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  But he knows by now what she is doing. He is ready when she picks up a box of matches.

  “Carry that into the hall,” she says, handing him the tray. “Put it down about two feet from the bathroom door.”

  Nick does not argue. Once more it all reminds him of those games in their joint childhood - he about five, she eleven or so. They were dangerous games then, he supposes - climbing dodgy walls, high trees, leaping over things - he had deduced later, in his twenties, she had doubtless been attempting to get him killed.

  He puts the tray in the hall, where she has told him to. Serena stands by the closed bathroom. She projects her trained voice. It rings round the hallway and will definitely pierce the door.

  “Listen, bitchy. I’m setting fire to your fucking flat, OK? Just thought I’d tell you. If you want to roast that’s up to you.”

  There is no reply.

  Of course not.

  Serena steps away, pushes the tray with her foot almost up against the door, strikes the match and lets it go among the torn crumples of waxy paper.

  A spurt of blue then greenish flame results. Then a little pop comes from the oil. The chemicals in the paper quickly add a properly smoky tindery smell.

  Serena and Nick draw back against the outer door. What will happen if the old woman does not believe them, does not smell the burning? Or if she does and still she will not respond.

  He thinks the oil fire will most likely burn itself out, unless, naturally, anything splashes from it to the carpet, or the flames, which now transparently crackle, an invisible force devouring the faces and slender bodies of screwed-up Beautiful People, also contact the wood of the door. Or Serena may simply career through the flat, sloshing the last of the oil and showering lit matches. What then?

  The slight smoke makes him want to cough. Serena does not cough.

  He wonders what Pond would do. Nothing, maybe. Pond has not bothered to get back in touch. Even among the stacks of unanswered messages Nick’s mobile stored before it gave up, Pond’s voice had been notable only by absence. No doubt he has heard via the media of the knifing and wishes to avoid involvement.

  Nick’s mind truly wanders now. He is considering the messages he has received. Debby (unanswered) and Sonia (also unanswered) and Lilian, from whom he had not expected a call, but whom he has not answered either. All of them concerned, wary. There were others. Most of them had tried to get in touch. Not Jazz. Somehow, strangely, he had thought she might.

  Something manages a tiny explosion in the tray. Or it is the metal buckling.

  The hallway is steeped in haze. Serena’s eyes are running, as his do now he becomes aware of it. He can, additionally, smell singeing carpet and underlay.

  The lock of the bathroom door slowly sounds. The door undoes. And through the fog Jonquil Franks looks round it at them, small, secretive, cautious, like an evil mouse-gargoyle.

  “I got a bottle of lavvy cleaner,” it says. “‘S bleach. Watch yourselfs. Not want it in your young face, eh? Eh? Or blinds you.”

  Then she steps out, and Nick sees Jonquil Franks has become herself again, complete with the Domestos. She simply flicks one glance at the fire in the tray, lets out one bark of amusement, shoves the tray away with her foot. The fog does not impede her.

  “I’ve write it down for you,” says Mrs Franks, and she throws a little notepad across at Serena. Serena starts, jumps, and Mrs Franks barks once more. She says, “That where Kitty gone. Greece. Why I should protect her? Enough I’ve had of it, her men come round here shouting, cuz she upsets ’em, and you with your posh, who you think you are, eh? And ruin my carpet. Well, she gets me new carpet then maybe I forgive her. But you can go and mucker her about. An’ if you comes back, I get policy onta yer. Wot she done you? It’s men she buggers up. How she bugger you, eh, eh? Get out.”

  Serena has gripped the notepad. She glides right back against the front door. Her malicious power has melted. Nick hesitates. He says to Jonquil Franks, “What colour is Kitty’s hair?” He is startled to hear what he has said. It is a ridiculous thing to have asked.

  Yet oddly Mrs Franks answers. Perhaps it is enough a non sequiteur that she can work with it.

  “Brown,” she says. She grins her razorous biter’s teeth. “But it won’t, never now. Red or black or blonde she’ll be.”

  Then Serena has opened the front door and is outside. Nick follows her. As the door shuts Mrs Franks, rather like last time, shrieks her malediction after them: “Piss onna pair of you, ya filthy pigs!”

  Outside Serena is already running away over the lawn towards the two trees and the road. She has not waited for Nick. When he reaches her in the street she is holding on to one of the trees and crying. They had sent the cab away, so now they must, when eventually she is able to stop her grief and hysteria, use her mobile, or walk along to the main road. Or the tube. She makes no protest when he picks up the notepad, which she has let fall on the ground.

  He lifts the cover. This has on it the picture of an ice-cream under a sunshade. But the first page is blank, also the next. Nick thinks, leafing through, all the pages are blank. But the last page is not. Jonquil Franks’s writing is extraordinary, low and sloping, with loops, like something bent over and running through coiled wire. She has, however, written more than an address, even a Greek address. Although admittedly such an address seems to be there too.

  A car drives slowly past them along the road. A face stares interestedly out at Serena. The press? (Dead celebrity’s sister mourns in a public place…)

  “Serena,” Nick says.

  She snaps to attention. “Get a cab.”

  “Give me your phone, then. I didn’t bring mine.”

  “You are useless,” she tonelessly tells him. “So am I.”

  He takes the phone and calls a cab.

  He has slipped the notepad in his coat pocket.

  Another staring car drives slowly by…

  Spring

  Delta

  The rigmarole at the airport - increased security, removal of coins, watches, mechanical alarms over belt buckles, a metal button… the long, long waits, drinking coffee, eating peanuts … the early start catching up, and the insistent demands en route of the cabby, wanting to be informed of every aspect of the destination, and the reason for going there - silenced, finally, when Nick told him a funeral was to take place and that he would rather not talk, thanks… the thought too that maybe the cabby was a reporter in disguise, and/or reporters were following the cab… that flash of sun on windscreen some highlight from a camera lens… the plane itself, at last achieved like a magic castle after many tests and ordeals… cramped, belted in. A prisoner in the belly of a throbbing roaring flying horse… blue sky… green-blue-grey land, water, cloud, world passing below… sipping the vodka, not bothering with the food, the niggling lung stirring resentfully despite the medical assurance that enough time had elapsed, and all now should be well… people chattering, their noise smothered by the plane’s own voice… Slipping down into a sort of sleep and thinking perhaps they would crash, perhaps there was a bomb, perhaps… always perhaps…

  On the edge of unconsciousness - or alternate awareness, for once asleep he would dream - Nick had recalled Serena’s long narration of Laurence’s burial, a stage monologue unlike the previous one which had revealed her lover as Kitty. At the time, sitting once more in Serena’s ‘cloistered’ flat, Nick had listened dully, not concentrating. Against the tapestry of a coffin entering the ground in the windy icy graveyard of a Saxon church on the Weald, Angela’s appalling uproar, Serena’s misery, (she had not been prevailed on to read anything or say anything during the service), Nick had only seen, heard, the memorised Mrs Franks - on the floor, punching Serena in the stomach, emerging from the bathroom with the bleach and the curious notepad. Serena had forgotten the notepad, it seemed. She did not ask Nick what had become of it. She only paced about, weeping for Laurence, their wonderful brother that they had both hated.

  What colour is Kitt
y’s hair?

  Brown. Red or black or blonde…

  It was, again, like the cinema and the soundless TV, one drama in the background, another superimposed and dominant.

  In the end Serena had gone to bed. Yes, she must have done, since he had fallen asleep in the chair and she, audience lost, stopped her literal sob-story and left him. He however woke at first light. As he went to the spare room for his bag, he was reminded of leaving Jazz after his escort attentions, going quietly out. But it was his sister he was leaving, and he was unpaid.

  Serena had said, after the funeral Angela had taken off to some secret hideaway to escape the attentions of the press. Nick had wondered incoherently if the canny Pond might have advised Angela to do this, and how to do it successfully.

  When on the plane sleep also closed its lid on Nick, he forgot Serena, and Angela, and glimpsed Pond only for an instant, an unknown man floating in the air.

  In sleep, Nick himself is not in the air. He is standing on a cliff path, looking up and through into a cave. There is a twilight of some sort, starless, though a moon is behind his back, he believes, glowing maybe on a sea and casting before him a black shadow. The cave also receives the moonlight and is duly lit. It has some leather armchairs and a mahogany desk, and unappealing books on mahogany shelves. His father’s library.

  Nick is not a child in the dream. He is as now he has become, a man in his earliest thirties. Yet Joss Lewis, who is seated in one of the chairs, looks as Nick remembers him from childhood, and then rather more as he had in Nick’s twenties. A paunchy man, sixty-five or fifty, whose face and whose body have succumbed to gravity, subsided.

  “Dad?” Nick says, softly. Does he not want Joss to hear him?

  And certainly his father makes no response.

  Nick climbs up, (it is easy) to the cave-mouth and moves just inside. His shadow vanishes as he does this. Joss’s eyes are open and he appears to be looking into space. He does not appear dead.

  Nor, of course, is Joss Lewis dead. After Claudia’s own sudden death, and the equally sudden collapse of - apparently - all Joss’s mundane but lucrative business ventures, Joss had simply withdrawn himself from what remained of his family. None of them had tried either to prevent this, or to make sure of where he took himself. Nick now, in the dream cave, ponders if they had, any of them, ever known. They had had no interest in Joss. Or only Serena had, and hers was of a financial nature. Once the money was no more, Joss had no value at all.

  There had been a few letters - or notes? Postcards? News items? Something. Or had there? Does Nick only imagine that?

  He reflects on these points quite lucidly in the dream.

  But he says nothing else to his father, does not again try to attract his attention. While Joss goes on looking, placidly, stodgily, at nothing, only occasionally blinking as if to prove he remains alive.

  The uniformed young woman is speaking, saying they will be landing soon. The cave is gone. The airborne plane growls and bumps like a car on a rutted road, and below lies a new nearness of buildings, a once classical city reproduced as a grubby model. A couple across the aisle are holding hands, between excitement, and nervousness at the descent. But the landing is ultimately smooth. And a while after there is all the rigmarole to repeat, papers and questions and checks and silly alarms and excursions, and waits, and luggage and fuss and intrusion.

  On the night he left Serena’s apartment, Nick had stolen down the secluded stone stairway, and emerged on the street. The old London Wall rose darkly out of the sprawl and tower of other architectures. The cab Nick had called was already waiting.

  A trio of hotels had occurred to him. He might go to one of these. But then abruptly a wave of panic, almost agoraphobia, had hit him. He told the man he had changed his mind, and gave instead the name of the cul-de-sac.

  The cabby was unsure of it. And so Nick must give him directions. This made the panic worse yet, oddly, enabled Nick to withstand it.

  When he got out, Nick stood below the block with the great window, not looking at it. The bag weighed heavily on his left side, though he carried it in his right hand. “You all right, mate?” the cabdriver had inquired, the query a weird combine of inquisitive indifference. Nick said he was, just a bruised rib, he had added, when the driver started to elaborate on how Nick did not look all right at all.

  Nick went briskly to the outside steps and up, opened the main door, strode in.

  Then he had to cross to the bench and sit there a while. The drizzly morning light washed hallucinatory shapes into the foyer. Nick saw an old drawer in a corner, and under the table one of his own note-books. But they were not real.

  Going all the way up all the stairs was almost impossible or seemed so; nevertheless he achieved it. The labour and breathlessness made less of the panic, however. He had to work physically and the panic took second place. He wondered if he would always be physically impaired like this now. They had told him he was fine. No lasting damage. He could even fly abroad in a month, they said, in five weeks to be sure. And more time than that had already passed.

  Reaching his door, he waited. Then - he knocked.

  Serena had come to the flat before, on his behalf. No one had been there, or she must have said. No one answered now. He had a vision of Friendly upstairs in Nick’s bed with some busty girl in a nurse’s uniform. Nick sat down on the floor and leaned his back on the wall. This lasted a few minutes only.

  He got up presently, unlocked his door and went in. The light came on. He had not caused it to do so. Ah. It was unexpected sunlight in the window.

  The light displayed nothing. That was, nothing extra. No men sitting, standing, walking or lunging, no bottles or rinds or cores. No blood. It looked, the flat, rather as it generally had, except now it was dusty, and the wooden floor was lacklustre. A cobweb hung from the cabinet, catching light, swinging in some momentum of its own, or of his, coming in.

  He would put the flat on the market. That was all he could do. It was not his flat. If the gang did not want it, someone else would. He thought again of going to a hotel, but he was too tired. He had shut and now relocked the door. He pushed no furniture up against it. His own apathy nearly interested him, but not quite.

  Nick did not really look at the window. It seemed naked and absurd today, all that glass, showing so much and revealing nothing.

  He slept upstairs. As before, fully clothed.

  No one visited or broke in. No one called. Nothing.

  He stayed in the flat for two days, two nights, after which he made the correct arrangements and removed himself to a small hotel in Bloomsbury.

  He stayed in the flat in Athens for a month, a little longer. This was not out of fascination with the flat or the confused city, nor from illness, cowardice or neurasthenia. His energy merely, revved up to such a ridiculous pitch, had run out. Like a clockwork thing left unwound. Like Laurence’s stupid Angie-watch.

  The Athens flat was spic and span, a term Mrs Rush had sometimes used. It had white walls, red furnishings, green blinds, and opened on a shady courtyard where tall palm trees rose from pots. At the front, a number of ornamental balconies ascended above his window, creating a webby illusion he did not unravel, but which he was uncertain he liked.

  Mopeds and bikes, bicycles even, donkeys even, went along the narrow road outside.

  The Acropolis was visible miles up, between a gap in the buildings. Its elevation, the slope appliquéd with papier mache shapes of houses that were blinding white at certain times of day, and ending in its ruinous crown, haunted his thoughts. He meant to go to see it, but put off the jaunt. One night he dreamed of flying out of the window, wingless but levitating, and sailing around the pitted columns, through the holes and mathematical spaces. He had seen so many photographs and drawings of it, probably this surreality was authentic enough.

  Awake, and during the day, the light, the Greek light of which so many had written, seemed to him to make all things transparent. That was, he could not see through
them, and yet the light could. For the light had eaten them all long ago. The stones, ancient or modern, the streets and plants, (even the gaudy scars left over three years back, by the Olympics), the people and any animals or traffic that moved or was still. Then, having eaten all, the light set out their perfect facsimiles instead, these standing or moving just as before, and now enduring as no actual existing object could. No wonder the Acropolis and the Parthenon had lasted so well, no wonder that eldritch woman in her black, her face wrinkled like a sort of tattooing, no wonder they were still there after so many hundred or thousand or million years.

  But Athens did not feel old. It felt and was heard as young and vociferous. It shrilled and shrieked and pushed and raced. At night, and into the early hours, bars pounded like excited hearts, neons flaring and pop music bellowing. It smoked too, lit cigarettes everywhere.

  A cat, thin as a serpent, which by day sometimes hunted for vermin across the street, or came to sun itself briefly at the sunny end of the courtyard - always bolting at any sound - after dark prowled the roof and wall-tops, a skinny vampire with luminous pale eyes. He came to dream of the cat, too, dreams in which it was his enemy, trying to enter the flat and rip and claw his face. He had no phobias about, or allergies to any animal that he knew of. He did not dream of entering the Acropolis again, nor of his father, Joss.

  Nick nevertheless slept a great deal in Athens. Being initially alone again and in another spot, seemed conducive to this. He would rise quite early, shower, dress, and go out for some yoghurt or a Turkish pastry, with thick Greek coffee. After that he would buy a few provisions. His Greek was rudimentary and from a phrase book, but in the city they were tolerant, or seemed or pretended to be. He knew he was often over-charged, but he could afford to be. He gave generous tips. A bribe, why not? And was not everything always that?

  Excursion done, he would sleep again, lying back on the bed. He did not attempt to look at any of the notebooks he had brought with him. Nor to write a word. The only things he read were the five second-hand books picked up in London. They were thrillers, or ordinary short stories, written by people he had never heard of and would never bother to read again.