The salesman clambered to his knees, painfully catching back his breath. He stared at the blood on his hands, and then at Mannock's face above the barrel of the shotgun.

'What the hell are you playing at?' he gasped in a weary voice, one ear cocked for any sounds fromthe river. 'That shot do you want to bring them over?' He gestured at the police jacket that Mannock was now wearing, and then shook his head sadly. 'Mannock, this isn't a fancydress party...'

Mannock was about to explain to him when a car door slammed. The engine of the stationwagon roared above the squeal of tyres. As the two men reached the sidewalk the car was swerving out of the square, bumper knocking aside a pile of cartons.

'Hathaway!' Forbis shouted. 'Did you see him? There's your sniper, Mannock!'

Mannock watched the car plunge out of sight down a sidestreet. 'Hathaway,' he repeated dourly. 'I should have guessed. He's decided to stay and meet his friends.'

After Forbis had torn the flag down from the hotel mast he and Mannock drove back to the river. Mannock sat uncomfortably in the police jacket, thinking of Hathaway, that strange youth who with himself and Forbis completed one key triangle within their society: Hathaway the misfit, head full of halfbaked Marxist slogans, saddled with a bored wife who one day tired of living in roominghouses and walked out on him, taking their small son; Hathaway the failed political activist, whose obsessed eyes were too much even for a farleft student group; Hathaway the petty criminal, arrested for pilfering a supermarket though he soon convinced himself that he was a martyr to the capitalist conspiracy.

No doubt one sight of Mannock's old police jacket had been enough.

An hour later the advance began across the river. One minute Mannock was sitting on the old railtie that formed the rear wall of Forbis's emplacement, watching the endless parades and drilling that were taking place on the opposite shore, and listening to the gongs and exploding firecrackers. The next minute dozens of landingcraft were moving down the bank into the water. Thousands of soldiers swarmed after them, bales of equipment held over their heads. The whole landscape had risen up and heaved forward. Half a mile inland vast dustclouds were climbing into the air. Everywhere the collapsible huts and command posts were coming down, ungainly cranes swung pontoon sections over the trees. The beating of drums sounded for miles along the water's edge. Counting quickly, Mannock estimated that at least fifty landingcraft were crossing the water, each towing two or three amphibious tanks behind it.

One large wooden landingcraft was headed straight towards them, well over a hundred infantrymen squatting on the deck like coolies. Above the square teak bows a heavy machinegun jutted through its rectangular metal shield, the gunners signalling to the helmsman.

As Forbis fumbled with his shotgun Mannock knocked the butt off his shoulder.

'Fall back! Nearer the town they'll come right over us here!'

Crouching down, they backed away from the emplacement. As the first landingcraft hit the shore they reached the cover of the trees lining the road. Forbis sprinted ahead to a pile of fiftygallon drums lying in the ditch and began to roll them around into a crude emplacement.

Mannock watched him working away, as the air was filled with the noise of tankengines and gongs. When Forbis had finished Mannock shook his head. He pointed with a tired hand at the fields on either side of the road, then leaned his shotgun against the wall of the ditch.

As far as they could see, hundreds of soldiers were moving up towards the town, rifles and submachineguns slung over their shoulders. The river bank was crammed with landingcraft. A dozen pontoon bridges spanned the water. Infantry and engineers poured ashore, unloading staff cars and light field pieces. Half a mile away the first soldiers were already moving along the railway line into the town.

Mannock watched a column of infantry march up the road towards them. When they drew nearer he realized that at least half of them were civilians, carrying no weapons or webbing, the women with small red booklets in their hands. On poles over their heads they held giant blownup photographs of party leaders and generals. A motorcycle and sidecar combination mounting a light machinegun forced its way past the column, and then stalled in the verge. Chanting together, a group of women and soldiers pushed it free. Together they stamped on after it, bellowing and cheering.

As the motorcycle approached, Mannock waited for the machinegun to open fire at them. Forbis was crouched behind a fuel drum, frowning over his sights. His large eyes looked like overboiled eggs. A tic fluttered the right corner of his mouth, as if he were babbling some subvocal rosary to himself. Then in a sudden moment of lucidity he turned the shotgun at the motorcycle, but with a roar the machine swerved around Mannock and accelerated towards the town.

Mannock turned to watch it, but a man running past collided with him. Mannock caught his slim shoulders in his hands and set the man on his feet. He looked down into a familiar sallow face, overlit eyes he had last seen staring at him through the bars of a cell.

'Hathaway, you crazy...'

Before Mannock could hold him he broke away and ran towards the approaching column striding up the dirt road. He stopped a few feet from the leading pair of infantrymen and shouted some greeting to them. One of the men, an officer Mannock guessed, though none of the soldiers wore insignia, glanced at him, then reached out and pushed him to one side. Within a moment he was swallowed by the mle of gongbeating and chanting soldiers. Buffeted from one shoulder to the next, he lost his balance and fell, stood up and began to wave again at the faces passing him, trying to catch their attention.

Then Mannock too was caught up in the throng. The drab quilted uniforms, stained by the dust and sweat of half a continent, pushed past him, forcing him on to the verge. The shotgun was knocked out of his hands, kicked about in the breaking earth by a score of feet, then picked up and tossed on to the back of a cart. A troupe of young women surrounded Mannock, staring up at him without any curiosity as they chanted their slogans. Most of them were little more than children, with earnest mannequinlike faces under closecropped hair.

Realizing what had happened, Mannock pulled Forbis from the ditch. No one had tried to take his shotgun from Forbis, and the salesman clung to it like a child. Mannock twisted the weapon out of his hands.

'Can't you understand?' he shouted. 'They're not interested in us!

They're not interested at all!'

1969.

Say Goodbye to the Wind At midnight I heard music playing from the abandoned nightclub among the dunes at Lagoon West. Each evening the frayed melody had woken me as I slept in my villa above the beach. As it started once again I stepped from the balcony on to the warm sand and walked along the shore. In the darkness the beachcombers stood by the tideline, listening to the music carried towards them on the thermal rollers. My torch lit up the broken bottles and hypodermic vials at their feet. Wearing their dead motley, they waited in the dim air like faded clowns.

The nightclub had been deserted since the previous summer, its white walls covered by the dunes. The clouded letters of a neon sign tilted over the openair bar. The music came from a recordplayer on the stage, a foxtrot I had forgotten years before. Through the sandstrewn tables walked a young woman with coralline hair, crooning to herself as she gestured with jewelled hands to the rhythm of this antique theme. Her downward eyes and reflective step, like those of a pensive child, made me guess that she was sleepwalking, drawn to this abandoned nightclub from one of the mansions along the shore.

Beside me, near the derelict bar, stood one of the beachcombers. His dead clothes hung on his muscular body like the husk of some violated fruit. The oil on his dark chest lit up his drugfilled eyes, giving his broken face a moment of lucid calm. As the young woman danced by herself in her black nightgown he stepped forward and took her arms. Together they circled the wooden floor, her jewelled hand on his scarred shoulder. When the record ended she turned from him, her face devoid of expression, and walked among the tables into the darkness.

Who was my beautiful neighbour, moving with the certainty of a sleepwalker, who danced each evening with the beachcombers at the deserted nightclub? As I drove into Vermilion Sands the following morning I peered into the villas along the shore in the hope of seeing her again, but the beach was a zone of laterisers still asleep under their sealed awnings. The season at Vermilion Sands was now in full swing. Tourists filled the caf terraces and the curio shops. After two or three hectic weeks at festivals devoted to everything from nonaural music to erotic food, most of them would jettison their purchases from their car windows as they sped back to the safety of Red Beach. Running to seed in the sandreefs on the fringes of Vermilion Sands, the singing flowers and sculpture formed the unique flora of the landscape, an island ringed by strange sounds.

My own boutique, 'Topless in Gaza', which specialized in biofabric fashions, I had opened two years earlier. When I reached the arcade near Beach Drive at eleven o'clock that morning a small crowd was already peering through the window, fascinated by the Op Art patterns unfurling as the model gowns on display flexed and arched themselves in the morning sunlight. My partner, Georges Conte, his art nouveau eyepatch raised over his left eye, was settling an electricyellow beachrobe on to its stand. For some reason the fabric was unusually skittish, clinging to him like a neurotic dowager. Gripping the wrists with one hand, Georges forced it on to its stand, then stepped back before it could clutch at him again. The robe switched irritably from side to side, the fabric pulsing like an inflamed sun.

As I entered the shop I could see it was going to be one of our more difficult days. Usually I arrived to find the gowns and robes purring on their hangers like the drowsy inmates of an exquisite arboreal zoo. Today something had disturbed them. The racks of model dresses were seething, their patterns livid and discordant. Whenever they touched, the fabrics recoiled from each other like raw membranes. The beachclothes were in an equal state of unrest, the bandanas and sunsuits throwing off eyejarring patterns like exhibits in some demented kinetic art.

Hands raised in a gesture of heroic despair, Georges Conte came over to me. His white silk suit glimmered like a bilious rainbow. Even my own mauve dayshirt was unsettled, its seams beginning to shred and unravel.

'Georges, what's happening? The whole place is in uproar!'

'Mr Samson, I wash my hands of them! Sheer temperament, they're impossible to deal with!'

He looked down at his dappled sleeve, and tried to flick away the livid colours with a manicured hand. Upset by the disturbed atmosphere, his suit was expanding and contracting in irregular pulses, pulling across his chest like the fibres of a diseased heart. With a burst of exasperation he picked one of the model gowns from its rack and shook it angrily. 'Quiet!' he shouted, like an impresario calling an unruly chorus line to order. 'Is this "Topless in Gaza" or a demonic zoo?'

In the two years that I had known him Georges had always referred to the dresses and gowns as if they were a troupe of human performers. The more expensive and sensitive fabrics bred from the oldest pedigree stocks he would treat with the charm and savoirfaire he might have reserved for a temperamental duchess. At the opposite extreme, the flamboyant Op Art beachwear he handled with the cavalier charm he displayed to the teenage beauties who often strayed by accident into the boutique.

Sometimes I wondered if for Georges the gowns and suits were more alive than their purchasers. I suspected that he regarded the eventual wearers as little more than animated chequebooks whose sole function was to feed and exercise the exquisite creatures he placed upon their backs. Certainly a careless or offhand customer who made the mistake of trying to climb into a wrong fitting or, even worse, was endowed with a figure of less than Dietrichlike proportions, would receive brusque treatment from Georges and be directed with the shot of a lace cuff to the inertwear shops in the town's amusement park.

This, of course, was a particularly bitter jibe. No one, with the exception of a few eccentrics or beachcombers, any longer wore inert clothing. The only widely worn inert garment was the shroud, and even here most fashionable people would not be seen dead in one. The macabre spectacle of the strange graveflora springing from cracked tombs, like the nightmare collection of some Quant or Dior of the netherworld, had soon put an end to all forms of biofabric coffinwear and firmly established the principle: 'Naked we came into this world, naked we leave it.'

Georges's devotion had been largely responsible for the success and select clientele of the boutique, and I was only too glad to indulge his whimsical belief in the individual personality of each gown and dress. His slim fingers could coax a hemline to shorten itself within seconds instead of hours, take in a pleat or enlarge a gusset almost before the customer could sign her cheque. A particularly exotic gown, unsettled by being worn for the first time or upset by the clammy contact of human skin, would be soothed and consoled by Georges as he patted it into place around its owner's body, his gentle hands caressing the nervous tissues around the unfamiliar contours of hip and bust.

Today, however, his charm and expertise had failed him. The racks of gowns itched and quivered, their colours running into blurred pools. One drawback of biofabrics is their extreme sensitivity. Bred originally from the gene stocks of delicate wisterias and mimosas, the woven yarns have brought with them something of the vine's remarkable response to atmosphere and touch. The sudden movement of someone near by, let alone of the wearer, brings an immediate reply from the nervelike tissues. A dress can change its colour and texture in a few seconds, becoming more dcollet at the approach of an eager admirer, more formal at a chance meeting with a bank manager.

This sensitivity to mood explains the real popularity of biofabrics. Clothes are no longer made from dead fibres of fixed colour and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure, but from living tissues that adapt themselves to the contours and personality of the wearer. Other advantages are the continued growth of the materials, fed by the body odours and perspiration of the wearer, the sweet liqueurs distilled from her own pores, and the constant renewal of the fibres, repairing any faults or ladders and eliminating the need for washing.

However, as I walked around the shop that morning I reflected that these immense advantages had been bought at a price. For some reason we had accumulated a particularly temperamental collection. Cases had been reported of sudden panics caused by the backfiring of an engine, in which an entire stock of model gowns had destroyed themselves in a paroxysm of violence.

I was about to suggest to Georges that we close the shop for the morning when I noticed that the first customer of the day had already arrived. Partly concealed by the racks of beachwear, I could only see an elegantly groomed face veiled by a widebrimmed hat. Near the doorway a young chauffeur waited in the sunlight, surveying the tourists with a bored glance.

At first I was annoyed that a wealthy customer should arrive at the very moment when our stock was restive I still remembered with a shudder the bikini of nervous weave that shed itself around its owner's ankles as she stood on the high diving board above the crowded pool at the Neptune Hotel. I turned to ask Georges to use all his tact to get her to leave.

For once, however, he had lost his aplomb. Leaning forward from the waist, eyes focused myopically, he was gazing at our customer like a seedy voyeur of the boulevards starstruck by some subteen nymphet.

'Georges! Pull yourself together! Do you know her?'

He glanced at me with blank eyes. 'What?' Already his suit had begun to smooth itself into a glasslike mirror, his invariable response when faced with a beautiful woman. He murmured: 'Miss Charming.'

'Who?'

'Raine Charming...'he repeated. 'Before your time, Mr Samson, before anyone's time..

I let him walk past me, hands outstretched in the attitude of Parsifal approaching the Holy Grail. Certainly I remembered her, sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness, with her melancholy, gamine face recreated by a dozen plastic surgeries. Raine Charming was a macabre relic of the 1970s and its teenage cult. Where, in the past, elderly screen actresses had resorted to plastic surgery to lift a sagging cheek or erase a telltale wrinkle, in the case of Raine Charming a young model in her early twenties had surrendered her face to the scalpel and needle in order to recapture the childlike bloom of a teenage ingenue. As many as a dozen times she had gone back to the operating theatre, emerging swathed in bandages that were rolled back before the arc lights to reveal a frozen teenage mask. In her grim way, perhaps she had helped to kill this lunatic cult. For some years now she had been out of the public eye, and I remembered only a few months beforehand reading about the death of her confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first biofabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser.

Although now in her late twenties, Raine Charming still preserved her childlike appearance, this strange montage of adolescent faces. Her gaze reflected the suicides of Carole Landis and Marilyn Monroe. As she spoke to Georges in her low voice I realized where I had seen her, dancing with the beachcombers in the deserted nightclub at Lagoon West.

When I bought the boutique the faded fashion magazines had been filled with her photographs... Raine with her wounded eyes, looking out above the bandages around her remade cheeks, or wearing the latest biofabric creation at some exclusive discotheque, smiling into Kaiser's handsome gangster face. In many ways the relationship between Raine Channing and this twentyfiveyearold genius of the fashion houses summed up a whole disastrous epoch, of which Raine's mutilated face was a forgotten shrine. One day soon, before she reached the age of thirty, even that face would dissolve.

However, as she visited our boutique this grim prospect seemed a long way distant. Georges was delighted to see her, at last meeting on equal terms one of the toobright luminaries of his apprenticeship. Without a thought for our disturbed stock, he opened the windows and display cases. Curiously, everything had quietened, the gowns stirring gently on their hangers like docile birds.

I waited for Georges to enjoy his moment of reminiscence, and then introduced myself.

'You've calmed everything down,' I congratulated her. 'They must like you.'

She drew her white fox collar around herself, rubbing her cheek against it. The fur slid around her neck and shoulders, nestling her in its caress. 'I hope so,' she said. 'Do you know, though, a few months ago I hated them? I really wanted everyone in the world to go naked, so that all the clothes would die.' She, laughed at this. 'Now I've got to look for a whole new wardrobe.'

'We're delighted you've started here, Miss Charming. Are you staying long in Vermilion Sands?'

'A little while. I first came here a long time ago, Mr Samson. Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes, have you noticed? It's a good place to come back to.'

We walked along the displays of gowns. Now and then she would reach out to stroke one of the fabrics, her white hand like a child's. As she opened her coat a sonic jewel, like a crystal rose, emitted its miniature music between her breasts. Velvet playtoys nestled like voles around her wrists. Altogether she seemed to be concealed in this living playnest like a bizarre infant Venus.

What was it, though, about Raine Charming that so held me? As Georges helped her select a brilliant pastel gown, the other dresses murmuring on the chairs around her, it occurred to me that Raine Charming resembled a childEve in a coutureEden, life springing from her touch. Then I remembered her dancing with the beachcombers in the deserted nightclub at Lagoon West.

While the young chauffeur carried out her purchases I said: 'I saw you last night. At the nightclub by the beach.'

For the first time she looked directly into my face, her eyes alert and adult above the white adolescent mask. 'I live near by', she said, 'in one of the houses along the lake. There was music playing and people dancing.'

As the chauffeur opened the door of the car for her I saw that the seats were filled with playtoys and sonic jewels. They drove off together like two adults playing at being children.

Two days later I heard music coming again from the abandoned nightclub. As I sat on the veranda in the evening this faint nightmusic began, the dry metallic sounds muffled by the powdery air. I walked along the shore through the darkness. The beachcombers had gone, but Raine Charming wandered through the tables of the nightclub, her white gown drawing empty signatures in the sand.

A sandyacht was beached in the shallows. Beside it a barechested young man watched with hands on hips. His powerful thighs stood out under his white shorts in the darkness, the thermal surf breaking the dust into ripples around his feet. With his broad face and smashed Michelangelesque nose he resembled some dark beachangel. He waited as I approached, then stepped forward and walked past me, almost brushing my shoulder. The oil on his back reflected the distant lights of Vermilion Sands as he moved among the dunes towards the nightclub.

After this rendezvous I assumed that we would see no more of Raine Charming, but the next morning when I arrived at the shop in Vermilion Sands I found Georges waiting nervously by the door.

'Mr Samson, I tried to telephone you Miss Channing's secretary has been calling, everything she bought has gone berserk! Nothing fits, three of the gowns are growing out of weave'

I managed to calm him down, then spoke to Raine's secretary, a tarttoned Frenchwoman who sharply informed me that the entire wardrobe of two evening gowns, a cocktail dress and three daysuits which Raine had purchased from 'Topless in Gaza' had run to seed. Why this should have happened she had no idea. 'However, Mr Samson, I suggest you drive out immediately to Miss Channing's residence and either replace each item or reimburse the total purchase price of six thousand dollars. The alternative'

'Mlle Fournier,' I insisted stiffly with what little pride I could muster, 'there is no alternative.'

Before I left, Georges brought out with elaborate care a cyclamen sportssuit in a shantung biofabric which he had ordered for one of our millionaire customers.

'For my good name, Mr Samson, if not for yours at moments such as these one should show the flag.'

The suit clung to me like a willowy, lacecovered cobra, shaping itself to my chest and legs. Its colours glowed and rippled as it explored the contours of my body. As I walked out to my car people turned to look at this exquisite gliding snakeskin.

Five minutes after our arrival at Raine Channing's villa it had quietened down considerably, hanging from my shoulders like a wounded flower. The atmosphere at the villa seemed set for disaster. The young chauffeur who took my car whipped it away with a snarl of tyres, his eyes moving across my face like razors. Mile Fournier greeted me with a peremptory nod. A sharpfaced Frenchwoman of about forty, she wore a witchlike black dress that seethed around her angular shoulders with the movements of a shrike.

'An entire wardrobe ruined, Mr Samson! Not only your own gowns, but priceless originals from Paris this season. We are out of our minds here!'

I did my best to calm her. One danger with biofabrics is that they are prone to stampede. Moments of domestic crisis, a cry of anger or even a door's slam, can set off a paroxysm of selfdestruction. My own suit was already wilting under Mlle Fournier's baleful eye. As we went up the staircase I smoothed the ruffled velvet of the curtains, settling them into their niches. 'Perhaps they're not being worn enough,' I temporized. 'These fabrics do need human contact.'

Mlle Fournier gave me a surprisingly arch glance. We entered a suite on the top floor. Beyond the shaded windows was a terrace, the painted surface of the sandlake below it. Mlle Fournier gestured at the open wardrobes in the large dressing room. 'Human contact? Precisely, Mr Samson.'

Everywhere there was uproar. Gowns were strewn across the facing sofas. Several had lost all colour and lay blanched and inert. Others had felted, their edges curled and blackened like dead banana skins. Two evening dresses draped over the escritoire had run rogue, their threads interlocking in a macabre embrace. In the wardrobes the racks of gowns hung in restive files, colours pulsing like demented suns.

As we watched I sensed that they were uneasily settling themselves after some emotional outburst earlier that morning. 'Someone's been whipping them into a frenzy,' I told Mlle Fournier. 'Doesn't Miss Channing realize one can't play the temperamental fool near these fabrics?'

She gripped my arm, a barbed finger raised to my lips. 'Mr Samson! We all have our difficulties. Just do what you can. Your fee will be paid immediately.'

When she had gone I moved along the racks and laid out the more damaged dresses. The others I spaced out, soothing the disturbed fabrics until they relaxed and annealed themselves.

I was hunting through the wardrobes in the bedroom next door when I made a curious discovery. Packed behind the sliding doors was an immense array of costumes, faded models of the previous seasons which had been left to die on their hangers. A few were still barely alive. They hung inertly on their racks, responding with a feeble glimmer to the light.

What surprised me was their condition. All of them had been deformed into strange shapes, their colours bled like wounds across the fabric, reflecting the same traumatic past, some violent series of events they had witnessed between Raine Channing and whoever had lived with her in the years past. I remembered the clothes I had seen on a woman killed in a car crash at Vermilion Sands, blooming out of the wreckage like a monstrous flower of hell, and the demented wardrobe offered to me by the family of an heiress who had committed suicide. Memories such as these outlived their wearers. There was the apocryphal story of the murderer absconding in a stolen overcoat who had been strangled by the garment as it recapitulated the deaththroes of its owner.

Leaving these uneasy relics to their dark end, I went back to the dressing room. As I eased the last of the disturbed gowns on to their hangers the terrace door opened behind me.

Raine Charming stepped out of the sun. In place of her clinging white fur she now wore a biofabric bikini. The two yellow cups nestled her full breasts like sleeping hands. Despite the clear evidence of some fierce row that morning, she seemed composed and relaxed. As she stared at the now placid tenants of her wardrobe, her white face, like a devious adolescent's, more than ever resembled a surgical mask, the powdered childface of a Manchu empress.

'Mr Samson! They're quiet now! You're like...'

'St Francis calming the birds?' I suggested, still annoyed at having been summoned to Lagoon West. I gestured towards the sealed wardrobes in her bedroom. 'Forgive me saying so, but there are unhappy memories here.'

She picked up my jacket and draped it over her naked shoulders, a gesture of false modesty that none the less held a certain charm. The fabric clung to her like a pink flower, caressing her breasts and arms.

'The past is something of a disaster area, I'm afraid, Mr Samson. I know I brought you out here under false pretences. Something went wrong this morning, and you are the only neighbour I have.' She walked to the window and gazed over the painted lake. 'I came back to Vermilion Sands for reasons that must seem crazy.'

I watched her warily, but something about her apparent frankness destroyed caution. Presumably the midnight lover of the sandyacht had left the scene, no doubt in a holocaust of emotions.

We went on to the terrace and sat in the reclining chairs beside the bar. During the next hours, and the many that followed in that house without mirrors above the painted lake, she told me something of her years with Gavin Kaiser, and how this young genius from the fashion world had found her singing at the openair nightclub at Lagoon West. Seeing in this beautiful fifteenyearold the apotheosis of the teenage cult, Kaiser had made her his star model for the biofabric fashions he designed. Four years later, at the age of nineteen, she had her first facelift, followed by even more extensive plastic surgery in the years immediately after. When Kaiser died she came back to Lagoon West, to the house near the deserted nightclub.

'I left so many pieces of myself behind in all those clinics and hospitals. I thought perhaps I could find them here.'

'How did Kaiser die?' I asked.

'From a heart attack they said. It was some sort of terrible convulsion, as if he'd been bitten by a hundred rabid dogs. He was trying to tear his face to pieces.' She raised her hands to her own white mask.

'Wasn't there some doubt...?' I hesitated.

She held my arm. 'Gavin was mad! He wanted nothing to change between us. Those facelifts he kept me at fifteen, but not because of the fashionmodelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.'

At the time, however, I hardly cared why Raine Charming had come back to Lagoon West. Every afternoon I would drive out to her villa and we would lie together under the awning by the bar, watching the changing colours of the painted lake. There, in that house without mirrors, she would tell me her strange dreams, which all reflected her fears of growing young. In the evenings, as the music began to play from the deserted nightclub, we would walk across the dunes and dance among the sandstrewn tables.

Who brought this recordplayer to the nightclub with its one unlabelled disc? Once, as we walked back, I again saw the young man with the powerful shoulders and broken nose standing by his sandyacht in the darkness. He watched us as we walked arm in arm, Raine's head against my chest. As she listened to the music jewel in her hand, Raine's eyes stared back like a child's at his handsome face.

Often I would see him at noon, sailing his sandyacht across the lake a few hundred yards from the shore. I assumed that he was one of Raine's past lovers, watching his successor with a sympathetic curiosity and playing his music for us out of a bizarre sense of humour.

Yet when I pointed him out to Raine one afternoon she denied that she knew him or had even seen him before. Sitting up on one elbow, she watched the sandyacht beached three hundred yards away along the shore. The young man was walking along the tideline, searching for something among the broken hypodermic vials.

'I can tell him to go away, Raine.' When she shook her head, I said: 'He was here. What happened between you?'

She turned on me sharply. 'Why do you say that?'