"Oh no no no no no," it said. "This won't do at all."

Chapter 9.

Jenny.

She has a Glaswegian accent that her mother tried to educate out of her and failed. Her mother believed in getting on, her father believed in staying behind, and as a result they both remained exactly where they'd always been until the day after Jenny's eighteenth birthday, when they finally separated, never to see each other again.

I met her again, in my seventh life.

It was at a research conference in Edinburgh. My badge proclaimed, "Professor H. August, University College London" and hers, "Dr J. Munroe, Surgeon". I sat three rows behind her through an incredibly tedious lecture on the interaction of calcium ions in the periphery nervous system and watched the back of her neck, fascinated. I hadn't seen her face and couldn't be sure, but I knew. In the evening there were drinks and a meal of overcooked chicken and mashed potatoes with soggy peas. There was a band playing medium misses of the 1950s. I waited until the two men she was with grew drunk enough to dance, leaving her alone with the unclean plates and ruffled tablecloth. I sat down next to her and held out my hand.

"Harry," I explained.

"Professor August?" she corrected, reading my badge.

"Dr Munroe," I replied. "We've met before."

"Have we? I can't quite..."

"You studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and lived for the first year of your time in a small house in Stockbridge with four boys who were all frightened of you. You babysat for your next-door neighbour's twins to make a few more pennies, and decided that you had to be a surgeon after seeing a still-beating heart working away on the operating table."

"That's right," she murmured, turning her body a little further in the chair to look at me. "But I'm sorry, I still don't remember who you are."

"That's OK," I replied. "I was another one of the boys too scared to talk to you. Will you dance?"

"What?"

"Will you dance with me?"

"I... Oh God, are you trying a line with me? Is that what this is?"

"I am a happily married man," I lied, "with family in London and no ill intentions towards you. I admire your work and dislike seeing a woman left alone. If it will make you happier, as we dance we can discuss the latest developments in imaging technology and whether genetic predisposition or developmental sensory stimuli are more important in the growth of neuron pathways during childhood and pre-teens. Dance with me?"

She hesitated. Her fingers rolled the wedding ring round and round her finger, three diamonds on gold, gaudier than what I'd bought her in another life, a life that had died a long time ago. She looked towards the dance floor, saw safety in numbers and heard the band begin another tune designed to maintain strict social boundaries.

"All right," she said and took my hand. "I hope you've got your biochemical credentials polished."

We danced.

I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department.

She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a womanaand she judged them for being idiots. "The benefit being," she explained, "that I can be both a woman and a fucking brilliant surgeon, but they'll always only be idiots."

I asked if she was lonely.

"No," she said after a moment. She was not. She had peers she liked, colleagues she respected, family, friends.

She had two children.

Jenny had always wanted children.

I wondered if she'd like to have an affair with me.

She asked when I stopped being afraid of her, to get so lippy on the dance floor.

I said it was a lifetime ago, but she was still beautiful and I knew all her secrets.

"Did you not hear the part about my friends, colleagues, family, kids?"

Yes, I'd heard all of it, and all of it weighed with me when I spoke to her, cried out to walk away, leave her alone, for her life was complete and needed no more complexity. How much greater, I said, must the attraction I felt towards her be, that I could know all this and still whisper sweet allurements in her ear?

"Allurements? Is that what you call it?"

Run away with me, I said, just for a night. The world will turn, and all things will end, and people forget.

For a moment she looked tempted, and then her husband came along and took her hand, and he was loyal and loving and completely sane and what she wanted, and her temptation wasn't so much about me, as about the adventure.

Would I have done things differently, had I known what was to befall Jenny Munroe?

Perhaps not.

Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.

Chapter 10.

Back in the insanity, back in the broken place.

Franklin Phearson, in my fourth life, came to me in the hospital to wean me off one set of drugs, not for my benefit, but for his. His was the voice which stood over me as I lay motionless in my hospital bed and proclaimed, "What have you been giving this man? You said he'd be lucid."

His was the hand that steadied the stretcher as they pulled me out of the front door and into the waiting unmarked ambulance.

His were the hard soles on leather shoes which clacked on the marble steps of the grand hotel, empty for the season, the staff sent home, where eventually they deposited me in a bed of feathers and burgundy blankets, to dream and puke my way towards some kind of salvation.

Going cold turkey from any drug is unpleasant; from antipsychotics it is a mixed blessing. Certainly I desired death, and they strapped me down to prevent my achieving it. Certainly I knew that all was lost and I with it, that I was cursed and there was no escape, and I longed to lose my mind entirely and push out my eyes and live in madness. And certainly I do not, even now, even with my memory, recall the very worst of those times, but rather remember it all as if it happened to another man. And certainly I know I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that again, and know that, while the door may currently be locked, there is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling. They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect. I do not want to die at this present moment, though the circumstances of this present writing will dictate my course. I remember that I have wanted it, and it was real.

There was no moment of light, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured in that place. Rather there was a slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few hours of reconciliation followed by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed awake a little longer. There was a slow restoration of human dignity: clean clothes, my hands freed at last, the scars around my wrists and ankles cleaned of crispy blood. I was permitted to feed myself, first under supervision in my bed, then under supervision by the window, then under supervision down the stairs, and at last on the patio that looked across a croquet lawn and towards a rolling green garden, where the supervision tried to pretend it was simply a friend. I was permitted to clean myself, all sharp objects removed from the bathroom and guards outside, but I barely cared and sat in the shower until my skin was a crinkled raisin and the boiler upstairs began to shudder with distress. A scraggly beard had been growing on my chin, and they brought in a barber who tutted and twitched and splattered me with Italian oils and told me in the loud voice reserved for children, "Your face is your fortune! Don't spend it all at once!"

Franklin Phearson had been a face on the edge of all this, by whose aloofness I could only assume he was in charge. He sat two tables away from me as I ate, was at the end of the corridor when I left the bathroom and was, I concluded, the man responsible for the two-way mirror in my bedroom, which provided constant monitoring of my room and was only revealed by the slow whirr of the surveillance camera lens as it adjusted its focus.

Then one breakfast he sat with me, no longer apart, and said, "You're looking much better."

I drank my tea carefully, as I drank all things carefully in that place, little sips to test for toxins, and replied, "I feel better. Thank you."

"It may please you to know that Dr Abel has been fired."

He said it so easily, newspaper folded on his lap, eyes half-running over the crossword clues, that I didn't fully grasp his meaning at the first rendition. But the words had been spoken, so I said again, as a neutral child had once spoken to my father, "Thank you."

"I applaud his intentions," went on Phearson, "but his methods were unsound. Would you like to see your wife?"

I counted silently to ten before I dared give an answer. "Yes. Very much."

"She's very distraught. She doesn't know where you are, thinks you've run away. You can write to her. Put her mind at ease."

"I'd like that."

"There will be financial compensation for her. Maybe a trial for Dr Abel. Maybe a petition, who knows?"

"I just want to see her again," I replied.

"Soon," he replied. "We'll aim to take up as little of your time as possible."

"Who are you?"

He threw the newspaper aside at this with a sudden energy, as if he'd been pent up waiting for that question. "Franklin Phearson, sir," he replied, thrusting out a flat pink hand. "An honour to make your acquaintance at last, Dr August."

I looked at the hand and didn't shake it. He retreated it with a little flap, as if it had never been intended for shaking at all but was rather an exercise in muscle relaxation. The newspaper was retrieved from the tabletop and flicked open to the domestic news, which promised strike action yet to come. I ran my spoon over the surface of my cereal and watched the milk ripple beneath it.

"So," he said at last, "you know the future."

I put my spoon down carefully on the side of my bowl, wiped my lips, folded my hands and sat back in my chair.

He wasn't looking at me, eyes fixed on the newspaper.

"No," I replied. "It was a psychotic episode."

"Some break."

"I was ill. I need help."

"Yeap," he sang out, snapping the pages of his newspaper taut with a merry flick of the wrist. "That's bu-ll-shit." He enjoyed the word so much it brought a quiver of a smile to the corners of his lips, and he seemed almost to consider saying it again, just to savour the experience.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Franklin Phearson, sir. I said."

"Who do you represent?"

"Why can't I represent myself?"

"But you don't."

"I represent a number of interested agencies, organisations, nations, partiesawhatever you want to call them. The good guys, basically. You want to help the good guys, don't you?"

"And how would I help, if I could?"

"Like I said, Dr August, you know the future."

A silence brushed between us like a cobweb in a gloomy house. He no longer pretended to read his newspaper, and I unashamedly studied his face. At length I said, "There are some obvious questions I need to ask. I suspect I know the answers, but as we are being so frank with each other..."

"Of course. This should be an honest relationship."

"If I was to attempt to leave, would I be allowed?"

He grinned. "Well, that's an interesting one. Permit me to answer with a question of my own: if you were to leave, where the hell do you think you could go?"

I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, feeling healing scars and fresh tears in the soft skin of my cheeks and lips. Then, "If I had this knowledgeawhich I don'tawhat use would you make of it?"

"That kinda depends on what it is. If you tell me that the West will come out of this conflict triumphant, that good wins and the bad fall beneath the righteous sword, then hell, I'll be the first guy to buy you a bottle of champagne and a slap-up feast at the brasserie of your choosing. If, on the other hand, you happen to know the dates of massacres, of wars and battles, of men murdered and crimes committed, well then, siraI cannot tell a lieawe may have to be in conversation a little while longer."

"You seem very ready to believe that I do know something of the future, whereas everyoneaincluding my wifeabelieves it to be a delusion."

He sighed and folded his newspaper away entirely, as if even the option of pretence were no longer of any interest to him. "Dr August," he replied, leaning across the table towards me, hands folded beneath his chin, "let me ask you something, in this spirit of free and frank conversation. Have you in all your travelsayour many, many travelsaheard of the Cronus Club?"

"No," I replied honestly. "I haven't. What is it?"

"A myth. One of those wry footnotes academics put at the bottom of a text to liven up a particularly dull passage, a kind of 'incidentally, some say this and isn't that quaint' fairy tale shoved into the small print at the back of an unread tome."

"And what does this small print say?"

"It says..." he replied, letting out a huff of breath with the weary resignation of the regular storyteller. "It says that there are people, living among us, who do not die. It says that they are born, and they live, and they die and they live again, the same life, a thousand times. And these people, being as they are infinitely old and infinitely wise, get together sometimesano one really knows whereaand have... Well, it depends on which text you're reading what they have. Some say conspiratorial meetings in white robes, others go for orgies at which the next generation of their kin are created. I don't believe in either, because the Klan has really dented the white-robe fashion down South, and orgies are everyone's first bet."

"And this is the Cronus Club?"

"Yes, sir," he replied brightly. "Like the Illuminati without the glamour, or the Masons without the cufflinks, a self-perpetuating society spread across the ages for the infinite and the timeless. I had to investigate it because someone said the Russians were, and from what I can tell it's a fantasy created by a very bored mind, but then... then someone like you comes along, Dr August, and that really throws off my paperwork."

"You think that because my delusions correspond to an old wives' tale there must be something to it?"

"God no, not at all! I think that because your delusions correspond to the truth, there must be something in it. And so," a flash of a grin as he leaned back easily into his chair, "here we are."

Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me.

"May I have some time to think about it?" I asked.