picture, I want to know how she feels. I want to know exactly how she feels.

“I want to know how she feels right up inside, when I’m up to my balls in her, my prick after all the other pricks, after what they’ve done. I want to have her, too. And she would want me, the pictures make her made that way. I want to be in her while she’s raw, while she’s open all the way to her fucking womb— and she is opened up, I can see it. I can see everything—the way she’s full of it, running with it, her cunt and the other men’s spunk. I want to be up her and make her full of me. I want to come. Helen, I want to come. I do. Then I want to see them having her again and we’ll go turn and turn about her, turn and turn about her everywhere. Everywhere. I mean there isn’t any end to what I want. There is no end, Helen.

“I can’t bear the way I always turn out to be. I’m telling you, I’ll never get out of this, I understand that. Sometimes I can manage containment, but that’s all.

“I can’t help you any more, Mrs. Brindle, I’m the wrong man for the job. I’m the wrong man. You’ll get better—”

She knew she was going to hang up, but the sound of the receiver falling still gave her a kind of jolt. Gradually, she discovered that she felt very peaceful, not needing to do anything: to cry, to move, to remember the edge in his words and the heat. She would turn out the light now, to calm herself and dream. Decisions could be taken in the morning, if there were any to take. It seemed there might only be one and that it was taken.

At about two a.m., the phone rang. She counted to twenty before it stopped and the silence sucked in around her again with a hissing throb. The noise hadn’t disturbed her, she hadn’t been asleep.