IV

Lou was back at his college desk, talking to his screen. He’d always hated Skyping people, it was so unreal and it made him feel odd. At the other end of the link was Colin Dorton, an English academic who’d helped him previously with the Big M story. But Dorton didn’t want to play ball any more.

‘For chrissakes get out of that Celtic scene, it’s as dead as a doorknob,’ Dorton was saying to him, a fraction of a second before his lips moved. He looked ghostly and blurred; someone from an old sci-fi series maybe. Quatermass and the Pit.

‘Celtica’s gone, it’s dead and buried,’ he was saying, as if to jangle Lou’s nerves even further. ‘Look to America, that’s where it’s at. You’re nobody unless you’ve got an American angle. We’re the fifty-first state virtually. You’ve sidlined yourself, nobody’ll take any notice of you, Lou.’

Later, after their chat, a gaping depression swallowed him. He hadn’t felt like that for ages, not since the time he’d sat alone in his room for weeks during an awful episode when a student party had got out of hand; a girl had accused him of something, along the whisper lines, and he’d been ostracised. He’d felt very lonely, and he was feeling just as lonely today. Useless too. He’d been beaten by the machine during seven consecutive games of Mahjong Titans and he’d become so frustrated he’d cheated with the H button to get his final clearance. Catrin seemed to have no problem with Mahjong Titans, she had a near hundred per cent record and all he could manage was a lousy twenty-two per cent win rate. If he was useless at Mahjong Titans, what else was he useless at without knowing it? How could he clear up the Big M thingy if he couldn’t win a little computer game? He’d have to cheat all the way.

He was staring at his screen, and it had a new picture on it, a view of Hotel Corvo which he’d taken with the light fading at dusk; this accentuated the dark green of the trees and the yellow lights in the hotel windows. His mouth suddenly tasted of whiskey, as if to remind him of his night there.

Dr Colin Dorton was right, probably. With the morning yawning before him, Lou felt isolated and lonely. He’d noticed already that without lectures to deliver and seminars to host he’d become detached from college life. History, language, literature – they were all to do with personal ambition and career paths, really. They seldom stayed pure. Academia had become a passive silence outside his door, tainted with the smell of irrelevant old books, and punctuated very rarely by the squeak of occasional shoes and distant banging doors. Life was passing him by. He’d made a mistake; revenge had led him up a blind alley. Lou was wasting away, emotionally and intellectually. His old colleagues still greeted him when they met, but since he was out of the loop now they left it at that. Dead in the water. He missed the gossip, arrivals and departures, the shagging news. A couple of new faces passed him with the vaguest of nods. Lou McNamara had messed up, career-wise. And his home life wasn’t a barrel of laughs either; sidelined now by the later stages of pregnancy, he felt surplus to requirements there too.

Approaching the endgame, Catrin had gone off sex and spent most of the night reading Roth, Don DeLillo or Walter Abish by the light of her bedside lamp, as if to highlight her husband’s error of judgement.

Black with self-loathing, Lou opened Feeney’s second chapter. It resumed where the first had left off, with the gunshot at Hotel Corvo and its aftermath: all the clients had taken fright and disappeared into thin air. Pryderi had got involved with the IRA, or mobsters, or top-end loan sharks who’d felled the hotel sign with a single gunshot. The blast had echoed around the chough nests on the cliffs below, then a deep silence had arrived. Nary a soul had bothered them after that and the place had become a Welsh Jamaica Inn, habituated by four benighted humans and a barful of ghosts, all of them peering forlornly through grimy windows as thick sea mists obliterated the world outside. Salty little weeds struggled through widening cracks. Rust raced along the railings. Hotel Corvo, the most happening place in the county, had become the restaurant at the end of the universe. Dead, as dead as Lou’s career. This was when all the staff had left; Lou had gone up to Oxford well before that and his ma had faded from his life.

The second chapter documented a forlorn period in the history of Hotel Corvo. Dr Dermot Feeney had sailed across the Irish Sea to trace Big M’s story during the great silence, and his morose tone matched perfectly the autumnal decline in the hotel’s fortunes as the quartet waited for something to happen. But it never did.

Apparently Feeney’s stay at a B&B near Hotel Corvo had been suitably mist-shrouded, as if the village had donned its own invisibility cloak and played dead among the damp, silvery spider webs which shone eerily in the encircling gorse. Feeney had been a big man with a bumpy face, corpulent and grumpy, looming along the coastal path in a huge gaberdine mac and a ridiculous leather bush hat. He grumbled in his notes that the food was poor and his bed damp. Service was virtually non-existent, glassware and cutlery dirty. But he’d managed to find one person who was prepared to talk to him. Lou knew that person – it was one of the seven Corvo regulars, the carpenter who’d taken him outside the hotel and showed him the shot-off sign. He’d been commissioned by Pryderi to paint a new sign for Hotel Corvo, and he’d visited the place to measure up and discuss the contract.

Without any customers, the four friends had locked up and closed all the shutters on the ground floor, which gave the place a wartime feel, bunkerish and Frankensteinian. According to Feeney it had reminded Ziggy of a bad winter when she was a child, when snowdrifts had covered the ground floor windows of her home and partially blinded the place; downstairs at the hotel had been equally ghostly and other-worldly.

When spring came they’d started a vegetable garden in the back and you could still see the potato ridges, but their hearts weren’t in it and very little produce reached the kitchen. No, they’d lived with the gun and the rod, and of course the freezers were full of food which lasted for quite a while. They stayed there, in total seclusion, for a year, Pryderi ranging across the countryside with his shotgun, Big M looming out of a fog with an eight-pound bass dangling over his shoulder.

And so they lived on in that strange seething silence which envelops social pariahs. With the world erased, they’d sat outside daily at a table below a large green parasol with a white frill, drinking wine and picking at fish and rice dishes with the best silver service, discussing their slow activities outside Hotel Corvo: Pryderi stalking his prey and trying to come to terms with messing it all up; Big M, cool as ever, half-asleep on the rocks below as the shoals swarmed around him; Rhiannon on her horse, an occasional silhouette on the hill above them as she returned home; Ziggy stationed in a chintzy chair in a big bay window overlooking the sea, worried, drinking too much, overdressed and over-gilded, consumed by her husband’s foolishness.

And when the sea mist thinned sometimes in the afternoon heat they’d find Big M sitting alone at the table outside playing solo chess with his Lewis set, the board glistening with dampness and a hoar of tiny droplets covering him like icing sugar.

One year became two. They found honey from wild swarms and ate it with their hands, sweet golden liquid around their lips, in their hair, jewelling their worn shirts.

The carpenter disclosed in his statement to Feeney that one day, when he went to check up on them, he’d opened some of the freezers in the basement and they’d held some food still, though one of them revealed a sorrowful sight with a small pile of frozen prawn sachets stacked in one corner and a pile of frozen sprouts in another, indicating that no one much like frozen prawns or sprouts. The bar was still relatively well stocked when they finally gave up and asked the carpenter to board up the windows. Pryderi, Big M, Rhiannon and Ziggy departed one lunchtime in Big M’s vintage three-litre Bentley, with the top down. It was a fine, clear day: the first they’d experienced in ages.

But it wasn’t a shortage of food which forced them to leave their island in the mist. It wasn’t even a lack of booze. Maybe a shortage of human company played some part in it, but the main reason for their departure from Hotel Corvo was quite mundane. It was Big M’s feet which propelled them onto the open road again.

One day, stooped over his chess set with one of the shrunken little figures in his hand, he’d looked up as Rhiannon and said: We’ve got to go, girl. We’ve got to go.

Dr Feeney had tried his hand at some humour in describing this episode but he was a fish out of water when it came to levity. There was nothing particularly funny about it anyway. Rather sad, really. Big M had leant back in his chair and placed one of his famous feet on the table, displaying a battered leather shoe. Once it had been a bespoke, hand-stitched Saddle Oxford in light tan from John Lobb. Top of the range. But Big M was down in the dumps, he’d had enough. His trademark shoes – his Ones and Twos, his Rhythm and Blues, his Scooby Doos were falling apart on his feet. Big M was down at heel, quite literally.

So what? said Pryderi, placing one of his own feet on the table and showing a cheap pair of black boots in equally poor condition. Inside one of his ribbed stockings they could see the familiar bulge of his compact Beretta 92. He was never without it these days.

Nah, said Big M. We’ve got to go.

After all he was a sex god, and sex gods didn’t walk around in shit shoes.

Hotel Corvo was a big black hulk, a sunken liner sleeping with the fishes, when they drove away. Big M behind the wheel, Pryderi by his side, Ziggy and Rhiannon in the back. Old-fashioned style, women in bright summer dresses and chiffon scarves, a wicker hamper between them. Rhiannon had leant forward, ran a hand through her lover’s hair and said someone needs a haircut, loverboy.

Some decent boots, that’s all he hankered after. He longed for the creak and perfume of a new pair of leather shoes on his feet.

Pryderi was ready to go too. So tired now, he’d been continuously on edge since the gunshot. Bloodshot eyes, stubble. Nasty tremor when he held a young deer in his gunsights; he’d lost his nerve. Didn’t want to shoot innocent animals any more either. He was superstitious: it could be him next in the firing line.

So where are you taking us, Twinkle Toes, he asked Big M.

But Big M didn’t have a masterplan. Never had, really. Go with the flow, have a nice time, don’t waste energy on trouble and strife. He didn’t want any angst or head games. That’s the way Big M lived his life. Never collide with the modern world, that’s what he used to say. Go round it, go under it, keep your head down till it’s gone right past, but don’t take it on head to head. It’ll wear you down, sap your batteries, suck away your life juice.

He just kept on driving along country roads, keeping the afternoon sun behind him as it sank towards the western sea. Long ribbons of daisy-flecked grass flowed between the wheels. August was tired and sleepy, summer’s sap-flow had slowed, and snails had already begun their long journey towards winter, climbing laboriously up the hogweed stalks; the season had come to a stop, a convoy waiting for its own spillage of pollen to be cleared off the road. Now it sat there in the spent grasses, its creaking bodywork already starting to rust.

They drove for hours, skirting deep woods squatting like huge green chiller cabinets, until the taller oaks and sycamores cast long shadows across the bleached wheatfields. They felt completely alone in this vast open terrain, and indeed they saw no one for a long time, not until late afternoon, when they met an England sign by the roadside. Shortly afterwards they entered a typical Hereford village, black and white cottages with sinister cats disappearing through rough holes under doors. Through the small-paned windows they could see warty hags with gnarled hands, up to no good behind broken cobwebs and piss-yellow net curtains.

For chrissakes carry on, said Ziggy, or I’ll start screaming.

So on they went, following the signs for Hereford. They got there late at night when the light was failing, so hardly anyone saw them putting in at one of the better hotels, a place with a garage to hide away the car. Like so many bankrupts, Pryderi had a surprising ability to find tons of money when he needed to. He showed off, hinted at a secret stash, got them an expensive suite. Swiss bank account, or maybe not, wink wink. Rhiannon was taken aback and stayed close to Big M; she liked it all above board.

They stayed in this place for a month, keeping a low profile, making sure they spoke good English always. Posh place with plenty of toffs floating around. In the meantime, Pryderi used his hunter’s instincts to comb the town for a bargain, and soon he’d spotted one – a boarded-up pub by the river called The Saddle Inn, going for a song. The previous landlord had been a dipso who’d played the optics all day, pissed as a rat by noon, people helping themselves while he picked fights with strangers. Nightmare, the place had been closed down by the constabulary.

So Pryderi bought it with his back pocket dosh and the four of them threw themselves into the business. Nice coat of blue paint, clean windows, yellow chintz curtains, classy prints on the walls, tables and chairs outside and a nice bistro feel to the place; shiny beer taps, good coffee, relaxing view of the old Wye Bridge. Felt almost French. Big M used to go down to the river each morning for a dip.

I just love that river, he’d say. Rises in Wales, ends in Wales, takes a stroll through England along the way. The water sounds Welsh, it so reminds me of home.

You’d know where he was by his dragon-red towelling robe on the bank, weighed down by the finest blue suede shoes ever seen in the city. Elvis would have been proud of them; a pair of catalogue Ben Shermans with a price tag to match their mod origins in the sixties: a mere sixty-five quid. He’d thrown them in as extras during a big splurge, but once on his feet they’d stayed there. Those shoes became his trademark.

Big M, with his usual aplomb, opened a nice little restaurant at the back.

The customers poked fun at him, they said shuffle them shoes Big M, but he liked that sort of thing.

The Ben Shermans looked a little out of place beneath his checkerboard trousers, but his chef’s toque seemed to balance things out once he’d added a blue flash to the headband. Nice touch, a hint of cavalier humour. They liked him, they liked his little eatery hidden away at the end of a flowerpot alley, with its little courtyard, fountain, and abundant greenery. He grew a splendid moustache and twiddled it as he engaged in badinage, teasing the men, making ridiculous passes at the women – all of them, indiscriminately, even the grandmothers: he was a natural magical realist. He went to their tables at dusk with rosebuds in slender vases, he lit their cigarettes, he indulged in crazy episodes of tap dancing as he carried the plates, he sang Tyrolean love songs from the windows above, he even brought out his fiddle on special occasions, swept around the place playing gypsy music and ogling the ladies close up with incredibly mournful eyes.

And the food, ah, the food was out of this world. Seafood a house speciality, but the a la carte menu was huge and catholic, a high church liturgy for a swelling congregation. It was just a hobby to Big M; just another string to his bow. But he was booked up every night, and soon enough he’d garnered a Michelin star and a great review in the Sunday Times. The chief ape himself, A.A. Gill, had declared that the food was much too good to be served so proximate to the dark ugly trolls who lurked just over the border.

And so it went on, a new paradise on earth was created by the four of them, but it didn’t go on for long enough. That old human worm, envy, crawled around the gutters of Hereford and spoke in many ears, whispering who is this man who wears his blue suede shoes in bed, seduces your wives and daughters, wriggles his hips and says he’s a love god? Why do our burghers crowd his tables, laugh in his sunny courtyard, go home with their wives to love again after years of cold indifference?

Soon, a brick sailed through one of the front windows. A few scenes occurred in the courtyard, staged by paid thugs. It was happening all over again, but no threatening gunshot was needed this time round. Customers were melting away and worse was to come, said the rumours. Bad stuff: a knife in the dark, or fire through the letterbox. Pryderi stowed his Beretta in his sock again. Ziggy started to chain smoke. Rhiannon doodled pictures of horses on napkins and dropped plates in the kitchen. It couldn’t go on.

Pryderi was mad with rage. He wanted to fight fire with fire; he wanted to take them on at their own game. He prodded Big M, urged him on with fighting talk. But to no avail. Big M wasn’t having any of it, his fighting days were over. Last thing I need is a spell in the cooler. Maybe he was ready for a change anyway. Cooking all day could get boring, and there wasn’t much time to chill. Big M spread his hands wide, shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘Let’s move on. What’s the point? Trouble breeds trouble, anyway I’ve had enough of small-town people with small-town minds. The river’s getting colder, autumn’s on the way. Let’s crack on, let’s have a nice easy time for a while, see some places and watch the leaves fall.’

Infuriated, Pryderi gave in, sold the place for a song, and had the Bentley serviced.

Soon they were gone.

Lou read the story till his eyes ached, then went for lunch in the students’ caff downstairs. Tray in hand, he looked around for someone to sit with, but all eyes seemed to be elsewhere, anywhere except where he was standing. Again he felt isolated, and soon he was morose too. His sandwich tasted artificial and his too-hot coffee came in a false styro-mug. Nothing felt real any more. Even the students around him had an ersatz quality about them, a submissive Stepford Wives blandness. Perhaps they were the Stepford children. Modern education had reduced the world to twelve incontrovertible bullet points, and the rest of the universe fitted neatly onto a Facebook page. Any restlessness was quickly numbed by a limitless flow of celebrity trivia. Christ, it was depressing. But he himself was a product of the same system. How much more exacting were his methods? Not nearly as good as Dr Dermot Feeney’s, who’d actually gone out and found some of Big M’s relatives. Yes, he’d got the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Or maybe the cat’s. Feeney had traced one of Big M’s cousins, through a nostalgia forum called Manx for the Memories, to an old people’s home in Douglas, Isle of Man. A geriatric who wore spanking new tartan slippers with gold bobbles, and who still had an interest in lurve.

Lou left half a sandwich and took his coffee to his room, then read on.

After Hereford, anonymity. Four chameleons in search of a shadow. Even Feeney wasn’t allowed to know where they’d landed. *A city in England, never revealed, said his notes. This time they rented a closed-down pub called The Shield and Dagger. Its cider specialties – Three Hammers, Green Goblin, Frosty Jack, Total Wipeout – hinted at a West Country location. Glastonbury Tor in the distance, maybe. A house for hard-drinking men with silvery eyes, blinded young by the apple maggot.

Who knows where they went, because they kept themselves to themselves. No food this time. No showmanship from Big M, not for a while anyway. But eventually the Big M within got the better of him. What started as bar-room banter became a regular routine, which became a comedy slot every Friday night – Big M with a black hat and a mic, a spotlight, and a flow of rough cider. He’d developed a bit of a drink problem during that period, according to Feeney. Big M seemed to get better with every pint. Like the brew, he became even more potent and deadly as the night wore on. Friday night got to be very popular at the Mutton, as it was called, mutton dagger being a well-known synonym in those parts for a man’s best friend...

The Shield and Dagger became a magnet as the Friday night comedy store spilled over into Saturday, then Sunday; taxis arrived suddenly from far and wide as Big M and his guests turned every weekend into a mini fringe event fuelled by gallons of scrumpy. His favourite routine, Fill yer Boots, based on his own penchance for snazzy footwear, was legendary. Hell for Leather also did very well. He was ideally suited to stand-up; cool and laconic, sad and ironic. But his popularity had the usual downside, and soon enough his success was pissing off all the local publicans. Their empty bars gave them plenty of time to work up a fury, and to plan revenge. One night the fab four at the Shield and Dagger were woken by a tremendous wall-rattling bang, and when the men opened the front door, Pryderi with his Beretta at the ready, they found a stinky old boot nailed to the wood, its tongue lolling out at them; inside it they found a message with an unlit match sellotaped to it. Not very polite. Pryderi put his Beretta back in his sock and read it.

The shits, he said to Big M without looking up. They want us out of town by noon on Sunday. Or the place’ll go up in smoke, us lot with it.

He put the note back inside the boot and returned upstairs slowly, mumbling savagely to himself. Again he wanted to take them on, fight them, use the gun if necessary.

But Big M packed away his clothes and his fancy boots, cancelled all deliveries, and invited everyone in the town to a drink-till-we’re-dry comedy session at the Mutton.

When they drove away at noon on Sunday – the timing was meant to be ironic – they left a pile of sleeping bodies and a hundred hangovers lying around in the Shield and Dagger. They left a message on the bar: Lock up when you go and throw away the key. The fun times were over. Yet again they said farewell to their temporary beds and hit the road.

Never mind, said Big M, it was fun while it lasted.

But Pryderi was getting pissed off with Big M’s attitude, fed up with their gypsy lifestyle and fed up with being constantly hassled. Just because they were good at what they did. Or was it something else? Their accents? Maybe Big M’s bed-seeking missiles, his wandering shoes?

Forget it, said Big M nonchalantly, driving the Bentley with his fingertips. He’d kept the comedy hat; it went well with his black Torino boots from Samuel Windsor, both soles studded with a single drawing pin to give a satisfying clink whenever Big M strode forwards. Vain, yes of course he was vain. But aren’t we all, in different ways?

Jesus Christ, we can’t go on like this, Pryderi had said in a roadside diner somewhere between the nowhere of their past and the nowhere of their future. We can’t go on like this. He was looking at the clouds far off on the eastern horizon, and trying to eat a leathery breakfast which was vile enough to kill a dog. Those clouds – perhaps they should head towards them like storm hunters: perhaps they should ride into a tornado and end it all. Pryderi was feeling lower than he’d ever felt before, and the sky seemed higher. The world outside seemed vast and dark and threatening. Where next?

Lou stopped reading, went over to his window, and looked out onto the world again. The clouds were still there, a long line of them, but they were losing their shape and morphing into pale discolourations.

He thought of the computer clouds, viewed by four wandering friends sitting inside a grubby roadside diner. It was amazing how his mind could flick between the real world in front of him and the tiny world inside his computer. And there was yet another bank of clouds: those inside his head, on which rested the gods of the ancient world. Apollo, Lord of Mice, still alive in the small soft memories of mankind. God of the sun, truth and prophecy. A contradictory god, created in man’s image; a beautiful smooth-skinned god, androgynous and bisexual, who could bring plague and then its antidote, healing. Lou tried to compare the four travellers in the roadside diner to the mythical mice which lived below Apollo’s altar. He saw Pryderi as a mouse whose fate awaited him like a sprung trap; Big M was a small sleek mouse with a nose for cats. Yes, Big M was the master-mouse who found the next big grain store, then led his tribe to safety when the pied piper arrived.

His mind drifted to some of the mice events in his life; camping in the Lake District with his brother one Easter, with frost on the ground and a posse of Hell’s Angels in the field below them, Lou had leant a bottle of milk against a fencing post before turning in, and when he tried to pour some milk into their tea mugs in the morning he’d wondered why the flow was so sluggish, until he saw a small mousy face, eyes closed for evermore, floating to the top of the cream: it had climbed in and drowned in the night. The mouse had looked like a tiny hairy child coming to the surface after a dive.

Lou turned back to his desk and read the last part of the chapter hurriedly, so that he could go home to Catrin. She wanted the nursery finished, ready for their baby.

Chapter M2 had been finished while Dr Feeney recovered at a Sligo clinic, his illness unspecified. Perhaps other things had started to go wrong in advance of his heart attack. Lou sympathised with him briefly, a big sick man alone in a strange bed, his heavy bushtracker’s hat in his locker, sweat-stained and smelling like a newly flensed animal hide. One of Lou’s colleagues, who’d met Feeney at a convention, had described him as a quiet, brooding, sit-at-the-back man with acne scars and permanently mis-shaven features. But Feeney was cunning; he’d been able to follow the fab four on their fugitive journey thanks to a letter sent by Rhiannon to Pryderi a few years later when she was in a psychiatric unit. Her letter had been an attempt at catharsis – apparently her son had been taken into care for a while when he was a small child. But though never really meant to be seen by Pryderi, or by anyone else for that matter, the letter had been kept in the family archive.

Following their mournful meal at the roadside diner they’d headed off at a tangent, deep into Middle England, and when the people and houses passing by had changed almost beyond recognition they stopped the car at a country town and sat in it for a while, windows open, listening. By now they were far away from the sea, and far away too from the chiff-chaff cadence of their native country. The voices around them had slowed and stiffened, more clay now than sand. They could go no further; they had reached the end of the road.

This time it was Ziggy who took control.

No more bloody pubs, she said with feeling. The boys had messed up every time so far, so the girls would have a go. Something different. She left them sitting in the car and took a shufty down the high street. When she returned she had two bags of condensed cholesterol from the pie & cake shop, delicious sausage rolls still warm from the oven and fresh cream cakes. Mmm. Crumbs everywhere. Worth travelling for. So a pie & cake shop was out of the question, she said wryly. How about a shoe shop? She hadn’t spotted one, they could sell some leather goods like bags and belts as well as footwear. Anything except cider. The smell of it made her sick now. And she’d heard stories of dead rats and all sorts of shit floating in the vats. Ziggy was all woman. She wanted a shoe shop.

You making fun of me? asked Big M, looking down at a pair of brand new boots on his size twelves.

No, said Ziggy, I’ve just seen some of the most down-at-heel plebs in the whole wide world. Bloody peasants. We’ll educate them, give them a better class of footwear.

Quite a snob, Ziggy. Who was she to look down on people? said Big M.

After all, she was an itinerant without a home or a job. That shut her up. But shoe shop it was.

As the other patients recovered and went home, Dermot Feeney had documented it all from his clinic. Superstitious, he’d started to fear the three empty beds swimming in shark circles around him, their cold white sheets hunting for fresh meat.

Ziggy rented a shop in the high street and dipped into Pryderi’s back pocket to fund her new venture. Cider and comedy had served them well, he had wads of cash again. While the shop was being fitted out they sent Big M on a mission to buy the classiest boots in Britain. Brown, black, red, blue or gold, they would have to be the best available. Big M relished his task and set off in the Bentley, happy to be alone again. When he returned, a fortnight later, he was sporting an amazing pair of Lazarus Python winklepickers from Paolo Vandini, which Rhiannon ordered him to remove at once. Unusually for her she was short of patience with his sang froid, his come-day go-day attitude. Big M was always sunny side up, forever paddling in the warm river of his own life. A shrug of the shoulders and then the boyish smile, disarming everyone. But it was time to be a bit more serious; they were attracting the wrong sort of attention again.

So Big M went into a bit of a sulk and spent his days hanging around bars, while Pryderi went all macho on them and refused to mince around in a poofter parlour as he put it. Still, the shop was a big success and Big M was kept busy supplying it with top-class footwear. Ziggy insisted on calling it Gracious in Defeat.

The shop sign, white lettering on purple, was revolting but the plebs loved it. As autumn blew its first crinkle-cut leaves down the high street the populace lined up to part with their Jobseeker’s Allowance. Big M spent many days and nights away buying eye-boggling boots and staying at expensive hotels. He’d hand his card to the bar girls and introduce himself humorously as chief buyer to a shoe empire called Gracious in Defeat. Wit and shoes: with just one more ingredient, chocolate, he introduced a whole new meaning to infidelity.

But success came at a price, as per usual. In the same way as Hay-on-Wye became a book town, Ziggy’s success turned the town around Gracious in Defeat into a shoe-shop sensation. The new shops arrived overnight, menacing the walkways with rack after rack of cut price footwear. Moccasin Mecca. Then came Cobblers! Afterward they arrived in droves: The Athlete’s Foot, Shutopia, R. Soles, Sock ‘n Sole, Footloose and Fancyfree, The Shoe Must Go On, Sole Proprietor, Walk on the Wild Side...

Soon the town seemed to offer nothing except shoe shops and charity shops selling second-hand shoes to a shoe-obsessed population.

Just wait, said Big M, we’ll be getting a brick through the window any day now.

He acquired a couple of low-maintenance dogs to warn of intruders in the night, two jet-black terriers which he named Left and Right in a sardonic reference to the little bootees they sold to teach tots their left from their right. And when he returned from one of his buying missions, sure enough he was met by a boarded-up window, splinters of glass on the pavement and three very glum faces sitting upstairs in the living quarters. The rest is history, as they say. After the inevitable sale came the inevitable escape. Once again Pryderi wanted to put up a fight. But once again Big M said nothing, packed his stuff and slept in the Bentley until they were all ready to join him. A week later they were on the road again, this time heading back towards Wales. They’d had enough of the English blowing hot and cold on their ventures. God knows how long it took them to sight Hotel Corvo and the cliffs of West Wales again, but when they did it was a blessed relief, however derelict the hotel looked.

Lou closed the chapter and moved it to the recycle bin, ready for deletion. After a short examination of his desktop picture he decided it was time for a change, the photo of Hotel Corvo was beginning to depress him. He’d have to take another pic. In the meantime he flicked through the folder of alternative backdrops which came with the computer. One of them showed an autumnal scene by a lake. It looked like somewhere in Canada, though he’d never been to North America: he was merely responding to previous pictures he’d seen of lakes in Canada. That was globalisation for you. Instead he selected a photo of a field: a generic, undulating tract of greenness with a blue sky above it. A bit bland, really, good on the eye but meaningless. That was the way of the world.

Lou closed down his computer and went to stand by the window, in what had become a nightly adieu to the scene outside, a vista which he increasingly liked and admired. Roof ridges reddened below him when the sun set, purple and mauve slates glinted whenever it rained; he loved the narrow estuary with its flotilla of colourful fishing boats, the broad sea beyond, the distant islands and headlands, and tower­ing above it all, the mountains. Perhaps he would take a picture of the scene tomorrow, or on the first fine day, and put it on his desktop. But wouldn’t that be odd, since the view was always there for him? How could he capture the essence of the place, its numen – the picture behind the mirror? He imagined a ghostly assembly of matter constantly forming and reforming behind the glass facades of mirrors everywhere around the world; a secret alternative world of almost-images. Did some people leave more of themselves behind mirrors than others? Surely Big M did. If Lou was supposed to breathe in molecules from Julius Caesar or whoever on a daily basis, how many molecules from Big M were there floating around in the world? A lot, thought Lou. He was beginning to like the bloke. Why was he trying to obliterate him, anyway? What was the issue?

Lou examined the horizon, now without a vestige of clouds, and went back to his desk. After restarting his computer he put all three chapters in the recycle bin and pulled the plug on them. Was he sure? asked the machine. Yes he bloody well was, answered Lou with his mouse. Finitio. His revenge motive had lost its attraction so he would cut and run before it was too late, before he’d spent too much time on the project. And by killing off Dermot Feeney’s magnum opus he’d queer the pitch for anyone else.

Lou checked the green memory stick and it was empty. Micro-dust would be gathering on the empty desks and chairs inside its miniature world; someone’s lunchbox would be lying there with a titchy banana beginning to mould over (at this point his eyes flitted to his own fruit bowl); maybe there would be a pile of virtual junk mail clogging up the main vestibule. In the corner by the reception desk he imagined a family of microscopic woodlice in a huddle, becalmed, their robotic segments glinting dully in the pale afterlight of a nuclear winter.

Lou closed his computer again and prepared to leave for home. He’d pop over to the professor’s room in the morning and realign his project; he’d say that Dermot Feeney’s work was useless, the product of a diseased mind etc. His Skype conversation with Colin Dorton had given him a new direction. Perhaps he could compare Welsh literature in the end days of the Roman Empire to Welsh literature in the end days of the American empire; there were distinct similarities. As he prepared to go home he realised that he’d lost his car keys, and it was raining. He stood in the main vestibule for a while, wondering what to do. Then he walked quickly downwards through the darkening town, towards the taxi rank.

Travelling home, he watched the raindrops as they followed their strange cometic paths along the glass, and he thought of Dermot Feeney’s words slipping one by one into the void.