'I don't know what it means.'

He shivered, and she put a hand on his arm. 'I don't believe in stuff like this as a rule. But it does sound weird.'

Justin sat wreathed in gloom, as Agnes waved to the waitress and ordered tea, then looked at him carefully. 'Aside from the voices, how are you?'

'OK, I guess. I get a lot of strange looks at school.'

'Good strange or bad strange?'

'Both.' He sighed.

'Are you complaining?'

Justin looked glum. 'Not exactly. Only, I guess I was hoping...'

She waited.

'I was hoping to feel better. Safer.'

'And you don't?'

'Even when I'm not hearing voices, or imagining being murdered by snipers, I feel like a blinking neon sign. When girls look at me I feel like the cheese in a mousetrap.'

'There's a word for that, Justin. l.u.s.t. It means they fancy you. It's because you look good.'

She met his eyes and for a fleeting instant experienced a whirring sensation in her blood. Then raised her camera and clicked off a shot. Portrait.

'It's supposed to feel good,' she said gently. 'It's supposed to make you feel desirable.'

Justin looked at her. 'It's not me they want. It's some strange hybrid-me made up of new clothes and insomnia.'

'Look, Justin, you're fifteen for Christ's sake. What do you want? Everyone changes. I wore Moroccan gowns with African combs in my hair when I was fifteen.'

'It's not all about style.'

She groaned. 'Don't tell me what it's all about, Mr Wisdom of the Ages. I know it's not all about style. You're the one who wanted a new ident.i.ty. I'm the one who occasionally suggests that fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.'

She glared at him.

'Jesus, Justin. I don't believe in any of this stuff anyway. But you're not an idiot, or schizophrenic, as far as I can tell, so I listen. Do I believe there's some supernatural force out to get you? Look at it from my point of view. I never believed in the tooth fairy. This doesn't seem a good place to start.'

He managed a rather formal smile and stood up to leave. 'Thank you for listening to me, Agnes. I know I'm a pain.'

'Sit down, for G.o.d's sake, don't run away.' But she felt the flaw between them, the imperfect connection.

Agnes opened her bag and handed him an oversized magazine printed on heavy matte paper. 'Take this, anyway,' she said. 'It's just out today.'

He rolled the magazine up like a weapon and left the cafe. Halfway home, he dropped it in a bin.

Agnes watched him go and sighed. Such an exasperating boy. Exasperating, too, that it was beyond her powers to put him right.

18.

At school the next day, a girl approached Justin. She was dark-haired and beautiful, with a scornful pout and perfect almond eyes. His peripheral vision automatically searched for her sn.i.g.g.e.ring cronies lurking in a corner.

She carried an oversized magazine pressed flat against her chest like a shield.

'You're Justin, aren't you.' She spoke without inflection, looking everywhere in the room but at him.

'Yes.'

'Great pictures, Justin.'

What pictures?

She spoke to the opposite wall this time. 'So. You going to Angel's party?'

Justin blinked.

'Well,' she repeated, slightly annoyed, 'you going?'

He stared at the girl. She had the most agonizingly seductive, contemptuous eyes.

'I don't even know your name.'

'Shireen.' She sighed impatiently.

How perfectly the name suited her, shimmery and sheer, sensuous, serene.

'So?' She gazed at the ceiling with irritation, flicking her nails.

He was desperate to say yes, go to the party, bring her alcoholic punch in a plastic cup, walk home with her afterwards in the cold night air, offering his coat and putting his arm round her shoulders for warmth. He was desperate to dance with her, kiss her goodnight when they reached her door, press his virgin lips to her silky pink mouth; he was desperate to see her again, make a date for coffee, the cinema. He wanted to sit close to her in the dark, breathe the flowery female scent of her, feel the brush of her glossy hair against his face; he wanted to nuzzle her neck, tell her he loved her and then slip his hand inside her padded push-up bra, stroke the delicate skin of her breast, feel the crinkly nipple between his fingers. He gasped, and shoved a hand in his pocket, pressing his quivering erection flat against his groin.

Boy growled.

'No.' The word erupted from somewhere near his solar plexus: half suspicion, half alarm. He didn't trust her. She was b.o.o.by-trapped. Wired to explode in his face. A Venus landmine. 'Thanks, anyway,' he added, eyes glued to a poster just behind her describing the Heimlich manoeuvre.

Shireen stalked off, shoulders hunched in furious humiliation.

Justin went home and changed into sweats. It was drizzling; the pavements shone with oily water reflecting images of the miserable suburban street. He called Boy, who lifted his head far enough to see the thin curtain of grey rain, then put it down again.

'Sill-ee-Boy!' chortled his brother.

Justin looked at Charlie impatiently. 'Oh yeah? Well, what would you have done?'

The startled child gathered his thoughts.

I'm not entirely sure what the circ.u.mstances are, he said, but as a general rule I try to keep things simple. If I'm clear about what I want, other people have an easier time making me happy. It sounds basic, but most of the time it works.

'Duck.' He spoke clearly, pointing to a wooden duck.

Automatically, Justin got up and fetched the duck.

'See?' said Charlie.

As if a one-year-old could sort out his problems, Justin thought. He patted his brother's head and went out alone, trailing self-pity like a snail.

Charlie looked at the duck and sighed.

Justin closed the front door behind him and set off, making a point to stamp in every puddle as he ran along. He needed the sensation of shattering house after house until the only structures left in his neighbourhood were abstract shiny fragments of brick and pebble-dash. The filthy rainwater soaked into his trainers and socks but he didn't notice. You run today, he said to his legs, to his thighs, his b.u.t.tocks, his ankles, his elbows, his torso, his shoulders and knees. You get on with the mechanics, I've got things to think about.

His body, eager to be of service, obeyed.

Somewhere, quietly in the background, he heard the steady beat beat beat of his feet on the pavement, reliable and automatic. In the foreground his thoughts floated free, riding his body's wake as it flew through the grim outskirts of Luton.

For a while he let his eyes half-close and felt the damp breeze cooling his feverish brain. He tried to empty it, pull the plug on the humiliations of the day and let them flood out behind him on to the road like bathwater. And then slowly, gradually, he began to inhale thoughts to fill it again. He breathed in deeply through his nose, and into the empty cave of his skull flowed the swirling vapours of people, ideas, desires.

He inhaled Agnes, fluorescent lime and sparkly. He was her TV makeover project, the one where a SWAT team revamps your kitchen, bathroom, garden, wardrobe, s.e.x life. In hope and desperation, he had given her his brief for a new body and soul, and she was doing her best to comply. It wasn't her fault the experiment was a failure.

Agnes wasn't disdainful, he was convinced her affection for him was at least partially genuine. It was the why that puzzled him. Perhaps to her, he was the ultimate charity case, malleable, desperate and faintly entertaining. She obviously wasn't interested in him, interested in that way. Was she? Could s.e.xual feeling be totally one-sided? While he ached with l.u.s.t, was she thinking about shoelaces?

There was so much he didn't know.

He thought about Peter, cheerful as chocolate, forever coasting on some gentle equatorial current. What was it about Peter? What clause of exemption allowed him to be gawky, uncool and invulnerable?

Then there was fate, that soft presence, the seducer at the edge of the abyss, luring him into the path of danger, lulling him into a comfortable sense of security, enticing him into a sh.e.l.l game he was guaranteed to lose.

He felt worn out from turning left when he meant to go right, saying no instead of yes.

And yet. If he stepped on a crack...

His life stretched before him like some diabolical obstacle course. The mines had been hidden, dug deep into the ground. He merely had to predict their positions and avoid blowing himself to kingdom come.

He left the pavement and began to run along the verge. The uneven surface caused him to stumble.

Think about something else, he told himself. Something pleasant. He thought about Shireen's peculiar come-on. He inhaled the thought of his encounter with her, gold, fragrant and heavy with the incense of ambiguity. He concentrated hard, letting her fill him, pushing fate out of his brain, replacing its gloomy miasma with her imperious s.e.xual buzz. In his head he explored her body, ran his hand down the sensuous curve of her contempt, closed his eyes and buried his face in the sullen, silky weight of her indifference. He let his heart pump her bright aura through his veins like morphine, like adrenalin, warming and energizing the machine, causing it to glide, accelerate.

There was no affection in his recollection of their encounter, no fantasy that they would walk hand in hand sharing little jokes and pet names. Instead, he fast-forwarded to the party where they might have danced sweatily to some trendy DJ. He'd have taken her hand and led her through the teeming crowd to a quieter place, a bedroom where they would fumble for each other, igniting something panting and desperate and then follow it through, not to the point of humiliation and terror, but far enough to make him feel less like a huge pulsing pink neon sign reading VIRGIN.

Sprinting, panting, exhausted, he felt the final shreds of gilded cloud dissipate, leaving him alone, a lost boy in a bleak landscape, his brain weighed down with the grim reality of his life. It wasn't Shireen he was interested in anyway. Almost any girl, it seemed, could cause his body to respond, inspire a spasm of grateful s.e.xual desire. He was at the mercy of the entire female s.e.x. His weakness made him vulnerable to the worst sort of danger. He would enter the swamp like a blind man, slip slowly down into the sucking whirlpool of the unknown, waving. Drowning.

He stopped running, finally, hands on knees, breathing hard, checked his watch, and waited while his brain drifted back into his body. He felt the pain dripping down his left hamstring, chest heaving, face hot, feet sodden and blistering.

He had left Luton behind, reached the outskirts of Toddington. Twelve miles. It was pouring now. All around him the world was slowly turning to mud. Tired and soaked, he began limping home.

19.

Shireen went to Angel's party with Alex. Alex had a car, plenty of confidence and no brain to speak of. He was definitely not gay.

Alex and Shireen could have been matched by cla.s.s vote, so compatible were their vital statistics: identical good looks, identical social status, identical att.i.tudes of genetic superiority in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. At Angel's party they danced together, drank plastic cupfuls of cheap red wine and snogged sweatily in the corner. Alex pushed Shireen down on a pile of coats, put one hand under her bra, and with the other guided her perfectly manicured fingers down to the tangled bulge at his crotch. He moaned, and Shireen turned her face away, faintly disgusted.

Eventually they left together and spent a steamy half-hour in Alex's car, during which Shireen provided the requisite s.e.xual satisfaction. Her new boyfriend did not return the favour, a fact she might have resented had she given it much thought.

In any case, the pairing stuck. From that evening, Shireen and Alex attended cla.s.s together, ate lunch together, did homework together. They only avoided full s.e.xual intercourse together due to Shireen's squeamishness about bodily fluids and Alex's squeamishness about condoms.

Everyone at school knew about their attachment and felt cheered, secure in the knowledge that all things find their proper level; that the world is run by strict, transparent rules, and that elegant constructions rule romance as well as nature.

The information reached Justin, who feigned indifference.

Inwardly, however, he felt depressed by his growing collection of missed opportunities. The fact that he wasn't particularly interested in Shireen didn't stop him from feeling that he had failed to grasp the potential of their fledgling relationship. Not only was he a failure as a possible boyfriend, but his fate had expanded to include indifference and insignificant failures piling up inch by miserable inch to create an Everest of wasted effort, a teetering peak from which he would eventually fall to his death.

Agnes seemed to have forgotten he existed, or at least that was how he interpreted her silence. Ten times a day he sat immobilized in front of the telephone, rehearsing casual conversations in his head. For the first few days, Boy had watched intently, curious and encouraging. But even he gave up when it became obvious that Justin could not bring himself to act.

He took to his bed, told his mother it was flu, and stayed there for days, tossing in a fever of self-doubt. His mother knocked tentatively on the bedroom door each morning, felt his head and p.r.o.nounced him 'not quite so warm as last time'.

Not warm at all, he thought. Frigid, in fact.

The ring ring ring of the telephone disturbed his dreams. Eventually he answered it.

'What's happened to you?' Agnes was irate. 'You've dropped off the face of the earth. What did you think of the pictures?'

'What pictures?'

What pictures? Agnes shook her head. He was some cool character, that Justin Case. 'Never mind. When can we meet?'

'I'm not well.'

She snorted. 'You don't sound ill. You sound depressed. When was the last time you went out?'

He could hear her frown. 'I went running a few days ago.'

'Aside from running. School, the shops, a film, a friend. Anything.'