Every time he picked them up, he knew as little as he had the first time. Every day he started new.
He sat in Anna Kearney's bedroom and threw the dice again.
How could you know which way to look at them?
With a shiver he saw that he had thrown the Stag's Horns. He turned it over quickly, shovelled the dice back into their leather bag. Without them, without the rules he had made up to govern their combinations, without something, he could no longer make decisions. He lay down next to Anna, supporting himself on one elbow, watched her sleep. She looked hollowed-out and yet at peace, like someone very old. He whispered her name. She didn't wake, but murmured, and moved her legs slightly apart. A palpable heat came up from her.
Two nights previously, he had found her diary, and in it read this passage:
I look at the images Michael made of me in America, and I hate this woman already. Here she stares out across the bay from Monster Beach with one hand shading her eyes. Here she undresses, drunk; or picks up driftwood, her mouth full of smiles. She dances on the sand. Now she is seen lying back on her elbows in front of an empty fireplace, wearing light-coloured trousers and a soft wool jumper. The camera moves across her. She is laughing out at the lover behind the handicam. Her legs are raised at the knees and slightly parted. Her body looks relaxed but not in the least sensual. Her lover will be disappointed because of this: but even more because she looks so well. Is it something about the room? That fireplace betrays her instantly, it makes too bare a frame, it throws her into high relief. Her energy is projected beyond the picture space. She is making eye contact. It is a disaster. He is used to a thinner face, gaunt cheekbones, body language pivoting between the grammars of pain and sex. Neither folded in on herself nor quivering with need, she is no longer the woman he knows. He is used to more urgency.
He will not be so attracted to someone this happy.
Kearney turned away from the sleeping woman and pondered the justice of this. He thought about what he had seen on Tate's flatscreen monitor that afternoon. He would have to talk to Sprake again soon; he fell asleep thinking about that.
When he woke up, Anna was kneeling over him.
'Do you remember my Russian hat?' she said.
'What?'
Kearney stared up at her, feeling stupid with sleep. He looked at his watch: 10 a.m. and the curtains were open wide. She had opened the window too. The room was lively with light, the sound of people, traffic. Anna had one arm behind her back, and was leaning forward with her weight on the other one. The neck of her white cotton nightgown had fallen forward so that he could see her breasts, which for some complicated reason of her own she had never encouraged him to touch. She smelled of soap and toothpaste.
'We went to the pictures in Fulham, to see a Tarkovsky film, I think it was Mirror. But I went to the wrong cinema, and it was bitterly cold, and I was sitting on the steps outside waiting for you for an hour. When you got there, all you could look at was my Russian hat.'
'I remember that hat,' Kearney told her. 'You said it made your face look fat.'
'Broad,' said Anna. 'I said it made my face too broad. And you said, without a moment's hesitation, "It makes your face your face. That's all, Anna: your face." Do you know what else you said?'
Kearney shook his head. All he really remembered was angrily searching the cinemas of Fulham for her.
'You said: "Why spend any more of your life apologising?" '
She looked down at him, and after a pause said, 'I can't tell you how much I loved you for that.'
'I'm glad.'
'Michael?'
'What?'
'I want you to fuck me in my Russian hat.'
She brought her arm from behind her back and there it was in her hand, a silky grey fur thing the size of a cat. Kearney began to laugh. Anna laughed too. She put the hat on her head and instantly looked ten years younger. Her smile was wide and pretty, as vulnerable as her wrists. 'I never could understand someone who wore a Russian hat to watch Tarkovsky,' he said. He gathered her nightgown up into the small of her back and reached down. She groaned. He was still able to think, as he often thought, Perhaps this will be enough, release me at last, push me through the wall between me and me.
He thought: Perhaps this will save her from me.
Later he made a phone call, and that afternoon, as a result, found Valentine Sprake wandering up and down the taxi rank at Victoria station with two or three blackened pigeons running in and out between his feet. They were all lame. Sprake looked irritated.
'Never phone me on that number again,' he said.
'Why?' asked Kearney.
'Because I fucking don't want you to.'
He showed no signs of remembering what had happened when they last met. His engagement with the Shrander-his flight, if it could be described like that-was as private as Kearney's, as private as madness: a dialogue so internalised it could only be inferred, partially and undependably, from the sum of his actions. Kearney got him in a cab and they went through the coagulated traffic of Central London then out to the Lea Valley, where the shopping parks and industrial estates were still embedded with a vestigial tissue of residential streets, neither clean nor dirty, new or old, inhabited by mid-day joggers and half-dead feral cats. Sprake stared sullenly out the windows at the alloy siding and empty buildings. He seemed to be whispering to himself.
'Have you seen this Kefahuchi thing?' Kearney asked him tentatively. 'On the news?'
'What news?' said Sprake.
Suddenly he pointed out a display of flowers on the pavement in front of a florist's. 'I thought those were wreaths,' he said, with a bleak laugh. 'Sombre though colourful,' he added. After that, his mood improved, but he kept saying, 'News!' under his breath in a contemptuous fashion until they reached the offices of MVC-Kaplan, which were hushed, warm and empty at the end of the working day.
Gordon Meadows had begun his career in gene-patenting then, after a series of high-profile drug launches for a Swiss-based Pharmaceuticals house, moved laterally and with ease into money. He specialised in ideas, kickstarts, original research. His style was to a blow a pure, weightless bubble: boost capitalisation, float, talk the stock up, and profit-take a stage or two before the product was due onstream. If you didn't get that far, he dumped you for what he could get. As a result, Meadows Venture Capital had the whole of a curious bolted-glass structure which glittered uneasily between the tailored alloy faзades of a Walthamstow 'excellence' park; and no one remembered Kaplan, a puzzled highbrow who, unable to meet the challenge of free market thinking, had returned only briefly to molecular biology before becoming a teacher in a Lancashire comprehensive.
Meadows was tall and thin, with a kind of willowy fitness. When Kearney first knew him, fresh from his pharmaceutical triumphs, he had favoured the merciless saffron haircut and goatee of the internet entrepreneur. Now he wore suits from Piombo, and his workspace-which had a grim view of trees along the towpath of the old Lea Valley Navigation- seemed to have been furnished from an issue of Wallpaper. BB Italia seating faced a desk made from a single slab of re-melted glass, on which stood, as if they had something to do with one another, a Mac Cube and Sottsass coffee pot. This he sat behind, eyeing Valentine Sprake with a cautious amusement.
'You must introduce us,' he told Kearney.
Sprake, who had worked himself up into a fever in the lift, now stood with his face pressed up against the glass wall of the building, staring down at two or three lumps of packing material the size of refrigerators, floating along the canal in the gathering twilight.
'Let's talk about him later,' recommended Kearney. 'He's got a great idea for a new drug.' He sat on the end of Meadows's desk. 'Brian Tate is worried about you, Gordon.'
'Is he?' said Gordon. 'I'm sorry if that's so.'
'He says you're progress-chasing. He's worried that you're going to sell us to Sony. We don't want that.'
'I think Brian is-'
'Shall I tell you why we don't want that
, Gordon? We don't want that because Brian's a prima donna. You've got to show confidence in a prima donna. Try this thought-experiment.' Kearney held up his hands, palms uppermost. He looked at the left one. 'No confidence,' he said, and then, looking at the right one, 'no quantum computer.' He repeated this pantomime. 'No confidence, no quantum computer. Are you intelligent enough to see the connection here, Gordon?'
Meadows laughed.
'I think you're less naive than you suggest,' he said. 'And Brian is certainly less nervous than he pretends. Now let's see… ' He tapped a couple of keys. Spreadsheets blossomed on his monitor like ripening fruit. 'Your burn-rate's quite high,' he concluded after a moment. He raised his hands, palms upward, and mimicked the way Kearney had looked from one to the other. 'No money,' he said, 'no research. We need fresh capital. And a move like this-as long as we thought it was good for the science-would expand our opportunities, not limit them.'
'Who's "we"?' said Kearney.
'You aren't listening. Brian would have his own department. That would be part of the package. He wonders if you work hard enough, Michael. He's worried about his idea.'
'I think you're getting ready to dump us. Here's some advice. Don't try it.'
Meadows examined his hands.
'You're being paranoid, Michael.'
'Imagine that,' Kearney said.
Valentine Sprake turned away from the darkening view and walked in a jerky, hurried fashion across the room, as if he had seen, out there in the marshes, something which surprised him. He leaned over Meadows's desk, picked up the coffee pot and drank its contents directly from the spout. 'Last week,' he said to Meadows, 'I learned that Urizen was back among us, and His name is Old England. We are all adrift on the sea of time and space here. Think about that too.' He stalked out of the office with his hands folded on his chest.
Meadows looked amused.
'Who is that, Kearney?'
'Don't ask,' said Kearney absently. On the way out he said: 'And keep off Brian's back.'
'I can't protect the two of you forever,' Meadows called after him. That was when Kearney knew Meadows had already sold them to Sony.
Lightweight separators in pastel colours were used to create privacy inside MVC-Kaplan's otherwise featureless tent of bolted glass. The first thing Kearney saw outside Meadows's workspace was the shadow of the Shrander, projected somehow from inside the building on to one of these. It was life-size, a little blurred and diffuse at first, then hardening and sharpening and turning slowly on its own axis like a chrysalis hanging in a hedge. As it turned, there was a kind of rustling noise he hadn't heard for twenty years; a smell he still recognised. He felt his whole body go cold and rigid with fear. He backed away from it a few steps, then ran back into the office, where he hauled Meadows over the glass desk by the front of his suit and hit him hard, three or four times in succession, on the right cheekbone.
'Christ,' said Meadows in a thick voice. 'Ah.'
Kearney pulled him all the way over the desk, across the floor and out of the door. At the same time the lift arrived and Sprake got out.
'I saw it, I saw it,' Kearney said.
Sprake showed his teeth. 'It's not here now.'
'Get a fucking move on. It's closer than ever. It wants me to do something.'
Together they bundled Meadows into the lift and down three floors. He seemed to wake up as they dragged him across the lobby and out to the canal bank. 'Kearney?' he said repeatedly. 'Is that you? Is there something wrong with me?' Kearney let go of him and began kicking his head. Sprake pushed his way between them and held Kearney off until he had calmed down. They got Meadows to the edge of the water, into which they dropped him, face down, while they held his legs. He tried to keep his head above the surface by arching his back, then gave up with a groan. Bubbles came up. His bowels let go.
'Christ,' said Kearney reeling away. 'Is he dead?'
Sprake grinned. 'I'd say he was.' He tilted his head back until he was looking straight up at the faint stars above Walthamstow, raised his arms level with his shoulders, and danced slowly away north along the towpath towards Edmonton.
'Urizen!' he called.
'Fuck this,' said Kearney. He ran in the opposite direction, all the way to Lea Bridge, then got a minicab to Grove Park.
Every murder reminded him of the Shrander's house, which in a sense he had never left. His fall had begun there, his deeply fallen knowledge imprisoned him there. In another sense, the Shrander's pursuit of him in succeeding years was that knowledge: it was the constant fall into the awareness of falling. When he killed, especially when he killed women, he felt released from what he knew. He felt for an instant as if he had escaped again.
Bare grey dusty floorboards, net curtains, cold grey light. A dull house on a dull street. The Shrander, intact, irrefragable, enduring, stood in its upper room gazing magisterially out of the window like the captain of a ship. Kearney ran away from it because, as much as anything, he was frightened of the coat it wore. He was frightened of the smell of wet wool. That smell would be his last unfallen sensation.
The beak opened. Words were spoken. Panic-it was his own-filled the room like a clear liquid, an albumen or isinglass so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the open door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. He stumbled across the landing outside and straight down the stairs-full of terror and ecstasy, the dice in his hand-into the rainy streets, looking for someone to kill. He knew he wouldn't be saved unless he did. A kind of lateral gravity was in his favour: he fell all the way from the Shrander's house towards the railway station. To travel, he hoped, would be to fall away from falling, at some more acceptable, some more merciful angle.
It was late on a wet winter afternoon. The trains were reluctant, overheated, empty. Everything was slow, slow, slow. He caught a local, grinding its way out of London into Buckinghamshire. Every time he looked down at the dice in his hand, the world lurched and he had to look away. He sat there sweating until, two or three stops beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill, a tanned but tired-looking woman joined him in the carriage. She was dressed in a black business suit. In one hand she carried a briefcase, in the other a plastic Marks Spencer carrier bag. She fussed with her mobile phone, leafed through a self-help book which seemed to be called Why Shouldn't I Have the Things I Want? Two stations further north, the train slowed and stopped. She got to her feet and waited for the door to open, staring at the darkening platform, the lighted ticket office beyond. She tapped her foot. She looked at her watch. Her husband would be waiting in the car park with the Saab, and they would go straight on to the gym. Up and down the train, other doors opened and closed, people hurried away. She looked nervously right and left. She looked at Kearney. In the overheated emptiness, her journey pulled out like chewing gum, then snapped.
'Excuse me,' she said. 'They don't seem to be letting me out.'
She laughed.
Kearney laughed too.
'Let's see what we can do,' he said.
Five or six thin gold chains, each bearing either her initial or her Christian name as a pendant, clung to the prominent tendons of her neck. 'Let's see what we can do, Sophie.' As he reached down to touch with his fingertip the make-up caked in the faint blonde down at the corner of her mouth, the train pulled slowly away. Her shopping had spilled when she fell. Something-he thought it was a shrink-wrapped lettuce-rolled out of the carrier bag and along the empty carriage. The platform slid backwards and was replaced by black night. The doors had never opened.
Kearney, expecting discovery at any moment, lived from newscast to newscast: but there was no mention of Meadows. The upper half of a body recovered from the Thames near Hungerford Bridge proved to be decomposed, and a woman's. A second Nigerian boy was found dead in Peckham. Apart from these incidents, nothing. Kearney regarded the screen with growing disbelief. He couldn't understand how he had got away with it. No one likes a venture capitalist, he found himself thinking o
ne night, but this is ridiculous.
'And now,' said the anchorwoman brightly, 'sport.'
He was less afraid of discovery, he found, than of the Shrander itself. Would Meadows be enough to keep it at bay? One minute he was confident; the next he had no hope. A noise in the street outside was enough to send his heart rate up. He ignored the phone, which was often ringing two or three times in a morning. Messages were backing up at his answer service, but he didn't dare call in and get them. Instead, he cast the dice obsessively, watching them bounce across the floor away from him like bits of human bone. He couldn't eat, and the slightest rise in temperature made him sweat. He couldn't sleep, and when he did, dreamed it was himself he had killed. When he woke from this dream-filled with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief-it was to find Anna lying on top of him, weeping and whispering fiercely:
'It's all right. Oh please. It's all right.'
Awkward and unpractised, she had wrapped her arms and legs tightly round him, as if to stifle his cries. It was so unlike Anna to attempt to comfort someone else that Kearney pushed her off in a sort of terror and willingly fell back over the edge into the dream.
'I don't understand you,' she complained the next morning. 'You were so nice until a few days ago.'
Kearney peered cautiously at himself in the bathroom mirror, in case he saw some other thing. His face, he noted, looked pouchy and lined. Behind him through the steam he could see Anna lying in a bath which smelled of rose oil and honey, her colour heightened by heat, her expression made petulant by a genuine puzzlement. He put down his razor, bent over the bath, and kissed her on the mouth. He put his hand between her legs. Anna writhed about, trying to turn over and present herself, panting and slopping water over the side of the bath. Kearney's cellphone rang.
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