In that moment he was lost. Out of the sand, the sky, the pebbles—out of what he would later think of as the willed fractality of things—emerged the Shrander. He had no name for it then. It had no shape for him. But it was in his dreams thereafter, as a hollow, an absence, a shadow on a door. He woke from this latest dream, forty years later, and it was a pale wet morning with fog in the trees on the other side of the road. Anna Kearney clung to him, saying his name.
“Was I awful last night? I feel much better now.”
He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she said: “People think it’s a failure to live alone, but it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.” Pinned to the back of the door was another note: Someone loves you. All his life Kearney had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early. Women calmed him as much as he excited them. As a result, perhaps, his dealings with men had quickly become awkward, unproductive, chafing.
What had the dice advised? He was no more certain than he had ever been. He decided he would try to find Valentine Sprake. Sprake, who had helped him on and off over the years, lived somewhere in North London. But though Kearney had a telephone number for him, he wasn’t sure it was reliable. He tried it anyway, from Victoria Station. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman’s voice said:
“You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service.”
“Hello?” said Kearney. He checked the number he had dialled. “You aren’t on a cellphone,” he said. “This isn’t a cellphone number. Hello?” The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. “Sprake?” Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Victoria Line platforms. He changed trains at Green Park, and again at Baker Street, working his way obliquely to the centre of town, where he would interrogate the afternoon drinkers at the Lymph Club on Greek Street, one place he might expect to get news of Sprake.
Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, they were brought together at sites like this by an attraction to movement, crowds, commerce. A middle-aged woman with an accent he couldn’t quite place had annexed a bench near the mock-Tudor shack at the centre of the square and was staring around with a lively but undirected interest. Every so often her upper lip folded back and a fey, unpremeditated sound escaped her mouth, more than an exclamation, less than a word. When Kearney appeared, walking fast from the Oxford Street end, an educated look sprang from nowhere into her eyes and she began talking loudly to herself. Her topics were disconnected and various. Kearney hurried past, then on an impulse turned back.
He had heard words he didn’t understand.
Kefahuchi Tract.
“What does that mean?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”
Mistaking this for an accusation, the woman fell silent and stared at the ground near his feet. She had on a curious mixture of good-quality coats and cardigans; green wellington boots; homemade fingerless mitts. Unlike the others she had no baggage. Her face, tanned by exhaust fumes, alcohol and the wind that blows incessantly around the base of Centre Point, had a curiously healthy, rural look. When she looked up at last, her eyes were pale blue. “I wonder if you could spare me the money for a cup of tea?” she said.
“I’ll do more than that,” Kearney promised. “Just tell me what you mean.”
She blinked.
“Wait here!” he told her, and at the nearest Pret bought three All Day Breakfasts, which he put in a bag with a large latte. Back in Soho Square, the woman hadn’t moved, but sat blinking into the weak sunlight, occasionally calling out to passersby, but reserving most of her attention for two or three pigeons hobbling about in front of her. Kearney handed her the bag.
“Now,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
She gave him a cheerful smile. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “I take my medication. I always take it.” She held the Pret bag for a moment then returned it to him. “I don’t want this.”
“Yes you do,” he said, taking things out to show her. “Look! All Day Breakfast!”
“You eat it,” she said.
He put the bag down next to her on the bench and took her by the shoulders. He knew that if he said the right thing she would prophesy. “Listen,” he assured her, as urgently as he knew how, “I know what you know. Do you see?”
“What do you want? I’m frightened of you.”
Kearney laughed.
“I’m the one frightened,” he said. “Look, have this. Have these.”
The woman glanced at the sandwiches in his hands, then looked over her left shoulder as if she had seen someone she knew.
“I don’t want it. I don’t want them.” She strained to keep her head turned away from him. “I want to go now.”
“What do you see?” he insisted.
“Nothing.”
“What do you see?”
“Something coming down. Fire coming down.”
“What fire?”
“Let me go.”
“What fire is that?”
“Let me go, now. Let me go.”
Kearney let her go and walked away. Aged eighteen, he had dreamed of himself at the end of a life like hers. He was reeling and staggering down some alley, full of revelation like a disease. He was old and regretful, but for years something had been combusting its way from the centre of him towards the outer edge, where it now burst uncontrollably from his fingertips, from his eyes, his mouth, his sex, setting his clothes on fire. Later he had seen how unlikely this was. Whatever he might be, he wasn’t mad, or alcoholic, or even unlucky. Looking back into Soho Square, he watched the schizophrenics passing his sandwiches from hand to hand, peeling them apart to examine the filling. He had stirred them like soup. Who knew what might come to the surface? In principle, he felt sorry for them, even amiable. The praxis of it was bleaker. They were as disappointing as children. You saw light in their eyes, but it was the ignis fatuus. In the end, they knew less than Brian Tate, and he knew nothing at all.
Valentine Sprake, who claimed to know as much as Kearney, perhaps more, wasn’t at the Lymph Club; no one had seen him there for a month. Eyeing the yellowed walls, the afternoon drinkers, the TV above the bar, Kearney bought a drink and wondered where he should look next. Outside, the afternoon had turned to rain, the streets were full of people talking into mobile phones. Knowing that he would be forced, sooner or later, to face an empty apartment on his own, he sighed with impatience, turned up the collar of his jacket, and went home. There, ill at ease but worn out by what he thought of as the emotional demands of Brian Tate, Anna Kearney and the woman in Soho Square, he turned on all the lights and fell asleep in an armchair.
“Your cousins are coming,” Kearney’s mother told him.
He was eight. He was so excited he ran away as soon as they arrived, off across the fields behind the house and through a strip of woodland, until he came to a pond or shallow lake surrounded by willows. It was his favourite place. No one was ever there. In winter, brown reeds emerged from the thin white cat-ice at its margins; in summer, insects buzzed among the willows. Kearney stood for a long time, listening to the diminishing cries of the other children. As soon as he was sure they wouldn’t follow him, a kind of hypnotic tranquillity came over him. He pulled his shorts down and stood with his legs apart in the sun, looking down at himself. Someone at school had shown him how to rub it. It got big but he couldn’t make it do anything else. Eventually he grew bored and climbed out along a cracked willow trunk. He lay there in the shade, looking down into the water, which teemed with tiny real fishes.