Esme thought the same. Not about him, about her. I'm being good. But she knew she'd never be able to keep it up. She'd have to tell him soon enough how wrong he had always been about everything.

Her mother nursed her like a grievance.

'My little girl,' she crooned over her.

Esme told her to stop. She was getting better. In some respects she felt better than she'd ever felt before. Her mother worried that that meant she was preparing to embrace the life of a permanent invalid. But then there was a secret corner of herself that was willing to embrace the life of a permanent nurse. Feed her daughter soup, kill her husband, put up the shutters, smell him rot and hope not to see daylight again.

Esme had never moved out of her parents' house so she was back in her old room. Yet it felt as though she'd been away all her adult life and was revisiting the sanctum of her childhood for the first time in decades. It was the lying down that did that. Lying down and seeing words jerk about above her head. Can one ever return to bed for a long period and not be reminded of being a child? Even the books on her shelves and the magazines on the chest of drawers, bought just before she was run over, even her newest clothes, seemed to belong to a much younger her. Where had she been in the intervening years?

Her mother caught her weeping once. 'Oh, my little girl,' she cried.

'Cut that out!' Esme said. 'I'm not in pain and I'm not sad. I'm just missing something.'

'What?'

'The last fifteen years of my life.'

'You haven't been here that long, darling.'

'I know that. I just can't think what I did with them before.'

In a few weeks she was able to lever herself up by her arms. It would be longer before she could walk, but there was no hurry. Physiotherapists visited her and were disappointed by her slow progress. 'She's regaining strength,' they told her mother, 'but she doesn't seem to have the will to be up and about.'

She wasn't worried about it herself. She still had a lot of thinking to do. Once she was out of the coma her thoughts did not fly at her. She missed that, as people from the country miss birdsong when they move to town. She had to call words to her now. She had to start at the beginning of an idea and puzzle it out. It was like following one end of a ball of thread, uncertain where it would lead her.

Her mother fretted. 'Why are you so quiet?'

'Thinking.'

'You've had a lot of time to think.'

'You can't have too much.'

Can't you? Her mother wasn't sure.

But her father liked her like this. He took it for remorse. Any minute now he expected her to announce that the accident had killed off her lesbian tendencies.

'What's happening in the world?' she asked one morning.

She had got herself over to the breakfast table to join her parents.

'The usual,' her mother said. 'Births, marriages, funerals.'

'What would you have instead?' her husband asked her.

'Something less horrible.'

'We make our beds, we lie in them,' Compton said.

Esme looked from her father to her mother, and back. How long had marriage been a horror to them both? From the first moment of their marrying, forty years before? Had they recoiled from each other even as they exchanged vows? She had never heard them speak lovingly of a time when they didn't dislike each other intensely. So why had they married, and why hadn't they parted? What was it that kept them together? The very magnetism of horror, was that it? The harmony that there is in hatred?

She suddenly saw them as a pair of evil planets, barren of life, spinning through space, in constant relation to each other but never colliding. Did a marriage obey the same unvarying law of physics as the solar system? And society too? Was this equipoise of antagonism essential?

But when the planets in disorder wander . . . Who said that? Esme knew a crossword clue when she saw one. Disorder wander a prince among men, 6 letters.

Then she remembered the rest from sixth-form literature. But when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander, what plagues and what portents . . . what commotion in the winds . . .

By these lights her parents had a successful marriage. They hadn't wandered in disorder. They might not have known a moment's happiness together, but at least the winds had stayed quiet.

Now apply this, she reasons, to that commotion whose abiding after-effects had been her study. A raging wind had been loosed, bearing plagues and portents, proof that the planets had wandered badly off their course. Some equipoise of hatred had been lost. You don't kill the thing you love, but you don't kill the thing you hate, either. You dance with the thing you hate to the music of the spheres. And all remains well a relatively speaking; of course relatively speaking, relative to massacre and annihilation a so long as the dance continues. The madness is to think you can dance alone, without a partner in mistrust. Had her mother left her father as she had so often threatened to, what would have become of either of them? She couldn't imagine her mother without her father, so intrinsic to her character was her contempt for him. She existed to denounce him. But he, oh she could imagine him on the streets wielding a machete. WHAT HAPPENED happened, no ifs or buts about it, not because ten thousand men like her father had been abandoned by their wives a though that must have added to the savour of it for some a IT HAPPENED because they forgot, or more likely never fully understood, that those they were killing performed the same function as their wives. It was a catastrophe of literal-mindedness. You don't kill the thing you hate just because you hate it.

As for why the hatred, Esme Nussbaum is not concerned to put her mind to that. Not now. Perhaps later when she has more strength. Should she slip back into a coma, she thinks, she'll have the mental space for it.

She is just strong enough, however, to see this one thought through to the end: an essential ingredient of the harmony of disharmony was lost when men like her father went on the rampage. And now, still, all these decades later, they wander in uncomplemented disorder.

She is no longer employed by Ofnow. When Ofnow kills its employees it assumes them to be off the payroll. Her mother has been trying to get her a pension a an endeavour in which she has not been able to count on the support of her husband who understands Ofnow's reasoning a but without success. She knows what their response will be if she pushes them too hard. They will prove her daughter is no longer on the payroll by killing her again.

Sometimes Esme forgets that she is no longer employed by Ofnow and finds herself preparing a new report to take into the office on Monday morning. It will argue that if the country is to enjoy any sort of harmony again, there must be restitution. Not a crude financial recompense to the descendants of those who vanished in the course of WHAT HAPPENED (there can be no talk of victims) a their whereabouts anyway, supposing some exist, are unknown. What she has in mind is making restitution to the descendants, or rather the idea of the descendants, of those who remained (there can of course be no talk of culprits either). Us, in other words, the living descendants of the living. Restitution in this sense: Giving us all back what we have lost.

There will be considerable relief in the office that she is not proposing financial recompense no matter that it cannot possibly be implemented. Blood money presupposes an offence and, since there hasn't been one, blood money isn't on the table. But they won't know what in God's name she means by giving us back what we have lost. What have we lost? Explain yourself, Miss Nussbaum. And she will. Gladly.

'What we have lost,' she will tell them, 'is the experience of a deep antagonism. Not a casual, take-it-or-leave-it, family or neighbourly antagonism a but something altogether less accidental and arbitrary than that. A shapely, long-ingested, cultural antagonism, in which everything, from who we worship to what we eat, is accounted for and made clear. We are who we are because we are not them.'

They stare at her.

'Remove them from the picture and who are we?'

They are still staring at her.

'We must give the people back their necessary opposite,' she will tell them, heated by her own fierceness, the splintered bones in her body a thousand weapons to slay with.

'And how do you propose doing that, young lady?' someone dares to ask.

Ah, she will say. Now you're asking.

iii At the very moment Esme Nussbaum was knocked down outside her place of work, her mother fell off a chair on which she'd been standing to dust the bookshelves. Mothers and daughters, especially when no man beloved of either is around to break the current, can be attuned like this.

In the time her daughter was in hospital Rhoda Nussbaum never gave up hope of her coming out of her coma because she could hear her thinking live thoughts. And now that Esme was home, back in the room that had been her nursery, back in her care, her mother heard even more of what was going on inside her head. Planets, marriages, collisions, commotion a she heard all that. Some of her daughter's thoughts and phrases she even recognised as her own. How could it be otherwise? If she was attuned to Esme, then Esme was attuned to her. Even in the womb the baby hears its mother's music. And as an essentially companionless woman, with a rich store of anger in her, Rhoda had confided in her daughter, sometimes in words, sometimes silently, earlier and more frequently than was common or even desirable. Necessary Opposites, for example, was the name of a two-girl, two-boy rock band Rhoda had danced to when she was a teenager. She was pretty certain the band vanished at about the time most hard-rock bands were consensually driven underground, and that would have been a few years before Esme was born. How extraordinary that a phrase that had been lying there in pieces in Rhoda Nussbaum's mind, unused and unreferred to, should suddenly reassemble itself in Esme's. But then again, maybe not. Rhoda had tried to dance her brains out to Necessary Opposites because she didn't like what her brains contained. Was it coincidence? The evil thing she wanted to dance out was all trace of a man in pain a or pretending to be in pain a declaring over and over I am who I am because I am not them as though it were an incantation, and begging her to kiss him, forgive him, enfold him, make him better. As though he had a better self she could release.

Hearing the words returned to her in Esme's thoughts did not bring back a long-forgotten event because she had never forgotten it a where she was when she heard them, how they made her feel, the feebleness of her response . . .

EIGHT.

Gotterdammerung i A BLOOMING, STRONG-JAWED girl of just sixteen, still to meet the husband she can't bear, Rhoda Nussbaum (to be) had a brief affair with a man more than three times her age. Though she called it an affair, there was not much sex in it. Nor much love. It was an affair of curiosity. She was inexperienced, but with a fierce sense of the ridiculous that made her courageous, and he was her schoolteacher. An unattractive man physically, but you don't say no to your teacher. Especially when he wants you to know he's emotionally damaged and you might just be the one to heal him.

'I'm in bits,' he told her when she put her face up to be kissed.

The hands with which he held her shook. At first she thought it was she who was shaking, but she saw the light dancing in his wedding ring like sun on choppy water. 'Make me whole again,' he said, his scraggy beard moving independently of his lips, as though it too was bouncing on a wild, wild sea.

'That's a lot to ask of a pupil you've only ever given B+ to,' she said.

He had no sense of the ridiculous and didn't laugh. He was a folk singer in his spare time and, though they were a long way from any wild, wild sea, sang about fishermen bringing in herrings. The fact that he sometimes brought his guitar to school was another reason Rhoda allowed him to try it on with her. The other girls would be jealous if they found out and Rhoda had every intention of their finding out.

'I just want you to be yourself,' he said.

She swivelled her jaw at him. 'What if I don't know which of my selves to be?'

'You don't have to worry. You're being the self I care best about now.'

Care best about! But what she said was, 'And which self is that?'

'The good and innocent one.'

'Ha!' she snorted. Lacking experience she might have been, but they were in a hotel room drinking cider on the edge of the bed, on the outside of the locked door a frolicsome sign saying LEAVE US ALONE: WE'RE PLAYING, and she knew that while there were many words for what she was being not a one of them was 'innocent'.

'Oh yes you are,' he said, unbuttoning her school shirt. 'Where there's no blood, there's no guilt.'

'There might be blood,' she warned him.

He overcame his surprise to smile his saddest folkie's smile at her. 'That's different. Blood shed in the name of love is not like blood shed in the name of hate.'

She wasn't having any love talk, but she could hardly not ask, 'How do you know? Have you shed blood in the name of hate?'

He let his long horse face droop lower even than usual. 'All in good time,' he said.

He was teasing her, she thought. This was his sexual come-on. I have done such things . . . Boys did that but she didn't expect it of a grown man. She liked him less for it and she hadn't liked him much to start with. He shouldn't have supposed she needed him to have terrible secrets. This was terrible secret enough. He was married, her teacher, older than her parents, undressing her, describing the shape of her breasts with his fingers, his touch so intrusively naked he might have been describing them in four-letter words. They were offending against every decency she had been taught.

He thought he guessed what she was thinking. He thought the mention of hate had startled her. But he had guessed wrong. She wanted him to finish a conversation he had started, that was all.

He told her in the end, some three or four visits to the hotel bedroom later. Very suddenly and brutally.

'You'd have been about ten,' he said. They were still dressed, looking out of the window on to a bank of air conditioners. Two pigeons were fighting over a crumb of bread that must have been thrown out of a window above theirs. The room had a worn, padded reproduction of the Rokeby Venus for a bedhead. In the days when the economy boomed and nothing yet had HAPPENED this had been an expensively raffish hotel, softly carpeted for high-heeled assignations. It still spoke knowingly of indulgence and love, but with only half a heart. So great a change in only six or seven years! Now a schoolteacher could afford to bring his pupil here.

A scented candle burned. His guitar case stood unopened in a corner. Was he going to sing to her, she wondered. The sign announcing that they were playing so leave them alone was swinging on the door.

She knew what he was referring to. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was the thing that happened when she was about ten. She hadn't known much about it, living too far from any of the centres of conflagration to see anything with her own eyes or hear anything with her own ears. One or two school acquaintances must have been caught up in it because they never showed their faces again, but they hadn't been close friends so their absence didn't impinge on her. Otherwise, apart from her form teacher once bursting into tears, and the headmaster banning all mobile phones and personal computers from the school premises, nothing occurred at school to suggest anything was wrong, and at home her parents remained tight-lipped. There was a blackout imposed by her father, no papers allowed into the house and no serious radio or television, but that had hardly bothered Rhoda aged ten. OPERATION ISHMAEL, however, in which she went, in a single bound, from Hinchcliffe to Behrens, could not be accounted for without reference to the turbulence it was devised to quiet, and so, one way or another, Rhoda learnt what she had never been taught. Namely that something unspeakably terrible had happened, if it had.

For me to think about when I'm older, she'd decided.

And now older was what she was.

'Yes,' she said. 'And . . .'

He gathered her into his arms. She didn't feel as safe there as she imagined she would when it all started. There was something ghostly about him a he was eerily elongated in body as well as face, as though he had grown too much as a consequence of a childhood illness equivalent to those that stopped people growing at all, bony, with a big wet vertical mouth that hung open despite the attempted camouflage of the beard, showing tombstone teeth. It wasn't difficult to imagine him with the skin stripped from his bones.

Why am I doing this, she asked herself. Why am I here? I don't even like him.

'She would have been about the age you are now, had she lived,' he said.

'She?'

'The girl . . .'

She waited.

'The girl I killed.'

'You killed a girl?'

'Come to bed,' he said.

She shook her head. She wasn't afraid. She just thought he was trying to impress her again. And maybe frighten or arouse her into doing something she didn't want to do.

'How do you mean you killed a girl?'

'How did I do it?'

That wasn't really her question, but all right, how did he do it?

'Not with my bare hands if that's what you think. I left it to others. I stood by and let it happen.'

She released herself. 'What others?'

'Does that matter?'

She pulled the face she and all her girlfriends pulled to denote they were talking to a moron. 'Hello!' she said. 'Does that matter?'

He reached for her cheek. 'What matters is that I loved and killed for the same reason.' He paused, waiting for a reaction. Was he expecting her to tell him it was all right. There, there a I forgive you. 'What attracted me,' he went on, as though he was working out his motives for the first time, 'repelled me.'

'You killed because you were repelled?'

'No, I killed because I was attracted.'

She wanted to go home now.

'Stay,' he said. 'Please stay.'

Rhoda stared into his ugly wet mouth and remembered a skull that had gone round the class during an anatomy lesson. Its mouth, too, though it had once been wired, fell open when the skull was passed from girl to girl.

'You mustn't think I'm going to be violent with you,' he said.