"Cool," said Jackson. "Because I don't like it when jokes are funny for everybody else."

"Anyway," said Tucker. "All in all, I'm a long way from being me at the moment."

"Exactly."

"Do I have to go to all the trouble of proving it?"

"The trouble is, he knows more about Tucker Crowe than you do."

"Yeah, but I have the documentation."

About fifteen minutes later, Duncan called her on her cell phone. She was outside the museum with Tucker and Jackson, fishing around in her bag for her work keys: the charms of Gooleness had been exhausted already, so, much earlier than anticipated, she was about to show her guests pieces of long-dead shark.

"I can't believe you did that," said Duncan.

"I haven't actually done anything," said Annie.

"If you want to make a sad spectacle of yourself around town with someone old enough to be your dad, then that's up to you. But the Tucker business . . . What's the point? Why would you do that?"

"I'm actually with him now," said Annie. "So this is slightly embarrassing."

Tucker waved at the mouthpiece.

"You should have thought about that before you made him take part in your juvenile games."

"It's not a game," said Annie. "That was Tucker Crowe. Still is. You can ask him any question about himself, if you want."

"Why are you doing this?" said Duncan.

"I'm not doing anything."

"I sent you a picture of Tucker Crowe a few weeks ago. You know what he looks like. He doesn't look like a retired accountant."

"That wasn't him. That was his neighbor John. Also known as Fake Tucker, or Fucker, because of a misunderstanding that people like you have spread all over the Internet."

"Oh, for God's sake. So how did you meet 'Tucker Crowe,' actually?"

"He e-mailed me about that review of Juliet, Naked Juliet, Naked I wrote." I wrote."

"E-mailed you."

"Yes."

"You post up one piece and you get an e-mail from Tucker Crowe."

"Listen, Duncan, Tucker and Jackson are standing here and it's cold and . . ."

"Jackson."

"Tucker's son."

"Oh, he's got a son now, has he? And where did he appear from?"

"You know how babies are made, Duncan. Anyway. You saw a picture of Jackson on my fridge."

"I saw a picture of your retired accountant and his grandson on your fridge. This is a circuitous argument."

"It's not an argument. Listen, I'll call you later. You can come round for tea if you want. Bye."

And she hung up on him.

Ros had worked hard over the couple of days Annie had spent in London. The day before she left, the two of them had gone over to Terry Jackson's house to rummage through his collection of Gooleness memorabilia and had ended up taking most of it, in the absence of anything else to show; Terry's wife, denied the use of a spare bedroom for the whole of her married life because of all the old bus tickets and newspapers, was insisting that it was a gift, not a loan. Terry had been unable to provide any kind of budget for the exhibition, so they were using anything they had on hand-old photo frames, unused dusty cases-to display his stuff. A lot of it was still in garbage bags, a conservation decision that would get them thrown out of the Museums Association if anyone ever found out.

"Gross," said Jackson, when Annie showed him the eye.

Annie admired his determination to say the right things, but the eye didn't really stare at you, in the way that Annie and Ros had hoped it might, mostly because it didn't really look like an eye any longer, unfortunately. They had decided to keep it in the exhibition because of what it said about the people of Gooleness, rather than what it said about sharks, although they would not be explaining their decision to the people of Gooleness.

Tucker liked Terry's Stones poster, though, and he loved the photograph of the four pals on their day out at the seaside.

"Why does it make me feel sad?" he said. "Even though they're happy? I mean, sure, they're all old or dead now. But it's more than that, I think."

"I have exactly the same reaction. It's because their leisure time was so precious, I think. We have so much, by comparison, and we get to do so much more with it. When I first saw it, I'd just had this three-week holiday trekking around the U.S., and . . ." She stopped.

"What?"

"Oh," she said. "You don't know about that, either."

"What?"

"My American holiday."

"No," said Tucker. "But then, we only met recently. There are probably a few holidays I need to catch up on."

"But this one should have come up in the full disclosure section of our conversation."

"Why?"

"We went to Bozeman, Montana. And the site of some studio that isn't there anymore in Memphis. And Berkeley. And the toilet in the Pits Club in Minneapolis . . ."

"Shit, Annie."

"I'm sorry."

"Why did you go with him?"

"It seemed like as good a way of seeing America as any. I enjoyed it."

"You went to San Francisco to stand outside Julie Beatty's house?"

"Ah. No. Not guilty. I let him get on with it. I went to San Francisco to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and to do some shopping."

"So this guy Duncan . . . he's like a real stalker."

"I suppose he is."

For a moment, Annie felt a little pang of envy. It wasn't that she'd ever wanted Duncan to stalk her, exactly. She didn't want to see him hiding behind her hedge, or ducking behind a supermarket aisle when she was doing her shopping. But she wouldn't have minded if he'd had the same appetite for her that he'd shown for Tucker. She had only just realized that the man talking to her now was much more of a rival than another woman could ever be.

Duncan poured himself an orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table.

"Gina."

"Yes, my sweet."

She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the Guardian Guardian magazine. magazine.

"What do you think are the chances of Tucker Crowe being in Gooleness?"

She looked at him.

"The Tucker Crowe?" Tucker Crowe?"

"Yes."

"This Gooleness?" Gooleness?"

"Yes."

"I'd say the chances were very slim indeed. Why? Do you think you just saw him?"

"Annie says I did."

"Annie says you did."

"Yes."

"Well, without knowing why she said it, I'd have to say that she's winding you up."

"That's what I think."

"Why did she tell you that? It seems quite a peculiar thing to say. And quite cruel, given your . . . interests."

"I was jogging along the beach, and she was there with a, a respectable-looking middle-aged man and a young boy. And I stopped, and introduced myself to the man, and he said he was Tucker Crowe."

"That must have been a bit of a shock to you."

"I just couldn't understand why she made him say it. I mean, it's not very clever. Or funny. And then I just called her from the bedroom before my shower and she's sticking to her story."

"Did he look like Tucker Crowe?"

"No. Not at all."

They found their eyes straying over to the mantel-piece, and the photograph he'd brought with him when he'd moved in: Tucker onstage, maybe at the Bottom Line, sometime in the late seventies. Duncan could feel the beginnings of another little panic, rather like the panic he'd felt the other night when he was talking to Gina about Juliet Juliet. The man he saw on the beach this morning wasn't the man who'd sung "Farmer John" in a club a few weeks ago, that was for sure. And the man he saw on the beach this afternoon definitely wasn't the man in the famous Neil Ritchie shot, the wild man lunging for the camera. What was troubling Duncan now was that, for the first time, he'd begun to wonder whether the young man on the mantel-piece could possibly be the crazy person with the matted hair who'd tried to attack Ritchie. They looked nothing like each other, really. Their eyes were different, their noses were different, their coloring was different. He'd never for a second doubted the wisdom of the Crowologists until now; he'd accepted the Neil Ritchie story as a piece of history, fact. Except-and these panics were coming thick and fast now-Neil Ritchie was an idiot. Duncan had never met him, but his ignorance, his rudeness and his self-importance were common knowledge, and Duncan had had an e-mail from him a few years back that had been offensive and a little deranged. Neil Ritchie was a man who'd traveled God knows how many miles in order to invade the privacy of a long-retired singer-songwriter who didn't want to be disturbed. This, let's face it, was not normal behavior. And yet this was the man Duncan was prepared to trust more than Annie and the pleasant-looking chap on the beach? If one took the two Farmer John pictures out of the equation and put glasses on the singer in the Bottom Line picture, changed his hair color to silver, trimmed it . . .

"Oh, God," said Duncan.

"What?"

"I can't think of any good reason why that man would introduce himself as Tucker Crowe unless he actually was."

"Really?"

"Annie's not really a cruel person. And the person on the beach looked a little bit like the person in that picture. Except older."

"And did she explain how she knew him?"

"She said he wrote to her. Out of the blue. After she posted that review of Naked Naked on our website." on our website."

"If that's true," said Gina, thoughtfully, "then you must want to hang yourself."

Unfortunately, Duncan was not physically capable of jogging through the streets of Gooleness for the second time in less than an hour, so he had to settle for a brisk walk, with occasional pauses. He needed the time to think, anyway; there was a lot to think about.

Duncan had not been a regretful man, not until recently. However, over the last few weeks, he had found himself wishing that he had done a lot of things differently. He had been impulsive, and overeager, and lacking in judgment. He'd got a lot of things wrong, and he hated himself for it. And the thing he'd got most wrong, he'd come to realize, was Juliet, Naked Juliet, Naked. What had he been thinking of? Why had he responded like that? After about five more plays, the songs in their acoustic form had started to pall; after ten, he'd decided he didn't want to hear the album again. Not only was it a weak, malnourished, puny thing, but it had started to diminish the magnificence of Juliet Juliet: who wanted to see the rusty old innards of a work of art, really? It was of interest to scholars, and he was a scholar. But how had he come to the conclusion that it was better than the original? He knew part of the answer to that question: he'd had access to Naked Naked before any of his peers, and to post a review saying that it was dull and pointless would have thrown away his advantage. But then that's what art is, sometimes, he always felt: something that confers advantages. His had come at a cost, though. He'd had currency, but the exchange rate turned out to be dismally low. Why hadn't he just taken the wretched review down? He turned back-to run home to his computer-and then spun around again. He'd do it later. before any of his peers, and to post a review saying that it was dull and pointless would have thrown away his advantage. But then that's what art is, sometimes, he always felt: something that confers advantages. His had come at a cost, though. He'd had currency, but the exchange rate turned out to be dismally low. Why hadn't he just taken the wretched review down? He turned back-to run home to his computer-and then spun around again. He'd do it later.

All that, and now this. If it was true that Tucker Crowe was in Gooleness-staying in his old house-then he had many other reasons to mourn the temporary desertion of his critical faculties. If he hadn't been so irritated by Annie's indifference, they might not have split up, and they might have met Tucker together. If he'd posted the same kind of review that Annie had written, Tucker might have e-mailed him. It was all too much, really. He'd lived his whole life cautiously, and on the one occasion when he'd screwed his caution up into a ball and thrown it to the wind it had ended like this. (And there was Gina, too, of course, which was another narrative strand in the same story. Gina was, metaphorically, Naked Naked, and her literal nakedness, or the offer of it, had only served to underline the aptness of the metaphor. He'd jumped too quickly there, too.) Most of his adult life he'd wanted to meet Tucker Crowe, or at least to be in the same room, and here he was, possibly on the verge of realizing that ambition, and he was scared. If Tucker had read Annie's piece, then the chances were he'd have read Duncan's, too. Presumably he'd hated it, and hated its author. Tucker Crowe knows who I am, thought Duncan, and he hates me! Is that possible? Surely he'd recognize and appreciate the passion for the work, at least. Wouldn't he? Or would he hate that, too? It would be better for everyone if, after all, Annie were playing some kind of cruel and juvenile trick. He turned toward Gina's place for a second time, thought better of it again.

And in the middle of all these doubts and anxieties, all this self-loathing, Duncan found himself trying to think of test questions that would either prove Tucker was who he said he was or expose him as a fraud. It was difficult, though. Duncan had to concede that Tucker Crowe was an even greater authority on the subject of Tucker Crowe than Duncan Thomson. If he were to ask him, say, who played that pedal steel on "And You Are?" and Tucker insisted that it wasn't Sneaky Pete Kleinow, that the album sleeve was wrong, then who was he to argue? Tucker would know, surely. He could win those arguments every time. No, he needed something different, something that only the two of them could possibly know about. And he thought he had it.

When Annie saw Duncan skulking on the other side of her front hedge, obviously trying to summon up the courage necessary to knock on what was, until comparatively recently, his own front door, and trying to peek through the window without anybody noticing, she almost hooted at the irony. Less than two hours before, she'd been quietly lamenting his lack of passion for her, her inability to provoke in him the desire to hide behind her hedge trying to catch a glimpse of her; and now here he was, doing exactly that. And then very quickly she realized that there was no irony here at all. Duncan was hiding behind her hedge because Tucker Crowe was in her kitchen. She was still not enough, in exactly the same way she hadn't been enough before.

She opened the front door.

"Duncan! Don't be an idiot. Come in."