"HER NAME'S GRACE?"

"GRACE. YOU. THE. DAD."

And that was how he found out.

Suddenly, the feedback stopped. It was replaced by a bemused and muted applause. Now that he could talk, though, he didn't know what to say. He certainly didn't want to say what he was thinking: he was thinking about his work, his music, about Juliet Juliet and the tour. He was thinking that the combination of a child and and the tour. He was thinking that the combination of a child and Juliet Juliet would be a permanent and unbearable humiliation. It must already be so for Lisa. (And maybe that last thought redeemed him, he was hoping. It seemed to have an ethical dimension to it. Certainly it was a thought about somebody else. He hoped God caught that one, even though it had been kind of tacked on to the end of a lot of other stuff, all about himself.) would be a permanent and unbearable humiliation. It must already be so for Lisa. (And maybe that last thought redeemed him, he was hoping. It seemed to have an ethical dimension to it. Certainly it was a thought about somebody else. He hoped God caught that one, even though it had been kind of tacked on to the end of a lot of other stuff, all about himself.) "What are you going to do about it?" said Jerry.

"I'm not sure there's much I can do, is there? In most states, they don't allow abortions after the kid has actually been born."

"Nice," said Jerry. "Classy. You going to see her?"

"Good to meet you, Jerry."

Tucker drained his drink and put it down on the bar. He didn't want to talk to this guy about his responsibilities. He needed to be on his own, outside.

"I wasn't going to say this part," said Jerry. "But you seem like kind of a jerk, so what the hell?"

Tucker made a be-my-guest gesture.

"That record. Juliet Juliet. It's really full of shit, isn't it? I mean, I can see you wanted to fuck her. She's a good-looking girl, from the pictures I've seen. But all that drama? I don't buy it."

"Very wise," said Tucker. He gave Jerry an ironic salute and left. He was intending to walk straight out the door, but he needed to take a piss first. So that was kind of bathetic, because he ended up giving Jerry the same ironic salute on the way back from the restroom.

Years later, little knots of bedraggled fans started meeting together on the Internet, and that visit to the toilet started getting some serious analysis. Tucker was always amazed by their literal-mindedness. If Martin Luther King had needed to take a leak right before the "I Have a Dream" speech, would these people have come to the conclusion that he'd come up with the whole thing midflow? While Tucker was walking out of the restroom, his drummer, Billy, was on the way in; Billy's mind had been completely fucked by weed, so it was almost certainly Billy who'd decided that a mystical event had taken place in there. Tucker's conversation with Jerry had remained private, to Jerry's enormous and eternal credit.

On the way home he puked against a wall somewhere between the club and the motel. He was puking up cold cuts and red wine and Irish whiskey, but it felt like something else was coming out, too. And the next morning he called his manager. It wasn't such a big deal, really, that night, no matter what the people on the Internet said. He found out he was a father. He canceled a tour. That night, there were probably musicians all over America finding out and canceling-it's what musicians do. It wasn't as if the day after was a big deal, or the day after that, either, ad nauseam, six thousand times. It was a cumulative thing.

twelve.

At first, Annie was glad Tucker and Jackson were late. It gave her time to compose herself, think about the version of herself she wanted to present. Yes, there was some kind of connection between her and Tucker, maybe, but it was a gossamer cyberthread: blow on it and it would break. And yet, if he'd arrived right on the dot of three, she would probably have been unable to resist running up to him and throwing her arms around his neck, which was presuming a reciprocal depth of feeling for which she had no evidence whatsoever. By ten past, she had resolved to give him a friendly peck on the cheek, and ten minutes after that she was wondering whether the peck shouldn't be downgraded to a handshake, although she'd do that two-handed-clasp thing to convey warmth. By quarter to four, she didn't really like him very much anyway.

And, of course, if she'd known there was any chance of outrageous rudeness on this scale, she'd have suggested meeting somewhere other than Dickens's house in Doughty Street. There weren't any shops or cafes around, nowhere she could sit inside and watch the entrance to the museum while sipping on a cappuccino that would cost roughly the same as a terraced house back in Gooleness. She just had to stand there in the street, feeling stupid. And though she had known, somewhere inside her, that a feeling of foolishness would be an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of this silly flirtation (could a flirtation be as one-sided as this one, without becoming merely a crush?), she'd rather hoped that it would come later on, when he didn't reply to her e-mails afterward. It hadn't occurred to her that he simply wouldn't show up. But what did she expect? He was a reclusive recovering alcoholic former rock star. None of that suggested a person who'd trot up to a museum at three o'clock on the dot on a Thursday afternoon. What to do? After an hour, and after considering and then rejecting a tour of the house on her own (because she suddenly didn't love Dickens as much as she'd made out), she walked toward Russell Square. She'd given him her cell number, but he'd offered nothing in return-cunningly, she could see now. All she knew was that he was staying in his daughter's apartment, but even if she were detective enough to obtain the relevant details, she wouldn't call, and she certainly wouldn't knock on the door. She had some pride.

Somewhere in her she hadn't given up on him, otherwise she'd have gone back to her cheap and musty hotel room near the British Museum, collected her overnight bag and gone back to Gooleness on the train. She didn't want to, though. When she got to Russell Square, she saw a poster outside an arts theater advertising a French movie, and she sat on her own in the dark for a couple of hours, squinting at the subtitles. She set the phone to vibrate, and checked it every few minutes just in case she'd somehow failed to feel the vibrations, but there was no message, no missed call, no evidence that she'd ever arranged to meet anyone.

She only knew a couple of people who still lived in London, Linda in Stoke Newington and Anthony in Ealing; one by one her friends had paired off and moved out. Many of them were teachers that she'd met at college, and they'd decided that they might as well earn their measly salaries in towns that were cheaper to live in than London, at schools where the pupils were exposed to knife crime only through rap songs.

Annie tried Linda first, on the grounds that she worked at home and therefore might be in to answer the phone, and that, as far as she could tell, Stoke Newington was closer than Ealing. As luck would have it, Linda was in, and bored, and offered to drop what she was doing and come and take her out for cheap Indian food in Bloomsbury. Less fortunately, however, Linda was almost unbearably annoying, a quality Annie had completely forgotten until halfway through the three-minute phone call.

"Oh, my God! What are you doing down here?"

"I came down . . . Well, it was an Internet date, actually."

"There is so much in that last sentence which needs unpacking. First, what happened to the dreaded Duncan?"

To her surprise, Annie found herself stinging a little.

"He wasn't so dreaded. Not by me, anyway."

She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them.

"And second-what? It's over already? At six o'clock? Was it a speed date?" And she laughed maniacally at her own witticism.

"Oh, well. You win some and you lose some."

"And this one was a loser?"

Yes, Annie wanted to say. That's what the expression means, you dimwit. Nobody comes down from the Olympic rostrum with a gold medal around their neck and says "You win some, you lose some."

"I'm afraid so."

"Hold that thought. I'm comin' to getcha. See you in half an hour or so."

Annie squeezed her eyes shut and swore.

After Linda had crawled under the fence surrounding her north London high school, she'd set about making a living as a freelance journalist, writing about liposuction and cellulite and leather boots and cats and sex aids and cakes and just about anything else the more down-market women's magazines thought their readers might want to know about. Last time Annie had talked to her, she was just about getting by, although she gave the impression that the work was disappearing quickly down the Internet drain. Linda had hennaed hair and a loud voice, and whenever she and Annie met up, she always wanted Annie's "take" on something or other, Barack Obama, or a reality TV show she never watched, or a band she'd never heard of. Annie didn't really have a "take" on very much, really, unless a "take" was the same thing as an opinion, but she always had the feeling that it wasn't, that it was something altogether more aggressive, definitive and unusual. Even if Annie had any of these qualities, she wouldn't waste them on a "take." Linda lived with a man who was every bit as hopeless as Duncan, although for some reason everyone had to pretend that he wasn't, that his novel would get finished, and published, and recognized as a work of rare genius, and he could stop teaching English to Japanese businessmen.

"So?" said Linda, as they sat down in the restaurant, even before Annie had taken her coat off. "Pray tell all."

Maybe Linda and Duncan should get together, Annie thought. Then they could "pray tell" and "aghast" each other to death.

"I left Mike at home so we could have a proper girly chat."

"Oh, goody," said Annie. Were there two words in the English language that combined more dispiritingly than "girly" and "chat"?

"What did you do? Where did you go? What did you talk about?"

Annie wondered for a moment whether Linda was par odying interest. Nobody could be as fascinated by a damp Internet date as the width of her eyes suggested.

"Well." What would they have done? "We went for a cup of coffee, and then we went to see a French film at the cinema in Russell Square, and then . . . That was it, really."

"What happened at the end?"

"The woman found out her husband had been sleeping with a poet and she moved out."

"No, at the end of the date, stupid."

Typical Linda: she'd missed the admittedly mild witticism, but she made Annie seem like the idiot.

"Yes, I . . ."

Oh, what did it matter? It was all ridiculous. She had invented an Internet date, and the Internet date had been invented to replace another date that she was beginning to feel might have been half fantasy anyway. Why not continue on the same path and give Linda something to goggle at?

"We just said good-bye. It was . . . It was all slightly awkward, actually. He brought his girlfriend with him, and I think he was hoping . . ."

"Oh, my God!"

"I know."

If the story she was telling were ever to be published, she'd have to thank Ros in the acknowledgments, maybe even offer her coauthorship. According to Ros, that sort of thing would almost certainly have happened, if she had really met somebody over the Internet.

"It happens more than you think," said Annie. "The stories I could tell."

She was beginning to feel like a real novelist, suddenly. Her first fiction was semiautobiographical, but now that she had some confidence she was pushing off into deeper imaginative territory.

"Have you been doing a lot of Internet dating, then?"

"Not really." It was harder than it looked, storytelling. It involved chucking the truth out altogether, something that Annie clearly wasn't prepared to do just yet. "But the couple of dates I've been on were so weird that I could probably tell you five or six stories about each one."

Linda shook her head sympathetically. "I'm so glad I'm not out there."

"You're lucky."

This last sentiment wasn't a reflection of Annie's true feelings. The time she'd spent with Mike had led her to believe that Linda was one of the unluckiest people she had ever met.

"And Duncan?"

"He met somebody else."

"You're kidding me. I don't believe it. My God."

"He wasn't so bad."

"Oh, Annie! He was ghastly."

"Well, he was no Mike, true, but . . ."

Was that overdoing it? Surely even Linda could see that she was being satirical. But no. Linda just allowed a faint, smug smile to scud across her face. "Anyway. He met somebody else."

"Who on earth did he meet? If that's any of my beeswax."

"A woman called Gina who teaches with him at the college."

"She must be desperate."

"Lots of lonely people are."

It was a gentle rebuke, but it did the trick. Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded. She'd never have stood for an hour outside the Dickens Museum like that if she hadn't just been coming down with it.

Annie's cell phone rang just as the papadums were being served. She didn't recognize the number, which was why she took the call.

"Hello?"

The voice was deeper than she had imagined, but weaker, too-tremulous, almost.

"Is this Annie?"

"Yes."

"Hello. This is Tucker Crowe."

"Hello." The first word she had ever said to him, and it came encrusted with ice. "I hope you have a good excuse."

"Moderately good. Mildly good. I had a mild heart attack, pretty much as soon as I got off the plane. I wish I could tell you that it was more serious than that, but there we are. It was enough."

"Oh, my God. Are you okay?"

"I'm not so bad. Most of the damage seems to be psychic. Apparently I'm not going to live forever, as I previously thought."

"What can I do?"

"I'd welcome a visit from somebody outside my own family."

"Done. And what can I bring you? Do you need anything?"

"I could probably use some books. Something English and foggy. But not as foggy as Barnaby Rudge Barnaby Rudge."

Annie laughed a little more than Tucker would have understood, got the name of the hospital, ended the call and blushed. She was always blushing these days. Perhaps she was literally getting younger, shooting all the way backward to prepubescence. And the whole terrible business could start all over again.

"And was that one of your stories?" Linda asked her. "It looks like it, from the color you've turned."

"Well. Yes. I suppose he is."

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

Nobody, she discovered the next morning, ever waited impatiently outside a bookstore for it to open. She was on her own in the cold. She'd got to Charing Cross Road at eight-fifty, only to discover that none of them opened their doors before nine-thirty; she went for a coffee, came back, and at nine-thirty-one she was watching through the plate-glass door as the staff fiddled around with the displays in the front of the store. What were they doing? Surely they must have worked out that she wasn't hopping up and down because she needed a celebrity cookbook. It was just as well that nobody could die of a thirst for literature: these people would just leave you gasping on the sidewalk. Finally, finally, a young man with stubble and long, greasy hair unlocked the door and slid it back, and Annie wriggled through the gap.