She was vanishing around a corner before Hugh moved, and he was afraid she would be out of sight by the time he reached the junction. She was waiting more or less patiently for him, however, and he followed in her faintly spicy wake until a fourth turn brought them out of the market on the far side from the library. As he blinked both ways along the narrow street Hugh felt more lost than ever, unable to recognise left or right or to determine what became of them if he turned around. 'All right now?' his guide said and peered at him. 'Where are you wanting to go?'

The answer was almost too desperate for words. 'Home,' he begged.

'Just stay there.'

She trotted into the market and was lost to view before Hugh thought of a response. Did she mean he shouldn't have left home while he was in this state? He was trying to prepare to venture one way or the other in the desperate hope that some familiar landmark would restore his bearings when the male grocer emerged from the market. His frown made Hugh wonder if he intended to deal with some slight to his wife, especially since he complained 'You still have not said your name.'

'Hugh Lucas,' Hugh felt powerless for confessing.

'Rakesh.' The man delivered a terse soft loose handshake and turned away. 'Come quickly now.'

'Where?'

Rakesh renewed his frown over his shoulder. 'You are on the corner, are you not?'

'Of what?' Hugh pleaded, feeling yet more disoriented.

'Of the road.' Having gazed at him and seen no comprehension, Rakesh added, 'The road where we live.'

In a moment, far too tardily, Hugh recognised him. He and his wife and twin daughters lived at the far end of the terrace opposite Hugh's. 'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I didn't know you at first,' Hugh babbled and, as his face grew hotter, couldn't stop. 'It's just that I'm, you know, you saw how I am.'

Rakesh gave him a last slow blink before facing forwards. 'I will take you home.'

He led Hugh to a white van speckled with rust above its wheels and watched closely until his pa.s.senger was strapped in. A devious series of turns led to the ring road, which the van hardly sooner joined than left. As he drove past a factory into the sudden shade of trees Rakesh said, 'I hope our girls will not see you like this. You should be careful of whatever you are doing.'

It was clear that he had drugs in mind. Hugh would have denied ever touching them a at least, the single joint he'd shared with Rory had left him coughing tearfully for several minutes a if the foliage hadn't loosed the sun, bleaching his vision. As the van swerved into a street and then another the pallor drained away, reinstating the shapes of houses along with their sandy colour. 'Do you know where you are now?' Rakesh said, halting the van.

Clothes flapped on lines in the narrow front gardens, dancers pranced on plasma screens in more than one front room. As Hugh released the seat belt and clambered clumsily out of the vehicle, he heard a sitar racing up a scale, pursued by the drumming of a tabla. He was home. He thanked Rakesh, who watched him hurry up the weedy path through the weedier garden to the house at the windy end of the terrace. When he unlocked the door he tried to find the house a hall and two rooms downstairs, three rooms and a bathroom above a rea.s.suring in its simplicity. There was surely no s.p.a.ce to get lost in it, and he did his best to believe that only the sunlight had distracted him during the journey. That didn't quite explain why he had absolutely no idea which way he'd just come home.

ELEVEN.

He shouldn't keep putting Hugh down, Rory thought. It was such a habit that Hugh seemed to expect it if not invite it, but it did neither of them any good. When had Rory fallen into it? Perhaps once their parents had betrayed they found Hugh's teacher training worthier of respect than Rory's ambitions, and their refusal to own up only made it worse. 'You do whatever makes you happy, Rory,' their mother would say, to which their father invariably responded 'n.o.body can do more than they can.' There was no arguing with this, or rather if he tried to they would deny that they'd meant to criticise him and look unfairly criticised themselves. He'd suspected that they wished he had Hugh's discretion, which he would call timidity if not cowardice. The worst row had been over the house, when they'd implied he was being racist for suggesting that they wanted to move not just south but somewhere whiter than the district had become, though it hadn't been Rory or indeed his brother who'd kept acting pained by the sight of a sari outside their property or the least hint of spice in the air. 'You boys can have it all to yourselves,' their father had said as if, having forgiven Rory for disappointing his parents again, they had to treat him just like Hugh, while their mother declared 'They need their own s.p.a.ce at their age.' They hadn't had much in their student accommodation, but once their parents moved to the Norfolk seaside, all the room in the house had begun to seem less than enough. Living with Hugh was the problem a with his oppressive eagerness to please, his insistence on putting his brother first whenever possible, his dogged willingness to help in any way he could and quite a few he couldn't, his mottled embarra.s.sment at being proved inadequate. Rory had given none of those as reasons for moving out within a year, and he wouldn't have admitted leaving behind so many temptations to disparage his brother. Nevertheless he could hardly bear knowing that their parents saw his move as evidence that he felt like them.

At least he had the view from the twelfth floor of the tower block across the fields east of Leeds. The vast sky was an inexhaustible prospect all by itself a at least, it used to be. Just now it was emptily blue except for three clouds raising their curly white crowns above the horizon and a diagonal vapour trail as blurred as the m.u.f.fled thunder of the aircraft. This ought to be more than enough to engage his imagination, but he felt as if that were falling short of the view.

He would like to blame the letters in the local newspaper. Certainly they made him feel resentfully defensive, shut inside himself. All the same, when he headed for the kitchen in case coffee was able to electrify his brain he sat at the table and read them once more, the entire black-bordered column of them that might have been announcing if not celebrating his death as an artist. In the first letter Name and Address Supplied had a joke that the writer must imagine n.o.body else had cracked: 'Can Do? Can't Do, more like.' Below this Name and Address Supplied wanted to know why the grant hadn't been spent on building a rubbish tip and added 'Hang on though, it was.' Their neighbour, Name and Address Supplied, complained that Can Do was a bad example to the young and an invitation to graffiti. Rory might have retorted that graffiti were a species of change and that without change there was no life and that life was the art of the universe, but how much of this was he sure he believed? The final letter, from Name and Address Supplied, maintained that public money should only support real art, which apparently was art that everyone could enjoy, and condemned Rory for robbing real artists. Perhaps his work was nothing more than an excuse for words.

Argument was life too, he tried to think as he filled a mug with muddy coffee, but he seemed to be causing his audience to retreat into their att.i.tudes, which made him feel too close to the same state. Perhaps he should revert to exhibiting in galleries, where at least people came prepared to find art. That seemed like despairing of renewing anyone's view of the world. Not long ago he'd felt that anything at all, however ba.n.a.l and everyday a even the concrete kitchen full of metal surfaces a could set off his perceptions on a voyage of discovery that he would want to share with as many people as he could, and now he had fewer creative ideas than his drudge of a brother.

No, that wasn't quite the case. He'd had the same idea as Hugh for Ellen's next book. How much use was Hugh likely to be? She needed input from someone with imagination a someone besides Charlotte, given how she was confining hers to whatever she thought would sell. She ought to be helping Ellen's writing look professional, not telling her what to write.

Rory took a gulp of coffee as he pa.s.sed the garden furniture that did duty as a dining suite in the main room. This felt like a joke that had died of old age, and so did the plastic chairs cushioned with toddlers' cartoonish quilts, not to mention the shelves composed of bits of a dismantled van and only just able to carry their load of art books. Even the taste of coffee seemed not just stale but shy of reaching him. Perhaps guilt was in the way. Hugh might at least deserve some credit for thinking how to help Ellen, but if Rory became involved, Hugh would have no chance.

That needn't happen. He could tell Hugh anything he found and let him pa.s.s on the information. The credit would mean more to Hugh than to him. Perhaps letting Hugh take it would free his own imagination from the dull dark mood that had settled over it a perhaps thinking of others would free him from the prison of himself.

As he sat at his desk in front of the window, a plane as silent as a snail drew its lingeringly disintegrating track across the sky. Rory was surprised not to hear it, since it was quite low. He switched on the computer and logged onto Frugonet and sent its engine in search of Thurstaston Cliffs. There were at least a dozen references, the first of which informed him that the area was composed of glacial drift, boulder clay up to one hundred feet thick on top of Tria.s.sic sandstone. He didn't see how that was of use to Ellen, but she might like the idea that the substance of the cliffs was full of erratic rocks. He was imagining a swarm of rocks crawling through the earth when the next sentence made clear that they had simply been transported by ice. They often contained crystals, and perhaps she could develop that. Erosion had scattered many of them on the beach.

Next came old news of a drowning at Thurstaston, of a teenager who had either fallen or thrown herself from the cliff. He remembered hearing of the incident, which had happened near the place where they'd all camped out and not long before they had. The girl a Mary Botton, a name that must have been a gift to any tormentors a had been plagued with nightmares for supposedly the first time in her life, after which she'd kept complaining that her schoolmates were watching her and wouldn't stop.

Rory found himself rereading this without understanding why and then gazing at it until his vision lost focus. He had to blink hard to rid his eyes of blankness, but this didn't enliven his brain. What was he expecting the report to convey to him? Perhaps if he didn't nag at it the point would become clear, though he felt oddly uneasy about leaving it uncomprehended. He seemed to sense it lurking among his thoughts as he clicked on a reference to Thurstaston Mound.

This showed him a site called Lost Landscapes of Britain and a nineteenth-century painting, which it would have taken him a while to recognise as depicting Thurstaston without the t.i.tle: Twilight Vigil at Thurstaston Mound. What the silhouetted figure was engaged in besides pointing with his stick at an inflamed sunset above the Welsh mountains across the estuary, Rory couldn't guess. Was that a bird or some other night creature swooping over the still water? The painter had omitted to put its reflection in. Was the figure meant to be indicating it or somehow attracting it with the long gnarled stick? All that Rory could be sure of, given the view that included the mouth of the river, was that the dark mound, which must have stood at least fifty feet high, had once occupied the edge of the stretch of cliff top where he and Hugh and their cousins had camped.

Where had it gone? He didn't know if he was more troubled by the question or by the significance of the painting, nor why either should concern him. Perhaps the painter's other work might help him interpret this one. Rory searched for Allan Gemini and was rewarded with a handful of listings, the first of which led to a site of The Occult in Art. The page that opened was devoted to the artist, displaying the Thurstaston image and three others. Stargrave in Winter showed a village square illuminated only by the pallor of snow, in which a dozen or more dark figures stood ankle-deep, their postures so awkward they might be frozen or intended to be symbolic or both. Night over Moonwell depicted a distant village where no lights were visible in the left half, beneath a sky that was utterly black except for a ma.s.sive moon and an oblique tendril of luminous white cloud that looked close to connecting the village with the satellite. Goodmanswood in November was a forest dimly glowing from within as though the fallen leaves had absorbed the last of the daylight, while the branches appeared to be straining to draw down the first stars or the dark gulf between them or something beyond. Rory didn't care for the paintings a they seemed sly, reluctant to own up to meanings that he suspected were aimed at an audience as secretive as they were a but he supposed he might mention them to Ellen, although they'd offered him no insight into the image of Thurstaston. He took another mouthful of coffee, only to feel he was searching for the taste. He swallowed to be done with it and went back to the listings for Thurstaston Mound.

The next one teased him with a sentence and the start of another.

Pendemon's house used to stand on the cliff below

Thurstaston Mound. His reputation seems to have been why

the local people made no attempt to rescue him from . . .

Rory fumbled with the mouse, and the list was replaced by a site. The t.i.tle appeared first, at the top of an empty window. A Battle of Magicians: Arthur Pendemon versus Peter Grace.

That sounded like background for Ellen, and he grew nervously impatient as the page failed to load. Once he'd set the computer refreshing the page he gazed past it at the unrewardingly eventless sky. The sentence and the fragment he'd already read took grudging form at the foot of an otherwise empty screen, and he had to a.s.sume they were waiting for some image to occupy the s.p.a.ce. When the indicator at the bottom of the page showed that about half the doc.u.ment was loaded, he scrolled upwards, to find nothing but emptiness all the way to the top. Should the doc.u.ment be full of pictures? His inability to imagine them felt too close to losing all his creativeness. He scrolled down in the hope that something had arrived above the words, but now the page was absolutely blank.

'Try again,' Rory snarled and jabbed the refresh b.u.t.ton. It took him a while to be convinced that this had an effect, and longer to identify it. The screen had turned yet more featureless. Even the t.i.tle had disappeared from the upper margin of the doc.u.ment. He raised his aching gaze to rest it on the sky, and the blank came with him.

It felt pasted to his eyes. The floor and ceiling and the walls on either side of him were blurred presences that he could hardly claim to be seeing. When he tried to look at any of them, the blank did away with them. Worse still was being unable to see his hands unless he held them out to either side of him, where they appeared as undefined lumps whose colour he had to remember more than discern. He felt disembodied and yet shut up in his body, the worst of both worlds. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists on the desk while he did his best to live with however many minutes the blankness took to dissipate. At last he risked slitting his eyes. Even when he stretched them so wide that they stung he might as well not have opened them.

It must be a migraine. The condition had affected more than one of his cla.s.smates at college like this. Rory had suspected them of finding an excuse to miss lectures, but he wouldn't have scoffed at them now. He groped at the vague colourless bulk of the computer tower to switch it off a he couldn't see to shut the programmes down first a and then he clutched at the desk to help himself up. By shuffling with his feet almost together, and by making contact with several items of furniture that his blindness scarcely let him feel, he managed to reach the door. He slid his hand along the wall to guide him to his bedroom, where his shins b.u.mped into the mattress and let him crawl onto the bed.

As he lay on his back he had the unpleasant notion that the blankness was a slab laid over his eyes. He was hoping to sleep off his state, but he was still trying to sink into unawareness when he seemed to feel a large insect struggling in his hip pocket. It was the vibration of his mobile, which he must have inadvertently silenced at some point. He fumbled it out and pressed it to his ear. However many times he said 'h.e.l.lo?' he couldn't distinguish a response; even his own voice was sounding mostly in his skull. Had losing one sense infected another? 'I can't hear you,' he said desperately. 'I'll call you back later.' As he moved the phone away from his face he thought he heard a voice, but it sounded far away under the blankness. It didn't speak again as he killed the call and scrabbled at his pocket with the mobile before attempting to grow calm. Perhaps the voice that had seemed to speak his name was deep in him.

TWELVE.

As Charlotte made to send the longest email she'd ever had to write, Glen came back from lunch with an author. 'Might be good news,' he said.

'I'm glad,' she felt required to say, though she had no idea for whom.

'How have you been spending this sunny afternoon?'

His breath betrayed how he'd spent much of his. She didn't need reminding how she was buried away from the sun. 'Just being an editor,' she said.

'Hey, me too,' he said and squinted at her email to s.e.xtus s.e.xta s.e.xagesima, lead singer with Ban This and now author of Praying is the p.i.s.s, in which a rock group called s.h.a.g the Pigs used magic to become the most successful band of all time. 'Did you send this?'

'I'm about to.'

He reached around her shoulders and scrolled with the mouse, a gesture she found more presumptuously intimate than touching her might have been. 'OK, don't,' he said soon enough.

'Is he another author we've had second thoughts about?'

'I was talking to the big man upstairs and he thinks you shouldn't edit this at all. Some books need to breathe, he said. If you try to fit them into how you think all books are meant to be you could end up suffocating them.' He continued to expose her email as he said 'I guess some of the spelling may need fixing if it's not intentional. Maybe some of the punctuation, though I don't believe they changed a comma of John Lennon's books. Leave all the words he's made up, but the t.i.tle could use work.'

'I won't argue with that.'

'One word should do it.'

'Praying is the Pits, you mean? It might still offend some people.'

'We're going to offend plenty. Let's use it, not pretend we can avoid it. I'm saying we should call it Praying is p.i.s.s.'

Charlotte might have laughed, if only to discover how amused she was. 'Have I heard the good news?' she wondered instead.

'Maybe you can make this work for your cousin. Don't tell me you weren't hoping it might be about her.'

Charlotte was recalling that he'd also drunk a good deal the last time he'd been enthusiastic about Ellen. 'I won't,' she said, 'but how?'

'Hey, where did your imagination go? While they're sold on magic upstairs you ought to make your move. How are her books looking?'

'I thought she was supposed to be working on the first one.'

'Better make it both. Right now they're saying they like two-book contracts for first-timers or they don't think it's worth the risk. She should give you a pitch you can wow them with, then as long as her new chapters shape up I'd say she's sold. They're hot for her upstairs.'

'You mean you've been talking about her?'

'Don't worry, I said she was your author and I didn't say she was your cousin. Maybe we should keep that between us for a while.'

He'd leaned closer to say so, and Charlotte felt oppressed a by his nearness, by the part.i.tions around them, perhaps most of all by his inconsistency. 'Why don't you ask her how she feels about working on both books,' he said.

'I don't think many authors work on more than one at once.'

'A great reason for new ones to learn to, I'd say. The more ways they can compete in today's market the better it'll be for all of us. It's not like she's on her own, is it? She'll have her cousin if she needs help.' He straightened up with a comical wobble that might have been intentional. 'I'll leave you to call her,' he said but lingered to frown at the screen. 'Don't send that by mistake.'

'I'll see if I need to say any of it.'

While it seemed disagreeably likely that she wouldn't, the delay gave her the illusion of control. As Glen gave up playing overseer she freed the desk phone and typed Ellen's number. He was rearranging papers in his cubicle by the time Ellen said 'h.e.l.lo?'

'Me.'

'Charlotte. I know you're waiting for my chapters. They're coming soon, I promise.'

'Do you think you might be able to let me have a synopsis of your next book as well?'

Ellen hesitated and then sounded oddly wary. 'Can I do a bit of research first?'

'Certainly you can, only how long do you think it'll take?'

'I've thought where I can set it. It's near enough for me to go and have a look.'

Charlotte wasn't sure if she heard or otherwise sensed movement beneath her. The m.u.f.fled subterranean activity had to be that of a train, and of course she hadn't felt the floor shift like a lid. 'Have I guessed where?' she said.

'I wouldn't be surprised.' Ellen paused for some kind of effect and said 'Thurstaston.'

Another train must be worming under the office, but Charlotte was more aware of having mouthed the name as Ellen spoke it, as if it were a prayer or some other kind of invocation. 'I'll finish this chapter and then I'll send them to you,' Ellen said. 'I was working on it when you rang.'

'Don't let me interrupt any more. I'll look forward to whatever's coming.'

At that moment the computer screen turned black. It had simply grown dormant, though it put Charlotte in mind of a window overwhelmed by a sudden fall of earth. She wasn't going to let it remind her of the earth that must be pressing against all the walls. She nudged the mouse to restore her words on the monitor. 'Enjoy your research,' she said as a farewell.

THIRTEEN.

Ellen was about to ask the children what they were doing on the swings when she saw that the house was for sale. A family must be viewing it, since a man was staring down at her from the attic bedroom that she and her cousins had shared until their aunt and uncle had begun to worry they were too mature. He seemed to take Ellen for an intruder, spying over the hedge with crime in mind. She could a.s.sure him that she'd spent several of the best weeks in her life here, except that it didn't quite live up to her memory: the trees and bushes that had turned the garden into a maze full of dens had been cut back, and where were the vines that had elaborated the adventure? The elder relatives must think this was the way to sell it, and at least the will donated the proceeds to a children's home. Ellen blinked her eyes more or less dry for a last sight of the house, and turned away as the man at the top told the children not to swing too high. None of this would help her with her book.

The row of houses overlooked a gravel track for walkers and cyclists alongside a bridle-path, beyond which fields and woodland stretched to the brink of the cliff. Ellen might have found the gap in the hedge and made straight for the field where she and her cousins had pitched camp, but after almost two hours on a pair of trains preceded and succeeded by buses, she needed a walk. The low unbroken cloud stained grey and black had none of the stale heat she'd brought with her. As she tramped a mile to the visitor centre she felt coated with humidity, which gave her little chance to think about her book.

The occasional cyclist overtook her so discreetly that they made her feel followed by someone she couldn't hear, and the odd head peered down at her a riders, of course. On this weekday afternoon the visitor centre was almost deserted. Ellen plodded along the corridor decorated with children's essays about nature to the Ladies', where she splashed her face with handfuls of cold water. She managed to splash the mirror above the sink, distorting her reflection, which appeared to sag and spread. She hurried out of the building rather than waste time wiping the gla.s.s.

Ought she to walk along the beach or the top of the cliff? It might be cooler near the water, and perhaps one of her characters could find something magical left by the waves. She crossed a field where a woman in a singlet and equally enormous shorts was competing at inertia with her breathless dog. A shady path led alongside a caravan park where the immobilised vehicles were as white and silent as monuments. At the end of the path an uneven series of steps cut out of the earth and ribbed with sticks descended to the beach.

The river had withdrawn, baring an expanse of sand several hundred yards wide. Yachts crept across the estuary, beyond which the sea bristled with the crosses of a wind farm. Down here the piebald ma.s.s of clouds seemed even lower, capable of resting on the edge of the cliff as it had settled on the darkened mountains across the river. Perhaps it was the reason why the beach was unpopulated, which she ought to welcome. She didn't want anyone interrupting her thoughts.